Strolling in the Paris of Siberia
Such lofty Lake Baikal thoughts did not have much to do with Irkutsk, though. With its 600,000 inhabitants and chaotic, traffic-clogged roads, there is no hint of Baikal’s beauty, though the city does sit on the majestic Angara River as it flows into the lake some fifty miles to the southwest. Nevertheless, on the evening of our arrival, we strolled down Lenin Street and entered what the locals call the 130 Quarter, the pedestrian Third of July Street, the southern side of which opens onto views of the Angara, where you feel the sort of café-life languor and esprit de flâneur one might sense in Paris’s historic center. Except of course here the area in its current leisure incarnation is less than a decade old. On a typical evening bands played, terrace restaurants were crowded, and merchants hawked ice cream. Young women dressed in summer casual but with the highest of heels vied for the attention of equally hip young men with globally fashionable beards and man-buns; stately elderly women walked with canes holding the arms of men with handlebar moustaches, recalling grandees of old. Here and there renovated Soviet-era vending machines dispensed fizzy water in little cups, just as they would have decades ago.
That the Bolsheviks executed in Irkutsk the White Russian Admiral Kolchak, commemorated by a statue, seems fitting; after all, Czar Nicholas I exiled some of the Decembrist revolutionaries here, in order that they serve their sentences under the direct supervision of the Governor General of the Irkutsk Guberniya. Their houses, two-story, of wood yet of almost palatial grandeur, with gray or brown facades and ornate white trim, recalled their upper-class tastes and background. Being revolutionaries, the Decembrists had enjoyed the favor of the Bolsheviks, who left their dwellings intact. Otherwise, Irkutsk’s best-known son is perhaps the Buryat-Russian playwright Alexander Vampilov of the Soviet period; Vampilov authored a play, Last Summer in Chulimsk, in which the protagonist is determined to keep order, whether it makes sense to or not: every morning he rebuilds a fence the locals have trampled down because it obstructs their access to a park. More recently, Irkutsk impressed the world with its native daughter Nazí Paikidze, a chess wizard who, refusing to don the obligatory Islamic headscarf, boycotted the 2017 World Chess Championship in Tehran.
Dusk lingered long, the sky a glowing ashen canopy, with the air chilling fast. This was Paris perhaps, but Paris of Siberia.
Mystic Lake Baikal
Yet not Irkutsk but Lake Baikal and its alleged mystic powers drew us to this time zone. One gray morning, we boarded a marshrutka (minivan bus) for the trip north to the mostly Buryat village of Khuzhir, population 1,500, on Olkhon Island, halfway up the lake’s western shore, and accessible by ferry. Famous as a “pole of shamanistic energy,” Olkhon attracts Russian aficionados of the spiritual arts and of shamanism in particular. The island’s Cape Burkhan, with a cave within its bizarre marble boulder—called Shamanka—is regarded as the chosen abode of the deity Khan-Khute-Baabay, and draws worshippers from all over Russia. Nevertheless, the cramped, seven-hour ride through taiga and across drab, grassy plains hardly inspired. And neither did the island itself, a mostly barren rock outcropping dotted with scraggly conifers and gaunt grazing cows. Khuzhir stood on high ground, its weathered shacks and izbas (Russian log huts) lashed by winds that never let up and stirred dust storms on its sandy streets, causing people and the many stray dogs to wince. The island’s western bank faces the mainland’s majestic taiga, where bears prowl and moose roam. The eastern side flanks the open Baikal; on the high bluffs stand, here and there, firs, their branches covered in prayer ribbons—gifts, proffered by visitors, to the local gods.
In the age of tourism, shamanism, is, not surprisingly, a business in Khuzhir. As far as is understood, Asian shamanism originated with the region’s Turkic and Mongol peoples. It involves, essentially, self-induced trances, chants, and a beating of drums that permit practitioners ingress into the spirit world and the power to heal and do harm among temporal earthlings. We found the most accessible shamans to be those with yurts—broad, quasiconical tents of animal hides, held up by poles—standing on the outskirts of the village. For a modest fee, you can listen to a lecture on the basics of shamanism. This seemed like a good idea, so we dipped inside, paid, and took seats with a half-dozen Russians.
The shaman-instructor, a young Buryat man, explained that, long ago, the heavens sent ninety-nine tengri (deities) to earth to help us humans out. The tengri grant shamans their powers, which, in the case of the exalted Zarin shamans, include being able to fly. One who is called upon to be a shaman may die if he refuses. Becoming a shaman involves surviving a three-day ritual. The most prestigious and powerful shamans are the shamany-kuznetsy (blacksmith shamans). Blacksmiths are revered because they once forged items essential to life in the region. They also have a lot of sway in the two Other Worlds, being able to call for help from the seventy-seven blacksmith deities.
A man named Igor raised his hand. He had, he said, fought in various wars, but considered God his guardian angel. Nevertheless, he was critical of the Church.
“I don’t like how the Orthodox Church charges seven thousand rubles [$112] for a baptism, when a lot of people make only about twelve thousand a month. What do you shamans charge?”
“We have no set fee. Each gives us according to the wishes of his soul.”
We decided we needed more insight than the “shamanism 101” lecture we had just heard. So, we arranged to meet a prominent local shaman, Gennady Tugulov, who is a Buryat native of Khuzhir. Tugulov, in his late fifties, is a blacksmith shaman. He arrived at our inn one evening toting his tools—a tiny hammer, a tiny anvil, a tiny file, and a small silver bowl—along with his folded indigo blue felt shamanistic robes and matching cap, all emblazoned with silver suns, for a meeting out on the wooden porch.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked, setting his load down on the table.
“Is it allowed?” we asked.
“It is for me! After all, I’m a shaman.”
He promptly lit up. With his cigarette dangling from his lips, he put on his robes and cap and laid out his tools, puffing as he did so. No one really knows, he told us, who came first to this region—the Buryats, the Sakha (as the Yakuts call themselves), or the Mongols. He affixed a dagger to his leather belt, which sported a silver buckle and silver bangles; around his neck hung, on green-and-blue ribbons, disks of burnished silver and gold, one signifying the moon, the other the sun. “Their circularity symbolizes eternity,” he explained. He then gave us a rundown of his qualifications: he was a thirteenth-generation shaman; of the nine levels of shamanism, he has one left to attain. One does not decide to become a shaman but is selected for the honor by one’s clan.
“What are these tools for, exactly?” we asked.
“Well, I put this file in the fire to heat it up. When it’s hot, I sprinkle it with vodka from this silver bowl and sprinkle the drink on people to help them. This little hammer I use to pound the anvil and call spirits. The bear claw I have here protects me. The silver plate hanging from my neck means I’m a white shaman. The copper one wards off people’s bad energy. There’s a lot of that around these days, so it’s necessary for people in my profession. A shaman must never fear, even when meeting bad people.”
He took a drag on his cigarette.
“Shamans help people, help the sick; we were once the healers and judges here. We speak to our ancestors and consult them for advice. You have to be a shaman or you can’t hear them. We also divine things through reflection and can see things through dreams. We do a lot of good, as you see, that simple folk cannot do on their own. The Soviets repressed us, yet still they came to us when they needed us; in fact, the very ones doing the killing came to us and sought our aid in purifying themselves after their bad deeds. In the 1990s we revived our profession and now practice it freely.”
“So things are returning to normal here?”
“Normal? No. You have seen Shamanka?”
“The rocky outcropping on Cape Burkhan?”
“Yes. Well, it has a cave running right through it. Since Soviet times mankind has desecrated nature around the lake. People have built resorts on the shores. These have to close or they risk really angering Baikal. People even bathe and do their laundry in the lake, which they should never, ever do. They take from the lake but they don’t give back. They need to ask permission from the goddess of water, and she must be asked politely, as you would ask a woman. When the lake gets angry, its waters will rise in terrible revolt. Terrible.”
Shamans, he told us, commune in solitude with nature, learning the language of the birds, the bears.
“You talk to bears?” we asked.
“We listen to them. Bears are very perceptive. If you talk to them, they won’t bother you. But they can tell you a lot.”
He fiddled with the bear claw he wore on a black cord around his neck.
“All our world’s problems come from people going against nature. Yet we must observe nature and obey it. We cannot go against nature. Nature will take its own.”
Orthodox Christian Russians come to him for aid.
“They try to contact their ancestors, but they cannot. They say there’s too much lying and corruption in their church.”
That was a familiar complaint in Russia. We asked if shamanism allowed for an afterlife.
“Yes. When shamans die, we’re cremated so that our spirits can rise to heaven in the smoke. I don’t fear death. There is no hell. After death, I know future generations will be asking me for help.” He tamped out his cigarette. “What we shamans want most of all is peace, the peace we find in the beauty of nature. We want that peace to last forever, for man and nature.”
Later that windy, clear evening we attended a Russian Orthodox church service in a small chapel—the Church of the Ruling Icon—at Khuzhir’s edge, overlooking the lake. Its blue onion domes, topped by gilt crosses, harmonized with the sky and shimmering waters far below. The priest entered, draped in his gold chasuble and black frock, and initiated the liturgy, aided by two parishioners, chanting a melodic, haunting hymn that blended with the whoosh of winds above and the crash of waves far below.
Orthodox Christianity is relatively new out here, on the shores of Baikal, but nevertheless, its rituals, with their timeless melodies, blended in well with the lake’s otherworldly aura. If, thousands of miles to the west, the Decembrists had tried to overthrow the czar and found themselves exiled here, at the very least they could take solace in their homeland’s soothing, sparsely inhabited, and almost limitless expanses of forest and steppe, lake and river.
We were headed even farther east, into environs more alien and daunting to Russians who came later and lived under a different sort of czar—one who would turn such pristine expanses into abodes of misery and terror. But what would these environs evoke today?
9
BLAGOVESHCHENSK, HEIHE, AND YAKUTSK
ROUGHING IT
TIME ZONE: MSK+6, UTC+9
I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.
—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
From Blagoveshchensk to Heihe: The Edge of Empires
“I lack the skill to describe anything as beautiful as the banks of the Amur.… The Russian bank is on the left, the Chinese on the right. If I feel like it, I can look at Russia, and if I feel like it, I can look at China. China is just as barren and savage as Russia: villages and sentinel huts are few and far between.… The Chinese will take the Amur away from us, of that there is no doubt,” wrote Anton Chekhov in his letter to a friend in 1890.1 The perceptive Russian writer may be right—today the Chinese empire seems to operate differently from the Russian one, its identity not in question, so unlike Russia, which rushes from imitation to negation of all things Western while China borrows from the world to strengthen its own power.
For a city whose name decodes as “the Place of the Annunciation” (by the Angel Gabriel, to the Virgin Mary, that she was to bear the Son of God), Blagoveshchensk, in the Russian Far East, arouses less than holy associations among those Russians who have heard of it. Chekhov stopped there on his way east across Siberia, a journey he describes in harrowing detail in Sakhalin Island. He had one thing in mind: sampling Japanese prostitutes—the Karayuki-san, or Ms. Gone Abroad, women who at the time offered their geisha services all over the world, including Siberia—working in doma terpimosti (houses of tolerance). They giggled ts-ts during sex and yet showed amazing skill, he wrote. They gave customers the impression they were “riding a highly trained horse,” and, afterward, ever so gingerly used tweezers to extract a cotton cloth from their shirtsleeve to wipe them dry, “tickling their belly” in the process.
Once dressed, Chekhov would have emerged from his “house of tolerance” in Blagoveshchensk to gaze upon rows of brightly painted, well-kept single-story wooden houses along the Amur river embankment, and, in their midst, men erecting an architectural curio no one would expect six thousand miles east of Europe: a small-scale, neo-Russian ornate replica of Paris’s chief landmark, the Arc de Triomphe. Erected in 1891 to honor Prince Nicholas, the future Nicholas II, the Russian version supports two towers crowned with the Russian state insignia, the double-headed eagle, their eyes perpetually looking up and down the great Siberian waterway on which the town stands. The arc itself faces China, on the Amur’s western bank—specifically, the town of Heihe.
Blagoveshchensk was tough to reach in Chekhov’s day, before the Trans-Siberian Railroad connected Moscow and Saint Petersburg with territories to the east (and Blagoveshchensk is not even on that line). Then, travelers made their way in carriages down bone-rattling dirt roads, muddy in warm months, iced-over in winter. We had an infinitely less arduous time in getting there. Yet still troubles beset us, even before we arrived one early August morn: fog closed Blagoveshchensk’s small airport, forcing our flight to land in Chita, some six hundred miles to the west. Grumpy flight attendants deplaned us into the lounge in Chita’s single-runway airport. Hours passed as we waited, wondering if we might end up spending all day there. Around us the other passengers sat glumly, patiently.
We asked airport staff for an update, but they responded only with miffed silence. A young woman holding a large bag with a map of Crimea and a “Crimea is Ours” logo gave us a dirty look, telling her little daughter, “Never mind them. Everybody is silent, but they vystupayut [speak out].” Truly, we decided, Russians are treated this way because they let themselves be treated this way.
Yet soon enough the fog relented and we found ourselves, for good or ill, aboard our plane and soaring east. We touched down just outside Blagoveshchensk, a city these days of 225,000 that embodies (and not because of the Amur River) the Russian noun glubinka—backwater.
It was a tense place. People seemed on edge. Don’t ask extra questions, don’t request extra service. In a restaurant the menu included a detailed “broken dishes” price list—from a teapot and a salad bowl to a place mat—in the event that customers were to become too unruly and start damaging equipment and dinnerware.
Just as we were settling into our hotel, a power blackout promptly killed the lights and, worse, the air-conditioning. It turned out that Putin was touring the Russian Far East to fish, hunt, and show off his aging but still taut strongman’s chest. Which meant he was set to visit Blagoveshchensk and discuss investment projects and so, along the way, had decided to stop by the Nizhne-Bureisk hydroelectric power plant under construction a hundred miles to the southeast of the city. To please Putin, the plant’s managers rushed to open one of its reactors ahead of schedule with, sadly, predictable results. The whole Far East went completely dark for hours. A million people suffered. That evening, bars and restaurants along the Amur embankment closed their doors; we couldn’t even find a place for a drink to toast Nina’s birthday. We had begun our Russia travels in Putin’s footsteps; now he was in ours, making
our trip a challenge.
So, we kept strolling down the darkened embankment, our gaze fixed on the bright Heihe just across the Amur. We learned later that a few Chinese locations were affected by the blackout, too, those connected by an international power line to Amur-Heihe.2 But from where we stood—not much wider than the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris—the Chinese bank was sending its shining lights, their shimmering reflections set on the river’s blue-gray surface, lending an impressionistic luminosity to our embankment. Here, women promenaded, bedecked in princesslike long mesh skirts—pink, turquoise, pale green. Couples, many with children, and mesh-skirted girls, despite the late hour, were ambling along, discussing the blackout. (We gathered it was not a rare occurrence.) A few bicycle riders zipped by us, jostling their lamps and ringing their handlebar bells to alert those walking.
Despite the darkness, there were a few stands selling kukly oberegi, little straw guardian dolls that are meant to be all-purpose protectors against all ills, from Satan to insomnia, bad luck, and of course the terrors of the night, the saleswomen assured us. Such pagan traditions have mostly disappeared elsewhere in Russia but, perhaps as embodiments of the Slavic spirit, have persisted here on the edge of the Chinese border, at the cusp of the non-Russian world.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 18