Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “They have one fellow who speaks good Russian, and he calls us up on our working frequency and tells us we are foolish to live in slavery when all we have to do is bear west for fifteen minutes to reach a free country.

  “One time my captain told him: ‘Yes, you are right, okay, we are coming right away.’ He got very excited and wanted to know how many of us would come. We told him not many … maybe four squadrons of MIG-21’s. He lost his temper at that and told us, anyway, we were too stupid to be free!”

  At this juncture the co-pilot, who had been eyeing Claire in a frankly admiring manner, bent smoothly toward her and slipped his arm around her shoulders.

  “Look down!” he told her. “The Ural Mountains! Soon we leave Europe behind. Then is Sibir – the name means the Sleeping Land – but it is not sleeping now. It is the New Land of the Soviet people, wide awake at last!”

  Pilots are the same the world over. They are not to be trusted with pretty girls. Although I was very curious to see the legendary Urals, the port-hole was completely blocked by two blonde heads. Kola leaned across the aisle.

  “Never mind, Farley,” he said sweetly, “come and look out my side. The view is just as good.”

  Actually the view was terrible. Seen from a height of five kilometres, through a filter of thin cloud, the Urals appeared only dimly as an ill-defined pattern of grey rock darkened by the forests clinging to the slopes.

  Although not physically as impressive as most of the world’s great mountain ranges, the Urals have nevertheless loomed surpassingly large in human history. In ancient times they were believed to be the eastern limit of the habitable world, if not of the world itself. The long, sinuous sweep of the Urals had a similar quality to that of the bleak, grey, sea horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond both lay a void in human knowledge and for an almost equal length of time both served as barriers blocking the spread of European man and denying him access to the greater world beyond.

  Lev Belikov, a Leningrad historian, has his own name for the Urals. He calls them the Great Wall of Europe.

  Immediately east of that wall lies a gigantic basin filled with bogs and so thickly forest-grown that the entire region used to be considered impenetrable except along the tortuous river routes. In the north the wall is anchored in islands far out in the Arctic Ocean in a realm of perpetual ice. In the south it is bedded in the arid steppes, beyond which lie the deserts of Kazakhstan. From its glacier-weighted northern tip in Novaya Zemlya, the Great Wall runs almost due south for two thousand miles. So effectively did it divide two worlds that it became permanently imbedded in human thought as the line of demarcation between two continents, Europe and Asia.

  It was not until almost the end of the sixteenth century that the Great Wall was effectively breached by the social explosion which dispersed the men of Europe on a rampage of pillage that eventually embraced most of the world.

  Even after it was cracked, the wall remained large in men’s minds. During the seventeenth century it was the line of departure from which traders, colonizers and outlaws moved into the vast wilderness stretching eastward to the Pacific coast.

  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it took on a new and sinister connotation. It became a prison wall. Countless thousands of men and women were exiled beyond its gates to the depths of Siberia, most of them never to return again.

  I was recalled from my recollections of Lev’s history lesson by Kola.

  “We must be about over Sverdlovsk now,” he said. “The gateway to Siberia. From here we fly along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Thank your stars we’re not on it. Six thousand miles and seven days from Moscow to Vladivostok! I did it once with a group of French industrialists and nearly went mad from boredom. So did they, only they were too polite to say so. It runs pretty well along the southern boundary of the U.S.S.R., too close by far, the way the Chinese are acting.

  “Between Sverdlovsk and the halfway mark at Irkutsk, there’s a string of big cities four or five hundred miles apart. Most of them began in the seventeenth century as forts, trading stations and administrative centres and until the 1930s they were backwoods towns with wooden buildings and mud streets. Most of Siberia was one big backwater in those days. Then in the mid 1930s it began to be obvious what Hitler had in mind and our leaders could see there was a good chance much of European Russia might be overrun. If that happened the Urals were going to serve as our last line of defence.

  “The government began moving whole factory towns – machines and people – from Western Russia across the Urals. By the time the war ended provincial places like Sverdlovsk and Omsk had turned into industrial cities, and after the war they kept on growing, faster and faster. Siberia came awake with a jump! Within fifteen years the whole western region of the Trans Sib, as far east as Irkutsk, had jumped into modern times. Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Bratsk, Irkutsk, the flame of a new industrial society set each one of them alight in turn. They’ve got almost four million people between them now, and they’ll have double that by 1975 ….”

  Kola was so carried away he did not notice he had lost me. I was preoccupied with observing another kind of Russian enthusiasm, which the co-pilot was demonstrating. I was by no means discontented when he glanced at his watch, removed his arm from Claire’s shoulders and, with manifest reluctance, returned to the cockpit. Muttering an apology to Kola I slipped back into my own seat, firmly resolved to remain there until the flight was over.

  Although I missed the end of Kola’s speech I later visited all but one of the new cities of Siberia’s southwestern tier, and I have to admit his enthusiasm seems justified, if one approves of whirlwind urban and industrial developments on a gigantic scale.

  The cloud deck below us became impenetrable and I fidgeted with impatience at being denied an aerial glimpse of this unknown land. Yura distracted me by telling me the story of Sorokin, the Mad Poet of Omsk, the Siberian city which was to be our first stop.

  Sorokin was a Siberian, born about the turn of the century of a Buryat mother and a Russian father. At the time of the Revolution he was one of the more eccentric characters in the Tsar’s realms. He also seems to have been something of an early hippie. He dressed in ornate robes in the Manchu style; let his hair grow to his shoulders; sported a divided beard which he sometimes dyed orange, and was a perpetual burr under the saddle of the establishment of his time.

  His reaction to the Bolshevik Revolt was to start a revolution of his own. He declared himself king of the mid-Siberian town of Ulan Ude and set up a farcical State which was intended to ridicule not only the Tsarist regime but that of the Bolsheviki as well. He printed his own funny-money and was so well regarded by the peasantry that they accepted it and gave him what food and shelter he needed in exchange.

  While the Civil War raged back and forth across Siberia, Sorokin wrote a savagely anti-militarist novel and mailed handwritten copies to kings and queens and other heads of state around the world. Only one recipient acknowledged the gift. The King of Siam wrote to thank the author but also to apologize because, not knowing any Russian, he had been unable to read the book.

  When Admiral Kolchak’s White Guards temporarily chased the Bolsheviki out of Omsk, Sorokin was hard on the Admiral’s heels. In the dead of night he went around the town pulling down the Admiral’s proclamations and pasting up his own, announcing that the real King of Siberia would appear in the city in solemn procession at noon the following day.

  Promptly at twelve o’clock Sorokin did appear … clad in a mock king’s robe and riding an elderly camel. His saddle bags were crammed with manuscripts of his own epic verse which he proceeded to sell to the cheering populace, one page at a time.

  The import of the verse was bitingly satiric condemnation of all military men, and an invitation to the people to reject militarism in any form.

  Anton Sorokin continued to make mock of militarism until he died in 1924. He was officially forgotten until many years after his death, when certain s
tolid bureaucrats were persuaded to believe that Sorokin had been, in all seriousness, Siberia’s great national poet. A statue to him was erected in Moscow and there it still stands, a subject of some secret mirth to those who know the tale.

  The seat-belt lights went on and we began to descend through the overcast. The plane broke clear and we seemed to be flying through a rain scud over the Saskatchewan prairies where I spent my boyhood. There were the familiar fields, as black as death with autumn plow, or pallid yellow with old wheat stubble. And there, surely, was the Saskatchewan River, muddy and broad and meandering between poplar-grown banks toward an incredibly distant horizon. Under the port wing appeared a modern city which might have been a ringer for Saskatoon, except that it was about ten times too big.

  The sense of recognition was so strong it was not until we had landed and taxied through seemingly endless coveys of unfamiliar aircraft that the illusion faded and Saskatoon became Omsk, sprawled on the fertile black prairies of southwestern Siberia.

  Our stewardess informed us we would be on the ground “for some time” and promptly departed on business of her own. We passengers followed the lead of the captain and straggled across a mile of tarmac to a log shanty grossly overheated by a wood stove and filled to the doors with travellers. This, it developed, was the airport buffet and if it seemed somewhat physically inadequate for a booming industrial and agricultural city of nearly a million people, it made up for it by the quality of the hospitality it dispensed. We shoved our way to the bar and bought slices of thick black bread liberally spread with clotted cream and caviar. Washed down with tumblers full of red Georgian wine and eaten in an atmosphere of cheerful camaraderie, it was a meal to remember.

  Our captain slipped away to return shortly in command of a little tractor pulling a train of open cars behind it. Throwing open the buffet door he shouted an invitation to all and sundry to join him for a ride back to the plane.

  Having now left Moscow far behind it appeared we had also left any pretence at normal airport procedures. When the little train trundled up to our aircraft people swarmed aboard without any pause for examination of boarding passes. The one concession to the organizational approach was when our stewardess belatedly arrived, red faced and puffing, and announced:

  “Comrades! This plane is going to Irkutsk. Anyone not going there had better get off now.”

  Three

  FROM THE Urals to Novosibirsk we flew a thousand miles across the famous steppes. However, these fat, grain-growing lands form only a relatively narrow strip along the southern edge of the West Siberian Plain which, for the most part, is a sodden morass of swamps, muskeg and virtually inpenetrable forests reaching far north of the arctic circle to fade at last into the treeless and frozen tundra of the polar coast.

  Under this gigantic northern jungle the Soviets have found a reservoir of oil and natural gas so vast that, by 1969, when less than half of the potential region had been tested, the proved reserves reportedly equalled those of North America.

  As I looked northward from our high-flying aircraft over an apparently limitless expanse of blue-greeen forest, I saw only the Siberia of legend – an inscrutable and timeless world where human life is restricted to an attenuated fringe along the muddy banks of slow-flowing rivers meandering through dark forests to join that northern Amazon, the heavy-bellied Ob.

  Some time after I had that first compelling view of it, I saw the West Siberian Plain again, this time represented on a map at Novosibirsk. True to Soviet doctrine for the development of distant regions, the map was not an illustration of how oil and gas would be extracted and then transported out of the wilderness – it was instead a design to demonstrate how an almost uninhabitable region would be developed and made habitable. On a swampy enclave of several hundred thousand square miles of taiga,* which in 1966 contained only a handful of small villages inhabited by timber cutters and trappers, the map boldly showed the location of three as yet unborn cities, each with a population of up to fifty thousand people, centred upon a vast complex of petro-chemical industries.

  Had I looked at that map prior to my visits to Siberia I would have been openly skeptical; but those three cities probably will be in existence and the petro-chemical plants built and in operation before 1975. This conclusion, which results from my observations of many “impossible” developments throughout Siberia, does not give me any personal pleasure. On the contrary I would be much happier to see the mighty basin of the Ob remain inviolate as one unspoiled fragment in a world defiled. I implied as much in conversations with the young scientists of Novosibirsk who were so proudly explaining the future to me, and they were horrified.

  “But,” answered one of them as politely as he could, “surely you agree it is man’s duty to develop the physical world. There can be no higher achievement for modern man than that!”

  His comrades nodded their heads and I realized they were as one with their peers the wide world over.

  On this first visit Novosibirsk passed far below and the sprawling plains were left behind. Ahead of us old mountains swelled under a forest shroud. They grew higher and bolder as we passed south of Krasnoyarsk and over the upper reaches of the river Yenisei. The evening sky had become miraculously clear and a wall of towering cloud on the southern horizon resolved itself into a line of snow-capped peaks. These were the palisades of the Sayan Range, and as we drew closer we could look beyond them into the great mountain massif of Outer Mongolia. It was a spectacle which would have pleased me more had I not been distracted by what appeared to be the outpourings of a volcano amongst the hills ahead – a volcano of factory chimneys whose smoke cast a shadow for at least fifty miles up the wide valley of the Angara River.

  Kola also viewed this banner of progress with a jaundiced eye.

  “The new satellite industrial cities of Irkutsk,” he explained. “In old times people called Irkutsk the navel of Siberia. Maybe now they had better refer to it as a different orifice.”

  Dusk and our plane settled together on the Irkutsk airfield and we were met at the foot of the boarding ramp by a tall, urbane man with dark, vital eyes. Mark Sergei, a renowned Siberian poet and writer of children’s books, was an old comrade of Yura’s. He was also secretary of the Irkutsk Writers Union, and our host. When he had settled us in our room in the Hotel Siberia he took us to the dining hall for a “little snack,” which translated itself into a five course meal featuring fish soup and reindeer stroganov. Mark took his hostly duties seriously. After we had stuffed he gave further evidence of this.

  “I don’t know what you would like to see most, but the Writers Union has made some small advance arrangements, subject to your approval. First we might visit the great hydro-electric plant at Krasnoyarsk – it is only five hundred miles to the northwest. Then we could go to the gold fields at Bodaibo in the mountains five hundred miles to the northeast. After that, perhaps a short trip southward to Mongolia; then a visit to our sacred lake, Baikal, and to the Buryat people at Ulan Ude. In Irkutsk itself we hope you will be the guests of the city at the celebration of the Great October Revolution and after that.…”

  I caught Yura’s eye and he gently interrupted Mark’s outline for an epic odyssey, explaining that, alas, the north was calling and we must go to Yakutia before the winter began in earnest.

  At breakfast next morning Mark introduced us to our first Yakut, Nadia Komarova, a beautiful twenty-year-old with raven hair, glowing olive skin, full red lips and snapping black eyes.

  Nadia was a student at the Irkutsk Institute for Foreign Languages, majoring in English and Spanish, en route to her degree as a high school teacher. When she apologized because her command of French was not very good, I asked a question that had been bothering me. During our short time in the U.S.S.R. we had met an uncommon number of people who spoke English, and an equally large number who spoke some other European language. Was this coincidence?

  “Not at all,” Kola explained. “Russian people are very sensitive about the problems o
f communicating in strange languages. They have to be. There are ninety-three official languages in the Union. Apart from those who are born to the Russian tongue, most people still speak their own ethnic language, plus Russian, which serves as the common language. People with a higher education, and that now includes almost all our young people, learn a third language as a matter of course. The preference is for English, French, German or Spanish, in that order.”

  Nadia was not only an intellectual surprise but a sartorial one too. She looked, as Claire rather wonderingly remarked, more chic than most college students in Canada; complete with eye-shadow (which stressed her oriental cast), a teased hair-do, a form-fitting black dress and high-heeled shoes. She was by no means unique. With their multi-racial background and their flair for dress, the girls of Irkutsk have to be as eye-appealing as any in the world. When I revisited the city with John DeVisser, he shot so many pictures of the pretties that I felt constrained to caution him against using up too much of his film.

  “Mind your own business!” he replied shortly. “I’m going to do a special book … Birds of Irkutsk.”

  While we men discussed the day’s plans, Nadia and Claire were deeply engaged in a conversation of their own. And when we announced that we would begin the day with a visit to the Angarsk Power Plant we found ourselves facing a revolt.

  Claire is an ikon addict and she had confided her passion to Nadia.

  “Power plants is nice,” said Nadia, “but is not fair. It makes bad impression for visitors, because always you doing what men want to do, and here in Soviet Union women are your equals. So please, will we not go to some churches now and look at ikons!”

  It was not a question. It was a statement of intent.

  Smiling sardonically Mark capitulated and drove us across town to the oldest Russian Orthodox church in the vicinity. It was a chilly morning, hazy and windless. We crossed the Angara River, glittering with moving crystals of shell ice. The church stood behind ancient walls a mile or two from town and beyond it farm lands rolled gently to an encircling rim of distant forests.