by Farley Mowat
I was still thinking about the tree when we climbed the broad stone steps of the main university building – a handsome white limestone palace built on the banks of the Angara about 1800, under the direction of an Italian architect. For a century it was the home of the Tsars’ governors and the seat of power for an immense part of Siberia. Now it remains as one of Irkutsk’s most famous and beloved buildings and the students who have inherited it are not immune to the effect of its pre-revolutionary grandeur.
We had dawdled a bit during our walk and were twenty minutes late for the meeting; nevertheless the earnest young student who met us in the foyer delayed us several minutes longer in order to point out some of the old building’s glories. He seemed as passionately proud of them as some of his engineer siblings are of the power dams and factories they have built. I warmed to him immediately although I had not really been looking forward to the visit because it had been rather too carefully arranged for my liking.
Fourteen young men and women, mostly under twenty and all Siberian born, were gathered in a pleasant commonroom around a long table. They greeted me politely and I took a seat between a beautiful Buryat girl and an equally attractive Evenk damsel.
These were the insatiable elephant children and I was soon swamped by waves of questions. Theirs was a specialized curiosity. They were not interested in Canadian living standards, politics or such trivia … they wanted to know about the Canadian north. I offered them generalities, acting on the assumption that they would know as little about my country as I knew about theirs. To my surprise and chagrin they demonstrated that they knew far more about the Canadian north than do most Canadians. They wanted details. What, for instance, was the material used for insulation in permafrost construction at our new arctic “city” of Inuvik? (I did not know). How many Eskimo students were attending universities? (That one made me choke a little, but in the end I forced myself to be honest and answered – two.) How much progress had we made in reindeer husbandry? (The answer to that one had to be – nil.) and so on and on until I finally appealed to the chairman for mercy. He grinned and rapped for order.
“We have picked enough out of Gospodin Mowat’s brains. Now it is his turn to see what he can find in ours.”
His deliberate use of the pre-revolutionary word for “mister” instead of the contemporary tovarich – “comrade” – drew a chuckle from several students.
The little Buryat beauty Tania came to my defence. She removed a little crimson and gilt badge from the cleft of her dress and pinned it on my lapel.
“Now you are honorary member of Komsomol, Tovarich Mowat!” She looked around the table and there was a challenging glitter in her eyes. “In Buryatia we do not make jokes at honoured guests!”
The conversation that followed was lively and surprisingly frank. I say surprisingly, because most of these students were presumably Komsomol members and therefore potential Party members; and the chairman was, in fact, the Party Secretary of a student organization.
Several had spent the previous summer working in the arctic as part of a group of seventy Irkutsk students who went to Chukotka on their own initiative and at their own expense. Many of them worked as volunteers at a collective where the local people – Chukchee and Eskimo – had established an experimental processing plant to prepare and preserve fish, reindeer, and sea-mammal meat for export to Japan.
Most said they intended to go north again the following summer and some had already changed their personal long-range plans as a result of the first trip and were taking special courses to prepare themselves for full-time arctic work.
“Why the north?” I asked. “Much of south and central Siberia is still almost virgin territory. Surely there’s enough to do down here.”
“I’ve read a lot of Jack London,” a geology student replied. “I suppose I might have caught what he called ‘the lure of the north.’ It wasn’t really like he described it when I got there, but there was a special kind of feeling you don’t get anymore in southern Siberia where I was born. The south is filling up with people from across the Urals. Things are getting too busy down here … the cities are too big.”
“It’s the freedom of the tundra I liked,” one of the girls interrupted. “The mosquitos may drink half your blood, but you still feel it’s worthwhile to be able to walk in all that open space and see wild reindeer, and wolves, and watch the geese nesting.”
“That’s one kind of freedom – romantic stuff if you ask me,” scoffed a male history student. “There’s another kind. There aren’t many bureaucrats in the north. You can make decisions without having to consult a hundred fine fellows sitting in their offices all the way between Irkutsk and Moscow.”
“It’s a frontier situation,” the chairman interjected. “Then too there’s the social responsibility of developing a big part of the world that hasn’t really changed much since the last ice age. All Soviet young people are aware of the duty to accept this responsibility. It is reward enough for them.”
Nobody backed him up on that one. A trifle impatiently one young man, an Evenk, even took issue with the chairman.
“That isn’t right. Things have changed, and were changing before Soviet power [the almost universal phrase used to describe the arrival of communism in the north] came to us. Of course the change was slow, and now it has become fast; but we of the Small Peoples had already learned a great deal of the secrets of the north.”
“There are other rewards,” said an engineering student, with perhaps a touch of cynicism. “The farther north you go, the higher the wages, the better the living conditions in the new towns, the longer holidays you get and the better the retirement benefits.”
“In North America,” I said, “Most young people head toward the big cities – not away from them. Isn’t there a lot of that here too? Especially among people born in Siberia?”
“There is and there isn’t,” Tania said cautiously. “We do feel the attraction of the cities, and most of us enjoy visiting them, but although we value them very much, we value the freedom when we are away from them even more. Many of us will go to Moscow or Leningrad or Novosibirsk when we finish here – but not many will remain in the cities.”
“The big cities are for old people,” said a blonde male student. “They are run by the old people and youth has to wait its turn. It isn’t the same in the new regions of Siberia, particularly the north. That’s young people’s country. Do you know that the average age in Bilibino where I worked this summer [Bilibino is a new town in Chukotka] is only twenty-six years of age?”
“There is too much inflexibility in the thinking of some older people. Look at the way some of them go about smashing up the natural world just for a new factory or bigger production!” The speaker was a second-year zoology student. “Look what almost happened to Baikal? Well, it’s not the only place. Some of the older people don’t seem to remember there are going to be a lot of generations who will have to live in this world after they are gone. I think this is a condition of age – the inability to really see the future in terms of unborn people. Oh, of course, they can plan for future production, but what good is it if the world is just a wreck when they get finished?”
“That is why I will go to the north to live and work,” said one of the girls. “Things are still clean there and not yet spoiled. We will have to fight to see the north is kept this way.”
“The balance of age in government is not as it should be,” pursued the zoologist, who was now firmly in the saddle and riding hard. “Young people see the threats of the future with clear eyes. It is true we need the wisdom of the older people but it should be only a counterweight – it should not outweigh the ideas and opinions of the young. After all, it is our world more than theirs.”
This seemed to me to be cutting pretty close to the bone, and I glanced at the chairman to see how he was reacting. To my surprise he did not indicate disapproval; but disapproval there was. It came from one of those who had accompanied me to the meeting. He w
as a man who had spent four years in a corrective labour camp during the Stalin era. Getting to his feet he took firm command of the meeting, brought the discussion to an end and thanked the students on my behalf.
“Now,” he said, “we must go. We have another appointment and we are already late.”
When we were on our way back to the hotel I taxed him for his action.
“There was no other appointment. Why did you break up the meeting?”
He shrugged and looked a trifle ashamed. “I am sorry, Farley. Do you have in English the proverb about the man who, once bitten by a dog, stays clear of dogs thereafter? Well, I have a reflex action, you might say. The way those young fellows talk – I must admire them – but perhaps I am too sensitive.”
Sensitive he may have been, and doubtless with sufficient reason, but he must have felt some guilt about his abrupt action at the meeting. A few nights later he introduced me to three other students, and over cognac in a small café they expanded on some of the themes discussed earlier.
“There is a very strong conflict in this country now between old and young,” one of them explained. “It is not yet an angry struggle but it is being waged very stubbornly. The old revolutionaries and party leaders suffered a lot, and they did good work, but things have changed, and their thinking has not changed enough. We don’t disagree with them about the principles of communism. We are just as good communists as they, but we are of a different kind. Their main job was to defend the vulnerable young communist infant and improve the physical conditions of our people, and they had to accomplish miracles. They did, too; but that phase is nearly over. Now there has to be a new way of thinking about the future – the long-term future. For instance, they talk about a world without war, but few of them really believe in such a thing. We, on the other hand, not only believe in it, we know it must be brought about. They are mostly ‘battle’ oriented. They still see the continuing survival of the socialist countries as a ‘battle’ with the capitalists. They see the development of undeveloped regions as a ‘battle’ with nature. We think the period of ‘battle’ thinking has to end.”
“We know about the peace movements amongst students in your country,” a second student interjected. “We think they feel the same way we do, but they have a difficulty. They have no clear idea what can be done, or how to do it. They don’t trust their system and they want to reject it, yet they have nothing to replace it with. We may not be entirely happy with ours, but that’s only because it isn’t working well. We believe it can be made to work better and this is what we intend to do. We will make the communist idea really serve man the way Lenin intended it should.”
“Aren’t you at all worried about talking this way to a stranger?” I asked.
“Would we talk to you if we were? Don’t underestimate us. You won’t read about us in Pravda, but there are many like us in the Soviet Union. And remember, we are not anti-revolutionaries. We are perhaps the new revolutionaries, helping the revolution to evolve.”
“About Pravda,” I said. “Are you in favour of what we in the west like to call a ‘free press’?”
The elder of the three raised his glass. “Here’s a toast to free ideas, anyway,” he said. We all drank, although I must admit that I first of all cast a glance over my shoulder to see if anyone was listening.
“We do have a free press but it doesn’t use printing machinery; it uses ideas in conversation. Do you know the saying that, these days, half of Russia is on wheels and the other half on wings? It is really true, you know. Everybody is on the move and our ‘free press’ goes all over the Soviet Union. It is far more effective than most printed papers. Who reads them anyhow? Have you tried to read our papers?”
“The day is coming when the grandfathers will realize they can withdraw with honour. Then there will be a wider spectrum of ideas and opinions in our printed press too. If communism is right – and we believe it is – we have nothing to fear from even adverse ideas. They can only serve to strengthen our resolve.”
They were an impressive trio of young men but I was not entirely convinced by their, to me, somewhat naïve belief that there is safety in numbers or that a rational dialogue such as they propose will be well tolerated.
For this reason I have not revealed these young men’s names and, in fact, have placed the interview out of its actual context.
Six
DURING one of my visits to Irkutsk, a catastrophe struck. The city went dry! Not a bottle of vodka, cognac or alcohol was to be had in the stores. The mood of the city changed perceptibly. Men one met on the streets looked as if the Last Trump had sounded. On the other hand women, and in particular married women, seemed exceptionally sunny, almost smug.
The truth is that Siberian men do tend to take a drop over the ordinary limit. As the Siberian saying goes: One hundred versts (roughly a hundred miles) is no distance. A hundred rubles isn’t worthwhile money. And a hundred grams of vodka just makes you thirsty.
The cause of the drought seemed obscure. Yura attributed it to the presence of a huge convention of state and collective farmers. “They’ve drunk everything there is,” he said gloomily. Someone else saw the drought as part of a dark plot on the part of Them – the bureaucrats – to force temperance on the city. Mark thought it was a just a distribution bottleneck.
“Nobody in their right minds would deliberately try to deprive Siberians of their drink,” he said. “The place would explode like an atomic bomb!”
Somehow our party seemed to be exempt from the general deprivation. We usually had a bottle or two, and as a result our popularity soared. One night we had fifteen people in our room, amongst them Lev Amisov and his nephew, a vivid, cheerful young writer improbably named Valentin Rasputin. During Lev’s temporary absence on a search for more liquid refreshment, Valentin told a yarn about his uncle.
Lev is the proud owner of a summer house – not a dacha, but half of a log-built duplex in a little village near Irkutsk. Each July this house becomes the focus for a family reunion. The previous summer the reunion lasted five days – until the last bottle was consumed. The exhausted participants then slunk away to their own homes; but Lev was not yet in a mood to sober up. He had hidden a small barrel of home brew in the earth-walled cellar under his kitchen floor against just such an emergency as this.
Unfortunately his wife was privy to the secret. When Lev came thirstily into the kitchen after bidding the last guests goodbye, he found his wife standing at the kitchen table which she had placed squarely over the trapdoor leading to the cellar. She was busy with an immense pile of ironing. Not a word passed between them, but Lev knew she knew what he had in mind and that she was not going to be cooperative. The only advantage he had was that he retained freedom of movement. After an hour or so he went outside and relieved himself, then came back and sat on the kitchen settee with a ponderous tome of poetry on his knee, grimly prepared to wait until bladder pressure forced his wife to abandon her guard post.
“Ah,” said Valentin, “but as usual he had misjudged my aunt! She had relieved herself before taking up sentry duty!”
They waited, silent, apparently engrossed in their own pursuits; the hours passed and Lev began to get really desperate. Finally he could stand it no longer. Throwing down the book he stamped out of the house.
As he paced miserably up and down amongst the birch trees, inspiration suddenly came to him. He snatched a spade out of his garden, raced to his neighbour’s door and banged on it furiously. When the neighbour’s wife answered he explained with an urgency which was not at all assumed, that a large and evil-looking snake had just crawled under the duplex and would undoubtedly finish up in somebody’s cellar. Would she let him into her cellar so he could search for and destroy the beast?
Would she? She practically thrust him down through the hole and slammed the trapdoor after him.
Lev went to work. It took him only a few minutes to break through from one cellar to the other. Settling himself in the cool darkness, he pull
ed the bung out of the barrel.
The first inkling his wife had that she was not alone in the house was a terrifying crash under her feet as Lev upset a shelf of pickle jars. The crash was followed by a full-throated roar of fury as he stumbled backward and fell into the cabbage bin. The sound was sufficiently muffled so she did not identify its origin, and she ran screaming out of the house.
In the garden she met the neighbour’s wife, wringing her hands and equally terrified.
“What happened?” the neighbour’s wife cried anxiously. “Did that big snake get into your cellar?”
At this moment Lev emerged from his own kitchen door, covered with mud, slathered with pickled mushrooms, and happily bellowing a patriotic song.
“Ulcers on your soul!” his wife shrieked, using a favourite Siberian epithet. “It’s a snake all right! Wait till I get my broom!”
“Which is why,” said Valentin winking broadly, “if you want to make my uncle turn pale … you only have to hiss!”
Lev returned empty-handed and so, as always in moments of dire emergency, we turned to Kola. Kola was a sight to behold. Every evening he would change out of his natty street clothes into a skin-fitting siren suit of chamois-like material in a gentle shade of fawn, that zippered tightly at all orifices. Clad in this remarkable outfit, he would pad energetically around the hotel corridors looking like a dapper Martian. Whatever he may have looked like, his efficiency was unimpaired. The accomplishment of the impossible was routine for him, and in due course he rejoined us carrying three bottles of champagne and two of cognac.
He told us that a party of Germans had just arrived in the hotel. “Timber experts and pulpwood specialists from the Democratic Republic. Very big shots. I’m afraid these bottles may have been intended for their reception.…”
“Thank God the partisan movement remains alive! It’s the Order of The Red Star for you, Kola!” Lev cried.
We talked about Germans and Germany for a while and I was surprised by the intensity of feeling which still remained a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War. There was no overt hatred, but there was an adamantine determination that never again would Germany be allowed to become a threat to Russia.