Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “While the Soviet Union exists, Germany will remain divided,” one elderly man said flatly. “Unless, of course, West Germany takes the socialist course, which is about as likely as the Angara River reversing herself.”

  “Why worry?” I asked. “Between us we beat them the last time, didn’t we?”

  “You westerners delude yourselves that the Germanic will for conquest has been destroyed. That is your business, although if you look at the historic record it is hard to understand how you could be so innocent. As for us, we will never trust the old Germany to behave in a civilized manner, and the old Germany of the sword and the flame is still alive. The United States knows this. That is why they have helped West Germany become an armoured camp sitting on the frontier of the Socialist lands. How do you suppose Americans would feel if they had an enemy like that on their doorstep – in Mexico perhaps?”

  “But surely,” I said, “there is a time to forgive the sins of the past. Even some Jews have forgiven Germany. Look at Israel.”

  A young man who had not said much until then drained his glass and angrily replied. “I am a Jew. I have not forgiven Germany. The Israelis may appear to have done so but only so they can make use of German money and German weapons against the Arabs. Even if the Jew within me could forgive, the Russian in me never could. Do you know the Fascists killed more than fifteen million Soviet people? Do you think all the black smoke from the crematoria was only from Jewish bodies? Maybe we will forgive them some day … but trust them? Never!”

  “It is true,” said the elderly man. “Here in this room I am sure you will not find one person who did not lose a close relative to the Fascists. You will hardly find a family in all the Soviet Union who did not suffer death or destruction at their hands. I can tell you the Fascists destroyed over one thousand of our towns and cities – shelled, bombed, or just burned them to the ground. It will mean little to you. It means much to our people. In 1940 we were just beginning to master our economic problems, and the destruction brought by the German invasion set everything back a full ten years. For you it was different. The war saved you from your economic problems. North America became rich out of the war. You kiss and forgive, and take them to your bosom, but it is out of self-interest you have forgiven them!”

  At this point Mark intervened to change the subject and let emotions cool.

  “Well, anyway, things aren’t so bad now. At least we have the Germans to thank that this isn’t a dry evening. Fill up and I’ll make a toast to Peace and Women – it’s rare enough those two go together!”

  Early one brilliant November afternoon Mark Sergeiv drove us to the airport to catch our flight to Yakutsk. However, the local weather proved delusive. Irkutsk was placidly sitting under its usual clear skylight (it has more hours of sunshine than any other city in the U.S.S.R.) while western and northern Siberia were suffering under howling blizzards. Our flight was “indefinitely delayed” so Mark led us up a broad stairway to the Intourist lounge.

  Because Irkutsk is the aerial crossroads of Siberia (the terminus or transfer point for flights from Mongolia, China, the Pacific Coast, European Russia and the far north), Intourist has done itself proud in the facilities provided at the airport. These include a private bar, a luxurious lounge and an array of magazines, books and newspapers in a score of languages. Foreign tourists in transit under Intourist’s omnipotent wing make use of these facilities; but so, happily, do a good many Russians who, through some magical process which I never did succeed in fathoming, somehow achieve special “tourist” status.

  The lounge was almost empty when our party, which now included Nadia who had elected to fly home to Yakutsk with us, arrived. Flights continued to come in from the south and east and since none was able to depart, more and more odd bods drifted into the lounge. They included two Czechoslovak journalists returning from North Vietnam; a Rumanian psychiatrist going home after a month’s holiday trip through China; a young Russian engineer on leave from a dam-building project in Outer Mongolia; a bevy of Japanese businessmen bound for Moscow, and some exuberant Army officers.

  The bar was opened and in no time at all a general party was underway. Only the Japanese behaved as if they were in a North American airport and kept soberly to themselves. That was their loss. The rest of us were soon dancing to the record-player or drinking and talking with one another as if we had been friends for years.

  Claire was being ardently pursued by the Rumanian doctor. I attempted to corner Nadia, but she was as mercurial as a nymph and kept bouncing away to share a joke with someone or to snatch a gulp out of Yura’s glass as that worthy dozed in an easy-chair. I joined Kola who was talking to the Czechs at the bar. The journalists had spent a month touring northern Vietnam and they confirmed that the country had been heavily damaged by the bombings and civilian casualties had been very high. What impressed them most was the steadfast quality of Vietnamese morale.

  “After fighting for their independence for more than twenty-six years,” one of them told us, “it has become a way of life. You can’t reason with them about it. You can’t make them see that the United States might some day, out of sheer frustration, try to wipe them off the face of the earth. They say they don’t care. They say they will not give up even if they are atom bombed – and they are actually preparing for this to happen.”

  In distillation, the many conversations I had with Russians about Vietnam indicated a curious state of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there was an awe-struck admiration at the way the Vietnamese were holding the American military colossus at bay, coupled with a tremendous feeling of solidarity for a fellow socialist state in agony. On the other hand almost everyone I met wanted an end to the war – an immediate end, even if this meant that the Vietnamese would have to back down a little. There was a strong undercurrent of fear that this local war might spread and get out of hand, eventually triggering the Big One (a fear which appears to find justification in events in southwest Asia during the winter of 1972). Most Russians found it impossible to understand how the United States dared run such risks. They seemed almost more baffled by the American attitude than angered by it.

  There are hawks in the U.S.S.R., of course, but most of the Russians I met, from all walks of life, were possessed of a deep-rooted and violent aversion to the very idea of war. The reasons are obvious. They know what war is all about. Furthermore they realize that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose if their country should become involved in war again. The difference between ordinary Russians and ourselves seems to be that they live with this aversion uppermost in their minds, whereas we have mastered the art of putting it quietly away in the back of ours. I had expected the Russians to be a bellicose people – for this is the way they are usually portrayed to us – and it was a shock to realize that they are far more intensely concerned with preserving peace than we are.

  I do not think their almost fanatical devotion to the cause of peace is something which has been impressed upon them by their leaders. If anything, the process probably works the other way. The hawkish urges of certain Soviet leaders have undoubtedly been dampened by an awareness that the masses are stubbornly opposed to war.

  It can hardly be accidental that during the twenty-five years which have elapsed since the end of the Second World War, the U.S.S.R. has not, despite several tempting opportunities, gone to war with anyone. I exclude such actions as the repression of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak revolts, since these can be almost exactly equated with similar “police” actions taken by the United States against Cuba or the Dominican Republic.

  This is a rather remarkable record when compared with that of the western powers. There has hardly been a year since 1945 when one or other of these powers (and sometimes several of them together) has not been directly engaged in warfare. The record of the United States in this regard is particularly depressing.

  To suggest, as some do, that the U.S.S.R. has been restrained from military excursions by the retaliatory threat posed by t
he United States is to embrace a dangerous illusion. If there is one thing Russians are quite confident about, it is their ability to hold their own if they are ever forced to fight again. The simple truth seems to be – in the words of a popular Russian song – “The Russian people don’t want war!”

  They are so fervently anxious to avoid it that propaganda designed to make them tolerate the idea would probably have little effect unless, of course, the Soviet Union itself was threatened with invasion.

  This brings up another point. Our belief (it is almost a tenet of faith) that the Russians are mindlessly manipulated by their propaganda agencies like a bunch of automata is one of our more glaring misconceptions. In my experience most Russians are so immunized to the propaganda downpour that it runs off them like water off a duck. Furthermore, most Russian internal propaganda is so unpalatable, and is prepared by such unimaginative dullards, that nobody but a born fool would pay much attention to it. There are undoubtedly born fools in Russia but most Russians do not fall into this category. The real nature of the situation is summed up in the words of a Soviet correspondent who spent five years in the United States and with whom I once had a discussion about the relative effectiveness of propaganda in our mutual countries.

  “I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda,” he told me. “Propaganda in the west is carried on by experts who have had the best training in the world – in the field of advertising – and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency. On the other hand,” he added somewhat wryly, “we never had such a training ground because we had very little to advertise. Consequently our propagandists are mostly old-fashioned and inept, and they try to make up by sheer volume of words for what they lack in ability. Yours are subtle and pervasive, ours are crude and obvious.

  “This is one thing. Another is that we Russians are not, by nature, a gullible people. We are, and always have been, suspicious of what we cannot see for ourselves. You can call it the peasant mentality if you like. At any rate it is quite a different attitude from the rather charming naivety which makes many North Americans incapable of doubting or assessing what they are told by their leaders and their communications media.

  “I think the fundamental difference between our two worlds, with regard to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours … and we tend to disbelieve ours.”

  The conversation at the bar was interrupted when a somewhat ruffled Claire elbowed her way into the throng and caught my arm.

  “Listen!” she said urgently. “That Rumanian romeo tried to inveigle me down the hall into an empty office so he could psychoanalyze me!”

  I glanced over my shoulder and sure enough the Rumanian was bearing down on us, a beatific smile on his face and a determined gleam in his eye.

  Happily at this juncture someone suggested we all adjourn to the restaurant.

  Aeroflot waited until dinner was on the table before it jumped us. The loudspeaker boomed a call for the flight to Yakutsk. I leapt nervously to my feet, ready to run like hell, but nobody else so much as budged.

  “Take it easy,” Mark admonished me. “They won’t go without you. Let them wait for a change.”

  Sure, I thought to myself, and the stars will stand still in the sky until we’re ready. But the food was good and the cognac in copious supply, so I resigned myself to spending another day or two in Irkutsk.

  When we were quite finished we leisurely made our way to the boarding gate. One of the little tractor trains was waiting and we climbed aboard. Suddenly I realized that the whole of the dinner group – more than a dozen people – were on the train with us, and yet I knew most of them were heading for Moscow and points west, while we were going into the northeast.

  “What goes on?” I asked Kola. “Don’t they know this is the Yakutsk flight?”

  “Of course they do. They’re just coming along to see us off.”

  The lot of them boarded the plane, making light of the buxom stewardess’s half-hearted attempts to head them off, saw us to our seats, had a parting drink with us and kissed us soundly, while the pilot gunned the motors just a trifle impatiently.

  Polar Aviation’s big, pot-bellied Antonov-10 (Soviet pilots call it the Pregnant Cow) lumbered off into the black night and for the first time since leaving Canada I was aware of a real sense of dislocation. My prior knowledge of Siberia’s southern tier had been sketchy enough, but at least I had known something about that region. My knowledge of what now lay ahead of us was effectively non-existent. Although Yura and Kola had provided me with some basic facts, these offered only the most skeletal picture.

  We were bound for the city of Yakutsk on the banks of the Lena River, 1,200 miles northeast of Irkutsk, at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. I knew that Yakutsk was the capital of something called the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic which embraced an arctic and sub-arctic area of one million two hundred thousand square miles, or more than a third the area of the United States. I knew, too, that Yakutia held the distinction of being the coldest inhabited region on earth and included within its boundaries much of the Central Siberian Plateau and a large slice of the Siberian Highlands. I knew it fronted on the Arctic Ocean with a shoreline more than 2,000 miles in length; that it almost reached the Pacific on the east; and that its southernmost point was just 160 miles north of the Chinese border. These were facts which would have been of value to a geographer but which left me helpless to envisage the place.

  On one occasion when I asked Yura to describe it in more meaningful terms, he replied with some impatience, “How I do that? Is big forest; big mountains; big river; big tundra … everything very big. How you describe north part of Canada? Is like north part of Canada, except, is different!”

  My attempts to inform myself about the people of Yakutia had not been quite so unrewarding, although they fell short of preparing me for the reality. In Leningrad I had spent an afternoon at the Ethnographic Institute indulging my amateur interest in human prehistory. My mentor was Chumer Taksami, an archaeologist whose specialty was the ancient people of Siberia.

  The origins of Siberia’s natives are to be sought in millenia out of time when a mysterious human flood began to rise in the west-central Asiatic plains and to flow inexorably northeastward into the Siberian wilderness. At least forty thousand years ago this tide overflowed the Chukotka Peninsula and spilled across what is now Bering Strait into the waiting void beyond. The western continents absorbed this influx until both South and North America became additional domains of ancient man. New tides continued to flow north and east out of the deserts, over taiga and frozen mountains until they reached the bitter fringe of tundra along the arctic coast. It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the age-old migratory spasms ceased.

  At the time the Cossack, Yermak, broke through the Ural wall, remnants of neolithic peoples of ponderous antiquity still lingered in Siberia, sharing its immensity with many later races. Chumer, who is himself a native Siberian – a Nanai – told me something of the fate of these many peoples as he led me past case after case of their artifacts.

  “These relics are now all that remain of scores of tribes and nations who were obliterated by the European conquest of Siberia, even as so many of your native American tribes were obliterated during the same period and by the same cause.

  “When the Cossacks first came amongst us there were about one hundred discrete peoples living in Siberia. Now there are twenty-nine; and some, like the Tophe and Yukagir, number no more than three or four hundred individuals. The vanished races managed to exist with one another in a state of ‘barbarism’ for thousands of years; but they could not endure the benefits of European civilization.”

  Amongst the tribes who managed to survive were the Yakut. A Turkic-speaking people of Mongolian physical type, they originated in the common heartland east of the Caspian Sea and drifted east and north through innumerable generations to reach the lands which were to become their home and which they settled more
than a thousand years ago.

  From being nomadic horsemen they transformed themselves into a sedentary people who made the most of their harsh new world. They developed an incredibly hardy breed of little horses which they raised as much for meat as for transport. They learned reindeer-breeding from those who had preceded them into the white wilderness. When, in 1620, the first boatloads of Cossacks drifted down the Vilyui River from the west and reached the Lena – the great central artery and sacred river of Yakutia – the Yakut, it is estimated, numbered more than half a million people occupying most of east-central Siberia. They did not occupy it exclusively but shared it amicably with many smaller nations.

  By 1918, many of the smaller nations had vanished and the entire population of the Yakut region, including all the surviving natives and the European interlopers, was down to a quarter of a million.

  “The decline of the native peoples of Siberia seemed to be irreversible,” Chumer told me. “Then came the Revolution … but you will see for yourself what happened after that. It is modern history, and you and I are talking now about the ancient time.”

  As the Pregnant Cow plodded on above a world I did not know, I found myself creating mental images of what might meet my eyes when daylight brought an end to this flight. Would the Yakut, Evenk, Yukagir and Chukchee be the Asian version of the Crees, Chipeweyans, Hares and Eskimos of Canada – whose blood relatives they were? Like the North American natives, would these people I had yet to meet be debilitated, disoriented islands of human flotsam, nearly devoid of hope and of ambition, surviving on charity – when they survived at all?

  Would the town of Yakutsk, and other towns I might visit, be repetitions of Churchill, Yellowknife, Inuvik, Frobisher Bay … thinly disguised colonial outposts whose sole raison d’ětre was to assist in the exploitation of the northern territories for the enrichment of distant southerners?