by Farley Mowat
“It was a good thing there were plenty of spare men, because our lot weren’t up to much. Kola was the first to slump into a coma. Yura went to the toilet and never came back. Then blonde Boris fell off his chair and went to sleep under the table. Farley stayed upright but he looked and acted as if he had been pole-axed. When it finally came time to go, we needed help and this was provided by two militiamen. They were both Yakut and looked like characters from an operetta, in their long black overcoats trimmed with red, huge felt boots, and shining leather cross-straps. They did not act like real policemen. They were too small, too round, too shy and far too amiable. It was impossible to imagine them seriously arresting anyone. They helped us all to the door, found our outer clothing for us, helped us get dressed and even tried to find a taxi, but there were none available. The Lena was nearly a mile away but somehow we all survived the stagger home – it must have been because of the anti-freeze.”
I was awakened at 9 a.m. the next day by an insistent rapping on my door. In no friendly mood I flung it open, and there stood a pale and distrait Kola in his siren suit.
“Farley, please be brave! We have been invited to be guests on the praesidium during the parade. Do not blame me! They will be crushed if we do not go. We have one hour to get ready … and it is Fahrenheit minus 22° outside!”
Sharp at ten o’clock, Simeon Danielov, president of the Writers Union arrived to lead us to our fate. There was no question of taking a taxi; the entire main street was one milling mob of people. We threaded our way to the civic square and to an impressive marble review stand backed by thirty-foot-high portraits of the local Communist leaders. Several of these, in the flesh, occupied a podium in the centre of the stand which was crowded with officials, great and small, stamping their feet, laughing uproariously, and ecstatically embracing old friends. There was none of the grim and paralyzing solemnity which hangs like a pall over Moscow’s Red Square on this date. On the contrary, Yakutsk was vibrant with a feeling of gaiety and warmth which belied the bitterness of the weather; yet did not belittle the intense significance Soviet people attach to the birthday of their Revolution and of their nation.
The Moscow celebration has a hollow, ominous, and depressing character, as if it is conceived and executed by automatons. One reason for this was given to me by a Soviet journalist.
“The Moscow parade is really quite dreadful. I won’t watch it myself. There we show our worst face to the world – a hard, unsmiling face. It is our showcase of power, intended to make our real and potential enemies realize they had better leave us alone. We are a little paranoic, you know, although after fifty years of unrelenting hostility from the western powers, and Japan, perhaps this is understandable. But the face we show in Moscow on November 7th is not the real face of Russia. To know what the Great October Revolution really means to us you must see the celebrations in some out-of-the-way town.”
I think my journalist friend would have accepted Yakutsk as being sufficiently out-of-the-way.
As we stood chatting to some of Simeon Danielov’s friends (he seemed determined to introduce us to every soul on the stand) there came a distant burst of cheering, followed by the dull roar of engines. My memory jumped sharply back to the night before our departure from Moscow and I braced myself in expectation of seeing the obscene grey snouts of tanks and armoured carriers appear at the entrance to the square. A brass band began to play a stirring march (why the bandsmen’s lips did not freeze to their instruments was a mystery I never solved) and the voice of the Party Secretary boomed out of the loudspeakers overhead:
“Comrades! Here come the shock troops of our Republic! Let us give them the greeting they deserve!”
The roar of engines grew louder, and around the corner came a column of more than a hundred tractors and farm trucks extravagantly decorated with red bunting, representing the state and collective farms from many miles around the city. The people in the square cheered wildly and threw paper flowers at the grinning tractor drivers, one of whom responded by waving a not-quite-empty bottle which may, conceivably, have contained tea.
Apart from a contingent of militiamen and a company of Red Army soldiers bearing no arms, this was the extent of the military flavour of the parade. It was also the extent of mechanization. Only the farmers rode – everyone else marched by on foot. And almost everyone in Yakutsk, with the exception of the few thousands in the civic square, and we people on the rostrum, must have been in the march. Someone told me later that the population of the city had swelled to 150,000 for the holiday. After three hours on the reviewing stand, I believed it. I suspect I saw every single one of them with my own eyes.
Contingent after contingent marched by carrying banners and placards, sometimes pushing or pulling floats, and usually preceded by a flag-bearer carrying a portrait of Lenin. Each contingent was greeted by the Party Secretary, who must have been chosen for his high office at least partly because of his leather lungs and his apparent imperviousness to physical discomfort.
The fact was that the marchers were the lucky ones. They could at least keep warm. For those of us on the stand the affair soon became a deadly serious exercise in arctic survival. I could understand why the reviewing stand was built of marble and concrete. No wooden structure could have endured the pounding of hundreds of feet as their owners bounced up and down in a desperate battle to keep their blood flowing.
Claire, Kola and I would certainly have lost that battle and, tough as the Yakut people are, I think most of our fellow victims would have too, had not a life-support system existed. I first became aware of it when I noticed a steady drift of people commuting between the stand and the city hall which stood a hundred yards in rear. At first I supposed these people were simply going off to relieve themselves, but this did not explain the joyous quality of the smiles they bestowed on all and sundry when they returned to duty.
The truth was revealed when Claire’s face began to turn blue and she began to moan softly. Simeon gave her a sharp glance then hustled us off the platform and into the city hall. The first aid station was in the spacious lobby. It was presided over by six extremely busy waitresses who were serving tumblers full of neat cognac. A quick gulp followed by a volcanic moment of instant thaw, then it was back to the Front again.
We regained our places in time to watch the school children of Yakutsk – every last one of them, I swear – march past in neat platoons. They carried a multitude of signs and banners devoted to the theme of Peace; and the messages and exhortations were not only in Russian and Yakut but in many foreign languages, including English.
The peace theme was not restricted to the children. It recurred on banners and slogans carried by such disparate groups as a contingent of Aeroflot pilots, and a party of Evenk reindeer herders in native dress accompanied by a dozen of their deer. It was a major component of the slogans carried by students from the State University.
In this remote place, so distant from the eyes of the foreign press (or indeed the eyes of any foreigners except myself and Claire) Peace On Earth, Good Will To Men, was patently something of deep concern to everyone.
I have watched peace marches in North America and they radiated the same feeling of passionate sincerity. The difference was that those marches were undertaken as protest against the government and were greeted with distaste and disfavour by significant portions of the public, whereas in far Yakutia the peace marchers must have had the blessings of their leaders, and they certainly had the whole-hearted support of the people. The loudest cheers at the Yakutsk parade were not for boastful banners describing production miracles accomplished under Communism – they were for the banners extolling the vital necessity of peace in the world.
Professional anti-communists can make what they want of this incident. They can call me a dupe if they wish, but it remains my conviction that the people of Yakutsk are on the side of the angels, in this respect at least.
Many Russian friends assured me that what I saw in Yakutsk was a repetition o
f what was taking place in most parts of the Soviet Union on that same date. It might be an idea if, at the next anniversary of the Great October Revolution, Western press representatives eschewed the massive military parade in Moscow and dispersed into the Russian countryside. I imagine they would be permitted to do so unless, of course, the inscrutable gentlemen in the Kremlin decided that the passionate desire for peace amongst the Russian people was some sort of military secret, best kept concealed.
When the last marchers had passed the praesidium there was a concerted rush for the city hall bar; but Claire and I and Kola wanted only to get back to the hotel. As we parted from Moisie Efrimov, he called out an invitation for us to join him and his wife for a little snack later on.
Moisie’s flat was, by Russian standards, a big one. There was a combined living room and dining room, lined with books, into which two huge tables had somehow been manoeuvred end-to-end; there was also a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. The “snack” turned out to be a full-fledged family party, and the other guests, all Yakut and about twenty in number, had already assembled. The men wore smartly cut suits in which they looked surprisingly debonair, and their sloe-eyed ladies were gaily dressed and elaborately coiffured.
By the time we arrived most of the men were crowded into one of the bedrooms playing cards upon the twin beds, while the women hustled back and forth between kitchen and dining room bearing plates piled high with Yakut culinary specialities. Moisie was soon called away from the game to prepare one of the more exotic dishes, stroganina, and he invited Claire and me to watch how it was done.
He produced an entire frozen fish about three feet long, stood it on its nose and with a razor sharp knife began slicing slivers off it exactly as one might peel shavings from a log of wood.
Claire was somewhat aghast when Moisie thrust a sliver into her mouth, but she got it down somehow and, after a thoughtful pause (during which I quite expected her to bring it up again) admitted that it was excellent. The fish, called chir, was a rather fatty, white-fleshed species from the arctic coast especially flown to Yakutsk for the holiday feast. The thin slivers seemed to dissolve in the mouth, leaving a rich, nutty flavour.
The guests were eventually herded into the dining room, crowding it far beyond its ordinary capacity; but that only made things cosier. The table had to be seen to be believed. Gleaming bottles almost obscured the vast array of food. There was French brandy, Armenian cognac, half-a-dozen kinds of vodka, grain alcohol, Polish, Hungarian and Georgian wines, and a large bottle of champagne between every pair of guests.
The food was as varied and as lavish. Several teen-age daughters of the guests acted as waitresses. The main dishes included cold, boiled cuts of young foal, hot mare’s-blood sausages, hot marinated beef, roast chicken, horsemeat salami, stroganina, wild rabbit soup and pickled fish. The table was also loaded with side dishes of black and red caviar, Kamchatka crab meat, pickled mushrooms, smoked sausage and some ominous looking things that may have been strips of pickled rawhide.
The eating and drinking lasted three hours and there were toasts on the average of one every five minutes. Poor Kola soon began to fail under the strain of trying to eat and drink with the rest of us while at the same time having to translate in three languages. The toasts got more and more sentimental and we sang sad Russian songs, wild Yakut chants, and lugubrious Newfoundland ditties, until, carried away by the applause which greeted my rendition of “Lukey’s Boat Is Painted Green,” I essayed an imitation of the bag-pipes and discovered I had hit upon an act which was to bring me fame throughout northeast Siberia. My imitation piping (particularly the “Pibroch of Donald Dhu”) roused such a response that I predict an absolutely smashing success for any real piper who may care to try his art in the highlands of Yakutia.
Before the meal was over Kola surprised us by fainting dead away. A doctor was called upon to revive him with spirits of ammonia while the rest of us pried our swollen bellies away from the table and adjourned to one of the bedrooms for a little dancing. Moisie owned a big, flashy record player but alas, it would only play 45 r.p.m. and all his records were of the 33 r.p.m. variety. This made but little difference. The room was so crowded we could only move vertically. We jumped up and down to the weirdly speeded-up music, doing what seemed to be a Yakut version of the bunny hop. When that finally palled, three of the men sang to us. They boomed out the ancient nomad songs of their people with power enough to shake the building and they succeeded, where the doctor had failed, in bringing Kola bolt upright in bed, wild-eyed and quivering.
I must admit that I did not have any deep and meaningful conversations during this party. Whatever I may have learned about the people of Yakutia was accomplished purely by osmosis. I am not at all sure this isn’t the best way.
Nine
YAKUTSK is not Yakutia. Though it is their capital city, and they are proud of it, the allegiance the Yakut give to the taiga is greater than any man can give to a world of concrete and asphalt.
One September evening I arrived in Yakutsk after a flight from Moscow to be greeted by Moisie Efrimov, Simeon Danielov and Nikolai Yakutsky. They were in boisterous spirits as we drove to the hotel.
“The rabbits have come back!” Nikolai told me excitedly. “It is the peak year and they are in the taiga in their thousands. Are you very tired? If not we will go to the taiga in the morning and spend the day there.”
“Yes, and the night too, and the next day … if the vodka lasts,” Ivan added, laughing.
At dawn a hunting party of half a dozen men came for me. Gone were the dapper literary gentlemen I had known. Fur hats, skin boots, and bandoliers packed with cartridges had transformed them into a robust troop of forest dwellers who might have been resurrected from one of their own epic legends. We drove out beyond the city, across the broad flood plain of the Lena into the encroaching forest.
In spring and summer the Siberian forest is known as the Blue Taiga, because of the smokey blue-green hue imparted to it by the dominant larch trees. After the first frosts, it becomes the Golden Taiga as the larch needles take on the colour of honey amber. In September the endless roll of the larch forest begins to glow with a lambent light, given texture by black swaths of pines and defined by the slim white lines of birches.
We drove to a park-like stretch of pines. Nikolai armed me with a double-barrelled 12-gauge gun, and we formed a skirmish line under his direction and set out to hunt for supper.
A heavy, wet snow began falling, and we had not gone fifty yards before we were absorbed into a timeless void. Nikolai came over to join me and as we moved together into the depths of his inner world, I recalled some lines from one of his poems.
The taiga is a universe without an end
Those that live within it are the stars.
Bright stars are the eyes of the beasts
And of the men who walk with the beasts.
The space between the stars is infinite
For the taiga is a universe without an end.
This is a true poem. The map of Siberia can give no real concept of the immensity of that land. The taiga alone can give the sensation of illimitable space and distance. It is a somewhat daunting feeling, and it makes men walk softly and speak in subdued tones.
Several times I saw the ghostly forms of snowshoe rabbits bounce through the veil of falling flakes, but I had no desire to shoot at them.
It was late afternoon before we returned to the thin slash of the road. The drivers of our cars had been busy in our absence. A huge fire roared amongst the pines, and suspended over it were pails of tea made from the same sort of tea bricks which for thousands of years were carried by caravans from Asia into Europe. Piled on a sodden newspaper were the ingredients for a hunter’s feast; a red pile of horsemeat together with potatoes, tomatoes, onions, slabs of unleavened bread … and bottles of vodka.
We squatted Indian style around the flames, steam billowing from our soaked clothing, while we cooked hunks of meat alternated between chunks
of onions and potatoes, skewered on freshly cut willow rods. The vodka bottles went around from hand to hand and we parboiled our gullets with mugs of boiling hot tea. The snow continued to fall and no one cared.
Fourteen-year-old Peter Danielov, Simeon’s son, squatted opposite me, his wild black hair plastered all over his dark face; immobile, except for the gleam and flicker of his eyes in the firelight. He seemed the epitome of a true forest animal, and it required a considerable effort to see in him a teenage student of our world, already the winner of a major scholarship in mathematics and destined for a career in astrophysics.
After a while Nikolai began telling a hunting story.
When I was a boy of twelve I was hunting with my grandfather. It was winter and we had walked a long way from the village when we came to a thicket where many trees had been uprooted by a great wind. My grandfather stopped and sniffed the air like a dog.
“Ah,” he said, “there is a big fellow sleeping close to here.”
We went into the tangle and found a big mound. A tunnel half-filled with snow led into it.
“Well, boy, here is the bear’s home. He is sleeping deep inside his house. I suppose we must leave him to his sleep for what can one old man and one small boy do against a bear?”
He was challenging me. I took my knife out of my sheath, tested it on my thumb and said:
“What we can do is kill that bear!”
He smiled and put his gun down – it was an old muzzle loader. He took his hatchet and cut a long pole and sharpened one end of it. Then he scrambled up on the mound and shoved the pole downward with all his strength.