Natasha's Dance (63 page)

    This colonial attitude was further strengthened by the economic decline of Siberia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As

    * The cultural importance of the Ural mountains for Russia’s European self-identification has persisted to this day - as testified by the notion of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ advanced by Gorbachev.

    fashions in Europe changed and the fur trade declined in importance, and efforts by the Russian state to develop mining failed to compensate for the loss of revenues, so the promise of a virgin continent suddenly became supplanted by the bleak image of a vast wasteland. ‘Nevsky Prospekt, on its own, is worth at least five times as much as the whole of Siberia’, wrote one bureaucrat.
³⁸
Russia would be better off, another writer thought in 1841, if the ‘ocean of snow’ that was Siberia could be replaced by a real sea, which would at least enable more convenient maritime trade with the Far East.
³⁹
This pessimistic vision of Siberia was reinforced by its transformation into one vast prison camp. The term ‘Siberia’ became synonymous in colloquial expressions with penal servitude, wherever it occurred, with savage cruelty
(sibirnyi)
and a harsh life
(sibirshchina).
⁴⁰
In the poetic imagination the unforgiving nature of Siberia was itself a kind of tyranny:

    The gloomy nature of these lands Is always harsh and wild, The angry river roars Storms often rage, And the clouds are dark.

    Fearing the winters,

    Endless and icy,

    Nobody will visit

    This wretched country,

    This vast prison house for exiles.
⁴¹

    This Siberia was a region of the mind, an imaginary land to which all the opposites of European Russia were consigned. Its boundaries were in constant flux. For the city-bound elites of the early nineteenth century, ‘Siberia’ began where their own little ‘Russia’ - St Petersburg or Moscow and the road to their estate - gave way to a world they did not know. Katenin said that Kostroma, just 300 kilometres to the north-east of Moscow, was ‘not far from Siberia’. Herzen thought that Viatka, several hundred kilometres to the west of the Urals, was in Siberia (and in a sense it was, for he was exiled there in 1835). Vigel thought that Perm -a little further east but still not within view of the

    Ural mountains - was ‘in the depths of Siberia’. Others thought that Vladimir, Voronezh or Riazan, all within a day or so’s coach ride from Moscow, were the start of the ‘Asiatic steppe’.
⁴²

    But Russian attitudes toward the East were far from being all colonial. Politically, Russia was as imperialist as any Western state. Yet culturally there was a deep ambivalence, so that in addition to the usual Western stance of superiority towards the ‘Orient’ there was an extraordinary fascination and even in some ways an affinity with it.* Much of this was a natural consequence of living on the edge of the Asiatic steppe, torn between the counter-pulls of East and West. This ambiguous geography was a source of profound insecurity - mainly in relation to the West, though such feelings were always the mainspring of Russia’s wavering attitude towards the East as well. The Russians might define themselves as Europeans in relation to Asia, but they were ‘Asiatics’ in the West. No Western writer failed to score this point. According to the Marquis de Custine, the centre of St Petersburg was the only European part of the Tsar’s vast empire, and to go beyond the Nevsky Prospekt was to venture into the realm of the ‘Asiatic barbarism by which Petersburg is constantly besieged’.
⁴³
Educated Russians themselves cursed their country’s ‘Asiatic backwardness’. They craved to be accepted as equals by the West, to enter and become part of the mainstream of European life. But when they were rejected or they felt that Russia’s values had been underestimated by the West, even the most Westernized of Russia’s intellectuals were inclined to be resentful and to lurch towards a chauvinistic pride in their country’s threatening Asiatic size. Pushkin, for example, was a thorough European in his upbringing and, like all the men of the Enlightenment, he saw the West as Russia’s destiny. Yet when Europe denounced Russia for its suppression of the Polish insurrection in 1831, he wrote a nationalistic poem, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, in which he emphasized the Asiatic nature of his native land, ‘from the cold cliffs of Finland to the fiery cliffs of Colchis’ (the Greek name for the Caucasus).

    * This makes Russia an extremely big exception to Edward Said’s provocative argument in
Orientalism:
that the arrogant European sense of cultural superiority imposed on the ‘Orient’ an ‘antitype’ or ‘other’ which underwrote the West’s conquest of the East (E, Said, O
rientalism
(New York, 1979)). Said does not refer to the Russian case at all.

    There was far more, however, than simply resentment of the West in this Asiatic orientation. The Russian empire grew by settlement, and the Russians who moved out into the frontier zones, some to trade or farm, others to escape from Tsarist rule, were just as likely to adopt the native culture as they were to impose their Russian way of life on the local tribes. The Aksakovs, for example, who settled on the steppes near Orenburg in the eighteenth century, used Tatar remedies when they fell ill. These entailed drinking
koumis
from a horse-skin bag, using special herbs and going on a diet of mutton fat.
⁴⁴
Trade and intermarriage were universal forms of cultural interchange on the Siberian steppe, but the further east one went the more likely it became that the Russians were the ones who would change their ways. In Yakutsk, for example, in north-east Siberia, ‘all the Russians spoke in the Yakut language’, according to one writer in the 1820s.
⁴⁵
Mikhail Volkonsky, the son of the Decembrist, who played a leading role in the Russian conquest and settlement of the Amur basin in the 1850s, recalls stationing a detachment of Cossacks in a local village to teach Russian to the Buriats. One year later Volkonsky returned to see how the Cossacks were getting on: none of the Buriats could converse in Russian yet, but all 200 Cossacks spoke fluent Buriat.
⁴⁶

    Such a thing would never have occurred in the overseas empires of the European states, at least not once their mode of operation had been switched from trade to colonial mastery. For, with a few exceptions, the Europeans did not need to settle in their colonies (and did not have to take much interest in their cultures) to siphon off their wealth. But such things were almost bound to happen in a territorial empire as enormous as the Tsar’s, where the Russian settlers in the remotest regions, six months’ journey from the capital, were often forced to adopt local ways. The Russian Empire developed by imposing Russian culture on the Asian steppe, but in that very process many of the colonizers became Asian, too. One of the consequences of this encounter was a cultural sympathy towards the colonies that was rarely to be found in colonizers from the European states. It was frequently the case that even the most gung-ho of the Tsar’s imperialists were enthusiasts and experts about oriental civilizations. Potemkin, Prince of Tauride, for example, revelled in the ethnic mix of the Crimea, which he wrested from the last of the Mongol khanates

    in 1783. To celebrate the victory he built himself a palace in the Moldavian-Turkish style, with a dome and four minaret towers, like a mosque.
⁴⁷
Indeed, it was typical, not just of Russia but of eighteenth-century Europe as a whole, that precisely at that moment when Russian troops were marching east and crushing infidels, Catherine’s architects at Tsarskoe Selo were building Chinese villages and pagodas, oriental grottoes, and pavilions in the Turkish style.
⁴⁸

    A living embodiment of this dualism was Grigory Volkonsky, the father of the famous Decembrist, who retired as a hero of Suvorov’s cavalry to become Governor of Orenburg between 1803 and 1816. Orenburg was a vital stronghold of the Russian Empire at this time. Nestled in the southern foothills of the Ural mountains, it was the gateway into Russia for all the major trade routes between Central Asia and Siberia. Every day a thousand camel caravans with precious goods from Asia, cattle, carpets, cottons, silks and jewels, would pass through Orenburg on their way to the markets of Europe.
⁴⁹
It was the duty of the governor to tax, protect and promote this trade. Here Volkonsky was extremely successful, developing new routes to Khiva and Bukhara, important cotton kingdoms, which opened up the way to Persia and India.
⁵⁰
But Orenburg was also the last outpost of the Imperial state - a fortress to defend the Russian farmers on the Volga steppelands from the nomadic tribes, the Nogai and the Bashkirs, the Kalmyks and Kirghiz, who roamed the arid steppes on its eastern side.

    During the course of the eighteenth century the Bashkir pastoralists had risen up in a series of revolts against the Tsarist state, as Russian settlers had begun to move on to their ancient grazing lands. Many of the Bashkirs joined the Cossack leader Pugachev in his rebellion against the harsh regime of Catherine the Great in 1773-4. They besieged Orenburg (a story told by Pushkin in
The Captain’s Daughter)
and captured all the other towns between the Volga and the Urals, plundering property and terrorizing the inhabitants. After the suppression of the rebellion, the Tsarist authorities reinforced the town of Orenburg. From this fortress they carried out a brutal campaign of pacification against the steppeland tribes. This campaign was continued by Volkonsky, who also had to cope with a serious uprising by the Ural Cossacks. In his dealings with them both he was extremely harsh. On Volkonsky’s order several hundred Bashkir and Cossack rebel leaders

    were publicly flogged and branded on their foreheads or sent off to the penal camps in the Far East. Among the Bashkirs, the governor became known as ‘Volkonsky the Severe’; he was a demon figure in the folklore of the Cossacks, who still sang songs about him in the 1910s.
⁵¹
Yet Volkonsky was by no means all severe. By nature he was soft and kind-hearted, according to his family, with a poetic spirit and a passion for music, intensely Christian in his private life. Among the citizens of Orenburg, he had the reputation of an eccentric. It was perhaps the consequence of a shrapnel wound he had received in the war against the Turks which left him with strange voices in his head. In mid-winter, when the temperature in Orenburg would sink as low as -30 degrees centigrade, he would walk about the streets in his dressing gown, or sometimes only dressed in his underpants, proclaiming that Suvorov (who had died ten years before) was ‘still alive’ in him. In this state he would set off to the market and hand out food and money to the poor, or go entirely naked into church to pray.
⁵²

    Despite his brutal treatment of the Bashkir population, Volkonsky was an expert on their Turkic culture. He learned their Turkic language and spoke with the local tribesmen in their native tongue.
⁵³
He travelled widely throughout Central Asia and wrote extensively about its flora and fauna, its customs and its history and ancient cultures in his private diaries and letters home. He thought the Tobol river, on the eastern side of the Ural mountains, was ‘the best corner of all Russia’.
⁵⁴
He was a connoisseur of oriental shawls, carpets, chinaware and jewellery, which friends from Petersburg would commission him to buy.
⁵⁵
During his last years in Orenburg he even came to lead a semi-oriental life. ‘I love this place’, he wrote to his nephew Pavel Volkonsky, the Emperor Alexander’s Chief-of-Staff. ‘I love its nomadic way of life.’
⁵⁶
Volkonsky lived like a Persian sultan in his exotic palace, surrounded by a retinue of Kirghiz and Kalmyk household serfs whom he regarded as his ‘second family’.
⁵⁷
He also kept a secret harem of Bashkir ‘wives’.
⁵⁸
Volkonsky mixed in a large society of Tatar tribesmen, whom he liked to refer to as ‘my natives’.
⁵⁹
Abandoning his Imperial uniform, he would receive the Kirghiz khans in a Mongol ceremonial uniform, or even in a
khalat.
⁶⁰
All the years he lived in Orenburg, Volkonsky never said he missed St Petersburg, and throughout this time he went back only once. ‘The quiet life of the Asian steppe suits my temperament’,

    he wrote to his daughter Sofia. ‘You may consider me an Asiatic -perhaps I even count myself as one.’
⁶¹

    ’A fairytale land from
The Thousand and One Nights,’
proclaimed Catherine the Great on her first trip to the newly annexed Tatar lands of the Crimea in 1783.
⁶²
Literature and empire had a close relationship in the Russian conquest of the Orient. The marvels of these places were such a fertile source for the imagination that many statesmen came to view them through their images in literature and art. Eighteenth-century tales, starting with the Russian translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
(1763-71), portrayed the Orient as a hedonistic kingdom of sensual luxury and indolence, seraglios and sultans, as everything, in fact, that the austere north was not. These themes reappeared in the oriental dream worlds of the nineteenth century.

    This ‘Orient’ was not a place that could be found on any map. It was in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, as well as in the east. The two compass points of south and east became combined in an imaginary ‘Orient’ - an exotic counter-culture in the Russian imagination - and it was made up as a sort of pot-pourri from many different cultural elements. In Borodin’s
Prince Igor,
for example, the melismatic music of the Polovtsian Dances, which came to represent the quintessential sound of the Orient, was actually drawn from Chuvash, Bashkir, Hungarian, Algerian, Tunisian and Arabian melodies. It even contained slave songs from America.
⁶³