Sibir (11 page)

“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?

Soviet propaganda which I had read insisted this would not be the case, and in the short time I had spent in the
U.S.S.R.
I had heard a great deal of talk about “equal rights” and “special treatment” for the Small Peoples of Siberia. I had already met many representatives of the Small Peoples whose apparent success seemed to give substance to the claim that the natives were being treated with astonishing consideration. However, I had met these examples in Leningrad, Moscow, Irkutsk … I had not seen the Small Peoples in their own homes. Even in Canadian cities it is possible to find occasional Indians and Eskimo who have successfully transcended into our society and who can be pointed to as evidence of our just and benevolent concern for native minorities.

The conflict between what I had been told about the treatment of minorities in the Soviet north and what I knew to be the truth about the treatment of such groups in the Canadian north and in Alaska, was so great I could not begin to resolve it. There was no use guessing. Tomorrow, I would begin to know the truth.

A
T
6
A.M. THE
Pregnant Cow bumped down at Yakutsk airport. The door opened and a blast of arctic air blew through the plane. The other passengers hung back as if reluctant to face the frigid blackness; but the urgent beckoning of our stewardess brought Claire and me to the door.

“You have a welcoming committee!” Kola explained.

Waiting at the foot of the ramp was a half-circle of broad-faced, dark-complexioned men who looked vaguely like a group of Eskimo gathered to greet a plane at some far northern settlement in Canada – except that, despite the below-zero weather, they were impeccably dressed in European fashion.

“Who are they?” I asked a trifle nervously.

“Yakut, is who.” Yura replied. “Famous Yakut writers and poets come to say hello. Very good fellows. You will see.”

As we reached the bottom of the stairs Yura was pounced upon and soundly kissed. Claire and I had our arms vigorously pumped. A particularly dapper young man whose wide grin showed a gorgeous display of gold-capped teeth introduced himself.

“Efrimov, Moisie Dmitrievich. Excuse please, my such bad English. Am secretary Writers Union of Yakut Republic. You are honoured sister-men from north country. We give much welcome!”

The genders may have been a bit mixed, but the emotion was sincere. Moisie hustled us into a cavernous airport whose waiting-room was filled with sleeping passengers. But this was not good enough for “honoured sister-men.” While waiting for our luggage to be claimed by Kola we were taken upstairs to a room normally reserved for the use of air crews of Polar Aviation (the writ of Intourist with its luxury lounges does not extend as far as Yakutsk).

The room was crowded with pilots, army officers and a few civilians, most of them pounding their ears. At the far end of the room stood a Chinese rose tree, some ten feet tall, looking wildly out of place. Northern Siberians grow potted trees the way we grow geraniums or African violets. They are to be found in almost every office and in many homes.

Despite having had to wait for us for several hours, our hosts seemed not the least fatigued. Champagne corks began to pop and we were swept into a torrent of talk about books and writing, travel and travellers. So much enthusiasm at such an ungodly hour was more than I could match, and in any case I was having trouble adjusting to these people. The contrast between the trim, dark business suits, white shirts and subdued ties worn by these ebullient little men, and their knee-length, beautifully embroidered reindeer-skin boots did not help the adjustment process. Nadia disappeared for a few moments and when she returned her stylish high-heeled shoes had been replaced by Yakut boots. Nadia was home … Claire and I felt we were a long way therefrom.

A big, burly Russian was snoozing in an armchair under the rose tree, his astrakhan hat tilted forward over a bulbous nose. The warmth of our reception stirred him to surly wakefulness. He raised his heavy head, glared at us with bloodshot eyes, and in a bull’s voice demanded silence. He was obviously a Very Important Person.

For a moment I felt a return to normalcy. The natives had been put firmly in their place. But no! Far from
relapsing into respectful silence, our new friends ignored the interruption. Yura, however, fixed the offending Russian with a hostile stare and in a loud voice explained:

“Huh! Big Chief in Moscow, maybe. Here is just another white man with loud voice. This is Yakut Republic. This is Yakut airport! Have more drink champagnsky!”

Our luggage having been retrieved, we were driven to the Lena Hotel, a five-storey concrete structure which provided us with luxurious accommodation, including a bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom in which there was not only a workable flush toilet but sometimes running water too. Subconsciously I had been expecting to find myself installed in a log hut – and the luxuries of the Lena were a bit too much to take in all at one go.

It was Claire who restored my sense of reality with the discovery that, in Yakutsk, the always inadequate toilet paper which is the mortal lot in the Soviet Union, was simply non-existent. When I delicately drew Yura’s attention to this, he grinned.