Sibir (5 page)

“Not at all,” Kola explained. “Russian people are very sensitive about the problems of communicating in strange languages. They have to be. There are ninety-three
official
languages in the Union. Apart from those who are born to the Russian tongue, most people still speak their own ethnic language, plus Russian, which serves as the common language. People with a higher education, and that now includes almost all our young people, learn a third language as a matter of course. The preference is for English, French, German or Spanish, in that order.”

Nadia was not only an intellectual surprise but a sartorial one too. She looked, as Claire rather wonderingly remarked, more chic than most college students in Canada; complete with eye-shadow (which stressed her oriental cast), a teased hair-do, a form-fitting black dress and high-heeled shoes. She was by no means unique. With their multi-racial background and their flair for dress, the girls of Irkutsk have to be as eye-appealing as any in the world. When I revisited the city with John DeVisser, he shot so many pictures of the pretties that I felt constrained to caution him against using up too much of his film.

“Mind your own business!” he replied shortly. “I’m going to do a
special
book … Birds of Irkutsk.”

While we men discussed the day’s plans, Nadia and
Claire were deeply engaged in a conversation of their own. And when we announced that we would begin the day with a visit to the Angarsk Power Plant we found ourselves facing a revolt.

Claire is an ikon addict and she had confided her passion to Nadia.

“Power plants is nice,” said Nadia, “but is not fair. It makes bad impression for visitors, because always you doing what men want to do, and here in Soviet Union women are your equals. So please, will we not go to some churches now and look at ikons!”

It was not a question. It was a statement of intent.

Smiling sardonically Mark capitulated and drove us across town to the oldest Russian Orthodox church in the vicinity. It was a chilly morning, hazy and windless. We crossed the Angara River, glittering with moving crystals of shell ice. The church stood behind ancient walls a mile or two from town and beyond it farm lands rolled gently to an encircling rim of distant forests.

The church (a nunnery once) was crowned by bulbous towers inhabited by what seemed like a million pigeons, wheeling and spiralling like living smoke. The tree-filled grounds and the old stone buildings had an air of gentle decrepitude about them.

Irkutsk, Mark told us, was one of the earliest bastions of the Russian Empire in the East. It was founded by a band of marauding Cossacks who reached the region in 1634 and chose this spot to build a wooden fort as a base from which to harry the native Buryat people. The fort developed into a great trading centre. In the nineteenth century, it became the final staging point for anti-Tsarists exiled to the salt mines and oblivion. From Irkutsk, many of the great overland and overseas expeditions to the Far East and beyond set out. Mark showed us an unpretentious memorial to Alexei Chirikov who, in 1741, sailed with Vitus Bering to become the first known Europeans to reach the shores of Alaska.

Even more impressive was the plethora of little stones
half buried under fallen leaves, marking the graves of the wives and children of the ill-fated Decembrist Revolutionaries of 1825 who were amongst the first to revolt against Tsarist rule. Wives and children voluntarily followed their men into Siberian exile along the incredibly arduous road leading to Irkutsk. They walked almost all the way, taking more than a year to complete the journey. Exhausted, sick, and starving, most of those who reached Irkutsk perished and were buried there.

Their graves were marked by very modest stones, but in the side-yard, close to the grey wall of the church, was one grave marked by an enormous granite boulder which must have weighed a good forty tons. It belonged to a fabulously rich man who accumulated most of his wealth from the use of slave labour in the salt mines. Before his death he tried to insure a kind of immortality by having this gigantic rock rolled into the churchyard to mark where his remains would lie. He had a solid bronze plug poured into a hole drilled into the rock upon which was inscribed his name and fame. During the Bolshevik Revolution, when the Reds were fighting desperately for survival against the Whites, metal became so scarce that a local gunsmith chiseled out the bronze. Now only the nameless stone remains.

We went into the church where, although this was a weekday, a special mass was being sung. The service was being conducted with the full pomp and panoply of Orthodox ritual. A hidden choir sang a lugubrious chant and the air was thick with incense. We caught glimpses of the high priest wearing a towering pearl-encrusted hat, and all but hidden from the worshippers in the dark depth of an inner sanctuary.

There were ikons – hundreds of them of every age and degree of decay – glittering dully with gold and jewels. Alas, they were not for Claire. A venerable gentleman with a long, discoloured beard shuffled up to us and in no uncertain tone informed Mark there was a service in progress and tourists were not welcome. Whereupon four
members of the Soviet New Order and two embarrassed Canadians withdrew as unobstrusively as possible.

Crouched on the stone steps outside the door was the one and only beggar we ever saw in Russia. He was a bent, unkempt and dirty old man but not, apparently, crippled. When I asked about him, Mark replied, “Well, like everyone else his age he draws a full State pension. Perhaps he enjoys the role he plays.…”

As we left the churchyard the glaucous gold October sun broke through the haze and the old city of Irkutsk lying across the river from us became radiant and lovely.

Rather hesitantly Mark asked if we still wanted to visit the power plant. Discovering that none of us really had any great hankering to see it, he was not-so-secretly relieved. Being a writer himself he knew the inutility of such expeditions to anyone except industrialists, engineers and people of that ilk. He understood that the spectacle of thousands of men and women swarming over a concrete mountain in order to produce millions of kilowatts of invisible electricity would add little to our understanding of the Russian people.

“Well,” he said. “Why don’t I show you my Irkutsk instead?”

So we drove to a great stone-paved esplanade on the banks of the Angara at mid-city. This broad wall, guarding the banks against spring floods, was dotted with men and women promenading in the pale, autumnal sunshine. The half-mile-wide river flowed strong and steady below us from its source at Lake Baikal toward its union with the Yenisei, and thence onward to the Arctic Ocean. On its congealing surface were dozens of tiny rowboats manned by fishermen who, unperturbed by the skim of ice, concentrated soberly on their rods and lines. They were engaging in one of the two great outdoor pastimes of all Russians. The season was a trifle late for the other: the passionate pursuit of wild mushrooms.

We left the car and walked through a park where platoons of well-dressed men were rehearsing for their part
in the coming parade to celebrate the day of the Revolution. The quietness was startling. There was none of the pulsating roar that rises from a city of half a million people in the west, and yet the broad, tree-lined avenues seemed to carry a steady stream of cars and trucks.

“It is so quiet because Irkutsk is still a wooden city,” Mark explained. “In the forest the trees absorb sound like a sponge and it is the same with the log houses of Irkutsk.”

These wooden houses were all about us; long streets of them, even near the centre of the city. They were beautifully constructed of squared logs, and many stood three stories high. Each was a work of loving labour and of art, decorated around doors and windows and under the eaves with scrolls and fretwork, sculptured shutters and complicated carved porticos painted in blues and greens to form intricate patterns against the chocolate brown of the ancient logs.

Here and there were gaps where these buildings out of another time had given way to the stark concrete constructions of the new age.

“The shape of things to come,” I mused, half to myself, “when this city becomes as faceless as all cities, and thunders and reverberates to the sound of the machine, and knows no more quietness.”

Mark stopped and looked intently at me for a moment. Then this New Man of a New Age said a heartening thing.

“We will not
let
that happen. There has been too much lost already in our land – by war and by senseless change. Change must come; but it cannot be allowed to obliterate the past. We have many destroyers amongst our planners – too many of them. But here in Irkutsk, as elsewhere, we are forcing them to be careful. Whole streets of these old houses will be preserved, not as museums, but as living homes. Man is a living thing, and man has roots. Any fool knows that without roots all things die, and we are not going to go that way. Just last year we
persuaded the administration to give us hundreds of pounds of real gold leaf so we could re-guild the domes of every church in Irkutsk. It was not religious zeal made us do that. It was our certainty that the old things belong to life as surely as the new – and must be cared for tenderly.”

“But surely,” I demurred, thinking of the tremendous concrete waste I had seen on the outskirts of Moscow, “people who think the way you do must be very much in the minority.”

“Not so much. And we have the young people behind us now – we writers and painters. They believe we are right because they feel it in their bones. Each year there are more of us and we are already strong enough to stop the worst of the destruction. Don’t misunderstand. We are not trying to stand in the way of changing times. We only mean to be sure change does not become a universal blight.”

Thinking about my own country I was sceptical of Mark’s certainty, but I kept my doubts to myself. Later I concluded that he had not overstated the position. Wherever I journeyed I met more men and women who shared Mark’s convictions than opposed them. On every human level I heard the echo of Mark’s words. I came away convinced that whatever else may happen in the Soviet Union, the past will remain alive and vital and will continue to nurture man and to be nurtured by him.

One evening Mark offered us a choice of entertainment: a performance of the State Symphony Orchestra, a Chekhov play at the State Theatre, a Verdi opera, or a performance by a troup of Koryak folk singers and dancers (the Koryaks are the native peoples of the northern Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific coast). He apologized because there was no ballet scheduled that evening.

Claire elected to attend the symphony to satisfy her curiosity about the quality of music available in this provincial city some twenty-six hundred miles distant from
Moscow. What she got was a set of five modern pieces by a group of five Leningrad composers all of whom were present in the flesh to conduct their own compositions. She reported that the theatre was packed and that Russian modern music left her just as cold as does its counterpart in North America.

I forewent the bright lights in favour of an evening spent talking with a small group of Mark’s friends.

It was mostly a writers’ evening. I was thoroughly quizzed on the status of writers in my own country and in turn heard some revealing things about the other side. Mark presented me with a number of his books. The children’s books were particularly impressive to look at, even if I couldn’t read them. On the whole, books for adults in the
U.S.S.R.
(unless they are art books) are poorly designed and rather shabbily manufactured. I remarked on this but Yura pointed out that in Russia adult books are sold for their content – not their appearance. They are intended to be read, not used as table ornaments or as status symbols. Furthermore, they are sold at a price everyone can afford. For instance, an average-length novel in hard cover sells for about 8o¢.

Children’s books are different. Visual appeal is considered vital for children, and the publishers go full out to achieve it. The best artists are hired to do the illustrations, which are always extensive and frequently superb. Production and design are comparable to ours but, because of the mammoth size of the printings, prices are kept to a tithe of what we must pay. Initial printings of Mark’s children’s books run from half to three-quarters of a million copies.

The shop-talk was interrupted by the arrival of a dapper, dark-complexioned young man named Yakob, bearing gifts – two bottles of Armenian cognac. Yakob was a Buryat, a member of the original cattle-breeding tribe who owned this region before the Russians came. He was also a town planner with a degree from Moscow University and, like all planners, was a rabid enthusiast.

He adroitly turned the conversation to his chosen field. Some years ago the state planning bodies realized that the twentieth century trend toward agglomeration (whereby the population tends to drift from the periphery of a country into a few mushrooming urban centres) had to be brought under control before it was too late – as it was almost too late for places like Moscow and Kiev. A first principle was established that the population growth of the most threatened cities would have to be arbitrarily arrested. The method chosen was to place stiff controls on the availability of housing – easily done since almost all the living space in the big cities is owned directly or indirectly by the state. Nobody who was not already a resident in Kiev, Leningrad or Moscow could obtain housing in those cities without a special permit, and permits were hard to come by. A would-be immigrant had to demonstrate that the city could not do without
him
– not vice versa.

This policy has been condemned by critics of the
U.S.S.R.
as proof that Russia is a police state, since it obviously restricts the free movement of the individual. However, I met few Russians who looked upon it as a tyrannical interference with their liberty. Most of them saw the point and recognized it as the only immediately practical method of keeping the growth of the metropolitan monsters in check.

As Mark pointed out it is not
an absolute
restriction. Those who yearn for big city life can earn a domicile permit by attaining such excellence in their jobs or professions that the city requires their services. Yura noted an interesting side affect. Hundreds of thousands of students go to study in Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow from all over the
U.S.S.R.
Since only a few are permitted to remain after graduation, the balance must return whence they came or otherwise disperse throughout the country where they are most needed. This is at least a partial explanation of why cultural, medical, teaching
and technical services outside the big cities of Russia are of such high standard.