Travels in Siberia (3 page)

The main four-legged animal I encountered in Siberia was the cow. Little herds appear all the time, especially in western Siberia, grazing along the road or moving at twilight from the woods or the swamp into a glade. Siberian cows are skinnier than the ones in America, and longer legged, often with muddy shins, and ribs showing. Some wear bells. Herders, usually not on horseback, follow them unhurriedly. The boys have motormen’s caps and sweaters with holes; the women, usually older, wear rubber boots, long trousers under their skirts, and scarves around their heads against the insects. Beef in Siberian stores is gristly, tough, and expensive. Siberian dairy products, however, are cheap and good. The butter and ice cream of Siberia are the best I’ve tasted anywhere.

At times Siberia has supplied a lot of western Russia’s butter, and some of England’s and Western Europe’s, too. Just before the First World War, 16 percent of the world’s exports of butter came from Siberia. N. S. Korzhanskii, a revolutionary who knew the father of the Russian Revolution, V. I. Lenin, when Lenin was living in England in 1903, recalled a meal in Lenin’s London apartment at which “I was amazed at the wonderful, beautiful-smelling creamy butter, and was just about to burst out with some remark about the wealth of the British, when Vladimir Ilyich said, ‘Yes. That must be ours. From Siberia.’ ” Lenin spoke to his landlady, and then informed his guests that the butter had come from the Barabinsk Steppe. “I passed through it twice,” Lenin added. “On my way into exile and back again. A marvellous place. With a great future. The Englishwoman told me that they all know Barabinsk butter and Chulym cheese.”

Lenin went to Siberia on two separate occasions. The exile he was referring to followed his arrest for revolutionary activities in St. Petersburg in December 1895. Lenin was twenty-five then, and still using his original name, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Sentenced to three years’ exile, Lenin was sent to Shushenskoye, a village on the Yenisei River in central Siberia. Exile under the tsars could be a rather mild proposition, especially compared to what the Soviets would later devise; during his exile Lenin received a government stipend of twelve rubles a month, which covered room and board as well as extras like books. He was able to get a lot of reading done. On the way to Shushenskoye, he stopped for a
couple of months in Krasnoyarsk and read in the library of a rich distiller named Iudin. The research he did there later helped in the writing of his
Development of Capitalism in Russia
. In Shushenskoye, he translated a book by the English Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, hunted, skated on the Yenisei, and entertained his girlfriend, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who came to Shushenskoye to visit. They later married and honeymooned there. All in all, Siberia seems to have agreed with Lenin splendidly and seasoned him as a political thinker. His revolutionary name, which he assumed in 1901, may have been inspired by the great Siberian river, the Lena (the name of his native river, the Volga, having already been taken by the father of Russian socialism, Georgi Plekhanov, known as Volgin).

The second time Lenin was sent to Siberia he had been dead for seventeen years. After the 1917 revolution, which succeeded in no small measure because of his vision and practicality, Lenin guided the Bolshevik putsch through civil war and consolidation of national power. Then in 1923 he suffered a series of strokes; a convalescence did not restore his health, and he died of another stroke in January 1924. Because of Lenin’s importance to the revolution and the saintlike status the Communists gave him, the Soviet government decided to have his body preserved. Embalmers and other technicians did such a skillful job that when they were done he looked better than he had in the months before he died. To house him, the government built a temporary and then a permanent tomb on Red Square in Moscow, where his body went on display for the crowds who filed reverently by.

In 1941, with the Germans approaching, an icon as important as Lenin could not be left at risk of destruction or capture, so the body was packed into a railroad car and shipped to the western Siberian city of Tyumen for safekeeping. There, far from the front, it waited out the war. In 1945, after the Allied victory, Lenin again returned from Siberia and went back to his Red Square tomb. Russians who had seen him both before and after his stay in Tyumen reported that when he went on display again he looked “much the worse for wear,” his second Siberian sojourn having had a less salutary effect, apparently, than his first. The experts in charge of such details soon got him back into shape again.

Like Lenin, many of the objects in museums and churches in the Kremlin and elsewhere in western Russia have spent some time in Siberia.
During the Second World War, state treasures and works of art and historic archives were put in crates and shipped east. A lot of western Russia’s heavy industry also moved to temporary factories beyond the Urals. The instinct to withdraw, to disappear far into the interior, figures often in Russian history. During invasions from the West, Russia’s strategic option of nearly unlimited retreat made it, in a sense, unkillable. After Napoleon began his invasion of Russia in 1812, an adviser told Tsar Alexander I, “I am not afraid of military reverses . . . Your empire has two powerful defenders in its vastness and its climate. The emperor of Russia will always be formidable in Moscow, terrible in Kazan, and invincible in Tobolsk.” Tobolsk, at the junction of the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, was at the time the administrative capital and ecclesiastical seat of western Siberia.

On the question of whether Russia’s vast size has benefited or hurt it overall, historians and others disagree. Those who take the negative side say that Russia has been too big and spread out ever to function properly, that it has been “crippled by its expanse,” that much of its land is not worth the trouble, and that Siberia is a road leading nowhere. A few years ago, two public-policy experts at a Washington think tank wrote a book advising Russia to close down its remote and hard-to-supply Siberian cities and villages and concentrate the population in locations more practical for transportation and the global market. The far places should be left to a few skeleton-crew outposts, and the difficult environment allowed to revert to wilderness, the experts maintained.

Those on the positive side of the argument (a larger number, in total, than the nays) say, basically, that Russia was not really Russia before it began to move into Asia. Before, it was a loose collection of principalities centered on trading cities like Novgorod and Vladimir and Moscow. The pro-Siberians say that other nations became empires by crossing oceans, while Russia did the same by expanding across the land it was already on. At weak moments in Russia’s history, it could have been partitioned between hostile countries that then were more powerful—Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, Germany—had not the resources and hard-to-subdue vastness of Siberia kept it alive. Possessed of Siberia, Russia became a continental country and not only an ethnic entity on the map of Eastern Europe. Or as Joseph Stalin once told a Japanese interviewer, “Russia is an Asiatic land, and I myself am an Asiatic.”

(Stalin, by the way, was exiled to Siberia repeatedly during his years as a young revolutionary, and he claimed that he had escaped from Siberia six times. He was, of course, alive during the Second World War and so did not make a posthumous visit via cold storage.)

The first Russian ruler to style himself officially as tsar, Ivan IV (
Ivan Grozny
, Ivan the Fear-inspiring, “the Terrible”), was also the first to add “Lord of All the Siberian Land” to his titles. He was able to do this because he had conquered the Tatar city of Kazan, a Muslim stronghold on the Volga River that had long blocked Russian moves eastward. In 1552, Ivan led a large army against Kazan, besieged the city, mined the walls, overcame the defenders, killed many of the men, enslaved men and women and children, and then had his clergy sprinkle the streets, walls, and houses with holy water to bring the benediction of the Almighty to this formerly infidel place. The conquest destroyed the Tatar khanate of Kazan. Farther to the east, the khan of Sibir, taking note of the event, became Ivan’s tribute-paying vassal, thus making Ivan his titular lord.

With Kazan out of the way, Russian adventurers could go beyond the frontiers to previously unexplored lands across the Urals. In 1581 and 1582, a band of Cossacks led by a Volga River pirate named Yermak Timofeyevich followed rivers into the country of the khan of Sibir, fought several battles with the khan’s forces, defeated him, captured his leading general, and occupied his fortress town, Isker, on the Tobol River. The khan, Kutzum by name, later regrouped and killed many of the Cossacks, including (in 1585) Yermak himself. But by then Yermak had sent envoys to Ivan with news of his victory and a rich tribute of sable furs, black fox furs, and noble captives. This impressed Ivan favorably with Siberia’s possibilities, and the state then secured Yermak’s foothold with contingents of troops. By 1587, the Russians had begun to build the city of Tobolsk a short distance downstream from Isker, the former stronghold of the Siberian khan.

Such an enlargement of Ivan’s territories gave added plausibility to the grandeur of the name “Tsar.” Ivan had reinforced it in other ways, too, primarily by announcing the many royal lines he was descended from. His mother, Ivan said, was a descendant of Mamai, khan of the Golden Horde, whose rulers traditionally came from the line of Genghis Khan. Ivan also claimed direct descent from the Caesars of Rome, through a progenitor named Pruss, supposedly Caesar Augustus’s brother.
Ivan’s paternal grandfather, Ivan III (“the Great”), had counted among his wives Sophia Paleologue, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, another important relation.

That emperor had disappeared forever, along with the Orthodox church in Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turks captured that city and desecrated and destroyed its churches in 1453. Then only Russia, nominally Orthodox since the tenth century, remained as the seat of the true faith. Soon after Ivan IV’s reign, Moscow became by tsar’s decree “the Third Rome,” Rome itself having been lost to the heresy and corruption of the Catholic church, and Constantinople, the Second Rome, now engulfed by Islam. Moscow would be the Third Rome, with no other to follow; there the true and orthodox faith would be preserved.

After Russia had acquired Siberia, tsars of the seventeenth century sometimes were told by Westerners that their dominion exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon. This information pleased the tsars, who probably did not look too closely into the math of the statement. The surface area of the moon is about 14,646,000 square miles. (Although the tsars would’ve measured in desyatin, or square versts, or something else.) When the moon is full, the part that’s visible is of course half the entire moon, or 7,323,000 square miles. Whether Russia in the seventeenth century could honestly claim to be larger than that is not certain. It had not yet taken over the Baltic territories, the Crimea, Ukraine, or the Caucasus, and most of its Siberian territory was unknown in size. Mapmakers then had little information about Siberia’s eastern regions and were not even sure whether it joined North America. Those details weren’t important, however. To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.

When I was in my early forties, I became infected with a love of Russia. By then I had left Ohio, moved to New York City, become a writer. On the street in New York one day I saw my first actual from-Russia Russian. My then landlord, a Romanian named Zvi, pointed him out to me. This Russian was stocky, broad, with big hands and wide fingers. He wore a light gray shirt, open at the neck. His pallid, unshaven face was almost the same colorless color as his eyes, and his thick, straight gray hair was combed up off his forehead. I nodded to him, and he nodded back. I considered this a very satisfactory first sighting. My landlord said that this man had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union because of the diplomacy of the great President Jimmy Carter and added with admiration that already the man had become a much-feared landlord himself in Brooklyn.

At about the same time, I saw a notice for a lecture to be given by two recently arrived Russian émigré artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The notice advertised them as conceptual artists and said that in Moscow before they emigrated they had been unable to find work because they were dissidents. Everybody had heard of and sympathized with Russian dissidents. The term came nowhere near to describing how contrary and daft Komar and Melamid really were. At the lecture, only Melamid spoke English. Komar interjected comments in Russian that Melamid attempted to translate. First they showed slides of themselves buying the
soul of Andy Warhol. There in the photo stood Warhol himself, a bit addled-looking but game, handing over the deed to his soul to these Russians, who were giving him a dollar bill in return. Melamid also announced they had recently gone to Crete and discovered the skeleton of the famous Minotaur, providing as proof a slide of a human skeleton with a bull’s skull for a head. They then showed portraits of people’s ancestors, which they said they were available to paint on commission; all the portraits were carefully rendered paintings of dinosaurs. A series of slides showed the pair at an altar they had built in the Negev Desert in Israel, a stop on their way to the United States. Upon this altar they had made a pile of their Russian suitcases and then set them ablaze, symbolizing the finality of their leaving home.

Later I wrote a long magazine profile of Komar and Melamid. After it appeared, Melamid and his wife, Katya Arnold, invited my wife and me to go drinking with them. We did, and had a great time, and the four of us became friends.

Meanwhile in the Soviet Union events were occurring that don’t need to be retold. One big change followed the next, people sloughed off communism like an old skin, and the Soviet Union disappeared. Nobody knew where Russia was going, but for the moment, anyway, it seemed to be free. The exile that our Russian friends had chosen, and the separation from friends and family that all had assumed would be forever, no longer had to be that. With American citizenship and passports, Alex and Katya could now travel to Russia like anybody. When they had lived in Moscow, Alex, and Komar, had been kicked out of the Union of Soviet Artists; now a gallery in Moscow was mounting a show of their work, and they would go back to superintend. Katya, who would accompany them, would be seeing Moscow and her friends and family for the first time since she had left in ’78—fifteen years. She asked my wife and me if we’d like to come on the trip. In my family, I’m more usually the traveler, and we had a four-year-old daughter besides. I said I’d come along.