Eight Pieces of Empire (37 page)

Enough politics.

SHEVARDNADZE, THE MAN
so thoroughly associated with his supposed love of power above all else, had married a woman who tried her utmost to dissuade him—out of a fear that he would destroy his life because of her father’s “enemy of the people” reputation.

And when Shevardnadze’s wife, Nanuli, died, the now-president Saakashvili made an emotional call to Shevardnadze’s aides, passing along a message that the government would help with her burial anywhere in Georgia.

Eduard Shevardnadze, the supposed political power-junkie, stated quietly that he and his wife had agreed they would be close together, whoever died first. “She said, ‘We will be together,’ ” he told me. She insisted on being buried as close as possible to her still-living husband.

“So I had her buried right outside my door here, for us to be close to each other. It is what she wanted.”

Georgia’s patriarch, Ilya II, strongly advised against this; it was a violation of Orthodox practices. “Our patriarch told me that those not buried in family cemetery plots, and too close to their loved ones, were fated to a restless, nonstop suffering after their passing,” Shevardnadze said.

“But we buried her here, right outside my door, and I am so gratified that we did.”

LAST SONG OF THE ULTAS

I
t was March 2005
. I set off on a five-thousand-mile trek and nine time zones to find them.

And while this is not the absolute maximum distance one can travel from Moscow and still be in Russia, it is very close. I wanted to know
how
they had survived, all 350-odd of them. Why were there so few of them? More important, I wanted to know whether they
would
survive. They were the Ulta people, their self-designation meaning “reindeer herder.” They had been reindeer herders for centuries, as nomads, then had been forced into state collectives during Communism, and now were on their own again, living a post-Communist village life, neither nomadic nor collectivized.

I first read about the Ultas (called Oroks in Russian) while researching a trip to Sakhalin Island, the massive Russian island within sight of Japan. The actual intent was to get as far away from Moscow as possible, to again feel the incredible breadth of Russia, even after it had lost its fourteen former “colonies,” or Soviet republics. There was plenty to report on. The island had a complicated history—until World War II the southern part was controlled by Japan and the north by Russia, which established a penal colony there for hard convicts. Chekhov had taken an arduous, more than two-month journey to Sakhalin from European Russia in which he lamented the inhuman state the prisoners were kept in. Now, in the mid-2000s, Sakhalin was again on the map, this time
in the midst of an oil-drilling boom, with Western companies and ones controlled by the Kremlin squabbling over the spoils.

Crude-oil contracts were not what attracted me to Sakhalin. It was the natives who drew me—among them the Nivkhs and the Ainu, numbering just over a few thousand, living amid more than 200,000 ethnic Russian residents. And then there were the 350-odd Ultas, about whom I could find very little information.

So big is Sakhalin that it takes an overnight train ride from the pseudo-Western oil-boom regional capital of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk just to get to the middle of the island, to the last depot in the town of Nogliki. Many anomalies of Sakhalin’s curious history remain. The railway is not according to Russian standards: It was set up by the Japanese, who used a 3.6-foot wide-gauge track, as opposed to the 5.0 feet standard in Russia.

The train lurched forward and sideways, snow squalls buffeting us all night on the way up the island. We finally ground to a halt at Nogliki, a tiny town and kind of “capital” for the remaining native peoples.

I woke up, got out, and was met by Alexei Limanzo, a diminutive, quiet, but determined man, the head of the Sakhalin native peoples association. We drove to the house of a friend of his, where despite the early hour we were served rounds of vodka. When I went to empty my bladder, there was a slaughtered reindeer lying in the bloody bathtub.

I had arrived at my destination.

Limanzo explained the intricacies of the discipline: A reindeer’s everything is edible, down to the intestines and other organs; the antlers are treasured, especially in Asia, as an aphrodisiac when ground to a fine powder. Limanzo arranged for me to meet with some of the local activists from among the Nivkhs, the largest of the native groups—but still numbering just a few thousand souls. Most of them were women. They seemed genuinely surprised that someone would be interested in their culture. I asked a lot of questions about the Nivkh language. The women explained that in addition to the neuter, female, and masculine genders found in Russian, for instance, there were specific genders for “round
things” and, more interesting, for dogs—dogs being central to the native existence of sledding and herding.

The next day, a perfect sunny Sunday morning, I headed farther north to seek out my goal, the Ultas. About half of them live in the village of Val, a down-at-the-heels-looking hamlet, more Russian-style
izbushkas
, simple wood-frame houses. Pristine snow reached their rooftops. My taxi driver let me out of his car at eight a.m. Except for the incessant barking of dogs, there was not a soul stirring, and amid the silence, the crackling of my feet in the snow sounded like glass being smashed. I knew no one in Val and had no leads, save for the name of the head of a local reindeer collective that Limanzo had given me. Even then, I didn’t have his address. I knocked on the first door that I saw.

A woman in a flowery robe opened it gradually, for some reason laughing that someone would knock on the door at eight a.m. on a Sunday morning in the middle of a subarctic, bone-chilling winter. She invited me in for tea. I declined, telling her I needed to find the reindeer herd man, Borisov. She made a motion to the left and then said turn right and then straight and to the left at the end of the road again. I got lost, and repeated this exercise at several other houses, until I finally found Alexander Borisov’s humble abode.

I walked into the yard, which was guarded by a half-feral yapping dog. I knocked a few times. A scruffy-looking man, an acquaintance of Borisov’s, opened the door and invited me in.

Borisov was still asleep, it turned out. There were the remnants of a birthday party from the previous night on a wooden table—nearly empty bottles of vodka and some half-eaten cake. Borisov had not been warned of my arrival. His friend roused him, and Borisov emerged, his hair tousled, eyes glued half shut, the remainder of his face inviting and warm. His first question was to ask me what the hell I was doing in Val on a Sunday morning. It seemed not too many outsiders visited.

Before the advent of Soviet rule, the Ultas had for centuries lived on nomadic reindeer herding, passing the winter months grazing them, and trading their meat or deriving sustenance from it during the summer. But
the freedom to move about at will ended with forced collectivization. The reindeer herding continued, but in a more regimented form.

It was one of the ironies of the empire that although the Ultas were subject to collectivization (and the repression of their native language), state subsidies kept the reindeer business alive, even thriving.

Before the Soviet breakup, there had been fifteen thousand head of reindeer tended by hundreds of herders. Now, Borisov said, there were just a few hundred head looked after by a mere fifteen men or so. On the day I visited, they were somewhere out in the frozen lands on snowmobiles, plying their trade, perhaps dozens, perhaps more than a hundred miles away.

Borisov got dressed and started telling me about the post-Soviet fate of the collective. Our interview started with the obligatory morning shot of vodka.

“We are a dying people,” he told me, without any sense of regret or overemphasis, as if speaking of an empirical inevitability. “Without reindeer herding, Ultas will cease being Ultas,” he said. When I asked about what his forebears had done for a living, he almost fell off his chair in laughter. “We are
Ultas
,” he said.

I eyed a few reading items on a bookshelf. There was a magazine about race car driving, which Borisov was eager to talk about, although he conceded he’d never been close to a race car and the only road in the town was a dirt one. There was also an Ulta-Russian dictionary. I picked it up and started leafing through it. Borisov expressed the same sort of amusement that the Nivkhs had about my interest in their language. He gave me a few rough translations from Ulta into Russian. He conceded that only one thousand of the dictionaries had been printed—the work of a quixotic Russian linguist. Despite its rarity, Borisov insisted I take it as a gift—he had no real need for it, he insisted. That was clear—it looked as if it had never been cracked open. He signed it and eagerly put it into my hands.

I had more questions about Ulta traditions, folklore, and the language of the Ultas. Borisov admitted he was no folklore expert. He was a reindeer collective boss, and his mission was to resurrect the trade. Then
he directed me to a house nearby, where he said I’d find a woman who was the local expert on the Ulta language and folklore. He warmly escorted me to the door and insisted I return during the summer, when he said the wildflowers were in bloom, the berries would be ripe for picking, and the nights were long and full of partying.

Borisov’s dog was a poodle compared to the one I encountered at the house of Elena Bibikova, which was so large and ferocious it looked like it had been feasting on reindeer carcasses 24/7.

Bibikova, a slight woman with characteristic Asiatic features and a face etched with deep age lines, opened the door a crack. Without asking who I was, she invited me into her home, decorated with handmade curtains and dominated by the hiss of a natural gas heater. She explained that out of the people living in the village, only a dozen or so still spoke Ulta fluently, all of them elderly. She was the expert among them: the keeper of the language, so to speak.

Bibikova was incredibly patient, as evidenced by her gentle methods of dealing with her husband, Vanya. By now it was ten a.m., and Vanya was already smashed on cheap vodka, a remedy for unemployment and resignation. He called the rotgut
asetonka
—acetone, or paint thinner, and just such an aroma filled the house. Vanya invited me to join him in a round of his paint-thinner stash, but I was already staggering from the chief reindeer herder’s toasts. I told Bibikova that I preferred some green tea.

We finished our tea (Vanya declined, calling green tea “atrocious stuff”), and Elena said she needed to go to her sister’s house, across the street. She volunteered, with a bit of resignation, that “somebody has to take care of him [Vanya]. He has this mania—he doesn’t sleep at night—only in the mornings. So I turn the gas off at night. I had to visit a relative in another town a few weeks ago, and I called the house to check on him. Vanya didn’t answer.” She thought perhaps he’d burnt the place to the ground. When she returned the house was intact, but the door was open—Vanya had simply wandered off to a buddy’s house to find another bottle.

“When they get up in the morning here, they think only about one thing: where to go and drink—nothing else,” said Bibikova. Again, it was the paradox of the Soviet system. Without the state subsidies that
had kept the reindeer trade going—or at least made it dependent on the government—the Ultas’ way of life had been ravaged. In this unforgiving, monotone climate, alcohol was the natural way of self-medication, and the parallels with disproportionately high levels of alcoholism among US Native Americans, equally displaced, were obvious.

Elena Bibikova was the only one in the village I met who seemed to recognize the significance of the impending loss of the language and identity of the Ultas. There were so many paradoxes at work. The development of energy-rich Sakhalin Island was as inevitable as the Ultas’ inevitable abandonment of their nomad culture. Then again, the empire, with its mass of subsidies, had kept the Ulta way of life alive, by subsidizing their otherwise unprofitable reindeer-herding industry. Now those subsidies and preferences were gone, and the only ones left who cared were fighting a losing battle.

“I try to organize classes to teach Ulta to our young people, but most parents here say ‘what’s the point?’ They’d rather their kids learn English than Ulta. We don’t even have a system for teaching our language. Our language is dying. Nobody needs it.”

Bibikova struggled on nonetheless. She composed simple ballads about Ulta life, reflecting on their customs of berry picking, and the precollectivization era of the months away from the village roaming the taiga forests, keeping camp while the Ulta men herded, and, of course, her singing of ballads.

“When our people rode in the sleds or the men would sit around, we would sing these songs. They were called ‘ya-ya.’ … I even made some up myself. I’d sing them to my sisters. When I was naughty, my mom told me: ‘You don’t want to do anything but sing!’ ”

Bibikova sang a song she had written herself, one she taught to the Ulta children in the village, or at least to those whose attention she could hold:

Ultay die risu

Ultay die risu

Ultay die rikhu

Ge-aya!

“We the Ulta people have lost our language.… People, do not lose your language. Speak it.”

Bibikova betrayed no resentment that she was among only a handful of people still speaking Ulta fluently, all of them over sixty. “When we die, the Ulta language will die with us,” she said.

Given her sense of conviction, I did not believe her.

HOME, SWEET CHERNOBYL

I
t was a bitterly cold
, crisp December day, but Nina Melnik was determined to show me her snow-covered rose backyard garden, her new shed made of cedar, her Russian-style
banya
(“your skin will feel like a newborn’s”), and her prized peach trees. It could have been anywhere in the vastness of pristine, pine-covered northern Ukraine.