In Siberia

Map

1
  Hauntings

2
  Heart Failure

3
  The Flight from Science

4
  Borderlands

5
  To the Arctic

6
  The Great Lake

7
  Last Days

8
  To the Pacific

9
  The Planet

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About the Author

Other Books by Colin Thubron

Copyright

About the Publisher

The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains. In the farther distance, perhaps, a herd of reindeer drifts, or a hunter makes a shadow on the snow. But that is all. Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear.

The emptiness becomes obsessive. Until a few years ago only five towns, scattered along the Trans-Siberian Railway, were open to foreigners under supervision, while Siberia itself receded into rumour. Even now the white spaces induce fantasies and apprehension. There is a place where white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice-floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers. And there are places (you could fear) where the terrors of the Gulag secretly continue, and the rocket silos are rebuilding….

Over the Urals the train-wheels putter pathetically, like old men running out of breath. The mountains look too shallow to form a frontier, let alone the divide between Europe and Asia: only a faint upheaval of pine-darkened slopes.

Beyond my window the palisades of conifer and birch part to disclose sleepy villages and little towns by weed-smeared pools. The summer railway banks are glazed with flowers. Beyond them the clearings shut on and off like lantern slides: wooden cottages and vegetable patches boxed in picket fences, and cattle asleep in the grass.

Dusk arrives suddenly, as if this were the frontier also between
light and darkness. Siberia is only a few miles away. It sets up a tingle of alarm. I am sliding out of European Russia into somewhere which seems less a country than a region in people's minds, and even at this last moment, everything ahead–the violences of geography and time–feels a little thinned, too cold or vast to be precisely real. It impends through the darkness as the ultimate, unearthly Abroad. The place from which you will not return.

I chose it against my will. I was subverted by the sudden falling open of a vast area of the forbidden world. The immensity of Siberia had shadowed all my Asian journeys. So the casual beginnings–the furtive glance in an atlas–began to nag and deepen, until the wilderness seemed less to be empty than overlooked, or scrawled with invisible ink. Insidiously, it began to infect me.

The Azeri merchant who shares my carriage never looks out of the window. Siberia is dull, he says, and poor. He trades clothes between Moscow and Omsk, and taps continually on a pocket calculator. ‘I wouldn't stay long out there,' he says. ‘Everything's falling to bits. I'd try China, if I were you. China's the coming place.' He is big and hirsute, thirty-something, and going to seed. After dozing, he checks his face in his shaving-mirror and groans, as if he had expected someone else.

Suddenly in our window there springs up the ghostly obelisk raised by Czar Alexander I nearly two centuries ago. It stands on a low bank, whitened by the glimmer of our train. Here, geographically, Siberia begins. On its near side the plinth proclaims ‘Europe', on its far side ‘Asia'. It flickers past us, and the darkness comes down again. And nothing, of course, changes. Because the boundary between Europe and Asia is only an imagined one. Physically the continents are undivided. Ancient geographers in the West (itself an artificial concept) perhaps decided one day that here was Europe–the known–and over there was somewhere else, Asia.

So I wait for the change which I know will not happen. In the dark the railway cuttings seem to plunge deeper, and the trees to rush up more vertiginously above them. A few suffocated stars appear. Occasionally the land breaks into valleys slung with faint
lights, and once, from the restaurant-car, I see a horizon blanched with the refracted glow of an invisible city.

I don't sleep. The Azeri's snores thunder a yard from my head. Instead, as I scrutinise my maps, I feel alternate waves of exhilaration and unease, so that my eye always returns consolingly to where I am. From here–the mountains west of Yekaterinburg–Siberia stretches eastward more than six thousand miles, and my journey reaches after it, unravelling across seven time-zones and one third of the northern hemisphere. The carriage rocks and murmurs. For the last time, the future looks shapely and whole. It lives in the simplicity of maps. Anything may change it, I know–the collapse of transport, the intrusion of the police or harassment by mafia. But for the moment my eye bathes in the mountains enchaining the south for three thousand miles, then travels along three of the world's greatest rivers–the Ob, Yenisei, Lena–which pour down from the borders of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean. Each of their basins is bigger than western Europe. Then comes Lake Baikal, deepest and oldest of all inland waters; the Amur river abutting China; the snow-fields of Kolyma, where the temperature drops to a meaningless -97°F…. These prodigies flow in seductive and dangerous procession to the Pacific–and suddenly the distances seem hopeless, and I wonder where I'll have to stop.

For this is Russia's Elsewhere. Long before Communism located the future in an urban paradise, Siberia was a rural waste into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state body: the criminal, the sectarian, the politically dissident. Yet paradoxically, over the centuries, it was seen as a haven of primitive innocence and salvation, and peasants located their
Belovodye
here, their Promised Land. So sometimes the censure of Siberian savagery would be reversed into applause for its freedom, and its inhabitants praised as pioneering supermen, uncontaminated by the rot in the bones of Europe. Now, as Moscow succumbs to the contagion of the West, Siberia becomes a pole of purity and authentic ‘Russianness'. I heard rumours that it might secede from western Russia altogether, or fracture into independent provinces. What, I wondered, had replaced its shattered Communist faith?

Across the lower part of my map, the Trans-Siberian Railway is slung like a hammock cradling something of pallid inconsequence. Perhaps it is the snail's-pace of the train–it moves at an unchanging 50 m.p.h.–that touches me with anxiety. Because now the region's statistics are staring me in the face, radiating from under my feet. Everything seems inaccessibly distant. If Siberia were detached from Russia, it would remain by far the largest country on earth. At almost five million square miles, it is bigger than the United States, including Alaska, and western Europe combined. As the sun is rising over the Urals, it is setting on the Bering Sea. My journey, I fear, will vanish in it.

 

It is perversely shocking, the calm and handsome Yekaterinburg. A seriousness, even an austerity, pervades it. But the city founded as a mining centre by Peter the Great in 1723, and named after the adulterous servant-girl he crowned his empress, is too ferocious in memory to feel serene. In 1918 the last Czar and his family were slaughtered in one of its cellars. During the Second World War, hundreds of dismantled factories from western Russia were reassembled here against the Germans, and its biological and weapons plants flourished (and leaked) until the Soviet collapse depleted them.

I walked here in apprehension. It was seventeen years since I'd travelled far in Russia (and never in Siberia) and now I gazed round as if with weak vision, waiting for the return of what I remembered. It was very quiet. The avenues opened under a soft, midsummer light. There were public buildings in the stuccoed fawn and white of St Petersburg, and double-jointed Hungarian buses wandered from one boulevard corner to another.

I felt light-headed. I kept expecting something to happen. I couldn't shake off a lingering disquiet, even guilt. It came, I knew, from another era: from the Brezhnev years, when I had been dogged through the western Soviet Union by the KGB. My footfalls sounded light and exposed to me. But now nothing disturbed or followed them. People were out walking their dogs–it was Sunday. A pair of boyish soldiers were sweeping leaves in their barracks, and some caparisoned droshkies were trotting up and
down as they had in the nineteenth century. On Central Avenue (formerly Lenin Street) the crowds looked dreamy and anonymous: pale-eyed men in track-suits or jeans, women in loose-fitting dresses. Nobody stared at me. I felt as if I had disappeared under the membrane of the city, dressed with the same indifferent shabbiness as everyone else–black trousers, grey shirt–my head cropped into a proletarian hedgehog, my rucksack unnoticed among the knapsacks around me. Speaking bad Russian, I hoped to pass for an Estonian.

In the city centre half the street-names had been changed. Old Bolshevik favourites–Lunacharsky, Kuybyshev, Rosa Luxemburg–had gone; and in their place were poets and writers or bland safeguards such as Central and Siberia Prospect. But whenever I asked the way it was the old, Communist names that fluttered to people's lips. And in an island in ex-Lenin Street the statue of Yakov Sverdlov survived: he who organised the Czar's murder, and gave his name to the city for seventy years. He stood thin and young on an artificial rock. His body seemed wrenched by a fit of anger. Once his statue had enshrined the force of an impassioned idea; but now, with that power faded, it seemed to depict only a frenetic student. Someone had splashed over the legs a bucket of crimson paint which dribbled down the rock.

From time to time a surge of colour or dash of style mesmerised me. There was colour in the streetside kiosks and markets, and everywhere an intrusion of once-heretical names: Lancome, Levis, Proctor & Gamble…. People passed wearing US army forage caps, or baseball hats marked ‘Montana' or ‘Chicago Bulls'. Groups of young women in miniskirts, with sleepy, wide-set eyes, were clopping along the pavements on platform shoes and long, willowy legs. Where had their parents been in Brezhnev's time, I wondered. I remembered nobody like them. The rooftop slogans which once glorified the Party now advertised insurance companies (‘Your dependable partner'). Trams went by blazoned ‘Pepsi' or ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola'. For this was a city which was holding its own in the New Russia, nested in a region rich in natural resources. Its governor was an ardent reformist. Its mafia
chiefs, when they were murdered, were embalmed expensively in Moscow before returning for burial.

I wondered if I had imagined the blank public gaze of twenty years ago, when nobody in the street acknowledged you. My memories were slipping and eliding. Yet from the faces around me some veil, I was sure, had dropped away. They were placid, but no longer absent. Sometimes they argued or sang. And still others were openly dispossessed. They sat with heads bowed over their unfolded palms, motionless, and sometimes dangled placards explaining their homelessness, beginning: ‘Dear People…' A man I had seen everywhere in the old Soviet Union–a drunk in seedy middle age–had lurched into sharper focus. I thought of him as Ivan. His eyes were smeared over, and the creases of his face trickled down into hopelessness. He looked both angrier and more futile than when I remembered him. Now he was out of work, and sometimes buttonholed me for money.

But my old unease was draining away. Once, half from habit, I stopped among parkland trees to check if anyone was following me. My breathing, I noticed, had quickened in the sultry quiet. After five minutes a pretty woman with a fat terrier went by. Then nobody. They don't care, I thought: they are engaged in industrial espionage, or they've joined the mafia. Or they've joined Ivan.

I went back into the confusing streets. I was looking for signposts, I knew. I couldn't imagine a Russia without destiny. So I was hunting for symptoms of a new faith or identity, but hunting impatiently, as people do on first arriving somewhere, hoping for talismans, for simple meanings. Hundreds of homemade advertisements and posters fluttered from walls or trees, and I read them like runic clues. They offered slimming courses, transcendental meditation, English lessons. Psychologists promised release from communication problems. Others offered work. ‘Turn to us…. Take off thirty kilos…. Discover your future…. Master everything….'

I wandered into a show called ‘People of Moment': twenty waxworks which circled an exhibition hall. Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci were followed by Genghis Khan dressed as a Chinese mandarin, and by the gangling giant Peter the Great. But
later came no Marx, no Lenin. Instead the ballerina Plisetskaya contemplated her ankle, while Elvis Presley elbowed Freddie Mercury, and Arnold Schwarzenegger flexed beside Dracula.

Now anything seemed possible. In my empty guest-house, once the haven of Party members, I asked about the region's vaunted independence from Moscow, as if I were enquiring after a hotel guest. Yekaterinburg had its own flag, after all–a white, green and black tricolour–and plans (I'd read) for its own currency, the Ural franc. But behind the reception desk three faces lifted towards mine in identical surprise. ‘Oh that! Every province has its own flag now, that's nothing! Who's ever seen a Ural franc?' The faces crumpled and tittered. ‘Independence is just a game of the governor's!'

And they burst into laughter.

 

But one place lies starkly empty. It is in an old quarter opposite the cream and turquoise tower of the Ascension Church, whose cross the imprisoned family could sometimes glimpse from their windows. The house of the merchant Ipatiev is nothing now but a sheet of crumpled tarmac and a tangled copse. In 1977, on Brezhnev's orders, it was bulldozed away by the local Party boss, Boris Yeltsin (who later called this a ‘senseless decision'), for fear it become a place of pilgrimage.

A skeletal canopy now rises where a memorial church will be, and a white cross stands over the site where Czar Nicholas II, his empress, children and last servants were butchered in the merchant's cellar. Two weeks before, the boorish Bolshevik shock-troops who guarded them had been replaced by a secret police squad, and they began to be afraid. White forces were closing in on Yekaterinburg, and a letter had been smuggled in promising rescue by loyal officers. But the letter was forged. And at midnight on 16 July the family was awoken and ordered to dress and come downstairs. Nicholas carried his haemophiliac son, whose arms were clasped round his neck. Anastasia carried her dog.