Sixty Degrees North (18 page)

These ships, by all accounts, were worse than the overland transport. For much of the week-long journey, which took them through the Sea of Okhotsk, close to Japan, the convicts were locked in cargo areas that were never intended to hold passengers. So many were crowded below deck, some said, that it was impossible to lie down. Food was thrown into the hold from above, and the prisoners, often seasick and diseased, lived in their own filth. Common criminals ruled these ‘floating dungeons', as the historian Robert Conquest called them, stealing food and clothing from the political prisoners and maiming or murdering anyone who got in their way. Women and young men were gang-raped, without consequence for the perpetrators, and those who died on the way were simply thrown by guards into the sea.

Such was the utter misery the journey entailed that the camps themselves may temporarily have seemed like a relief. Here at least was a ration of food for each person, and a little warmth, though not nearly enough of either. Here too was some modicum of order. Any relief would not have lasted long, however, as the reality of life in Kolyma sank in. The main job of the prisoners once they arrived at their designated camp was mining, principally for gold but also for other precious metals and, later, uranium. Prisoners were set work quotas that, even in twelve to sixteen hour shifts, were unachievable. If their productivity dropped too far, so too did their food ration. And if, as was almost inevitable, it continued to fall as starvation set in, they were likely to be shot as ‘saboteurs'. The fact that there was not enough to go round ensured that everyone was always out for themselves. Gradually, reduced to little more than skeletons, ruled by hunger, thirst and exhaustion, the prisoners ceased to be themselves any longer; they became hollow people, with only the barest and basest of feelings. Varlam Shalamov, who spent fourteen years in Kolyma, wrote that: ‘All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one's fellow
man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies.'

Of those who survived the camps, many were broken forever. They were freed, but never free. In
The House of The Dead
, a fictionalised account of the four years he spent in Siberian exile in the 1850s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of how some convicts, once released, could not find the freedom they had longed for in the towns and villages to which they returned. Sometimes, ‘a sedate precise man, who was promising to become a capable farmer and a good settled inhabitant [would] run away to the forest.' These former prisoners would become ‘inveterate tramps', leaving behind their families to wander forever, living a life that was ‘poor and terrible, but free and adventurous'.

Dostoyevsky's experience was mirrored in the twentieth century too, when some former gulags inmates found themselves unable to readjust to the settled life, to the towns or cities in which they had previously lived. Home, for these ex-prisoners, could no longer be located in a single place. Family, work, responsibility: all became chains that had, in the end, to be escaped. The taiga became home; the land itself was freedom.

Of course, Siberia already had its population of wanderers: native Russians – Evenki, Sakha, Nenet, Chuckchi, Koryak, Yukaghir and others – who, up until Soviet times, lived nomadic lives, herding reindeer and hunting wild animals. Their movement was governed by the natural migrations of the animals on which they relied. The idea of settlement – of tying oneself to a single place and staying put – was entirely alien; it made no sense at all in the context of their lives. To remain in one place in the taiga was to die.

In the region around Magadan, the predominant native culture was the Even, who lived in small family groups, herding reindeer. For 2,000 years or more, since these animals were first domesticated, the relationship between people
and reindeer has been central to Even life, providing almost everything that was needed to survive. Their meat was eaten and their milk was drunk; their fur was used for clothing and for shelter; their antlers could be fashioned into tools. Fish, herbs, berries, wild mammals and birds all offered variety in people's diet, but reindeer gave stability. Without them, life in Siberia would have been virtually impossible.

Native Siberians' relationship with the land was one of absolute intimacy. In order to stay alive it was essential to know the places through which one moved, to know them psychically and geographically, but also to know their character. That character was the essence of the place, it was its soul or spirit. And for the Even, as for other Siberian peoples, spirits were a genuine, conscious presence in the land, to be respected, heeded, and appeased if necessary. Everything in this place had a spirit – every animal, every river, every mountain and valley – and according to Piers Vitebsky, ‘Because such creatures, places, and objects have some kind of consciousness, they also have intention.' To live safely and successfully, therefore, one must ‘strive to be aware of the moods of your surroundings and adjust your behaviour accordingly, in order to achieve your aims and avoid disaster.'

This understanding of the world, as a sentient place, would once have been almost universal. But it seems difficult to comprehend now when viewed from a distance, from the more or less soulless comfort of our own time and place. There are shadows of it still lurking, though, in our ways of thinking and in our language, and they lie not far beneath the surface. Siberia's climate, we might say, is
harsh
, and the land itself
cruel
or
unforgiving
. These adjectives are intended metaphorically, but it is not an enormous psychological leap, once we ascribe such characteristics to a place, to allow for the possibility that they might not be metaphors. To say that Siberia is an unforgiving place is to identify one element of
its character, its spirit. And in difficult times, when faced by the reality of that lack of forgiveness, recognition of this spirit inevitably grows. In the
Kolyma Tales
, one gulag prisoner sees this with terrifying clarity. ‘Nature in the north is not impersonal or indifferent,' he says, ‘it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here.'

In central Kamchatka, my travelling companions and I visited a group of Even people. In the village of Esso, we boarded a decrepit orange helicopter that took us, noisily, nervously, to a treeless plateau that felt as far from our own lives, perhaps, as it was possible to go. As we stepped out and the engine was cut, the thundering of the blades was replaced by a thundering of hooves, as hundreds of reindeer – some white, some piebald, most a dark, chocolate brown – turned anticlockwise as one, in a tight defensive group. On the edge of the circle, men in khaki clothing stood watching the animals, one of them gripping a lasso in his fingers. Then, without warning, the loop was thrown and a reindeer was hauled out from the crowd. It emerged thrashing and dancing on the end of the rope – whole, vivid and vital. We watched in silence as the men dragged the deer away from the others, then pinned it hard against the ground. A blade was inserted in the back of its neck, just at the base of the skull, killing it instantly. What had been living and thrilling became dead.

It took only moments for the animal to be cut into useful pieces. First, slices were made up the length of the legs and the skin pulled back. The head was removed and placed upside down, facing away from the camp. Then, with breathtaking ease, the skin was stripped away from the body, and the innards removed from the carcass. More people appeared, wielding knives, with jobs to do. Six men and one woman worked together, cutting the animal into its constituent parts, disassembling it into food and fur. Cigarettes hung from their mouths as they bent over the body, cutting and
dividing. A small, smoky fire was lit on the ground beside the meat to keep insects away.

When the work was done we were invited into the communal tent, a large, wood-framed structure, with an open fire in the centre and a blackened pot hanging over the flames. Into this pot, the deer's heart and other chunks of meat were dropped, and for an hour or two we sat together with the Even, speaking, drinking tea, and eating the animal we had just watched die.

More than any other event in the time I spent in Kamchatka, I have thought back to that day with the Even. There among the mountains and the reindeer was something that struck me and stayed with me, but which I have never fully understood. I knew, of course, that there is a falseness to any such interaction between native people and tourists, and that a deep economic perversity had made our encounter possible in the first place. But beyond that, beyond all of that, there was something else, something that moved me and which moves me even now. It was something in the thundering of those hooves, and in the parting of skin from flesh. It was something in the sharing of food. On that day I witnessed a familiarity between people and place that was far beyond what words could express. It was a bond that was more than a bond; it was a love that was more than a love. There in Kamchatka, those people were not really separable from that place. They and it were part of each other. It was a kind of union that once was normal and now is extraordinary, and though I knew that such concordance is no longer truly possible in the world in which I live, in seeing it I felt for the first time its absence. And from there, from that recognition, my own longing took shape.

That visit to the Even camp was in some ways misleading. While the life we saw out on the land looked much as we imagined it could have looked for centuries, in fact a very great deal has changed for all native Siberians over the past
hundred years or so. Indeed, over that time, their culture and their way of life has been degraded, threatened and deliberately perverted, with consequences that are still being played out across the country. For the Soviets who took power in the early twentieth century, nomads were a problem. The native people's lifestyle, the authorities believed, was socially backward and incompatible with the new economy. Their solution to this problem was utterly destructive. From the 1920s onward, reindeer herding began to be treated in much the same way as any other form of agriculture, and was eventually brought under the control of enormous state farms. Herders became labourers, no longer working for themselves but instead for a wage from the farm managers. Animals became the property of the state. In addition, the authorities created ‘native villages', in which herders were expected to live when not on ‘shift' on the land. The number of men directly involved in working with the reindeer was limited – wages would be paid only to essential employees – and the number of women was limited much further, usually to just one for each herd. In this way, families began to be broken up, with fathers absent for long periods. The situation was made much worse by the removal of many children, who were sent to schools elsewhere in order to educate them out of their parents' way of life.

As well as these physical changes, the spiritual world of the people was threatened too. Shamans in particular, who had been crucial in perpetuating the native understanding of the land and its spirits, were persecuted, murdered and ultimately wiped out (the word ‘shaman' is Even in origin, but similar figures existed across Siberia and northern Scandinavia, and still do in other hunting and nomadic cultures worldwide). The Soviets went to great lengths to try and replace native ways of thinking with their own brutal logic. In one example, shamans, who in their traditional rituals would embark on ‘soul journeys' in which they would ‘fly',
sometimes held aloft on the back of a reindeer, were thrown out of helicopters to prove they could do no such thing.

The Soviets' plan, to a great extent, was successful, achieving much of what it was supposed to achieve. Though spiritual beliefs are still widespread among native people, the shamans have gone, and nomadism as a way of life was minimised as far as was realistically possible. But a high price for this success was paid by those who had to live with the impact.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the people of Siberia were vulnerable in a way they had never been before. During seventy years of social upheaval, enforced from the outside, the communities of the region had lost the self-sufficiency that was once necessary for their survival. Reindeer herders who for millennia had been reliant only upon their own skills and knowledge of the land and its animals had become dependent upon supplies and services brought from elsewhere: upon vets, upon air transport, upon endless bureaucracy, upon vodka. And when communism disappeared, the economic safety net of the state disappeared, too.

In native villages today, the results of that change are all too apparent. Alcoholism, substance abuse, violence and suicide: it is a familiar list. Young people feel alienated from their culture and from their place. Women particularly, for decades urged to take up occupations rather than involve themselves in herding, now feel themselves entirely separate from that lifestyle. They are lost in a land to which they no longer feel connected.

What took place in Siberia – the enforced ending of shamanism, the restructuring and settling of native life – was an imposition of alien values upon a landscape and a way of living that was tied to that landscape. The Even's entire system of knowledge, their culture and identity, was centred around the taiga and around their reindeer. But during the
Soviet era, the centre became elsewhere. It moved to the villages and to the cities. The herders found that their lives had become peripheral. The taiga was now to be seen as a workplace; the reindeer, a product. At the same time that Soviet authorities were physically exiling prisoners in the gulag, they were psychologically exiling native Siberians from their own home, dividing them from the ways of living and thinking that had evolved in this place, naturally, necessarily, over thousands of years.