Travels in Siberia (11 page)

Kennan’s view of Russia in these years missed a lot, naturally. He never returned after his expulsion in 1901, so his news tended to be limited and out of date. When the tsar conceded in principle to government reforms in the October Manifesto in 1905, and events that would end in revolution gained a big lift of momentum, Kennan had reached the age of sixty. He seems never to have grasped the philosophy or appeal of Marxism; to appreciate that particular style of romance you needed a younger and more sophisticated sensibility, like John Reed’s.

By the time of the Bolshevik revolution, Kennan was going on seventy-three. Like much of the world, he responded to this event with
surprise and alarm. But the fact that he was old, possessed of fixed ideas, and increasingly conservative did not make him hopelessly wrong in his judgment of the Bolsheviks; on the contrary, he got them right at the first try. To him the Bolsheviks were a catastrophe unmitigated by anything, and he urged President Wilson’s advisers, who periodically asked Kennan for counsel, to tell Wilson to oppose the Bolsheviks in any way he could, including militarily. Whatever were the emotions that had led him to overlook the crimes of the revolutionaries of his generation, these Bolshevik troublemakers young enough to be his sons or grandsons did not fool him at all.

In 1918, with much of Russia in armed resistance to the Bolshevik government, Wilson did order military intervention, but not in support of the goals advocated by Kennan. One expeditionary force, sent to Murmansk with the stated purpose of protecting Allied supplies from German capture, did join British and other troops in battling the Bolsheviks. A larger American force of twelve thousand men sent to eastern Siberia, however, attempted to remain neutral, pursuant to Wilson’s idea that all warring parties in Russia, including the Bolsheviks, should sit down together and work out an agreement of some kind. The ridiculousness of this, given the Bolsheviks’ ruthless methods and utter lack of compromise, drove Kennan up the wall. He protested and sent memos, to no avail. In the end, the net effect of U.S. and Allied intervention was to give the Bolsheviks a pretext for legitimacy without weakening them significantly either in the East or West. Most Allied troops had left Russian territory by the end of 1920, with the Bolsheviks solidly in control. That outcome probably would have been the same, intervention or no.

In later years, Kennan lived in Medina, New York, where he had once worked in his brother’s bank and where his wife was from. But he always stayed in touch with his Ohio hometown, and he went back for visits. At his return to Norwalk for his sister’s funeral in April 1923, the
Norwalk Reflector-Herald
did a story that laid on more rhetoric about him shaking the might of the Russian empire and the tsar putting a price on his head and so on. The story’s quotes from Kennan sound aged and fond. He remembered the handwritten newspaper he put out with Sam Wildman when they were ten years old; the paper had three subscribers, he recalled, two of whom were himself and Sam. The
Reflector-Herald
’s reporter didn’t ask and Kennan didn’t say why he thought the dream of
liberal democracy in Russia had so sadly failed. In anybody’s life, plenty of dreams don’t work out. He had gone on epic travels, he had written words that influenced Tolstoy and Chekhov, and he had helped shape tumultuous events on the other side of the world—not bad for a boy with a primary-school education from Norwalk, Ohio.

For my own first solo trip to Siberia—unaccompanied by Russian friends—I decided to follow Kennan’s earliest example and come at it from the West. Americans like to wester; but when you reach the Pacific, why stop there? If there’s wilderness on the other side, might as well keep going. For starters I moved with my family from Brooklyn to Missoula, Montana. One reason I chose Missoula was that I had seen a brochure in the Missoula airport describing flights that Alaska Airlines had begun to make to the Russian Far East. Consulting the schedule, I saw I could fly from Missoula to Siberia with just one change of plane.

Not long after we moved, I read a story in the local newspaper about a recent evangelical meeting led by a traveling musician and preacher named Fred Brodin. Dr. Brodin is an Inuit whose grandfather was an Inuit from Siberia who crossed the Bering Strait and settled in Alaska in the early 1900s. The family still has relatives on the other side, and Dr. Brodin knows a lot about the region. The news story said that Dr. Brodin was raising money for an evangelizing expedition that would go by snowmobile across the frozen Bering Strait to native villages on the Siberian side. The boldness of this idea struck me, so I gave Dr. Brodin a call, and then drove down to see him in Kimberly, Idaho, where he lived. Dr. Brodin runs an organization called Indigenous Messengers International, which works to bring the Gospel to Inuit communities from Siberia to Greenland. He told me about that, and about the language problems involved—Siberian and Alaskan Inuits can talk to each other, but both
have a harder time understanding Greenland Inuits—and about the upcoming snowmobile journey, which he said would go in February if they raised enough money and had thick enough ice.

A journey like the one planned had actually happened two winters before, though Dr. Brodin had not been on it. He said that five Quaker Eskimo missionaries had set out from the Alaskan village of Kotzebue and had driven west to the edge of Alaska, where a plane and then a Russian helicopter had ferried them and their snowmobiles across the strait. The helicopter set them down in Chukotka, the part of easternmost Siberia that resembles a Rorschach-blot duplicate of Alaska. On Chukotka’s Chukchi Peninsula, the men then made a thousand-mile circuit by snowmobile, over the tundra from one native Siberian village to another.

Dr. Brodin told me that the leader of that trip was Robert Sheldon, a pastor in Anchorage and the superintendent of the Quaker Alaska Yearly Meeting. Robert Sheldon would be leading the next trip as well. Thinking maybe I could go along, I asked Dr. Brodin to put me in touch with him, and he did. I flew up to Anchorage at my first opportunity.

Robert Sheldon turned out to be a powerfully built man of average height with sloping shoulders, short black hair that hugged his head like a bathing cap, and a mustache that went around his mouth and connected to a small beard. He had canny, humorous eyes; some pastors radiate naïveté, but Robert Sheldon seemed not at all that kind. Over breakfast one morning he described his trip to Chukotka. His companions had been Roland Booth, pastor of the Friends Church in the village of Kivalina; Enoch Stalker, pastor of ditto in the village of Noatak; Norman Westdahl, a Quaker evangelist; and Rodney Jones, a student at the Friends Bible School. The group left from Kotzebue on February 22, 1993, driving five snowmobiles and towing sleds of fuel and supplies. They crossed Kotzebue Sound, went along the northern shore of the Seward Peninsula, and stopped at the village of Shishmaref because of a whiteout snowstorm. After a day or two they continued on to the village of Wales, at the peninsula’s tip where the strait is narrowest.

Ice ridges and open water caused by currents between the continents made the strait impassable, so a twin-engine Beechcraft came to Wales, loaded men and sleds and snowmobiles (dismantled), and flew them
twenty-three miles to the U.S. island of Little Diomede. That island is about a mile and a half from the Russian island of Big Diomede; the Russian-American border runs between. A little Eskimo village holds on to the western shore of Little Diomede. A Russian border post, invisible from the east except for a hut of a guard station, constitutes the only human occupation on Big Diomede.

Little Diomede has an ice runway in winter. The Beechcraft landed there, and then a Russian commercial helicopter—the fruit of complicated negotiations that had taken months—arrived. It packed the men and equipment into its large cargo hold and then flew west. Robert Sheldon said the entire round-trip fare for the Russian helicopter came to only $824.

Robert Sheldon kindly gave me a copy of the video he had made of the journey. The video’s production values are shaky, but that only adds to its authority. At the beginning you see the five men and their wives and other relatives and friends in Kotzebue, a village of one-story houses, oil tanks, shipping containers, and dog pens linked by narrow paths in the snow. The men are lashing things to the sleds and smiling and blinking at the camera. Then they’re sitting at a kitchen table eating scrambled eggs and pancakes; Robert Sheldon looks over his shoulder at the clock and says when they will go. Outside again, they pull on their long white parkas with fur around the hoods and cinch them behind. They say goodbye. Robert Sheldon’s four-year-old son, Michael, has tears on his cheeks. The men jerk the starter ropes on their machines, swing aboard, and head off into the white yonder.

Snowflakes, close to the lens, then lots of white blankness and the pervasive chattering whine of the snow machines. Soon the men are in Wales; then they’re airborne. A big moment comes—I pause the tape at this point—when the plane banks around Little Diomede and the camera sees Big Diomede for the first time. Impending out of the ice, the Russian island stands almost vertically, a rampart of rock and snow. The gloomiest and most Russian of minor chords, played by a full orchestra, would be appropriate here. Even a completely uninformed observer could not help but sense that at the icy shore of Big Diomede a major shift in philosophy begins.

The Siberian part of the Eskimos’ journey, village to village on the Chukchi Peninsula, becomes sadder and darker the farther north they go. In the first village, Lorino, smiling kids sitting cross-legged in the
school gym hear their message and sing songs the Americans teach them. But driving on in the Arctic night, the party comes across the vodka wagon—big metal drums of vodka on sleds, behind Russian snow machines driven by itinerant vodka peddlers. In one or two of the northernmost villages, the population is so drunk that public assembly isn’t possible, and the Eskimos meet with villagers by twos and threes in their homes.

The whole journey lasted almost three weeks. At the end of the video, the returning travelers are a few miles from Kotzebue when they see the headlights of neighbors’ vehicles lined up on the ice to welcome them. The five men ride past the lights and then the scene shifts to indoors, as they walk one by one through a front hallway and into a kitchen, unbuckling and pulling off their several layers of outer clothes. Bravery and accomplishment radiate from them like heat. Robert Sheldon’s little boy, Michael, is now so happy he can’t stop jumping up and down. Robert Sheldon picks Michael up and holds him, then puts him back on the floor, where he goes shouting and bouncing out of the frame.

As it happened, I never did go to Siberia by snowmobile. For reasons of politics, money, and global climate change, the follow-up trip that Dr. Brodin had been working on did not come to pass, and Robert Sheldon’s remarkable snowmobile journey remains the only one of its kind. But after flying up to Alaska and talking to him, I modified my original plans anyway. Something about the proximity of America to Siberia beguiled me. I had not previously thought about the fact that the United States and Russia share a border. In that part of the world you can be in one country and then in the radically different other like slipping behind the looking glass. Instead of making my first solo trip to Siberia in a long, trans-Pacific swoop via Alaska Airlines, I decided to travel north, through the former Russian America, and find out about crossing to Siberia there.

I ended up going to Alaska many times. On flights from Seattle to Anchorage I always asked for a window seat on the right-hand side of the plane, because from it (if the weather was clear) I could observe white cruise ships on the deep blue of the Inland Passage, and the shrinking bigness of the Hubbard Glacier (usually described as larger than Rhode Island), and the delta of the Copper River with its glittering, complicated channels. I got to know the Anchorage airport well. In the big
hexagonal waiting room on Concourse B there is a mounted Kodiak bear on all fours next to a polar bear standing on its hind legs. Both bears look fierce, both are “record class” animals (according to the plaques), and both were killed by dentists.

In Anchorage, I came across books on Siberia I hadn’t known about, many of them from the University of Alaska Press, as well as some obscure ones in the public library. In midwinter, when snow plowed up from the parking lots blocked the first-floor windows and a day from sunrise to sunset was just a few hours long, the whole dark world seemed to hover around the light on the page. At first I mainly read about the Bering expedition—how Vitus Bering led an expedition to the North Pacific in 1725, following the instruction of Peter the Great; how he was supposed to see if Asia and America were joined but did not sail far enough north to establish that for sure; and how he returned to Petersburg in 1730 only to be reproached by the authorities and sent back to try again. Crossing Siberia and sailing from Kamchatka a second time, he managed to reach the Alaskan coast in July 1740. Upon the first sighting of America his men congratulated him on his success, but Bering merely shrugged. He was becoming apathetic and strange. He turned back for home quickly, spending not even a night on the Alaskan mainland, thereby infuriating George Steller, the naturalist on board. Mishap then followed mishap for Bering. Almost everybody onboard, including him, got scurvy, the ship drifted helplessly, and finally it washed ashore on an island a few days’ sail from Kamchatka. On that island, Bering died.

A team of Russian and American archaeologists began excavations on Commander Island (as it became known) in 1979. The Bering expedition had been a massive undertaking, involving thousands of people at its various stages, and it was well supplied, even oversupplied. A lot of the stuff Bering and his men had on the island was still there. The archaeologists found an optical lens from somebody’s spectacles, and an iron rope-splicing tool, and sticks of sealing wax, and a silver kopek from the reign of Boris Godunov, and a bottle of turpentine, and four iron boarding axes, and flasks of pharmaceutical glass, and iron crampons for walking on ice, and a dog- or wolf skin with a crucifix sewn to it, and little iron hammers, and fragments of an hourglass, and a box of the type cannoneers wore for holding their fuses, and a large number of objects whose purposes were unknown.