Travels in Siberia (21 page)

With the Hinckley buzzards on my mind, I wondered if that wasn’t what troubled me about the crows and ravens of Russia: maybe someplace deep in their bird consciousness these carrion lovers cherish memories of the Mongols’ glory years in the distant thirteenth century, and they know that if they are only patient, the Mongols will return.

The Russian princes who hiked endlessly to appear before the Great Khan at Karakorum left no written descriptions of the experience, preferring to forget about it, no doubt. But after Russia was a country among others, and Muscovy had unified the princedoms and elevated the Muscovite prince to the eminence of tsar, he began to send out embassies. Ambassadors dispatched to meet with the Chinese emperor, six thousand miles away in Peking, wrote some of the first and best accounts of travels in Siberia.

The earliest of these travelers, in the seventeenth century, knew almost nothing about China. Russians of the time had heard that China was completely surrounded by a brick wall, so they assumed it couldn’t be very large. Nicolae Milescu (sometimes called Spathary), a Moldavian-born Greek of great learning, spent three years on the journey and accomplished little besides annoying the Chinese emperor, K’ang-hsi, with arguments over protocol. Evert Ysbrantsoon Ides, a Dutchman sent in 1692, had better diplomatic success, and after his tedious twenty-month trek to Peking delighted in the food and entertainment there—“Soops and pottages . . . extraordinarily grateful to the taste,” he wrote, as well as performances by trained apes and mice and rides on the emperor’s elephants.

Like many high-ranking officials in tsarist Russia, these envoys and their suites tended to be foreign born. John Bell, a physician with the
embassy led by L. V. Izmailov in 1719, was a Scotsman of a prosaic and down-to-earth sensibility who wrote an account described by a reviewer in 1817 as “the best model perhaps for travel-writing in the English language.” I like Bell a lot, and think the almost-dour factuality of his prose argues for nonfiction being a particularly Scottish art. The Izmailov party left St. Petersburg on July 14 and by fall were waiting in Kazan for the roads to freeze. Setting off from there in late November, Bell wrote, “The roads were rough and narrow, lying through dark woods, interspersed with some villages and cornfields.” Minus the now omnipresent power-line towers, that description would still fit the landscape today.

Going by sled for 250 versts from the city of Tyumen to Tobolsk, the Siberian capital, Bell and his companions covered the distance in thirty hours, which I figure equaled about five miles an hour. From Tobolsk they went up the Irtysh River and then across the Barabinsk Steppe, a dangerous region because of the Kalmuck bandits that roamed it. At the Ilim River they turned south and followed that tributary to the Angara, which led them to the city of Irkutsk, a big place even in that day, with two thousand houses. While in the vicinity of Lake Baikal, Bell learned of the existence of a personage called the Dalai Lama, and his mention of him is believed to be the first ever in an English text.

Between Baikal and the Chinese border, Bell reported “waste land enough to maintain, with easy labour, several European nations.” He complained about the insects, like almost all travelers before and after. Headed south across the Gobi Desert he noted that European tents were useless, because the tent pins wouldn’t hold in the sand. When in the distance the travelers saw, on the high hills, the windings of the Great Wall, one of them cried, “Land!” Like Ides, Bell noted the pleasures of Chinese dining, the “water-melons, musk-melons, sweet and bitter oranges, peaches, apples, wall-nuts, chess-nuts” he tasted, and the courses enlivened with “dancing and musick, and quail-fighting.” He wrote, “The Chinese handle the two ivory or wooden pins, which they use instead of forks, with such dexterity, that they can even take up needles with them.”

Lacking knowledge of each other’s language, the Russians and the Chinese conducted their diplomatic business in Latin. Mandarin-speaking Jesuit missionaries in Peking—by then there had already been a Catholic missionary presence in Peking for almost four hundred years—provided the Latin-to-Mandarin translation. Adding to the difficulty
of conversation was the Chinese belief that their emperor embodied God and thus could regard the Russian tsar only as a vassal. That meant the tsar’s representatives had to kowtow; the awkwardness of this in terms of protocol had thwarted the Milescu embassy. Peter the Great, the tsar who sent the Izmailov party, really wanted it to make progress, especially in the establishment of regular trade. Peter had instructed Izmailov to kowtow if he had to. Peter even sent along, as a present for the emperor, a model of the Battle of Poltava, which he had carved himself.

K’ang-hsi, by the way, is considered perhaps the greatest Chinese emperor of all time. He occupied the throne for sixty-one years, from 1661 to 1722, and solidified the Manchu line, whose years in power (1622–1912) were almost the same as those of the Romanov tsars. K’ang-hsi consistently outmaneuvered and outsmarted the Russians. In the Amur River Valley, on China’s northern border, he blocked Russian expansion and made the Russians formalize their withdrawal from the area in the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), the first-ever treaty between China and a European power. Because of that setback, Russia had to keep to the north in extending herself across Siberia and wasn’t able to move into the Amur country until the nineteenth century. Had it not been for K’ang-hsi, Russia might not have gone so far northeastward or colonized Alaska.

The emperor’s attitude toward foreigners may be seen in his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose name translated literally as “Office for the Regulation of the Barbarians.” John Bell described K’ang-hsi sitting cross-legged on his throne and wearing no crown but “a little round cap” topped with “a large beautiful pearl in the shape of a pear.” Of K’ang-hsi’s power, Bell wrote, “It seemed somewhat strange to a Briton, to see some thousands of people upon their knees, and bowing their heads to the ground, in most humble posture, to a mortal like themselves.”

Bell returned across Siberia to St. Petersburg without misadventure in 1722 and soon after accompanied Tsar Peter, whom he admired, on a trip to Derbent. In later years, Bell served as secretary to the British minister in St. Petersburg, married a Russian lady, and went home to Scotland in 1746. He wrote his book there, and it came out in 1763, forty-some years after his trans-Siberian journey. At the end of the book he remembered Siberia in terms that, for Bell, almost constituted praise: “From what I have said concerning it [Siberia] I presume it will be granted, that it is by no means so bad as is generally imagined.”

The first book by a native-born Russian who went to Siberia was
The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself
. Written in 1672 or 1673, this book has been called the only significant work of Russian literature between the Old Russian “Lay of Igor’s Campaign” in the twelfth century and the poetic predecessors of Pushkin in the later eighteenth. I think
Life of the Archpriest
is one of the best works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. It’s vivid, hair-raising, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious. Avvakum Petrovich, a priest of the Orthodox church, found himself on the conservative side of the seventeenth-century dispute between the reformers of the church and what came to be called the Old Believers. For its time, this split was almost like the reforms of Peter the Great or even the Russian Revolution in the turmoil it caused. Changes that seem small now—crossing oneself with three fingers instead of with two—appeared huge and heretical to Avvakum and his followers, who saw in them the coming of the Antichrist and the loss of the possibility of salvation, in their hard lives the only enduring hope they had.

Today Avvakum seems like a complete fanatic, as indeed he was. He hated learning and rationalism, anathematizing what he called “almanack-mongers [who] say: ‘We understand the things of heaven and earth, and who is equal unto us?’ . . . Look then, proud almanack-monger,” he went on, “where are thy Pythagoruses and Platos: they have all been eaten by worms, like so many swine.” And when Avvakum got mad, he got really mad, as in his response to the reformers’ excommunication of him from the Orthodox church: “My excommunication, it came from heretics and, in Christ’s name, I trample it under foot, and the curse written against me—why, not to mince my words, I wipe my arse with that; if the heretics curse me, the saints of Moscow—Peter, and Alexis, and Jonah, and Philip—
they
bless me.”

Yet somehow, for a fanatic, Avvakum kept his eyes open and saw what was in front of him and wrote it down. For his intransigency and vehement preaching, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich exiled him to Siberia, along with his wife, Nastasia Markovna, and their children. In the lands beyond Lake Baikal—a region then called Dauria—he served as a chaplain to an expedition led by the Cossack Athanasius Pashkov, an unsympathetic type who burned and tortured people and even flogged Avvakum
seventy-two strokes with a knout. At one point Avvakum was riding on a boat that got away in some rapids of a river, and he was running back and forth, calling on God, weeping and beseeching the heavens. When the boat finally passed through to safety, the Cossack said to him, “You’re making yourself a laughing-stock.” Avvakum had enough sense of reality to tell this story on himself. Sometimes, he reported, his family was reduced to living on fir cones and the bones of carcasses left by wolves.

When Avvakum and the other exiles eventually are marching back to Moscow, and the months of journeying drag on and on, Avvakum records a conversation between himself and his wife that is a Russian moment for the ages. The two are among a group walking along on ice, unable to keep up with the horses, and Avvakum says, “My poor old woman tramped along, tramped along, and at last she fell, and another weary soul stumbled over her, and he fell too, and they both screamed, and were not able to get up . . . And I came up, and she, poor soul, began to complain to me, saying, ‘How long, archpriest, are these sufferings to last?’ And I said, ‘Markovna! till our death.’ And she, with a sigh, answered, ‘So be it, Petrovich; let us be getting on our way.’ ”

How long, archpriest . . . ?
Both question and answer were apt. The trip back to Moscow from Siberia took them three years. After Avvakum’s return, the tsar was hoping for compromise but met only continued resistance from Avvakum, whom exile hadn’t softened. As the dispute over reform became a full-scale schism, believers of Avvakum’s persuasion began starving themselves and committing mass suicide. Whole villages shut themselves up in their wooden churches and immolated themselves rather than submit to enforcement of the reforms. Historians estimate that in these years about twenty thousand followers of the old way killed themselves by fire. Avvakum, always the voice of moderation, wrote, “You will not be very long burning in the fire—just the twinkling of an eye—and the soul is free. Are you afraid of the furnace? Play the man, spit at it, do not be afraid! Fear comes before the fire; but once you are in it, you forget it all.” For this kind of rhetoric he was again exiled, this time to the north, to the Arctic coast near Nova Zembla, where he preached that “the Gates of the Church had been forced by Satan.” In 1682, after sending an unusually violent letter to the tsar, he got his wish and was burned at the stake.

Thousands of others who opposed the reforms ended up in Siberia,
either through exile or voluntarily. Old Believer villages remain in Siberia to this day. During the Stalin years, when Old Believers suffered new persecutions, some survived by going even deeper into the taiga. In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists prospecting by helicopter for iron ore happened to see garden rows on a mountainside in remote taiga 150 miles from the nearest village. Upon investigation, they found a family of five Old Believers who had seen no other humans for forty years. As the geologists and the family talked, someone mentioned Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow who had instituted the reforms more than three hundred years before; at his name, the family spat and crossed themselves defiantly with two fingers.

The inquisitive spirit of the eighteenth century desired more books about Siberia. Of course the Bering expeditions produced several. George Steller, the naturalist infuriated by Bering’s quick decision to turn back, lived through the shipwrecked winter on Commander Island and wrote
Journal of a Voyage with Bering 1741–1742
, which described his journey and some of the flora and fauna. That book, and
Steller’s History of Kamchatka
, came out before the century’s end. An outspoken fellow, Steller angered the Russian bureaucracy and died in unhappy circumstances a few years after the expedition’s return; I think of him when I’m in the American Northwest and I see the large and quarrelsome Steller’s Jay. Sven Waxell, a Swede who served as Bering’s lieutenant, not only survived that winter, but his twelve-year-old son, Laurentz, who accompanied him, made it as well. Waxell’s account was written in 1758 but not published until much later.

Part of Bering’s commission had been to send parties to far regions of eastern Siberia for exploration and mapping. In 1751, Johann Georg Gmelin, a German naturalist and coleader of the expedition’s academic contingent, published his
Reise durch Sibirien, von dem Jahr 1733 bis 1743
(
Travel in Siberia in the Years 1733–1743
), a work that came to be widely read throughout Europe. It described Russia as a harsh and brutal place, and even more so in Siberia. The writings of Gerhard Friedrich Müller, the other coleader, portrayed Russia more upliftingly as the possessor of a continental empire. Müller was a member of the Russian Academy and a geographer and historian. In his travels with the expedition, Müller went to Siberian cities so remote that officials in St. Petersburg had little contact with them. In the archives of the city of Yakutsk,
almost a third of the way around the globe from the capital, Müller found documents indicating that a group led by a Cossack named Semyon Dezhnev, seeking furs, had sailed from the Lena River delta around the Chukchi Nos to the coast of the Bering Strait back in 1648. In other words, Müller learned in Yakutsk that the main question supposed to be determined by Bering’s expedition—whether or not the continents of Asia and North America joined—had already been answered in the negative by Russian sailors almost a hundred years before. Either the news had never gotten back to western Russia, or it had but then was somehow forgotten there. Müller published this scoop in his
Nachrichten von Seereisen
(Description of Voyages) in 1758.