Travels in Siberia (23 page)

All these previous Midwesterners, even if they went as late as 1913, may be said to have traveled in the nineteenth century. The Russia they saw was still the Russia of the tsars, despite its advances, and it was of course about to be thoroughly swept away. Had these travelers made their journeys in late 1917 or after, they would have had an especially vivid experience of a torn-apart country, because the chaos of revolution, when it came, swirled around and along the railroads. After the October Revolution ended Russia’s participation in the ongoing European war, soldiers rushing home to claim the land the Bolsheviks had promised them overwhelmed the trains. An American Communist who was in Russia at the time reported that a representative from the YMCA told him he had seen a sign that said, “
Tovarish Soldiers
: Please do not throw passengers out of the window after the train is in motion.” Soldiers rode all over the cars, even on the tops; at the entrance to many tunnels around Baikal lay the bodies of soldiers whom the low ceilings had knocked off.

In Siberia, the civil war that followed the revolution was fought mostly on and near the Trans-Siberian. For the next few years, the death and horror there were unlike any previously seen. Armed bands of uncertain loyalties went up and down the tracks in trains fitted with machine guns and armor. Derailed locomotives punctuated the scenery here and there. Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who had been under house arrest since he abdicated early in 1917, were shipped east by rail across the Urals for strategic reasons that summer, and there they came to an end even more awful than was traditional for Russian rulers who ever set foot in Siberia. For a while the tsar and family and household were held in Tobolsk; then they were moved to a well-fortified mansion in Ekaterinburg. On July 17, 1918, in the middle of the night—maybe because anti-Bolshevik forces were approaching, or for a crazier reason, or for nothing resembling a reason at all—they were taken to the basement and slaughtered, every
one, among screams and ricochets and flying plaster dust, by a squad of killers who used a variety of weapons including a Colt .45.

Meanwhile a force of about fifty thousand Czech soldiers from the World War’s eastern front had started out on the Trans-Siberian with the goal of reaching Vladivostok, boarding ships, and making their way to Europe and the western front by sea. These former Allied prisoners of war hoped that by changing to the winning side they would gain independence for Czechoslovakia after the war. Their presence in Siberia was a wild card that would further destabilize the situation.

Because the Soviet government had signed a separate peace with Germany, the Czechs soon were halted on their eastward journey. The Czechs had guns and numbers, however, and they chose to fight the Red Army units that opposed them along the railroad, with the result that much of the Trans-Siberian was in Czech hands by mid-1918. Adding to the confusion, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, former commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, had recently appeared in Siberia as the minister of war in an anti-Bolshevik government that he then took over by coup d’état. As self-proclaimed supreme ruler, Kolchak hoped to fight his way through western Russia and overthrow the Bolsheviks. He crossed the Urals into the west and won a few victories, but the Red Army pushed him back, and he withdrew again into Siberia, where support for his White Army was supposed to be strong. Among his potential allies were worthies like the murderously anti-Bolshevik Cossack atamans Grigory Semeyonov and Ivan Kalmykov, who each controlled a stretch of Far Eastern railroad line. For public relations value, both these leaders had their drawbacks. Semeyonov claimed he couldn’t sleep well at night unless he had killed someone that day, and Kalmykov was said to have shot members of an orchestra in a café for playing the “Internationale” instead of “God Save the Tsar.” Around the cities of Chita and Khabarovsk they racked up many atrocities.

England and Japan, eager to help defeat the Bolsheviks, sent their own troops into Siberia in 1918. The British force was small—a mere one thousand six hundred men—but Japan upped the ante substantially with an army of seventy-three thousand. Together the British and the Japanese pressured President Wilson to contribute an American contingent, and finally he did, reluctantly. The stated mission of the twelve-thousand-man American Expeditionary Force, as it was called, was to
protect Allied supplies in Vladivostok from capture, to aid the passage of the Czechs, and to make sure the Russian people had a chance for uncoerced self-determination. At a more basic level, the Americans probably intended to keep Japan from grabbing Russian or Chinese territory, and more basically than that, they didn’t know what they were doing at all.

The English hated the Bolsheviks, plain and simple. The British commander, General Alfred William Fortescue Knox, had been a military attaché in St. Petersburg before the revolution, knew many former tsarist officials, and inspired little confidence in General William Graves, the American commander. Graves, of a devotedly democratic cast of mind, wanted the Russian people to choose their own system of government, and he feared Knox was maneuvering them back to monarchy. Graves was especially distressed by his English counterpart’s referring to the Russian peasants as “swine.” Knox and his fellow officers, for their part, thought Graves a pro-Bolshevik fool because he wouldn’t join them in trying to eliminate the Reds. In this opinion the Japanese concurred with the British so vehemently that Graves had to cope with many newspaper stories in America reporting Japanese charges of his supposed Bolshevik sympathies.

Admiral Kolchak’s hoped-for support in Siberia never materialized. Losing battles with Red forces and partisans, he retreated farther eastward. Typhus hit what remained of his army, and dead and dying White Army soldiers by the thousands accumulated along the railroad line. Kolchak pleaded with the Czechs to help him, but by late 1919 his chance was past. Instead the Czechs turned him over to the Soviet government in Irkutsk, along with the half billion rubles in gold reserves Kolchak’s train had been carrying. The Irkutsk Soviets gave Admiral Kolchak a quick trial, shot him, and shoved his body into the Angara River through a hole in the ice.

The American, English, Japanese, and other foreign intervention forces had left Siberia by the end of 1920; Red victories continued until most of Siberia fell under Soviet control, though in the Far East battles were still being fought until 1922. Some of the very last White forces escaped the region into China that year and ended up in northern California. Events of the civil war in Siberia produced heroes of Communist iconography—for example, Sergei Lazo, the partisan leader, whom the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky praised in verse for defying his Japanese captors
and crying, “Long live Communism!” even as they poured molten lead down his throat. For a while the Bolsheviks allowed the Russian Far East to exist as a separate republic, called the Independent and Democratic Far Eastern Republic, with a president who had lived for many years in Chicago, and its own declaration of independence written in English. That sham government was soon dispensed with, and all Siberia officially became part of the Soviet Union.

During the Soviet era, the Trans-Siberian Railway would take on the dismal role of transport for millions of prisoners shipped eastward to camps in the gulag. Accounts of Siberian exile and prison under the tsars had always included a journey, usually on foot, along the Siberian Trakt. All twentieth-century descriptions of Siberian punishment would begin with a rail journey, usually torturous and long. Soviet-era prisoners who had read about prison and exile of tsarist times sometimes scoffed at how tame those former sufferings were compared to their own. In my catalog of travels and travelers so far, I have said little about Siberian prison journeys, labor, and escapes. I will talk more about those subjects farther on.

For the moment it is perhaps enough to say that in the years of Bolshevik rule the evil of the system was so dense that it distorted anything that came near. That was of course especially true of books about Siberia, a region used by the Soviets as a penal colony screened off from the world. Even relatively lighthearted books—
I Wonder as I Wander
, by the American poet Langston Hughes, about his round-the-world ramblings in the early thirties—take on a queasy air because of what we know was happening offstage. At least Hughes had a sense of humor and was no ideologue; foreign travelers (and Russians as well) writing in moods of political rapture, real or feigned, produced books about Siberia that are embarrassing to look at today.

Henry Wallace, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, was a passionate believer in “the century of the common man.” Born in Iowa, Wallace also had a bad case of the Russia-love that seems to strike Midwesterners, and he happened to catch it at an unfortunate time. As America’s successful cooperation with Russia in the Second World War was growing, and Germany was falling back in retreat, Wallace urged Roosevelt to send him on a friendship mission to Siberia, China, and Central Asia; Roosevelt agreed. Wallace made the trip in five weeks during mid-1944,
and in 1946 published an account,
Soviet Asia Mission
. Worse books have been written about Siberia, but Wallace’s holds the distinction of being the worst that is also widely known.

By now Wallace, a decent and dedicated man, has already been kicked around enough for
Soviet Asia Mission
, and it is perhaps unsporting to pile on. He later admitted the book’s failings himself, in an article titled “Where I Was Wrong.” Still, one has to note that in his visit to Magadan, headquarters of the complex of Kolyma gold-mining camps that cost perhaps three million slave laborers’ lives, Wallace did not grasp that he was seeing a Potemkin village tricked up temporarily just for him, with the barbed wire taken down and the watchtowers dismantled; or that his host, Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov, was not the mere “industrial boss” described. Nikishov turns up in his true capacity as bloody tyrant in a number of gulag memoirs; he was in fact a feared lieutenant general in the NKVD (secret police). Wallace’s
Soviet Asia Mission
includes the sentence, “The larch were just putting out their first leaves, and Nikishov gamboled about, enjoying the wonderful air immensely.”

As David J. Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky wrote in
Forced Labor in Soviet Russia
(published 1947), “[Wallace] should have been aware that every yard of the ground of these cities and towns [Magadan, among others] was drenched with the blood of Russian ‘common men.’ ” These authors identified Nikishov as the “NKVD chief and actual dictator of the Far Eastern slave empire.” Elevated words about Siberia from a speech Wallace gave in Irkutsk—“men born in wide, free spaces will not brook injustice and tyranny. They will not even temporarily live in slavery”—were quoted back at him reprovingly by Dallin and Nicolaevsky. Of course, many well-intentioned people in America and elsewhere at that time were still optimistic about the Soviet Union and reluctant to hear about the gulag. Robert Conquest’s
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
, published closer to the end of the Soviet era, in 1978, blasted Wallace all over again and was accepted more widely.

Owen Lattimore, of the U.S. Office of War Information, who traveled to Siberia with Wallace, wrote an article for
National Geographic
magazine that came out not long after they returned. In it he said, “We visited gold mines operated by Dalstroi in the Valley of the Kolyma River, where rich placer workings are strung out for miles . . . It was interesting to find, instead of the sin, gin, and brawling of an old-time gold rush, extensive
greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons, to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins!” Lattimore later conceded that he was “totally ignorant about the actual situation” he encountered in Siberia.

Just as the twentieth century split the atom, it took apart the human soul; in the camps of the Siberian gulag the soul’s reduction approached the absolute. Most of the prisoners dispatched to the worst of the Far Eastern camps died, and writers like Osip Mandelstam who might have described the horrors did not survive to do so. Among those who did survive, the experience usually depleted the residue of hope in them to a level where they didn’t have much left to write with. Only a very few gulag prisoners (like Varlam Shalamov) came out sufficiently unimpaired to create literature from what they’d been through. In certain respects not even the sufferings inflicted by the Mongols had been as bad. The Mongols killed the body but generally left the soul alone.

Still, history kept revolving, and the nightmare years of the gulag receded, amazingly, into the past. The same Siberia the old-time travelers saw remained, in its broad characteristics of geography and nature. Again Siberia became a space connected to the rest of the planet—traversable, visible, relatively unveiled. Wreckage from the Bolshevik era lay strewn around the landscape like the morning-after relics of a debauch, and the environment had been damaged, and the threat of drastic climate change evoked fear of some new swerve of history waiting just down the road. Through simple luck, the present seemed to be a breathing spell, at least for a little while. Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.

So I decided to cross Siberia. I had flown into it and out again, and that was okay. But as I read more and studied the journeys of previous travelers, I understood that Siberia belongs to the category of things (oceans, deserts) that must be crossed, just as mountains are to be climbed. In the genre of Siberia travel, flying in and out again doesn’t qualify. Of course, flying across Siberia hardly counts at all; anyone could accomplish that in the course of a nine-hour snooze. Neither, by my judgment, does taking the train, for reasons of its claustrophobia and its speed. After some thought, I decided the best method would be to drive.

I wasn’t sure how to go about this. I began in this way: