Travels in Siberia (41 page)

Kennan identifies the Sunday school superintendent in his nightmare as “a well-known citizen of Norwalk, Ohio, whom I had not seen since boyhood,” but he does not give the man’s name. A local historian in Norwalk, Henry Timman, whom I once asked about this mystery, guesses that the superintendent in Kennan’s dream might well have been Cortland L. Latimer, for many years superintendent of the Sunday school at the Presbyterian church in Norwalk, which Kennan’s family attended in his youth. Presbyterian children had to be well prepared for Mr. Latimer’s questioning about the weekly Scripture lesson, and they spent their Saturday evenings going over it before bed. Latimer was also a banker and a lawyer in the town, so he seems to have been suitably austere for his nightmare role. Whoever the actual superintendent was, he attains a strange, twilit immortality in Kennan’s Kuskunskaya nightmare.

The day we were in Kuskun, the village could not have been more unlike the lonely and winter-besieged place where Kennan stopped. Kuskun’s older part, with its houses of gray logs below moss-covered roofs, had grown a several-mile stretch of newer village that extended on either side along the old Trakt. At a wide place where a turnoff led to the present highway, babushka ladies had set up a bazaar of farm- and homemade goods. Sergei bought our lunchtime
tvorog
while I talked to a man in a Boss T-shirt and to some other locals who said that most of the village had been built after the war. Zinnialike yellow flowers on high climbing bushes perked up the fences and housefronts with their bright blooms. They’re called
zolotie zhari
, golden balls, a woman told me. Some of the gaily painted houses had radio antennae on high poles in their yards, or birdhouses, or nonfunctioning cars; one had a horse-drawn hay rake parked out front. A man stood cooking soup in a big black kettle resting on bricks above a fire next to the road. A woman with her hair in a topknot bent over in a garden. The village seemed to be in full summer mode.

At one end of the village, the old Trakt crossed a small river called the Esaulovka on an ancient, ruined bridge. Its gray wooden crossbeams supported the ricketiest of planking; the planks were sawn lumber but the beams showed only the marks of a bladed tool like a froe or an adze.
Perhaps those old beams had been here since Kennan. From a hempen rope tied around one of the beams, some village boys in shorts or underpants were swinging and dropping into a deep part of the river. The water was clear and tannin tinted, and it had a visible current, a rarity in Siberia. I thought of going out onto the bridge but decided the planks looked risky. A minute later an old, stooped peasant woman approaching from the other side hurried across the bridge without looking down or breaking stride. She told Sergei she crossed over it and back every day to buy bread in the village.

More cities: after Kuskun we went through Kansk, which was hot and dusty and sprawling like a west Texas cattle town, and Nizhneudinsk, where we passed more prisons, including an abandoned one with its high steel gates gaping wide. Outside the small city of Tulun, our jury-rigged tailpipe came off the muffler outlet and began to drag on the road as the van refilled with fumes. Sergei and Volodya parked on a gravelly place in Tulun and crawled underneath to wire it back on. When Russian cities are uncheerful they don’t fool around, and Tulun was as uncheerful as they come. Here the usual dust and heat and drabness were abetted by a special, extramiserable quality I couldn’t put my finger on. Close to where we pulled over, a train station stood on a hill, and people drained of all expression were walking down its dusty slope like souls in the underworld.

I sat with my back against the van’s front bumper and did a quick sketch of Tulun. For the first time I really noticed the wires. More than any place I’ve ever seen, Russia is bedecked and bedraped with wires. It’s like a house with not enough electrical outlets, in which extension cords and multiplug connectors are everywhere. Competing with the festoons of wiring, the city’s central-heating steam pipes, which in this region cannot be buried underground because of the permafrost, add their own vermiculate wanderings to the mixed-up scene. One of Lenin’s famous sayings was, “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.” Though I’m not sure exactly what that means, I think its real-world consequences can be seen in a mare’s nest like the skyline of Tulun.

The urban or semi-urban landscape we had entered now became continuous. Soon we were in the valley of the great Angara River, approaching Irkutsk. The air turned smoky and gray, and extensive industrial plants began to parallel the road. I couldn’t decide if the region actually qualified as industrial, because sometimes farm fields came right to the factory walls, and haystacks poked up beneath tall chimneys spewing smoke. Traffic began to roar in many lanes alongside us. Aiming toward city towers ahead, we pinballed through a skewed grid of smaller streets until we finally arrived at the center of Irkutsk, the onetime Paris of Siberia.

We reached Irkutsk on the afternoon of August 27. Since leaving St. Petersburg, we had been on the road for twenty-two days.

One of the first places we went in Irkutsk was to the house (now a museum) built in 1854 for Prince Sergei Trubetskoy. He was one of the leaders of the revolutionaries whose failed uprising of December 14, 1825, earned them the name Decembrists. Had the revolution succeeded, Trubetskoy was supposed to become the country’s interim dictator until a constitutional government could be set up. Many of his comrades saw him as a George Washington figure. By logic, after the movement was crushed, Trubetskoy should have been among the ones hanged. The loftiness of his family—in nobility, the Trubetskoys ranked just below the tsar—and the fact that his mother was a lady-in-waiting to the tsarina no doubt saved his life.

Like many other Decembrists, Trubetskoy was sent to Siberia. His wife, Ekaterina, followed him into exile. For twelve years he served his sentence of hard labor in prison fortresses east of Lake Baikal, and in 1839 he was allowed to relocate with his family nearer to Irkutsk, where he later moved and built this house. Though it may have been one of the grander houses of Irkutsk in its day, it is not overly fancy but rather suggests the elegance of curtailed excess and of cultured taste making the best of materials at hand. The house has a brick foundation supporting smoothly joined logs that have been planed square and fitted
together horizontally. Single-story wings on either side balance a central, peaked-roof section that rises to a tall second story. The overall effect is of an eccentric Greek Revival style married to the skill and intricacy of Russian-village woodworking. I thought I’d never seen a better-looking house. I wanted to find out what it was like inside, but unfortunately it was closed for renovation when we were there.

A block away is another Decembrist house-museum. It was the house of Sergei Volkonsky, whose importance to the Decembrist movement and nobility of birth almost equaled Trubetskoy’s. The Volkonsky family descended from a prince, later a saint of the Orthodox church, who fought the Mongols in the fourteenth century; Sergei Volkonsky’s mother, Alexandra Repnina, also happened to be the tsar’s mother’s highest-ranking lady-in-waiting and closest friend. Like Ekaterina Trubetskaya, Maria, the young wife of Sergei Volkonsky, voluntarily shared his exile. Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “Russian Women,” in praise of the Decembrist wives, compared Maria Volkonsky to a saint. Pushkin rhapsodized that her hair was more lustrous than daylight and darker than night. Tolstoy, whose mother was a Volkonsky and who came from the generation that followed the Decembrists, thought so highly of Sergei Volkonsky that he is said to have based the character of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in
War and Peace
on him and to have used the letters and journals Volkonsky wrote during the Napoleonic Wars to help create the character.

The Volkonsky house-museum is large and imposing, in a Russian château style, though it’s not a work of art like the Trubetskoys’. Its displays consist mainly of portraits and photographs of the Volkonsky family and the families of other Decembrists. The elderly lady guide who took us through gave us the biographical details of everybody. Zinaida Trubetskoy, born to Sergei and Ekaterina in Siberia in 1837, survived to 1924, long enough to receive a government pension granted by Lenin himself in honor of her revolutionary father. Among the ancillary characters, the museum also had the only picture I’ve ever come across of Georges-Charles d’Anthès, the French army officer and ballroom roué who killed Pushkin in a duel. Had there been matinee idols in d’Anthès’s day, he could have been one, with his wavy blond hair.

For a while Tolstoy planned to write a book about the Decembrists, but he set the idea aside because all official papers relating to them were in secret archives and thus unavailable for his research. After the Revolution of 1905, when documents withheld under the tsars became accessible,
Tolstoy was seventy-seven years old and no longer able to take on such a big project. Why the Decembrists interested him is easy to grasp. Though their revolution fell apart and though their punishment was a humiliation and a waste, the Decembrists were inspiring nonetheless. Of the hundred and some Decembrists judged most culpable by the Committee of Inquiry that followed the suppression of the uprising, only three were over forty years old. Almost all the Decembrists were of the same youthful generation in 1825; and if I had to pick one generation as the greatest in Russian history, theirs would be it. Alexander Herzen hailed them as “a perfect galaxy of brilliant talent, independent character, and chivalrous valor—a combination new to Russia.” Of those Decembrists declared the most dangerous—in other words, the most prominent among them—the greater number would live out their lives imprisoned or exiled in Siberia.

They began their young manhood by beating Napoleon. Most of them were or had been officers in the army of Tsar Alexander I, who could claim to be the liberator of Europe for outlasting the French emperor’s invasion of Russia; following up the French retreat with his army of 110,000; fighting Napoleon at Vitebsk, Vilnius, Lutzen, Dresden, Kulm, and Leipzig; contributing to the French defeat at Waterloo; and winning for Russia the top position among the allied nations that finally brought down the Napoleonic Empire. Throughout the war, Alexander’s officer corps performed outstandingly, its members vying with one another in acts of bravery. The young lieutenants and captains and adjutants were proud of their country and loved their emperor. When they led their troops in the grand victory march down the Champs-Élyseés, no Russian officers in history had ever enjoyed such glory.

Being in France during the four-month occupation dazzled them, too. When it came to ideas, the countries they had liberated were far more up-to-date than their own; now the Enlightenment, which previously had been allowed to penetrate Russia in only the tiniest doses, belatedly hit them head-on. They had been educated well, if narrowly, in Russian military academies. They knew classical authors, and like most of the Russian gentility spoke fluent French. Their travels in the war opened them to writers like Adam Smith, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Montesquieu, Walter Scott. In France, their emperor magnanimously dissuaded the other allied powers from punishing the conquered country
with harsh conditions, and he let the French choose the type of new government they preferred. Away from home, Tsar Alexander acted like a liberal monarch. He even talked about ending serfdom in his own country, a passionate cause among many of his young officers.

Then the occupation ended, the officers went back to Russia with the army, and the door of their oppressive country slammed shut behind them. For young men who had just been in the sunlight for the first time, the experience was especially painful; having brought freedom to Europe, they could enjoy little of it themselves. Their emperor, once again in his own country, reverted to despotic type, shutting down their informal discussion groups, saying what they could and could not read, and making them report to martinet superiors. The officers found their situation degrading, intolerable.

Among the principal Decembrists, there are a lot of guys to like—for example, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, who led the December uprising in the south and took full responsibility for its failure, and who remarked, when the wet rope attempting to hang him slipped off his neck and dropped him on the ground, “Poor Russia. We don’t even know how to hang people properly”; or Mikhail Lunin, who betrayed none of his comrades during his interrogation and who vowed in old age that as long as he had even one tooth left in his mouth it would be directed against the tsar; or Nikolai Bestuzhev, a sweet and companionable fellow who refused to allow the boy cadets from the Naval Academy to follow him when he led his men to the Senate Square on the day of the rebellion, thus saving the cadets’ lives, and who made clocks and taught agriculture and painted portraits and generally ameliorated life for everybody with him in Siberian exile.

The Decembrist I especially like, though, is Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin, a guards officer of wide acquaintance and popularity, whose memoir gives a vivid picture of the movement and the later sufferings that he and his comrades endured. Near the beginning of his book, Yakushkin tells of the moment during a parade in St. Petersburg when he and another officer fell out of love with their tsar: