Travels in Siberia (73 page)

From time to time I contemplate the phrase “the incomplete grandiosity of Russia.” I’m not sure who said it originally, or how I happen to have it in my head, but it describes the country. Russia’s grandiosity, good or bad, doesn’t end. It just trails off into the country’s expanses, like Kutuzov’s army evaporating before Napoleon. The incomplete grandiosity pursues its incompleteness out there in Siberia somewhere. In past times there were stories of Russians who went so far into Siberia, and stayed so long, that they forgot the Russian language. Travelers who came upon them found them not really Russian anymore, speaking an unknown tongue. Incomplete grandiosity is the voyage of Semyon Dezhnev, who sailed around the eastern end of Asia, proved the continent was not connected to America, told his superiors of this epochal discovery—and then they mislaid his report. Incomplete and cruel grandiosity are the roads to the Arctic Circle that Stalin wanted people to build and that they quickly and gratefully gave up on when he died.

What I’d seen of Siberia was only a tiny part. The grandiosity extended constantly onward, out of the view. I hadn’t seen the hydropower dam on the Angara River near Bratsk, which stoppers one of the largest man-made lakes in the world; or the Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam on the Yenisei, which blew a water conduit leading to a generating room in August 2009, killing more than sixty workers, and leaving in doubt the future of the dam, and of many other dams, as the Soviet-built infrastructure continues to decay. I hadn’t seen Vissarion, the Siberian messiah figure who formerly was a traffic cop known as Sergei Torop; nor his village, called the Abode of Dawn; nor any of the forty villages his five thousand followers have built around it in the taiga while they wait for heaven on earth to arrive.

I hadn’t seen a reindeer herd in Siberia, or witnessed the animals made frantic by mosquito swarms that seem to be fiercer and to stay around longer every year. I hadn’t been to Siberia’s Arctic coast, now with less ice in the summer than anybody can remember, and I didn’t
observe the German cargo ships
Beluga Fraternity
and
Beluga Foresight
when they went along that coast on the first-ever successful commercial voyage through the Northeast Passage, during the summer of 2009. From Europe to China or Japan via the Northeast Passage along Siberia is more than four thousand miles shorter than going through the Suez Canal; the opening of this passage as the climate warms is expected to change the shipping patterns of the world.

I never came across an American oil-field worker in Siberia, though I did see and talk to one in the Seattle airport while he waited for a plane to Kamchatka, from which he would fly to Sakhalin. I never talked to any climate scientists, though they must be the second most common kind of Americans, after oil people, currently in Siberia. The oil people think in terms of decades, to keep the oil flowing, and the climate scientists think in terms of centuries and the global damage the oil is doing and will do. I never saw the bubbles of methane rising in sheaves from the thawing sea floor along Siberia’s Arctic coast, as documented by scientists from the University of Alaska in 2008. The amount of methane in permafrost in Siberian lakes is said to be ten times as much as the earth’s atmosphere holds now; I never saw climate scientists lighting methane bubbles effervescing from a lake, though scientists do that sometimes. As a heat-trapping gas, methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide; I never saw a Siberian lake where the stream of methane bubbles from the thawing permafrost on the bottom created a roiling action that kept the lake from freezing throughout the winter, though I’ve read that happens, too.

As the winters are getting shorter, sleep-deprived bears can’t hibernate, and roam the forests of southern Siberia into November, frightening the local population; but I never saw those bears, or any others. I did not see or smell the forest fire as big as Italy that burned in Siberia in ’06, or the yellow snow caused by the dust storms from the former Aral Sea that fell on Omsk and Tomsk in ’07. When I swam in Baikal, I did not realize that it had warmed 2.8 degrees in the last century, or that the amount of chlorophyll was three times what it used to be.

I never came upon what is known as a drunken forest—a forest in which the thawing of the supporting permafrost causes the trees to lean every which way. The entire Siberian permafrost is starting to thaw, scientists say, and when it does it will release seventy-five times as much
carbon as is put into the atmosphere every year by the burning of fossil fuels; I’ve seen plenty of Siberian swamps, but no clearly identified thawing permafrost, except under certain buildings, which are melting it themselves. For weeks and weeks I traveled through the taiga, most of which in Siberia rests on permafrost. Because the permafrost covers four hundred thousand square miles of Siberia to an average depth of eighty-two feet, and because the end of a drunken forest is a dead forest is a swamp, most of the taiga I saw may be future swamp. A melting of the permafrost will add gigantically to Siberia’s already plentiful supply of swamps. All these signs and portents of future climate disaster are out there, unseen by most people, somewhere in Siberia.

The Decembrists, the historical Russians I admire most, were incomplete grandiosity personified. Their revolution failed, their idealistic plans for national reform remained dreams. The serfs, whom they had wanted to free, were freed eventually, but only after most of the Decembrists were dead. The Decembrists’ reputation has survived so well, perhaps, because the grand intentions of their youth were never realized and tarnished. Their lives were noble, epic, partly finished sketches, backlit and sanctified by suffering.

Ivan Yakushkin, the clear-headed memoirist, returned to Moscow in 1856 following the amnesty and died eight months later. He was sixty-four years old. Prince Sergei Trubetskoy died of “apoplexy” in 1860 at the age of seventy upon hearing of his daughter’s death from TB. Prince Yevgenii Obolensky married an illiterate servant girl and died in Kaluga, near Moscow, in 1865. The Annenkovs moved to Tobolsk, where he became a civil servant, and then to Nizhnii Novgorod. Baron Andrei Rozen lived to be eighty-four and fasted on the anniversary of the uprising every year. Nikolai Bestuzhev, the kindhearted officer who had refused to let the young cadets accompany his soldiers to the Senate Square, died in Siberia in 1855. His death was the result of a cold he caught from riding on the outside of his carriage so friends of his could ride inside.

Prince Sergei Volkonsky, after receiving the news of his pardon brought to him by Mikhail, his fast-traveling son, packed up the household in Irkutsk and left for Moscow. They made the return journey at a
leisurely pace because of his age. Back in western Russia, the long-bearded prince, who had gone around in tarry clothes in his exile and enjoyed philosophical conversations with his fellow workmen and farmers, reassumed the air of a distinguished aristocrat. Observers remarked on his pale skin, silvery locks, and saintlike, biblical appearance.

For a long time the prince and his wife, Maria, had led mostly separate lives. She remained slim and lovely into her fifties and her lustrous hair never turned gray. She died of kidney disease at the age of fifty-eight at their estate in the Ukraine. Volkonsky was staying at his son’s estate on the Baltic, and not well enough to go to her. Eighteen years her senior, he outlived her by two years. After her death he went into a decline, but despite his frailty and his confinement to a wheelchair his mind remained keen. Now as the end of his life was approaching, he set about to write his memoirs, and on November 28, 1865, while working on them, he died. The last words he wrote were,

The Emperor said to me, “I

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

During Soviet times: Stephen Waltrous, “The Regionalist Conception of Siberia, 1860 to 1970,” in Diment and Slezkine,
Between Heaven and Hell
, p. 116.

Newspaper gossip columns: Lloyd Grove, “Lowdown: 740 Park Hits Roof over Book Party,” New York
Daily News
, October 6, 2005.

latitudinally for thirty-six hundred miles: Lengyel,
Siberia
, p. 15. Siberia is one-fifth of the total forested area of the world. It contains more than half of the world’s coniferous forests and two-fifths of its temperate forests. See Kotkin and Wolff,
Rediscovering Russia in Asia
, p. 257.

the Urals aren’t much: The English traveler John Dundas Cochrane wrote, “The ascent and descent [of the Urals] are so nearly imperceptible, that were it not for the precipitous banks every where to be seen, the traveler would hardly suppose he had crossed a range of hills” (
Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey
, p. 122).

about three thousand miles beyond the Urals: From the Urals to Chukchi Nos, the easternmost tip of Siberia (and of Asia), is 3,562 miles; from the Urals to the Sea of Okhotsk is 2,771 miles, and to Vladivostok is 3,174 miles.

for as much as 250 miles: Lengyel,
Siberia
, p. 14.

The steppes were why: Gryaznov,
The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia
, p. 133.

“To the rescue, Kamchatka!”: Pasternak,
Safe Conduct
, p. 69.

with only five portages: Sutherland,
Princess of Siberia
, p. 111. On the river portage system of Siberia, see also James Forsyth, “The Siberian Native Peoples Before and After Russian Conquest,” in Wood,
History of Siberia
, p. 78.

more than four hundred years old: Tobolsk was founded in 1587, Surgut in 1594, Ketsk in 1602, Tomsk in 1604, and Turukhansk in 1607.

the largest swamps in the world: Diment and Slezkine,
Between Heaven and Hell
, p. 71; also Sinor,
The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia
, p. 23.

the rivers run muddy: Barratt,
Rebel on the Bridge
, p. 153.

the lowest on the planet outside Antarctica: Forsyth,
A History of the Peoples of Siberia
, p. 9; also Pipes,
Russia Under the Old Regime
, p. 3.

the
Los Angeles Times
estimated: “70 Years’ Worth of Waste Has Remote Region Over a Barrel,”
Los Angeles Times
, September 13, 1997, p. A2.

Its coal reserves: See Kotkin and Wolff,
Rediscovering Russia in Asia
, p. 188: “Today, the West Siberian Basin remains the world’s largest storehouse of hydrocarbons.”

minerals like cobalt: See Hill and Gaddy,
Siberian Curse
, p. 81; also Encyclopaedia Britannica online, s.v. “Asia Mineral Resources.”

about half the gold then being mined: Dallin and Nicolaevsky,
Forced Labor in Soviet Russia
, p. 146.

Geologists have always liked Siberia: Facts about Siberian plate tectonics come from Dr. Sergei V. Shibaev, chief of the Siberian Department of the Geophysical Service of the Yakutsk Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha. Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus of geology at Princeton University, kindly passed along to me details about the Permian extinction and the Siberian Traps.

Paleontologists come to Siberia: For information about Siberian paleontology, I am grateful to Ross MacPhee, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

mammoth ivory became a major export: See Bobrick,
East of the Sun
, pp. 310–11.

cloud-free for more than two hundred days a year: Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, has more hours of sunlight than anywhere else in Russia (Mowat,
The Siberians
, p. 61). Viktor D. Trifonov and Elena Kossumova, astronomers at a solar observatory on the shores of Baikal, told me the observatory was there because of the two hundred days of sunshine the lake receives annually on its western shore.

In the early morning of June 30, 1908: Gallant,
Day the Sky Split Apart
.

Travelers who crossed Siberia: The observations in this paragraph are found in Pallas,
A Naturalist in Russia
, p. 91; Bell,
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Pekin
, p. 59 and passim; Fries,
A Siberian Journey
, p. 108; and Strahlenberg,
Russia, Siberia, and Great Tartary
, pp. 371, 438.

At times Siberia has supplied: Leonid M. Goryushkin, “Migration, Settlement and the Rural Economy of Siberia, 1861–1914,” in Wood,
History of Siberia
, p. 149.

Sentenced to three years’ exile: Florinsky,
Russia
, 2:1149; also Lengyel,
Siberia
, pp. 147–48.

a government stipend of twelve rubles a month: Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 3:342.

a rich distiller named Iudin: Lincoln,
The Conquest of a Continent
, pp. 217, 268.

translated a book by the English Socialists: Lengyel,
Siberia
, pp. 147–48.

inspired by the great Siberian river: Fischer,
Life of Lenin
, pp. 4–5.

Russians who had seen him both before and after: Melamid and Komar,
Monumental Propaganda
, p. 51.

in a sense, unkillable: “Siberia also meant greater security from enemy attack. ‘Russia lacks a heart at which to strike,’ the late German Marshal von Hindenberg insisted” (Lengyel,
Siberia
, p. 8).

“I am not afraid of military reverses”: Florinsky,
Russia
, 2:675. Tsar Alexander I said
that rather than cede the country to an invader, he would withdraw to Kamchatka (ibid., p. 638). A similar strategy was employed as recently as 1993, when Boris Yeltsin, threatened by a putsch within his government, made a contingency plan to relocate the government near his home city of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), east of the Urals. See Remnick,
Lenin’s Tomb
, p. 472.

administrative capital and ecclesiastical seat: Ides,
Three Years’ Travels
, p. 11; also Armstrong,
Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia
, p. 80.

“crippled by its expanse”: The historian Nikolai Berdayev, in Remnick,
Lenin’s Tomb
, p. 523.