|
Summer in Siberia
One gray autumn morning last year
as I was gathering my folders, class notes, roster and textbooks
after another session of world history,
Davy McCall, distinguished professor emeritus of economics
and general man-about-Chestertown, approached me to say
that the local Rotary Club was planning an excursion to Siberia
and was actively recruiting participants.
With schoolboy instinct I raised my right hand, announcing "I'm your man!"
Most people don't have that kind of reaction to Siberia. The name conjures images
of blinding snow storms, barbed wire and pale sunshine that lasts for just a few hours around lunchtime. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago made a lasting impression in the West, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a household name around the world. But he didn't do much for Siberian tourism.
Quite a few people suggested that I'd need to dress warmly for the trip, even though we were scheduled from May 31 to June 31 to visit four cities that sit at roughly the latitude of Montreal. Granted, Montreal in the summer isn't Washington DC, but neither is it the northern tip of Greenland.
Others expressed anxiety about travel deep into Russia. "Will they LET you go to those places?" The Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, particularly since the Stalin era. After all, if missile silos dot the maps of America's midwestern states, then the Russians must have practically paved their interior with military installations.
There is no question that obtaining visas for remote corners of the country presents a bureaucratic challenge. But I had been to Russia six times already, twice for extended periods with trips off the beaten path, and I knew that the challenge was more a test of patience than a product of jealously guarded secrets of the Russian hinterland (though it is true that one of the cities on our itinerary, Omsk, had only been "opened" for tourism after 1991).
As if by malicious plan, we received our visas only a few days before our scheduled departure. What we did not know was that they were to be the cause of our first misadventure. Our visas were dated one day later than our scheduled arrival date, which meant that, just as we were ready to board our flight from London to Moscow, we received the unhappy news that our stay in England would be a bit longer than expected. We would not be allowed into Russia until the following day. We would miss our connecting flight in Moscow. For the first time, the harsh reality of the tremendous distances that separate Siberia from the road more traveled was beginning to hit us.
Our unexpected layovers in London and Moscow caused no small amount of anxiety or expense, but we were fortunate with our rescheduling, and, having purchased new tickets, within two days we were back on track.
A flight from Washington to Seattle takes roughly the same amount of time as one from Moscow to Kemerovo, our first destination. But passengers in the U.S. can derive a sense of satisfaction from knowing they have crossed the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Russia requires more fortitude from its travelers. Moscow is already several hours by plane from the Baltic Sea, the nearest sizeable body of water. To reach Vladivostok, Russia's major port on the Pacific, requires over nine hours in the plane from Moscow. In fact, Moscow is farther from Vladivostok than it is from New York.
Quite a few friends told me they would think twice about boarding a Russian airliner, and I have to admit that I shared their hesitation. News reports of poorly maintained air fleets and a few sensational crashes in Siberia were enough to put me on edge, particularly when sitting in cramped quarters that made economy class in our discount airliners seem positively spacious. But consider the alternative. To travel by train from Moscow to Kemerovo would have taken maybe three or four days. Indeed, the final leg of our route through Siberia, a train ride from Biysk (five hours southwest of Kemerovo by car) to Omsk, ate up 22 hours. Like it or not, our group's tight schedule did not allow the luxury of sightseeing from the Trans-Siberian Express.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon as we approached Kemerovo. Beneath us a rolling sea of apparently uninhabited land stretched in every direction. Here and there the fiery plume of an oil refinery shone. But unlike America, where sprawl has blurred the boundaries between cities and countryside, in Russia cities tend to end abruptly. Beyond are only occasional villages or industrial outposts. America's farmlands resemble a patchwork from the sky, but in Siberia immense tracts of undivided land characterize the landscape. Because Russia's experience with private ownership of land is so much shorter than our own, and because the government after ten years of market reforms has yet to pass legislation on a system of buying and selling land, much of the landscape still has an unspoiled appearance.
The American highway system, visible at night from the air like sparkling webs across the land, has no counterpart in Siberia. Instead single threads join cities to each other. And although traffic on them is growing rapidly, it is unlikely that the population will ever grow large enough to make many more highways necessary.
Russians west of the Ural Mountains point proudly to their thousand years of history that distinguish their culture from the comparatively brief blip of America's past. By contrast, the Russians of Siberia have inhabited the lands to the east, in most instances, for a mere 160 years at most, give or take a decade. Ivan the Terrible sponsored Russia's first exploration of Siberia in the 1580s, but it was not until the 1840s that the Romanov dynasty began actively to encourage its settlement, and the flow of migrants did not increase dramatically until the construction of the Trans-Siberia Railroad in the 1890s. Of course, Siberia's fame as a place of exile preceded any intentional migration. Its endless and forbidding forest, known as taiga, attracted, in addition to convicts, only ascetic monks in search of union with God or the religious misfits known as the Old Believers, who rejected the church reforms of the 1670s and Peter the Great's coercive Westernization. Indeed, explorers in the taiga in the 1980s stumbled across a community of Old Believers who lived in blissful ignorance of either world war or the revolution of 1917.
But to concentrate only on the Russians is to miss the fact that Yermak, Ivan the Terrible's explorer, first entered a land populated by hundreds of different indigenous groups. Many of these native Asians, like their counterparts in North America, have vanished. Russia's assimilation of the east, though not without serious conflict, was less bloody than the history of the European-American wars against the Indians, and local cultures are disappearing in the waves of Russian and Western cultural influences brought to them via television and shiny new shopping centers. The languages of the Buryats, Yakuts, Nentsy, Altaitsy and others are struggling to find voice as Russian is simply easier to use with neighbors and in businesses dominated by native Russian speakers.
But Russians have proved open to union with indigenous people of Asia. Everywhere the visitor looks she sees nearly every combination of skin color, hair color, eye shape and build. Whether because the official policy of the Soviet government was the fraternity of all peoples or because Russia has always been a crossroads of people, prejudice seems almost absent. That is, of course, until conversation turns to gypsies or the people from the Caucasus, both of whom are reviled from Minsk to Khabarovsk.
Kemerovo is an almost purely Soviet-as opposed to Russian-city. When Russian prospectors at the end of the nineteenth century discovered rich veins of coal near the village of Shcheglovo, they were preparing the area to become one of the foundations of Stalin's industrialization program in the late 1920s. The Kuznetsk Basin, or Kuzbas, supplied coal in seemingly limitless quantities for decades and, indeed, continues to this day. The Kuzbas mines attracted not only Russians. One section of Kemerovo bears the name "the American town" in memory of the colony of idealistic American workers who, drawn by the prospect of constructing a workers' paradise and dismayed by the lack of opportunity in their homeland, settled in the region. The colony did not survive the 1920s, as many of the Americans returned in disappointment. But the local museum of the mine still proudly displays suitcases, beds, photographs and other artifacts from the time when optimism still reigned.
As a city, Kemerovo is not much to look at. Neither a natural stopping point on a thoroughfare nor the site of particular natural beauty, its only attraction was the abundance of coal just beneath the topsoil. Our group got the chance to get a close look at the strip mine-a massive scar in the earth in which huge trucks transport rock and coal 100 tons at a load. The pit, ringed by roads that take the vehicles ever deeper, is hundreds of feet deep. From on top, automated shovels the size of buildings appear like Tonka toys. Industry has been priority number one for more than 70 years, so Kemerovo is about as likely a tourist destination as Gary, Indiana. Yet our tour guides were clearly proud that the Kuzbas mines had fueled Russia's ascent into modernity.
Kemerovo now has a budding entrepreneurial elite determined to transform the area from merely an open wound on the landscape to a modern market of the East. The local Rotarians were factory owners, advertising executives and leaders from a fairly broad range of businesses. The introduction of market economics brought a brief but bloody period of gangland politics to Kemerovo, making it infamous as a symbol of Russia's "wild east." Perhaps a legacy of that recent past, conversations among our hosts tended to be hushed, and most recreation took place in private clubs. But we kept sensitive questions to a minimum, preferring the role of grateful guests for the sumptuous circumstances in which we found ourselves-a private suite of rooms with our own cooks and maids, who brought us delicacies once available only to an exclusive political elite (and now affordable only to an economic elite): bananas, fresh orange juice, caviar, boiled tongue, salted fish and all manner of baked goods, displayed as befits honored guests.
A "party" in Russia is not complete without a complete spread of extravagant hors d'oeuvres, a variety of vegetable and meat salads, dark and white bread, pickled greens and, towering above it all, shiny rows of bottles filled with beer, wine, vodka and liqueurs (and that doesn't even include the main course, which is bound to overwhelm). A table of salsa and chips in the corner will simply not do for a Russian crowd, for whom the feast IS the party. The intimacy of table talk provides far more satisfaction for the partygoer than small talk and pleasantries over cocktails. The effect of frequent and obligatory toasts, however, is far more devastating.
Our nightly feasts in Kemerovo were replaced by more austere conditions in Gorno-Altaisk. Although it serves as the capital of the autonomous Altai Republic, Gorno-Altaisk is a relatively small city of 60,000. Its entrepreneurs are of a more modest sort than those in Kemerovo, and its young Rotary club struggles to maintain sponsorship of a local orphanage for children with birth defects or addiction.
But what Gorno-Altaisk lacks in material wealth it makes up for in the natural beauty that surrounds it. Just as Maryland claims to be "America in miniature," the Altai region might as easily claim to be a condensed version of Asia. Visitors who approach from the north, as our group did, first encounter low rolling hills. Within an hour cedar-covered mountains appear, and those who venture further south on the road to Mongolia will encounter both desert plateaus and jagged peaks as high as those in the Rockies, not to mention sizeable lakes and rivers. Locals claim that the tiny republic has ten separate microclimates, despite the fact that it is slightly smaller than Ohio.
The Altai region is home to an indigenous culture with roots in Tibet and Mongolia but on which centuries of near isolation have left distinct traits. The local religion is an offshoot of Buddhism that, among its characteristics, ascribes special power to the surrounding rocks, mountains, rivers and, especially, the numerous springs. When the region was incorporated into the Russian empire, the church, rather than forcibly converting the local population, chose instead to try to win the Altaitsy over by inserting itself into their practices.
The result was not particularly auspicious. In a sort of kitschy inversion of the Church's intent, Orthodox Russians now make pilgrimages to springs declared sacred by the local faith but which the church, by constructing crosses nearby and performing appropriate rites, has blessed with its own holy sanction. Nowadays some of the springs are roadside tourist attractions, replete with shish kebob stands and peddlers of local crafts, such as wooden combs with the imprint in English "From Siberia with Love."
The Altai also has attracted its share of colorful characters. Most famous is Nikolai Roerich, the painter and writer who fell in love with the area in the 1930s and envisioned an apocalyptic end to the world in which the Altai region alone would be saved from conflagration. As a champion of indigenous cultures and the proponent of a syncretic blend of Eastern and Western philosophies, Roerich attracted (and continues to attract) a following around the world. Though few Americans have heard of him (which surprised our hosts), a museum filled with his works still stands on 107th Street in New York City.
Our final stop was Omsk, perhaps the only destination familiar to any of my acquaintances back home. The city's source of pride is its connection with Feodor Dostoevsky, arguably the greatest writer of Russia's "golden age" of literature. The writer earned his involuntary trip east by making friends with the wrong crowd, a gathering of intellectuals known to harbor seditious ideas about the autocracy. In a remarkably sadistic act of clemency, Tsar Nicholas I commuted Dostoevsky's death sentence as he stood blindfolded before the firing squad.
In the Soviet era, Omsk, like much of the rest of the country, became home to heavy industry. Most of Omsk's major factories were relocated there during the Second World War, when the Soviet government took advantage of the country's great distances to move its industrial base out of harm's way. Factories that produced tanks and equipment for the Soviet space program kept the city closed to foreigners, despite the fact that it was one of the largest cities in Siberia.
But unlike Kemerovo, Omsk has a history that predates the Soviet era by about 200 years, and its architecture and cosmopolitan sensibilities reflect that longer perspective. The city owes much of its charm to the work of artists and architects from St. Petersburg, so much so that locals refer to one street as "Little Petersburg." Quaint cafes and outdoor restaurants give Omsk a European feel; and even though it lacks a specific center, the city's amenities-from the walkways along the Irtysh River to the amusement park to local museums to the attractive churches-make it a pleasant site for unhurried exploration.
Omichi, as the locals are known, are fond of telling visitors that their city is Russia's third capital. In addition to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Omsk was home to the headquarters of Alexander Kolchak, a polar explorer and admiral-turned-counterrevolutionary who fought against the Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1921 and made the city the headquarters of his regime. In Soviet times, Kolchak's name was only to be mentioned amid terms of condemnation, but the Omichi now speak with gratitude of the man who helped elevate the status of their otherwise forgotten region.
Just as in every place we visited, our Omsk Rotary hosts made sure that we had a full schedule of activities. We examined a tire factory and the local water works (declining the invitation to sample directly water that had only hours before been brown with sewage), and for my professional interest I was given the opportunity to witness student defenses of senior theses at the Omsk Pedagogical University. Russian professors do not worry that they might offend their students or cause them to shed tears. Their questions were sharp, challenging, critical, at times even humiliating. But the students bore it all with sweaty fortitude. I could not help but wonder how Washington College students would stand up under such interrogation.
On the afternoon before our departure, our group was treated to a visit to a sanatorium in the suburbs of the city. The facility is primarily for the benefit of veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya or other misfortunates, but our hosts had connections with the director, and we spent our final day in Siberia enjoying what to me is Russia's greatest invention-the banya. Jacques Margeret, a seventeenth-century French traveler to the court of Boris Godunov described the Russian steam bath as "a hot-house which is so hot as to be almost unendurable." It can be that, but the effect of the sweating one endures, interrupted by dips into cold water (or snow in the winter), a meal and the ever-present toasts of vodka, is positively euphoric.
Of course, our group visited Siberia in June, when the trees are green and the mosquitoes are thick. Summer does not last long. I received a note from one of my host families that described August as "cold." So my friends who had expressed fears of Siberia's temperatures were not far off the mark. Nevertheless, Siberia is a land of remarkable beauty and generous people. Just as midwesterners warn foreigners that New York is not the same as the United States, the same is true of Russia. To see Moscow and St. Petersburg is wonderful, but to travel deep into its interior is to discover the warmth that exists even in its coldest places.
Clayton Black is associate professor and chair of history, specializing in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His trip to Siberia was sponsored by Rotary International.
|
