In Siberia (23 page)

He had been a fine naval chief once, but his talents transferred neither to the army nor to politics. His regime was a barbarous and divided one, and Kolchak himself had declined from the clear-sighted strategist of his prime into an irresolute wreck.

Only with difficulty I find the prison where he ended. It had been subsumed by an electric power station. A river flows sunken below, making for the Angara. I walk under its ruined bridge along an embankment whose concrete revetment is sliding into the water. The banks are flecked with rubbish, and overgrown, drooping with willows.

Kolchak was interrogated for over two weeks as the broken White armies fell back on the city, threatening to retake it. His mistress–the grave beauty Anna Timireva–had refused to desert him, and was incarcerated in a cell nearby. The record of Kolchak's ordeal survives. He answered his accusers with dignity and intelligence. He implicated nobody but himself. He sent a secret note to Timireva, warning that if the White forces closed in he would be executed. The note was intercepted. During the second week his interrogators grew more nervous and strident, and he
must have known it meant the end. Gunfire could be heard to the west.

Before dawn on 7 February he was taken down to the narrow river. A hole had been cut in its ice. He went calmly, refusing a blindfold. His portly prime minister Pepeliaev was dragged trembling beside him, and a firing-squad placed them together in the headlights of its lorry. Timireva, waiting alone in her cell, heard the distant volley. Then the bodies were pressed under the ice.

The current flows deep here. I clamber back along the ruined bridge. A few years before, some local businessmen had planned to raise a memorial to Kolchak. But still there is only the river.

 

Three hundred years before Stalin's Gulag, groups of convicts were being ejected over the Urals: the sight of their judicial brandings and amputations, apparently, was offensive to their countrymen. Soon afterwards the need to populate Siberia and to mine its ore drew out a deepening river of deportees, and by 1753, when the death penalty was abolished in favour of lifelong labour, the variety of offences punishable by exile had grown bewildering. Prize-fighting, wife-beating, begging with false distress, illicit tree-felling, vagrancy and fortune-telling might all condemn a man to Siberia, as well as the European innovations of taking snuff (exile was accompanied by ripping out the nostrils' septum) or driving a cart with the use of reins.

By the early nineteenth century the exile system had settled into remorseless stride. Many were simply deported to colonise some remote region and forbidden to return; but a horde of criminals, their heads half-shaven and their cheeks branded with their crime, went shuffling in chains to labour in the Nerchinsk silver-mines or the gold-pits of Kara. They were legally dead. The journey itself–it might take two years–was enough to kill thousands. The transit-prisons were racked by typhus, scurvy, smallpox and syphilis. All along the Trakt the begging-song of convoys tramping into exile–‘Have pity on us, Our fathers'–and the jangle and clank of their chains while they held out their caps for bread,
became the very sound of Siberia. The nineteenth century saw a million convicts march into the wild, with their families sometimes trudging pathetically behind them.

In time this dilution of Siberian society lent it a criminal hue which older settlers resented. Discharged prisoners forbidden to return spilled into the community with few skills but robbery, and the roads and woods were rife with vagabond escapees migrating towards the Urals, but rarely arriving. In the end, the vastness of Siberia was their prison and their grave.

Their scourge was eased only by the political exiles, who were far fewer than the criminals but who became, in time, a leavening intelligentsia. Among a medley of cultured dissidents and Polish revolutionaries, those who touched the Russian heart were the Decembrists. Mostly aristocratic liberals disgusted with czarist autocracy, they were guilty of an inept uprising in December 1825, which left their elite Guards regiments leaderless in St Petersburg's Senate Square. After their trial, five of the 121 conspirators were incompetently hanged, the rest imprisoned or banished. In Siberia a belated splendour illumined their cause when some of their wives and fiancees abandoned rank, palaces and even children to follow their men into exile. Thousands of peasant women had done the same and vanished unrecorded, but two Decembrist princesses–the magnificently rich Yekaterina Trubetskaya, and the beautiful young Maria Volkonskaya–came to personify romantic sacrifice.

By the time they settled in Irkutsk in 1844, their hardships were almost over. Their wooden mansions–country cousins to St Petersburg palaces–survive in a still-quiet suburb. They are modestly graceful. Yekaterina Trubetskaya's is the smaller: a gabled house on brick foundations. Her embroidery and escritoire are still here, and a toilette case filled with minuscule instruments. Robust and vivacious, she had been the first to follow her husband, driving four thousand miles by coach and descending into the silver-mines the moment she arrived at Nerchinsk. She was a stocky, plain woman, but when the haggard Decembrists looked up in the lantern-light they imagined an angel.

Two streets from her home, the grey and white Volkonsky
mansion floats out bay windows and pediments with a rural charm. In its reception rooms, still handsome with crimson wallpaper and white ceramic stoves, Princess Maria's musical soirees were attended even by the formidable governor-general, Muraviev-Amursky. (Sometimes she herself played on a clavichord which had been smuggled into her luggage by a loving friend on the night of her departure.) In her early forties she was still commandingly beautiful, as when Pushkin had loved her, and she poured her energies into the renovation of schools and a foundling hospital, the raising of a theatre and concert hall. Gradually this wife of a state criminal became, in popular thought, the Princess of Siberia.

Her home had been alive with guests and servants, and with her two children who softened, perhaps, the memory of the baby she had left behind and never seen again. Her bedroom still overlooks the remains of the garden where her elderly husband, who turned absent-mindedly rustic, worked among the vegetables. She was not faithful to him.

As I wandered alone from floor to floor, with an inventory of artefacts reportedly in place, there were things I could not find. Where were the iron marriage-rings–forged from their husbands' fetters–which these women wore until their deaths? And where the cherished clavichord which had accompanied the princess on her 4,000-mile sledge-ride into exile? When I asked the curator, he said that it had fallen out of tune and had been sent to St Petersburg for restoration three years before. It was still in a warehouse there, he added wearily, and might remain there for years longer. ‘We can't afford to pay the bill.'

Few of the Decembrists survived to hear the amnesty granted them after the death in 1855 of the implacable Czar Nicholas I in the thirtieth year of their exile. The survivors returned west as celebrated ghosts. Yekaterina Trubetskaya had died three years too soon; but Maria Volkonskaya went back, and so did their ageing husbands. Some Decembrists tried to eradicate Siberia from their reassembled lives. But others, like Maria, seemed to grow paler in civilisation, and even talked wistfully of the past, as if its suffering was where their meaning lay.

The world has turned to mist, and my train crawls above invisible valleys. Far in front, its engine groans unseen in the whiteness. As we round the southern tip of Baikal, a stray pylon or smokestack rises memorially out of the fog, as if a town might lie in ruins beneath. The visibility closes down to 200 yards. When we descend along the lake-shore, its waters vanish into the sky. Small waves come lapping out of nowhere. A fishing-boat is anchored in mid-air. Then we are climbing into hills again, winding like a caterpillar through dying forest.

The construction of this loop in 1904 was the railway's final link to the Pacific. Already, in other stretches, permafrost had undermined the tracks and summer marshes engulfed them. Bandits and even tigers harassed the workers, cholera and bubonic plague broke out and convict-labourers ran amok, while floods swept away bridges and poor steel and insufficient ballast buckled beneath the strain.

But this lakeside section, where miles of mountain drop sheer to the water, was the most hazardous. For five years a pair of ice-breaking steamers, manufactured in Newcastle upon Tyne and reassembled on the lake, bypassed the cliffs by carrying the train across the water. The larger ship, belted in inch-thick plates, could bear up to twenty-eight carriages laid keelwise along its deck, while a bronze forescrew roiled the water beneath the prow so that four-foot-thick ice collapsed beneath it. At last, when the lake became a bottleneck in 1904 during the war against Japan,
a way was blasted through the cliffs over two hundred bridges, and the great railway was complete.

As the mist starts to lift, we delve in and out of tunnels, then turn inland along the Selenga river. We are close to Ulan Ude now, the capital of Buryatia. The clouds are pouring off the hills on either side, and the river comes gliding out of fog, brimming and calm.

My gaze joins that of the Buryat woman opposite, fixed out of the window. She is visiting her family village, she says, where her mother has fallen ill with cancer. But her hair is dyed ginger, as if she were denying her race. I ask when she was last here, but she only says: ‘Too long ago.' It is like travelling back into childhood. This landscape where she was born–the grasslands of Buryatia–seems strange to her now. ‘I've been twenty-seven years in Novosibirsk, all my married life. That way you lose touch. My husband's a Buryat too, but we speak Russian even in the home.' She turns away from the window. ‘It's not right.'

Her four sisters have arrived already at her mother's sick-bed. She is re-entering her past, before it dies. It is thickening outside our window: Buryatia. Mongols who had settled here a millennium ago, absorbing the local tribes, her people had sometimes allied themselves with czarist Russia against the harsh Mongolian regimes to their south. They were skilled stock-breeders and metallurgists, more numerous and organised than the tribespeople in the far north. Their ancestors had ridden with Genghis Khan. In the ungiving pastures of Transbaikal which we were entering, they had been converted to Buddhism by Mongolian and Tibetan missionaries, and alone among indigenous Siberians they possessed a written language. But even during childhood the woman had sensed in her parents the terror and bewilderment of the thirties: the forced collectivisation, the disappearance of the kulaks and lamas, the destruction of the monasteries.

She sees her Buryat identity fading down the generations. She has not thought of it much before, she says; but now I sense her hunting after half-discarded memories, a definition of her people, her mother, herself.

In a village somewhere east of Ulan Ude, she remembers, her
grandparents kept a scroll painted with the Buddha and fringed in blue silk. It seemed very old. But it was the caressing silk border which the small girl remembered, not the sage it enframed. There were three statuettes of the Buddha too, to which the old people burnt incense and offered meat and fruit. Sometimes the girl would watch secretly to catch the Buddhas eating. She remembers the cupboard where they sat, how its doors opened after Stalin's death, and the sleepy fumes of incense.

‘Every morning they offered the Buddhas tea and milk, then sprinkled it to the corners of the porch. That's how Buddhism survived–in secret, the old people remembering. In Stalin's day they rolled up the scroll with their prayer-books in a wooden box, and buried them under the house. But our family's clan still had an altar on a hill, where they offered sacrifices.' She frowns with remembered rebellion. ‘I wasn't allowed to go, because I was a girl. But my brother told me about it.'

She goes on looking out at the Selenga valley. Sunlight is breaking over wheat-fields glazed with frost. And now she recalls her grandmother's death, how the village lama came and read prayers secretly over her body. ‘Officially the lama did not exist, of course, but everybody knew who he was. Afterwards my grandmother's coffin was carried out of the house for a Communist funeral.' Her eyes flinch from the sunlight behind tinted spectacles. ‘My mother will have prayers read too; but my father was buried under the Soviet star.'

She gives a tight laugh. In her Mongol face the lips protrude sensuously almost level with her nose; but her hennaed hair and curly-framed spectacles suggest some violent hybrid, which is perhaps how she feels. I say: ‘So you were brought up a Buddhist?'

‘No. I became a Communist. That's what we were taught at school.' She looks rueful. ‘And now it's gone.' It is growing familiar to me, the native dilemma. She has lost both worlds, and cannot go back. ‘But sometimes, at important moments, this Buddhism returns. Before I got married, my mother insisted I see a lama. He compared my husband's horoscope with mine, and looked up the state of the moon in his books. He discovered we were both born in the Year of the Rabbit, which makes for
difficulties. But he read some prayers and said we'd be all right. And we've been…all right.' Outside the window the suburbs of Ulan Ude are mustering. ‘I still feel something for the Buddha.' She touches her heart in the sentimental Russian way. ‘But it's hard to believe in anything now. And death frightens me.'

 

The sixteen parallel tracks at Ulan Ude station were jammed by trucks heaped with gravel, logs, coal-dust, bricks, and by the cylindrical tape-worms of oil tank wagons. They clanked among fumes and dinning loudspeakers as if on rails to Gehenna. From a splitting concrete bridge I glimpsed the Buryat city ringed by smoke and industry. A thicket of cranes marked the Selenga docks. I emerged into a deserted road, tramped down side-streets and arrived suddenly in the square which is Ulan Ude's heart. Then I burst out laughing.

I was looking across a ceremonial space of grotesque pomp, where white and basalt ministries clashed in the perverted pilasters and capitals of Stalinist baroque. Opposite the Buryat parliament, the stucco and black basalt opera house looked built of coal and clotted cream. And in the square's centre, surmounting its crumbling plinth with blank authority, was the biggest head of Lenin in the world. It was the size of an office. If I stood on its beard, I calculated, my forehead might touch its nostrils. It had been sculpted for an exposition in Canada, and since nobody wanted to buy it the municipality of Ulan Ude stepped slavishly in. Iconic, bodiless, it made sense only in the nightmare perspectives of the Soviet past, where a man had displaced divinity. Even now, leaning dangerously on the tower of its neck, the head threatened to roll forward and crash down the square's width, crushing everything in its path.

My laughter spluttered out like a firecracker in the square. I looked round guiltily, but nobody was within a hundred yards of me. A banner slung from the rooftops read: ‘May you be young and beautiful–my Ulan Ude!'

But out of the square trickled a provincial, almost domestic main street. Behind a screen of pollarded willows its brick facades mingled with wooden cottages, and alleys trailed off into quiet.
In these old merchants' quarters the Buryats prevailed. Like the Tuvans, they had anticipated the Soviet disintegration by declaring themselves, with delicate contradiction, a ‘sovereign state' within Russia, and their old script and language were reviving. But Buryats numbered only a quarter in their so-called republic, and Russians still filled the industrial suburbs, where the collapse of the defence industry had brought a new poverty. Factory walls were slashed with graffiti culled from American movies and videos: ‘Sold my soul to Rock…Fucked-up Baby…Latex Cult…Metal up your ass…Impaled Nazarene….'

I slunk away as if I had written them.

The main street petered into solitude where an unfinished bridge hung in mid-river and a cathedral loomed above wasteland. Stucco was dropping in chunks from its deconsecrated walls, and when I roamed round searching for an entrance, I found the doors and windows barred. The nearest cottage was a charred shell, in whose fire an old woman, someone said, had died two days before. Her white cat was still wandering the debris. Somebody had tried to salvage or loot the contents, and the ground was littered with enamel basins, hair curlers and broken 78 r.p.m. records: my feet crackled over fragments of ‘Pushinka' and ‘Quiet Waters'.

For a while I stood among the wreckage, while the cat came purring against my boots. I gathered it up, not knowing what to do. The stench of smoke lingered over the timbers. But suddenly a light appeared under the cathedral's bell-tower; a door opened as if in a ruin and a woman emerged. She managed the collection here, she said, and had adopted the cat, which she took gently from me.

‘Collection?' I had heard of a whole museum mured up in the cathedral, but it was closed to public view. Was it possible to…? The cat walked between us like a mascot.

Yes, it was possible. As the woman mounted the tower's stair and unlocked door after armoured door a rich and incoherent maze came to light. Inside had been hoarded not the relics of Christian Orthodoxy but the accumulated treasures of Buddhist monasteries and temples salvaged in the hours before their demolition. Earmarked for display in a museum to promote atheism,
then preserved for some future archive of their own, they waited here in glimmering profusion, sometimes stacked pell-mell among Cossack ploughs and harness, more often ranked in half-documented cabinets to themselves.

I examined them in ignorant wonder. In the gloom hundreds of Buddhas lifted their gilded hands in peace or teaching. Gifts from Tibet, Mongolia, China, even Cambodia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a few were very old. They sat or stood in bronze, gold, gypsum, papier maché. Their smiles filled the dark. Three thousand scroll-paintings crowded the shelves with Tibetan manuscripts and Chinese silks and a medley of temple instruments and regalia–ceremonial horns and the masks of lamaist mystery plays, whose actor-monks glowered out through slavering jaws or demon eyes. Sunlight penetrated only in mote-heavy beams, too weak to fade the sacred banners or illumine the fertility deities coupled in Tantric bliss. I began to lose all sense of age or worth. A horse-headed lute curved beside a ninth-century Indian Buddha, the household altar of a Buryat chief among the bric-a-brac of early tea-merchants.

The collective memory of Buryatia, it seemed, had been incarcerated in these once-Christian walls, and left to die. Of the forty-seven monasteries flourishing in the 1920s, all were gone by 1939. But Buddhism was reviving, said the woman, as she locked the last doors behind me. There were many little monasteries and temples she knew of, newly scattered through the region, and the greatest was only twenty miles away. The outer door clanged shut. The white cat was waiting in the grass. You could take a bus anywhere into the country, she said, and hear the lamas praying again.

Outside, dusk had settled round the cathedral walls. I looked up with a start into the sky, where the first snow of winter was falling, dry and tiny, like grains of salt.

 

‘Free? Freedom to beg, oh yes! That's a kind of freedom!' The grizzled builder elbowed my ribs with each irony. He was angry and a little drunk even at dawn. Outside our bus window the city had splintered into dimming lights around a grey coil of river.
Things have got terrible now.' He set his jaw at the window. ‘You don't see half the cattle you did–and these Buryat farmers are coming into the city. But there are no jobs for anyone, and nobody's getting paid. I've lived in this place for thirty years, and it's never been like this.'

Everything achieved under slavery, it seemed, was being destroyed by freedom. The sparse meadows and dry hills through which we travelled were almost empty. No snow had settled. Only here and there spread tilled fields crammed with cabbages and dotted by canvas shelters where tin chimneys puffed.

‘Look at those. Fucking Chinese. They come over the border and rent our fields. Koreans, too. They take our money.'

‘Why don't the Russians farm like that?'

‘I don't know.' The builder glowered out, thinking. ‘I reckon it's all politics. The government here does whatever Moscow tells them. And Moscow…'

I turned away to stare at the hills, away from his rancour. Once or twice we passed the haunt of some remembered spirit, where the view of a mountain or the rise of a spring was marked by cairns and rotted prayer-flags. The whole land, it seemed, could be read like a holy book. Such country was its own temple, indestructible. Lamaism had merged with an ancient shamanism to bless it, and its possessive deities had offered a more convincing reality, perhaps, than the Communist shadow-play.

Dawn was now breaking over Ivolginsk, over sparks of colour at the foot of the wooded hills. Beyond marshy pastures and a flimsy stockade, the triple roofs and tilted eaves of a Mongolian temple levitated in bright yellow. I emerged from the bus into biting cold. Around half the monastery stunted birches, hung with prayer-ribbons, spread in a forest of dead white blossoms. I walked delicately through them. The rags dangled stiff with frost. They rasped against my shoulders in a jungle of hope, petition, grief, printed with Mongolian prayers I could not read; dragons, wheels, fire-breathing horses.