Authors: Colin Thubron

In Siberia (37 page)

And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.

Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at
me. âYou know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.'

âA joke?'

âYes. He was in charge of the village telephone, and one day he told somebody in passing: “By the way, Stalin's on the phone to you!” So he ended up in the camps for five years. My parents must have suffered for that.' He presses a wooden slat back with his boot. âPeople grew up in their parents' silence.'

We climb to where he remembers the cemetery lay, but it is lost under snow. The opalescent light has intensified over the valley. Around us the trees and shrubs are laden and heavy, as if bearing white fruit. They shiver with tiny wagtails. I pick some dwarf-cedar needles, which prisoners used to boil in the futile hope of deflecting scurvy.

I say: âWhatever it's like now, things are better than they were then.'

Yuri does not answer at first. Everything with him takes a long time. He has a slight stutter. He says: âThose were religious times, in a way. People believed things.' He seems to envy that.

So suffering came down from the sky, as natural as rain or hail. There was no one to accuse. No one was near enough, embodied enough. Stalin's empire, like Hitler's Reich, was meant to last through all imaginable time. The past had been reorganised for ever, the future preordained.

I say, not knowing: âYou'll never go back to that.'

Yuri says: âWe're not the same as you in the West. Maybe we're more like you were centuries ago. We're late with our history here. With us, time still goes in circles.'

I don't want to hear this, not here in the heart of darkness. I want him to call this place an atrocious mystery. I want him not to understand it. With his blond moustache and Tartar cheekbones, I have cast him as the quintessential Russian, the litmus test for the future. The mountain air has gone to my head.

But his hand, which was tracing a circle, now tentatively lifts. âMaybe we spiral a little,' he says, âa little upwards.' He looks across to where the cableways limp in ghastly procession over the heights. âI wish my grandfather had lived on. He loved a good
joke, and people can joke about anything now. We've still got that. Jokes.'

I clasp his shoulder, but we are too fat in our quilted coats, and my hand slips from him. He smiles for the first time, on a mouthful of discoloured teeth, before turning back along the track.

And on that frozen hillside he starts to sing.

Searchable Terms

Abakan

Afghanistan: Russian war in

Aganbegyan, Abel

Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk

Alaska: sold to USA

Albazin

Aleksei (of Birobidzhan)

Aleksei Akilovich (Old Believer)

Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevich

Alexander I, Czar

Alexandra, Empress of Nicholas

Altai, Ice Princess of

Altai mountains

Altai republic

Amur river

Anfissa (of Tyumen)

Angara river

Association of the Tambour
see
Doongyr

Babel, Isaak

Baikal, Lake

BaikalâAmur Railway

Baikalskoe

Baptists: in Komsomolsk-na-Amur

Baraba steppe

Barguzin ranges

Barnaul

Belovodye
(promised land)

Berezovka river

Bering, Vitus Jonassen

Birobidzhan

Blagoveshchensk

Boris Godunov, Czar

Boris (of Komsomolsk-na-Amur)

Botkin, Doctor

Bratsk High Dam

Brezhnev, Leonid

Buddhism: and shamanism

in Buryatia and

Christian missionaries

burial tombs
see kurgans

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Buryatia

London Missionary Society

station in

Butugychag

California

Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia

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Charlemagne, Emperor

Chechnya

Chekhov, Anton

China: river Amur border with

Russia merchants in

Khabarovsk; trade with

Russia

Chita

Civil War (Russian, 1919â20)

Clara (of Birobidzhan)

Clinton, William Jefferson

coal mining: at Vorkuta

collectivisation

Conrad, Joseph

cosmic consciousness

Cossacks: in Siberia sack

Sibir (1582); found Irkutsk

at Albazin in

Manchu service; found

Yakutsk

Cowie, Martha see Yuille, Robert

and Martha

Dalai Lama

Dalselmash factory

Dalstroy (agency)

Darwin, Charles

Decembrists

diamonds: in Sakha

Dikson

Diring Yuriakh

Dolgans (people)

Doongyr (Association of the Tambour)

Doroskova, Agrippina

Dostoevsky, Fedor: exile in Omsk

and cosmic

consciousness

drugs (narcotic)

Dudinka

Dukhobors
(âSpirit-wrestlers')

Dzhurma
, SS

Ehrenburg, Ilya

Elgen(women's labour camp)

Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duchess

Entsy people

Evenk people

Fedor (Magadan Jew)

Feodosy, Archbishop of Omsk

Galina (curator, Museum of Siberian Culture)

Galina (Old Believer wife)

Garanin (Dalstroy official)

Genghis Khan

Ginzburg, Yevgenia

gold: in Kara; in Sakha

in Kolyma

Golden Horde (Mongol)

Goose Lake

Gorbachev, Mikhail

Gorno-Altaisk

Gulag: memories of; at

Vorkuta

graves; at Severobaikalsk

acceptance of; in

Kolyma
see also

labour camps

Haroun al-Rashid, Caliph

Hegel, G. W. F.

Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Herodotus

Herzen, Alexander

Hitler, Adolf: 1939 pact with Stalin

Horse river

Huns

Igarka

Igor (Clara's son)

Indigirka

Innokent, St

Irkutsk

Irtysh river

Ivan IV (the Terrible), Czar

Ivolginsk

Ixodes tick

Japan: investments in Far East

Jews: settlement in Birobidzhan

John Chrysostom St

Kamchatka: volcanoes

Kara gold fields

Karakorum (state)

Kashketin (camp commandant)

katorga
death camps

Katun river

Ket people

KGB

Khabarov, Yerofey P.

Khabarovsk

Khlysti
(sect)

Khor river

Khrushchev, Nikita S.

Kipling, Rudyard

Kitezh, City of (legendary)

Kolchak, Admiral Alexander Vasilievich

Kolyma

Komsomolsk-na-Amur

Kozyrev, N. A.

Krasnoyarsk

Krupskaya, Nadezhda Lenin's wife)

Kuchum, Khan

kulaks

Kunga-Boo (shaman)

kurgans
(tombs)

Kuytun

Kuzbas basin

Kyzyl

labour camps
see also
Gulag

Lavrentiev, M. A.

Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett

lemmings

Lena river

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: statues

exile

in Shushenskoe

death

London Missionary Society: in

Novoselenginsk

mafia (Russian)

Magadan

mammoths

man, origins of

Manchu dynasty

Mandelstam, Osip

Mangazeya Marfa (circus artist)

Mastrov
(river steamer)

Melkite Church

Memorial (organisation)

mica

Mine 29 (Vorkuta)

Minusinsk

Misha (of Dudinka)

missionaries

Mochanov, Yuri

Mongolia: and Tuva

Christian missionaries in

mosquitoes

Mukhanov, Peter

mummies

Muraviev-Amursky, Count

Nikolai Nikolaevich

Museum of Siberian Culture

Nansen, Fridtjof

Natasha (of Khabarovsk)

Nerchinsk silver-mines

Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689)

Nicholas I, Czar

Nicholas II, Czar: murdered with

family and

Rasputin sees mammoth

skeleton

Nikolai (Potalovo doctor)

Nivkhi tribesmen

Norilsk

Novoselenginsk

Novosibirsk

nuclear power

Ob river

Ob Sea

oil fields

Oimyakon

Old Believers

Olga, Grand Duchess

Olga (Yekaterinburg pilgrim)

Olkhon island (Lake Baikal)

Omsk

Orotukuan

paganism: among Yakuts

Paris Universal Exhibition (1900)

Pasternak, Boris

Pavlov (Dalstroy official)

Pazyryk culture

Pechora river

Pepeliaev, V.

perestroika

permafrost

Peter I (the Great), Czar

Pivan Pokrovskoe

pollution

Potalovo

Primoriye

Proctor, Richard Anthony

Pushkin, Alexander

Rasputin, Grigory

Rasputin, Masha (pop star)

Rasputin, Valentin

Rechnoi state farm, Omsk

religion: practice and worship

churches

and monasteries revival

along Yenisei

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