Sixty Degrees North (19 page)

The longing for home and the longing for love are so alike as to be almost inseparable. The desire to be held by a person, or by a place, and to be needed; the urge to belong to something, and for one's longing to be reciprocated; the need for intimacy. These needs, these urges, these desires were within me when I travelled to Kamchatka, as they had been for years previously. But they had not yet found a way to express themselves. When I fell in love I had found something, somewhere, onto which I could project my longing from a safe distance. Kamchatka was beautiful and mysterious, and there was a stillness at its heart that seemed to calm, temporarily, the restlessness in my own. But Kamchatka was also, quite literally, at the other side of the world. By this time I had come to accept Shetland as my home, but I had not yet come to love it as that. The infatuation that I developed was a sign, first of all, that these feelings were building within me. And it was a sign, too, that place and landscape could be the foundation upon which love grew.

In the months that followed my visit to Kamchatka, I thought about it often. I kept in touch with people I had met there. I read everything I could find to read about it. I looked over my photographs obsessively. I even learned the Cyrillic alphabet and began to grapple with the Russian language. I made plans to go back, to spend more time there
and, if possible, to come to know it properly. But I never did go back. Like all infatuations, this one began to fade. It ceased to occupy my thoughts to such an overwhelming degree, and it ceased, in the end, to lure me away. It was too expensive to go, I concluded, too complicated, too far away, and the reality of return was too liable to disappoint. Slowly, my dreams of Kamchatka were set aside.

As a place of exile, Siberia was extraordinarily effective. It is huge, cold and utterly strange: a natural repository for our fears and an ideal place in which to dump unwanted people. But the reason it has remained a land apart – unlike America's West, which was absorbed into the country – is, I think, as much about us as it is about the place itself. For in Siberia, the land and the climate resist the European understanding of home; they resist our desire to be settled. Pioneers in America did not move for the sake of moving. They migrated westward to find new places to live and to find land that could feed families and communities. They went to make better lives and to settle down. In most of Siberia, however, settling is an entirely unnatural thing to do. Much of the land cannot support meaningful agriculture, so towns and cities are reliant, always, on food and supplies imported from elsewhere. To try and settle therefore, means accepting peripherality. It is a literal and a psychological dependence on other places. Today, that is how the vast majority of the region's inhabitants live, but it remains a precarious kind of existence, vulnerable always to the impact of decisions made far away.

The appalling history of Siberia cannot be shaken off. It clings to the land, distorting and concealing it beneath the horror of what happened here. But the dark spirits that seem to haunt this region do not belong to it; they are not the spirits of the place itself but, rather, our own demons.
Western civilisation demands settlement. That is the relationship that our culture desires. But in Siberia, we are faced with somewhere in which such a relationship does not make sense. The native people of this region were nomadic because that is what the place and the climate demand. Their home was not a single location, it was the land itself, and their connection to that land – forged through hunting and herding – was entirely unlike our own. Siberia is an ideal place in which to exile Europeans because it is a place that rejects the European idea of what a home actually is. In Siberia, settlement itself is a kind of exile.

When I look back now upon the time I spent in Kamchatka, I can still recall those pangs I felt, and the deep longing I had to return. That longing was an urge to connect and to immerse myself in a place. I look back now upon Kamchatka with fondness and with nostalgia, as one might a teenage sweetheart, many years estranged. Sometimes my dreams of it return, and I wonder if I will ever see that place again.

ST PETERSBURG

the city and the swamp

St Petersburg is a miracle city, which really ought not to exist. For three centuries, since its foundations were laid in swampy soil close to the mouth of the River Neva, both natural and human forces have conspired to try and destroy it, and several times they have almost succeeded. To many, it was a city that was doomed from the start. Its construction was an act of imperial folly that was bound to be repaid by failure. It was a place that did not belong where it was built, an affront to the natural order and to the nation itself.

Peter the Great conceived it while travelling in Western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. There, he was impressed with London and most particularly with Amsterdam, and he imagined for himself a new Russian capital. When the long-disputed Neva estuary was won back from Sweden in 1703, Peter understood its importance. Up until that time the area had been thinly populated marshland, but it was also the only access that Russia had to the Baltic, and that made it essential for the country's development: culturally, militarily and economically. In the summer of that year, the new city began to take shape with remarkable haste. According to Peter, this was to be a Paradise on Earth, and Russia's ‘window on the West'.

From its very beginning, though, the city was plagued by forecasts of its destruction. In its early years one prophet warned of how God would ‘drown the Anti-Christ's city', and Peter's own first wife Eudoxia, whom he banished to a convent, cursed the place and declared that it would one
day stand empty. Those predictions have sometimes seemed close to coming true. Great floods have swept through its streets, and fires have raged through its buildings. Devastation has always felt possible. In the Second World War, Adolf Hitler declared that he would be the one to finally destroy this city and empty it entirely of people, and during the 900-day siege of 1941 to 1944 he almost succeeded. More than a million died in those years, killed by starvation and by disease in one of the war's most appalling acts, a prolonged and deliberate mass murder.

And though he granted Leningrad – as it was then called – the country's highest award of honour in the last year of the war, Joseph Stalin was no more a friend of the city than his German adversary. According to the composer Shostakovich, Hitler merely ‘finished off' the work that Stalin began. The Soviets had moved the country's capital back to Moscow after taking power in 1917, two hundred years after Peter the Great had done the opposite. They then set about emptying the city of the power and wealth it had hitherto accumulated. In the Great Purge of the 1930s, Leningrad suffered enormously. From ordinary families right up to Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party's leader in the city, tens of thousands of residents were exiled or executed. For Stalin, the city was a reminder of the old, tsarist Petersburg, and a symbol of the openness and cosmopolitanism that he so despised. It was, in Nikolai Gogol's words, ‘a foreigner in [its] own fatherland', and after the war Stalin set about crushing it all over again. Those who had led Leningrad through the siege were murdered; writers, artists and intellectuals were disposed of in the gulags. The city's suffering continued.

It was a week into September when I arrived in St Petersburg, but autumn had not yet caught hold in this corner
of the north. A warm wind bustled down Nevsky Prospekt as I pushed my way through the crowds towards the river. And though it had passed six in the evening the sun was still bright, lingering like a blush against the pink walls of the Stroganov Palace. From edge to edge, the wide pavements were filled with people: tourists in raincoats and baseball caps, striding businessmen in suits and shades, girls in short skirts locked arm in arm, old women whose headscarves could barely contain their peroxide perms. The street overflowed with beeping horns and screeching tyres, over-revved engines, sirens and shouts; the smell of drains and exhaust fumes thickened the air. It was loud and chaotic, a heaving pandemonium, and I kept close to the buildings, nervous of the hustle and din that seethed between them.

Crossing the sluggish grey Neva to Vasilevsky Island, I lingered beside the red Rostral Columns that tower there, with their four marble figures representing the great rivers of Russia. Once, these columns served as oil-blazing lighthouses, aiding vessels, but today their only role is to lift your eyes up and away from the filthy water below. From there I continued to Petrogradskaya and across the walkway to Hare Island, and the fortress where this city was founded. The Cathedral of Saint Peter and Paul shone butter gold in the evening sun, its gilded needle spire reaching 400 feet upward, to where hooded crows blinked like black stars against the sky. A syrupy light lay dappled among the trees around the fortress, and yellow leaves were just beginning to fall, a step ahead of the weather. In drains and on paths they were piled, dry and crackling underfoot. I kicked them as I wandered through Aleksandrovskiy Park, feeling a childish pleasure in that most irresistible of acts.

There is nowhere else like this in the north. By a wide margin St Petersburg is the most highly populated place on or above the sixtieth parallel, with five million people now living in the city itself and many more in the surrounding
area. In that sense, as in others, it is an anomaly: a strange city in a strange place, a new city designed to look like an old one, a former national capital that was intended, from the start, to appear foreign. I had arrived on the twentieth anniversary of the city's most recent name change, when Leningrad became St Petersburg for the second time in its life. For nearly seventy years it had held the name of the former leader, a tribute bestowed in January 1924, just five days after his death. Prior to that, though for only a decade, this had been Petrograd – a Russification of its original, Dutch name, pushed through in the patriotic fervour of the First World War. For the two centuries before 1914, it was St Petersburg. But by most of its inhabitants it is known simply as ‘Piter'.

It has been said often that St Petersburg looks like nowhere else in Europe because it looks like everywhere else, and there is certainly truth in that. Peter and later leaders employed architects from across the continent to bring their own styles to the new Russian capital. The only place that its founder was adamant it should not emulate was Moscow. Over the following centuries, as the whims of tsars and tsaritsas were made solid across the city, Petersburg took on a schizophrenic, pieced-together feel. It was beautiful, yes, but also haphazard. Neo-Classical palaces stand alongside Baroque churches, flanked by apartment blocks and mansions in what Russians call Style Moderne, or Art Nouveau. The effect is intoxicating and confusing at once. The only consistent feature is grandeur. This does not feel like a city that grew and evolved here naturally, over time. It feels like an imposition, like a city commanded into being – which is precisely what it is.

The next day, autumn awoke with a start. Dark clouds smeared the sky and rain shimmered along Nevsky Prospekt. Looking down from my room, high above the street, a parade of umbrellas scurried back and forth like swarms
of multicoloured beetles, and I gazed half-hypnotised at the city below. The whole world was in a hurry, and everyone, it seemed, needed to be elsewhere.