The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (10 page)

We were moving quickly across the country now and got back on the train after the show, for a final tally of some twelve hours in Yekaterinburg. A short sleep and we were awake in time to get a lungful of fresh air on the platform in Tyumen', the wartime home of the now-embalmed Lenin, encapsulated in the Lonely
Planet guidebook with the evocative phrase “nothing much to see around the station,” an assessment I can confirm.

More to the psychological point, though, Tyumen' is regularly cited as the “official” entry point to Siberia. Siberia is one of those names, like Timbuktu or Samarqand, whose geographical specificity is dwarfed by its romantic and infamous aura. Proust observes that a romantic personality “accumulate[s]” in place-names “a store of dreams.” The dangerous ground here is what Alina Simone describes as “this mythic idea that Siberia was where you went to experience the real Russia,” that it was “only here, among the descendants of Cossack warriors, political prisoners, and religious dissenters, in these gray and cosseted cities, that I would become one with the True Slavic Soul.” I try to do my best to avoid a sentimentalizing or fantastic impulse in prose recollected in leisure, but even the vaguest of border crossings can give me the vertiginous thrill, in both three and four dimensions, of looking and saying to myself, “Here is Bosnia,” or “Here is Siberia,” or “Here is Mongolia,” all implying “Here is a place where things happened that still resonate in human imagination.”

After the frantic pace of the last few weeks, a few unhurried days on the train were more than welcome, and I was happy to stare out the window for hours at a time. As the explorer George Kennan wrote of riverboat travel, “One has all the advantages of variety, and change of incident and scenery, without any exertion: all the lazy pleasures.” The endless, martial conifer forests had given way to birch and oak, unpredictable and fecund meadows, and swampy immobile rivers with an algae glaze. Restricted to cities and trains, we were spared the Siberian
summer plague of mosquitos. The greatest hazard of the climate was merely the heat, somehow both humid and dusty.

“Monotony is the divinity of Russia,” wrote Custine, “yet even this monotony has a certain charm for minds capable of enjoying solitude.” Wood, wood, always wood: rough Lincoln-log cabins of bisected trunks, more refined houses of plank and carved filigree with cords of four-foot firewood stacked up the north sides and shiny tin roofs. The occasional burned-out shell with a pyrrhic chimney stood as warning and inevitable consequence. Birch-and-pine, birch-and-pine—the landscape held a rhythm in time with the train's wheels.

Eventually a new topography emerged: marsh with a thicket—more than a thicket, a forest, of beheaded and beleafed birch drowned in the thaw but still pristine white, a choir of flagpoles in a vast marching ground of scrub.

We retired to the dining car for toothsome fried potatoes and buckwheat kasha with mushrooms. Hours of grass and short trees passed. The only signs of animal life were one or two white birds, like seagulls, though we were far from any sea; a more prosaic duck; and a couple of goats and cows in a village an hour and a half from Omsk. Twice in twenty hours I saw what you might call a highway. “Distances! These are the curse of Russia,” said Tsar Nicholas I to Custine. The Frenchman replied, “Do not, sire, regret them: They form the canvas of pictures that are to be filled up.” He was an accomplished flatterer; later in the book, he shared his true impatience: “There are no distances in Russia—so say the Russians, and all the travelers have agreed to repeat the saying . . . unpleasant experience obliges me to maintain precisely the contrary. There is nothing but distance
in Russia, nothing but empty plains extending farther than the eye can reach.”

Omsk appeared, a little Lego city of industry and housing complexes. One tower produced a miles-long charcoal effluent. Here Gorbachev was punched by an unemployed drunk at a campaign stop in 1996. Here, too, Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for anti-tsarist activity from 1850 to 1854, and the Irtysh River that bisects the city loomed in his imagination ever after. In
House of the Dead
, his fictionalized memoir of prison camp life, he reminisced about the coming of summer and the restlessness it induced in the prisoners: “One suddenly notices dreamy eyes fixed on the blue distance, where far away beyond the Irtysh stretch the free Kirghiz steppes, a boundless plain for a thousand miles.” The riverbank was the location of the brickyard where some of the prisoners worked, the only “free [and] open” view, an opportunity “to see something not the regulation prison surroundings. . . . I speak of the riverbank so often because it was only from there one had a view of God's world, of the pure clear distance, of the free solitary steppes, the emptiness of which made a strange impression on me. It was only on the bank of the Irtysh that one could stand with one's back to the fortress and not see it.”
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For our part, we had just about twenty minutes to run out onto the platform and across the pedestrian bridge over the tracks to a snack kiosk. There we queued impatiently behind a
chatty drunk to stock up on chips, ice cream, and beer for the night. I glanced at the time and then at the train, imagining being stranded in this unappealing factory city, and was not reassured by the inspirational banner “V.V. Putin Guarantees Development for Russia.”

V.

The Knout and the Pierogi
(Tomsk to Baikal)

W
e were awoken at five a.m. for the approach to Novosibirsk. As I assembled our bags, I caught a glimpse of an otherworldly, serpentine fog hovering inches off a riverbed, winding through the field to the horizon. It had been a twenty-four-hour trip, during which our cabinmate spoke twice: “Hello” at the beginning and “Good luck” as we loaded off.

Novosibirsk station has a deservedly high reputation. It's a green-and-white neoclassical palace with an arched and chandeliered main hall—one of those “vast, glass-roofed sheds,” Proust wrote, “beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross.” The town is, as its name implies, a recent (founded in 1893) and successful (the third-biggest city in Russia) development, a by-product of the construction of the railway
itself. It has the wide boulevards and half-empty look of a Western boomtown—Denver or Calgary. And, like a Western town, everywhere there were remnants of 1950s and early 1960s décor—in this case, the Art Deco genericisms of Soviet storefront signage: “BREAD,” “CLOTHES.”

We were picked up by another Andrei—nearly every promoter on this tour seemed to be a Dima or a Misha or an Andrei—a cherubic punk who Maria swore looked like the 1980s actor Richard Greico. In addition to the obligatory cutoff jean shorts and Vans, he wore a flannel button-down over a Flipper T-shirt and had a Hüsker Dü cassette playing in the car. Siberia, at least in the micro-culture of Andrei's car, was in the midst of a full-fledged 1990s revival. He would drive us the five hours to Tomsk. A train does go there, Andrei said, but “no one takes it.”

It's proverbial that periods of reactionary politics can be the wellspring of creative protest, like the sharp political messages of Western punks in the Reagan and Thatcher eras. During that same period, Novosibirsk and Omsk were the centers of perhaps the only indigenous Siberian punk scene. Largely acoustic and based on
magnitizdat
(bootleg recordings), the small but influential circle centered on bands such as AIDS, Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) and its singer Yegor Letov, and the raw and charismatic songwriters Alexander Bashlachev (aka Sash-Bash, not Siberian but closely associated with the scene) and Yanka Dyagileva. The “suicide punks,” as this generation of nihilistic Siberian musicians are sometimes called, shared a brutal, amateurish, and personal style. Letov described Bashlachev's gruff, toothless style as “dreadful, bright, and aggressive with no connection to aesthetics . . . a kind of voodoo that he found in his soul.” Letov's own recordings were described by one listener,
speaking to the musicologist Yngvar Steinholt, as having “that common Russian mud.” Grazhdanskaya Oborona tapes, said another, were like “a raw, moldy cellar, like the ones they still have in the villages. You climb down into the cellar and there is this dank, black soil, this mould, this damp smell.”

Bashlachev, who came to Leningrad from the northern Volga provincial town of Cherepovets, resurrected the
bardy
tradition of Vysotsky with a new intensity, and it was at one of his “house shows” in Novosibirsk that Yanka (as she became familiarly known) was inspired to pick up a guitar. Intense and reclusive, Yanka, sometimes called “the Patti Smith of Russian punk,” was a tortured character who refused to give interviews. She was romantically linked with both Bashlachev and Letov (who remastered and rereleased all her recordings in 2008). One photo showed her with an anarchy symbol on her shirt and pointing a gun at the camera. Her songs, whose nearest Western analogue is perhaps early PJ Harvey or a low-fi Sinead O'Connor, were visceral (“From a beautiful soul/Only sores and lice/From universal love/Just mugs covered in blood), personal (“The television is hanging from the ceiling/And no one knows how fucking low I'm feeling”), and morbid (“The water will come, and I will sleep”). Neither she nor Bashlachev survived their twenties. Bashlachev fell from a ninth-floor window in 1988, and Yanka drowned in 1991. Both were officially suicides, though there are the usual suspicions. Some claimed that Yanka's body was recovered from the river with a crushed skull and no water in her lungs.

“It's really hard to find anyone who is still alive from those days,” said Andrei, switching the Hüsker Dü tape out for Patti Smith. “Heroin was really cheap.”

Andrei was from Novosibirsk and a northern Siberian family but had been born in Kazakhstan and raised there until the age of ten. He had spent some time in Boston on a work/travel visa working for the hardcore label Bridge 9, after quitting a construction job with some Poles in Dorchester. We pulled over at a rest stop where a dozen shirtless army guys milled around in the sun. I was about to make a snarky comment about the array of terrifying knives for sale until it occurred to me that any given truck stop in Oklahoma would have all that and more. (Though maybe it wouldn't have had the fifty vultures, circling something I couldn't quite see behind the building.) A sign read “2800 km to Chita.”

“Chita,” said Andrei. “I've got some stories from there.”

“And?”

He didn't elaborate. “It's like a giant bad neighborhood. Everyone's trying to leave.”

He turned over the Patti Smith tape as we passed an Armenian
shashlik
(kebab) house and stopped to use the bathroom. In the back, they were building a stage and dance floor that would hold hundreds. In the front stood a statue of an eagle crushing a snake. Next to that, two live bears—Misha and Masha—in an iron cage.

“Rock and Roll Nigger” came on the tape, and I started singing along under my breath. “You like this song?” Andrei asked.

“Yeah, it's a classic,” I said.

“Is it . . . controversial in America?”

I explained that people understand the premise that it's about feeling like an outsider and a defiant outcast. He nodded and kept driving.

Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and some of the other Siberian
cities have a distinctive local architecture of nineteenth-century rough wood houses, like aristocratic log cabins with ornate carved trim painted in fading ceruleans, purples, and reds. The buildings are deteriorating and sinking into the unsteady ground and facing an uncertain future. “The ones that aren't protected [by the government], they get burned down by developers,” said Kostya. “If someone is living there, first they will burn the porch, as a”—he and Andrei briefly debated the translation—“as a hint.”

A new big business in Tomsk was selling insurance against Lyme disease. The old big business was importing used cars from Japan. “A whole region lived on it,” said Kostya. Many of the eastern Siberian cities teem with cars with steering wheels on the right, “Japanese style.” Importers would ship the cars to Vladivostok, then move them westward across the country via train, selling them in the cities along the tracks, until Putin raised the tariff on auto imports to “encourage” the purchase of domestic vehicles.

“That must have been an unpopular reform,” I observed.

“Yes,” said Kostya. “There were riots. People burned Lada dealerships. I saw a picture with ten or twelve guys with machine guns protecting one of these stores.”

Would you ever, I asked him, consider moving away from here?

“To Moscow or Saint Petersburg, no,” he said. “I don't like cities, they are moving too fast. And people from Siberia, when they go to Saint Petersburg and take a shower, they're breaking out in pimples, because of the different water!” He paused. “It's hard here, though, if you want to make some change, that is—against the grain.”

From the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, Tomsk was a way station for the tea trade from China to the Nizhny Novgorod market via Perm'. Custine detailed an annual delivery of “75 or 80,000 chests of tea, half of which remains in Siberia, to be transported to Moscow during the winter on sledges, and the other half arrives at the fair.”
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It was probably my favorite Siberian town: off the main train line, it was compact, charming, shaded, and full of those picturesque old wooden houses.

Chekhov disagreed, variously describing Tomsk in letters to friends as “not worth a brass farthing” and “a dull and drunken sort of place; no beautiful women at all, and Asiatic lawlessness. The most notable thing about Tomsk is that governors come here to die.” He expanded on that opinion to his family: “Tomsk is a most boring town. To judge from the drunks I have met and the supposedly intelligent people who have come to my room to pay their respects, the local inhabitants are deadly boring. At all events I find their company so disagreeable that I have given instructions that I am not receiving anyone.”

Kostya asked about the politics of other punks on the tour. The touring circuit we had been on since we arrived in Poland would be familiar to anyone from the German squat and youth center archipelago and the scene associated with American labels like No Idea and Plan-It-X Records: young, idealistic kids who love Fugazi and Hot Water Music, planning antifascist action days and running leftist infoshops and zine exchanges. Their politics were progressive; they were fighting what they considered the good fight. Notwithstanding the fact that they were entirely
tangential to the effective politics of the country, they had a valuable sense of camaraderie and moral grounding.

Kostya and Andrei, on the other hand, agreed with the old cliché that Russia needs the “knout or the pierogi”—or, as we might say, the carrot or the stick. It's the historical idea that, as Custine quotes a Russian aristocrat, Mongol despotism “established itself [in Russia] at the very period that servitude ceased in the rest of Europe. . . . Bondage was thenceforward established . . . as a constituent principle of society.” This is the view that gives grudging respect to figures like Ivan, Peter, Stalin, and Putin—that only the iron hand of a stern but fair tyrant-
cum
-father figure, cruel in what used to be called the “Asiatic” model, can corral and control the sprawling and fractious Russian nation (including, of course, its colonized territory).

Kostya ran a small punk label and had been putting on shows in Tomsk for years. His great-grandfather was a Kazakh
kulak
(“wealthy peasant”), exiled four times. Another great-grandfather was an NKVD officer who worked with the Chinese army. “I've seen pictures of him. I think he was—not really a nice guy. He looked—typical.” Kostya's father had been the head of the medical department of a local university but lost his job after he objected to a Putin policy that replaced a free prescription drug benefit for seniors with a cash stipend. Kostya left college and got a job working for an offset printing company to support the family. “It is hard to put on punk shows officially here—I mean [to publicize them] with posters and Facebook and so on. Some people will show up and wait for you after the show, you know what I mean? . . . I saw down by the beach a few years ago—the students like to have flash mobs there, and [at] this one
they were wearing terrorist masks, and doing—” He mimed a Nazi salute.

Ultra-nationalist thugs, of course, are a danger anytime you have a stagnant backwater whose best days seem irretrievably past. As Christopher Hitchens put it, “nationalism and chauvinism are often strongest at their peripheries—Alexander the Macedonian, Bonaparte the Corsican, Stalin the Georgian”—and, he might have added, at the psychological peripheries, where dwell the economically tangential and the politically crippled. “Developing an overweening national pride is always a sign,” Michel Houllebecq once wrote, “that you have nothing much else to be proud of.” International punk has footholds in both the positive and creative and the negative and destructive axes of what Greil Marcus calls “the geopolitics of popular culture.”

For all their devotion to and passionate advocacy for progressive Western punk tropes like veganism and antiglobalism, the punks I had talked to thus far had a disheartening aversion to, or apathy about, their corrupt and depressing local and national politics. Like Yegor from Saint Petersburg, there was a general disdain for the protests that sprang up in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the wake of Putin's 2011 reelection. The common view was that they were of interest only to the urban, Westernized bourgeoisie, and doomed.

The feminist punk band–art collective Pussy Riot had already been arrested, but the international attention generated by their conviction and imprisonment wouldn't come to full force until the fall. When I asked the punks I met in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and further afield about the controversy, their opinions were muted, verging on dismissive: the women were naïve; they
weren't really a band, or at least not a band anyone knew;
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what did they expect, and what are we supposed to do about it? In this apathetic light, their focus on Western-style punk ethics came to seem an escapist distraction with the veneer of protest, and a funneling-off of critical energy.
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