Travels in Siberia (32 page)

No other spot between St. Petersburg and the Pacific is more full of painful suggestions, and none has for the traveler a more melancholy interest than the little opening in the forest where stands this grief-consecrated pillar. Here hundreds of thousands of exiled human beings—men, women, and children; princes, nobles, and peasants—have bidden good-by forever to friends, country, and home. Here, standing beside the square white boundary post, they have, for the last time, looked backward with love and grief at their native land, and then, with tear-blurred eyes and heavy hearts, they have marched away into Siberia to meet the unknown hardships and privations of a new life. No other boundary post in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or been passed by such a multitude of people.

At this pillar, Kennan said, exiles were allowed to stop and make a last goodbye, to press their faces to the ground and pick up a little of the earth of western Russia to bring with them. Beyond this spot they were, in a sense, jumping off into the void.

Naturally I wanted to find this pillar and see what it looks like now. If I stood beside it, I would be in an exact place where the famous traveler had been. I explained about the pillar to Sergei and we kept our eyes open. Kennan had said that the pillar was two days’ travel from Ekaterinburg, between the villages of Markova and Tugulymskaya. I noted a large town named Tugulym on the map, but Markova was either too small to be included or didn’t exist anymore. Then about 145 miles from Ekaterinburg, on the right-hand side of the road, there it was: Markova, barely a hamlet, just some houses and a sign. A short distance beyond it, tall markers announced the boundaries of two
raioni
, or districts. The marker facing westward said Tugulymskii Raion and the eastward-facing
marker said Tapitskii Raion. We got out at the wide place in the road there. Pistachio shells and a Fanta Orange can littered the oil-stained ground, the trucks blew by, the trees leaned overhead. But no sign of Kennan’s fateful pillar could be seen.

A woman in a roadside café nearby told Sergei that the road we were on was the new road. The previous one, the original Trakt, used to run through the woods just to the north. She had never heard of any pillar such as Kennan had described. Following her directions, we went down a brushy lane until it ended at a collection of trash piles, and then Sergei and I continued on foot into deep forest with weeds and underbrush over our heads sometimes. Rain had fallen the night before and our clothes were soon soaked through, while grass seeds covered us all over. The woman had said that exiles who died along the road were buried beside the old Trakt, and you could still see the mounds. We did find mounds on either side of a declivity among the trees, and its barely visible path could once have been a roadway. But the mosquitoes were coming at us so madly that we had to wave our hands before us like windshield wipers on the fastest setting, and I soon decided that Kennan’s pillar, if it did perhaps exist somewhere in these thickets, would not be found by me.

Back on the road, we drove slowly and asked people along it if they’d ever heard of the pillar—none had—and if they could show us sections of the old Trakt. Everybody we talked to pointed out pieces of the Trakt right away. Sometimes it was on one side of the new road, sometimes the other. Where it crossed grassy fields you could still see the deep depression the road had made in the ground. A man selling carrots on the new road told us that the Trakt had been the main street of a tiny village nearby called Maltsevo. Leaving the pavement and rambling along mud paths, we came upon Maltsevo in its backwater where the new road as well as the railroad had passed it by. Every one of the dozen or so houses in the village was made of wood, and every piece of wood was the same shade of weathered gray. The houses’ logs, thin pieces of overlying lath, decorative scrollwork, and plank window shutters all seemed to be in a slow-motion race to see which would be the first to fall completely down.

The single distraction that kept the village from epitomizing the dreary Russian peasant village of all time was the loud rock-and-roll anthem reverbing from speakers somewhere invisible but quite close by. I recognized the song as “It’s My Life” (in English, the original) by Bon Jovi. As
we stood on the town’s one street, a small, unshaven, dark-haired man came walking along. He had on two sweaters whose several large holes almost did not overlap. We asked him where the Trakt used to be and he immediately said, “Right here!” gesturing backhand at the ruts at his feet. “Also there,” he said and gestured far to the west. “And there!” This final gesture, to the east, was like an overhand throwing motion, and it pantomimed a hopelessness at even imagining how far the road went on.

I turned to where he gestured—first, back to the west, where the old road came on snakily but straight, a pair of muddy ruts in a wide and worn bed. The ruts entered the village, barely deigning to notice the weak attempt at domestication alongside, and then headed straight out of town. Across another field they dwindled eastward to the horizon and forever. I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them all. I stood looking at it with Sergei and Volodya and the man wearing two sweaters. For a moment I got an intimation of the sadness Kennan had been talking about—the deep and ancient sorrow of exile.

Siberian exile began almost as soon as there were tsars. In a document dated 1592, Tsar Theodore, son of Ivan the Terrible, ordered that a prince being sent to build the Siberian city of Pelym take with him one Ignati Khrypunov “and his wife and children and whole household,” deposit Ignati and family in the new city of Tobora, and not let him go from Siberia without an order from the tsar. The offense of the unfortunate Ignati is not mentioned. During those years of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—including the period of turmoil over succession and false tsars known as the Time of Troubles—many people were exiled to Siberia. Boris Godunov, the regent and actual power during Theodore’s reign, was said to have executed or exiled the whole town of Uglich for rebelling against his rule. And because the town’s church bell had rung to call people to insurrection, Godunov sent the bell to Siberia, too.

A number of books about Siberia mention this bell. Godunov dispatched it to the city of Tobolsk. Valentin Rasputin, in
Siberia, Siberia
, says that the bell may have melted there in a fire in the seventeenth century. According to another book, it was hanging in a Tobolsk church tower in 1850 when its ringing greeted Fyodor Dostoyevsky as he arrived on his way to labor-camp exile. George Kennan visited the belfry in Tobolsk where the bell hung in 1886. He reported that the city of Uglich now wanted its bell back, but the mayor of Tobolsk had replied that the bell was sentenced for life and therefore its term of exile had not yet expired.
When I was in Tobolsk, I saw what I took to be the original Uglich bell in the museum, but it turned out to be a replica. According to the website of the city of Uglich, a vigorous local campaign for the bell’s return succeeded in bringing it back in 1892.

Exile became an official form of punishment under the Code of Laws of 1648, during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Within fifteen years, there were seven thousand four hundred exiles in Siberia. Peter the Great, Alexei’s son, made many new laws that his subjects did not want to obey; Peter exiled hundreds of people at a time. In that era, Russian corporal punishment was so brutal, with whippings, brandings, and mutilations, that exile also served as a way of removing the disfigured from public view. In 1753, Empress Elizabeth had replaced execution with permanent exile to Siberia, and from this came a system whereby there were four classes of exiles: prison convicts, sentenced to hard labor and banished for life; penal colony settlers, also banished for life; banished people guilty of lesser offenses, who did not have to live in prisons or penal colonies; and families who chose to accompany any of the above. The first two classes of exiles wore iron shackles on their legs and sometimes on their arms, and they had their heads half shaved to identify them.

In
The House of the Dead
, Dostoyevsky recalled how he and other prisoners had half their heads shaved every Saturday when “the battalion barbers washed our heads with soap and cold water and scraped them mercilessly with the bluntest of razors. The memory of this torture still gives me gooseflesh.” To avoid this weekly experience, Dostoyevsky found a convict with a better razor who shaved him for a kopek. On some convicts the shaved part went from the front of the head to the back, on some it went crosswise.

Of course the exiles of all classes suffered other miseries as well—filthy quarters, hunger, cold, all kinds of bugs, diseases, beatings with the knout. The convict-executioners who wielded that instrument, which was a handle with leather thongs, had been instructed to distribute the blows around a central point on the prisoner’s back so that the scar they left looked like an asterisk. Sixty blows in a single beating were enough to kill a man. The authorities ordered Dostoyevsky flogged twice in prison—once for complaining about a “lump of filth” in a fellow prisoner’s soup, and once for saving another prisoner from drowning after he
had been ordered not to. The second flogging put him in the hospital, and when he got out and rejoined the other convicts, they nicknamed him Pokoinik, the deceased.

Dostoyevsky had ended up in Siberia because he belonged to a Fourierist discussion group, and because at a meeting of the group he read aloud a letter by Vissarion Belinsky, the banned literary critic. Nikolai Gogol, during the more eccentric later stage of his life, had published an antiliberal pamphlet in which he praised the monarchy, the church, and serfdom; Belinsky, then living in Paris, attacked him in a letter that became the reformers’ rallying cry. Betrayed, arrested, and convicted, Dostoyevsky received a sentence of death. He was at the place of execution when an order from the tsar commuted the sentence to prison labor in Siberia followed by four years of service in the army. The close call gave him a certain perspective on his Siberian sojourn and no doubt contributed to his sense of plot.

From the beginning, exile was the punishment for imaginary and real misdeeds of all kinds. During the years of schism in the Orthodox church, believers set out for Siberia voluntarily, to get away from heretical practices, or under compulsion, as was the case with Avvakum. Even expressing doubt about the truth of Greek Orthodoxy could result in exile to Siberia. In the seventeenth century, according to Kennan, you could be exiled for fortune-telling, prizefighting, vagrancy, taking snuff, and driving a horse with reins instead of sitting on its back or running alongside. Usury, debt, drunkenness, trespassing, salt gathering, wife beating, and begging when not in distress were all infractions worthy of exile. At times when Russia was fighting wars with Sweden and other countries, thousands of prisoners of war were sent to Siberia, and many lived out their lives there.

People in power often used exile to get rid of personal enemies and those they felt threatened by. An exile in the time of Peter the Great wrote that Peter had sent Prince Dolgoruky to Siberia merely because he was too popular with his soldiers. Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the black African valet and secretary to Peter, incurred the displeasure of Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s high-ranking counselor, who had him sent to Irkutsk (Gannibal would be better known in later years as the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin). Menshikov himself, one of the great grafters and rakes in Russian history, spent his last days in the tiny Siberian village of Bereyozov, above the tundra line, where he went around in a peasant
smock and a long beard and soon died. He had overreached in his arrogance after Peter’s death and angered Peter II, who exiled him. When Peter’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, became empress in 1742, she lost no time in exiling Natalie Lopukhin, the French wife of a general in St. Petersburg, because Mme. Lopukhin was too beautiful and copied Elizabeth’s dresses. For good measure, Elizabeth branded her rival’s tongue. By the time her successor, Peter III, pardoned Mme. Lopukhin twenty years later, presumably that lady’s charms were not so threatening.

Catherine the Great, who followed Peter III, changed the government substantially by giving the nobility more power and freeing them from obligatory government service. The glory days of the Russian nobility began with Catherine. As part of the new arrangement, small disputes and violations of the law would be decided by local councils run by the nobles, and among the punishments available to them was exile to Siberia. In effect, a local nobleman could send a serf to Siberia because he didn’t like his attitude—bad conduct, general worthlessness, being “incompatible with public tranquility” or “prejudicial to public order” were sufficient reasons for deportation. Catherine’s new laws encumbered the serfs even more than they’d been oppressed before, and as a result many took off for Siberia on their own. Serfdom, as an institution, did not exist east of the Urals.

The wretchedness of the serfs’ condition under Catherine troubled the conscience of a nobleman named Aleksandr Radishchev, who became the most famous exile of her reign. Radishchev’s offense was to write a book called
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
, a passionate unmasking of the evils of serfdom that is sometimes compared to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Scholars consider Radishchev’s book to be the beginning of the literature of social protest in Russia. Radishchev, born in 1749, was an official of some rank who had served as a clerk of the Senate and chief of the St. Petersburg Customs House. Ideas of freedom and justice shared by his contemporaries in other countries inspired him; his idol was George Washington.
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
describes a semifictional trip between the two cities during which the narrator sees and is told about a horrifying array of local injustices and crimes caused by serfdom.

The book came out in 1790, and he published it himself. Following the usual procedure, he first submitted the manuscript to the censor,
who told him he must take out a lot of it. Radishchev agreed, went home, and on his own printing press published the whole book uncut as he had written it. Then he brought the bound book back to the censor, who did not bother to reread it before stamping “With the permission of the Department of Public Morals” on the last page.