Travels in Siberia (34 page)

Varlam Shalamov, the prose writer and poet who survived seventeen years in the murderous gold-mining camps of the Kolyma, noted in his prose piece “An Epitaph” that the daily quota of dug-up earth for a Kolyma miner was about 267 times as much as the quota had been for a Decembrist prisoner laboring in Siberian mines about a century before. Both the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century prisoners had essentially the same tools—-shovels, picks, wheelbarrows. And after he finally got out of the Kolyma, Shalamov wrote, “I read memoirs of persons who had been sent to exile in Siberia under the czars. I found their escapes from Yakutia and Verkhoyansk bitterly disappointing: a sleigh-ride with horses hitched nose to tail, arrival at the train station, purchase of a ticket at the ticket window . . . I could never understand why this was called an ‘escape.’ ”

We know the Soviets killed or jailed people for offenses even more bizarre than any the tsars dreamed up. Biographical notes about Shalamov don’t say why he was sentenced to the Kolyma mines the first time, in 1937, but in 1943 he was given an additional ten years for, among other things, expressing the opinion that Ivan Bunin, a recent Nobel Prize laureate, was “a classic Russian writer.” People slaved in the gulag camps for five, ten, or fifteen years because they had used fake ration cards, or worked for the American Relief Organization during the famine that followed the First World War, or stolen a spool of thread, or perpetrated a “facial crime” (such as smiling during a serious party lecture), or inquired about the cost of a boat ticket to Vera Cruz, or studied Esperanto, or possessed a piece of Japanese candy (proof of spying for the Japanese), or danced the decadent Western dance called the fox-trot.

A single ill-considered remark could be enough. An actor named Shirin, of the Lenin Collective Theater, landed in a labor camp for bursting out, “Don’t feed us Soviet straw; let’s play the classics!” A woman got ten years for saying that a recently convicted enemy of the people, Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, was handsome. A man spoke of the tragically deceased
hero of the revolution, “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, with apparent reverence (“Let’s remember his soul”) but unwisely happened to be in a bathroom at the time . . .

Stalin, with his wide-screen approach to governing, moved not only individuals but also entire populations around his empire like pieces on a game board. In those years people were even exiled
from
Siberia. As part of the Soviets’ campaign against religion, the Tibetan Buddhist High Lama, Agvan Dorzhi, was deported from Buryatia to Leningrad. Solzhenitsyn tells of a Yakut native who was relocated from the Kolyma district to near Leningrad for the crime of rustling reindeer. After his release from exile and return home, the Yakut said to prisoners whom he met in Kolyma, “Oh, it’s boring where you come from! It’s awful!”

During the Second World War, tens of thousands of citizens of Korean background were shipped from Vladivostok and environs to Central Asia because of fears for their loyalty. A large number of Chinese were rounded up in Russian cities along the Chinese border and moved north to Yakutia for the same reason; most of them died as a result. Whole trainloads of German-speaking Estonians were given one-way passage to the Barabinsk Steppe, in the middle of western Siberia, because they were thought to be sympathetic to the Nazis. And so on.

Stalin’s death in 1953 marked an end to the large-scale deportations. Nikita Khrushchev denounced the wrongs and excesses of Stalinism in his famous speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. The following year, after winning a struggle for power with fellow Stalin-era holdovers among the party leadership, Khrushchev did not have his main rivals shot, as Stalin would have done, but instead made Vyacheslav Molotov ambassador to Mongolia and sent Georgi Malenkov to head a Siberian electrical-generating plant. In the later years of the Soviet Union, and certainly after its fall, one heard less often about enemies of the government being sent to Siberia. And yet in 2005, when President Vladimir Putin brought down the politically inclined oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of bribery, theft, and fraud, the defeated billionaire was sent not to some minimum-security jail in greater Moscow, but to Penal Colony Number 10, southeast of the Siberian city, of Chita. That city, many miles east of Lake Baikal, was where Tsar Nicholas I had sent the most dangerous of the Decembrists—or rather, those he had decided not to hang.

Some of the above ran through my mind as I stood in the village of Maltsevo looking at the old Trakt running eastward out of sight. In the road’s deeply worn ruts I tried to picture its former magnitude. This had been a continental highway, after all, a road of empire. I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling, and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travelers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust. If there were a museum of the great roads of the world, the Sibirskii Trakt would deserve its own exhibit, along with the Via Appia and the Silk Road and old U.S. Route 66.

In America we love roads. To be “on the road” is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibility. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. “Riding off into the sunset” has always been our happy ending. But I could find no happy-ending vista here, only the opposite. This had also been called the Convicts’ Road or the Exiles’ Road. Not only was it long and lonesome, but it ran permanently in the wrong direction, from the exiles’ point of view. Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here.

Using a place as punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place.

Eleven days from St. Petersburg we were well into the swampy flatlands of western Siberia. Now we were camping out every night. In a country without fences or No Trespassing signs, we had an abundance of camping spots, but every one required a certain amount of searching nonetheless. Sergei sometimes spent an hour or more in the evenings looking—stopping, getting out, walking around, then trying somewhere else. He wanted ground that was dry, not too low, not too many trash heaps, near water if possible, away from the road but not too difficult to get to. When he was satisfied with his find he would pronounce it a “khoroshoe mesto,” a good place.

The country’s swampiness did not manifest itself in great expanses of water with reeds and trees in it, like the Florida Everglades. There were wide rivers, and reedy places, but also birch groves and hills and yellow fields. The way you could tell you were in the swamp was, first, that the ground became impassibly soggy if you walked at all far in any direction and, second, by the mosquitoes.

I have been in mosquito swarms in beaver meadows in northern Michigan, in wetlands in Canada, and near Alaska’s Yukon River. Western Siberia has more. On calm and sultry evenings as we busied ourselves around the camp, mosquitoes came at us as if shot from a fire hose. Usually mosquitoes cluster in a cloud around their targets, but as Volodya made dinner I observed a thick and proximate cloud surrounding him head to toe, and then a whole other sort of candidate swarm
around that inner swarm, and then more in all directions, minutely enlivening the sky.

With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists—your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. The reason for this tactic is a mystery. The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth—part of a larger psyops strategy, maybe. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the indrawn breath of air. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emitting a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup.

Nothing short of a good breeze keeps Siberian mosquitoes down. They laugh at organic-based repellents. Strong repellent with DEET is disagreeable to them, but they work around it. Thick smoke can be effective, but you have to stand right in it. In past times, native peoples and Russians wove fine netting of the long hairs in a horse’s tail and wore the nets throughout the summer. Members of a tribe called the Tungus carried smoke pots with them wherever they went, while another native people, the Voguls, retreated into smoke-filled huts for the summer months and became dormant, doing most of their hunting and traveling in the wintertime. The sheer volume of mosquitoes might cause an observer not to mention the gnats, flies, and tiny biting insects (known as no-see-ums in America); there are plenty of all those as well. Sometimes in the evenings I imagined I could hear the great insect totality tuning up all around, a continent-wide humming.

The mosquitoes kept tabs on us vigilantly everywhere we moved, indoors as well as out. Because all our campsites were just places along the road, the bathroom arrangements had to be of the walk-off-into-the-bushes variety. Tending to necessities while under insect attack was a real experience. I recalled what a Siberian traveler named Hans Jacob Fries had written about this problem more than two centuries ago: Fries was a Swiss doctor whose book,
Reise durch Sibirien
(Travel in Siberia), described a journey he made in 1776 and, incidentally, became one of the earliest books to use that serviceable title. Fries wrote that during his passage through western Siberia he was bitten on a “delicate portion of
my privy parts . . . so severely by a horse fly . . . that for three days I didn’t know where to turn on account of the pain, and I had the greatest trouble to prevent the setting in of gangrene.” The recollection of Fries’s misfortune filled me with caution, not to say fear.

Sergei had provided each of us with a special antimosquito hat, called a
nakomarnik
, that was draped with netting and resembled something a beekeeper might wear. When the mosquitoes were the worst, we wore those hats, and gloves, and we tucked our pant legs into our boots. Dressed this way we could move around and perform most essential activities. I found sketching and taking notes difficult with gloves on. Also, the no-see-ums got through the holes in the netting and were hard to swat once inside. A few mosquitoes always sneaked in, as well, and whined maddeningly. As Volodya cooked meals on the propane stove, mosquitoes attracted by the rising vapors flew over the pot, swooned from the heat, and fell in. When we ate our oatmeal in the morning there were often a few mosquito bodies in it. Most of them we just ate, but sometimes there were ones that had bitten somebody and were full of blood . . .

Bugs are just part of the Siberian situation, as inescapable as distance and monotony. That long-suffering traveler Chekhov described a cockroach-infested room in the jailhouse where he spent the night in a tiny settlement on Sakhalin: “It seemed as though the walls and ceiling were covered with black crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind. From the rapid and disorderly movements of portions of the crepe you could guess the composition of this boiling, seething mass. You could hear rustling and a loud whispering, as if the insects were hurrying off somewhere and carrying on a conversation.”

Vladimir Arsenyev, the Russian army officer and explorer who mapped some of the most inaccessible parts of the Primorskii Krai north of Vladivostok, wrote about flies that fell so thickly that they put out his campfire; Dostoyevsky waxed lyrical about the blessed moment in the cool of predawn in the prison barracks when the fleas stopped biting and the convicts could sleep; and John Bell noted that his ambassadorial party bound for Peking changed its route across eastern Siberia partly because they were “much pestered by gnats and muskitoes.” The swarms afflicted animals, too—descending on young foals in such numbers as to kill them, suffocating reindeer in Yakutia by clogging up their nostrils, tormenting
cattle on the Barabinsk Steppe so that the herdsmen had to paint them all over with tar. Some of my Siberian notebooks still have squashed mosquitoes between their pages. The Lonely Planet guidebook to Russia that I referred to before I went on my journey states, in the section about Siberia, “By August, the air has cleared of mosquitoes.” From my experience, this is no longer the case.

After about two weeks on the road, Sergei and Volodya and I had been together enough that the official politeness among us had worn off and we were all acting like our ordinary selves. I sometimes withdrew into moodiness and silence; Sergei said nothing for hours at a time and looked grim around the eyes. I glanced at him every so often trying to detect his mood. Meanwhile Volodya leaned back in the passenger seat, comfortably unencumbered by a seat belt, eating hard candies and listening to the radio. He and Sergei often talked so fast and allusively between themselves that I could not extract a clue as to what they were saying.