Travels in Siberia (40 page)

It still strikes me as strange that during the Cold War we in America liked to believe that Russian women were not beautiful at all. Longtime fans of professional football in the United States may remember a light-beer commercial of twenty-five or thirty years ago that involved an imagined Russian beauty contest in which very fat, be-warted, missing-toothed women in bathing suits promenaded down a ramp before judges and flashbulbs: “And now, contest in svim vear!” I forget what the point of the commercial was, aside from its generic beer-commercial comedy, but it reflected the prevailing attitude of the time. How, I wondered, could we have got the facts so wrong? Maybe the misconception grew out of the Second World War propaganda posters of our Soviet allies, with their images of beefy Russian women working at war-industry jobs. Or maybe it had something to do with the Iron Curtain, which kept almost all women but the wives of the highest Soviet leaders from the eyes of the West. Those wives were older, like their husbands, and tended to be equally blocky and stone-faced.

Or maybe the error goes back to John Quincy Adams. In the second volume of his memoirs, Adams describes the five years he spent in St. Petersburg during the eighteen teens as America’s first official ambassador there, and he mentions repeatedly how ugly the Russian women were. Other American observers in the nineteenth century followed Adams’s lead, declaring that Russian women were too manlike, rough, and otherwise unattractive to appeal to American tastes. This assessment makes me more inclined to distrust the messengers, however, when I recall that perhaps the best foreign observer of Russia in that century, the Marquis de Custine, viewed the subject differently. Custine was the most famous French homosexual of his day, and his journals of his Russian travels (published 1843) report on what he saw there with intelligence and specificity. Of the Russian peasant women, Custine wrote that handsome ones were scarce among them, “but when they are handsome, their beauty is perfect.” He went on: “They possess all the vague and shadowy delicacy of the women of the north, united with all the voluptuousness of Oriental females.”

A later American ambassador, Cassius Marcellus Clay, who represented the United States in St. Petersburg during the American Civil War, and who believed that he personally had won that war by enlisting the tsar’s support on the side of the North, and whose ghost, wherever it may be, I feel sorry for because his name will always be associated with a man greater than he, wrote in a recollection of his ambassadorial career that he had known “many hundreds, almost thousands” of beautiful Russian women, and he added, “so many wonderfully fine women can hardly be seen in any country in one assemblage.” A scholar who quoted this in a book published in the 1930s cautioned that Clay’s opinion should not be taken seriously because of “his egoism and his sensitivity to women.” But on the question of the beauty of Russian women, it seems only common sense to rely on Clay and Custine rather than J. Q. Adams.

The first time American men met Russian women in large numbers, the statistics offer evidence on the side of Clay. Of the twelve thousand soldiers serving with the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia from 1918 to 1920, 6 percent—more than seven hundred men—married Russian women. After the American withdrawal was announced, Orthodox priests were marrying as many as thirty couples at a time. General William Graves, the AEF’s leader, disapproved of all this romance and made a rather killjoy report to his superiors in which he said, “Entirely too many of these women would not, under the law, be permitted to enter the United States.” If a bride was found to be of poor moral character (by Graves himself, presumably), he wanted the army to deny her transportation. Higher-ups countermanded this idea.

My friend Alex Melamid points out that one saw almost no beautiful women on the streets of Moscow when he was growing up in that city during the 1950s and ’60s. Alex agrees that now all over the country there are millions of them—the Ukrainian city of Kiev, he says, is also amazing in this regard—but he thinks they have appeared only since the fall of the Soviet Union. He guesses that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of Russian female beauty are connected in some way, but he doesn’t know exactly how.

Puzzling over this mystery, I one day happened upon a possible answer in a book by an American economist named Alexander Blakely. As a young entrepreneur, Blakely witnessed the birth of Russian capitalism firsthand in the 1990s when he tried to establish a chocolate factory in
Novosibirsk. He puts forth an explanation based on market forces. In his book
Siberia Bound
, he compares the women he observed in Siberia to one-crop farmers in a stable economy. Their crop is their beauty, which they overproduce in pursuit of limited demand, thus increasing the supply, thus driving down the value even more, thus increasing the supply further, and so on. The women’s object in all this is, of course, to gain economic advantage, which to them means somehow getting out of Siberia. Blakely says that whenever one of these beauties flirted with him, he would tell her that he loved Siberia and planned to live there forever. Usually, he recalls, she would turn on her heel and walk away without a word.

Today, many hundreds or thousands of websites show photos of Russian women and other information about them. The purposes of these postings are mixed, no doubt, but certainly a great amount of heartbreak and hope is involved; also, one can’t avoid sensing the women’s danger. Articles in newspapers and magazines warn us regularly about the rise of international sex trafficking. One article I read said that a sex trafficker can make $250,000 from each woman sold. Slavery, ineradicable as all human evils, appears to be going strong in the world once again. A large number of the women taken by sex traffickers to destinations around the world are from Russia and the former Communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe. Once again the beauties of Russia are being shipped away in bondage almost as in Mongol times. A Russian friend told me, half seriously, that women have become Russia’s second-leading export, after oil.

From Krasnoyarsk we drove southeast to the Mana River and camped on a wide stretch of bank across and just upstream from a village called Ust’-Mana. All three of us were tired and the weather had turned sunny, so we decided to spend the next day and night there. We lounged around camp, bathed in the river, washed our clothes, spread them to dry on the wild rosebushes along the shore. The forest that covered the nearby hills and extended beyond in mind-numbing immensity was an original-growth combination of sky-high cedars, with less-huge firs, birches, and pines. I made a few forays into it. There were no trails, just little pathways that went for a distance and then petered out. Gazing at it from our
camp during supper, I asked Sergei and Volodya if this forest qualified as taiga. They looked at it, thought for a minute, and then Sergei said, “No. That is not real taiga.” Volodya agreed. Later I learned that no matter the forest and no matter the Russian, if you ask him or her if a forest is taiga, he or she will always look at it, pause, and say, “No. That is not real taiga.”

For me the big event of our lazing-around day was the attack of the cows. Sergei and Volodya had gone off somewhere and I was a hundred yards or so away from the camp when I saw a small herd of cows heading for the tents at a trot. Without stopping, they went into the camp and began to rip it apart. One stuck her head into our cardboard box of provisions, ate half a cabbage in a couple of bites, nosed open the oatmeal box and slobberingly ate several mouthfuls. Another came to the table on which Volodya had left a round loaf of bread and licked it fast all over, causing it to spin. Another bumped her head beside the head of the first cow, who was still neck-deep in the provision box. By the time I ran up, the table was knocked over, the chairs were scattered or down, tent pegs were pulled up, and oatmeal flakes had been strewn everywhere. I hissed at the cows with a snakelike sound that always used to scare cattle years ago when I was a ranch hand in Wyoming. These Russian cows just looked at me from the corners of their eyes. I shouted and waved my arms, and they did me the courtesy of stopping what they were doing to look directly at me, still without backing off. Only when I picked up a chair and threatened them with it did they huffily and slowly retreat.

A footnote regarding the village of Ust’-Mana for students of Russian cinema: scenes from Vladimir Nazarov’s
Khozyain Taigi
(Master of the Taiga) and Nikita Mikhalkov’s
Sibirskii Tsiryulnik
(
The Barber of Siberia
) were filmed in and around Ust’-Mana, local people told us.

The next morning when we started out again, the road, which had been getting worse since Krasnoyarsk, deteriorated thoroughly. Long unpaved sections with many big rocks and
yamy
(holes) made for a bumpy and dusty ride. The van’s low clearance underneath, which I’d worried about before, now caused problems as we began to scrape, and we almost high-centered from time to time. A boulder in the path knocked away a foot or so of tailpipe. A worse bump on an uphill grade crushed and scraped away the remaining two or three feet, leaving no pipe extending from the muffler’s outlet to carry off the exhaust fumes. Immediately the air in the van, which had never been good, became
unbearable. Now I could detect an actual blue fog. I tried to remember what the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning were. Sergei, as expected, refused to go to a garage or muffler shop and do anything about the problem. That was not necessary, Sergei announced, sitting beside his open window and its plentiful incoming dust. Finally Volodya, the swing vote among us, switched to my side and told Sergei that we had to fix the tailpipe right away or we’d all suffocate. Sergei said he would fix it, and with some annoyance he pulled over to the shoulder.

He got out. Volodya and I watched. Sergei was just wandering around a weedy patch of ground that paralleled the road, looking down and kicking occasionally at the dirt. After a minute or two he bent over and stood up with something in his hand. It looked to be a piece of pipe. We got out to see what he’d found, and he showed us a somewhat rusty but still serviceable yard-long piece of tailpipe that must’ve fallen off another vehicle. It was exactly the same width as the one we’d lost. With Volodya’s help, Sergei scooted under the van and wired the length of the tailpipe in place at the muffler outlet and other points leading to the rear bumper. When we started driving again the fumes were much better, though not by any means gone. Still, I had to praise Sergei for what an ingenious guy he was.

Beyond Krasnoyarsk the road also began to run closer to the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing it over and back from time to time. Each crossing was watched over by a guard in a small shed. When the guard, usually a short, stout woman, saw a train coming, she would walk into the road, wave a flag to stop the cars, and lower the barricades. If the train was a long and slow one, as many were, the people in the waiting cars would unpackage drinks and snacks, throw their doors open, stretch out their legs, and get comfortable. After the train had gone by, the guard would walk onto the tracks, look both ways to make sure all was safe, raise the barricades, and wave the cars through with her flag. At regularly spaced intervals on the road, piles of snack remains showed where each car had been.

Sometimes in the evening we camped not far from the tracks. During lulls in the train traffic, I climbed up the stones of the roadbed and looked down the rails to where they disappeared around a distant bend. As on the old Sibirskii Trakt, phantoms thronged along the railway. I pictured the flag-bedecked, celebratory trains that passed by here when
the railway was first completed in tsarist times, and the soldiers of the Czech Legion in their slow-moving armored trains in 1919, and the White Army soldiers dying of typhus by the thousands along the route, and the slave laborers who laid the second set of tracks in the 1930s, and the countless sealed Stolypin cars of prisoners dragged along these tracks to the deadly gulag camps of the Soviet Far East. Osip Mandelstam, the great poet on his way to death at the Second River transit prison in Vladivostok, had gone along this line. The ties and the steel rails and the overhead catenary wires all leading determinedly eastward still had a certain grimness, as if permanently blackened by history.

One afternoon a few days out of Krasnoyarsk, we stopped to buy our
tvorog so smetanoi
for lunch in a village called Kuskun. I had made a note of Kuskun while reading Kennan. He and Frost came to this village (then called Kuskunskaya) on the return leg of their journey during a night when the temperature was forty-five below. Both men were wretchedly uncomfortable and about played out. On a narrow plank bench in the post station, Kennan threw himself down and fell asleep and had a nightmare to which he devotes a detailed description. He says he dreamed that he had been invited to give a talk to a Sunday school of a church called the Holy Monopolists. He asked the congregants who the Holy Monopolists were and was told that “they were a new sect consisting of people who believed in only one thing.” He did not know what the one thing was, however, and was afraid to ask. The Sunday school superintendent, in front of all the students, asked him a question to which he did not know the answer: “Who was the first progressive-euchre player that after his death was brought back from Alaska amid the mourning of a nation?” Unable to find the answer in a soda biscuit the superintendent handed him, and deeply ashamed of his ignorance, Kennan awoke.

In all of the books of Siberian travel I read, this is the only recorded nightmare. Kennan goes on about it for two pages. Probably it struck him so forcibly because it was an advance tremor of an oncoming nervous breakdown, one he only narrowly avoided. (Frost, for his part, did not fare as well, and in the journey’s later stages became crazed and paranoid.) No darkness can match Russian darkness, as Kennan’s unconscious was perhaps discovering. Of course every dream is unique in its particulars, and Kennan’s nightmare is doubly removed from us because it is a nineteenth-century nightmare—a sort of antique. The
Holy Monopolists sound plausible as a frontier American sect, progressive-euchre players are seldom mentioned anymore, and Sunday school superintendents, awesome figures in their day, have lost their power to terrify.