Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  I was amazed that these people, who had turned their backs on the very notion of progress, could have escaped communism while remaining in Russia. Surely these Russians must be part of the answer to that question: who are we, if we’re not communist? I started dreaming of visiting an Old Believer community. But it was only a dream. When I began traveling in Siberia, I found that, though there were sectarian villages all over Siberia, most were falling apart, their young having left for the cities. Even if I could identify one that was still vigorous, I could hardly turn up there on my own. For as an independent woman, a nonbeliever, and a Westerner, I represented everything they abhorred.

  It was a rare piece of good fortune that I happened to meet one of the few people in Russia who could help me. Vladimir Nikolaevich Alekseev was on a visit to the British Library as part of a delegation of librarians. He was tall and deep-chested, with a bushy brown beard, and he ran the country’s greatest repository of Old Believer books, in Novosibirsk.

  Every summer for thirty years, he told me, he and his wife had spent traveling down rivers, into the forests in search of outlying Old Believer communities. The Old Believers’ lives revolved around their old texts, he explained. As their communities dwindled, many were no longer being used. They did not relish the prospect of their books falling into the wrong hands and were happy to let him acquire them for Novosibirsk’s library.

  In due course, when I met his wife, Professor Elena Ivanovna Dergacheva-Skop, a formidable personality and distinguished scholar of the Old Believers, they asked me to join them on their next trip. They were going to visit their favorite Old Believer community, where they considered the Old Belief was best preserved. The village was called Burny, which means “stormy,” and it lay deep in the forest, far way from any road or railway. To get there involved traveling north up the River Yenisei, then east down the Stony Tunguska River in boats. I did not appreciate as I traveled to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk for the start of the expedition quite how intrepid the Alekseevs were to organize it at that juncture. Inflation was still running at 19 percent a month; the economy was barely functioning and transport was paralyzed for lack of fuel and passengers.

  Thirteen of us boarded the sturdy river steamer. There were a group of Elena Ivanovna’s students and a couple of other Britons: a history lecturer called Alan and his wife, Kirsty, who taught Russian. I sat on deck, my back to the throbbing engine, looking out over the cold, boiling waters of the Yenisei. We had left behind the rusting industrial hulks of Krasnoyarsk. Soon we would be passing the hidden bunker city which had been carved out of the ground in the paranoid Cold War years. I scanned the banks for signs of it. I had come up from below to get away from Alan, who was irritating me intensely. He knew a lot about Russia on paper. But never before had he been in a place where things did not work. He did not speak the language either. With every day that passed his plump, rubicund face was looking more aggrieved.

  The Yenisei rises in the mountains on Mongolia’s northwestern border and runs through the landmass before debouching into the Arctic Ocean. It marks a natural boundary between the low swampy plains of western Siberia and the virgin forests of the central Siberian plateau. To the east, the forest stretched away, unbroken in places, for thousands of miles all the way to the Sea of Okhotsk.

  The river was so wide here that the banks had shrunk to two green strokes of a pencil on either side. For centuries, these waterways were the main thoroughfares through the landmass. The Cossack commander Ermak brought his little expeditionary force down this network of rivers when he subdued the Mongol khanate of Kuchum and conquered Siberia in 1581. His was a commercial venture, paid for by rich merchants pursuing the fur trade. Later, from the mid-eighteenth century, rivers became the main conduit for transporting convicts and rebels to Siberia. The leaders of Russia’s two great early peasant rebellions, Stenka Razin and Emilian Pugachev, sailed up the Yenisei into exile. So did the Decembrists, those dilettante revolutionaries who tried to overthrow the tsar in 1825, after catching the democratic virus in Europe when they drove Napoleon’s troops back from Moscow. Stalin traveled up this river into exile, too, as did hundreds of thousands of Soviets consigned to the Gulag.

  A day and a half later, the steamer dropped us off at the mouth of the Stony Tunguska River. It was ten o’clock at night and raining, but still light, being so far north. As we hauled our rucksacks up the wooden steps from the foreshore Alan lagged behind, attaching trolleys to his large cases. “This is no place for luggage trolleys!” snapped Elena Ivanovna. “Leave it to the boys!” “Oh, shut up. Leave me alone!” growled Alan.

  We were laying out our sleeping bags in the barrack-like hostel when Vladimir Nikolaevich summoned us to the largest dormitory. “I know you’re all longing to get to bed,” said Elena Ivanovna, holding us with her blue determined gaze. “But I have to say this: the chipmunk is a bird, and it flies low. In other words, from now on we’re an Expedition, and an Expedition has only one leader. However absurd the order, I’m the boss and you do what I say. There’s only one way, and that’s mine.”

  Day One. Bor consisted of a muddle of wooden barracks at the mouth of the Stony Tunguska River. Balanced on the edge of a vast reach of forest, it must once have been a bustling transit point, servicing the gold and copper mines and expeditions of geologists. Now the only other guests in the hostel were a group of drunken, gap-toothed ex-convicts. The airport at the end of the dust track was a graveyard of rusting planes. Planes passed overhead, but they no longer stopped at Bor. Vulpine hunting dogs sprawled on the track lay undisturbed. The original plan was to travel upriver along the Stony Tunguska in two large flat-bottomed boats. But one was missing, presumed holed in the shallows upriver. The only other one large enough was expected back tonight. Meanwhile, the Alekseevs asked that we refrain from speaking English outside the hostel: if word got around that there were foreigners in Bor, the price of transport would soar.

  Day Two. The boat was back, but there had been so little rain that it could not make the final stretch of our river journey. Now the Alekseevs were trying to get hold of a plane. We made the odd foray to the two wooden huts that served as shops. The students played cards. Alan fretted, and I retreated behind a book.

  Of all the rebellions against the Russian state, that of the Old Believers was the one that caught the popular imagination. Ostensibly, the schism was provoked by a series of what to us seem tiny changes. Patriarch Nikon ordered for Church rituals and texts in 1653: the spelling of Jesus’s name; the number of Hallelujahs in a service; the number of fingers with which worshippers crossed themselves. His reasons for doing so were pragmatic. Since the fall of Byzantium, Russia was the last great power in Eastern Christendom not overrun by Islam. It aspired to leadership of the Orthodox world, but in order to achieve this it had to bring its own religious practice into line with the rest of Orthodoxy. The priorities of the Old Believers were different: for them, all that mattered was the tradition they knew, and that was inviolable. They fled to the forests and outlying regions. Tens of thousands retreated into their wooden churches and burned themselves to death.

  Of course, the reasons for the schism lay deeper, in the issue of Russia’s destiny: should it open up to the West, or not? Over the next two centuries it became more overtly political, embracing a fifth of the population. For merchants and those with land, Peter the Great’s reforms offered a way forward; but not for the poor. The Old Belief became a movement of resistance to the encroaching power of the modernizing, power-hungry state.

  In Krasnoyarsk, before we boarded the steamer, another scholar of the Old Believers had been saying to me that most Russians today did not understand them: “They see them as quaint, with their stern expressions and long beards. They think of them as having valuable icons and books—yes, it’s a dangerous time for them, they’re being robbed, even scholars steal things from them! What they can’t see is that the Old Believers are an essential part of Russia’s identity. They’re the living continu
ation of that first rift which opened up in Russia in the seventeenth century. They’re vital to our understanding of ourselves. Ever since then it has opened up again and again whenever there’s a civil war. As there was during the Revolution. As there is today! Look at the struggle between Yeltsin and the parliament—it’s the same old thing. Our history only begins to make sense when you see that it doesn’t move on like Western history—it just goes round and round!”

  That was what interested me about the Old Believers. For centuries Russia was a backwater, its peace occasionally disturbed by elites bringing modern ideas, which resulted in sudden upheavals. There was Christianization, there were Nikon’s reforms; Peter’s determination to turn Russia into a European nation-state, and Lenin’s to impose communism. These ideas were all visited on the country top-down, from the center, and they succeeded in laying down veneers of change. But how much did things change underneath that veneer? And would these present upheavals result in changes that would affect more than an elite?

  In the evenings, when we met up for our improvised meal, Vladimir Nikolaevich would talk about life in Burny. While I adored these stories, Alan was growing increasingly jumpy. For he was writing a paper about Burny entitled “The Last Medieval Village in Europe.” The reality we were hearing about was rather different: yes, in theory the villagers lived off the land; built their houses, and avoided machinery and labor-saving devices. But this evening we learned that the men traveled to their distant winter hunting grounds on snowmobiles. “What’s that if not a labor-saving device?” exploded Alan. The students fell about laughing, but the Alekseevs looked deeply distressed.

  Day Three. Today Alan blew our cover by ringing the Alekseevs at the airport and asking for them in his few words of Russian. Elena Ivanovna was so angry that she could hardly bring herself to look at him.

  Everyone was jumpy. Tomorrow was Saturday. Unless we left then, we would be stuck in Bor until Monday. Each additional day here meant one fewer in Burny, as Alan and his wife had fixed return plane tickets. It was looking possible that we might even find ourselves returning to Krasnoyarsk without reaching Burny. The Alekseevs were looking worn out.

  Meanwhile, the restless Alan had found an empty floor of clean rooms with curtains, doors that locked, and even bedclothes. They were pitifully cheap by Western standards, but not for the Russians. Alan moved in with his wife, and offered to take rooms for the whole expedition, but Elena Ivanovna refused: this was an instance of the chipmunk flying low. I dithered: I knew I should choose the solidarity of the group. But I was sleeping badly, thanks to a snoring student. Shamefacedly, I joined the Britons.

  It was an immense relief to be alone. Now, my only companion was a six-foot balsam whose pink fleshy blooms had dazzling yellow stamens. The fragile branches were suspended from the curtain rail by strands of wire. In this dead-end place it seemed like a vision of Sophia, goddess of wisdom and femininity. I gazed at it, thanking all those lonely men who had resisted stubbing their cigarettes out on her roots, or crashing into her after a night’s drinking.

  Day Four. Last night, Vladimir Nikolaevich told us we were not far from the site of the Tunguska explosion of 1908. That famous event flattened eight hundred square miles of forest and was heard seven hundred miles away. The first scientific expedition reported that huge trees had been uprooted and whole herds of reindeer killed. One of the few witnesses—from a long way away—was so terrified that he lost the power of speech for seven years.

  Finding no crater, the expedition concluded that whatever caused the explosion, it was definitely not a meteorite. By the 1950s, scientists were saying that it looked nuclear: it had devastated an area twenty times larger than Hiroshima. Could a comet have created its own, natural nuclear explosion? Still, nothing explained the size of it. Some suggested that only a black hole could have made such a bang. Others suspected some lethal combination of matter and antimatter. Inevitably, there were suggestions that a cosmic spacecraft had exploded in midair.

  Day Five. The Alekseevs had secured transport: a rusting military cargo plane that did a weekly round of isolated forest settlements. The flying bus rose out of Bor with a deafening roar. We flew east, following the glittering thread of the Stony Tunguska River, touching down here and there to collect men going to market. The plane was soon crammed with men, clucking chickens, a pig in a crate, kegs of salt fish, and barrels of berries.

  I had known that we were entering the largest remaining reach of virgin forest in the world. But only now did the vastness become real. Undulating over the hills, the woodland looked like the hide of a sleeping beast: cloud shadows, moving slowly, threw dark patches over its flanks and gave it breath. Then, without warning, the pilot looped the loop over a clearing; bodies crashed, barrels rolled, pigs and chickens squealed. Chuckling, the pilot brought down the plane and spilled thirteen of us out, disheveled, onto a spit of land in midriver.

  THE LOST HEART OF RUSSIA

  As the sound of the plane faded an awesome silence settled in. What I had thought of as silence was only ever a muted roar. This had depth and presence. It beckoned, like a new dimension.

  Shallow water chuckled over the smooth pebbles on that spit of land in midriver. The fractured surface was flecked with sunlight. Beyond there was only the dappled forest. I knew this landscape from a thousand Russian iterations: paintings by Shishkin and Levitan, forest wallpapers in cramped apartments, postcards, tapestry cushions, plastic trays, poems and eulogies of mushroom picking. My Russian friends loved the idea of this landscape. But few of them can have been in forest like this. It was their archetypal landscape, however, the ancient place of their belonging.

  A flotilla of dinghies carried us up a tributary of the Stony Tunguska. The rippling waterway was refracted into a million fishy scales of light. To one side, the water gleamed darkly purple, on the other it ran chalky green. Standing on the foreshore to welcome us, surrounded by bearded, headscarved villagers, stood an upright man with bright blue eyes. This was Philimon, about whom we had all heard so much. He was the village’s redoubtable lay preacher, and the Alekseevs’ special friend.

  The headland behind was dotted with log cabins. Across the river reared an escarpment of pink granite. A muddy track wound through the village, with a thin, raised boardwalk. Dogs, cows, and children wandered freely, girls in faded print dresses dragging muddy siblings in their wake.

  • • •

  Our hostess, Photinia, blue-eyed with honey-colored skin, darted round the room, piling the table with food. Next to Elena Ivanovna sat Philimon, Photinia’s father. His face, with its blue eyes framed by red-blond hair, was striking for its air of authority. Two blond children ran around the table, while in the open doorway a muddy two-year-old was hugging a sheep. By any sociological definition these people were peasants. But in Russia the word does not conjure up a Tolstoyan ideal so much as something narrow and dark. In living memory, Russia’s government engineered famines that killed millions of peasants because they were blocking the path of progress. I needed another word to describe these Old Believers. They radiated confidence and intelligence, the assurance that they were anything but marginal, that they lived at the center of the world.

  The Russians have a legend that when the Mongols invaded Russia, the Prince of Vladimir took refuge in a town called Kitezh. A spy gave away his hiding place. But even as Khan Baty’s warriors bore down on the town the waters of the lake engulfed it. They say Kitezh is the lost heart of Russia. It seemed to me as I sat at that table that I had found that heart.

  • • •

  That evening I sat on the pebbled foreshore of the River Burny, reveling in the space, after our days of confinement in Bor. The deep green of pines and cedars was broken by paler splashes of birch and a hectic rash of larch. The shallow water chattering over the stones was dark now. From somewhere along the riverbank came the sound of shooting. Late though it was, it was light enough for boys to be firing at tin cans.

  I had come down here to
get away from Alan. The foreigners were lodging in the house of a village elder with a grave, iconic face. Our host, Maxim, was part of the army which pursued the Wehrmacht out of Russia, right back to Berlin. He was badly wounded on the battlefield: “In fact, they told my family I was dead, but God watched over me.” Coming home from the devastation of that war with his Old Belief reaffirmed, he had proceeded to make his house and many of the contents, too: furniture, cross-country skis, the families’ boots. To work with your hands was a kind of prayer, he said.

  Next day he was leaving for Krasnoyarsk for an operation, he told us. So if we had any questions, now was the time to ask them. I had asked Alan to hold off posing one particular question, that first evening at least. But being Alan, he could not resist. As the dinghy rounded the bend in the river, he had been the first to spot the satellite dish jutting up over the village. So they’d come to escape from modernity, had they, he gloated; we’ll probably all find that they’re watching television, too.

  “Do you have a television?” Alan duly asked Maxim.

  The Old Believer drew himself up and said with an air of chilly finality, “We do not.” After that the conversation froze over.

  RUSSIA’S QUAKERS

  To be honest, Alan was not the only one who went to bed disappointed: Burny, with its electricity and snowmobiles, seemed much like any other remote village in Siberia.

  Next morning, at the service held in Maxim’s house, to pray for the success of his operation, I realized how wrong I was. The life of the village was organized around the old calendar of religious and agricultural festivals, with its forty-four saints’ days, twenty-seven major holidays, and services lasting for hours. We woke at dawn and watched as the red dot of a woman’s headscarf appeared, sailing through the mist like a boat. She was followed by a stream of people hurrying along the wooden planks raised above the muddy track through the village. They gathered in Maxim and Galya’s largest room, the men in high-necked embroidered shirts, tied with sashes into which their women had woven prayers.