Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  Other branches of the Old Belief had priests, and their services were elaborate, colorful rituals. But this village belonged to the strictest branch of the splintered movement. Russia’s Quakers, they had no chapel and no priest, not since their last bishop was killed off by the Orthodox inquisition three centuries ago. Since then they had lived unbaptized, unmarried, unshriven, answerable for their actions only to their God.

  The service, which I watched through a crack in the curtain, was a revelation. Ten centuries ago the ambassadors of the pagan Prince Vladimir came back from Constantinople dazzled by the ritual of Eastern Christianity. “We know not whether we were in heaven or on earth,” they said, “for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth.” Vladimir was converted and the Russian Orthodox ritual has continued to entrance believers ever since with the drama it enacts. But here there was only a lot of men and women praying and singing directly to their God.

  The service was conducted by a frail, bearded old man who needed prompting now and then by Philimon. All the other elders, including Philimon, had returned too recently from visits to the outside world. Before they could take a service, or be fully reintegrated into the community, they had to undergo a ritual period of cleansing. The longer the villagers spent away from Burny, or the more serious their transgression against the community, the more extreme the spiritual quarantine imposed. This was the community’s way of dealing with threats to its cohesion. Sometimes the penance involved a long period of solitude in the forest. The villagers were free to travel out into the world of sin. But afterward they had to go through this strong, purifying ritual of return.

  After the four-hour service, and the communal meal that followed, I went for a walk. The sun had burned through the mist and threads of smoke were rising from the wooden houses. The cows had been let out of their barns and were wandering around, foraging for grass. Yes, that was it. In the Russia I knew, power was imposed from the top. It pressed down on people, filleting them of initiative, determining so much of the behavior we consider typically Russian. These people were different. They had responded to the schism by taking power into their own hands. In mainstream Russia, there was always someone to blame. These people did not live like that. They could choose to bring in a satellite dish if they wanted to. But they had to answer for that choice directly, to their God.

  Just then a middle-aged woman with startling green eyes came running up, pushing her hair under her headscarf: “Hello! I’m Anfissa, Maxim’s sister-in-law. Come and have a drink!” It was nine o’clock in the morning.

  “Could I drop by a bit later?”

  “No, no. I’m out all day, it’s got to be now! It’s very important. You see it’s my name day!” Traditionally, the feast day of the saint after whom you were named was more important than your birthday. I was making my excuses when Anfissa exclaimed: “Look, there’s your husband!” I turned to see Alan emerging from Galya’s front gate, on his own. “That’s not my husband!” Anfissa rushed off after Alan, while I made my escape. Not fast enough. Alan soon caught up, panting, contrite, trying to be charming: please could I translate?

  Anfissa’s dilapidated house was furnished only with a metal bedstead, a table, and a few stools. The sills were thick with dust. She grinned, following my gaze: “Why bother with housework? That’s what I say. When we were kids our house was swept away by floods not once but twice, but we’re all alive and kicking. It’s not things that matter, but people. I’ve always kept open house, like my ma,” Anfissa said, pouring us glasses of her homemade beer. “The boys come and say, “Anfissa, can I chop some wood for you?” As long as I’ve got enough brashka … Pity you weren’t here a couple of days ago for Stepan Stepanovich’s wake. You must’ve heard—he drowned in the river. Did we put it away! We saw him off well!” The deceased was Photinia’s father-in-law, and the accident happened when we were in Bor. Was that the real reason we were stuck there for so long? Perhaps the Alekseevs were worried that we would come here and find the villagers all blind drunk.

  “Oh, just lend me your husband for a night or two,” Anfissa was saying. “He’s not my husband.” “We’d get on just fine—don’t mind me, it’s just Anfissa rabbiting away—I’m all mouth really …” A widow, she lived on her own. “A little more? It’s good, clean stuff, made it myself,” she kept saying. “My sister—no, not Galya—was staying last night,” Anfissa said to me in a stage whisper. “You know what she said: ‘I feel like a good fuck.’ ” She roared with laughter.

  By the time Alan and I staggered out of Anfissa’s house the village was a blur and our differences were forgotten. A motorcycle was roaring down the narrow mud track through the village. The rider’s long fair hair streamed out behind. The track led from the river where we had landed to the far edge of the clearing. Beyond, the forest stretched for hundreds of miles. When the young man reached the end, he turned his motorbike around and raced back again, and again.

  IN THE WILDERNESS

  News of our drink with Anfissa traveled around the village in no time. Philimon was not amused: Anfissa was the black sheep of the village, it turned out. After that, I had the distinct impression he was avoiding me.

  Now I sat with a group of young people on top of the high escarpment, looking down over Burny. From here you could see where the waters of two small rivers flowed together down below. While the River Burny ran purple, the Vel’mo was pale green from gold panning farther upstream.

  All afternoon we had been picking berries in the forest. From up here you could see how fast the community was growing. A ring of new buildings, bright with freshly cut wood, had gone up around the edge of the village. All over Russia, Old Believer communities were falling apart, but this one was expanding. What was its secret?

  My companions could not tell me, for Burny was all they knew. But I learned a lot from them. The village was in fact well connected with the outside world. Three of the fifteen extended families in Burny were not even Old Believers, just refugees from the chaos of mainstream Russia. As for the Old Believer families, ever since they came out of hiding in the 1950s their children had been obliged to attend boarding schools, and their young men to do military service. Other sectarian communities started losing their young to the cities from that time on. But these young people had no intention of leaving. Things were better here, they said.

  Some of the children from Burny’s secular families were even converting and marrying into the Old Believer families. Grigory, husband of the beautiful Photinia, was a convert, for instance. It had taken him three years to win Philimon’s approval for their marriage. Pious and bearded, he looked every bit the Old Believer now and had recently been elected mayor of Burny.

  Down below we watched boys spreading grass out to dry on the roofs. Philimon’s wife, Natalya Semyonovna, was working her vegetable garden with two of her youngest daughters. Across the street, the convert Grigory was cleaning fish in his backyard. Maxim’s wife, Galina, was carrying jars of pickled cucumbers from her summer kitchen in the garden to the storehouse.

  It was harvest time. In a few weeks the sun would lose its warmth. Then the permafrost, which had receded enough to till the ground, would grip earth and water again for the next nine months. From first light, everyone in the village young and old was busy gathering food or preserving it. Every hour counted. When the village was still cloaked in mist, a group of the men had set out in their flat-bottomed boats to cut grass. Every household needed a barn full of hay to feed their animals through the winter. In the forest pasture was scarce and for each successive boatload they had to travel farther downriver. They would not be back till late tonight.

  The village paid their state taxes in kind, and berries would be part of the tithe. We had started by the river, where the canopy of trees was high. Siberian cedar, spruce, larch, and birch vied to reach the sun, and the light that filtered through was tinged with green. Boulders and fallen trees made walking difficult. As we progressed slowly up the steep slope, cla
mbering over huge fallen trees, long-legged blond children bestrode the trees like mountain goats. Gradually, the trees grew smaller and more sparse. We were looking for cranberries, but in the crevices of the rocks there were blueberries, raspberries, and blackcurrants, too.

  When we got back the young men would set off downriver for a night’s fishing. “That sounds like fun,” I said. They laughed; they’d rather stay and watch the Mexican soap opera, they said. But there was no time for that: it was only a few weeks before the river froze over.

  On a fallen tree yards away a chipmunk sat nibbling a nut, chattering, watching us unafraid, its striped tail garish. Earlier, while we were scattered among the trees picking berries, the silence was broken with little cries. This was how the villagers kept in touch in the forest. Even on a sunny day you could never be too careful. Not so long ago Photinia came face-to-face with a bear as she was picking berries. When she felt two hands on her shoulders she thought it was one of the boys. She turned around to find a bear standing behind her. If she was terrified, the beast was even more so; it was just a youngster and it wanted to play. It fled, pursued by the hunters. When they tracked it down they found that it had died of fear and exhaustion.

  The shadows were long by the time we climbed down the rocks and crossed the river to the village. It had been fun. By comparison with young people from the cities these young seemed so carefree. They promised to take me to the haybarn where they all met up in the evening.

  But in fact these Old Believers lived with danger every day. Photinia’s father-in-law had drowned in the river only days ago. Maxim and Galya had lost two of their sons in accidents. Even at home they were not safe: for the last two years the snow around Burny was so deep that when it thawed, the houses nearest the river, including the one where we were staying, were flooded up to the windows.

  Hunting was the most dangerous occupation. When the Old Believers came out of hiding in the 1950s, the state recognized that such skillful hunters could be a valuable source of hard currency. They were offered a deal: if they would sell all the sable they trapped to the state, they could carry on with their lives. This was still their main source of income. The animals had to be trapped in deep winter, when their coats were thick. Temperatures could be as cold as forty to seventy degrees below freezing. Each family had its own hunting grounds, a long way away from the village, and the men would stay out for several months at a time. Every decision, every day was a matter of life and death.

  One of the boys who came berry picking had already started hunting with his father, whose prowess as a hunter had earned him the Order of Lenin in Soviet times. “When it’s really cold you’ve got to keep moving all the time—you can’t sit down, you can’t even eat. You’ll probably cover ten to fifteen kilometers a day, checking snares all day. The work’s too finicky for gloves—you’ve got to take them off. And each time you do the cold gets in.

  “The first few years are the most dangerous for a hunter, Father says. The young are too rash, he says. Like my brother Ivan. He was just back from military service. He went out with Father and another brother, Peter. They were all working on their own. He’d checked his snares and reached a hut. But it was still light, so he thought he’d go on to the next hut. He wrote a note to Peter, saying catch up with me at the next hut. He hadn’t realized there were these open stretches, where you sink right into the snow. Anyway, it got dark when he’d gone about halfway. He couldn’t see a thing. Kept losing the path, bumping into trees, falling into holes. He was dead beat, so he thought he’d just stop and have a rest. He started making a fire, then his axe broke. I’ll just have a little sleep, he thought. It wasn’t that cold. What he didn’t know was that the temperature was dropping—by next morning it would be twenty-two below.

  “Well, Peter reached the hut and read the note. He was dog tired, but for some reason he couldn’t get to sleep. He got up, thinking I’ve got to catch up with Ivan, and set off into the night. It was madness. Ivan hadn’t even said which hut he was going to. On and on he walked, bumping into things. Then, amazingly, he came on Ivan, fast asleep in the snow. He couldn’t wake him up. He had to beat him with a stick to bring him around. Ivan would’ve been dead by morning.”

  THE TIME OF THE ANTICHRIST

  A shaft of evening light shone through the window onto Philimon’s fair hair, picking up its reddish tinge and the tips of his curly beard, leaving his face in shadow. Today he was much more relaxed. His friendship with the Alekseevs went back many years. They were more than scholars of the Old Belief: they were his allies, guardians of the tradition, mediators between the Old Believers and a Russia which regarded them merely as backward peasants.

  Vladimir Nikolaevich was showing me Philimon’s collection of books. Some were brilliantly illuminated. Some dated back from before the schism. Many were handwritten, including one, unusually, which was copied by a woman, Philimon’s mother’s godmother.

  Philimon had been talking about the difficulties he was having. There was rising nationalism among the Evenki, native hunter-gatherer Siberians. After the fall of communism, this territory was designated as their homeland. He dreaded to think what would happen if the Evenki started trying to get them out. The Old Believers could not, would not, go out into the world.

  The village was also facing problems with the local authorities. The scale of the corruption was new: “They’re squeezing us dry … If it were up to me I know what I’d do. I’d just pack up and go. Move on as we’ve always done, deeper into the forest.” But although Philimon was the chief village elder, these decisions were arrived at collectively. On top of all that, there was the problem of prosperity: the rest of Russia might be on its knees, but here the villagers were managing well, too well for Philimon’s liking. Prosperity brought choices like television and snowmobiles.

  Philimon sighed deeply: “We live in a decadent age. All these distractions and labor-saving devices take us away from the physical work which brings us to God. The sins we commit we wash away through work, through prayers and tears.” He sighed and closed his remarkable blue eyes. “Man cannot serve two masters. This is the time of the Antichrist. We’ve got to escape from his snares. We will have to do it, before we meet our Maker. It will take fortitude. Determination. Self-discipline.”

  Philimon spoke with a peasant burr, but the cadence of his speech and his vocabulary were grand, fashioned by the sacred texts. “Any day now the Antichrist will come. We have no idea when that will be. We are so wrapped up in our lives that we won’t even notice. He will creep up on us unawares. He will be sitting right beside us. We must take ourselves in hand. Repent. But …” He paused.

  “You mean the community isn’t ready?” Elena Ivanovna prompted him.

  “That’s exactly what I mean. It’s the path of the few, I’ve got to accept that.”

  However much they revered their starets, their lay preacher, this flourishing community was not going to leave everything behind and follow him. That was the tragedy Philimon faced. He sighed: “But then again—how could I leave my family?” His face looked tortured.

  Philimon had never expected to become Burny’s starets. His father, who held the position before him, was revered for his piety and leadership qualities. When he resigned the villagers elected Philimon. In those days he was something of a rebel in Old Believer terms. He was, and remained, the best hunter in the region: his average winter harvest of two hundred sables was four times more than most men’s. Back then, he read voraciously, and wrote poetry—he used to compose verses for each newly built house and write them on the walls, they told me. The community, who were charged by tradition with arriving at a unanimous choice, hoped he would show his father’s talent for leadership. Philimon accepted the challenge. He changed his life to embrace the myth of original purity behind the Old Belief.

  All of our cultures were once defined by such myths of purity, I had been reflecting; myths which could not be changed if they were to retain their meaning. But for the Jews, th
e story of the Garden of Eden was succeeded by the promise of a New Jerusalem. Looking to the future as it did, it unlocked the concept of modernity for us.

  Yes, I reflected, this is it, the secret of Burny’s success. It is vested in this man with his blazing commitment to his faith. He asked a lot of the villagers. But he did not do so by telling them what to do so much as by challenging them to live up to the example of the books. Philimon was a long way off retiring, but I wondered who would succeed him. Might it even be his madcap oldest son, Ivan, the boy racer with his motorbike? More unlikely things had happened.

  These Old Believers saw their lives as a gradual spiritual progression. Little was expected of the children and Burny’s teenagers danced, smoked, drank, and loved rock music like their counterparts anywhere. Only once they married, which they did early, were they expected to start taking their inner life seriously. From then onward, it occupied a progressively more important role in their lives, until in the end the serious men—the women did not appear to have this choice—retreated to a hut in the forest to devote themselves to the life of the spirit. That is what Philimon’s father did when he retired as the village’s starets, and Philimon himself would doubtless do the same in due course.

  I took my leave and walked back along the raised boardwalk to Maxim’s house. Over the fence, Ivan was taking his motorbike to bits. A group of children in rubber boots were driving cows home through the mud. Photinia was taking her washing off the line.