Sibir

by Farley Mowat

  Soviet propaganda which I had read insisted this would not be the case, and in the short time I had spent in the U.S.S.R. I had heard a great deal of talk about “equal rights” and “special treatment” for the Small Peoples of Siberia. I had already met many representatives of the Small Peoples whose apparent success seemed to give substance to the claim that the natives were being treated with astonishing consideration. However, I had met these examples in Leningrad, Moscow, Irkutsk … I had not seen the Small Peoples in their own homes. Even in Canadian cities it is possible to find occasional Indians and Eskimo who have successfully transcended into our society and who can be pointed to as evidence of our just and benevolent concern for native minorities.

  The conflict between what I had been told about the treatment of minorities in the Soviet north and what I knew to be the truth about the treatment of such groups in the Canadian north and in Alaska, was so great I could not begin to resolve it. There was no use guessing. Tomorrow, I would begin to know the truth.

  Seven

  AT 6 A.M. THE Pregnant Cow bumped down at Yakutsk airport. The door opened and a blast of arctic air blew through the plane. The other passengers hung back as if reluctant to face the frigid blackness; but the urgent beckoning of our stewardess brought Claire and me to the door.

  “You have a welcoming committee!” Kola explained.

  Waiting at the foot of the ramp was a half-circle of broad-faced, dark-complexioned men who looked vaguely like a group of Eskimo gathered to greet a plane at some far northern settlement in Canada – except that, despite the below-zero weather, they were impeccably dressed in European fashion.

  “Who are they?” I asked a trifle nervously.

  “Yakut, is who.” Yura replied. “Famous Yakut writers and poets come to say hello. Very good fellows. You will see.”

  As we reached the bottom of the stairs Yura was pounced upon and soundly kissed. Claire and I had our arms vigorously pumped. A particularly dapper young man whose wide grin showed a gorgeous display of gold-capped teeth introduced himself.

  “Efrimov, Moisie Dmitrievich. Excuse please, my such bad English. Am secretary Writers Union of Yakut Republic. You are honoured sister-men from north country. We give much welcome!”

  The genders may have been a bit mixed, but the emotion was sincere. Moisie hustled us into a cavernous airport whose waiting-room was filled with sleeping passengers. But this was not good enough for “honoured sister-men.” While waiting for our luggage to be claimed by Kola we were taken upstairs to a room normally reserved for the use of air crews of Polar Aviation (the writ of Intourist with its luxury lounges does not extend as far as Yakutsk).

  The room was crowded with pilots, army officers and a few civilians, most of them pounding their ears. At the far end of the room stood a Chinese rose tree, some ten feet tall, looking wildly out of place. Northern Siberians grow potted trees the way we grow geraniums or African violets. They are to be found in almost every office and in many homes.

  Despite having had to wait for us for several hours, our hosts seemed not the least fatigued. Champagne corks began to pop and we were swept into a torrent of talk about books and writing, travel and travellers. So much enthusiasm at such an ungodly hour was more than I could match, and in any case I was having trouble adjusting to these people. The contrast between the trim, dark business suits, white shirts and subdued ties worn by these ebullient little men, and their knee-length, beautifully embroidered reindeer-skin boots did not help the adjustment process. Nadia disappeared for a few moments and when she returned her stylish high-heeled shoes had been replaced by Yakut boots. Nadia was home … Claire and I felt we were a long way therefrom.

  A big, burly Russian was snoozing in an armchair under the rose tree, his astrakhan hat tilted forward over a bulbous nose. The warmth of our reception stirred him to surly wakefulness. He raised his heavy head, glared at us with bloodshot eyes, and in a bull’s voice demanded silence. He was obviously a Very Important Person.

  For a moment I felt a return to normalcy. The natives had been put firmly in their place. But no! Far from relapsing into respectful silence, our new friends ignored the interruption. Yura, however, fixed the offending Russian with a hostile stare and in a loud voice explained:

  “Huh! Big Chief in Moscow, maybe. Here is just another white man with loud voice. This is Yakut Republic. This is Yakut airport! Have more drink champagnsky!”

  Our luggage having been retrieved, we were driven to the Lena Hotel, a five-storey concrete structure which provided us with luxurious accommodation, including a bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom in which there was not only a workable flush toilet but sometimes running water too. Subconsciously I had been expecting to find myself installed in a log hut – and the luxuries of the Lena were a bit too much to take in all at one go.

  It was Claire who restored my sense of reality with the discovery that, in Yakutsk, the always inadequate toilet paper which is the mortal lot in the Soviet Union, was simply non-existent. When I delicately drew Yura’s attention to this, he grinned.

  “Not using toilet paper in real north. Is much better using reindeer moss.”

  This was not much help, but we soon discovered the local drill. Each morning one made a rapid trip to a magazine kiosk and purchased a newspaper. Some people preferred Pravda; others were partial to Izvestia; but the real cognoscenti bought the Red Star.

  While I am on the subject of minor inconveniences, I should mention the telephone. Claire and I went to bed soon after reaching the hotel, hoping to sleep until noon. At 8 a.m. we were awakened by the demoniac shrilling of a telephone bell. For some terrible moments I could not even locate the thing. I finally tracked it down in the depths of a big cupboard. It spouted an impassioned spate in an unknown language and refused to believe I could not understand a word it was saying. I hung up and crawled back into bed. The shrilling began again. This time the machine was vibrant with outrage at my obtuseness. I hung up. Instantly the bell rang. I took that telephone, throttled it with my scarf, muffled it in the depths of my heavy parka, wadded it into the cupboard and shut the door.

  The difficulty is that, because of a mysterious shortage of paper in the Soviet Union, telephone directories are almost, if not quite, nonexistent. This means you must know the number you want to call or else engage in the trial-and-error method of tracking down your quarry. As one who distrusts telephones and hates the way they have come to dominate our lives, I have a sneaking regard for the Soviet method of outwitting them. On the other hand, one must occasionally get a little sleep. This cannot be achieved by taking the receiver off the hook, since this is construed as a distress signal and will bring a posse of worried hotel officials, probably accompanied by a doctor, pounding on your door.

  We woke at noon and I had my first daylight glimpse of Yakutsk – out the hotel window. I looked down upon a spacious, paved square around which wheeled a line of buses, taxis and trucks. Backing the square was a series of masonry buildings. Most of them were five storeys high but the one directly opposite was in the process of having an additional three floors added to it. This building would have been able to hold its own, for size, in Moscow, but here in the heart of Siberia it seemed positively gigantic.

  I whistled tunelessly – a sure sign of inner perturbation. Claire, who was still abed, wanted to know what was bothering me.

  “Nothing much. I’m just confused. Where in hell are the picturesque native huts of Yakutsk? And how in the name of all that’s holy do these people get away with running up eight-storey masonry buildings on permafrost?”

  “Why shouldn’t they get away with it?” Claire asked.

  “Because, oh wisest of women, it just isn’t possible! It’s something you won’t really understand, but permafrost means a permanently frozen soil which may be hundreds of feet in depth. It never thaws. That is, it doesn’t until you build a house on it, thereupon the warmth seeping through the floor thaws the ground under the house, gradually turning it into a
bog, into which the house slowly sinks. Permafrost is the bane of arctic engineers and construction people. It drives them mad. Our solution has been to build very light one- or two-storey structures of wood or aluminum, flexibly mounted above the ground surface on blocks or on steel posts. This crowd must be clean out of its collective mind! These monstrous masses of concrete all over the place have simply got to founder and fall apart. Wonder if they’re insured?”

  Claire had joined me at the window. “Sometimes you can’t see what’s right in front of your nose, Farley. Look at the building across the street. There’s your answer. As the buildings sink, they just add new storeys on the top.”

  A brisk knock on the door announced Kola’s arrival. It was typical of his thoughtfulness and attention to detail that he had brought us a copy of the Red Star. He announced that we were to have lunch with some of our newly met Yakut friends.

  Our host was Basil Protodiakonov, a small, shy man with a winning smile and a face cast in the same mould as an Eskimo. He was the author of three novels and two books of poetry. He was also, he told us modestly, a professor of history at the Yakut State University.

  Over a meal of black bread, caviar, pickled fish, schi soup and reindeer shashlik (equivalent to shis-ka-bob), Basil talked about his city and his country.

  For almost three centuries after its founding in 1640 as a Cossack fort, the settlement of Yakutsk changed very little. Essentially a trading post and later an outfitting centre for placer gold seekers, it eventually came to be a minor administrative town of the Russian Empire. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it acquired a bad reputation as a place-of-no-return for those political prisoners whom the Tsars felt were particularly dangerous; but for the most part it remained an almost unknown village, infinitely remote from the civilized world. It was inhabited by fur traders, a few unlucky government officials, a rag-tail garrison of Tsarist troops, political prisoners, and an amorphous fringe of natives who were considered to be one small cut above the level of outright savages.

  In 1917, Yakutsk had a population of seven thousand people and was the only “large” town in the immensity of north central and eastern Siberia – a region half the size of the United States. Essentially it was not very different from similar, if smaller, frontier settlements in the Canadian north and in Alaska, for it epitomized the general state of inertia and neglect which characterized such places and which still characterizes many of them to this day.

  The blight of internal colonialism began to disappear from Yakutia in 1919 when the Yakut people, in revolt against the Russian Empire, took back almost the whole of the original region they had owned before the coming of the white men. They were encouraged by Lenin and other Soviet leaders to form their own republic.

  “This was not so easy to do,” Basil explained. “At the time of the Revolution our people, and the Evenk and others who lived with us, were not in good condition. Whole communities in the taiga died every year from starvation; from typhus; from tuberculosis and smallpox. A woman who could raise one child out of every five she bore was very rare. There were no schools for the children if they did survive. We had no written language of our own, and so we were completely illiterate because we had almost no opportunity to study Russian. Many, many of our people had become so hopeless it was nearly impossible to rouse them even to try to help themselves.

  “It was lucky all did not feel so hopeless; and the reason they did not was because of something the Russian Imperial government did for us by accident. From the middle of the eighteenth century they had the habit of sending condemned political prisoners to live out their years and die in the taiga of our land. These men were not criminals. Many were aristocrats who had made the mistake of asking for liberal reforms. They lived in our villages with us and taught some of us to believe in a future; to believe in ourselves; to be willing to work for a better world even if it could not come in our time.

  “In 1914 we already had a revolutionary group called the Lighthouse Keepers. It was their task to keep the light of hope alive. When the Revolution began in Russia, we too revolted. We took Yakutsk city and drove out the Tsar’s men. Maxim Amasov, a young man of our people, was our leader. He was helped by Platon Oiyumski who became the first Yakut writer.

  “We had to fight hard to stay free. First we were invaded by Admiral Kolchak’s White troops, and we threw them out. Then Pepeleyov, a White general armed by the Japanese and the Americans, invaded our land, but we beat him too. There were raids into Yakutia from Mongolia until 1924 but all were repulsed. It is not easy to take freedom away from a people who have just escaped three hundred years of oppression.”

  Moscow recognized the autonomy of the country in April, 1922, when the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formally constituted. Since that time the Yakut have governed themselves, although subjected to varying degrees of pressure and control from Moscow. When, on a later occasion, I questioned the degree of “autonomy” enjoyed by Yakutia, a young painter of the new generation gave this answer.

  “Freedom is always relative. What we native Siberian peoples have now is the freedom to live – after having been condemned to death. We may grumble about ‘ukases’ from Moscow, but I tell you truly that if anyone tries to destroy the thing which gave us our new life, the Communist idea, there is not a man or woman in Yakutia who will not fight like a taiga devil to defend it.”

  Hitler discovered the truth of this declaration. Yakut soldiers were amongst the toughest and most effective troops in the Soviet army. They were used as shock troops and suffered astronomical losses in proportion to the size of their nation. One out of every five Yakut men of military age, and a good many women with them, died in battle against the Germans.

  Basil Protodiakonov was less afflicted than most people in the Soviet Union by the compulsive desire to pour masses of statistics into the ears of visitors; but he was not totally guiltless.

  “To tell you something about the progress we have made since the Revolution, there is the fact that we have almost tripled our numbers. There are now 300,000 Yakut of pure blood not to mention the people of mixed Russian and Yakut blood. Our land now has a population of over 700,000, including people from almost every state in the Soviet Union; and our city of Yakutsk has 110,000 people. We welcome all newcomers and do not fear they will take our land away from us for we are so strong within ourselves.

  “Knowledge has made us strong, and has given us back our pride. Since 1924 we have had our own written language. Our children spend their first years at school studying in their native tongue and using textbooks written by our own Yakut educators. In 1917, Yakut people were almost totally illiterate and now there is no illiteracy. We have eight hundred grade schools; 780 kindergartens; eighteen high level technical schools; and our own State University. Nearly 50,000 Yakut now have higher education degrees of university level. We have our own state theatre producing Yakut drama, opera and ballet, and our own symphony orchestra. There are twenty-eight newspapers in the Yakut language. We have our own television and radio system; eight museums; more than six hundred libraries. We have …”

  I felt a yawn beginning – not because of lack of interest but due to a simple reflex action which overcomes me whenever I am exposed to statistics. I tried unsuccessfully to stifle it. Basil glanced at me, paused for an instant, and went right on.…

  “… now talked long enough about ourselves. So let us have one more toast. Dear friends! Please carry back with you the loving wishes of the Yakut people for the Small Nations of your north. Let us drink to their success and happy future!”

  I managed to drink that toast, but any North American Indian or Eskimo will know why I very nearly choked upon it.

  After lunch we were driven down the broad main street of Yakutsk to a not-quite-completed block of flats housing the Writers and Artists Unions. The main street was a study in instant change. Massive new masonry buildings alternated with ancient log structures, which had settled so deeply into the
melting permafrost that the lower windows of some were actually below street level. Yakutsk is treeless but the skyline gained something in variety from the presence of scores of construction cranes all busily at work, despite the fact that on this November afternoon the temperature was 15° below zero. These cranes are the ubiquitous hallmark of modern Russia. We had grown used to their gaunt dominance over Moscow and other major cities; but it was a surprise to find them just as abundant here in the heart of Siberia.

  Basil escorted us into a room where twenty or thirty writers, painters and journalists were waiting to welcome us.

  With one exception they were all natives – mostly Yakut but including several Evenk and a shy young Yukagir lad who looked to be about eighteen. The exception was a gentle-faced Russian who had lost a leg during the siege of Leningrad.

  We all seated ourselves around the inevitable green, baize-covered table. In the Soviet Union indoor life revolves around tables. If it is not a conference table, it is a dining-room table or a sitting-room table. The North American kind of party where people mill aimlessly about a room engaging in competitive and transient conversations is virtually unknown in the U.S.S.R., where it is axiomatic that, if you wish to entertain friends, you do so sitting at a table. The system has its advantages. You never have to balance your glass and a cigarette in one hand while you juggle a plate full of dainties in the other. You never need to wait for your host to carry your glass out to the kitchen to renew its contents – a bottle is always within reach and if you neglect to keep your own glass topped up, your neighbour will do it for you.

  There is nothing static about these tabletop soirees. It is permissible to play musical chairs if you happen to catch a stimulating glance from the lady across the way; but guests are not allowed to escape into exclusive little conversational compartments for long. The tamadar sees to that!