Merv, once called Queen of the World and believed to be the cradle of civilization, resolved itself into “a nascent and as yet very embryonic Russian town, with some station buildings, two or three streets of irregular wooden houses... No ancient city, no ruins, no signs of former greatness or reviving prosperity.” What he did see, however, was enough to remind him how impotent Great Britain had been in attempting to check the Russian annexation of Merv in 1884. “The flame of diplomatic protest blazed fiercely forth in England,” he recalled with bitterness, “but, after a momentary combustion, was as usual extinguished by a flood of excuses from the inexhaustible reservoirs of the Neva.” It would have been a very different matter, he implied, had George Nathaniel Curzon sat penning despatches at the desk of the Foreign Secretary.
Once more the train drew away to the East across a land wiped almost clean of history and Curzon composed its epitaph:
In these solitudes, the traveller may realise in all its sweep the mingled gloom and grandeur of Central Asian scenery. Throughout the still night the fire-horse, as the natives have sometimes christened it, races onward, panting audibly, gutturally, and shaking a mane of sparks and smoke. Itself and its riders are all alone. No token or sound of life greets eye or ear; no outline redeems the level sameness of the dim horizon; no shadows fall upon the staring plain. The moon shines with dreary coldness from the hollow dome, and a profound and tearful solitude seems to brood over the desert. The returning sunlight scarcely dissipates the impression of sadness, of desolate and hopeless decay, of a continent and life sunk in a mortal swoon. The traveller feels like a wanderer at night in some desecrated graveyard, amid crumbling tombstones and half-obliterated mounds. A cemetery, not of hundreds of years but of thousands, not of families or tribes but of nations and empires, lies outspread around him: and ever and anon, in falling tower or shattered arch, he stumbles upon some poor unearthed skeleton of the past.
Meanwhile the line ran through green, well-timbered country that paved the approach to Bokhara, capital of a quasi-independent State already succumbing to Russian influence. At first Curzon could see no more than a distant outline of minaret and dome: for the train, having skirted the city walls, perversely drew away into the shelter of a modern Russian-built station nearly ten miles from Bokhara itself. Although some of the local merchants had wished the station to be sited nearer the city, the general attitude of the Bokhariots towards the railway was one of suspicion. It was regarded as foreign, subversive, anti-national and even Satanic: they called it Shaitan’s Arba, or the Devil’s Wagon. Even in Russia such an attitude was not uncommon. Readers of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, published in 1866, will recall how Lebedyev was taunted with believing that “railways are a curse, that they are the ruin of mankind, that they are a plague that has fallen upon the earth to pollute the ‘springs of life.’” To which he replied: “The railways alone won’t pollute the ‘springs of life,’ but the whole thing is accursed; the whole tendency of the last few centuries in its general, scientific and materialistic entirety is perhaps really accursed.”
The Russian railway authorities readily adopted the suggestion of the Bokhariots that the line should not approach the city. It gave them an excuse for building a rival town and a cantonment of troops for its protection: an unobtrusive yet effective safeguard against possible unruliness on the part of a recently occupied and still semi-independent state. But already the merchants of Bokhara were regretting their early hostility to the line, much as English land-owners had come to lament the wealth lost by their having opposed the advance of the railway across their estates. Everywhere, Curzon noted, apprehension had given way to ecstasy: “I found the third-class carriages reserved for Mussulman passengers crammed to suffocation, just as they are in India; the infantile mind of the Oriental deriving an endless delight from an excitement which he makes not the slightest effort to analyse or to solve.” Sometimes, it must be confessed, he did live up to the reputation of a Superior Person.
KENNETH ROSE,
Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and His Circle in Late Victorian England
2. Peter Fleming
It was a three or four day journey to Samarkand. Night fell soon after we had started on this journey and it was discouraging to find that the electric light on the train was not working. My fellow-passengers in the soft-class coach all turned out to be fairly senior railway officials bound for a conference in Tashkent. It was to be what the Russians call a Self-Criticism Conference at which the delegates, theoretically, take it in turns to explain the appalling blunders for which each of them has been responsible and to suggest how these blunders can be avoided in the future. One of the possible remedies is so obvious that I cannot believe that these conferences are much fun, and if I had been going to one I know that I should not have felt at my best; but I cannot say that I was much impressed by the reaction of the twenty or thirty railway officials to the complete failure of the electric lighting system on a train in which they had to spend three long nights. All this happened, you must remember, in the nineteen-thirties, and in those distant days to be deprived without warning and in one’s own country of some essential service or amenity was looked on by the British, not as another thorn in an outsize martyr’s crown which it is their duty to wear with as good a grace as possible, but as a cue for action, or at least for vigorous protest. If nothing came of the protest, one improvised. The Russians neither protested nor improvised.
As the deserts turned from gold to dove-grey and the dusk closed in across them on the thin black line of the Trans-Caspian Railway, my fellow-passengers put their soup-stained memoranda back into their portfolios of imitation leather and let the darkness flow over them till it obscured everything in the compartment except the glowing tips of their cigarettes, eternally agitated in debate. Nobody tried to mend the dynamo, nobody tried to buy candles when we stopped at the occasional villages and the still more occasional towns. “Oriental fatalism” is perhaps the explanation that suggests itself to those of you who know the Russians; and I agree that there is nothing more fatalistic than the Chinese, and I remember thinking that if the other passengers in that coach had been senior Chinese railway officials, or even ordinary Chinese, some poor stationmaster would have been intimidated or bribed into providing us with lamps and we should have travelled in a blaze of light.
Still, we travelled, which was the main thing. I think I have said that there was no dining-car on the train; nor was any other source of food or drink provided. This added greatly to the interest of a slow and rather tedious journey. It meant that one depended entirely for victuals on the stations at which the train stopped; and although I say “one depended,” I really mean that about three hundred depended, for of course everybody on the train was equally anxious to avoid starvation. Imagine for a moment that you are a passenger on a slow train without a dining car, travelling through Russian Central Asia twenty-five years ago. Tomorrow morning you wake up as soon as it gets light. You have an upper berth. The other men in the compartment are inert, untidy molehills of humanity. Soon they will wake up too, and make themselves once more into mountains, full of self-importance and statistics and perhaps also of an abstruse charm. But now they are huddled with their knees up to their chins. They are clenched like a fist against the cold, and although the cold is not all that severe they are not as well equipped to meet it as the peasants in the hard-class carriages. Those three molehills are important people, senior officials of a nationalized service in a Socialist state. Being important people, they are entitled to certain privileges and priorities. As a result, instead of wearing sheepskins and felt boots like most of the hard-class passengers, they are dressed in European-style suits and shoes, and although these clothes make them feel ochin kulturni or very cultured, they also make them feel the cold much more than their social inferiors. Which only goes to show that you can’t have everything.
As you peer down from your upper berth the first thing that strikes you is what a terrible mess
the compartment is in. The whole floor is carpeted, like the floor of a parrot’s cage, with the husks of sunflower seeds. The spittoon has become a sort of cornucopia, overflowing with melon-rind and bread-crusts and grape-skins and egg-shells and cigarette-ends. You climb down from your berth and pick your way through this debris into the corridor. The sun is rising over the desert and on the southward horizon you can see a line of blue mountains beyond which lies Persia. The express train is tearing along at a steady twenty-five miles an hour. Presently it begins to slow down, whistling in that rather hysterical way to which so many foreign trains are addicted, and at length comes convulsively to a stop in a small wayside station, where with any luck you can buy something to eat for breakfast—melons, sour milk, grapes, bread, perhaps the dusty carcass of a chicken sold by wild-looking Turkomen or Uzbeks.
“Death to the Bourgeoisie.”
A propaganda train showing peasants and
workmen attacking “capitalists.”
At last the train, by now in an indescribably filthy state, reached Samarkand, only about twelve hours late. However blasé you may be, it is no good pretending that there is not something romantic about the sound of Samarkand; and I got out of the train in a state of pleasurable curiosity. The road had not been exactly golden, but here at any rate, I thought, was Samarkand. It turned out that I was mistaken, for the railway station is some five miles from the city. Night had fallen and it was very cold. I chartered a droshky and we set off clip-clopping through the dust under poplar trees that rustled in the chill night wind.
PETER FLEMING,
With the Guards to Mexico
In the Gulag Archipelago
1. Marie Avinov
In 1938 Marie Avinov, the wife of a former Russian landowner, was sent east in one of Stalin’s mass deportations.
Early one cold, snowbound December morning, I and some two hundred other women were packed into a few ill-smelling motor-vans known as “Black Ravens.” I could not tell which railway station we were driving to, since there was no opening in the walls of the van. Finally the doors opened on the Kazan station—the same station from which my family used to embark each spring for our beloved Kotchemirovo. I couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between then and now.
Rifle-carrying NKVD men lined us up on the slippery station platform. We certainly were a motley throng of deportees with only our gender in common: former noblewomen shifted their weight from foot to foot along with thieves, intellectuals, and prostitutes. More than half our number were wives, legitimate or otherwise, of Party members fallen victim to Stalin’s purges. This Communist “élite” stood apart, with a defiant air. We stood there for an hour or more until our legs felt weak and our knees wobbly. One woman fell. A guard gave her a hard blow with his rifle, and she shrieked. There came a gruff, reluctant reprimand: “Easy there! What’s the good of beating her?” I found myself coupled with an “ex-lady” in her seventies, who had been a noted musician and a friend of Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and other famous composers. She had been arrested the past July while strolling in a Moscow park, and hadn’t been allowed to return to her room to collect any belongings. Now she stood shivering in her thin shoes, with a ragged and bloodstained army coat wrapped around her once white summer dress. In her hands she clutched a tiny suitcase, that she had somehow obtained in prison. I offered to carry it for her.
“Oh, no, thank you,” she said in a nervous whisper, “it’s not at all heavy. All I have in it is an old ivory fan.” “A fan?” I repeated incredulously.
“Yes,” she added in the same hurried whisper, “yes, you see, I had it with me when they arrested me. It was such a hot day, that day was. Now it’s all I have left. I’d hate to lose it.”
For what seemed an eternity, we were kept waiting on that platform. Several more vanloads of prisoners arrived and were lined up behind us. Thieves and prostitutes quarrelled and swore; many others wept quietly. I felt sorry for the Communist “ex-ladies” who were trying to appear defiantly aloof. We others, at least, didn’t have to pretend this was all the fault of some official blunder.
We looked like a herd of ragged cattle about to be shipped to a somewhat less green pasture, and when the train finally crawled in, the analogy became even stronger. As we were driven into the railway carriages, I decided that we would have probably been more comfortable if we had been cattle. The carriages were all alike, each with a passage running its full length. On the one side was a row of tightly sealed, whitewashed windows, and on the other—where one finds the compartments in a sleeping car—a row of wire cages. In each cage, there were three tiers of wooden bunks, four bunks to a tier, with so little space between bunks that the occupant could never sit upright. The boards were hard, but it was blissful to be able to get off our feet and lie down.
In our car, the last three cage-compartments were occupied by male prisoners. We caught glimpses of them as an armed guard escorted us on our way to the washroom. We were forbidden to look around while passing the men’s area, and had to keep our eyes fixed on the floor ahead of us. The heart of every woman faltered as she went by: her own husband could possibly have been in there. One night, I thought I heard Nika’s voice when a man called out for water. The sound of blows followed. Then a scream: “You have no right! There’s nothing against the law in what I said!” From the sound of things, the beating went on. I shut my eyes and stuck my fingers into my ears. Was this the way Nika had lost his tooth? Soon afterwards, the guards dragged their victim through the corridor to the end of the car. Later still, we learned that he had been stripped and thrown naked into a small, unheated cell. At this news, one of the women in our cage began to sob aloud. The commander of the guards flattened his nose against the iron partition. “Do you want to join the gentleman?” he asked in an ominous voice. The woman fell silent.
This hellish journey lasted a fortnight. Our daily ration was some black bread and two cups of tepid water. I had not fully recovered from malaria, and in the stifling atmosphere, my thirst became a torture. From the corridor where our guards sat smoking, whiffs of tobacco intensified my craving for a cigarette. One evening I became slightly delirious and began to moan for a drink of water—an offence that called for the little cold cell.
Two young cage-companions of mine tried to comfort me as best they could. Both had been singers in the Moscow Grand Opera, before their husbands had been arrested and “disposed of.” Now the talent and energy of these lovely young artists were destined to be buried in a forced-labour camp for the next ten years.
I saw one of them creep to the wire partition. She called out in a soft voice.
“Comrade Chief! Oh, Comrade Chief! Would you care for a little music? We’re well-known singers, you know. We’ve been applauded by Comrade Stalin himself, and now we’d like to sing for you and your men.”
There fell a prolonged silence, during which a slow, collective smile crept over the faces of the guards and ended in a broad grin on their commander: “Well, perhaps, just one or two songs...” Putting their rifles aside eagerly, they all crowded in front of our cage.
Whatever their backgrounds and political shadings, Russians love music and have a soft spot for artists. That night, in the stifling heat of the rumbling train, under the ecstatic gaze of the NKVD, I heard a most amazing performance. First a cyrstal-clear, enticing soprano rose in the “Habanera” from Carmen. I had often heard that lovely melody, but never as I heard it that night. One of Rubinstein’s duets followed, then my favourite Schubert, Der Wanderer. Boisterous applause broke out from every cage-compartment. The Commander reeled around as if awakening from a dream.
“Stop it! Quiet! Shut up! And you, Comrades, back to your places!” The men dispersed. Lights were lowered. But presently a hand pushed a cup of water into our cage and a rough voice said, “Eh, you singers! Here’s your reward. Now keep quiet!”
As I lay in my bunk, shaking with thirst and emotion, that cup of cool, refreshing water was pressed into my hand.
&nbs
p; “Have a drink, my poor dear,” whispered a gentle voice. “We sang to get it for you.”
PAUL CHAVCHAVADZE,
Pilgrimage through Hell
2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Dismayed by the hopeless length of my sentence, stunned by my first acquaintance with the world of Gulag, I could never have believed at the beginning of my time there that my spirit would recover by degrees from its dejection: that as the years went, by, I should ascend, so gradually that I was hardly aware of it myself, to an invisible peak of the Archipelago, as though it were Mauna Loa on Hawaii, and from there gaze serenely over distant islands and even feel the lure of the treacherous shimmering sea between.
The middle part of my sentence I served on a golden isle, where prisoners were given enough to eat and drink and kept warm and clean. In return for all this not much was required of me: just twelve hours a day sitting at a desk and making myself agreeable to the bosses.
But clinging to these good things suddenly became distasteful. I was groping for some new way to make sense of prison life. Looking around me, I realized now how contemptible was the advice of the special-assignment prisoner from Krasnaya Presnya: “At all costs steer clear of general duties.” The price we were paying seemed disproportionately high.
A Book of Railway Journeys Page 17
