Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  The capital and its representatives also attempted to bring order into another unruly market, the one for women. The conquerors sought sex as the chances arose and brute force afforded. But soon the gratification was overlaid with a more systematic element. The Cossacks began collecting women and girls as they collected pelts. The tribute was called yasyr. The system could not have operated without the entrepreneurial talents of certain natives, who sold women and girls to promyshlenniki. The chattel passed with casual cruelty among the woodsmen, lost and won during gambling sessions. Cannier promyshlenniki traded the women on to streltsy, the men in military service, in return for furs. The practice siphoned off the czar’s fur tribute, and so Moscow tried to outlaw the yasyr. But efforts to put an end to the trade in women proved futile.

  Much later, the treatment of Siberian natives improved. In the early eighteenth century the Yakutsk region, as well as Chukotka and the Kamchatka peninsula farther north and east, fell to distant Irkutsk to administer. That province’s governors had little enthusiasm for handling aboriginal affairs from afar and handed over to native chiefs the responsibility for taxing and policing their people.

  A profounder consequence came with the near-total extermination of fur-bearing populations across Siberia. The hunting-out of the animals necessarily drew a line under the first phase of Siberia’s “development,” and all the early paraphernalia of social control employed to extract the yasak lost their relevance. In the late 1700s Catherine the Great abolished the system of taking hostages and took steps toward abolishing the yasak itself. The tribute endured mainly in ceremonial forms, though it was left to the Soviets to scrap the yasak entirely.

  The Orthodox Church, too, came to have a softening effect. Well before the Empress Catherine, the church was already active in Siberia, taking the edge off some of the harshness the natives endured as priests directed their energies among the natives to collecting soul tribute. They built schools for natives and they spread charitable works about. By the thousands, they baptized Evenki, Tungus, and Yakuts and gave them Russian names. The profession of faith came easily to many native converts, not least because Christians were supposedly exempt from yasak.

  The metropolitan church was perpetually scandalized by Cossack adventurers striking up irregular liaisons with heathen native women, not to mention by the practice of yasyr. Baptism, on the other hand, removed all barriers. The church gave its blessing to Cossacks marrying native converts. At the same time, native men who were baptized could serve alongside Cossacks and streltsy in the divine mission of opening up Siberia for the czar. John Stephan, preeminent historian of the Russian Far East, argues that racial prejudice among the Russians in Siberia was largely absent, in contrast to West European colonial expansion. Differences with aborigines were expressed in social and cultural, rather than racial, terms. Natives were called inorodtsy (“people of different birth”) or inovertsy (“people of another belief”). Pyotr Golovin, voevoda of Yakutsk, was an equal-opportunity sadist. Though he used meat hooks on the natives, he as readily applied the knout, pliers, and hot coals to his own men, and their Russian wives. Killing and being killed: the violence that the Russians brought with them respected neither race nor rank. In the twenty years after 1677, the voevodas of Irkutsk, Nerchinsk, Albazino, and Yakutsk all were murdered by underlings. Most of the survivors, including Golovin, were hauled before the courts; their charge sheets were filled with sadism and murder as much as with the inevitable embezzlement.

  Meanwhile, though the rebellions were doomed, natives exerted influence in more subtle ways, slowly drawing Russians away from their old certainties and into new Siberian habits. In places, native cultures held their ground. On the Kamchatka peninsula, the offspring of Russian-Kamchadal unions may have been Orthodox in their religious belief. But they spoke Kamchadal, wore local clothing, and ate as Kamchadals had always done. In Yakutia, in the Lena Valley, Russian settlers also began to go native.

  PART TWO

  Irkutsk

  CHAPTER 5

  52°18.0' N 104°17.7' E

  I am heading for Irkutsk, because at times Russia’s history seems to pivot around this Siberian town, insignificant enough today, at the remote center of a continent. Irkutsk once grew rich and even cultured on the back of the Western world’s first China boom. Once, too, it directed an eastern push that launched Russian adventurer-traders into the Pacific, to found settlements in Alaska and California; from there even colonial adventures in Hawaii were hatched. Later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was in Irkutsk that reactionaries and reformists, archconservatives and radicals, conspired to grab from the Chinese empire lands along the Amur nearly equal in area to France and Germany together. Pacific destiny suddenly seemed to offer hopes for a national renewal that would surely consign Russia’s harsh, czarist orthodoxy to history.

  For all that, for seven hours now our train from Mongolia has tried and failed to break into Russia. I am sharing my compartment with Anya, a small, blond Russian, and her baby; and a middle-aged woman, a Mongolian trader, a mother duck fussing over a flotilla of underlings spread throughout the train smuggling Chinese-made handbags and jeans into Russia. Soon after the train scrunched to a halt at the twilit border, we handed over our passports. Silence since, and still we are waiting for passports and for the first, hopeful clanking of renewed motion. Timeworn jibes at Russian officialdom have long since given way to impatience, apathy, and finally a waking exhaustion.

  The journey properly began two or was it three days earlier, as I left Tokyo, my home, to fly via Seoul to Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia. Across the Sea of Japan by night, each squid boat in the ink-dark sea below us had been a point of pure light, whole fleets forming inverted constellations. Dawn had us high over Beijing. Picked out by horizontal shafts, a forest of skyscrapers threw long shadows across the suburbs, a sight as distinct from above as were the ramparts of the Great Wall running in a line across the crumpled range to the north.

  As a foreign correspondent, I had once lived in Beijing, leaving just as the high-rises started going up in preparation for Beijing’s Olympic Games, a coming-out party with which the Communist leaders, their grizzled hair dyed black, intended to mark a rebirth, China’s return to historical greatness. Making the city presentable was the excuse for a maelstrom of destruction. In a few short years, a medieval city that the great Ming emperor, Yongle, would have recognized as his own was leveled. For much of its life Peking was Asia’s ecumenical Rome. Today, of its 2,500 or so religious sites a mere few dozen temples remain, mainly for touristic consumption. The maelstrom has also torn at Beijing’s social fabric, cutting through rich threads of community habit, shared memory, and (what always infuriated the leaders) subversive resistance to the madder impulses of higher authority. There has been breathtaking cynicism. Even the Cultural Relics Bureau formed a property-development company to pull down buildings in its charge. Six centuries ago Yongle had used 200,000 convicts and a corvée of peasant labor for his capital projects. Today Beijing’s 7,000-odd giant construction sites employ a peasant army of 1.3 million. The work kills 2,000 or 3,000 migrant workers a year—a price worth paying for historical greatness, though no one is really counting.

  Beyond the mountains stretched the dun grasslands of Inner Mongolia, a province of China now fenced and settled since Communist victory in 1949 by 20 million Han Chinese, but in living memory a land crossed by vast herds of gazelles and knots of wild ass. Where the fences and roads end, there Mongolia proper (“Outer” Mongolia only if you are looking at it from a Chinese perspective) begins, and the plane banks north over the Gobi Desert. The desert, at least, looks as it ever did, not smooth and billowing as the mind conjures a picture-perfect desert to be, but gnarled and pockmarked with rifts and rocky excrescences, a checkerboard of mineral tones, verdigris and dull purple, salt lakes and cloud shadows. Just recently, a blink in geological time, the government has licensed the wandering hands of international mi
ning companies to roam over the Gobi’s virgin clefts and folds. Beneath are said to lie some of the world’s biggest unexploited deposits of copper, gold, coal, and much else that the industrial revolution now in full swing next door in China hungers for.

  A boom is already rolling over Ulan Bator. The city was once a religious city, a mobile, tented capital on the Tuul River that shifted pastures with the season and the whims of its rulers, powerful lamas. With Soviet vassalage came a huge coal-fired power station, a fraternal gift that pinned the floating capital to an immovable spot on the steppe. The plant is now in a state of advanced decrepitude, kept going by two or three Russians who remember how to keep its innards functioning. It generates light for the city at least some of the time, when it also casts a sooty pall over the tented suburbs, gers-settlements expanding fast up the road to the airport. In droves, herder families are giving up the pastoral life to move, with a few remaining animals, in search of city work. Mongolians, a mere 2.7 million of them, live across a country the size of France, Germany, and Spain combined, but more than three fifths of them live hugger-mugger here in Ulan Bator. Since I was last here, the road to the airport has lost its glorious sense of a lane on the way to nowhere until it passes under a crumbling triumphal arch by the landing strip. These days the road is lined with billboards hired by Korean and Japanese companies, manufacturers of gargantuan machinery for moving earth. Four-wheel-drive cars with tinted windows tear up and down, horns blaring at goats, cattle, horsemen riding into town, and ordinary folk crossing from their shantytowns to the bus stop. Our own jeep veers off onto the graveled steppe to work around a plastic tarp, weighted down with stones; two feet poke out, two shoes scattered down the slope.

  Downtown, change here too. Fading fast is the turn-of-the-last-century air, apparent on previous visits, of a Russian provincial city, all pink and ocher stucco and flourishes of neoclassicism. The opera house with its creaky stageboards, around which gentle life in the capital revolved, now hides behind a high-rise of steel and glass. Inside this, Mongolians on their day off ride up and down the country’s first and only escalator. Across the main square, the children’s theater has been turned into a stock exchange. On the north side, the State Khural, which during Communist days served as a dour charade of a parliament, has under democracy had bestowed on it a new bombastic facade, all gilt leaf and supersized columns, while in the center, on a squat marble throne, presides a truly enormous Genghis Khan.

  Thirty miles’ drive to the northeast of the capital, not far from the Tuul River, the great khan is to be found again. As you breast a rise of the empty steppe, there in front of you is a silver Genghis Khan astride a silver stallion, the warrior’s huge right hand resting on the pommel of a golden whip as he gazes toward the Khentii mountains in the extreme distance. The great khan and his mount have as their pedestal a round, colonnaded building with something of the Colosseum about it. Making sense of this unlikely spectacle, immobile on the heaving steppe, induces a whiff of seasickness. Think Jesus over Rio, or the granite presidential faces at Mount Rushmore, but here the whole sails through a rolling ocean that offers no obvious fix of visual scale. The statue is more than 130 feet high. You climb up a staircase through the horse’s hindquarters. You take an elevator up the neck of the animal, and you appear on a viewing platform between its ears. Far, far below, the only other structure in view is a curious length of fabricated wall, propped up from behind with metal struts. It is the remains of a film set, put up by the BBC when filming an epic about Genghis Khan. It was supposed to represent the Great Wall of China, and at its foot skirmishes were filmed. The thing looks pitifully small there by itself on the steppe. From my vantage point between its ears, our hero’s horse would have needed scarcely to lift its feet to breast that flimsy fence and move on a terrified China.

  When Mongolia was a Soviet vassal, Genghis Khan’s memory was taboo. The man was a “reactionary.” He thwarted Mongolia’s “productive energies.” But in a new Mongolia cast adrift on a sea of uncertainties, not least whether China will come to dominate the country and suck out its wealth, the great khan has become a talisman of virility.

  • • •

  At one o’clock in the morning comes the sudden stamping of feet above my head—Russian guards checking for heaven knows what on the roof. Anya curses them before pulling the blanket over her head. Then an armed soldier, a stocky young Buryat, pushes into the compartment and clambers over the bunks, soon leaving without having found what he was looking for. A health officer, an imperious bouffant blonde in a tight skirt, high-stacked heels, and a green canvas cape, fixes me with a stare, as if drilling down to all my concealed infirmities. Border officials follow. One asks a young Swede in our carriage to prove that his case does indeed contain the working violin the musician claims. The Swede takes it out and plays it. Where, asks the officer, is his license for it?

  At last, the officials are gone. It is the cue for the Mongolian mother duck to retrieve the handbags she has distributed about the train, and lead her brood out onto the platform, where they each remove several pairs of trousers and tops, sealing the merchandise into striped plastic bags with the squeal of packing tape running off the reel, bundling everything back onboard as the train takes its first jolting steps in Russia. I tumble into a deep, restorative sleep and am woken by shafts of sunlight playing about our compartment. Outside, a new world. Birch and pine have replaced the arid steppe. Scatterings of dachas sit in meadows, potato patches in bloom behind the picket fences. Goats sun themselves on old walls. And, dominating the scene, the glittering Selenge River, deep, powerful, and at ease with itself, flowing toward Lake Baikal, the biggest feeder of that prodigious lake. We stop once by the lake. (Four hundred miles long and the area of Belgium, it should more properly count as a sea.) Local women on the platform offer up hot oily bundles of smoked omul, Baikal’s landlocked salmon. Someone rustles up a bottle of vodka, and the train trundles on. Two hours later we pull up in Irkutsk, the station announcer sending sleepy news of departures wafting across the broad Angara River.

  Irkutsk surprised me. Farther east than Singapore, it was a European town that looked not only settled in an old-world kind of way but even handsome. Its buildings made it a whimsical town, as if the folk of Irkutsk once had money and were not shy about spending it on flourishes of decorative brick for their townhouse facades, or throwing up turrets when it took their fancy. Surprising numbers of wooden buildings also survived. The eaves of wooden cottages and townhouses fluttered with fretted lacework and gingerbread trim. But the town’s best days were squarely behind it. The wooden buildings lurched and heaved in the permafrost, setting off down the hillside or swallowed up to the level of their ground-floor windows. Yet all the while, they kept about them a sense of delight in things. And even when decay had eaten away at most of the delight, the buildings drowned in a sense of their own dignity.

  The city was once the administrative capital for the whole of eastern Siberia, stretching far away to the Kamchatka peninsula and even, for some decades of the nineteenth century, beyond to Russian-occupied Alaska. Booms have swept over Irkutsk: in the furs of sea otters, and in gold. But what first made the place was its trade with China. Irkutsk has the rare distinction, in the early eighteenth century, of catching the first China wave, and rode it supremely well.

  • • •

  It is striking to think how Russia’s first commercial relations with China predated that moment by hundreds of years. At the height of the Mongol empire, in the thirteenth century, Russian grand princes were required, as vassals, to visit Karakorum, the Mongols’ capital. They must have met Chinese there, and admired their wares. By then Chinese goods already filled the markets of the Golden Horde, along with stuffs from Persia and the Caucasus. For the Mongols, for all the devastation they had wrought, had also revived an East-West trade along the old Silk Road—a Pax Mongolica. By the early 1400s Russian merchants were established alongside Indians and Chinese in the C
entral Asian emporium of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan, whose tiled minarets and madrassas rose in jets of exhilarating blue from the dull-brown plains.

  In the second half of the seventeenth century, St. Petersburg took to organizing expeditions to Mongolia and China. Part traveling embassies, part trading caravans, the expeditions set off with mixed and sometimes unarticulated motives. As well as to establish diplomatic relations and to trade, another priority was to spy: secretly observing China’s resources and its military strength.

  In Peking, the hard-living Russians lodged in their own compound, the Eluose Guan, the Russian Hostel. They were neither scrupulous in their dealings nor nicely observant of Manchu court etiquette. The natural impulse of Chinese officialdom was to have as little as possible to do with the rowdy and impatient merchant-adventurers. Meanwhile, the whole thing was costing the Chinese, who paid to put up the Russian caravans for the months they were in Peking. The Chinese insisted on this, because it upheld the notion that the Russians were in the capital as guests rather than by rights.

  Frustrations grew, on both sides. A caravan was permitted in Peking only every three years, and even then no more than two hundred Russians were allowed to be attached to it. Merchants seeking greater freedom appealed to mandarins’ private greed when faced with bureaucratic obstruction, but it led to no greater certainty. Russians might be cooped up in Peking for months. A caravan trade that in principle benefited both sides in practice ran into the sands.