Shelikov’s luck never gave out as he sent out ship after ship. In the Three Saints he claimed Kodiak Island for Russia, in sight of the Alaskan mainland. From that toehold, a New World empire spread down the coast of the Pacific Northwest, or Russian America as it was coming to be known. The enterprise that he founded grew into the Russian-American Company. Its writ ran down the American coast.
Supply lines for Shelikov’s informal empire were always stretched to breaking point, and distant settlements sometimes starved. Alaska was at a minimum a summer’s sail away from the Russian harbors of Okhotsk or Petropavlovsk, with heavy odds of contrary winds and the certainty of scurvy. Those ports in turn were a grueling overland journey from Irkutsk, company headquarters. After Shelikov’s death, company forts spread down as far as Fortress Ross in present-day Sonoma County, California, but food was never grown in the abundance hoped for. Later visions of empire encompassed even Hawaii, which held out the allure of supplies: beef, pork, tobacco, and a profusion of tropical fruits. In 1817 Alexander Baranov, Shelikov’s successor, made a bid for the islands, building a short-lived fort on Kauai.
By the time of that quixotic sortie, the Russian-American Company’s fortunes were on the ebb, and Russia’s Pacific empire with them. The farther the Russians spread, the less they could call on the state’s backing—even as they were rubbing up against the powers of Spain, England, and the United States. The problems of feeding and defending the Pacific outposts led to their demise. And perhaps not even Shelikov imagined that the sea otters could be hunted so swiftly to extinction. Like the buffalo hunters of the American plains, the seaborne promyshlenniki were caught up in orgies of killing. Between 1786 and 1832, nearly 3.2 million fur seals were killed in the rookeries of the Pribilof Islands, or one every eight minutes. The slaughter and the putrid carcasses left behind led fur seals to shun the islands for years. As for sea otters, the basis of Russia’s expansion into the Pacific, in 1854 not a single pelt was shipped home.
For Irkutsk, this was the end of a period of fabulous wealth. Russia brought down the curtain on its overseas colonies with the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, for $7.2 million. Yet after expansionist ambitions had proved impossible to project across the Pacific, Russia was directing them toward a target nearer home: the Amur River and a huge chunk of land to the north and east of it had recently been seized from a prostrate China. Not only did Russia’s newly stolen territories seem of themselves to hold untold wealth, but unlike Russia’s existing ports on the Pacific, situated in the north and frozen for half the year, the Amur also seemed to hold the key to a waterborne trade with countless distant lands. Russian power could, the river’s boosters claimed, be projected from the Amur far more effectively than it ever was from the American colonies.
And so, in time, the Amur seemed to confirm a Pacific destiny for Russia after all. In that, too, Shelikov had been more prescient than most. Russia, he had told Catherine the Great’s Commission for Commerce, needed an ice-free base on the Pacific, accessible all year round. Was there not such an access at the end of the line of mountains that ran from Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk? The Amur’s mouth must presumably lie somewhere near there. Half a century on, when much of the geography still remained obscure, many Russians thought such a base must exist. The disappointment was to set in later.
• • •
While it lasted, money from the Sino-Russian trade showered down on Irkutsk and took outward form in exuberant building works and displays of religious and civic virtue. But from the first, there was something old-fashioned in the way Irkutsk expressed itself, as if the past were the only country.
Travelers’ accounts affirm a constant: that Irkutski have always invited strangers to be amazed at their city, and before the Church of Our Savior, formerly the cathedral, a flower seller asks me to admire this survivor from the earliest times, when Irkutsk was more fort than town. Once, in the square that rolled out in front of the cathedral, the decrees of the voevodas were proclaimed, and executions carried out. Irkutskis’ pride in their Church of Our Savior, with its solid forms and simple facades, borders on defiance—Colin Thubron calls the church a clumsy battleship sailing over parklands. Even when the foundations were being laid in 1706, at the height of the rule of Peter the Great, this Old Russian expression of a native, rustic spirit already looked dated. A century later, the town’s intelligentsia were printing vigorous defenses of the Church of Our Savior and a handful of other survivors. Anyone who did not see how these wonders embodied essential Irkutsk, as the buildings floated serenely above the wide sweep of the Angara, suffered from “profound delusions,” and more pity to them.
Czar Peter was seeking with a passion to carry the European Enlightenment to Russia. He was demolishing old Moscow in favor of new forms. When that did not work to his satisfaction, he moved the capital to his newly built European city of St. Petersburg. Irkutsk could not hold off Peter’s borrowed European styles forever. But in Irkutsk, people made of them what they pleased. When the Baroque carried over the Urals, Irkutsk residents adopted the style as a native son, above all when they built with all the passion and warmth of wood.
Local craftsmen embellished everything they could lay their hands on—window frames, of course, and doorjambs and lintels, but also soffit boards and fascias, cornices, pilasters, and pediments. With his flights of fancy, as Valentin Rasputin, Siberia’s great writer and a native of Irkutsk, puts it, a master builder, who knew full well how things were meant to be built, strayed instead toward what was pleasant for him. It spoke of an individualistic streak and a keen competitive spirit—true sibirski qualities, both. At first the fretwork was cut by eye out of the wood. Later, for more lucrative commissions, stencils were used. No building in Irkutsk, and therefore in Russia, has more riotous fretwork than the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Images and patterns are plundered from everywhere: the firebird of old Slavic legend, with its magical plumage and its promise of both hope and despair, and also patterns and motifs from Buddhist temples, presumably introduced by Buryat craftsmen. Rasputin, guardian of Irkutsk memory and conscience, writes that building rules laid down “in the centers of town planning, after covering thousands of versts to reach Irkutsk and catching a whiff of local air, nearly always slipped out of their regulation molds onto the sinful Siberian ground.” Only rarely does an Irkutsk building express itself in a single style.
Together, the craftsmen and the merchants who supported them made up three-quarters of the male population. Impressive forgework railings ring the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Irkutsk silversmiths fashioned shimmering icons. Smelters and casters were early famous for the pure resonances of their bells, and at times all of Irkutsk seemed to be alive with bells calling the faithful to prayer. In 1797 one master bell maker, Aleksey Unzhakov, who may have been a Buryat, cast the Big 761-Pood Bell (that is, 27,400 pounds). A century later, old men were still talking of the time the whole town hauled the bell to the Epiphany Cathedral. From one end of Siberia to the other, communities begged Irkutsk’s master craftsmen to put up their churches or cast their bells. In the 1970s a joint Soviet-American archeological expedition in Alaska came across a silver-mounted icon of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, done superbly in the Siberian Baroque style. It was made in old Irkutsk in 1794 and had been brought to the New World at the height of the trade in the furs of sea otters.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, European and American travelers passed through this part of the world in surprising numbers, many keen to find evidence of the government sloughing off a despotic past and using wealth to pour Russia into a modern mold. They were dazzled by Irkutsk’s civic virtues in a European town that lay, in effect, in Asia. In the center of Irkutsk, the exchange, public arcade, and covered bazaars formed the commercial heart and social heart, with assembly rooms for public balls and masquerades. Hospitals and asylums regularly astonished. Under Catherine the Great, Irkut
sk became a pioneer in smallpox vaccination, and not just the townsfolk but many surrounding Buryat and Tungus natives were among the world’s first people to be inoculated.
In Irkutsk, John Dundas Cochrane, a young English naval officer traveling by foot from London to Kamchatka—a feat that earned him the somewhat mocking nickname of the Pedestrian Traveler—was struck by the wide streets laid out, unusually for Russia, as a neat grid. Municipal workers, he marveled, scooped up the horse and dog shit. In the prison, he claimed to find the inmates well nourished and able even “to earn a considerable fortune” in the prison manufactory. The workhouse was “established upon a most laudable plan.”
Unusually also for Russia, the young in Irkutsk were being educated. The boys’ schools were run along the latest English lines, following Joseph Lancaster’s model of peer-group tutoring. Other schools were built for girls, apprentices, and prisoners’ children. Irkutsk’s first public library opened in 1782, with books sent by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Merchants contributed volumes. Today, their bequests fill the town’s libraries. Theater audiences were sufficiently discriminating for indifferent troupes touring Siberia to consider bypassing Irkutsk for fear of the drubbing they would get. In the 1780s Governor-General Ivan Jakobi established in Irkutsk a forty-piece orchestra, and when public concerts and balls fell off, private ones filled in. Maslenitsa, the pre-Lenten Carnival, was a time of masquerades and house-to-house calls in fancy dress.
In Siberia, no established nobility formed an upper class. Society was an eclectic mix of merchants from Moscow, Novgorod, and Kazan; Swedes; Germans; Polish exiles; the odd Frenchman; an elegant and much-feted Persian prince who was a hostage in Irkutsk as a surety of good behavior on the part of his elder brother ruling lands near the Black Sea; and at least one Englishman, Samuel Bentham, brother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He was later to run King George III’s dockyards; a man of parts, he designed the first cast-iron bridge across the River Thames, at Vauxhall. In Irkutsk were explorers and natural philosophers. The director of the bank had been a student of Linnaeus and was a welcome companion on visitors’ “philosophic walks” to the outskirts of town.
Yet even men of the sunniest dispositions were compelled to modify first impressions. After all, Ivan Borisovich Pestel, the Siberian governor-general whose genius for order and cleanliness had impressed Cochrane, was later removed for graft on a quite staggering scale. Corruption in the job, admittedly, was the rule. One governor-general, despite a fortune in gold and furs, would bully a few eggs off a citizen who had nothing better to offer. The first inspector-general sent from St. Petersburg to investigate official corruption himself extorted 150,000 rubles from the citizenry. In the early nineteenth century the wife of the Irkutsk governor, Madame Treskin, set up a commissary to sell the bribes she collected.
• • •
A number of decades later, a transformation in impressions was complete. The bad in Irkutsk and its environs was allowed to outweigh the good, or at the least, it was not done to take the place too seriously, however rich it was growing. For in the latter half of the nineteenth century a gold rush was recharging Irkutsk’s fortunes just as the sea otters gave out and when the glory days of the tea caravans were a memory.
Gold had first been found in the banks of the Lena River in 1843. Soon, the goldfields ran along the Lena and Amur rivers and their tributaries, and through Transbaikalia toward the Mongolian border. As with tea and furs before, Irkutsk threw itself across the flow of gold being dug out and rushed to market. By law, gold from all the mines of Eastern Siberia had to be deposited for testing at the government laboratory in Irkutsk, which opened in 1871. Over the course of thirty years, 600 million rubles’ worth of gold (over one million pounds in weight) was delivered to the laboratory—and that was said to be just half of the amount of gold actually dug out. One smuggling technique was employed by Chinese embalmers in Irkutsk preparing the bodies of deceased Chinese for the return to their hometown in China: they blew gold dust up the nostrils of the corpses.
Roughnecks flooded the town from other parts of Siberia, Europe, and Asia. With a killing a day, Irkutsk became Russia’s murder capital. Garroters lassoed victims up dark allies. At night, residents fired warning shots out of the window before retiring to bed. Anton Chekhov, in Irkutsk on a journey from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin Island, was out whoring one night with a couple of army officers. He heard someone shouting six times for help. “It was probably somebody being strangled.”
Gone were the comparisons with St. Petersburg. Wooden sidewalks and filthy streets spoke of civic neglect. Travelers found the furniture in their hotels old and battered, and that it was one thing to go to bed but quite another to sleep: Irkutsk became notorious for its bedbugs. Masked balls gave way to burlesques, with dancing girls and a black man from the Deep South singing a Russian version of “Old Folks at Home” (“Way down upon the Swanee River”). The same riotous society night after night of soldiers, administrators, and long-haired students arguing the rights of man soon palled. Society hostesses claimed they would die of ennui without their annual visits abroad—to Europe and, increasingly, to Japan, which, with the new railway to Vladivostok in 1890, was no longer far.
PART THREE
Chita
CHAPTER 6
51°02.7' N 115°37.7' E
Russian to Buryat: Why have you got such bandy legs?
Buryat to Russian: From Genghis’s time, when we sat on the Russians’ necks.
BURYAT JOKE, 1999
Heading in the direction of the sleepy voice on the PA system, I recrossed the Angara to the train station with a ticket to Chita, three hundred miles farther east. There, I wanted to know the story of the Buryats, a Mongol people who took up Tibetan Buddhism in these parts only to be upended by other forces scything in from outside, victims of empire and ideology. A Buddhist republic within the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation: how could this be? As a country name, Buryatia had to me always carried about it an air of unreality, as if chosen by Georges Remi for a Tintin adventure. The sense was reinforced as I read what I could about Buryatia, or Transbaikalia, as the region is also called. Through the pages emerged numbers of Buddhists and Western followers of esoteric religions who claimed Buryatia as the worldly site for Shambhala, the Buddhist pure land written about in the earliest Sanskrit texts. At the same time, in the first part of the twentieth century, such Buddhist myths came to assume looming importance in the minds of Japanese militarists and expansionists all too prone to bouts of wild mysticism. These Japanese came to see these borderlands, so distant from the Japanese archipelago, as the “cradle of Asia,” the locus for a pan-Asian brotherhood guided by Japanese paternalism. All this happened in the watershed of the upper Amur, and it became clearer to me that the story of Buryatia merged with the plumes and currents of the Amur’s wider tale. For now I wanted to find out whether a place so beaten about by bigger forces was today a distinct place, one where its people fashioned their own visions.
The railway line from Irkutsk, around the lower end of Lake Baikal, is as striking as any, a passage blasted through rock buttresses high up above the waters—a feat of engineering virtuosity, not to say bravery and coercion. It was accomplished in 1904, after all the rest of the Trans-Siberian Railway was built, and then because of the Russian need to rush matériel to the front in a war being fought—disastrously, as it happened—against the Japanese in Manchuria.
Chita station was nearly empty when I arrived in the late afternoon. So, too, was the wide main street in the early Soviet neoclassical taste. I went in search of a hotel. The Hotel Panama City promised to be the best of a limited choice. I signed in to a sparse room, cash demanded up front. There was no hot water. An attendant appeared with a galvanized bucket and what looked like the oversize element to a kettle, two or more feet long. “Russian service!” the attendant exclaimed, and retreated in a peal of laughter.
On the Ingoda River,
Chita is supposedly the highest navigable point in the Amur River system, from which Russians at one point launched themselves into East Asia. Today, though, not so much as a marsh-punt lies along the river’s empty banks. The river valley is ringed by forested hills that some nineteenth-century Russian settlers—political prisoners yearning for a free country—likened to Switzerland. The place was later strategic, for it was an important railway town, the railhead for an imperial project, the China Eastern Railway, as it veered off from the Trans-Siberian, across the river, and into brigand-infested Manchuria. The railway imported turmoil in both of Russia’s revolutions, in 1905 and 1917, and Chita railwaymen, fervent revolutionaries, brewed more of their own. For two years during Russia’s civil war, Chita was the capital of the Far Eastern Republic, a buffer state between the Soviet Union and imperial Japanese forces seeking to expand in the Far East. Today the facades of the main street appear outsized for the role Chita is now asked to assume, as a sleepy regional capital of Transbaikalia. Tucked well off the main street, in sight of one another, are a wooden mosque visited by a handful of Siberian Tatars, a wooden synagogue standing empty, and a wooden church now given over as a secular shrine to the Decembrist revolutionaries. They were exiled here in the 1820s, when their idealism seemed to offer an alternative to the stultifying rule of the czars. They still seem to offer that today, as the Russian government under Vladimir Putin grows ever more illiberal.
Black Dragon River Page 11
