Yervant might have grated had he not shown form soon after passing through the border checkpoint at Zhalinda, a run-down village with ragged children. From here the road to Albazino was ungraveled, a rutted track through bog and pine forest. Soon Yervant’s new tires were spinning, and the car was up to its axles in mud. “It doesn’t matter,” said Yervant. “Something will come along.” It seemed unlikely. We had passed nothing since Skovorodino save an old motorcycle and sidecar. Yervant was untroubled. Other drivers from the city would have cursed me for bringing them to this desolation, but sure enough, an hour later, an old truck plowed its way along the track toward us. Cheerfully, its driver pulled us out of our hole, and we lurched on to Albazino.
The forest began to open, and we knew we were nearing the ancient settlement. Soon we were driving through a land of abandoned meadows and fields, with the wilderness gnawing away at their edges. Finches, tits, and buntings moved in flocks through the country. Yervant was disgusted. “Just look at this!” He waved with both arms. “Good black soil just lying around, going to waste. This is pure gold! I tell you, in Armenia they would be using this damn land. They would be cultivating it. Gold, pure gold!”
But it was not Armenia. It was the Russian Far East, and I was moved by this spot: the encroaching wilderness and the izbas scattered about with their cheerful fretwork. One or two were homesteads with horses and hayricks, and children playing out front. But most of them were abandoned, sinking back into the land. And then to our right, much larger than when I had last seen it: the Amur, sinuous and insistent, curling toward the distant haze in the east.
Above the river you could easily make out the foundations of the old fort, a rectangular escarpment, chest high, except on the side where it led steeply down the bluff to the Amur itself. These banks enclosed a grassy area about the size of a football field. In the middle was a tiny wooden chapel, around which the Cossack defenders of the seventeenth-century Manchu sieges lie buried. I wandered around the perimeter, reaching into the banks and scooping away handfuls of the rich, crumbling soil in hopes of finding evidence of where two empires had once clashed. Manchurian oaks had sprung up on the escarpment, and a mewing pair of Amur falcons, their boots bright red, were nesting in one of them. The view from the Albazino fort can have changed little: among the willows far over on the Chinese side, a couple of fishermen sitting on the bank with poles; otherwise, nothing. A middle-aged border guard grumbled mildly at me as she passed: the only tourist in weeks, she said, had gone and set off her trip wire on the KSP. Over the river, clouds of mosquitoes. Fascists.
Behind the remains of the old fort were two log cabins. One was a museum, the other an old homestead. A local woman of legendary reputation had founded the museum. Agrippina Nikolaevska Doroskova had recently died, in her tenth decade. Her grandfather had in 1854 come down the river as a Cossack soldier on the barges of the first expedition of Nikolay Muraviev, the imperializing governor-general of Eastern Siberia. (With this, and a subsequent expedition, Muraviev grabbed the Amur lands from China without firing a shot in anger.) The grandfather had settled in Albazino, and Agrippina had been brought up in good Cossack ways. A primary-school teacher by training, she had devoted her life to giving Albazinians a sense of their Cossack past—and instilling in them a sense of Cossack destiny. Things were by no means easy. Under the Soviets, Cossacks were a suspect class. They were independent-minded and their communities were democratic. Worse, their loyalty had always been with the czars, and had formed an important element of the White Russians during the civil war. After the White defeat, the Soviets instituted a program of “Decossackization,” in which Cossack hosts were disbanded, lands were seized and redistributed, and many Cossacks massacred. The survivors were forbidden to serve in the Red Army—no border-guard duties for them anymore. Cossacks suffered again during Stalin’s Great Purge in 1936–38.
In front of the museum a tall, rather chubby man in his thirties or early forties stood with tousled hair and a thick golden mustache. Alexandrei, Agrippina Nikolaevska’s grandson, now ran the museum. We walked together along the embankment. Alexandrei began to tell me of his grandmother. One day in the mid-1930s, just here—Alexandrei pointed at the Manchurian oaks—Agrippina had been planting trees with her pupils. Digging the holes, they had found musket balls, and then cannon shot. The deeper they dug, the more came up—the first exhibits for the Albazino museum on which she had set her heart.
Inside, the izba was crammed with rusted pikes, cannonballs, old muskets from the Manchu attacks, and also barley and rye grains blackened by the siege fires. Wooden shovels, too, for iron at that time was scarce, and used only for weapons. Only a fraction of the site had been excavated, and the fort foundations have yet to be inspected. But there were also potsherds, and arrow tips of flint and iron, a reminder, as Alexandrei put it, that the “Russians lived on top of the Daurians.” Of course, after the Daurians gave the place up to the Russians, so the Russians gave it up to the Manchus—until the 1850s. At this point the historical record in the Albazino museum resumed. There were the usual cavalry swords and disembodied uniforms—green chekman tunics, yellow-striped breeches, and wild high hats of curled fleece. But there was the homely stuff: a clothes mangle, hoes, and plows. A seven-pronged trident, too, for Amur fish, and fishhooks the length of a hand. A late-nineteenth-century photogravure gave a poignant sense of what it was to emigrate to Amuria: it was of a huge raft, a floating farmstead of peasant families and their chattels and their oxen all drifting down the Amur to new lands.
A recent photograph, taken in color, showed a dozen visitors to Albazino standing in front of the chapel. The women all wore the headscarves of the Orthodox Church. The men had hands clasped in front of them. Who, I asked Alexandrei, were they? “The Peking Albazinians,” he replied. They were, he explained, the descendants of Cossack defenders at Albazino defeated 320 years before and invited to enroll in the Manchu forces returning to Peking to serve the Kangxi emperor.
The pilgrims had come in 2005, Alexandrei said, and could not hold back their tears when told of the fortress’s defense. A Panikhida memorial service was performed in the chapel. The priest gave each pilgrim a copy of the Albazino Madonna, and the pilgrims pinned photographs of loved ones on the chapel door. Then lunch was served at the old izba next to the museum. Good Russian fare was laid out—pancakes and sour cream, borscht, boiled potatoes—and the “Our Father” recited. The photograph I was looking at was taken afterward, after the “We give thanks to Thee, Christ our God,” before the pilgrims bumped back to Skovorodino. And the extraordinary thing, though I should not have been surprised, was that all the pilgrims looked, indeed they were, entirely Chinese.
It was Agrippina’s aim in life, Alexandrei said, to bring the old Albazino back to life: not just the flourishing Cossack farm community of the late nineteenth century, but the spirit of the first settlers following Khabarov into these wilds in the 1650s. With tenacious memory, Agrippina ferreted out every historical detail and refused to let them go. From his grandmother, Alexandrei had tried to learn what he could. But to me an alchemy seemed to be working on the facts. For the earliest Cossacks, agents of destruction, were now the peace bringers to Amuria. Had they not brought corn in their knapsacks for sowing but were met by belligerent Daurians from across the river? Had they not needed so often to lay down their plows and harrows in order to take up arms? And, two centuries after the Treaty of Nerchinsk had cast out the Cossacks from Albazino, had not Nikolay Muraviev rightly reclaimed what was Russia’s and given Albazino its second birth?
All down the Amur after his bloodless, barge-driven conquest, Muraviev sent Cossacks to settle and defend Russia’s new borders. He created a new Cossack host, the Amur Cossacks, headquartered at Blagoveshchensk. You did not have to be a “born” Cossack to join; Buryats from Transbaikalia also signed up. The host was headed by an elected ataman, a chief, and in every Cossack settlement established along the river, a village at
aman was elected there too. One hundred and twenty settlements sprang up. The fifty thousand Cossacks in them were given generous tracts of land: six million desyatinas in all, the equivalent of half a square mile per Cossack. In gratitude, and as a sign of toughness, one Amur Cossack rode to St. Petersburg on a white horse, a strong local breed, and presented it to the czar. The horse lived in the czar’s stables until its death, whereupon its monument was made. In the museum is a photograph of the rider, Perschkov, his Cossack hat at a wildly jaunty angle.
An end was put to all this in 1920, with the Red Terror. Then, the following decade, came Stalin’s Great Purge. For Albazino, these were dark years. Soon after Agrippina planted the oaks, Cossack homesteads began to get calls in the dark of night, and the men of the house were not there in the morning. Between 1936 and 1938, more than sixty Cossacks were taken from the village. No one in Albazino was free from suspicion of having betrayed the motherland, for by now, just on the other side of the river, were the Japanese, who had recently overrun Manchuria and had set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. Stalin’s men whipped up a paranoia about fascist-imperialist infiltration and local betrayal. Of all those Cossacks from Albazino visited by the Cheka, only five returned. Nothing, said Alexandrei, was heard of the rest.
As peace returned after the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War—Albazino never recovered. Over the decades, Russia’s central planners saw no point in the place. Having once insisted that family farms be abandoned in favor of collectives, they now closed Albazino’s agricultural collective and shuffled villagers elsewhere. Three out of four Albazinians left at this time. But not Agrippina, except to travel to Moscow once in order to lay the village’s case before nothing less than the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Perestroika came in time: people married, returned to Albazino, and settled down, plowing up the fallow land and making something of the place again. It was said of that time that good Albazino potatoes, cabbages, butter, and beef fed the whole of Skovorodino district. And sometimes, when the Albazinians worked the ground, they brought up cannon shot or musket balls or the old wooden shovels of their forefathers. Then they would carry them to Agrippina in her museum.
• • •
I asked Alexandrei whether he considered himself to be a Cossack. His shoulders moved back, and he was no longer stooping. “Certainly,” he replied. I asked him what it meant to be one. Three things, said Alexandrei: religion first, the Orthodox Church; then love of the motherland; last, a martial spirit, a readiness to go to war to defend the frontiers. The first two were states of mind, I remarked, but it seemed rather futile to aspire to the third condition: not only was the Russian frontier at peace, it was also manned by the Border Guard Service, which did not recruit locally.
“It is only a question of time,” Alexandrei asserted matter-of-factly, “before Cossacks take over the defense of the border again. We Cossacks are rising again in the Russian Far East.” Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for the first time since 1920, Cossack hosts were allowed to re-form. Cossack soldiers had proved their worth in the nasty armed conflicts that arose after the Soviet Union splintered, in Abkhazia, Georgia, and Chechnya. More recently, Vladimir Putin had thought to promote the notion of Cossacks as quintessential Russian patriots. A bill had passed the Duma giving Cossack units a security role in some parts of the country combating terrorism and maintaining order.
So Cossacks, said Alexandrei, were now back in the saddle. He himself was the village ataman. He and others were in the process of forming a political party promoting Cossack rights—including the right to guard the border. An Albazino Peasant Farming Collective had been created into which the village lands had been incorporated. A five-year program had been agreed upon that would restore communal Cossack farming, though I had seen no tended fields. “We’re planting wheat soon,” said Alexandrei. “In the autumn we’ll cut the hay for the cattle, and in the winter we’ll have all the dairy produce we need. We Cossacks will feed ourselves soon. And we have more ideas. We will rebuild the fortress in its entirety: stockade, embrasures, the lot. Look, I will show you the foundation stone we have just laid. We will build a guesthouse, too, for visitors, and all Albazinians who have left will return.”
• • •
It seemed to me that Alexandrei was dreaming (though what a place to dream). Yet on the train out of Skovorodino the following evening, I found that he was not the only one. I struck up an acquaintance with Viktor, a short, middle-aged man with quiet, impeccable manners and a full, drooping Cossack mustache. He invited me to take vodka with him in the dining car. On the Trans-Siberian Railway, invitations to vodka are wonderfully common. Less wonderfully, they are sometimes extended by men who are already drunk, and the friendliness of the brawny arm around your shoulder is one small remove from a latent violence that a refusal to drink would bring about. After a period of drinking together (my shots artfully spilled on the greasy tablecloth), such men might collapse into catalepsy, or disappear never to return. Viktor was different. We sat down to clean white linen. We sipped the vodka rather than downed shots. And Viktor ordered us a complete meal of pickles and salami, ukha fish soup, and beef stroganoff, which we ate slowly and with relish, with napkins on our laps.
Viktor was on his way to the other side of Blagoveshchensk, to a village where a working museum dedicated entirely to the Amur Cossacks—a first—was to be inaugurated. In the softest, most polite manner, Viktor was a chauvinist among proud Cossacks, which might be saying something. The whole past had been molded and recast into fantastic shapes to give it Cossack purpose. Viktor himself had grown up on the Zeia, the mighty left tributary that flows into the Amur below Blagoveshchensk. He had been raised, he said, in a Cossack village, in an izba three hundred years old. On the table, the tips of two of Viktor’s fingers were missing. Rural children of his generation in the Russian Far East often appeared to have lost fingers to frostbite while out playing: they didn’t notice the cold creeping up.
But how could the izba be so old? I asked. Only in the 1850s had Muraviev’s first Cossacks appeared and put down roots. “Russian Cossacks may have been registered as living here for just one hundred and fifty years,” Viktor said softly. “But they have been living here for much, much longer. They came here even before the local tribes. The Nanais, for instance: the Nanais came much later.”
So what about Yermak? I said. Was he not the first Cossack in Siberia? Viktor tutted a no. “Far Eastern Cossacks, the real Cossacks, came much earlier. We are remnants of the Golden Horde. You see, we’re related to Genghis Khan. Now Genghis, he wasn’t Mongolian. No, he was a typical Russian, a Slav from Yugoslavia in fact. Mongolia was just his base. From his base he spread out east and west. When Genghis Khan wanted to conquer Japan, guess who built his ships? Us Cossacks!”
My head swam, though not from the vodka. When I steered Viktor toward the century just past, I hoped to find surer ground. I asked about the Cossack river settlements and their relations with Chinese on the other side.
Viktor began talking about growing up by the Amur, with Chinese settlements opposite. It was all, he said, rather friendly. Each autumn, villagers would row to an island that lay in the middle of the stream to pick berries; and the Chinese would come to gather firewood. It was always the same: if four Russian women and a young man, say, paddled over, exactly the same number of Chinese would appear from the other bank. There was smuggling, too, of course. The Chinese would bring spirit liquor, which Russians would take in exchange for sheep, and occasionally grains of gold.
“It was always the same, friendly like that. But when we had a chance to shoot each other, it was almost like a law. My grandmother used to tell me about one day when she was a girl. They were riding in their winter sleigh down the Amur, where it was very broad. My great-grandfather saw something move by the bank, and reaching for his rifle he fired two quick shots. When they passed, two dead Chinese lay among the bushes. ‘What have you done?�
�� my grandmother cried. My grandfather just answered: ‘You never can tell. You never can tell what’s on their minds.’”
Viktor’s Cossack family had suffered as much as any under Stalin—his grandfather was taken away in 1937, stood before a three-man tribunal in a nearby village, and was taken out the back and shot. Did he believe a Cossack revival was now possible?
“The Cossack spirit is on the rise, that’s sure,” said Viktor. He looked down at his plate and then up at me. “But almost all the Cossacks—the real Cossacks—they’re gone. Or they’re too old to pass things down. The old Amur Cossacks, their whole existence was as border guards. If they don’t hand the border back to us, we’re done for. Cossacks can survive only if they’re in the service of someone. Otherwise, they’re not warriors. They’re just builders. Or plumbers.”
CHAPTER 12
53°22.8' N 124°04.9' E
We carried on by train from Skovorodino, in a broad sweep south and east that followed the Amur River a few dozen miles to the south. The engineers of the Trans-Siberian Railway could not lay the track any closer on account of the marshland and rugged hills that hugged the river along this stretch. This was empty country, and haunting. Russian stations were few, and settlements seemed precarious. But now the railway had occasional company, a brand-new main road, recently opened. The Amur Highway’s asphalt had replaced a mud track notorious for swallowing vehicles whole during the spring thaw. On the new road, trucks were few, cars even fewer. But the road was, above all, a political project, made in Moscow. The Russian Far East had for too long hung off the edge of the realm. The new road, in symbolic more than practical terms, was intended to winch it back in.
I spent hours gazing out at the bright rivers and lush meadows. How little different it can have looked when this was China’s Outer Tartary. I also spent hours thinking about the pivotal moments in the story of the Amur, the fur-driven impulse that first brought the Russians to this place, the Manchu repulse that pushed them away, and finally the nineteenth-century nationalist urgings that brought them back. It was like a ball ricocheting over historical time, absorbing fresh energies (including, later, manufactured grievances) at critical points.
Black Dragon River Page 23
