Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  Yet early Cossack life on the Amur was a case of extreme deprivation. In his old age years later, one of the first Cossack soldiers to garrison the Amur recounted how his unit, exhausted from rowing downriver, now found their provisions spoiled in the summer heat. At first they tried to beg local natives for millet. Then, as winter set in, they went in search of a barge laden with flour that had gone aground near Albazino. Other soldiers they met trying to reach the barge were “half-dead, disfigured by the frost, blackened with smoke . . . so that one could not tell a close acquaintance.” The corpses of Cossacks who had died from starvation marked a grim trail. The hind-parts of some had been hacked off, and lots were being cast over who should die next.

  In time, communications grew more reliable and supplies more regular. Religious sectarians followed the Cossacks into the new lands—German Mennonites, Old Believers, Dukhobors, and their offshoot the Molokans, who shocked the church authorities by drinking milk during Lent. But the greatest numbers were simple peasants, often moving as whole communes from the crowded “mainland” of European Russia.

  The pace of peasant emigration began slowly—a mere 250 peasant families came to the Russian Far East in 1859–61—but built swiftly, given momentum by Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs. Until the early 1880s, peasant immigrants still hauled across Siberia and then floated down the Amur on rafts and barges with their belongings and livestock. Yet by now there were other possibilities. One St. Petersburg bureaucrat chose to travel to his new post in the Russian Far East by crossing by ship to New York, taking the railroad to San Francisco, and then shipping out from there to Vladivostok.

  Soon there was a viable sea route to the Russian Far East even for poor peasants. Anglo-Russian war scares had led St. Petersburg to commission a number of five-thousand-ton steamers from German yards for use as commerce raiders. When the scare died down, the vessels were pressed into service with the Volunteer Fleet, funded by public subscriptions. The fleet ran services from Odessa on the Black Sea to Vladivostok, via the newly opened Suez Canal. Between 1882 and 1907 nearly a quarter of a million peasants, most of them from the Ukraine, came to the Russian Far East, and for many the sea route was the easiest one, if hardly comfortable.

  From the very start, Russia’s acquisition of its Amur lands threw into focus the three overwhelming challenges for Siberia as a whole: how to organize its colonization, how to develop its economy, and how to see to its defense. The challenges had dogged Russia all century, and the solution to all of them, as clear as vodka to committed sibirskii, lay in solving the problem of communications. By mid-century, that meant the railroad. It was a paradox: the railroad soon came to overshadow a river that turned out to have more than its share of frustrations.

  • • •

  As well as the photogravures of early Amur settlement, I have with me a wonderful volume, printed on heavy sumptuous stock; it was worth hefting about with me for my whole Amur journey. The Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, published in 1900 by the Ministry of Ways and Communication, is at once a work of history, archeology, geography, and anthropology. It is a story of Russian settlement, an Amur compendium, a tourist guide, a railway timetable, and a steamer bible (for train travelers at that time still had to alight at Sretensk and travel on the Amur to Khabarovsk, where the railway resumed to Vladivostok). Full-color advertisements from the Chinese tea merchants at Kyakhta, all dragons and gilt edging, spoke of the exotic. Least necessary of the volume’s categories is the hagiography of the imperial dynasty. But the book’s black-and-white plates would make up for anything. The Guide is like a tour through a Museum of Mankind and captures an extraordinary moment. The growing Russian presence had not yet obliterated native life, and here are photographs of a Kyrgyz bride upon her embellished horse, Oroch astride their reindeer, shaman on the tundra, lamas in their datsan. Indeed, Russians were adapting local technologies, as a photograph of Russian emigrant children in front of a “movable school” attests: the school in question is a yurt. But, from the plates, there is no doubt that Russia is coming—has already arrived: upholstered views of a first-class saloon, all chintz and damask; and the church car—ornate baroque windows on the outside and in the dim, sanctified interior, an iconostasis, a lectern, and two candlesticks the height of a man. A book of wonder, and shot through it are heady claims about how the globe is shrinking. Thanks to the Trans-Siberian, the authors promise, London to Shanghai, via Moscow, will take a mere sixteen days. For 114 rubles, first-class—or a third that for “hard-seat” coach—the world is your oyster.

  By the late 1880s, huge numbers of Russians were, quite literally, praying for a railway. Foreign newspapers with an interest in “improving” Russia called for one, with British, American, German, and now Japanese steel and manufacturing interests lining up behind them. Yet in Russia the forces of inertia were powerful, the resistance active. A railway would lead to mass peasant emigration from crowded European Russia, bringing down the price of land. Imports of Siberian or Manchurian wheat would lower the price of grain. And so the big landed interests reinforced the conservatism of St. Petersburg’s state ministers and bureaucrats.

  What helped tip the balance in favor of a railway were not only brutal famines in the Ukraine and the stirrings of agrarian revolution but also a new force rising in the land—big industry. Compared with Britain, Germany, or even Japan, Russia had industrialized late. But now new Russian steelmakers and manufacturers were eager to supply the iron and the engines for a Siberian railway. A railway, they also knew, would bring in cheap wheat, keeping proletarian wages down. And the colonization of Siberia promised, wonderfully, to furnish not only raw materials for the nascent industrial revolution but also a ready market for its finished products.

  For all that, it took a single man, admittedly the czar himself, to set a Siberian railroad in motion. Alexander III came to the throne after revolutionaries assassinated his reforming father in 1881. That he would throw his support behind the railroad project was not self-evident. The autocrat had much of his grandfather’s want of imagination. He was, if possible, even more wedded to the rigid doctrine of Official Nationality than was Nicholas I. Wild risks were not to be taken. What feeble reforms his father had introduced were rolled back. The new czar had a strongly xenophobic cast. His anti-Semitism was virulent, serving as the informal blessing for the pogroms that tore through the Jewish settlements of southwestern Imperial Russia. He was bluff and barrel-chested, and apart from bellowing out the occasional operatic air, the czar’s chief hobby was unbending horseshoes and tying pokers in knots.

  Yet Alexander III had developed an interest in Siberia that was nearly absent in his father. He could see that a railway would ease population pressures in famine-hit European Russia, carry riches back from his eastern lands, and project Russian power into the Orient. The czar had also fallen under the spell of advisers who sang of a vital, expanding transpacific trade. He was persuaded of an English and even a Japanese threat to Russia’s eastern flank. He grew annoyed when foreigners mocked all the talk of an iron road across Siberia’s wastes as something out of the novels of Jules Verne. So when a Siberian governor-general, Nikolay Ignatiev, sent alarming if fictional reports to St. Petersburg of a resurgent China, its armed forces growing and its agents infiltrating Transbaikalia, Alexander’s patience snapped. “How many times have I read such reports,” he scratched into the margins of Ignatiev’s latest cable. “I must own with grief and shame that up to the present the Government has done scarcely anything to meet the needs of this rich but forsaken country. It is time, it is high time!”

  Now the fainéants were stirred into motion. Ministers ran around forming and filling the necessary commissions. Proposals grew. On March 29, 1891, came an imperial decree: the czar willed that a railway should be built from the Urals to the Pacific, at state expense. It was “destined to unite the Siberian lands, so rich in natural endowments, with the railway network of the interior [i.e., Europe
an Russia].” Alexander III then instructed the heir, his twenty-three-year-old son Nicholas, to lay the foundation stone, at Vladivostok.

  • • •

  At the time the czarevich, callow and narrow-shouldered, was on a foreign tour designed to give him a “thorough political education.” His “Eastern Journey” had begun in Trieste in late 1890, aboard an armored cruiser. He had called on royal cousins in Greece, passed through the Suez Canal, and stopped at Bombay and Ceylon (where perhaps he did not have the sunset sex on the beach with a dusky girl that Chekhov, on his way back to Russia by sea from Sakhalin, had boasted of a year earlier). The voyage continued to Singapore, Java, and Siam. Nicholas stopped in China, and by mid-April 1891 he had arrived, escorted by the Russian Pacific Fleet, in the empire of Japan.

  A double-bolted kingdom had opened to the world only three decades before, under the guns of Commodore Matthew Perry and what the Japanese called his “Black Ships.” Since then, Japan had embarked on a hothouse program of Westernization, industrialization, and military buildup. The Meiji emperor was keen that Nicholas’s visit should be a success, in hopes of allaying both countries’ mutual suspicions of military encroachment by the other. The visit began well. Nicholas was smitten by Japan’s exoticism. Out touring, on a whim he bought a cloisonné hairpin and presented it to a girl standing nearby. In Nagasaki he had asked about the city’s famous tattoo artists. The following day, in imitation of Pierre Loti, creator of the story on which Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was partly based, dragons curled in wreaths up the czarevich’s arms. But then, on April 29, came the unexpected. Nicholas was returning by rickshaw to Kyoto after a day trip to Lake Biwa, with a line of policemen on each side as escorts. Suddenly a policeman launched at the czarevich with his saber. The lunge left a four-inch gash in his forehead, and the second blow might have proved fatal had not Nicholas’s quick-witted cousin, Prince George of Greece, deflected it with his cane.

  The Emperor Meiji and his family and government were appalled, and some thought Russia might initiate hostilities. The emperor himself called on the crown prince as he recuperated onboard a Russian warship in Kobe harbor, despite statesmen’s warnings that he might be taken hostage. A young seamstress slit her throat in front of the Kyoto prefectural office as an act of national contrition. The nationalist would-be assassin, Tsuda Sanzo, was quickly tried, and one town in Yamagata prefecture ordered all hapless residents who happened to be called “Tsuda” or “Sanzo” to change their names. “What provoked him to his abominable deed?” the official account of the czarevich’s tour asked rhetorically. “Hatred of the Russians? That is excluded, for there is no such thing in Japan.” Less than fifteen years later, the two nations were at war, and racial hatred of the Japanese had been sanctioned by the seasoned prejudices of Nicholas II himself, by now a fervent advocate of the threat from the “yellow peril.” The war proved disastrous for Russia and ultimately, because it stirred revolution and unrest at home, the beginning of the end for Nicholas.

  For now, though, Nicholas cut short his state visit to Japan and arrived, pale and shaken, in Vladivostok. The port was a raw place then but fairly large, with fourteen thousand inhabitants and the usual muddy streets and open sewers of every pioneer settlement in the Russian Far East. Barracks and warehouses had sprung up along the Golden Horn. The substantial merchants’ houses were outnumbered by the mud-plastered huts of Chinese and Korean workers who made up a third of the town’s population in those days. Nicholas ran through a routine of civic duties. He presided over a ceremony for the start of the construction of a naval dry dock in his name. He did the same for a stone monument going up in honor of Admiral Nevelskoi, founder of Nikolaevsk near the mouth of the Amur and initiator of Russia’s great mid-nineteenth-century Amur adventure. And, on a breezy May 31, 1891, after an open-air service, the crown prince, standing in for his father, “the Most August Founder of the Great Siberian Railway,” took up a shovel, filled a wheelbarrow with unpromising soil, and emptied it on what was to be the embankment for the future Ussuri line. He then laid the cornerstone at the railway terminus.

  Later, someone propped an image of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker where the czarevich had officiated at the railway station. But soon the imperial party itself was gone, back to St. Petersburg on a route up the Amur waterway that took Nicholas to Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Nerchinsk, and Chita, and then home via Irkutsk. Everywhere in the Russian Far East ecstatic crowds greeted him. In Khabarovsk, on a bluff overlooking the river, Nicholas unveiled a statue to Muraviev, or rather Count Muraviev-Amursky (for his feats, Nikolay Muraviev had been ennobled and given the name of the river he had conquered). The chest of the latter-day Yermak puffed out, his chin jutted toward China, and a telescope was thrust into folded arms. In Blagoveshchensk and Nerchinsk, Nicholas passed under triumphal arches thrown up in his honor (I had gazed at the one in Nerchinsk, abandoned, its plaster dropping in great flakes, next to Butin Palace). Looking back from the middle of the twentieth century that lively chronicler of Russia, Yuri Semenov, described Nicholas’s Eastern Journey as a “mysterious hieroglyph” foreshadowing the fate of Russia’s last aristocratic ruler, one who remained obsessed with Siberia, and who in the end even died there.

  • • •

  Shortly after the ceremonies at Vladivostok, it was ruled back in St. Petersburg that for the purposes of building the transcontinental railroad, the route would be split up into six geographical sections, the most challenging being the easternmost three: the Circumbaikal from Irkutsk to the rugged territory at the southern end of Lake Baikal; the Transbaikal on to Sretensk; and the Amur from Sretensk to Khabarovsk, where the Ussuri line from Vladivostok would come up to meet it. The year 1903 was to be the date of completion—an extraordinarily compressed timetable for such a massive undertaking.

  The man whom Alexander III entrusted with the gargantuan task of building the Trans-Siberian Railway was a forty-two-year-old newcomer to St. Petersburg, Sergey Witte. He was born in the provincial Georgian capital of Tiflis, and was a railwayman through and through—author, no less, of Principles of Railway Tariffs for Cargo Transportation. He earned a name for himself during the Turkish war of 1877–78, to which, against the odds, he swiftly brought large numbers of troops and matériel. By the late 1880s Witte was the manager of a private railroad headquartered in Kiev. Often, he had managed the passage of the imperial train as the Romanovs traveled to and from their holiday grounds in the Crimea. The train would rush along its route, until it reached the sector controlled by Witte, who insisted it move more slowly, on grounds of safety. Alexander III himself had chastised Witte for this, and he blamed the Jews: “Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one, because it is a Jewish road.” Shortly after, on its way back from the Crimea to St. Petersburg, the imperial train, fifteen carriages long and hitched to two powerful locomotives—something Witte had warned against—charged over an embankment. A score of passengers were instantly killed. The imperial family was in the dining car. There, the bull-like czar held aloft the collapsed roof long enough to allow the family to escape. The church pronounced a miracle, divine intervention acting through the sovereign. But the czar now acknowledged Witte’s warnings. He plucked Witte out to oversee the construction of the Trans-Siberian. No man until Lenin was to set such a stamp on the country as this Lutheran of German-Baltic stock. By the following year, Witte was finance minister, a post he held for more than a decade, by which time he was the most powerful man in the empire, overshadowing even the czar, Nicholas II, for by then Alexander was dead. The blunt trauma he suffered during the train crash seems to have been at the root of the kidney failure that killed him a few years later.

  PART SIX

  Blagoveshchensk

  CHAPTER 14

  50°16.8' N 127°24.7' E

  The train from the west coursed for what seemed like days through wild, untrammeled meadows punctuated by bright lusty rivers coming down from the north. Early
one morning the sun streamed through the window, and on the PA system, a gravelly Russian chanteur sang, in a voice trained on Georgian tobacco and brandy, of disappointed love. It was the cue for shaven-headed men who had wandered aimlessly about the corridors in string vests now to stuff their bellies into shirts, climb into leather bomber jackets, and sit upright on their bunks.

  Outside, an expanse of marsh grass stretched away on both sides. To the east, a glinting ribbon drew closer, swelling into a major river: the Zeia, biggest left tributary of the Amur, coming down from the north, from the Stanovoy mountains—the way the first Cossacks came. Now the train was pulling through a slowly more peopled landscape: dachas, vegetable patches, piles of garbage thrown onto waste ground, an old couple in a precarious rubber boat crossing a stream. By the back door, we were entering Blagoveshchensk.

  A couple whom I had befriended were getting off too. Vasily was slight and tidy, in his fifties, with a blond mustache and a faraway look. Though polite, he threw a dismissive look toward the chocolates I offered him, a womanly indulgence. He was a professional soldier, an officer in the Border Guards near Blagoveshchensk. Whatever you do, said Marina, his wife, biting on a truffle, don’t ask him about his time in the Chechnya wars. “Only fool soldiers brag about what they got up to in Chechnya,” she went on. “Real soldiers never talk about it.” Vasily looked out of the window at nothing in particular.