Journey Into the Mind's Eye

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by Lesley Blanch


  . . . a handful of human beings torn away from the world and bereft of the slightest shade of any hope for a better future, drowning in the cold black mud of the unpaved highway. Everything around them was hideous to the verge of horror: the never-ending mud, the leaden sky and the sodden willows that had shed their every leaf and the raven with its feathers all ruffled, perching among their starkly outflung branches. The wind would now mourn, now rage, then wail and roar . . .

  The prisoners’ journey was often protracted by climatic conditions. Sometimes, those proceeding to the extreme north were obliged to wait at Irkutsk until winter hardened the ground, which was otherwise an impassable bog. And only in summer could certain convoys reach their destination, travelling by barge, drifting slowly along the great rivers, crammed into their cages. Only on the ferry boats, used for a short crossing, were the prisoners uncaged; otherwise suicides, escapes, mutinies, and the sort of fight to the finish, such as that of Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and her rival would have been frequent.

  There were others, less wretched, who crossed the Urals as settlers, pioneers in a new land, but, the Traveller had said, they are neither dramatic nor sinister, you don’t find them interesting. Touché. I saw Siberia in other terms: though there was great drama in these bands of settlers who pitted themselves, puny, unprivileged and unprepared, against the violence of Siberian nature. Yet, as if that nature had come at last to love its conquerors, it was to yield unimaginable riches. The black Siberian earth bestowed sumptuous harvests: the mines revealed fathomless treasures.

  Tobolsk and Omsk had been two of the largest forwarding centres from where, under the Tzarist régime, convicts were sorted and dispatched to remote labour camps deeper into the Siberian wastes. Here they were often torn for ever from their families, some of whom had contrived to accompany them so far. Here, scenes of unimaginable grief and suffering were everyday life as the prisoners were marched off. In five pound iron leg fetters, their heads grotesquely half-shaven, some branded across the face, this grey phantom procession had stumbled across the Urals, fifteen miles a day, their diet a watery soup and black bread, and such small extras as they could obtain from the peasants on the way. There were four main categories of prisoners (many of whom were convicted without trial): Katorzhniki, hard-labour criminals; Poselentzi, penal convicts; Silni, banished persons; and Dobrovolni, women and children who went into voluntary exile and followed their men: but having got so far, were not always able to continue – sometimes their strength failed, or, by careless administration, they became separated and then for ever lost all trace of each other. Sometimes they had not been able to buy the goodwill of the guard and were deliberately herded into opposing columns, and began their march, north or east, a thousand miles farther, to the appalling Kara or Nertchinsk silver mines beyond Baïkal. In leg fetters, with boots that had rotted over the months, their wretched clothes hanging on them in clammy rags, these tragic columns marched, died by the way, or prayed for death.

  •

  As we moved farther east, I began to realize how much the loss of the Traveller’s note-book meant to me. Confronted with the actual towns and regions that had been only names, anecdotes or historical data brought to life by the Traveller’s handwriting and, I thought, graven in my mind, I now found everything fusing in a hallucinatory jumble. Was it at Omsk or Tomsk that the mysterious monk, Feodor Kouzmitch, in all probability none other than the Tzar Alexander I, expiated his sins – parricide among them – as a hermit, during the last years of his long life? Now I had to rely on my memory, for history or colourful details did not seem to be Olga Maximova’s strong point. Nor did she have anything to say when I told her that, while English children’s first notions of Siberia came from reading Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, it could be considered as a rather accurate description of the country and conditions at that time. Verne had obtained much data from his friend Elysée Reclus who, in turn, had received it from his fellow-idealist Kropotkin – and few were better fitted to describe Siberia than he.

  Sverdlovsk was on us before I remembered that, to the note-book, it was Ekaterinburg of dark memory. But the note-book had been kept before the Revolution cast its own light and shadow, transforming people and places, imposing new connotations, heroic or sinister. From the train window, Sverdlovsk seemed a thriving modern town slashed by a fine main boulevard. In vain I raked the cement sky-line for old roofs, searched for rising ground, crowned by the domes of an old church, which might have served as a landmark to locate the ‘House of Special Purpose’, the Ipatiev house where the Romanov family were shot down in the cellar. Had I left the train and gone to seek the setting of this holocaust, it would have been difficult to convince Olga Maximova that I did not go in a spirit of reverential mourning. The Tzar and Tzarina were wilfully blind rather than evil. But who has the right to be so blind? In the words of one historian, their reign (for they became an indivisible force of obstinacy) ‘went from one pogrom to another’, the culmination of Romanov misrule. Even so, the Tzar had long retained a mystical significance for his people: he was Tzar Batioushka, their Little Father – God’s anointed, for Holy Russia. But by 1905, the year of tentative revolution, such beliefs were beginning to be questioned.

  As the Romanovs stumbled into the train that was to take them to their Siberian prison, I wondered if the Tzar recalled that jewelled conceit that had been made for him by Fabergé’s craftsmen in 1900. The Great Siberian Easter Egg, as it was known, was the apotheosis of those exquisite extravagances for which Carl Fabergé was famous, and which the Imperial family in particular enjoyed exchanging among themselves and their friends to mark some event of significance, whether national or domestic. The Trans-Siberian Easter Egg was an especial treasure: it commemorated the train’s through run, Moscow to Vladivostok, and the route was engraved round its enamel circumference. Inside lay a tiny model of the train. Uncoiled, it measured about twelve inches; the carriages were made of gold, the engine in platinum with rubies for headlights. It was a perfect working model and could be wound up to chug along for several inches. We can imagine it snaking its way across a malachite tea-table at Tzarskoe-Selo, among the petits-fours and tea-cups, coming to a stop before a lace-edged napkin; as now, the ex-Emperor’s train crawled to a standstill at some wayside halt in the Urals and the Imperial suite – forty or more persons in all – drew down the blinds to avoid prying eyes. At that moment, the Tzar was still surrounded by a considerable suite, something that is now forgotten, overshadowed by the stark drama of their end, in Ekaterinburg. But at first, after the abdication, being dispatched in all honour, by Kerensky, to what he believed would be safety at Tobolsk, they travelled in some style.

  Two ladies in waiting (and their femmes de chambre), two equerries, or gentlemen in waiting (and their valets) did not seem unreasonable to the Provisional Government; nor did two doctors, two tutors for the Imperial children, a lady of mysterious function, described as Lectrice à la Cour and her two maids, a barber, a wine steward, the maître d’hôtel, five footmen, three chefs and their three aides, a number of femmes de chambre and valets de chambre, the valet de pied of the Grand Duchesses, and Nagorny, the sailor who was the puny little Tzarevitch’s devoted attendant. Fifty trunks crammed with household comforts followed the exodus of what was, after all, the last remnants of the Byzantine Court.

  It was rather in the terms of some Byzantine mosaic of splendour that the Romanovs were still seen by the majority of the peasants. The driving necessity behind the Revolution was slow in permeating the more remote villages: they too had their visions, but in terms of the old skazki or fairy tales. For them, the Tzar was still a legendary being, beyond merely human comprehension – perfectly expressed by a Siberian peasant, of whose words we have a transcript. Eudoxia Semenova had been commandeered by the local Soviet to scrub the floors at the ‘House of Special Purpose’ – the merchant Ipatiev’s house – on July 15th, and was therefore one of the last people to see the Imperial family alive.
Confronted by the trapped, tragic little group – for at Ekaterinburg the suite of fifty had by now been reduced to half a dozen – she describes her astonishment; for reality did not tally with fact. Her words, spoken later to the Court of Enquiry, speak for legions of simple country people at that time, to whom the Tzar was Gosoudar or, more warmly, their Little Father.

  ‘As God above is my witness, Sirs, I often used to dream of seeing our Little Father. And once, in a dream, I saw all our Gosoudars together in golden robes, surrounded by a golden light, with flowers falling all round them, I don’t know from where. There was music and flags, and the bells rang without stopping . . . Our own Gosoudar, Nicholai Alexandrovitch, was just as I had always known he would be – a giant – a fine-looking giant. The Tzarina was one of our real rosy Russian beauties. She walked like a Queen and her voice was like a flute in Paradise . . . The Nasliednik – the heir to the Throne, the hope and pride of our nation was a strong and happy cherubim, a blessed child. As for the Princesses, they were the most perfect beauties you ever saw. One was preparing herself, as God had ordained, to become wife to the King of England. The second, to marry the King of France, and the third, the King of Germany.’

  It was this innocent and radiant vision that most of the faraway peasants still cherished at that time. It was the townspeople and industrial workers who envisaged the Romanovs otherwise.

  •

  And in that waiting hour at that desolate wayside halt going towards some unknown destination, did the Tzar remember the many chances he had been given to understand his people’s needs? The crowds converging on the Winter Palace that winter Sunday in 1905 had come singing hymns, carrying ikons and banners, to speak with their Little Father; but his Cossacks had shot them down. When the Moscow-Kazan railway workers joined the strikers’ movement and ran supplies to the rebels it was General Orlov, a particularly close friend of the Imperial couple, who restored order by ruthless military force. Three hundred strikers were killed, seventy shot out of hand, and a station-master who did not – or could not – provide a requested train was hung.

  Meanwhile, the Trans-Siberian line was also in rebel hands, and only reduced to submission by equally violent measures. The strikers had been abetted by numbers of disillusioned soldiers returning from defeat in Japan. At last two special troop trains, each controlled by a General, set out simultaneously, from points East and West, stopping along the way to flog and execute the rebels. (‘Never forget – Russia loves the knout!’ wrote the Tzarina, ruthless but perceptive, in one of her admonitory letters to her husband.) By the time the two Generals met and, over a bottle of champagne, congratulated each other on the success of their joint expedition, the strikers’ moderate demands were heard no more. The strike had occasioned particularly severe casualties in Siberia since for a while chaos had prevailed, with unqualified men taking over the engines, so that fatal collisions were daily occurrences and order, at any price, seemed desirable to the passengers along the line. As no doubt it seemed to the self-engrossed Imperial couple in the fussed-up middle-class suite in which they lived aloof, at Tzarskoe-Selo. The Tzar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna represented a hated system and thus it was inevitable they should have perished with it.

  Everything about this dark Siberian drama is poignantly obsessive; it has the inevitability of a Greek tragedy; moreover, it is surrounded by a strange pattern of coincidence and prophecy. It was in the Ipatiev convent at Kostroma that the Romanov dynasty had begun and, three hundred years later, it was in the Ipatiev house at Ekaterinburg that it perished. In my end is my beginning. When the Imperial family had been taken under guard to their first Siberian imprisonment at Tobolsk, part of the journey was by boat, and as they followed the slow windings of the river, passing the little white houses of a village on the banks, Pokrovskoie, they must have recalled the words of Rasputin ‘the Siberiak’ their adored Staretz, or Holy one, ‘Our Friend’, who had foretold that one day, willing or unwilling, they would pass by his house. From St. Petersburg, the notion of visiting such a remote Siberian village must have seemed improbable. But it had come to pass, like so many of the Staretz’s pronouncements. They must, then, have remembered another of his prophecies; that when he died, their days would be numbered. Now Rasputin’s body lay in a little chapel the Tzarina had erected in the park at Tzarskoe-Selo and the Romanov family were going towards their own burial place, in a mine-shaft beyond Ekaterinburg.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  As the train loped on its way towards Tomsk I thought of another, earlier Romanov, the Tzar Alexander I who had found doushevny mir, the peace of the soul, in Siberia: or so it is believed. The Tzar’s end is surrounded in mystery and the belief that he did not die in 1824 at Taganrog but reappeared, ten years later, at Tomsk, as the holy man or Staretz Feodor Kouzmitch is still firmly established in the countryside; and elsewhere too, for it is one of those enigmatic episodes which break through the rigidity of fact, and are so shot with colour and threaded with conclusive details that they become obsessive.

  All that day I was recalling the strange story. Worthy and unworthy subjects alike obtain obsessive power by the mystery surrounding them. Was Naundorff the Dauphin? What really happened at Mayerling? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? Was there a Monster of Glamis? What of Anastasia? In Moscow I encountered a distinguished historian who seemed astonished at my interest in her. ‘But why do you foreigners puzzle so much over Anastasia? If one of them escaped . .? It’s of no consequence to us now.’ His tone was authoritative, his lack of interest unfeigned, unlike so many of his fellow countrymen who showed a lively interest in anything concerning the Romanovs, the Yussoupov-Rasputin drama, and other episodes over which a veil has been drawn. Was Yussoupov still alive? Truly? Living in Paris? How? And was it true the last Tzar’s sister had gone to America. . .? These were the coulisses of history; in the U.S.S.R. it seemed the limelight fell on more immediate issues or those far further away in time.

  •

  Below the roar of party leaders, relayed on the loud-speakers, a persistent humming sounded. One late lingering mosquito was travelling with us, and zoomed round hungrily. I remembered how the Traveller had described the particular fury of Siberian mosquitoes. They had caused fearful malarial epidemics among the workers constructing the line. In summer, he said, one saw linesmen and working parties all wearing gloves and heavily veiled straw hats, like elegant Edwardian lady motorists.

  We decided to move to the restaurant car while Mikhail, our attendant, dealt with the mosquito. He was partial to spraying all the compartments and corridors with particularly vigorous perfumes; but they had evidently not overcome our mosquito. Russians share the Asiatics love of scent, and manufacture many kinds. I asked Mikhail their names; some were flowery, Silver Lily, and Lilac; some were not, Red Moscow and Kremlin being, I thought, almost as oddly named as another, Pikovaya Dama – Queen of Spades – generally considered of ill-omen, as in Pushkin’s tale of that name. Mikhail let me sniff at his store of bottles, but Pikovaya Dama was not among them. It might have been just the thing to finish off our mosquito.

  •

  ‘Do you know what Siberia produces in one hour?’ asked the engineer, beaming across the dining-table. Fortunately I was not expected to reply. ‘Six hundred tons of steel, 500 tons of laminated iron, 700 tons of mineral iron, 21,000 metres of cotton material, 6,000 cubic metres of wood, 15 million kilowatts of . . .’

  His voice glowed with pride and Armenian brandy; I held out my glass for some more ‘insanity drops’, as the Buriat-Mongolians referred to alcohol. However impressive, I have always found statistics exhausting. But after another revivifying nip of ‘insanity drops’ I was able to marvel at descriptions of the new town of Akademgorodok – miracle concentration of scientists near the science-city of Novosibirsk; where Nuclear Physics, Cytology, Cybernetics, Solid State Physics and Geophysics are all household words. We were now joined by Olga who beamed, finding me at last responding to developments of which she
was justly proud. Trotsky had called Siberia the accentuation of Russia’s backwardness – one railroad cutting across a wasteland. But now? Now it is surely the essence of Russian progress.

  Akademgorodok was begun in 1957 and endowed as a privileged, first class community, in order to persuade a scientific intellectual élite to disperse from the overcrowded Russian cities and settle there, beyond the Urals. But there is no sense of exile. It lies in a beautiful countryside with skiing, hunting and swimming too, in the short but torrid Siberian summer. I was told that the opera-house is larger than Moscow’s Bolshoi (a city’s status, I noticed, is apt to be reckoned by the size of its opera-house), and all the best companies come there. There are cinemas, super-markets, amateur concert-groups and many clubs. The scientist society live in comfortable modern ‘kottedgi’ set among the birches. There is a special Wunderkind school for children from all the ethnic groups of the U.S.S.R. who show an outstanding scientific turn of mind, infant seismologists or mathematical prodigies from the Ukraine, junior physicists from Samarkand, and such.

  I thought of another, earlier intellectual élite: the Dekabrists. They too had formed schools – the first in Siberia, when at last their prison sentence was commuted to Siberian exile. The brilliant tuition of these lost men was such that, when some of their pupils were later admitted to the universities of Moscow or St. Petersburg, they far surpassed the other students. Thus were they avenged, for from the young intellectuals they had formed came the seeds of a stronger, better organized spirit of revolt, which at last swept the way clear for the new Russia I now saw around me.

 

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