Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  Tamadar means “Master of the Table” and the word is of Georgian origin. If the tamadar notes a tendency toward break-away conversations, or a lull in the gaiety, he immediately calls on someone to propose a toast. Russian toasts are not mere sterile formalities; they are vital ingredients in social intercourse; ornate, involved, witty, and usually of considerable length.

  Theoretically there are two kinds of toasts. If it is not a serious one, the proposer may elect to sip at his raised glass, and the others may follow suit. However, if it is a serious one, the proposer drains his glass, and so do the guests. Serious toasts include those to women, peace, friendship, absent friends, love, present guests, motherland, national heroes, and practically everything else you can name. I never actually encountered an un-serious toast.

  All glasses must be filled to the brim when a toast is proposed – not with wine (wine toasts are considered effete) but with cognac, vodka, or, if you are in the far north, pure grain alcohol. A good tamadar will accept no excuses for a guest’s failure to drink up, unless the guest has already slumped out of his chair and disappeared beneath the table. This seldom happens to Russians but, I am ashamed to relate, it happens quite frequently to visitors from other lands, at least during the period of their initiation.

  Between toasts one drinks champagne or any of the several excellent Georgian wines. These serve, instead of water, as chasers for the most robust liquors. By the exercise of superlative cunning it is sometimes possible to acquire a bottle of mineral water which, since it is colourless, can be surreptitiously substituted for vodka, thus enabling a neophyte like myself to remain moderately compis mentis.

  Our initial gathering at the Writers Union was not a full-fledged party. We were too full of curiosity about one another to consume more than a token number of bottles. Again I was amazed at the degree of interest in things Canadian and at how well informed these people were about North America. Most of them had read translations of such diverse writers as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Jack London, Steinbeck, Stephen Leacock and (I blush to include myself in such company) even Mowat.

  Yura introduced me to the crippled Russian, who was a writer of nature books.

  “You see?” Yura said wickedly, “no race prejudicial in Yakutia! Even they let white men in Writers Union!”

  This sally was greeted with laughter but it made me feel uncomfortable, perhaps because I could not imagine a situation even remotely comparable existing in North America.

  Claire asked a question about the publication of Yakut children’s books in which she, as an illustrator, was particularly interested. This led to a general discussion of local publishing and to another deluge of statistics.

  The Yakut Writers Union has fifty-two full members (those who have proved their professional competence through their published work) and thirty-four associate members. The Union publishes a monthly literary magazine, Polar Star, with a press run of 5,000 copies in Russian and 25,000 in the Yakut language. The Yakut State Publishing House publishes an average of 160 titles a year for a total run of about one million copies – all in Yakut. The majority of these books are translations from Russian and other foreign languages, but from thirty to fifty titles a year are original works by Yakut authors. It is a two-way street. Altogether about eighty books (poetry, fiction, nonfiction and plays) by Yakut writers have been translated into Russian Figures for works in the Evenk language are comparable though quantitatively much smaller. Even the four-hundred-strong remnant of the Yukagir people can point to several hundred titles printed in their own tongue.

  These figures have to be singularly impressive if they are to be credited at all. Although I had no opportunity to examine the records of the publishing concerns, I did visit most of the ten well-stocked book stores in Yakutsk, and their contents, and the crowds of Yakut of all ages waiting to buy books, gave me no reason to doubt what I had been told.

  On my first meeting with the native authors there was little discussion of the subject matter of their work, nor did I bring up the question of how much freedom they had to write what they wanted to write. However, during succeeding visits to Yakutsk, and some long and intense conversations, I heard quite a lot about both subjects.

  The prime motive of the Yakut writers has been the urge to sustain, revivify and glorify their native cultures. Yakut poets have produced long, epic verses devoted to legendary Yakut heroes. Novelists write with unabashed chauvinism about the strength, courage and pride which characterized the taiga and tundra dwellers both before and after the coming of Soviet Power. Men like Nikolai Yakutsky write ecstatic works of non-fiction extolling the beauties, the riches and the potential of the Yakut Republic. It all adds up to an outpouring of the strongest sort of nationalistic feeling. It is certainly not anti-Russian; but it is unabashedly pro-Yakut.

  There is often an interlarding of stock phrases of praise of the Communist system, but these are such obvious interjections that nobody but a Westerner diligently seeking proof of the existence of an all-powerful propaganda mill would take them very seriously. There are also the usual political books and articles which are pure propaganda and which sit in sad and lonely stacks in every bookstore and seldom seem to find a buyer. One role of such publications in Soviet society was described to me by a truck driver.

  “Sleeping pills are hard to get, so if we can’t sleep we ‘hit ourselves over the head’ with a bottle of vodka. If there isn’t any vodka, well, for twenty kopeks you can buy a book about the glories of the last Five Year Plan. Nobody needs to stay awake if he doesn’t want to.”

  On the question of the writer’s freedom to say what he thinks, there was some ambivalence. The older writers gave no indication that they were bothered by a feeling of restraint.

  “If we wanted to criticize the system in such a way as to make difficulties for it or to sabotage what it is doing, we would not be published. When mistakes are made, we do criticize just like everyone else has a right to do; but we see it as our task to support what Communism is doing … because of what it has done and continues to do for us.”

  The younger writers appear to be less affected by this sense of gratitude, as this comment by one of them suggests:

  “Publishers and editors are usually old men. Some were Stalinists. Most of them don’t like to see things change too fast. Many of our older writers agree with this, but we don’t feel the same way. We have a lot to be proud of in our past but we cannot live entirely in the past. It is time we began to think hard and write hard about what is happening to us now and consider the alternatives the future has in store. You don’t get perfection in the future if you believe things are nearly perfect in the present. Consequently a lot of what we younger people write these days is written ‘for the basket’ [he meant the wastepaper basket], but it won’t always be so. This is one thing we are quite sure about.”

  Eight

  THE ANNIVERSARY of the Great October Revolution comes on November 7, by the new-style calendar, and during the first days of November, 1966, the people of Yakutsk were busy painting their city red. Flame-coloured cloth hangings bearing portraits of a benign Lenin, a stern Marx, or a fatherly Gorki appeared on the front of almost every building. These ranged from handkerchief-size through bedsheet size to an enormous portrait of Lenin hanging four storeys deep on the face of the town’s largest apartment block. Crimson pennants, banners and flags sprouted from rooftops and from every lamp post. Billboards and hoardings displayed garish pictures of workers and farmers marching triumphantly across red fields toward a newer dawn, and crimson bunting clung like Spanish moss to the upthrust skeletons of cranes and derricks.

  Yakutsk was transformed and, if it did not become a thing of beauty, it was at least ablaze with colour, and vigorous with motion. It was overflowing with human beings. For several days Polar Aviation’s aircraft had been flooding the town with people coming home for this, the greatest holiday in the Soviet year, and with men and women from the far-flung mining centres, industrial developments and
electric power projects scattered throughout the north. These latter were mainly immigrants to Yakutia from distant parts of the Soviet Union who either had no homes to go to or who could not spare the time to travel to them.

  The Lena Hotel became so crowded that scores of visitors (mostly male, young, bearded, and loaded for bear) had to be content with mattresses and couches packed cheek by jowl in the lobbies and the halls. The hotel restaurant was crowded all day long and far into each night. Although the temperature plunged to 20° and 30° below zero in the small hours before dawn, this had no perceptible effect upon the groups of revellers who sang their way around the frozen streets until the restaurants and cafés again opened for a new day’s business.

  When we went down for breakfast (a table was thoughtfully reserved for us, otherwise we might have starved to death), we would find the restaurant already filled with slightly bleary-looking Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, even Lithuanians, restoring themselves with a magic elixir of champagne and cognac mixed half-and-half in eight-ounce glasses, and knocked back with one convulsive gulp.

  Yakutsk was becoming a distinctly boisterous place, but it was notable that although the Yakut intermingled with the newcomers in the restaurants and cafés and seemed to drink as much as anyone, they showed no evidence of carrying a load. When I sought an explanation from Moisie, he only shrugged, smiled, and muttered something about white men not being able to hold their liquor.

  Another notable thing was that no matter how stoned the merry-makers became, they never seemed to get ugly. On the contrary they became terribly sentimental and full of boundless love for everyone, particularly for pretty women, of whom they counted Claire as one. Happily their expressions of affection stayed within reasonable bounds and I never had to take up arms on her behalf. This was lucky, since I cannot recall ever having met a brawnier bunch of potential bruisers.

  By November 6 the normal life of the city had ground to a halt. Nobody was making even a pretense of working. The day brought a peculiar phenomenon with it. The temperature had dropped during the night to 30° below zero and not a breath of wind stirred the frozen air. When Claire, Yura, Kola and I left the hotel at midmorning, we found that Yakutsk had disappeared under an opaque shroud that, unlike ordinary fog, was eerily luminescent. It seemed to glow with a diffuse brilliance yet was so dense I could see only a few yards ahead of me. Cars and trucks growled along the roads, invisible except for the yellow cones from their headlights. The streets were crowded with holiday-clad people whose gay clothing reflected the mysterious glow as they slipped past us, disappearing like disembodied spirits.

  Claire and Kola and I had experienced nothing like this before, but it was old stuff to Yura.

  “Is people-mist,” he told us. “Is same in all big towns in far north.”

  Yura’s ‘people-mist’ was later explained to me by a meteorologist, but he gave it a far less attractive name: human habitation fog. As I understand it, the fog is caused by a build-up of warm, slightly moist air from people’s bodies, houses, vehicles and animals which, under conditions of windlessness and extremely low temperatures, forms a blanket over towns and villages. It only occurs during cloudless weather, and its eerie internal brilliance is due to refracted sunlight. It often endures for days on end, since calm, brilliantly clear and utterly frigid weather is the normal condition during the Yakutian winter.

  The cold of Yakutia is proverbial; and with reason. The two coldest inhabited places on earth – the towns of Verkhoyansk and Oimyakon – are within its borders. Although they lie four hundred miles apart, each has registered an official low of 97.8°F below zero! Throughout most of Yakutia the inhabitants endure temperatures of 70° below zero during January and February. Such fantastic cold does not seem to bother people much. At Oimyakon I was told that small children are permitted to stay home from school when the temperature goes below minus 60°. But the city folk of Yakutsk are evidently of a softer breed; their younger children can stay home if it is a mere 50° below.

  At 30° below, Claire and I experienced a pressing desire to stay home too; but fortunately the temperature began to rise. A light breeze blew away the people-mist and by mid-afternoon Yakutsk was basking in bright sunlight. It was not exactly Mardi Gras weather, and I felt somewhat annoyed at the Bolsheviki who so thoughtlessly gave birth to the Great Revolution at a season when good Soviet citizens in Siberia would have to celebrate under polar conditions. Claire and I agreed we were lucky to be under no obligation to join the multitudes who, so we had been told, would spend most of the morrow either marching through the streets in procession or, worse still, standing on the sidewalks to cheer the marchers on.

  “We can watch it all from our little home away from home in the Lena,” Claire said. “Let’s get a bottle of champagne so we can celebrate in style.”

  Of such stuff do we weave our mortal dreams.

  On the evening of the 6th, Nadia and Moisie took us to a performance at the State Theatre and I wore my kilt for the last time in Siberia. I am proud of my Scots ancestry and the wearing of the kilt is a symbol of that pride. But there are some things more precious to a man even than his pride. When we left the theatre the temperature had slipped to 34° below and we were unable to find a taxi. Only prompt action by the ever solicitous Nadia averted what could have been a major personal calamity for me … but all that came later.

  The program began with speeches delivered by the high and mighty of the Party. The Mayor (a Yakut) introduced the most important man in Yakutia – the Communist Party Secretary, a dark, handsome, rather saturnine-visaged fellow who gave an hour-long accounting of the economic successes achieved in the Republic during the year. Except for the Secretary’s impassioned delivery (he was, as are most Yakut, a born orator) it sounded startlingly like a progress report being given by the Chairman of the Board of some vast industrial empire to his stockholders. Perhaps the simile is not entirely inappropriate, since the Yakut people do consider themselves the real owners and beneficiaries of the resources and industries of their country.

  Other speakers followed, detailing the progress made in social and cultural developments, and I noted that of the thirty or forty men and women who occupied the stage, only three were recognizably European.

  Reaction to the speeches (which were being broadcast on radio and television) surprised me. The audience applauded almost every item of what seemed to be an endless list of statistics, with an enthusiasm which, I am convinced, was neither forced nor ritualistic. The excitement and pride on the faces around us had to be genuine.

  There was a brief intermission and then we were treated to a play about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. This was not one of the most exciting theatrical events I have ever seen and I noted that the audience seemed to feel this way too. The applause was polite, but not sustained.

  The third and final part of the program was an oratoria in seven parts composed in the Yakut language and sung by a chorus of forty voices accompanied by the State Symphony Orchestra. It was based on ancient Yakut folk themes … and it was absolutely magnificent! Even Kola, who is a connoisseur of opera and symphonic music, was so moved by the splendour of this performance that, for once, he could find no words to express himself. He was not alone. As the chorus wove its way through the melodic but strangely alien and compelling music, people wept openly. At the conclusion the entire audience came to its feet with a roaring ovation.

  I was still somewhat stunned by the emotional impact of the oratorio as we pushed our way through the lobby and out of doors. The sting of the bitter air soon brought me round. We waited ten minutes for a taxi and by then I was beginning to get worried.

  “Farlee, you grow cold?” Nadia asked sympathetically.

  “My dear, I’m perishing!”

  “Then come with me,” she said sweetly. “All of you come. Soon we all make warm.”

  She took us down a dark and unprepossessing side street to an ancient wooden building. Padded double doors led out of the Siberian deep-freeze i
nto a big, brilliantly lit room that was rocking with noise, hazy with smoke, and blissfully hot. This was the Red Star, a combined restaurant and dance hall, and it was swinging to the blare of a ten-piece band. At least two hundred people clustered around scores of tables piled high with festive food and bottles. Nadia led us to a table presided over by a blonde Russian boy and we were welcomed to a party that had, even by Siberian standards, already reached an advanced stage of revelry.

  Having been apprized of my dangerous state of chill by Nadia, the blonde boy, Boris, poured me a full tumbler of what I took to be vodka, and shouted out a toast of the bottoms-up variety. I hoisted my glass … and the world exploded. These people were drinking pure alcohol – and drinking it straight! Not even Newfoundland fishermen, the toughest men I know, would dice with fate that way. I never quite recovered from my initiation into what is locally known as White Dynamite, and my memories of the remainder of the evening are hazy. Fortunately Claire stuck to champagne and was able to remember and record some of her impressions.

  “Over and over I was amazed by the high quality of Russian music. Even in this small arctic city the dance band was really excellent. It was also curiously folksy because of the combination of two accordions, a balalaika, trumpets, trombones, and a piano.… The dancers were extraordinarily gay, everyone smiling and nodding and laughing at everyone else. People danced close together in a sort of nondescript foxtrot, but in true Russian style everyone danced with everyone else. It was impossible for any girl to sit out even part of a dance. Somebody would come along and snatch her up.… The clothing of the women fascinated me. Some wore snow-boots of thick felt with rough leather soles; others wore spike-heel pumps and some wore flat-heeled ballerina slippers. There were women with sheer nylon stockings, and others wearing black wool over-stockings. There were girls in informal woollen dresses, others in sweaters and skirts, and still others elaborately turned out in party frocks. A number of them wore aprons, and it was some time before I realized they were waitresses who had simply stopped waiting!