Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “For a long time it was thought reindeer could only be raised on the tundra and in the thin adjoining sub-taiga. Now we have proved they can be farmed in the very heart of the Siberian forests and we are rapidly developing this discovery. If we are fully successful, we will be able to raise the base herd to eight or ten million animals and turn the heavy taiga, which at present yields only wood and fur animals, into one vast productive farm.

  “It is hard for me to understand why Canada has neglected this resource. You possess the second largest northern forest region in the world and the largest tundra region. I have visited your country and your north, and talked to your experts. Your Dr. Porsild* in Ottawa told me reindeer raising was impossible because Eskimo and Indians could not be trained as herders. He also said reindeer would crowd out the native caribou and that, in any case, the carrying capacity of the Canadian north would only be adequate for a few hundred thousand deer. I do not understand all this.

  “Here in the Soviet Union, the wild reindeer have increased, under strict protection, to just under a million animals at the same time we were building our domestic herds. In the Taymyr Peninsula, in 1957, there were 110,000 wild reindeer. Now there are 235,000, which is about as many as all of the wild Canadian caribou still left alive. And in Taymyr we also have some of our most successful domestic herds.

  “The Finnish botanists, Achti and Hustishy, who are also reindeer experts, have examined the Canadian north as has the respected botanist Dr. Nicolas Polunin, of Great Britain, and all agree that the carrying capacity for reindeer in the Canadian tundra and sub-taiga alone cannot be less than two million and may be as high as five million. Remember that at one time there were a million in Alaska alone.

  “As to training herders – I cannot understand this problem at all. There are about two thousand Eskimo in Chukotka and they now have a number of first-rate herds, although twenty years ago none of them kept reindeer. Anyone can learn to be a herder and a reindeer breeder if we really wish to see such a thing come about. Here we already have many more reindeer than can be handled by our native herders and there are now many hundreds of young men and women, Georgians, Tatars, Russians, from the south who have come north to learn the trade. In three or four years they become as proficient as hereditary herders, and sometimes they are better because they have no fixed preconceptions.

  “If Canada should ever change her mind about reindeer, we will be glad to help establish the husbandry. Everything we have learned is at your disposal. I am sure there would be no difficulty if you wanted to import stock from us. I think it would be easily arranged so we could send a number of good people to teach your herders. I would go myself, and very gladly. It is something worthwhile doing – to help increase the supply of food in the world and to help make remote places hospitable for humanity. When men have enough good food, and enough space to live in, they find peace, and that is the best thing of all.”

  The brief day was drawing down over the tundra. In the warm yaranga someone had proposed a toast to friendship between the peoples of the north. As we drank to that, Claire remembered that this was Remembrance Day in Canada – November 11, the date marking the end of the First World War. Diminutive Simeon Kerilev, the young Yukagir novelist, jumped to his feet.

  “Yours must truly be a great and a wise country. It sets aside a full day of the year to honour peace! Let us drink to Canada and to peace itself and to the growth of love between all men.”

  I had not the heart to tell him that Remembrance Day only remembers, briefly and palely, those who were killed in war, and that we have no day of peace, and those who insistently celebrate the cause of peace in North America are not amongst the most popular members of society. Truthfully, I do not think he, or most of the men and women I met in the Soviet Union, would have been able to understand. For them the word Mir – Peace – has a significance so deep that only the most case-hardened cynic could doubt the sincerity with which they use it.

  The Aeroflot pilot and his crew had been religiously drinking tea all day – now they suggested that perhaps it was time to go. Reluctantly we bundled ourselves up and walked through the bitter dusk to the helicopter. As we lifted in a throb of metal blades, hundreds of deer raised their heads, stared a moment incuriously, and then went back to their never-ending search for food.

  Below us, and almost obscured in the snow dust of our departure, five little figures waved what I thought was an ultimate farewell. It was not so. Three years later I returned to their camp on the sweep of tundra plain by the rim of the arctic sea and they greeted me like a son gone too long from home. Incredibly, the old lady was still alive, still refusing to be left behind at the settlement. She held my hand in her gnarled claw and looked at me with recognition; then her eyes blurred and she looked through me and beyond me into some forgotten time, and muttered a few words.

  I had a different interpreter that day, a stupid and ignorant man. He was embarrassed by my insistence that he translate.

  “She says only some nonsense about a god who will look after you.”

  Yura Rytkheu was also with me on that return visit. He caught my eye and shook his head. Later, when we were alone, he told me what the words meant.

  “She gave you a blessing, not in the name of the Christian God, but in the name of the Spirit of the Deer. She is a shaman, one of the last of them. She speaks to the old spirits and believes they answer her. I think you are a very lucky man.”

  We were well on our way toward Tchersky when Victor abruptly decided we should change course and visit Kolymskaya, the largest of the settlements in Nizny Kolymsky State Reindeer and Fur Farm. So we turned south and after a hundred miles settled down in gathering darkness on the main and only street of a log village set in thin, larch taiga.

  Apart from his consuming urge to show me absolutely everything in his arctic domain, Victor particularly wanted me to see the grave of his personal hero, Ivan Dimitrivitch Tchersky, in honour of whom Victor had succeeded in renaming Nizhniye Kresty. As a sideline to his innumerable other activities, Victor had for years past spent his holidays exhuming and reconstructing the history of this exiled Polish aristocrat whose memory he worshipped with almost, if not quite, the fervour he felt for Lenin.

  Born in 1842, the son of a wealthy landed proprietor, Tchersky was expelled from Krakow University and then exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activities against the Russian Tsar. Sent first to Omsk, he served as a soldier there until the governor, a man of education and some understanding, recognized in the youth a genius for natural sciences and commissioned him to go exploring in eastern Siberia. Tchersky went to Baikal, where he spent three years and laid the foundation for the subsequent natural history studies of that great lake. This work won him honours in France and Germany, but not in St. Petersburg, where attempts to have him pardoned failed. Tchersky did not care. Although wracked by tuberculosis, he was possessed by a desire to explore the whole of the then almost unknown interior of the Kolyma region.

  With his wife, who was a Baikal Cossack woman, and his young son, and accompanied by three Buryat men, he set out on an odyssey which led him through the deepest mountain valleys of an unknown world. Year after year he penetrated farther and farther, exploring the headwaters of the Indigirka, and finally making his way through the massive Moma Range to the Kolyma valley. He planned to descend the Kolyma to its mouth, turn west along the arctic coast and finally ascend the Lena.

  During a prolonged October storm in the year 1886 he reached the end of his physical endurance. His crippled lungs collapsed and he died on the banks of the Kolyma, but not before he had made his wife swear to carry his collections of plants, animals, and knowledge back to the savants at St. Petersburg. This she did, taking two years to complete the journey. This peasant woman survived until 1947, dying at the age of something between 100 and 110 years.

  When we stood in front of the modest stone monument at Kolymskaya under which Tchersky lies, big, burly Victor wept unashamedly. His thunderou
s voice was, for the moment, muted.

  “He had the courage of a hundred men. He was made of iron, that little Pole. Nothing could stop him except death. He opened all this part of the world to knowledge; and he loved the people of the north with a big heart. For a long time he was almost forgotten, but now we are seeing to it he is remembered again. We are building Tchersky for him, as well as for ourselves and for the future.”

  * People of the Deer, 1952; The Desperate People, 1959; McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Canada; and Atlantic, Little Brown, Boston, U.S.A.

  * Dr. A. E. Porsild, Dominion Botanist.

  Seventeen

  WHEN WE climbed out of the helicopter at Kolymskaya we were met by two fur-clad Yukagir girls. Tania, age nineteen, was the Party Secretary of this taiga village of six hundred people; and Ludmilla, twenty-three, was Mayor.

  With a possessive arm around each of these local dignitaries, Victor led the way into the village. We encountered scores of children, clad from head to foot in reindeer fur, coming home from school. Ludmilla explained that half the village population consisted of children. The Yukagir seemed to be staging a determined comeback from the edge of oblivion.

  As the youngsters glimpsed our faces and our odd garb in the yellow light streaming from the apartment windows, they were as startled as if they had encountered a posse of Martians. We must have been the strangest visitation to reach this remote place since Tchersky’s day.

  Naturally we were taken to see the kindergarten, where a number of dark-faced women were busy bundling up their offspring. Staffed by volunteers working under a trained director, these universal Soviet institutions provide an essential service. Since most women in the U.S.S.R. choose to work at something apart from household tasks, the kindergartens double as day-care centres. From what we saw of them – and God knows we saw enough – they seemed to be happy, well-run, and homey places. If the children were developing traumas as a result of spending several hours a day away from their own parents, they did not show it. The youngsters I met were an extraordinarily well-behaved and likeable bunch of sprats. I doubt if this has much to do with communism; it is most probably due to the fact that Russian children are traditionally well behaved, and well treated.

  News of our descent on Kolymskaya spread like wildfire. As we were leaving the nursery a breathless young lady ran up and very prettily begged us to come and see the school. This was a ten-room log structure, warm, bright, and vividly decorated with giant posters of Lenin. The children had all gone home, but nevertheless we had to see each room while the senior teacher practised her English on us. She was reasonably fluent, although her compliment to me (she had read a magazine synopsis of one of my northern books) seemed a trifle ambiguous.

  “To reading your book of Eskimos is making me very bad inside my stomach.” She said passionately.

  Fortunately for my ego she placed her hand demonstratively, not on her stomach, but over her heart. A small error in anatomical terminology.

  After a look at the community centre, which contained a gymnasium-cum-theatre and a well stocked little library, Ludmilla dragged us off to see her own pet project, the fur farm.

  It was full darkness by then and savagely cold. We tried to take an interest in row upon row of pens which housed a hundred silver foxes (the original stock came from Canada), a number of blue polar foxes, and some black and platinum mink. Being wiser than we, the beasts remained in their sheltered boxes until Ludmilla unfeelingly drove them out.

  At last Tania took pity on them and on us and led us at a trot toward the cafeteria for “a little glass of tea before you fly to Tchersky.” On the way we were overtaken by a team of ten huskies hauling a heavily laden sled driven by a small, lithe Yukagir. Victor hailed him and he stopped his team and came shyly over. He was Serafina Petrovich Robik, the most famous trapper and hunter in Yakutia and twice winner of the republic’s annual award for wild fur production.

  His curious last name was the bequest of an American trader named Roberts who sailed a little schooner from Alaska to the Kolyma sometime in the early 1900s. There is a good measure of Yankee trader blood flowing in the veins of the Yukagir, Eskimo, and Chukchee, and it is memoralized not only in family names but also in a number of English words which have passed into the local vocabulary: bonanza, rum, and sveety (sweetie) are three examples. Robik was just coming home from a five-day trip around his trap-line, during which he had taken thirty-four ermine and six white foxes.

  I was a little suspicious about that “glass of tea,” but since we had come to Kolymskaya unannounced and had only been in town a short time, I thought it unlikely anything too elaborate could have been prepared for us.

  I still had much to learn about Siberians! All the tables in the log dining hall had been placed together in a line. And once again the table tops were lost to view under a fabulous array of food and drink. Thirty or forty grinning Kolymskayites stood by their chairs waiting for us. Kola’s pale face grew paler still.

  “I hope by the time we get back to Moscow our surgeons will have mastered the art of liver transplants!” he muttered.

  Sometime before midnight we were escorted back to the helicopter. I am not an enthusiast of night flying in the arctic, but I was in no mood to worry overmuch. Claire was beyond worrying. She had made the mistake of getting into a toast-making match with the big-boned, buxom lady cook at the café and, though she had fought gallantly, she had gone down to defeat. As we tucked her tenderly into the helicopter she tried to raise her right arm and was heard to say:

  “Want give toast t’all nice pilots going carry me home t’bed.”

  As a consequence of our visit to the herd, Vasily Amasov, the jew’s-harp-playing team leader of the reindeer herders, concluded I was the stuff reindeer farmers are made of. One afternoon Claire and I were invited to attend a gathering at the headquarters of the state farm. It turned out to be a full-scale banquet during which I was presented with a magnificent red and gold ornamented scroll testifying to my appointment as Honorary Canadian Breeder and member in good standing of the Second Reindeer Team. I have since mused over that presentation quite a lot and have concluded it is better to be an honorary breeder than no breeder at all.

  Gay as an Irish gnome, as full of laughter as any happy child, Vasily proclaimed with frank emotion to all and sundry that I was his dear friend. When we left Tchersky he gave me his prized jew’s harp, having earlier almost buried Claire and me under gifts of fur hats, embroidered deerskin gloves, and other tokens of his affection. The day before we parted he told me he would be delighted to take a year off from his own work in order to start a reindeer farm for Canadian Eskimos. He was dead serious about this, having first obtained consent from the state farm director and from Victor Nazarov. Unwilling to hurt his feelings, I said I would let him know … and never did.

  Late in 1969 I unexpectedly met him again at Batagai, near Verkhoyansk. There was no longer any laughter in his dark eyes. His beautiful young wife had died in childbirth that autumn and he had found it impossible to remain in the familiar world of Tchersky without her. He embraced me in the crowded airport waiting room and wept as he told me of his loss.

  “Please arrange for me to visit Canada,” he pleaded. “To forget my wife I must go somewhere I am really needed. Don’t your Small Peoples of the north need a good reindeer man?”

  This time I had to refuse his offer directly, knowing that even if his own government would permit him to leave, he would find cold comfort at the hands of the Canadian government. I did not tell him how much I wished he could be starting a new life for the Eskimos on the abandoned tundra of my own land. There are some things which are too difficult to say.

  The kind of life my Yukagir friend would have liked to build for Canadian taiga Indians and tundra Eskimos was exemplified by the state farm he had helped build in Kolyma. Here is the shape of it.

  Nizhny Kolymsk State Farm embraces the whole of the Kolyma district, some 87,000 square kilometres of taiga, tundra, l
akes, and rivers. In the 1940s when the farm was first organized (as a collective), it had a population of about a hundred Evenk, Chukchee, and Yukagir families, and a herd of 7,000 reindeer. Today it is the largest reindeer farm in Yakutia, with 36,000 deer. It also has departments for fishing, fur raising, and trapping; and it supports 2,840 people, including 212 Evenk families, 197 Chukchee families, 106 Yukagir families (which is about ninety per cent of all the Yukagir left in the world) and fifty families of native-born Russian stock.

  Its headquarters is in a big three-storey building in Tchersky, where a staff of thirty-seven, embracing economists, agronomists, veterinary scientists, botanists, and construction engineers – mostly young and mostly of native origin – work under the direction of an elected committee headed by an Evenk, Gavriel Efrimov. Most of the staff, including the director, hold university degrees and each year at least thirty young people from the farm are sent as far afield as Leningrad for university training in the many specialties which affect the farm’s operation.

  Most of the employees live in the three settlements of Kolymskaya, Kanzaboy, and Pokholsk, which were originally tiny, decayed collections of one-room shacks, but which by the end of 1973 at the latest will all be completely modern towns. Work on the new Kolymskaya was well underway in the winter of 1969. This town will have ten sixteen-apartment masonry buildings connected with one another and to a central shopping area by aluminum and plexi-glass corridors. It will also have several aluminum-sandwich-wall type experimental apartment blocks; a hockey and soccer stadium; a completely integrated fur-breeding station; a new two-storey community centre with a large theatre; and all requisite ancillary buildings for a permanent population of a thousand people. Central heating, sewers, running water, electricity, and an airport have already been installed.