Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  The Revolution did not really touch Chukotka, except in token form, until 1928. As late as that time most of the Eskimo and Chukchee on the northeast coast spoke English, not Russian, as their second language. Primitive socialism had been replaced by mercantile capitalism and they were well started along the road which the Alaskan Eskimo have since followed.

  When the first Soviet proselytizers arrived amongst them, there was hell to pay. The shamans and the chiefs united with the foreign traders to resist the newcomers and to block any reversion to socialism. Stories are told of American traders supplying free arms, including old brass cannon, to the Chukchee chiefs in an effort to persuade them to resist the Soviets by force of arms. Luckily the Chukchee and Eskimo are not warlike, and they declined the honour of dying in what would have been, for them, a hopeless struggle.

  The New Life (as the Revolution is known in Chukotka) did not really take hold there until people had become literate. This marked the turning point. By the mid-1930s socialism had been sufficiently well established so that the Chukotka National District could be formed and allowed a measure of self-government.

  Today, according to those Chukchee and Eskimo I talked to, this little “nation” is well on its way to achieving recognition as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Its native peoples are mostly employed on collectives and state farms. Reindeer herding has proved to be extremely profitable, and a major sea-mammal hunting operation (primarily for whales and seals) is conducted by a score of shore collectives. Chukotka has its own radio system and television studios broadcasting in native languages. In Anadyr it has its own publishing house, producing books by local writers as well as translations from the Russian and from foreign languages. By 1969 the district had produced twenty-one fully qualified Chukchee and Eskimo doctors, enough native teachers to staff all forty of its primary and secondary schools (this figure is exclusive of schools in the new cities) and a number of specialists, including Vladimir Rentirgin, a Chukchee who is Chief of the Research Institute for Gold and Nonferrous Metals in Magadan; and Ivan Leekay, of Eskimo and Chukchee blood, who was recently elected to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences as a philologist.

  The Eskimos of the town of Uelen maintained direct contact with their Alaskan relatives up until 1956. Parties from both sides of the Bering Strait used to meet on the winter ice off the Diomede Islands and camp together for days at a time. This happy leak in the Cold War wall was eventually plugged – not by the Russians but, according to Yura, by the Americans, possibly, as he suggested, “Because they not want their Eskimos to see and hear truth about life in our Chukotka.”

  The Chukchee are a lusty people and Yura and some other Chukchee friends gave me considerable insight into the current state of love and sex in Russia.

  Despite what we read about Russian puritanism, I am able to report that sex remains alive and well in the Soviet Union. There is, however, an old-fashioned sense of propriety amongst European Russians which insists that people preserve a rather Victorian appearance of prudery, which perhaps explains the disgruntled comments of some western journalists who, after a few months in Moscow, begin to react like Pavlov’s dogs who hear the bell, but can’t quite run it down. I am sorry for these gentlemen and I pass on to them some reflections on the matter from a charming young Muscovite whose job brings her into frequent contact with westerners.

  “It is so very strange the way many foreign men behave. If they have a few drinks with you in a café, or take you to dinner or a dance, they take it for granted you will go back with them to their hotel, or let them go back with you to your apartment.

  “Don’t they know there is more to it than that? I will go anywhere with a man I love, and I am proud to take my lover to my place; but there must be love. If I just slept with a man in a hotel or at my flat, people would think me stupid. They would despise me; and they would be right. There must be love before love-making. But, in Russia it is possible to fall in love in one minute … if only both people will allow themselves to do it.”

  The romantic approach is generally the correct one in the Soviet Union. There are, however, certain practical difficulties to overcome. One is the lack of privacy, particularly in the major cities. In summer this poses no great problem … the birch glades surrounding Moscow are hospitable to lovers, and easy to reach by public transport. In winter things are not so easy. Hotel rooms are almost impossible to get unless you are from out of town. There are no convenient motels. But there are the cosy sleeping compartments on Russian trains. A friend of mine who travels frequently between Leningrad and Moscow estimates that nearly half the weekend rail passengers are lovers making the most of the overnight run between the two cities. “You have no idea how strong the romantic flavour is aboard the Friday night train to Leningrad. I have had to stop using the weekend trains. It is too upsetting for an old man like me,” he told me somewhat sadly.

  Love finds a way even in Moscow, where young men band together and acquire, by whatever devious methods, a room or a flat whose facilities they share in common. A friend of Yura’s explained the system to me. “What we do is make little badges – like this one I am wearing – and we wear them when we are on the subway or at a party. See? It says on it, only, I Have A House. It doesn’t guarantee any girl will become your friend; but if a girl you meet begins to fall in love with you it tells her that her love won’t go to waste. Here, take my badge. And here is the address. But, please, telephone this number first. Nobody will answer but if it stops ringing, wait for an hour and then try again. If it rings more than a dozen times it means you are welcome to use our room.”

  Because I am not about to snitch on any of my Russian friends, I can use no names, but both Claire and I were astounded at the multiplicity of romantic entanglements which seemed to surround all our companions. They kept falling into and out of love with a frequency and ardour that left me exhausted just thinking about it.

  As might be expected, attitudes vary in different parts of the country. In Georgia or Armenia, for instance, the direct approach to a woman is acceptable. In fact, give a Georgian a few litres of his native wine and any other approach becomes unthinkable.

  I remember a night when we were driving back to Tbilisi after a country outing culminating in a party at a vineyard worker’s house – a party that lasted for nine hours, and during which incredible amounts of new wine went down the hatch. There were two carloads of us weaving down the highway toward the distant city. Claire and I shared the back seat of the rear car with a young Georgian interpreter. Sitting up front with the driver was one of the most distinguished literary figures in the Georgian Republic, a fine old man with a pointed white beard and the dignity of a Khan. Our own interpreter, a young Muscovite named Sasha who had a low tolerance for Georgian wine, was driving in the lead car with Yuri Rytkheu.

  Halfway home the lead car screeched to a halt, a door swung open, and someone fell out into the ditch. Our car stopped too and I jumped out, suspecting that all was not well with young Sasha. All was not well. He was rendering unto Georgia what was Georgia’s.

  When I returned to our car Claire had a wild-eyed look, and she pushed so close against me that the young Georgian was left with most of the back seat to himself. However, I was preoccupied with Sasha’s problems and did not correctly evaluate the undercurrents.

  We had gone only a few kilometres farther when the whole scene repeated itself. This time Sasha refused to get back into his car and began crawling around the ditch on his hands and knees. Yura joined me and we discovered what was wrong. Sasha possessed two solid-gold front teeth of which he was extremely proud. They were no longer in his mouth, and he was dumbly determined not to leave the scene without them.

  Walking back toward our car I met Claire running toward me. She looked as if she had been in a football scrimmage.

  Later, in our hotel room, she unburdened herself.

  “The first time you got out, the Georgian interpreter grabbed me as if I was his long lost love and kis
sed me so hard I nearly suffocated. I thought I was going to strangle. Then you came back and I had a chance to catch my breath and collect my wits. I didn’t want to say anything to you, because … well, it would have been embarrassing. Then, before I could stop you, you jumped out again. I was just going to jump after you when old pointy-beard turned around, grinning like a goat, and pushed his paw up under my skirt. It took me two seconds to get out of the car but they were the longest two seconds in my life. Georgian men! Don’t you dare get out of arm’s reach again until we leave this place!”

  Unfortunately the Georgian attitude is not a two-way street. A visitor is extremely ill-advised to even look sideways at a Georgian girl unless he is wearing a bulletproof vest or has a bodyguard.

  There were some Georgians in Tchersky. One of them was the husband of a lady reporter from the Kolymskaya Pravda. I met her at a party held in John’s and my honour, and for some reason I attracted her amorous interest. She must have read Dorothy Parker’s dictum that candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, because she plied me with large glasses of cognac at five-minute intervals. I was able to slip these under the table to Yura, who nobly drained them and passed back the empties.

  As I was to learn somewhat later, the lady’s husband worked a night shift at Green Cape harbour, which meant that his wife “had a house” each night until he returned in the small hours of the morning. Being unaware of these facts at the time I agreed to escort her home – not because I reciprocated her emotions, but from a true sense of chivalry. She could never have made it on her own.

  It was a bitterly cold night, and whatever warmth might have been engendered in me by the modicum of cognac I had drunk was all gone by the time we reached the log house in which she lived. By then I only wanted to go back to my own apartment and get some sleep … an attitude which she found quite inexplicable. Nevertheless, I persevered and she finally let me go.

  I was less than a block from her house when Victor Nazarov’s black Volga roared up behind me and slammed to a stop. Victor flung open a door, seized me by an arm, and dragged me onto the seat beside him. Without a word he grabbed my left leg and jerked my foot high into the air. For a moment he studied my boot, a standard felt overboot that I had borrowed. Then he relaxed; grinned; bellowed amiably in my ear; and drove me back to the party from which I had hoped to escape.

  Nothing was said about his odd behaviour until next morning, when Yura took me aside and told me about the Georgian husband.

  “He very crazy, that one. Every dawn when he come home he walk all around his house and look for footprints in snow. If find man’s footprint, he follow just as good as wolf follow poor reindeer. When he find man who owns footprints, he has big argument with him. Only he argues with little hatchet.

  “When Victor hear you leave party with girl, he very much nervous for you. Maybe very much nervous for himself, too. How he explain to Moscow he need state funeral for first Canadian visitor to Tchersky?”

  Victor had been particularly concerned that I might have been wearing my Canadian sealskin boots, which had distinctively patterned rubber soles that left an unmistakeable track, the only one of its kind in Siberia.

  It is a common complaint of western visitors that they are seldom invited into Russian homes. The implication, sometimes stated as a fact, is that Russians are afraid to make friends with foreigners for fear of reprisals from the KGB, or for similar sinister reasons. I suspect this is nonsense. I do know that some Russians are hesitant about taking foreigners home because they are afraid their houses won’t measure up to western standards and so will reinforce the contemptuous attitudes which are typical western reactions to the life styles of the Russian people.

  I was a guest in scores of private homes, ranging from the tiny one-room cubbyhole of a young Leningrad artist and his wife to the palatial apartment of a renowned Georgian artist in Tbilisi; from the home of a truck driver in Magadan, to the luxurious quarters of a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; from the snug, three-room establishment of a beginning Yakut poet, to the ancien régime dacha of one of Irkutsk’s most successful authors; from the tents of the Yukagir reindeer herders, to the ultra-modern apartment of a Moscow diplomat. The problem was never one of how to arrange an entrée into private homes; if there was a problem at all, it was how to survive the ensuing hospitality.

  My best memories of the Soviet Union are of evenings spent drinking, eating, arguing, laughing and singing in the intimate atmosphere of Russian family life. Most of what I learned about the way people thought and felt, I learned on such occasions. What seemed then, and still remains, the most important element of all was the warmth and depth of friendship which was offered to me; friendship which took me behind the barriers of generic conclusions and crass generalities which so effectively shield people of different races and cultures from meaningful understanding of one another.

  My friendship with Lydia and Anatoly Gorshkov was a case in point. During our first visit to Tchersky, Claire and I saw Lydia quite often, since she ran the little café where we ate many of our meals. We met Anatoly on only two occasions; once when he showed us through a new shopping centre whose wall mural decorations were his work, and once at a party at Victor Nazarov’s flat. Nevertheless, when we left Tchersky, Lydia wept as she kissed Claire goodbye. Anatoly also kissed her; then he kissed me on both cheeks and shyly gave us one of his drawings.

  “You must come back. If you do not we will suffer very much, because you are our dear friends,” said Lydia tearfully.

  By North American standards we had hardly known each other well enough to justify a casual acquaintanceship. By Russian standards, we had known each other long enough to become close and enduring friends. Nor was this a social sham. When I returned to Tchersky in 1969 Lydia was away in Moscow with her three-year-old son, Mischka, who had a serious bronchial condition and was receiving specialist treatment. On the day of my arrival, Anatoly sent Lydia a telegram telling her that I had come and the next morning she left Mischka in her mother’s care and boarded a plane. She flew nearly five thousand miles so she and Anatoly could properly welcome me into their home. Neither she nor her husband saw anything extraordinary in this. After all, I was their friend.

  This beautiful young woman did not fly back empty-handed. On the very evening of her arrival I went to dinner with the Gorshovs in their small flat in one of the new apartment blocks. Lydia fed me Turkestan honey melon, Armenian tangerines, Polish pickled mushrooms, Bulgarian chianti, and Bulgarian brandy – all rare and expensive delicacies; but … for a friend … nothing is too good.

  She had not even room in her baggage for presents for Anatoly, whom she had not seen for nearly two months. Everything she brought with her from Moscow, except a small bag of her own clothing, was intended for my entertainment.

  Anatoly cooked shash-lik on a fireplace he had built himself (after a ferocious battle with the housing authorities) in his tiny dining-living room. We ate and drank and talked until long after midnight, when Victor’s Volga came to take me home to my apartment in Green Cape, four kilometres distant.

  I had barely gone to bed when there came a soft rap on the door. Standing outside, red-faced from the bitter cold, and hesitant about the reception they might receive at this late hour, were Lydia and Anatoly. They had forgotten to give me a basket of apples, pomegranates and grapes which Lydia had also brought for me from Moscow. They had walked the four kilometres with the gift, and after giving it to me and holding my hand for a moment, they left and walked back home again.

  I spent as much time as I could with this loving young couple, and we talked as frankly and as intimately as if we had known each other since childhood. They were not atypical. On the contrary they were very representative of the many people I met in the Soviet Union whom I am happy to call my friends.

  Anatoly was thirty-four in 1969. He told me that in his youth he had been a “wild one.” I could believe it. His lean, saturnine face still carried a devil-may-care stamp. “I did
not know what I wanted as a youth, and nothing that offered itself seemed to quicken my heart. Moscow was my home, but it seemed like a dead city to me. Perhaps all cities seem the same and perhaps they are all dying. I did nothing at school. Then came my army stint – three years of it – and about halfway through I began to think I had been an idiot. I decided I should get an education, but it seemed a bit late in the day and I felt too old to go back to school. Instead I went out to Siberia, to Krasnoyarsk, and got a job on the dam there, knocking holes in the rock with a pneumatic drill. One lunchtime I was leaving the cafeteria when I ran straight into Lydia. I took one look into her face and the whole place exploded. Three hours later I asked her to marry me, and three days later we were married.”

  “I am a real Siberian,” Lydia interjected, “born in Leninskaya; but when I was just a child I was taken to live in Moscow. I think I felt about the city the same way Tolia did. As soon as I was old enough I went to Krasnoyarsk for school, became a dietitian, and was starting on a managerial course when Tolia caught me. I could not resist him. He was a wandering man, an artist with the soul of a poet, and a wonderful lover. After two years in Krasnoyarsk we decided we wanted to go to the real north. We got as far as Lensk, where Tolia earned a living painting signs while he struggled hard to be an artist. Four years ago we moved on to Tchersky, looking for a wild place and a strong, exciting life.”

  “My great dream,” said Anatoly, “is to someday sculpt a huge statue overlooking Bering Strait – a statue to Dezhnev, that brave Cossack who founded Nizhny Kolymsk and then went on in a little open boat to round Chukotka and sail south into the Pacific – the true discoverer of Bering Strait, and the first European to prove that Asia and America were not joined together.”