The Wild East

America and Russia have always resembled one another. Most importantly, the concept of manifest destiny isn't unique to America; Russians think of Siberia in much the same way as Americans think of the Wild West. The "frontier myth" is central to both national identities. In Andrei Konchalovsky's lengthy epic, Siberiade, we get the chance to examine the Russian version of an American cinema cliche up close.

Like the American film, Giant, Siberiade revolves around the quest to open up Siberia by drilling for oil. Beginning in tsarist Russia, the film tracks several generations of Russian frontiersmen (and their love interests) and ends with the discovery of oil in the modern era. It also interweaves this local story of a small and fragile outpost of civilization with that of the broader Russian-or rather Soviet-narrative of progress.

Near this tiny village one man spends his life in a seemingly Sisyphean struggle to carve out a road in the Siberian taiga. But his heroic struggle is a metaphor for the larger Soviet story of development. Throughout the film the director inserts historical footage, or classic black and white film footage that appears to be historical footage, to remind viewers that throughout each of the decades that the film covers, the Soviet Union represents the almost Hegelian ideal of progress, movement, technological innovation, hard work, heroism, and forward motion.

If this small group of Siberians eventually discovers the oil that transforms a wilderness into a "Sun City" of economic sophistication and industrial power, the nation as a whole was experiencing this same metamorphosis on a truly Titanic scale. As the film nears its climax, it's interesting to note that Party officials and bureaucrats (rather than the entrepreneurs and capitalists of American mythology) play a decisive role. Although it's an ordinary driller who heroically throws himself into a harm's way in an attempt to close down a burning oil well, it's a regional party boss who defends the project by asking his superior, perhaps a member of the Central Committee, to remember how, in World War II, the two men used to take "risks" in order to defeat the Germans. Thus, even in 1979, the era of stagnation, the Party's leadership is cinematically represented by intelligent, even daring, apparatchiks. Although Party leaders and politicians honor the workers who make things happen on the ground, it is they who should and do make the future happen in Siberia.

Russia's Greatest Love Machine..

Grigori Rasputin seems to belong to another age, and a medieval age at that. And yet Rasputin was one of the figures who did the most--albeit unintentionally--to usher in the Russian Revolution. In the documentary series Land of the Tsars an entire episode is devoted Rasputin's fascinating rise to power and ignominious demise.

Rasputin was a Siberian peasant with captivating eyes and boundless sexual energy whose charisma charmed local women and eventually led to his angry expulsion at the hands of unsympathetic townsmen. Although Rasputin married, and remained devoted to his wife throughout the rest of his life, he never stopped courting other women, and his wife seemed to accept her husband's infidelities as inevitable. After his expulsion from his native village, Rasputin took a trip to a famous monastery where he experienced a profound religious epiphany. After that, the film relates, Rasputin wandered the length and breadth of Russia for many years, gaining an ability to deal with people from every walk of Russian life in the process.

At the end of his travels, Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, where his charisma immediately won him an audience with the Tsar and Tsarina. At their first meeting, the holy monk used startlingly familiar language to address the country's ruler, calling him "papa." Rasputin was a strange sort of holy man, one who developed a theory that one had to sin brazenly in order to earn true forgiveness from God. Rasputin sometimes asked women to strip with him in order to practice their powers of sin-resistance: sometimes they successfully resisted sin, other times they failed. Rasputin's unusual behavior did not stop him from winning the hearts of the tsar and his wife. He did so, in part, by conforming to a long Russian tolerance for the role of a "holy fool" who, notwithstanding his personal eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, had special access to God's will.

Most importantly, Rasputin soon demonstrated an ability to heal the tsarevich, whose hemophilia saddened his parents and threatened to undermine the line of succession. In effect, Rasputin's healing powers seemed to protect the heir to the thrown for the better part of a decade, and even seemed to work at a distance, when the monk was far from the capital. Rasputin was a regular presence at the royal court, but he wasn't unduly influential until the advent of World War, which Rasputin warned the tsar against.

During the war, the royal family's fortunes declined precipitously. When the tsar left to lead the troops at the front, the tsarina assumed a great deal of authority in domestic affairs, and listened attentively to all of her holy favorite's advice. To her, Rasputin spoke for God. On the other hand, Rasputin's disastrous advice carefully mirrored the empress' own political philosophy, so it's impossible to say whether or not Rasputin directly undermined the authority of his peers. Yet Rasputin's deleterious effect on popular opinion is impossible to gainsay. He was seen as sexual profligate, a mad monk, a German spy, and an ally of the devil himself.

When one of his lovers nearly assassinated him, Rasputin made matters worse. In pain, he turned to alcohol and his behavior became still more erratic. Bragging about his influence at court, drinking heavily, chasing women, and even at one point exposing himself in public, Rasputin became the symbol of autocratic immorality and incompetence. Deeply unpopular even within the aristocracy, one leading member of society and a group of supporters eventually conspired to kill Rasputin to save Russia. Famously, Rasputin survived a poisoning, and then two volleys of shots, and then apparently remained alive as he was sent into a frozen river. The tsarina fell into deep mourning, but recovered in a month; the tsar was at least partly relieved to be free of the negative publicity that surrounded Rasputin's nefarious activities. The film ends with Rasputin's strange prophesy, delivered shortly before his death: that if he were to be killed by friends of the tsar, the country would disintegrate the tsar's own family would be dead within the space of two years, which was in fact what happened.

Siberia

What do we really know about Siberia? What is there to know,other than the fact that it constitutes three fourths of contemporary Russia? Is Siberia a place or a state of exile and disenfranchisement? Ian Frazier's 2009 New Yorker articles, Travels in Siberia, seems to suggest that a massive road trip across its massive expanse will shed some light on the problem. According to Frazier, Siberia is made up of the following: permafrost, 4600 miles of taiga, eight time zones,mud and dust, massive but lazy rivers, the remote Sakhalin Island, Lake Baikal, the Arctic, the Urals, Vladivostock, 400 year old cities, 38 million people, Russians and aboriginal peoples, 5,771 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway, prisons, military outposts, Chinese borderlands, refineries, concrete architecture, mosquitos,Admiral Kolchak beer, Irkutsk, memories of Rasputin, Lenin, Mandelstam, Stalin, and the Decembrists (e.g., Volkonsky and Trubetskoy) and raw materials, especially cobalt, zinc, oil, gold, diamonds, copper, lead, mercury, and nickel. It's also home to travel writers.

Siberian Utopia

When I tell people I have started a blog on modern Russian history, they inevitably ask: “Are you Russian? “ When I say no, they ask: “Well, have you been to Russia?” The answer to both questions is no. I have no natural or biological connection to Russia or any of the countries that made up the Soviet Union. I don’t even speak a word of the language. It’s an arbitrary fixation which, to my mind, is the best kind of obsession. In fact, I am not always sure I actually desire to go to Russia. How could the actual location live up to the “Coast of Utopia,” to borrow a phrase from Tom Stoppard? And of course I’d be better off not going if the cost of a ticket alone is $2000 or so. When it comes to travel, Mexico fits my budget.



This is how I used to think before Russia came to me. That’s right, this author filled out a simple three-page form a couple of months ago (and did so last year as well) and I’ve just now been informed that I will likely be heading to Russia in May 2011. I’m stunned. More shockingly, a Russian visitor may be staying with my family as early as October 2010. This is not a drill: if all goes well, I may be schlepping a Russian faculty member or administrator around Chicago in the fairly near future.




And how strange to find myself on the way to Russia only a few months after electing to create a blog to track my deepening interest in Russian history? But odder than the fact that I may be headed for Russia (the program still has to find a match in this specific country before I can be more definite), is that I’m not headed to Moscow or St. Petersburg but rather to the heart of Russia and indeed the entire Eurasian landmass apparently, Yekaterinburg.

In the next several days I hope to post something about Yekaterinburg. When I applied, I knew nothing other than the fact that Yekaterinburg was in Siberia and that the czar and his family had been murdered there during the Revolution. It’s not a pleasant association. Since then, I’ve just briefly Googled the place, and it seems that Yekaterinburg is a large city, the third largest in Russia in fact. It’s odd to think that I selected this Siberian city over similar opportunities in Switzerland, Holland, Finland, and England, where the population at large will be much more likely to speak English. After all, who willingly puts himself on a place for 24 hours? And what is there to visit in Yekaterinburg outside of the city itself?



But when else would I ever in my life have the opportunity to visit the heart of Russia? I’m struck dumb with gratitude to my college for sponsoring the journey and looking forward to tracking everything in this blog. But never fear dear reader, if it turns out that they can’t find a match in Russia, I’ll seek out Russian history in one of the other sponsoring countries. In Switzerland, I’ll look for the homes and hotels of Lenin, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, and other Russian exiles. I read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. If in Finland, I’ll journey across the gulf to visit St. Petersburg itself. In London, I’ll spend time in the London Museum, exactly where Marx used to sit, or seek out the place where the Russian social-democrats made mischief. In Holland, I’ll have to settle for looking back a couple of centuries to Peter the Great’s famous visit to learn about the shipbuilding trade.

East and West

It's interesting that the two dominant powers today, China and the U.S., both have wild Wests. They think about them very differently. For us the West has been a place of promise and escape, where rough virtues conquer nature. For China the West is a little more threatening. That's where Genghis Khan and Tamerlane came from, and where today they keep a lid on simmering Uighur and Tibetan tensions by banning journalists. The terrain is so forbidding it makes the Rockies look like goose bumps. In both countries the East is the region of sophistication, learning, and power.

In Russia--really Europe in general--it is the East that poses a disorderly threat. During World War I German soldiers were shocked at the chaos they found in Lithuania and Latvia. The dirt, disease, and nonsensical languages had to be scrubbed out. Russia replicates this thinking when it comes to Siberia. The orderliness of St. Petersburg clashes with the horrible wonders beyond the Urals. But the one notion we all share is that origins are located in the East. Maybe it's a function of the sun rising there. But for Europeans the East (which ultimately means Russia, and for Russia Siberia) is the primordial slime they emerged from. It's where their nightmares and fairy tales are located. It's where they go to be violent. For the Americans and Chinese the ancestral home is not so disturbing; it is the seat of civilization. Controlling ourselves as we move westward is more of a challenge. So there is a fundamental difference between Europe on the one hand, and America and China on the other.

All this makes central Asia, including former Soviet states like Kyrgystan and Tajikistan, the most interesting place in the world. There East and West face each other with total incomprehension. Our attempts to impose geographical symbolism onto the globe fall apart. Buddhist metaphysics, great art, nuclear arms, and terrorism thrive in places that can't be situated. Nothing originates and nothing develops there and yet, extracted from direction and time, those spots occupy a kind of no-place or utopian ideal.

My Cold Places

I never responded to Fur Coat's rash ruminations on the genre of travel writing. To me the only good reason for reading books is to expand the horizon of experience. Some people say the only justification is pleasure, or that there is a relationship between literary style and goodness tout court. Both are partly true. But I value experience most, and travel writing produces a kind of virtual geographic mobility parallel to what history does on the temporal axis.

By contrast, true crime, a genre my esteemed colleague loves, strikes me as pure repetition-compulsion. A great example is James Ellroy's My Dark Places, which Fur recommended in an earlier post. The details of Ellroy's mother's murder are repeated in masochistic detail a ludicrous number of times. Not only is this psychological stasis unhealthy, it is ultimately boring, and that's the worst crime of all.

If you want a real horror story, try George Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System. Kennan--cousin to the famous Cold War diplomat--was one of these 19th century travelers who tried to be both a gentleman and a tough guy. He weathers sleeplessness, cold weather, and bad food with his iron constitution, and manipulates dim provincial officials with his wit. His description of a mule carrying him down a sharply graded slope toward the Altai is unforgettable. But his aim was not just to survive a harsh environment (like another classic of the genre, Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands) but to investigate the Siberian prison system. What he finds is so appalling, both in terms of prison conditions and inmates' degree of guilt, that it challenges the novelty of the Gulag. Kennan brings us the thick stench of those cold, crowded places, the constrained fury and resentment of the inmates, and the overwhelming beauty and desolation of the landscape. All without leaving your La-Z-Boy.

Journey to the Heart of Shabbiness

I’ve never been a fan of travel writing. It seems so self-indulgent, impressionistic, essentialist, and random. Travel writing is as annoying to me, as say, blogging is to other people. Apologies to all of you. I remember reading Paul Theroux’s musings as he worked his way across Mexico, down through Central America, across the Panamanian isthmus, across the Andes, and down to Patagonia, all by way of a train. I felt the journey to be as long and tedious as he must have felt it to be, despite his attempt to cover up the vicissitudes of South American train travel with literary allusion and cleverness.

Almost by definition, the travel writer feels unconstrained by organizational or thematic demands. He or she can write as much on any particular topic as seems necessary and then move on whenever necessary. It’s all a matter of whim and caprice. The writer isn’t even constrained by the reality of what one sees: he or she can refer to his or her own subjective perceptions of a place, or reach back into the past for previous iterations of the locale. You’re thinking that this blog is worse: it doesn’t even organize content into whole chapters. You’re also thinking that it’s not really possible to hate travel writing. It’s easy to digest, escapist, exotic, and colorful. Historians have even fallen in love with the genre, for in the context of history the travel writer’s biases, uninformed opinions, xenophobic ruminations, shallow attempts to sympathize with the “natives,” and misconceptions, become fodder for rich historical and textual analysis. Even so, I retain my position. Travel writing is solipsistic. The traveller seems to end up knowing less than the person who hasn't travelled. He certainly knows less than the people upon whom he bestows his passing appraisals.

It’s not surprising then that I didn’t warm up to Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium, a record of his journeys through the disintegrating Soviet empire. The critics rave about the book. They love Kapuscinsky’s perspicacity, linguistic acumen, and cultural knowledge. And I must admit that the book has some merits. It takes you through a variety of Soviet republics and regions, reminding readers that the Soviet Union and Russia are not synonymous terms. One minute you’re in the Caucasus, the next in Ukraine, the next you’re in the Muslim South, the next in polar Siberia, the next in what used to be Poland. And you do learn something about the diversity of Soviet experience. You encounter separatism, memories of Beria’s arrest and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Khrushchev-inspired Virgin Lands ecological disaster, the disappearance of the Astral Sea, oil in Baku, Jewish life, and so much more.

If there is one unifying theme to Kapuscinsky’s travels, it is that of Soviet shabbiness. The planes don’t run on schedule, passengers wait for days on end at the airport, everybody can be bribed, housing stock is in poor condition and extremely limited, a low level fear of the authorities pervades every aspect of existence, resignation characterizes the dominate mood of the masses, etc. In this larger theme of a Soviet reality rooted in blandness and tediousness and creeping corruption, the author makes the best of a poor genre.

Siberia, Risk, and Mammoth Sperm

I’ve posted on the gulag but said nothing about the elephant in the room: Siberia. Siberia was the place that made the gulag archipelago possible. Ian Frazer’s New Yorker articles, Travels in Siberia, remind me of the topic. He took a trip across Siberia in an old car and wrote up the experience, which is odd only in that most people seem to invest their hopes in the trans-Siberian railway experience. Frazer’s article, and Bruce Lincoln’s book on the subject of Siberia, reminds you of the unique aspects of this place, which surely make Russia as unique a place as it is.

As Frazer points out, Siberia has now official borders. It stretches across 8 time zones, dwarfs America, holds untold natural resources, contains the largest forest in the world as well as a vast steppe, stretches from Mongolia to the Arctic, touches three seas, and contains some of the coldest locations on the planet, some cities reaching negative 90 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also been the site of some important history, including Mongol invasions, journeys of exploration and colonial conquest, fur trapping, the exile of revolutionaries like Stalin and Lenin, Civil War conflict, industrial strikes, and notable trips by men like Chekhov (Sakhalin Island is technically part of Siberia) and George Kennan.

One part of Frazer’s treatment of Siberia that struck me as funny, but not necessarily relevant to his article, is that most Americans of my own generation were exposed to Russian through the military board game, Risk, which makes the extreme eastern portion of Siberia into a strategic gateway into Alaska and the American continent. More relevant, perhaps, is the author’s reminder that Russians, and to a lesser extent everybody in the West, uses the term Siberia as a metaphor for isolation and distance. To be in Siberia, is to be lost or, worse still, to be (borrowing a phrase from the book of the same title) in the geography of nowhere.
For me, the strangeness of Siberia is best captured by a book I read on the subject of the extinct woolly mammoth, of all things.

Frazer’s article reminded me of the book. For as late as the 19Th century, so many woolly mammoths were found in the area that mammoth ivory was a major export. In fact, from time to time scientist discover frozen mammoth carcasses, as opposed to either fossils or bones. According to this book on the mammoths, some scientists hope to be able to use the DNA to revive the species and are even discussing the kind of habitat the resurrected mammoths will need to survive. (Presumably, the intent is to inpregnate a female elephant). Even without the science fiction involved in finding mammoth sperm to bring these creatures back to life, it appears that live mammoths were roaming the area when people were building the pyramids in Africa, or as late as 5000BC. Dwarf mammoth skeletons or fossils have been found on Siberian arctic islands for example; they shrunk, as all species tend to do, when a group of them became isolated on these islands and cut off from the mainland.