Authors: Colin Thubron
In Siberia (37 page)
And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.
Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at
me. âYou know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.'
âA joke?'
âYes. He was in charge of the village telephone, and one day he told somebody in passing: “By the way, Stalin's on the phone to you!” So he ended up in the camps for five years. My parents must have suffered for that.' He presses a wooden slat back with his boot. âPeople grew up in their parents' silence.'
We climb to where he remembers the cemetery lay, but it is lost under snow. The opalescent light has intensified over the valley. Around us the trees and shrubs are laden and heavy, as if bearing white fruit. They shiver with tiny wagtails. I pick some dwarf-cedar needles, which prisoners used to boil in the futile hope of deflecting scurvy.
I say: âWhatever it's like now, things are better than they were then.'
Yuri does not answer at first. Everything with him takes a long time. He has a slight stutter. He says: âThose were religious times, in a way. People believed things.' He seems to envy that.
So suffering came down from the sky, as natural as rain or hail. There was no one to accuse. No one was near enough, embodied enough. Stalin's empire, like Hitler's Reich, was meant to last through all imaginable time. The past had been reorganised for ever, the future preordained.
I say, not knowing: âYou'll never go back to that.'
Yuri says: âWe're not the same as you in the West. Maybe we're more like you were centuries ago. We're late with our history here. With us, time still goes in circles.'
I don't want to hear this, not here in the heart of darkness. I want him to call this place an atrocious mystery. I want him not to understand it. With his blond moustache and Tartar cheekbones, I have cast him as the quintessential Russian, the litmus test for the future. The mountain air has gone to my head.
But his hand, which was tracing a circle, now tentatively lifts. âMaybe we spiral a little,' he says, âa little upwards.' He looks across to where the cableways limp in ghastly procession over the heights. âI wish my grandfather had lived on. He loved a good
joke, and people can joke about anything now. We've still got that. Jokes.'
I clasp his shoulder, but we are too fat in our quilted coats, and my hand slips from him. He smiles for the first time, on a mouthful of discoloured teeth, before turning back along the track.
And on that frozen hillside he starts to sing.
Abakan
Afghanistan: Russian war in
Aganbegyan, Abel
Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk
Alaska: sold to USA
Albazin
Aleksei (of Birobidzhan)
Aleksei Akilovich (Old Believer)
Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevich
Alexander I, Czar
Alexandra, Empress of Nicholas
Altai, Ice Princess of
Altai mountains
Altai republic
Amur river
Anfissa (of Tyumen)
Angara river
Association of the Tambour
see
Doongyr
Â
Babel, Isaak
Baikal, Lake
BaikalâAmur Railway
Baikalskoe
Baptists: in Komsomolsk-na-Amur
Baraba steppe
Barguzin ranges
Barnaul
Belovodye
(promised land)
Berezovka river
Bering, Vitus Jonassen
Birobidzhan
Blagoveshchensk
Boris Godunov, Czar
Boris (of Komsomolsk-na-Amur)
Botkin, Doctor
Bratsk High Dam
Brezhnev, Leonid
Buddhism: and shamanism
in Buryatia and
Christian missionaries
burial tombs
see kurgans
Buryat people
Buryatia
London Missionary Society
station in
Butugychag
Â
California
Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia
Cementny Zavod (punishment camp)
Charlemagne, Emperor
Chechnya
Chekhov, Anton
China: river Amur border with
Russia merchants in
Khabarovsk; trade with
Russia
Chita
Civil War (Russian, 1919â20)
Clara (of Birobidzhan)
Clinton, William Jefferson
coal mining: at Vorkuta
collectivisation
Conrad, Joseph
cosmic consciousness
Cossacks: in Siberia sack
Sibir (1582); found Irkutsk
at Albazin in
Manchu service; found
Yakutsk
Cowie, Martha see Yuille, Robert
and Martha
Â
Dalai Lama
Dalselmash factory
Dalstroy (agency)
Darwin, Charles
Decembrists
diamonds: in Sakha
Dikson
Diring Yuriakh
Dolgans (people)
Doongyr (Association of the Tambour)
Doroskova, Agrippina
Dostoevsky, Fedor: exile in Omsk
and cosmic
consciousness
drugs (narcotic)
Dudinka
Dukhobors
(âSpirit-wrestlers')
Dzhurma
, SS
Â
Ehrenburg, Ilya
Elgen(women's labour camp)
Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duchess
Entsy people
Evenk people
Â
Fedor (Magadan Jew)
Feodosy, Archbishop of Omsk
Â
Galina (curator, Museum of Siberian Culture)
Galina (Old Believer wife)
Garanin (Dalstroy official)
Genghis Khan
Ginzburg, Yevgenia
gold: in Kara; in Sakha
in Kolyma
Golden Horde (Mongol)
Goose Lake
Gorbachev, Mikhail
Gorno-Altaisk
Gulag: memories of; at
Vorkuta
graves; at Severobaikalsk
acceptance of; in
Kolyma
see also
labour camps
Â
Haroun al-Rashid, Caliph
Hegel, G. W. F.
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Herodotus
Herzen, Alexander
Hitler, Adolf: 1939 pact with Stalin
Horse river
Huns
Â
Igarka
Igor (Clara's son)
Indigirka
Innokent, St
Irkutsk
Irtysh river
Ivan IV (the Terrible), Czar
Ivolginsk
Ixodes tick
Â
Japan: investments in Far East
Jews: settlement in Birobidzhan
John Chrysostom St
Â
Kamchatka: volcanoes
Kara gold fields
Karakorum (state)
Kashketin (camp commandant)
katorga
death camps
Katun river
Ket people
KGB
Khabarov, Yerofey P.
Khabarovsk
Khlysti
(sect)
Khor river
Khrushchev, Nikita S.
Kipling, Rudyard
Kitezh, City of (legendary)
Kolchak, Admiral Alexander Vasilievich
Kolyma
Komsomolsk-na-Amur
Kozyrev, N. A.
Krasnoyarsk
Krupskaya, Nadezhda Lenin's wife)
Kuchum, Khan
kulaks
Kunga-Boo (shaman)
kurgans
(tombs)
Kuytun
Kuzbas basin
Kyzyl
Â
labour camps
see also
Gulag
Lavrentiev, M. A.
Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett
lemmings
Lena river
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: statues
exile
in Shushenskoe
death
London Missionary Society: in
Novoselenginsk
Â
mafia (Russian)
Magadan
mammoths
man, origins of
Manchu dynasty
Mandelstam, Osip
Mangazeya Marfa (circus artist)
Mastrov
(river steamer)
Melkite Church
Memorial (organisation)
mica
Mine 29 (Vorkuta)
Minusinsk
Misha (of Dudinka)
missionaries
Mochanov, Yuri
Mongolia: and Tuva
Christian missionaries in
mosquitoes
Mukhanov, Peter
mummies
Muraviev-Amursky, Count
Nikolai Nikolaevich
Museum of Siberian Culture
Â
Nansen, Fridtjof
Natasha (of Khabarovsk)
Nerchinsk silver-mines
Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689)
Nicholas I, Czar
Nicholas II, Czar: murdered with
family and
Rasputin sees mammoth
skeleton
Nikolai (Potalovo doctor)
Nivkhi tribesmen
Norilsk
Novoselenginsk
Novosibirsk
nuclear power
Â
Ob river
Ob Sea
oil fields
Oimyakon
Old Believers
Olga, Grand Duchess
Olga (Yekaterinburg pilgrim)
Olkhon island (Lake Baikal)
Omsk
Orotukuan
Â
paganism: among Yakuts
Paris Universal Exhibition (1900)
Pasternak, Boris
Pavlov (Dalstroy official)
Pazyryk culture
Pechora river
Pepeliaev, V.
perestroika
permafrost
Peter I (the Great), Czar
Pivan Pokrovskoe
pollution
Potalovo
Primoriye
Proctor, Richard Anthony
Pushkin, Alexander
Â
Rasputin, Grigory
Rasputin, Masha (pop star)
Rasputin, Valentin
Rechnoi state farm, Omsk
religion: practice and worship
churches
and monasteries revival
along Yenisei
see also
Buddhism
missionaries; Old Believers
paganism
Revnovo village
Rezanov, Nikolai
Roerich, Elena
Roerich, Nikolai
Russian Academy of Sciences
Â
sable
Sakha republic
Sakhalin
Sakharov, Andrei
Samoyed people
Sasha (Birobidzhan friend of Igor)
Sasha (of Novosibirsk)
Sayan mountains
science
Scythians
Selenga river (and valley)
Semyenov, Grigory
serfdom: abolished (1861)
Sergei, Grand Duke
Sergei (circus artist)
Sergei (Old Believer)
Serpentinka
Severobaikalsk
Seward, William
Shakhovskaya, Varvara
Shalamov, Varlam
shamans and shamanism
Shamil (of Severobaikalsk)
Shelikhov, Grigory
Shelikhova, Natalya
Shturmovoi
Shushenskoe
Siberia: extent migrants and
settlers in oil-fields
secession proposals
name; mystique
native peoples as
place of exile
religious dissenters in
Sibir
silver mines
Skoptsi
(sect)
Skovorodino
Sokol
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
Stalin, Josef: repressions and
persecutions
popular appeal
pact with Hitler (1939)
death
paranoia; exiled
in Turukhansk; empire
Stalina (Vadim's wife)
Stallybrass, Edward and Sarah
Steller, Georg
Stepan (Entsy man)
Stolypin, Piotr
Stone Tunguska river
Stroganov family
Stundists (sect)
Sverdlov, Yakov
Svetlana (Krasnoyarsk schoolteacher)
Â
taiga
âtaiga madness'
Tania (Yakut woman)
Tannu Ola
Tarbagatai
Tartars
Tayshet
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
Therese (Khabarovsk prostitute)
throat-singing
Timireva, Anna
Tobol river
Tobolsk
Tolbuzin, Aleksei
Tolstoy, Count Lev
Trakt road
Trans-Manchurian Railway Trans-Siberian Railway: towns;
slowness carries
migrants; replicated at
1900 Paris Exhibition
gauge; bypasses Tobolsk
building of
branches at Tayshet
character of trains
Transbaikal
Trubetskaya, Princess Yekaterina
tundra
Tura river
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Turukhansk
Tuva
Tyumen
Â
Udachny
Uglich: bell from
Ulan Ude
Union of Sovereign Northern
Republics: proposed
Ural mountains: character
Urchan
Ussuri river
Ust-Ulagan
Â
Vadim (traveller on Yenisei)
Valentina (of Dudinka)
Vasil (of Vorkuta)
Viktor (of Pokrovskoe)
Vladivostok
Volkonskaya, Princess Maria
Volodya (station-worker)
Vorkuta
Vorkuta river
Vorogovo
Â
Wagner, Moritz
women: in Soviet prison camps
status in
Siberia
Â
Yagodnoe
Yakimova, Rima
Yakut people
Yakutsk
Yakutsk Academy of Sciences
Yekaterinburg
Yeltsin, Boris
Yenisei river: size; travel on
headwaters; contamination
confluence at Kyzyl; at
Krasnoyarsk
Yeniseisk
Yermak (Cossack leader)
Yuille, Robert and Martha (nee Cowie)
Yulia (Clara's daughter)
Yuri (geologist)
Â
Zarinsk
Zaslavskaya, Tatyana
Zhigulin, Anatoly
Zhirinovsky, Vladimir
Zhukov, Marshal Georgi
Znamensky Monastery, Irkutsk