Siberia took me aback. The vastness of it is staggering, almost incomprehensible. Before I ever went there, Siberian friends had tried to explain the character of their native land to me, but words cannot capture it. Russians regard Siberians as a race apart – ethnically, linguistically and culturally Russian, they nonetheless have a bearing that marks them out. It is something to do with calmness, steadiness and openness. I have stood with the pianist Denis Matsuev in the moments before he walks on stage to play to 3,000 people and there is not a flicker of disquiet in his deep Siberian eyes. A great bear of a man, his colossal hands rain down on the keys with boundless power – his colleagues affectionately call him ‘the piano smasher’ – but there is no hint of effort in his unflappable face. Siberia breeds stoicism, endurance and quietude, qualities born and nurtured in a place of herculean geography, where the extremes of beauty and suffering are the stuff of daily life.
Standing on the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains, I find the distances hard to take in. In shades of green and yellow, the steppe stretches in all directions to the infinity of a barely discernible horizon. In winter, all this will be covered with pure, endless snow. Hardly surprising that this place has spawned legends of space and emptiness and freedom. Hardly surprising that the people of sixteenth-century Muscovy – oppressed under Ivan the Terrible, terrorised and dispossessed in the Time of Troubles – should look to escape eastwards, to find release and air and liberty here in the unfettered Siberian lands. There’s a word for it in Russian – volya. It means ‘freedom’, but it also means ‘will’ or ‘independence’; and, as it became ever more associated with the untamed east, it began to acquire overtones of wildness, volatility and the unknown. In later years, Siberia would gain a reputation as a place of deportation, exile and labour camps. Siberia as heaven; Siberia as hell – it has never been a place for the faint-hearted.
The rush into Siberia at the end of the sixteenth century was famously led by the dashing Cossack Yermak Timofeyevich, his memory immortalised in Russian folk poetry and popular ballads:
On the Volga, on the Kama1,
Lived the Cossacks as free men!
Their leader – Yermak as they called him –
whispered to his bold comrades:
‘True Cossacks, brothers all!
When summer’s gone and winter’s come,
Where, oh where, shall we live then?
On the Volga, to live as thieves?
Attack Kazan and meet the Tsar?
For he has sent his men,
Forty thousand ’gainst us few —
No, brothers, no!
Let us go … and take Siberia!’
Like many who came to Siberia in those days, Yermak was on the run. The Cossacks acknowledged no master – their very name means ‘free men’; their kingdom was the dikoye polye, the wild steppe – and Yermak had fallen out with the tsar over his plundering of Russian merchant convoys.
Siberia was the refuge of choice for Russia’s outcasts and outlaws. Its virgin lands needed populating and Moscow was not too choosy who did it. Ivan the Terrible handed out 20-year charters to noble families like the Stroganovs to set up colonies, but what he claimed were ‘empty lands’ were actually the fiefdoms of Islamic khans, successors of the Mongols and the Golden Horde.
The colonisers needed fighting men to drive them out, and Yermak was quickly signed up. In 1582, he led a small band of Cossacks deep into the Siberian hinterland, terrifying the local population with the sound of gunfire and massacring the forces of the Siberian khan Kuchum. But as winter fell, Yermak found himself cut off, far from home and short of food and bullets. With a panache that would write his name in the history books, he sent envoys back across the Ural Mountains with a message announcing that he had ‘conquered Siberia’. He apologised for his past crimes against the tsar and told Ivan he was quite willing to be hanged for them, but if pardoned he would ‘deliver the Kingdom of Sibir’ to the Muscovite crown.
Ivan the Terrible duly pardoned Yermak, conferring on him the title of Prince of Siberia and sending him reinforcements and a superb suit of silver armour. Shortly afterwards, in a skirmish with the forces of the khan, Yermak was pursued across a tributary of the Irtysh River where the weight of the splendid armour dragged him to his death:
It was at the little stream2 Kamyshinka, friends –
At the little stream Kamyshinka,
Where there lived a people proud and free.
At their head stood Yermak, son of Timofey.
Alas for the son of Timofey … Alas!
Yermak may not have lived to see it, but the conquest of Siberia was to be completed with astonishing rapidity, opening up vast sources of wealth that transformed Muscovy from a state on the brink of collapse to a nation of unparalleled riches. In later years, it would be Siberia’s gold, coal, timber and iron – and nowadays her vast stores of oil and gas – that would make Russia a superpower. But, as Elizabeth I’s ambassador Giles Fletcher wrote with some envy, Siberia’s first gift was fur:
The native commodities of the countrie3 (wherewith they serve both their owne turnes, and sende much abroad, to the great enriching of the emperour and his people) are many and substantiall. First, furres of all sortes. Wherein the providence of God is to be noted, that provideth a naturall remedie for them, to helpe the naturall inconvenience of their countrie by the colde of the clymat (for it would breede a very frost in a man to look abroad in that place). Their chiefe furres are these: blacke fox, sables, lusernes, dunne fox, martrones, gurnestalles or armins, lasets or miniver, bever, wulverins, the skin of a great water ratte that smelleth naturally like muske, calaber or gray squirrell, red squirell, red and white foxe. Besides the great quantitie spent within the countrie (the people beyng clad all in furres the whole winter), there are transported out of the countrie some yeares by the marchants of Turkie, Persia, Bougharia, Georgia, Armenia, and some other of Christendome, to the value of foure or five hundred thousand rubbels, as I have heard.
Furs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were to become a sort of international gold standard, traded, bartered and creating huge fortunes. Fur fever in Siberia acted something like the Alaskan gold rush in nineteenth-century America, drawing in hopeful settlers who by 1648 had established a Russian presence all the way across the region, as far as the Pacific Ocean. Like the American Wild West, the ever-retreating frontier of unoccupied land became a powerful and enduring El Dorado for Russia’s self-made men. In the popular imagination, the virgin lands of southern Siberia even today inspire tales of daring adventure and romance.
But as well as material gains, Muscovy’s expansionism had another goal – security. The experience of foreign aggression and repeated invasion had imbued the Russian mindset with an obsessive desire for protection: her frontiers were long and vulnerable, with no natural barriers such as seas or mountains, so she drove the danger further and further from her heartlands by energetic colonisation in all directions. Russia felt she could be safe only if she controlled her Eurasian hinterland – east and west – and the Soviet Union’s obsessive grip on her East European ‘buffer states’ suggests that similar fears lasted well into our own times.
East of the Urals, the vastness of Siberia meant Russia could not at first settle her new lands. But she did her best to assimilate or subdue the native populations. Through military force, trading links, the extraction of tribute and the exploitation of natural resources she laid the foundations of the multi-ethnic, multilingual empire that would determine her future.
There is, though, another, darker side to Siberia. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934), with its prisoner’s lament on the journey to the east, poignantly evokes the convict road that so many Russians would tread over the next four centuries:
Mile after mile creeps by4 in the endless march.
The heat of the day is done,
The sun on the steppes is setting.
Oh, road, where chains are dragged,
where bones of the dead still lie,
where blood and sweat have flowed,
to the echoing groans of the dying!
Isaak Levitan’s painting The Vladimirka Road (1892) captures similar emotions. In a desolate landscape, a path has been worn through the steppe. It stretches to the far horizon, where it seems to have no end. There are no human figures in Levitan’s canvas, but the power of the work is the unspoken presence of the generations of feet that have created the path, as they marched eastwards along the convict road to exile.
Siberia as land of opportunity has always coexisted with Siberia as land of torment and captivity. From the seventeenth century, they developed side by side. First the tsars, then the Soviet leaders saw it as a safe, distant dumping ground for those who threatened their power. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lenin, Stalin, Osip Mandelstam and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn were among those who trod its frozen paths, each of them exiled for troubling the Kremlin autocrats. The early Romanovs sent convicted criminals and prisoners of war to forced service in battalions defending the frontier; exile in tsarist times was largely to villages and towns, where offenders would be monitored until the end of their sentence (Lenin was allowed to take his hunting rifles and half his voluminous library with him). But by the1930s, Siberia was covered in a network of labour camps, and the majority of inmates were political prisoners. Even if a prisoner escaped, death awaited him from starvation in the forests and swamps.
I have seen the places where so many suffered in Stalin’s Gulag. Most traces of the camps have been erased, but not all of them can be. About 120 miles outside the Siberian town of Tyumen, in the midst of endless birch forests, I found the remains of the Bazhenov labour camp slowly being reclaimed by weeds and saplings. Right beside it, though, a vast hole in the ground – a mile wide and seemingly almost as deep – bore indelible witness to the work of the thousands of prisoners who were forced to quarry asbestos here. Today, the work continues with modern mining methods, but deaths from lung disease in the area are enormously high. Just standing on the edge of the pit makes me uneasy about what I am breathing in. But back in the 1940s and 1950s, camp inmates were forced to chip away at the asbestos with picks and shovels and without any protection. The camp records make poignant reading. At least 7,000 men and 600 women were imprisoned here5, and documents list the tasks they were forced to carry out: ‘manual work in asbestos quarry; digging of mine shafts; geological explorations; work in asbestos processing facilities; asbestos enrichment tasks; building of road and rail transport facilities; construction of camp buildings and accommodation’.
The archives list the names of the camp commandants over the years of its existence – Colonels Afanasiev and Trofimov; Lieutenant-Colonels Yorkin, Zheleznikov, Filimonov, Perminov; Major Gorbunov – and record that Bazhenov was finally closed6 on 29 April 1953, less than two months after the death of Stalin. The records testify that Colonel Trofimov was ‘relieved of his duties due to ill health’, although his illness is not specified. There is no information about the health of inmates either during or after their time in the camp.
Bazhenov was one of nearly 500 ITLs – Correctional Labour Camps – that made up Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of locations mostly here in Siberia, but spreading to nearly all areas of the Soviet Union, where an estimated 14 million people were imprisoned between 1929 and 1953. Conditions were made deliberately harsh. Political prisoners – the politzeks – were treated worst of all, and it’s thought one and half million died from hunger, disease, cold and exhaustion. The population of the camps was a valuable source of free labour for the Soviet Union as it rushed to build its industrial base. All the great Siberian construction projects – the railways, canals, power stations and gigantic blast furnaces that became the showpieces of the Soviet economy – were built by prisoners. When the central planners ran short of labour, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or secret police) would always supply them with more freshly arrested ‘enemies of the people’. Like Bazhenov, the majority of ITLs were closed after Stalin’s death, but some continued to operate well into the 1980s.
A period of openness about the camps came in the 1990s when archives were declassified, but today the Russian state harasses organisations like Memorial that continue to expose the crimes of the Soviet era. Siberians live daily with the legacy of their past, not just from the twentieth century but from earlier times of exile too. The Siberian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, himself a descendant of exiles, captures the ambivalent nature of the place – as freedom or as banishment – in his haunting, autobiographical narrative poem Stantsiya Zima (literally ‘Winter Station’, in fact the name of his home town):
These involuntary peasant settlers7
took (I suppose) this foreign countryside
like fate, each to his own unhappiness:
one’s stepmother, however kind-hearted,
can never be the same as a mother.
But having crumbled its soil in their fingers,
and let their children drink of its water,
they realised it was their own, the flesh
of their flesh, tied by blood to them.
So they put on again the yoke of destitution,
that bitter-tasting life. No one blames
an old nail sliding into a wall: it’s being
hammered with the butt of an axe!
There were so many hardships,
anxieties of survival;
however much they bent their
labouring backs,
it always turned out it was not they
who consumed the crops –
The crops consumed them …
It would be many years after the initial sixteenth-century colonies before Moscow could extend her centralised control to the furthest reaches of her empire. In the early years, when Yevtushenko’s ancestors first arrived, much of Siberia remained beyond the pale. Many who were exiled there simply disappeared into its endless landscape. The Siberian taiga became a refuge for the discontented, the overtaxed and disaffected peoples of European Russia – a sort of safety valve for those who harboured resentment against the tsar and his agents. One such group would eventually grow into a major force in Russian history, attracting millions of followers.
On a day of biblical-scale downpours, I waded through the puddles in a rutted cinder track on the edge of Yekaterinburg, a city of around a million people on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains. I was looking for a church, the Shrine of the Birth of Christ, and found it tucked away behind a sports field and medical dispensary. My knock at the wooden door at the back of the church was answered by a tall, serious priest, his black beard trailing down his black cassock and his long hair tied tightly back. Father Pavel declined my offer to shake hands, saying the priesthood did not permit it. He looked in his fifties but told me he was 39. I said I had come in search of the Old Believers, and he nodded gravely. ‘That is not a name we encourage. We are the true Church, the only Church.’
The Old Believers – Starovery or Staro-obryadtsy – are the heirs of historical disaffection. Their ancestors were religious dissidents who split from the official Muscovite Church in the 1650s, fled to Siberia and braved centuries of persecution to keep their form of worship alive. Like the Pilgrim Fathers, they opted for exile rather than betray their beliefs. But numerically, and politically, they were much more significant. Many millions of Russians renounced the official Church in a schism that began as a protest against the state-sponsored reform of liturgical rituals – how to make the sign of the cross, how to bow, how many times to say hallelujah – but developed into a power struggle over the role of Church and State.
The Old Believers opposed the hijacking of religious belief by a centralised state-sponsored hierarchy and clung to democratic self-determination in the appointment of priests and the running of parishes. So fierce were their beliefs that thousands of them burned themselves to death rather than submit.
When the Old Believers were declared heretics and excommunicated en masse, the spirit of rage and resentment came close to revolution. And it found a remarkable spokesman in a fiery priest from Nizhny Novgorod called Avvakum Petrov:
What we need to do is spit8 on all these newfangled rituals and books and then all will be well … As to my excommunication, it came from heretics so in Christ’s name I trample it underfoot. And the curse they have put on me? I won’t mince my words – I wipe my arse with it!
As students, we all loved Avvakum’s autobiography because it was full of such pithy, vigorous putdowns – there’s plenty of straight talk about sex and descriptions of his opponents as ‘shit-faced pharisees’ wiping their backsides with hellfire – all expressed in a laconic, down-to-earth brand of Old Russian. But as I re-read it now, I see what a marvellous document the Life of Avvakum is, and what a remarkable man he was. When Tsar Alexei began to crack down on the schismatics with the cooperation of the official Church under its patriarch Nikon, Avvakum and his family were banished to Siberia. In his Life, Avvakum recounts how for 14 years they were imprisoned in a pit dug into the frozen earth. In the face of certain death – he was eventually burned at the stake in 1682 – he meditates on the nature of spiritual belief and earthly authority, in a series of agonised, self-doubting but ultimately triumphant passages:
As they were beating me, I felt no pain9 because of the prayers I was saying. But now as I lie here the thought comes to me: Oh, Son of God, why did you let them beat me so? When I was living as a sinful man, You did not chastise me, but now I know not in what I have sinned … Woe for my sinful soul! My daughters dwell in poverty and their mother and brothers lie buried in a dungeon in the earth. But what can be done? Every man must endure pain for the Christian faith, and with God’s help I will accept that which has been ordained and will come to pass … Many have been burned and baked. They burned Isaiah and Abraham and other defenders of the Church. God will count the number of them … So, are you afraid of that furnace? Take heart, spit on it, and do not be afraid! You may feel afraid, but as soon as you go into the furnace, everything will be over in an instant … When we all are dead, these words of mine shall be read and we shall be remembered before God … In very truth I know not how I may endure this thing to the end: but I glorified God and He knows that. I am in His hands now …
As I walked into the Old Believer Church in Yekaterinburg, I suppose I was vaguely expecting Father Pavel to be a modern-day version of fiery old Avvakum. He spoke cogently about his own experiences – how he had helped reclaim the church building from the state after the Communists had converted it into a museum, how he and two other priests had built up the congregation and engaged local icon painters to restore the iconostasis. But when I asked if relations with the official Orthodox Church were better now, Father Pavel frowned. ‘How can we have good relations with them? They have betrayed the truth of Christ.’ I must have looked puzzled because Father Pavel launched into a tirade. ‘We are the only Church that has remained constant. And those who remain constant will win salvation. How can anyone believe the sign of the cross should be made with three fingers, like they do? Of course it must be made with two fingers, as Our Lord has taught us …’
As the priest spoke, I thought of the centuries of deaths and suffering, the mass immolations like those portrayed with vivid fury in Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina, and I was at a loss to understand. How could the difference between two fingers and three fingers, or saying hallelujah three times instead of two, lead men to murder and die with such alacrity? The answer, undoubtedly, was that people were taught and came to believe that these things made the critical difference between eternal salvation and the burning fires of hell. It put me in mind of the fervent women I had encountered scurrying through the catacombs of Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves. From the seventeenth century onwards, the passion that led men to die for such convictions fomented huge resentment against a Muscovite state that was seen as encouraging apostasy.
Two months after Avvakum’s death, a new tsar would come to the throne, and the swelling anger of the Old Believers would be part of a daunting set of problems he would have to tackle: a semi-underground Church in sullen opposition to the state, and a yawning gap between an autocratic tsar and a downtrodden people; an empire over-extended in Siberia and in the increasingly troublesome south. The new tsar would have to make changes, and make them fast, if he wanted to avert the looming crisis.