Amalrik was put to work digging pits for poles that were supposed to carry power lines. In the hot Western Siberian summer, he was assaulted by clouds of midges, his face became swollen with their bites, and in order to urinate in peace he had to climb to the top of a tree. When resting in the shade, he lit a fire to keep the midges away, but the moment he sat down, huge Siberian ants beleaguered him with even more powerful stings. All this discomfort, however, was both unnecessary and useless. The pits were dug with a spade because no one had bothered to fix a drill, the wooden supports for the poles were untreated and doomed to rot, and “in the end ... there was no wire!”790 In other tasks, too, a little machinery would have gone a long way, but the Stalinist psychology of the 1930s had trickled down to levels where it no longer made even tyrannical sense. Why buy a tractor or a mechanical mower, for example, when labor was free?
The ethnic patchwork of the countryside likewise reflected the Gulag years. Guryevka’s settlers had come from Byelorussia; neighboring villages were inhabited by Latvians, Tatars, and Poles. They all had to cut wood at the nearest lumber camp, where they were treated like common prisoners, and in the spring they labored with the same lack of enthusiasm at the local collective farm. Shaped by collectivization, they had lost their proprietary attachment to the soil. In fact, the spirit of enterprise had been so rooted out of them that they worked just as inefficiently on their own private plots as on the farm. And in winter, they drank themselves into a stupor nearly every day.
The fact that exiles were sent to live among them merely served to remind them of what a limited life they led. “Baffled and hurt,” wrote Amalrik, “that their town should be used as a prison, they said, ‘Why is our life, which we live all the time, considered a punishment?’ ”791 which didn’t do very much for local morale.
At the same time, prison camp culture (like exile culture before it) had left an indelible imprint on Siberian life. With familiar improvisation, many Siberians in remote hamlets devised homemade, gas-fume lamps out of copper tubes soldered to tin cans, or created playing cards out of sheets of paper glued together with starch. Sometimes the starch was produced by straining masticated bread through a rag. Others drank chifir, an extremely bitter, densely brewed coarse tea that was once used as a camp amphetamine and is now favored by long-distance truck drivers in the north as a completely reliable means of staying awake. Peasants make their own muddy-green vodka from rye, but fortify it with ethyl or denatured alcohol. The higher the latitude, the stronger the brew – for it is “a Siberian tradition,” we are told, “to have the percentage of pure alcohol in vodka match the latitude of the place where it is consumed.”792 Eau de cologne, and even turpentine and anti-freeze filtered through bread and cotton, are sometimes used by Siberian alcoholics to keep their spirits up.
Unable to rely on Russian medicine to cure their ailments, Siberians also tend to fall back on home remedies, such as suppositories made of raw potatoes for treating hemorrhoids and compresses made of sauerkraut for migraine. Vodka, of course, is often liberally consumed for medicinal purposes (to kill any harmful bacteria, it is said, that might inadvertently be ingested at a meal), and sugar serves as a general antidote to poisons. Official prescriptions dispensed by a local pharmacy are not necessarily more effective or safe.
Lacking the technology to exploit the resources it possessed, by the 1980s the Soviet Union had begun to face an energy crisis, with its oil and coal industries unable to increase production. Some parts of the Trans-Siberian had yet to be electrified; tankers commissioned for the transport of petroleum in the Arctic seas proved too big for their designated ports; other problems stalled the economy. Perestroika seemed to promise a way out. Dozens of foreign companies – Amoco, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, PalmCo., among others – signed “protocols of intent” with Soviet state concerns, covering possible joint ventures in oil and gas development in Western Siberia, lumber and gas-pipeline projects in the Far East, the building of cold-storage and other facilities for processing, packaging, and transporting food, port development, housing, ski resorts, hotels, discos, and so on; yet few real deals were struck. The risks seemed extravagant, and Soviet organizations were notorious for reneging on agreements, bills, and the delivery of promised goods. In the last days of the Union, as the internal distribution system broke down completely, the barter economy within and between republics, districts, cities, towns, factories, and individuals reached new heights. Timber was swapped for grain, shoes for tractors, sugar for cement. In some cases, goods were exchanged for expertise – the Amur District, for example, supplied soybeans to a butter-and-fat combine in Khabarovsk in return for help in its garment industry. Under such circumstances, the border trade along the Sino-Siberian frontier (based in part on the barter system, but also using Swiss francs as the currency of exchange) flourished, with Siberians obtaining finished Chinese goods like towels, blouses, shirts, and flashlights for such things as fertilizer and wood.
History is long, and “whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the Heels,” cautioned Sir Walter Ralegh in his History of the World, “it may happily strike out his Teeth.” Ralegh (subject to a sovereign’s wrath) had more than the problems of veracity in mind, but in attempting to fathom Russia’s future one could do worse (for once) than appropriate an enigmatic sentence from Tass on an attempt by a research team to determine the deepest point of Lake Baikaclass="underline" “Data on the magnetic declination of Baikal’s anomalies was specified.”793 Perhaps only one thing can be said for certain, and it recalls a prediction made over two centuries ago by Mikhail Lomonosov who, in a fit of enthusiasm for Russia’s early eastern expansion, wrote: “Russia’s might will grow by way of Siberia.”794 He said this before the empire of the tsars had been largely established; now that that empire, inherited by the Soviets, has dissolved, it is true beyond any dream he could have had.
When the Russians first plunged across the Urals, there had been, aside from the tenuously confederated “state” of Sibir, no national political entity to oppose them; and as they rapidly extended their conquest across the land, none emerged until they were confronted in the Amur Valley by the Chinese. The Chinese never claimed any part of Siberia for themselves (beyond the suzerainty owed to them by a few of the tribes), and what interest they had in the land north of Mongolia was readily relinquished in 1689 by the Treaty of Nerchinsk. So, aside from the hereditary rights of the aboriginal population, Russia’s possession of this huge territory faces no plausible challenge from any other power. Nor are the natives sufficiently numerous (in proportion to the Russians) to mount a collective nationalist movement of any force. All today are minorities in their own homelands, and few would be likely to agitate for some kind of independent statehood where none existed before. Only if Siberia itself as a “colony” of the mother country were to declare its independence could it join in the pattern of separation that has dissolved the USSR.