– Henry Norman, All the Russias
PART ONE
1
THE SLEEPING LAND
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Russia lay in ruins. War, famine, plague, and police-state terror under Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first tsar, had depopulated the interior; Moscow itself had been burned to the ground. Its troops in retreat, contained to the west by Poland and a resurgent Sweden, and to the south by the Crimean Tatars backed by the Ottoman Turks, Russia turned to the east, where Siberia, “mysterious and far-extending, opened her arms.”1 By an accident of history comparable to Columbus’s discovery of America, a relatively minor frontier action led, within the space of a few generations, to the conquest and occupation of a territory larger than the Roman Empire.
So sudden was the acquisition that Russia never quite managed to take full account of what it possessed; yet today that vast territory – the richest resource area on the face of the Earth – is the hope of Russia’s desperate future and the world’s last true frontier.
Siberia, as the Russians first encountered it, was a geological and anthropological wonder. Although part of it resembled the European Russian north, and its level marshlands to the south continued the endless sweep of the Eastern European plain, it was a subcontinent apart, and aside from its western margins, unknown except by name. Large mountain ranges cut across it to the south and east, majestic volcanoes on its far horizons formed part of the Pacific rim of fire, and its mighty rivers, rivals to the Mississippi and the Nile, could, if linked together, encircle the globe twenty-five times. Each one of its three major river basins was larger than the whole of Western Europe. In climate, it ranged from the Arctic to the semi-tropical, supported animals as diverse as camels and polar bears, and shared latitudes with areas as distant as Thule, Greenland, and Marseilles. Five million square miles, or about 7.5 percent of the total land surface of the globe, lay within its compass, from the Urals to the Pacific, and from Mongolia to the Arctic seas. In trying to imagine what this means, one nineteenth-century explorer remarked:
If it were possible to move entire countries from one part of the globe to another, you could take the whole United States of America from Maine to California and from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, and set it down in the middle of Siberia, without touching anywhere the boundaries of the latter territory. You could then take Alaska and all the States of Europe, with the single exception of Russia, and fit them into the remaining margin like the pieces of a dissected map; and after having thus accommodated all of the United States, including Alaska, and all of Europe, except Russia, you would still have more than 300,000 square miles of Siberian territory to spare.2
Siberia also included perhaps the oldest place on earth, north of Mongolia around Lake Baikal.* At the turn of the century, an expedition to the area searched for traces of the Garden of Eden, and although the Siberian north might seem inimical to the ever-green idea of a garden of earthly delights, in its natural resources, in fact, Siberia would prove beyond compare. Two parables explain the paradoxical plenitude of its ice-bound wealth. One wittily provides that in distributing earth’s bounty across the land, the hands of God momentarily froze as they passed over Siberia and let riches fall upon it in disproportionately large amounts. But another holds that when God saw that man was not worthy of the wealth he had provided, he froze it and locked it away in frosty desolation, and made the land itself lifeless in expiation of Adam’s sins. “Siberia” itself is a mystical term, derived from the Mongolian siber (“beautiful,” “wonderful,” and “pure”), and the Tatar sibir, which means “the sleeping land.”
The sleeping beauty at its heart was Lake Baikal, the oldest lake in the world, the largest fresh-water lake by volume (with about a fifth of the fresh water on the surface of the globe), and the deepest continental body on earth. Fed by some 336 tributary rivers and streams, it formed a crescent nearly 400 miles long, yet had an isolated ecosystem comparable to that of the Galapagos Islands, where the path of evolution could still be traced. Of its 1,700 indigenous species of plant and animal life, 1,200 were unique – including a fish called the golomyanka, which gave birth to live young. Baikal also had tens of thousands of freshwater seals – although the nearest ocean was 1,000 miles away. To ancient Chinese chroniclers, however, it was known as the “Northern Ocean,” and revered by a number of Siberian tribes as the “Holy Sea.” Even the Russians, who developed various superstitions about its sudden, apparently willful storms (whipped up by winds sweeping down from its volcanic ramparts), would say that “it is only upon Baikal in autumn that a man learns to pray from his heart.”3
The overall topography of Siberia divided rather neatly into three broad horizontal zones. To the north lay a great treeless tundra, extending along the whole Arctic coast from Novaya Zemlya to Bering Strait; through the middle stretched a broad belt of forest from the Ural Mountains to the Okhotsk Sea; and to the south, arable land that shaded into semi-arid desert steppes from the southern Urals to beyond the Mongolian frontier.
Inhospitable and desolate, the desert-dry tundra was covered for most of the year by trackless wastes of snow. Nothing grew upon it but tufts of coarse grass or swards of moss and lichen, and fierce Arctic gales, known as purgas, drifted and packed and scored its snowy surface into long, hard, fluted waves. Underneath was a thick substratum of “geological ice” or permafrost – eternally frozen ground – that was so deep in places as to be “centrally defeated only by the heat from the earth’s hot core.”4 In summer, the ground thawed to a depth of just a few feet, and below that was impervious to water, and hard as iron. In a sense, each spring it rained upward, since evaporation was the only way water could escape. As melting snow saturated the topsoil, over time it had become covered with a dense, luxuriant growth of gray Arctic moss. “Moss had grown out of decaying moss, year after year,” until the whole tundra had become “one vast, spongy bog.”5
Along the tundra’s southernmost margins, some trees took root, but in the shallow soil they assumed grotesquely horizontal forms. The dwarf or trailing cedar grew “like a neglected vine along the ground,”6 and other trees became remarkably gnarled and twisted from ever-turning toward the meager Arctic light. As they revolved upon themselves, their short, knotty trunks appeared in time as if entwined “with terrible growths like splints on broken bones.”7
Set against this arboreal grotesque was a landscape that also at times looked as though it had been designed by a fastidious Creator devoted to geometry. By a process still mysterious, but connected to the alternate thawing and freezing, expanding and contracting of the soil, the early summer melt collected into perfectly round lakes, and stones squeezed to the surface were often arranged in neat, decorously concentric circles, with the larger stones on the periphery and the smaller stones within. Ice-wedges, made by melt-water trickling into cracks or frost-fissures, also broke the soil into exactly drawn, even-sided polygons.
On the fringe of the tundra, 200 to 400 miles inland from the coast, the primeval coniferous forest, or taiga, began. Scattered larches, groping for a patch of thawed ground, appeared first; and then, by degrees, came denser stands of spruce, fir, cedar, birch, and pine, until their intertwining branches formed a thick canopy above the forest floor. The heart of the taiga was bathed in twilight even at noon, but its greater enchantment lay in the thousands upon thousands of miles of its extent – “only migrating birds,”8 wrote Chekhov, “know where it ends.” In contrast to the limited wildlife of the tundra (the reindeer, polar bear, lemming, and Arctic fox), the taiga teemed with brown and black bear, wolves, sables, squirrel, polecats, stoats, lynx, elk, hare, wild boar, badgers, wolverine, and hundreds of species of birds, including ducks and geese.