In the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, it was still possible to reach the capital from Kamchatka more quickly by sailing eastward across the Pacific Ocean to California, traversing the United States by rail, embarking on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean for Europe, and from there continuing on to St. Petersburg by horse or rail.
Although the Great Siberian Post Road spanned the distance overland, it was little better than “a mere track cut by caravan traffic,”545 pitted and unpaved. The seatless, springless carts in which wayfarers were customarily obliged to travel (with their knees squeezed up to mitigate the joint-wrenching jolts) were notoriously uncomfortable, and even the stalwart Kennan found traveling by telega, as such vehicles were called, almost too much for him. “On a bad, rough road,” he wrote, it “will simply jolt a man’s soul out in less than twenty-four hours. Before we had travelled sixty miles... I was so exhausted that I could hardly sit upright; my head and spine ached so violently, and had become so sensitive to shock, that every jolt was as painful as a blow from a club.”546 In spring, the roads were also awash in mire, and roughened by daily thaws and nightly frosts. Still worse was the Yakutsk-to-Okhotsk Track, which had been reconstructed in the mid-1750s by convicts, but somehow to no avail. Corduroy roads (or wooden causeways) had been laid over some of the bogs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but so many horses floundered in the snow or slipped and fell where rain and other weathering had caused the wood to rot that scarcely one of every hundred survived. One traveler reported seeing more than two thousand horse skeletons between Okhotsk to Yudoma Cross, some with their heads grotesquely protruding from the mire.
Aside from a telega, all that could be had for travel was a rudimentary, poorly sprung carriage called a tarantass. In either case, to travel by post station meant to travel “by transfer,” that is, having to change vehicles and horses at every stop, unloading and reloading one’s luggage perhaps hundreds of times in the course of a trip.
Boxes and cases with sharp edges had to be discarded, and all one’s gear packed in flat leather bags. Bedded in hay, these formed the foundation for what was to be the traveler’s bed for the duration of the journey. On top of this layer came a fur sleeping bag, or a mattress and rugs and blankets. Soft pillows were needed to line the whole of the back part of the vehicle, and in the front pan, under the driver’s seat, space had to be found for all the odds and ends needed for a journey of several weeks – food, teapot, cutlery, and so on... To repeat the packing process as well, over two hundred times, at all hours of the day and night, in the depths of a Siberian winter, was not something to be looked forward to.547
It was much better to buy or hire one’s own carriage, if possible, for the duration, and sleep on it at night rather than in one of the miserable inns.
Siberia’s fame, of course, attracted all sorts of wilderness enthusiasts, missionaries, scientists, ethnographers, geologists, journalists, world travelers, and Victorian dilettantes. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, Siberian travel literature became almost the rage. One American, who set out to cross Siberia on foot, wore a hat that was telescopic and could be used as an umbrella. Even so, before his journey was half done, his hair had become as bleached as sheep’s wool. Another came to rough it on a holiday, and John Dundas Cochrane, a captain in the Royal Navy, proposed to walk around the globe via Siberia “as nearly as could be done by land.”548 Setting out from London, he crossed the English Channel to Dieppe, traveled on to Moscow, and from there all the way across northern Asia to the Sea of Okhotsk. Still unspent by his exertions, he embarked for Kamchatka, but soon after his arrival fell in love with a Kamchadal maiden and returned with her westward the way he had come. There were also priggish Anglican clerics who disapproved of everything aboriginal, investigative journalists like Kennan, tsarist apologists, and scientists like Adolph Erman, a Prussian physicist who had studied in Berlin and Königsberg and later became a professor at the University of Berlin. In 1828, he crossed Siberia as part of a journey around the world, and made magnetic and other scientific observations along the Lena River that earned him a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
Travelers of whatever sort were prudently advised, in one inventory, to equip themselves with “a revolver, heavy woolen underwear, well-lined rubber boots, warm furs, a mosquito veil, a pillow or an air cushion, bed linen, a coverlet or a rug, towels, soap, a portable india-rubber bathtub, and ‘remedies against insects of a vexatory disposition.’ To avoid police suspicion as a disseminator of subversive propaganda, one should... never use anything but unprinted paper for wrapping fragile personal belongings in trunks and handbags.”549
None of this was superfluous. Most inns were wayside huts almost without accommodations, and for some reason often run by invalids. One wayfarer recalled that between Tomsk and Yeniseysk, he stopped first at an inn run by a peasant who turned out to be deaf, and the following night at another whose keeper was dumb. A porter then appeared who was blind. Between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, houses swarmed with large blackish-red and small white cockroaches that filled all the chests and cupboards, and at dinner it often happened that thousands of them fell into the bowls and plates as the result of the ascending smoke. Even at Tomsk the lodgings were dismal. At one “hotel,” some Americans couldn’t even get utensils with their meals. “We carved our bread with a bowie knife,” one wrote, “and ate our eggs, not with a spoon, but by jerking all that would come out into our mouths, before breaking the shell and sucking away what remained attached to the skin.”550 At the Hotel Europe, where another guest stayed, the headwaiter apologized for the fearless mice and said: “We keep twelve cats, but they seem rather afraid of the mice themselves.”551
As late as 1897, many of the hotel rooms in Omsk lacked even a washstand, and were thronging with blackbeetles and other vermin, like an etape. Anticipating the entomological assault, one guest had imaginatively brought along with him four saucers and a can of kerosene. The legs of the bed were placed in the saucers, into which the kerosene was poured; but “with a sagacity which one would hardly credit in so small an insect,” he wrote, “the bugs detoured up the walls on to the ceiling,” and then, “having accurately poised, drop down upon their victim.”552
From Verkhneudinsk to Kansk, summer travelers were plagued by gnats, horseflies, and other blood-sucking insects that bred in such swarms that they enveloped the ground “in a sort of haze.” Everyone wore delicate horsehair nets over their faces, high boots and leather gloves, and even cattle hid themselves during the day in stables and barns, venturing out to pasture only at night. “And people,” one bitter traveler exclaimed, “can’t be too careful when they have to attend to the necessaries of life. I myself was stung so severely that for three days I didn’t know where to turn on account of pain, and I had the greatest trouble to prevent the setting in of gangrene at this delicate portion of my privy parts infected by the sting.”553