Travels in Siberia (47 page)

As we were leaving Chita, I got a chance to show how serious I was. We came around a bend, and on the other side of the road directly in front of us I saw a prisonlike accumulation of buildings and guard towers with a fence and barbed wire around it. I asked Sergei to pull over, grabbed my camera, and got out. Then I started taking pictures of the supposed prison, ignoring Sergei’s yelling from the van to stop. Perhaps to prove he wasn’t kidding, he drove off as if to leave me there, but a short distance down the road he pulled over again. As I approached the structure more closely, I saw warnings to stay away spray-painted on its battered steel gates. The place looked decidedly grimmer the closer to it I came. In another minute or two I jogged back to the van.

Sergei was shouting at me the moment I opened the door. He spoke harshly and yelled and gesticulated like a completely different person, someone I’d never met before. He said that what I had done was very bad and very dangerous and could get us all in trouble. I yelled back at him, but I forget what. Even Volodya, usually mild mannered, added his own accusatory comments and seconded Sergei with disapproving shakes of the head. Sergei kept repeating that I must never do anything like that again. I heard him out angrily but refused to say I would not.

Sergei and I were sort of not speaking to each other for a while after that. Following this incident, I became deeply uncertain of everything around me and briefly considered asking Sergei to drop me off at a train station so I could continue on my own. At the next police checkpoint where we were stopped, the DPS officers detained us longer than usual, and a strange, skinny woman hanging out with them asked if we could give her a ride. Sergei refused her. I wondered what that was about. I wondered about everything. I thought maybe I should take the film with the prison photos out of my camera and throw it away; in the next moment that seemed absurd, and then not absurd the moment after that. At the evening’s campsite, in a cow pasture near a village, Volodya silently endured tooth misery while Sergei and I went about our business close-mouthed and shut down.

This remained our general frame of mind the following afternoon when we reached Chernyshevsk, an important point on our journey. I had been half dreading Chernyshevsk, because beyond it the road became undrivably bad for the next five hundred miles. Due to the swamps and the lack of local population and the difficulty of maintenance, from Chernyshevsk to the town of Magdagachi, a long way to the east, there was in effect no vehicle road. Therefore, all cross-country drivers had to stop in Chernyshevsk (or, if westbound, in Magdagachi) and load their vehicles onto Trans-Siberian car- and truck carriers in order to traverse the roadless stretch by rail.

This situation had created a bottleneck at Chernyshevsk, where traffic backed up like leaves in a storm drain. The place was really just a village beside a large Trans-Siberian Railway train yard, and it offered travelers—who routinely had to wait forty-eight hours before an available transport appeared—almost no lodgings, no bathroom facilities you would want to enter without protective gear, and almost no restaurants. Meanwhile the trucks and cars kept arriving.

We joined the queue of waiting vehicles beside the train station at about two in the afternoon. Asking around, Sergei learned that we would be able to get on a train leaving that night at nine thirty. If I thought I could pleasantly while away the afternoon reading, sketching, and jotting in my notebook, I was mistaken. The misery bubbling up everywhere in Chernyshevsk blotted out any idea of calm. Sitting in the van was difficult because of the heat. The widely strewn trash and garbage guaranteed every person an individual corona of flies. Strange guys in warm-up suits loitered the premises at large and hit on any stranger they saw. Even Sergei and Volodya, when they strolled from the van, had to dodge them. The couple of times I ventured among them I was like a crouton in a goldfish pond. The public bathrooms had overflowed some long time before, so most people who needed them employed instead whatever out-of-the-way or not-so-out-of-the-way corner of Chernyshevsk they could find. The train station itself was devoid of services or information of any sort. Apparently all departure and arrival announcements were relayed solely by word of mouth.

Every fifteen minutes or so, a gang of begging children descended upon the vehicle queue. They rapped on the van’s windows and pleaded
and cajoled. One of them was a girl with a scar on her face, close-cropped auburn hair, and surprisingly fashionable hoop earrings. The first time they came, Sergei assembled them around him and gave them a short lecture about the shame of begging compared to the honorability of work. Sergei offered them, instead of a handout, a decent amount of rubles if they would wash our car. The kids loved this idea and went immediately and found a whole slew of cut-off bottle bottoms and other vessels among the ambient trash and filled them at a public tap. Then they washed the car, every inch. In our stuff, Sergei found some rags for them to use for polishing. They polished like demons, climbing all over the van. When they had finished, Sergei examined the work, paid them, and complimented them highly on their job. They ran off, and in fifteen minutes were back begging again.

Late in the afternoon, a train hauling vehicle transports arrived from the east. The transports carried used Japanese cars, most of them Toyotas, with their front ends covered in masking tape, like bandaged noses, to protect them from flying gravel on the road. So far I have not described this important aspect of Siberian trade: throughout the year, but especially in the summer, guys ride the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok, buy used Japanese cars there, and drive the cars west across Siberia for resale. Cargo ships full of these vehicles arrive in Vladivostok all the time. A used car bought in Vladivostok for $2,000 can be resold farther west in Russia for three times that much. The entrepreneurs who drive this long-distance shuttle tend to wear muscle shirts, shiny Adidas sweatpants, and running shoes, and their short, pale haircuts stand up straight in a bristly Russian way. On the road they are easy to recognize by the tape on their vehicles and the fact that they speed like madmen. The faster they finish each round-trip, the more trips they can do and the more money they can make.

One of the drivers debarking in Chernyshevsk told Sergei that this load of cars and drivers had had to wait five days in Magdagachi for transports, and then spent forty-eight hours on the train. In Chernyshevsk, the unloading had to be done one car at a time. Some of the drivers, when they finally did emerge with their vehicles onto the cracked pavement of the Chernyshevsk parking lot, shifted into neutral and raced their engines in automotive howls of liberation or rage. The appearance of each vehicle caused the crowd of begging children to swarm around
it. Some drivers honked and yelled at the kids to go away, others rolled their windows partway down and held out little pieces of leftover food. I saw the girl with the hoop earrings trot to a window and snatch the back end of a kielbasa that a driver offered her. At a more aloof distance, but just as attentively, the loitering guys also gathered around.

As the unloading was going on, I thought I’d take advantage of the moment’s distraction to attempt another exploratory stroll of Chernyshevsk. When I walked onto the main street, the latest driver to zoom his vehicle from the parking lot spotted me and pulled over alongside. Hopping out and locking his car, he said, “You are an American, right? I love Americans. America is the best. I’m going to get something to eat. Come and eat with me. We’ll drink vodka and get drunk.” The guy was big, large bellied, bristly haired, and his T-shirt said, in English,
KALASHNIKOV: THE GREATEST HITS
. Above the words was a picture of a Kalashnikov rifle, and below them a list of the “Greatest Hits,” i.e., wars in which Kalashnikovs have been used. I thought I should accept the guy’s invitation, in the interest of writerly curiosity, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to. I pretended I didn’t understand and wandered away.

In a little memorial grove of pines growing from the scuffed, hard-packed earth beside the station platform, I came upon the village of Chernyshevsk’s main—indeed, only—point of interest. Here a tall statue of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the nineteenth-century writer after whom the village was named, stared broodingly across the train yard. Made of pewter-colored metal and standing perhaps ten feet high, the statue embodied the most heroic of socialist realist styles. Straight Prince Valiant–like hair just past the collar framed the writer’s determined chin, noble nose, and deep-set eyes. He wore a long coat, unbuttoned, over a waistcoat and cravat; his left hand, curled like the hand of a discus thrower in classical Greek statuary, held not a discus but a thick sheaf of manuscript pages. By his aspect one could imagine him waiting forcefully here for a train to take him to the offices of his publisher, where his recently completed oeuvre would be turned in. Adding to the realism was the fact that none among the station’s passersby, even its pigeons, seemed to pay him any mind.

From what I knew about Chernyshevsky I would hardly have pictured him as such a handsome or dynamic-looking guy. He lived from 1828 to 1889, and in 1862 and ’63 he wrote the utopian socialist novel
Shto Delat’?
(
What Is to Be Done?
). Next to the Bible,
Shto Delat’?
was the most widely read book in Russia in the 1870s. Later it would be the favorite novel of both Lenin and Stalin. Its author, the son of an Orthodox priest in the Volga River city of Saratov, wrote it during four months when he was imprisoned in the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. A mix-up within the censorship bureaucracy allowed it to slip through, and it was published in three installments in
Sovremennik
(The Contemporary), a St. Petersburg journal. It had already come out as a book by the time the authorities discovered their mistake and banned it.

Shto Delat’?
is about liberated women who defy social expectations by living unconventional lives, and who put their politicoeconomic theories into practice by establishing a sewing collective. The novel also has male heroes who are revolutionaries and who interact with these women. One of the male heroes, Rakhmetov, became the basic ideal that every male revolutionary in Russia aspired to be. Here is some sample dialogue:

“You haven’t heard?” he said aloud. “There’s an experiment at putting into practice those principles recently developed by economic science. Do you know about them?”

“Yes, I’ve read something. That must be very interesting and valuable. Can I really take part in it? Where can I find it?”

Scholars say that after Marx and Engels, Chernyshevsky was the writer who had the most influence on the generation that made the Russian Revolution. Many revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century knew the book practically by heart; some even tried to set up collective commercial enterprises like the one in the novel. Lenin said hundreds of people became revolutionaries as a result of reading
Shto Delat’?
After Lenin’s brother Alexander was executed, Lenin reread the book because it had been among Alexander’s favorites. “[Chernyshevsky] plowed me up more profoundly than anyone else,” Lenin said later. “I sat over [
Shto Delat’?
] not for several days but for several weeks. Only then did I understand its depth . . . It’s a thing that supplies energy for a whole lifetime.”

Almost unanimously, world literary opinion has disagreed with Lenin’s rave review. Though Chernyshevsky admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy did
not like him and rejected his principles. Turgenev and Herzen, both early acquaintances of Chernyshevsky, came to find his writing coarse and simpleminded. In the twentieth century, the philosopher and critic Isaiah Berlin, while acknowledging the “literally epoch-making effect” of
Shto Delat’?
pronounced it “grotesque as a work of art.”

After being convicted of subversion in 1864, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in Siberia, to be followed by permanent exile. The punishment only enhanced his revolutionary mystique. As the popularity of his book grew with young radicals, a few of the more daring among them set themselves the task of finding its imprisoned author and spiriting him to freedom. In 1875, a student named Hypolite Myshkin almost succeeded in this attempt by impersonating a gendarme sent to convey Chernyshevsky to another prison. Another would-be rescuer was Boleslav Shostakovich, grandfather of the composer. Because of Chernyshevsky’s popularity as a rescue target, the prison authorities moved him from one prison mine to another, and when the time came to exile him, they shipped him to the far north, to the town of Viliusk in Yakutsk province, where he was permitted to move about as long as he stayed within five hundred yards of the stockade.

Prison life had broken Chernyshevsky thoroughly by then. Scurvy, malaria, stomach ulcers, and rheumatism afflicted him. In Siberia he wrote almost nothing of note; even his letters descended into repetition and confusion. His wife visited him only once, for four days, while he was exiled. In accordance with his principles he had wanted her to have complete freedom, and she willingly took him up on the idea. In 1883, his sons succeeded in persuading the government to grant him amnesty, and he was then allowed to return to western Russia. In 1889, gravely ill, he received permission to go back to Saratov, where he died the same year.