…Russia, the dear, dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe
which is as large as all Europe put together.
(Spufford, p.3; 2010)
 |
| A vast, flat landscape stretching as far as the eye can see - and beyond. This territory in the Russian Far East is so typical of much of Russia |
Русский народ – крайный народ, “The
Russian people are a people of extremes”, the Russians love to say; and it’s
not simply a platitude. It’s true. All of us who have joined Russians round the
kitchen table will have experienced eating and drinking with friends who are
laughing and joking one minute, weeping bitterly the next over some memory,
then back to the laughter. Anyone whose business has involved working with
Russians will know the sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach when the
Russian client, having prevaricated for weeks about a decision, suddenly
decides that they want you to deliver tomorrow.
This may not seem uniquely Russian; until you understand the
frequency with which it happens – and with just about everyone you deal with.
It struck me a long time ago that this is a direct result of the climate in
Russia. The country has a classic continental climate. Most of it is far from
the sea; so hot, dry summers and freezing, snowy winters are the norm. Moscow
usually has around a week or so in the summer when the temperature is plus 35
degrees Celsius or more, and a similar period in the winter when the
thermometer reads minus 35. Perhaps it is hardly surprising that in a country
where the temperature can change by 70 degrees in just four or five months, the
temperament of the people can swing so radically between extremes of behaviour.
This is a theme noted by many writers over the years, such as Robert Kaiser and
Laurens van der Post:
Climate [is] an overbearing fact in Russian life. It
isn’t unusual for the last snowfall of a Russian winter to come eight months
after the first. Spring and autumn usually amount to a few weeks stuck between
the long winter and the short, green summer. Nature is more an enemy than an
ally in the Russian north, a powerful enemy which traditionally has forced
people into prolonged periods of inaction, which makes their food supply
problematical year after year, and which must eventually influence their most
basic reactions to life and fate.
(Kaiser, p.38; 1976)
Throughout my journey I had always the impression that Russians
instinctively prefer to work at great pressure in prolonged concentrated bursts
followed by periods of protracted almost irresponsible inactivity which perhaps
correspond to the rhythms their climate imposes on them.
(van der Post, p.206; 1965)
Ironically,
the socialist system of central planning lent itself to this pattern: workers
could do little for the first three weeks of the month, then go all out to
fulfil the plan in the final week. This led to situations such as a shoe
factory in the last week of the month making only shoes for the left foot; they
would then be put in pairs to say the plan has been fulfilled, even though the
end result was useless.
George Feifer dwells on the effect that the Russian winter
can have on people’s mood. It’s less a problem with the cold – unless the
temperature is in the low 30’s (or even worse in parts of Siberia) you can
always put on extra layers – than it is with the light, or lack of it.
Someday, I’ll write an essay about Russian winter. Russkaya zima, the
great depressant of spirit and waster of life. We live in a no-man’s land,
enveloped by the seamless, soundless mist. Isolated even from the sky: it’s
been weeks now since enough sun has forced through to be able to guess its
position.
(Feifer, p.70; 1976)
 |
| Murky Moscow winter afternoon |
I’ve known weeks in Moscow where I’ve felt, as Feifer
describes, “isolated even from the sky”, and not had a glimpse of the sun. As
you go further north, the days become very short. A few years ago in January I
went to a morning performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. When I
emerged from the metro around 1100 it was just beginning to be light.
The compensation for that, of course, is to be in St
Petersburg in the middle of summer, to experience “the White Nights”. In 1989,
while in Leningrad (as it still was) gathering material for my radio programme
on the veterans of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, I persuaded a local
journalist with whom I was working to drive me to the beach in front of the
Saints Peter and Paul Fortress on the banks of the River Neva at midnight. I
took a newspaper – just to prove that you really could read a newspaper without
artificial light at midnight. Many years later, I took some interesting
photographs by natural light in the centre of St Petersburg in the small hours
of the morning.
G Dobson, H M Grove and Hugh Stewart wrote books about St
Petersburg, Moscow and Provincial Russia respectively early in the twentieth
century, and a number of their observations appear in these pages; some to show
how things have changed, but many to show how much has not. A simple truth
about Russian history is summed up thus by Stewart:
Russian history is inextricably woven with its rivers.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.345; 1913)
 |
| The River Lena, heading north through Yakutia towards the Arctic Circle. Yakutia (Sakha) is the size of India; but its population is 1,000th that of India. 97% of its territory is not only uninhabited; it is uninhabitable. |
In my days as a military analyst, I remember well my friend
and colleague, Chris Donnelly, seeing the reaction of British Royal Engineer
troops to being told that they had nothing with which they could even
contemplate crossing certain Russian rivers, so wide are they in places. Van
der Post bears this out:
The river was so wide and the heavy rain had covered the flat earth with
so much water that the road looked like a causeway across an inlet of the sea.
Now I understood why so many people I had met told me that with such a river
they felt no need to go to the sea for their vacations. This over-abundant
water gave them all the sea they needed and on holiday they preferred to go to
some village deep in the country.
(van der Post, p.187; 1965)
Being so far from the sea but having such vast rivers helps explains
why Russians readily swim in rivers in a way which Britons don’t.
As Ronald Hingley points out, the sheer size of Russia is
something which is very difficult to comprehend unless you come from North
America or China.
Territorial size has conditioned the Russian mentality for many
centuries. Consisting largely of a vast plain with no significant natural
barriers between its western frontiers and the far-distant mountain ranges of
central Siberia, the country has always lacked defensible frontiers such as
might have saved it from becoming embroiled again and again in so many long,
exhausting armed conflicts with its neighbours.
(Hingley, p.29; 1978)
And the problem of defending the country’s borders has indeed
played large in the Russian psyche over the centuries, including in the
twentieth century, when there was foreign intervention in the Civil War of
1918-1922, and when Hitler’s forces rolled so easily across much of European
Russia in 1941 and 1942. The Soviet leadership used this to explain why so much
money was spent on the defence of the borders of the Motherland instead of on
consumer goods. This did, however, lay the country open to criticism when it
used its armed forces outside the country’s borders, such as the following
exchange heard at a diplomatic reception in early 1980, shortly after Soviet
troops went into Afghanistan:
Western Ambassador: Tell me, Ambassador, how big is the Soviet
Union?
Soviet Ambassador (muttering): Twenty two million, four hundred thousand
square kilometres…
Western Ambassador: Ah. Not big enough for you, eh? (Turns
on his heel and walks off)
(Dalziel – I don’t remember the source for this, but I do recall hearing of it
when I was in Kiev in 1980, shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan.)
The idea that Russia’s borders had to be defended by massive
forces was not an argument heard in the 1990’s. The country may have been in
internal chaos, but few considered that the West was a potential enemy.
Unfortunately, particularly following his incursion into Ukraine, this is a
fear which Vladimir Putin has used once again to make excuses for the poor
state of the economy. The question posed above could have been asked again
after the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
Russia is not simply a huge country but the landscape is
frequently tedious. In 1974 I caught a train from Kiev to Moscow at three
o’clock in the morning and travelled virtually all day. This being my first
trip to the USSR I thought it would be interesting to see the scenery. It was –
for the first half hour of daylight. After that, it was relentlessly flat and
dull. When you’ve gazed upon one lot of fields stretching as far as the eye can
see and countless copses of birch trees, they do become tiresome. This is a
theme to which writers – and, indeed, Russians themselves – constantly return.
“We have a saying that in Siberia 100 kilometres is no distance at all,
100 roubles no money and 100 grammes of vodka no drink!”
(van der Post, p.232; 1965. As told to the author by a
travelling companion on the Trans-Siberian Express)
Like most of Russia, Siberia is a vast plain. Its only hills are gentle;
even the Ural Mountains seem to have been depressed by some giant flattener.
Out the window of the Trans-Siberian, a traveller sees only fields, woods of
birch and pine, villages of wooden cottages and an occasional town or city. The
scenery hardly changes from one end to the other.
(Kaiser, p.23; 1976)
Instead of offering dramatic scenery, Russia is a vast flatland,
stretching beyond every horizon to fill a continent… It lacks the breathtaking
vistas of Switzerland, the picturesque hills of Bavaria, or the hedgerows and
stone walls that give the English countryside its charm. Russia is plainer,
more rambling, wilder, undisciplined.
(Smith, The Russians, p.150; 1977)
First then, a word as to the appearance of the country, and this…applies
to rural scenery in Russia generally.
 |
| Lenskiye stolby, Yakutia |
Sluggish rivers, with steep red
banks, wind through broad plains. In the distance are dark woods of pines or
birches, which in the evenings resound with the notes of nightingales. The
unfenced communal fields slope gently towards the horizon, and through them,
also unfenced, runs the broad stoneless road with deep ruts. There is no
strongly marked feature in the landscape. The predominant colour is in summer
grey or brown. In spring it is bright, almost dazzling, green, and in winter
practically unrelieved white. The feeling of space, of distance, which the
people call their great enemy, impresses itself strongly on the mind; all round
for a thousand miles is Russia.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.295-296; 1913)
Occasionally, certain features break the monotony. Arkady Shevchenko
talks of church domes:
There is no drama to the countryside of northern Russia, only an
occasional gentle swell of the land and, even more rare, the bulbous dome of a
once-lovely country church.
(Shevchenko, p.268; 1985)
And Vladimir Soloukhin of windmills:
It is known that windmills were once an obligatory part of the Russian
landscape, especially towards the south, in the areas around Orlov, Kursk,
Voronezh and Ryazan… In our parts, admittedly, watermills were preferred
because we were surrounded by a dense network of quiet, clear rivers. On the
Koloksha alone between Yuryev-Polsky and Ustye, a distance of some seventy
versts, there were twelve watermills. Twelve dams, twelve millponds – a real
cascade, as they might say now. Yet what a beauty it was, the Koloksha! Its
water was kept high by the dams and it was clear and full of fish; but now it
is really shallow, sickly overgrown and covered in slime.
Yet there were windmills, too.
Are there any records giving the overall figures for watermills and windmills
in Russia? It would be interesting to know, because that would give us the
number of peasant households that once owned those watermills and windmills,
only to be smashed to pieces, as well as the number of peasant families that
were subsequently dispersed far and wide or, more commonly, annihilated.
(Soloukhin, pp.62-63; 1989)
Nowadays the bulbous dome of the country church of which
Shevchenko writes is less rare; in fact, more and more are
appearing. They are the visual manifestation of the consciences of thousands of
Russians who have got rich in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and
on the backs of their fellow countrymen. But also more common is the sight of
the dilapidated ruins of homes and outhouses left to rot as people move away
from the countryside to the towns and cities. I recall driving with my wife
through a dilapidated village in Ryazan Oblast where the houses were literally
falling down, and seeing a beautifully painted church with a gilded dome. I
described it at the time as “an oligarch’s conscience”.
It is not only the natural geographical features which change
little as you travel across Russia. Under both Tsarism and Soviet rule the
centre imposed a rigid uniformity on the country. Peter Pomerantsev talks of
landing in Vladivostok:
When we finally landed in Vladivostok…I expected to see the Orient; we
were, after all, a thousand kilometres east of Beijing, where Russia meets the
Pacific…But instead it looked like more of the same Russia, the same
green-brown blur of hills and thin, unhappy trees.
(Pomerantsev, p.27; 2015)
I had a very similar experience when I flew in to Blagoveshchensk
in the Russian Far East in 2009. Look across the Amur River and you are looking
into China; but look around you and you could be in the suburbs of St
Petersburg. Making such a trip the vast size of the country is again brought
home to you. I had flown non-stop for nine hours, yet I hadn’t crossed one
international border. Before the age of air travel, Stewart remarked on how
similar life was in Russia, north to south as well as east to west:
…the traveller in Russia will notice a certain sameness in peasant life
from Archangel to Astrakhan, the same village plan, the same type of houses, of
clothes and manners, a sameness which is accentuated by the similarity of the
scenery.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, pp.294-295; 1913)
Nonetheless, travelling around Russia does perhaps have a
romanticism about it, as the former British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir William
Hayter noted:
Uncomfortable though it sometimes is, there is no travel like Russian
travel. Old towns like Novgorod and Rostov Veliki, little white churches with
gold domes, on tufted green hills by wide lakes; the Volga, in a steamer with a
rhythmic vibration suggesting the cygnets’ dance in Swan Lake, a placid, immense stream, the European bank a cliff, the Asiatic bank a
swamp, Kazan, Samara, Stalingrad gleaming on their little hills…
(Hayter, p.17; 1966)
Many Russophiles would agree with this sentiment, at the same
time acknowledging the truth of Kaiser’s comment about the poor condition – or
indeed, lack – of the roads when travelling.
Though known as a super-power, the Soviet Union lacks many of the attributes
of Europe’s smaller countries – a basic network of good roads, for example.
(Kaiser, p.420; 1976)
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| 'Peasants' (from Dobson, Grove, Stewart) |
And despite the undoubted progress made in the twentieth
century and the growth of cities, Stewart’s assessment of the provincial towns
of a hundred years ago remains largely true.
Russia is primarily an agricultural country, and there are few great cities. The ordinary provincial town offers very little of interest either in appearance or life.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.390; 1913)
The desperately forsaken Russian countryside is still so much a part of the life of Mother Russia.
“Moscow is the façade; we’ve always needed façades. But the truth is still the village. Everything comes from the village and is the spirit of the village.”
(Feifer, p.15; 1976; as told to him by a student at Moscow University who was from
the countryside)
Follow the narod
into the countryside and the modern world
peels away with astonishing suddenness. Not only the peasantry but the
countryside presses in close around Moscow. It surprised me to see that just
ten miles from the Kremlin, near the village of Little Mytishchi, city life and
its conveniences simply come to an end. New apartment buildings give way to
izbas, squat, low, peasant log cabins.
Side roads are suddenly no longer paved but turn to dirt, often no more than
two ruts or footpaths dribbling off among garden fences.
(Smith, The Russians, pp.250-251; 1977)
 |
| 'A Summer's Day in the Country' (from Dobson, Grove, Stewart) |
In general the Great Russian villages are not picturesque. But when they
are tree-shaded, and one looks at them in soft evening light from over a wide
river or pond, they are steeped in a quiet melancholy beauty of their own.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.299; 1913)
The izbas of the present day show little improvement
over those of the time of Peter the Great. They are as a rule draughty,
insanitary, and insect-ridden, and it is not an unmixed evil that every six or
seven years they are burnt down accidentally in a village fire or through
private enmity, for the satisfaction of which “letting loose the red cock” is
not an uncommon expedient.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.302; 1913)
These quotations have echoes of Hingley’s comment above (Chapter
1: Mother Russia) that, “The poorer the mother
and the harsher her conditions of life, the greater the devotion of her sons.” Still today, life in the Russian
countryside is harsh and not pretty. The younger generation leave in their
droves to find a better life in the cities. Many a peasant cottage, an izba, is not the pretty decorated place
with hand-carved fretwork of picture postcards. It is a grubby dwelling and its
ageing inhabitants frequently can barely eke out a living.
“What is
Russia?” and “Who are the Russians?” might be questions that arise from the
following quotations from 100 years ago:
There are few districts in Russia, “the land of forty races,” where there
have not lived alongside with the Russian peasants peoples who differed from
them in customs, language, physical type, and religion.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.362; 1913)
 |
| 'A Dance in Little Russia' (from Dobson, Grove, Stewart) |
White Russia is the name given to the upper basin of the Dnieppr…The name
is said to allude to the colour of the peasant dress.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.397; 1913)
To the south and south-east of White Russia lie the three governments of
Tchernigoff, Poltava, and Kharkoff, which constitute the romantic and
fascinating country known as “Little Russia”… The name originated in the
fourteenth century to distinguish the land round Kieff [Kiev, or as Ukrainians now prefer,
Kyiv – SD] from the Great Russia, whose
centre was Moscow. The other title given to this district, the Ukraine, means
properly “the border” or “the frontier”, a term one might have expected to
accompany the expansion of Russian territory in every direction, but associated
once for all with Little Russia, which was for centuries the border with
Poland.
(Stewart in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, p.413; 1913)
Stewart
describes Russia as “the land of forty races”; in Soviet times the boast was
that the USSR was home to over one hundred races and that they all lived
together in harmony. The violence which broke out in some parts of the USSR as
the country began to break up and, indeed, after the collapse, suggested –
rather like in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s – that this “harmony” had more to do
with firm control imposed from the centre, rather than genuine brotherly love
and mutual understanding. “White Russia” which Stewart writes about is the
literal meaning of Belarus (or Belorussia, as it was known before the break-up
of the Soviet Union); and the point which he makes about “Little Russia” was
used by some Russians in 2014 to justify the invasion of Ukraine. As one
Russian said to me: “Stephen, you don’t understand; there is no such country as
Ukraine!”
Kaiser
underlines a problem which was encountered by geographers and travellers in
Soviet times: that maps were not permitted to be accurate – strange, but true!
Geographers in the Soviet Union face an unusual occupational hazard. For
reasons which must have something to do with national security, no published
map of the USSR published in the Soviet Union can be accurate. Each river, city
and town must be moved slightly from its actual location. Western geographers
discovered this idiosyncrasy by comparing old and new maps of Soviet territory.
It is hard to imagine the purpose of this subterfuge in the age of spy
satellites.
(Kaiser, p.29; 1976)
Taking this
one stage further, sizeable towns with populations tens of thousands strong
which were completely associated with defence industries often did not appear
at all on maps, and had obscure names related to a city which was perhaps a
hundred kilometres away, such as Chelyabinsk-40. It was here in 1957 that the
world’s worst nuclear accident occurred (since then, only the accidents at
Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 have been more serious). Because the
site of this plutonium production site officially did not exist, it took until
1976 and the publication of an article in New
Scientist magazine by the Soviet scientist, Zhores Medvedev, for the
details of the disaster to be known. To this day no-one knows how many hundreds
– or likely thousands – of people died as a result.
In the light
of this, it is perhaps appropriate to end this chapter on a sombre note, yet
one which, in contrast to the upbeat tone of Hayter’s comment on the joys of
Russian travel, underlines once again the extreme nature of Russia and its
people. The plume of radioactivity which drifted across a large swathe of
territory in the Urals Region from Chelyabinsk-40 was certainly “a long shadow of death and tragedy”.
The Russian lands are cold and morbid, and a long shadow of death and
tragedy hovers over her people. The woeful cries of toil and grief and poverty
fill her music and her poems; life is suffering, suffering is life.
(Uris, p.245; 1971)
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