In Siberia (22 page)

Here the 300-year-old Church of Our Saviour sails like a clumsy battleship over parklands. Its six-storeyed bell-tower and eccentric whitewashed sanctuary, clotted with rustic decoration, now enclose an ethnic museum; but outside its apse, the Baptism of Christ and the canonisation of St Innokent, the first Bishop of Siberia, cover the wall in faded murals; while alongside, a
crowd of frescoed Buryats are undergoing mass baptism in a pool. Just to the east, above the onion domes and dunce-cap spires of the Epiphany Cathedral, a host of fretted crosses announce reconsecration.

Irkutsk grew up in a mood of rough enterprise. It was founded by Cossacks in 1652 as a garrison-town against the Buryats, but it straddled the burgeoning trade-route between Russia and China. Southward through Mongolia towards Peking went gold, sable pelts and mammoth ivory; northward into Russia came tea, silks and porcelain. The nineteenth century saw the discovery of gold and the intrusion of convicts: Irkutsk became a hub of the czarist prison empire. Small-time traders made suddenly good, peasants and ex-convicts struck lucky in the gold-fields, filled the town with turbulence and possibility. Grand boulevards swept across the boardwalks of mud-clogged lanes, fetid with pigs and open sewers, where palaces might replace hutches overnight. Sturdy, characterful old millionaires walked about in peasant dress. (One found his four-poster bed too beautiful to use. ‘I sleep under it,' he said.) People's speech was touched by an antiquated civility long gone from St Petersburg, full of affectionate, slangy diminutives. Parvenus turned themselves into tinsel aristocrats, then lost their fortunes gambling in a week.

A night-life of merriment and debauchery was sharpened by rampant crime. Fur traders and mining concessionaires crammed the vaudevilles and restaurants, or haunted the drinking-dens and gaming tables. Irkutsk became the murder capital of Russia. No day passed without one; sometimes there were over 200 in a month. The nights were bedevilled by professional garrotters; and sledgers would gallop out in blizzards to lasso lone pedestrians and murder them up side-alleys. Nobody interfered. (Poking your nose into others' business was not
sibirski
.) The police were helpless. Householders would routinely fire a warning salvo from their bedroom windows before retiring.

In 1879 a spark in someone's hay-loft started a fire which wiped out three-quarters of the town. Within a few years it was rebuilt, more handsome in brick and stone. It bloomed into a proud paradox. Old-fashioned, pretentious, opulent, squalid, cultivated
–it was starting to confuse its visitors. All but the most jaded or sophisticated were surprised by its magnificence: by the libraries and picture galleries in the handful of finest houses; by the endowment of hospitals and schools; by the balls ablaze with military decorations, Paris fashions and regimental bands playing in the galleries. Upper-class Siberians were starting to commute between their Irkutsk palaces and St Petersburg.

But other travellers reported little but indolence and social pretension. It was
bon ton
, apparently, to have your wardrobe laundered in London, even though you lost sight of it for a year. And the galas, some said, were stereotyped, provincial affairs, attended by the same crowd: the governor and administrative officials, some rich civilians, army officers, and a few classy political exiles.

The merchants, meanwhile, had become a powerful, homemade aristocracy. They financed exploration and sometimes swayed policy under a near-independent governor. And the influx of cultured exiles–especially the 1825 revolutionary Decembrists, and Poles after their failed 1863 uprising–had brought a charge of gentler energies. Gradually the drawing-room pianos were beginning to tinkle, and the library books to be read. After the street-fighting and fires of the Revolution, the remains of these libraries were picked out of the frost and gutters by furtive bibliophiles. Along with charred liturgies donated by old women who had saved them from churches, their skeletal collections now occupy the bookshelves of obscure municipal archives, with the names of half-remembered families on discoloured labels beneath: Yagin, Kazanzevy, Smirdin….

Splendour and rusticity still mingle in the street facades, along with outbursts of pomposity and fuss. I gaze at the rare beauty of stone instead of concrete, comforted by buildings older than myself or than the century, the classical orders trying for grace again. Here and there some playfulness or barbarism erupts in swagged pilasters or columns run amok. But they do not seem to matter. I go down streets where wooden mansions are sunk to their windows in the earth, or mount in tipsy storeys to preposterously scalloped friezes: the homes of peasant princes.

Their gaiety or pride overlaps into the streets. Young women are promenading arm-in-arm again, irregularly beautiful in their shiny tights and lace-up boots. The parks are full of students. Perhaps it is my illusion, but poverty here seems more gently worn, the people more integrated, less transient. They say they inhabit the jewel of Siberia.

 

Across a tributary of the Angara the white walls of the Znamensky Monastery spread under turquoise domes. Its garden was awash with hollyhocks and sunflowers, and the graves of Decembrists lay lapped in marguerites. Beside them I found a young priest receiving his flock. Standing frail in his black cassock, his black hair tied back from a black beard, he whispered consolation to men twice his age, and from time to time a nun would kneel to kiss his casually proffered hand.

The monastery had just been restored, he said, and out of a sickened world the faithful were returning. He himself was the son of an ardent Communist father, but his mother had been a Christian. He spoke easily of this, while his supplicants drifted away. ‘She was half French and half Bessarabian. Even when I was little she took me to church. I remember her singing….' His eyes swam over the graves beside us, as if she were dead (but I did not ask). ‘And my father's Communism, I believed in that too. It was only as a conscript in the army that I lost my Communism. In the army men get very close, you know, talk very intimately….'

It had created its own brotherhood, I supposed, its own iconoclasm. ‘So you were left with your mother's faith.'

‘No, that had already faded. But it was in the army that I began to feel my sin.'

I said hesitantly: ‘In what way?'

‘In every way. In my work, in my friendships, in my heart.' He looked suddenly bashful: swimming eyes and girlishly parted hair. ‘The army can be cruel, you see, very rough. Drinking, swearing…and this terrible weight of sin grew in me. That is how I really came to God. Through my guilt.'

In the church, among a glimmering cluster of shrines, he bowed and crossed himself in a sustained fever of submission. An under
growth of nuns–black cowls, black box-hats–pressed their lips to his hands, sometimes dropped to their knees, while I stood uneasily beside him. The old, nest-like Orthodox comfort intensified around us: a soft blaze of candles dimming the brightness of restoration, kindling the gaze of salvaged icons, gilding the iconostasis where an old woman was kissing her favourite saints (Surely they're listening? Surely they understand?). And beyond this the doors of the sanctuary hung closed on eternal mystery, and from somewhere rose the antiphonal yearning of a choir.

We arrived in front of a casket as big as an altar. Above it hung a full-length icon of St Innokent, the miracle-working Siberian missionary who attempted the conversion of China before returning to die here in 1731. In memory, at least, he looked darkly benevolent, robed and crowned in cream and gold and clutching a pastoral stave. For almost two hundred years he had rested in peace, his body incorruptible, healing pilgrims from his silver sarcophagus in a monastery on the far side of the Angara.

‘Then the Communists took him away,' said the priest. ‘In 1921 they destroyed that monastery and stole his casket–a beautiful thing–and buried him somewhere in Yaroslavl. But it was documented where he lay, and after
perestroika
he was dug up again and brought here. And his body uncorrupted! Just like yours and mine! The skin! The flesh!' He was gazing at the sarcophagus. In the dimness his lemony skin shone creaseless, like a boy's. ‘Still he can heal anything!'

Even as he spoke, a carpet was rolled out and the gilt lid levered back from a glass panel above the saint. In a swirl of black calico, nuns and acolytes were tumbling to their knees before it. ‘Come,' said the priest. ‘Look.'

I approached with mistrust, my boots squeaking.

But what lay in the silver-lined coffin I could not tell. A pair of gloved hands was knotted over a swell of vestments, and above them a mitre bulged like a jewelled onion from the white cloth covering someone's face.

The priest was whispering close. ‘We can't show his face, because the light would hurt it. But in December, on his name day, it is revealed…perfect!'

‘Will he stay here?' I felt vaguely cheated.

‘I don't know. He might be moved to the cathedral when it's restored. But I think things will end before that.'

‘What things?'

‘All things.' He became urgent. There was something I must understand, he said. ‘There's going to be a war, a cataclysmic war. The saint has said so.'

‘When?'

‘Before his death, he declared it. That on the Last Day the world would be consumed in conflict. I know that it will be between Russia and China. The Chinese are godless, they have a bigger army than we do, they are hungry for land. We will all die by this.'

‘And America?'

‘America is godless. Nothing good can come from there. Only videos and that music, nakedness, AIDS, everything. America will not help us.' His face had loosened and disintegrated in its fervour, and suddenly to my bewilderment I recognised there the dissolute conscript. The world was crumbling away, he said. He found virtue only in the old, the distant past. The present was licentious, the future unspeakable. He rambled about the ages of Churches–the Armenian, the Ethiopian. The older they were, the better. Beside Russia, he claimed obscurely, the only hope was Spain. Yet Rome was anathema to him; America was anathema; Moscow had become hellfire; Islam was a deformity; and most terrible of all, just to the south, seethed the soulless multitudes of China, who had not listened to St Innokent. From time to time, when the chant of a choir underscored his jeremiads, or he dropped into harrowed silence, I would picture a small boy standing beneath his mother, fluting ‘Oh Lord forgive me', while back at home his father growled or drank, or perhaps laughed.

After a while an old man came stooping towards us. He had just lost his wife and daughter in the same week, he whispered, he had nothing left. Then the priest's face cleared, and he strode to the saint's coffin. Gravely he dipped his finger in the oil lamp behind it and anointed the man's forehead and chest. ‘You mustn't weep.'

I walked away among the worshippers. A pair of crazed-looking youths was singing in the black knot of a choir. On the fresco behind them St Innokent appeared to be crowning himself saint, while in the sky above him God the Father looked helplessly on. The air was grey with incense. In front of the casket three nuns lay prostrate on their stomachs, one of them sobbing, as if something had to be expurgated for ever.

 

There are only a few graves around the monastery, but none of them is ordinary. Princess Trubetskaya, who followed her husband into exile in 1826, lies with their three small children under two stones. Nearby is the grave of the Decembrist Peter Mukhanov, whose lover Varvara Shakhovskaya voluntarily shared his banishment. For ten years she lived close to his changing prisons, but they never set eyes on one another again before she died brokenhearted and was buried alone.

But most prominent is a marble obelisk overswept by nautical instruments: copper anchors, capstans, sails, hour-glasses, compasses. The bust above them shows a jowly, high-boned face with far-sighted eyes and a jovial wig. Grigory Shelikhov was dubbed ‘the Russian Columbus'. An ambitious fur trader in the north Pacific, he dreamt of a Russian Alaska which would bloom into economic self-sufficiency, complete with cities, shipyards, cathedrals, industries and cattle pastures. In 1783 he sailed with three ships into the Bering Sea, together with his dashing and astute wife Natalya–the first white woman to see Alaska–and within three years had built forts and settlements along the southern coast and islands, and had claimed Alaska for Russia. Soon he was envisioning an empire stretching between the Bering Straits and Spanish California. But in 1795 he suddenly died at the age of forty-eight, and was laid with florid honours under his monument.

The trading company which he established pursued his vision. In 1812 a Russian fort even appeared just north of San Francisco. But in the end these tiny colonies were too precarious and distant for St Petersburg to hold. The Americans and British pressed too hard on them, and they became a drain on the imperial treasury.

In 1867 Alaska, with the last of Shelikhov's dream, was sold to the United States for two cents an acre. But it was a difficult sale. The US Secretary of State, William Seward, who pushed it forward, was vilified for extravagance by the American press and public–‘Seward's folly', it was called–and Congress took over a year to vote him the money. A century later Alaskan real estate was selling for 2,000 dollars an acre, while people still place roses by Shelikhov's grave.

 

Irkutsk resisted the Revolution. In fact all Siberia–with its wealthy peasant farmers and thin industrial proletariat–inclined haltingly to the Whites, or to Siberian independence. But by 1920 the White Siberian front had broken and the Civil War was all but over. The railway and the Trakt beside it had turned into a slow, chaotic river of the refugee and dying. The White commander, Admiral Kolchak, fled back to Irkutsk with twenty-nine freight-cars carrying the Imperial Gold Reserve, but his authority melted away and he was handed over to the Reds.