Sibir (7 page)

“Some people thought we could not win. We knew we could. Things are not the same in our country as they were some years ago, and not the same as most foreigners seem to think. Lenin said the will of the people must be
supreme … we
were
the people. In Moscow they listened, and at last they bowed to the people.”

The battle to save Baikal brought, at its conclusion, one of the most significant human successes in recent times. It was a major victory of reason combined with deep instinctive feeling, over the senseless and suicidal passion of modern men to exploit the world around them into ultimate destruction.

To my western mind the scope of the victory seemed staggering. In 1967 the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet of the
U.S.S.R.
voted to make the entire Baikal region – the lake and thousands of square miles of surrounding territory – into a national park. All fishing along the north half of the lake was prohibited for five years and along the south side for seven years. Sport fishing only will be permitted in the future. Lumbering operations on all watersheds flowing into the lake have been halted for good. Extensive reclamation projects are underway to restore tributary streams and river beds to their pristine condition. A series of new fish hatcheries are being built. All forms of wildlife ranging from wolves to wild flowers are now under complete protection. By the end of 1969 the seal population had increased to forty-five thousand animals, and even the very rare Barguzin sable was staging a remarkable comeback. The Sacred Sea has again become a Sacred Sea in truth.

I asked Boris about the fate of the multi-million ruble cellulose plants and their adjacent towns.

“It was unnecessary to abandon them entirely,” he said, with the magnanimity of a successful warrior. “So we were content to have the two factories closed until a complete filtration system was built which guaranteed no effluent of any kind would ever enter Baikal. They will continue to work, but they will be fed with wood from other districts to the south of the park regions. They can now do no more harm. Of course, the plans for the three other plants were cancelled.”

One day I visited the Baikal Limnological Institute where more than a hundred scientists are doing research on the infinitely varied problems connected with preserving freshwater lakes. The men and women of the Institute were foremost in the fight to preserve Baikal and their satisfaction in the victory knows no bounds.

“We have done more than save Baikal,” a woman zoologist told me. “The fight woke up the whole of the Soviet Union to one of the grave dangers threatening mankind. We will not go to sleep again. Our leaders now understand how great the danger is and they are really listening hard to those who can tell them how to control and stop the damage done by a thoughtless modern industrial society. What happened here at Baikal will help set the pattern for the future development of our country.”

Whether or not she was overly optimistic I cannot say. I do know that some strange things have happened since the Battle of Baikal was won. I was involved, unwittingly in one such incident.

In May of 1969, Mir Publishing House in Moscow published a translation of a book of mine called
Never Cry Wolf
.

This book was originally published in 1963 in Canada and the United States; it was an attempt to dispel the many myths about the destructive nature of the wolf, and to demonstrate that the wolf was a vital element in the balance of nature, and, as such, merited protection from those who would exterminate it. More than three hundred thousand copies were printed in various editions in North America but, as of 1970, the North American wolf was still being hunted toward imminent extinction, often by government hunters, and almost everywhere with the assistance of government bounties.

Mir published the book with a rather odd translation of the original title. They called it,
Wolves! Please Don’t Cry!
A few weeks after publication a battle began between proponents of the wolf and those who felt he ought to be eliminated. The battle was of surprisingly short
duration. In August the Soviet Government published an edict declaring that the wolf was to be regarded henceforth as a “threatened species,” and placed it under state protection. The
U.S.S.R.
thus became the first nation in the world to extend protection to the wolf. It would seem that the mistranslation of my original title was not unjustifiable.

On the morning of my first visit to Baikal it was bitterly cold and snowing. Mark drove Claire and me to the lake along the banks of the Angara, which has been dammed near Irkutsk to produce a man-made addition to the lake extending for some fifty miles toward Irkutsk.

This new lake is much favoured as a recreation area by Irkutskians, many of whom have built their
dachas
along its shores. Dachas are the equivalent of North American summer cottages, but with an essential difference. Great numbers of Russians seem to feel the atavistic need to get back to nature, and this means as far back as possible. Consquently the cottages they build are small and primitive, although often delightfully designed and decorated in “woodland peasant” style.

At first I was not convinced that the simplicity of the dachas was so much intentional as it was a product of a not-so-affluent society. Once, while visiting Yura Rytkheu’s dacha near Leningrad I made a rather snide suggestion to this point, to which he replied: “Farley, you think I am a poor man? Ha! I make more money than President of
U.S.S.R.
If I want, I have electric lights and television here. Have everything. But why I want to do that, eh? Why anybody want to take city with him on his back when he go live with nature?”

Discreetly I dropped the subject, but several months later when Yura came to visit Canada as my guest, friends took us for a weekend to their cottage at one of the summer colonies near Lake Muskoka. Yura examined the place with great interest, noting the electric dishwasher, power lawn mower, colour television and other essential elements of North American cottage life, and he
remembered his earlier conversation with me at
his
dacha. Innocently he addressed our host.

“You are lucky man! Have
two
city houses! But now, please, show me your dacha, your hiding place where you go to get
away
from city life.”

The Russian compulsion to have one’s feet in the earth is so great that there are large areas near all Soviet cities reserved for “summer farmers.” Anyone who so desires can obtain use of a plot of land whereon he can build a cabin and have a patch of soil to till. As early in the spring as possible hundreds of thousands of apartment dwellers move to the little cabins, and there they stay all through the summer, and late into the autumn. Working members of the family commute back and forth to their city jobs. On holidays or in the evenings they till their gardens, sit in the long light of the setting sun, fish in the river or talk to the neighbours. They are deliberately recreating the essence of the ancient way of life, and spiritually and physically they are the better for it.

Most dachas, incidentally, are privately owned. They can be sold or passed on through inheritance. However, the land itself, as with all land in the
U.S.S.R.
, belongs to the people (which is to say, to the State). It can be used in perpetuity by individuals or families but cannot be bought or sold. Real estate manipulators and speculators have a thin time of it in the Soviet Union.

Most of the road to Baikal leads through rolling taiga (
tame
taiga Mark called it, in contrast to the wilderness beyond) which seemed intensely familiar in its crowding stands of spruce and birch, even to a red fox who sat on a snow drift by the roadside and watched us pass with only moderate curiosity. Near the end of the Angara valley we began seeing the villages of lumbermen, boat builders and fishermen. Built entirely of logs the houses were nevertheless very individualistic because of the work done by the owners in decorating gables and eaves and window frames with the same sort of ornate fretwork and carvings which distinguish the houses of Irkutsk.

“The men spend long hours at it during the winter evenings,” Mark explained. “It is true folk art and very serious business. Every Siberian wants to be a little different from everyone else. The first Russians to settle in Siberia were men and women who had been serfs in Europe and could not stand that life. Although they were oppressed by the Tsar’s rule even here, they never became serfs again. If the authorities drove them too hard they simply packed up their belongings and disappeared into the wild taiga to find places nobody even knew about. Siberians have a different spirit from European Russians. They prize their individuality very much and will fight hard to keep it. This is one of the reasons so many of them died in the Great Patriotic War against the fascists. They were amongst the best fighters Russia had.”

The weather began to warm a little as we reached the outlet of Baikal, but in the distance dark clouds still massed over a phalanx of snow-clad mountains which crowded right to the edge of the inland sea, lifting peaks three thousand feet above its steel-blue surface. It was a truly magnificent spectacle, and it was not hard to understand why the friends of Baikal fought so hard for its preservation.

The road only managed to struggle a few kilometers along the northern shore before the cliffs brought it to a halt at a little village crouched in a steep alpine valley which seemed uninhabited except for a score or so of very friendly dogs that swarmed out to give us greetings. One of a succession of storms being spawned in the southern mountains swept viciously across the lake, raising great breakers that came crashing against the cliffs. We drove up a narrow, paved, switch-back road away from the shore and eventually reached a lookout a thousand feet above the lake. At this altitude a snow-laden wind encompassed us, coating the larches with wet snow and obscuring the view except for brief, mysterious glimpses of the mouth of the Angara and the cliffs beyond it.

“I’m sorry about the weather,” Mark apologized as
we crowded back into the warmth of the car. “But I wanted you to visit Eisenhower’s Peak.”

I must have looked startled.

“It is not on any map, but that’s what we call it,” Mark said with a grin. “Or sometimes just Ike’s Peak. You see, sometime before the Revolution, so the story goes, some branch of General Eisenhower’s family had the idea for developing a tourist resort at Lake Baikal. They negotiated to buy a tract of land along this shore, but later had to give up the idea. When he was President of the United States, Eisenhower was supposed to come to Russia for a state visit and he particularly asked to be taken to Baikal.

“Well, you know, Irkutsk wasn’t used to entertaining heads of big foreign states and we were not ready for him. So things began to hum. Special experts came in from Leningrad and Moscow to help. The first thing was to pave the road from Irkutsk to Baikal. Then they decided to build this special road to the top of the mountain so Eisenhower could have the best of views.

“Well, he never came. The American
U
-2 spy plane was shot down over our country and the visit was cancelled. All the same, we in Irkutsk are grateful to Ike. Sometimes when we drive along this nice pavement to Baikal we give a friendly little thought to him.”

D
URING
my first stay in Irkutsk I avoided visiting industrial plants. Such enterprises afflict me with a feeling of unease. However, when I returned to the city in 1969 with John de Visser, it became necessary to visit at least one plant so John could photograph people at work. Arrangements were made to tour the aluminum smelter at Shelekhov.

We were accompanied by a rotund little man we had hired from Intourist to act as John’s interpreter. Sergei Saltikov had spent many years lazing about on Black Sea cruise ships with parties of European tourists, and he was furious at being dispatched to Siberia. He joined us only a few hours before we left Moscow and so we did not find out, until too late, that he was a lush, and that his concept of the English language was uniquely his own. Although perhaps capable of directing lady tourists to the nearest toilet, he sank into the absolute depths of obscurantism when he tried to explain something of any greater complexity.

Once when we were being driven across the taiga our Russian guide asked Sergei to draw our attention to something.

“Take your optic suspension position for observation independently in the reverse direction!” Sergei instructed us.

By the time John and I had worked
that
one out,
whatever it was we were supposed to see had long since vanished astern.

Then there was the time we were being shown through a power house, one of whose turbines was out of action and under repair. As we approached the silent machine Sergei translated the guide’s explanation: “His tubule is steady for the prophylactic,” a statement which produced such an appalling mental image that I hustled past the unfortunate turbine without even a sideways look.

Sergei was cast in an unmistakable mould. His little pink hands were horribly reminiscent of trotters, and his pointed ears and enormous jowls heightened the porcine effect. At the table he was a sight to behold. He engulfed his food with a single-minded fury which suggested that the ultimate Worm Of The World was resident in his rotund tummy.

It was inevitable that we should privately give him the sobriquet of Piggy, and equally inevitable that he should get wind of it. From that moment he became our sworn enemy. His method of obtaining revenge was to intimate to others that, far from being what we seemed, we were in reality Yankee spies. Some of our Russian friends relayed this accusation back to us. They thought it hilariously funny, but there were times when the fun wore a little thin.

The night before we were to tour the aluminum plant Piggy engaged in a monumental binge. In the morning he refused to budge out of his bed. “I am too many strengths down for this work continually,” he snorted, head buried in his pillow. “And which, therefore, is not in the paragraphs of my estimation working to plus four hours in the day!”