Sibir (9 page)

As we walked past it one of my companions gave the tree a friendly pat. “Do you know who saved this tree? Not the planners, I can tell you! It was the workmen themselves. They refused to cut it down and the people of the city stood right behind them.”

Perhaps this is only another example of incurable romanticism in the Russian psyche, but it may have a deeper meaning. Certainly some of my Irkutsk friends look upon the old tree as a kind of symbol of a new resistance movement – a peaceful movement directed at slowing the onrush of the mechanical colossus, Progress, so that men can at least try to regain meaningful control of it.

I was still thinking about the tree when we climbed the broad stone steps of the main university building – a handsome white limestone palace built on the banks of the Angara about 1800, under the direction of an Italian architect. For a century it was the home of the Tsars’ governors and the seat of power for an immense part of Siberia. Now it remains as one of Irkutsk’s most famous and beloved buildings and the students who have inherited it are not immune to the effect of its pre-revolutionary grandeur.

We had dawdled a bit during our walk and were twenty minutes late for the meeting; nevertheless the earnest young student who met us in the foyer delayed us several
minutes longer in order to point out some of the old building’s glories. He seemed as passionately proud of them as some of his engineer siblings are of the power dams and factories they have built. I warmed to him immediately although I had not really been looking forward to the visit because it had been rather too carefully arranged for my liking.

Fourteen young men and women, mostly under twenty and all Siberian born, were gathered in a pleasant commonroom around a long table. They greeted me politely and I took a seat between a beautiful Buryat girl and an equally attractive Evenk damsel.

These were the insatiable elephant children and I was soon swamped by waves of questions. Theirs was a specialized curiosity. They were not interested in Canadian living standards, politics or such trivia … they wanted to know about the Canadian north. I offered them generalities, acting on the assumption that they would know as little about my country as I knew about theirs. To my surprise and chagrin they demonstrated that they knew far more about the Canadian north than do most Canadians. They wanted details. What, for instance, was the material used for insulation in permafrost construction at our new arctic “city” of Inuvik? (I did not know). How many Eskimo students were attending universities? (That one made me choke a little, but in the end I forced myself to be honest and answered – two.) How much progress had we made in reindeer husbandry? (The answer to that one had to be – nil.) and so on and on until I finally appealed to the chairman for mercy. He grinned and rapped for order.

“We have picked enough out of Gospodin Mowat’s brains. Now it is his turn to see what he can find in ours.”

His deliberate use of the pre-revolutionary word for “mister” instead of the contemporary
tovarich
– “comrade” – drew a chuckle from several students.

The little Buryat beauty Tania came to my defence. She removed a little crimson and gilt badge from the cleft of her dress and pinned it on my lapel.

“Now you are honorary member of Komsomol,
Tovarich
Mowat!” She looked around the table and there was a challenging glitter in her eyes. “In Buryatia we do not make jokes at honoured guests!”

The conversation that followed was lively and surprisingly frank. I say surprisingly, because most of these students were presumably Komsomol members and therefore potential Party members; and the chairman was, in fact, the Party Secretary of a student organization.

Several had spent the previous summer working in the arctic as part of a group of seventy Irkutsk students who went to Chukotka on their own initiative and at their own expense. Many of them worked as volunteers at a collective where the local people – Chukchee and Eskimo – had established an experimental processing plant to prepare and preserve fish, reindeer, and sea-mammal meat for export to Japan.

Most said they intended to go north again the following summer and some had already changed their personal long-range plans as a result of the first trip and were taking special courses to prepare themselves for full-time arctic work.

“Why the north?” I asked. “Much of south and central Siberia is still almost virgin territory. Surely there’s enough to do down here.”

“I’ve read a lot of Jack London,” a geology student replied. “I suppose I might have caught what he called ‘the lure of the north.’ It wasn’t really like he described it when I got there, but there was a special kind of feeling you don’t get anymore in southern Siberia where I was born. The south is filling up with people from across the Urals. Things are getting too busy down here … the cities are too big.”

“It’s the freedom of the tundra I liked,” one of the girls interrupted. “The mosquitos may drink half your
blood, but you still feel it’s worthwhile to be able to walk in all that open space and see wild reindeer, and wolves, and watch the geese nesting.”

“That’s
one
kind of freedom – romantic stuff if you ask me,” scoffed a male history student. “There’s another kind. There aren’t many bureaucrats in the north. You can make decisions without having to consult a hundred fine fellows sitting in their offices all the way between Irkutsk and Moscow.”

“It’s a frontier situation,” the chairman interjected. “Then too there’s the social responsibility of developing a big part of the world that hasn’t really changed much since the last ice age. All Soviet young people are aware of the duty to accept this responsibility. It is reward enough for them.”

Nobody backed him up on that one. A trifle impatiently one young man, an Evenk, even took issue with the chairman.

“That isn’t right. Things have changed, and were changing before Soviet power [the almost universal phrase used to describe the arrival of communism in the north] came to us. Of course the change was slow, and now it has become fast; but we of the Small Peoples had already learned a great deal of the secrets of the north.”

“There are other rewards,” said an engineering student, with perhaps a touch of cynicism. “The farther north you go, the higher the wages, the better the living conditions in the new towns, the longer holidays you get and the better the retirement benefits.”

“In North America,” I said, “Most young people head
toward
the big cities – not
away
from them. Isn’t there a lot of that here too? Especially among people born in Siberia?”

“There is and there isn’t,” Tania said cautiously. “We do feel the attraction of the cities, and most of us enjoy visiting them, but although we value them very much, we value the freedom when we are away from them even more. Many of us will go to Moscow or Leningrad or
Novosibirsk when we finish here – but not many will remain in the cities.”

“The big cities are for old people,” said a blonde male student. “They are run by the old people and youth has to wait its turn. It isn’t the same in the new regions of Siberia, particularly the north. That’s young people’s country. Do you know that the average age in Bilibino where I worked this summer [Bilibino is a new town in Chukotka] is only twenty-six years of age?”

“There is too much inflexibility in the thinking of some older people. Look at the way some of them go about smashing up the natural world just for a new factory or bigger production!” The speaker was a second-year zoology student. “Look what almost happened to Baikal? Well, it’s not the only place. Some of the older people don’t seem to remember there are going to be a lot of generations who will have to live in this world after they are gone. I think this is a condition of age – the inability to
really
see the future in terms of unborn people. Oh, of course, they can plan for future
production
, but what good is it if the world is just a wreck when they get finished?”

“That is why
I
will go to the north to live and work,” said one of the girls. “Things are still clean there and not yet spoiled. We will have to fight to see the north is kept this way.”

“The balance of age in government is not as it should be,” pursued the zoologist, who was now firmly in the saddle and riding hard. “Young people see the threats of the future with clear eyes. It is true we need the wisdom of the older people but it should be only a counterweight – it should not outweigh the ideas and opinions of the young. After all, it is our world more than theirs.”

This seemed to me to be cutting pretty close to the bone, and I glanced at the chairman to see how he was reacting. To my surprise he did not indicate disapproval; but disapproval there was. It came from one of those who had accompanied me to the meeting. He was a man
who had spent four years in a corrective labour camp during the Stalin era. Getting to his feet he took firm command of the meeting, brought the discussion to an end and thanked the students on my behalf.

“Now,” he said, “we must go. We have another appointment and we are already late.”

When we were on our way back to the hotel I taxed him for his action.

“There was no other appointment. Why did you break up the meeting?”

He shrugged and looked a trifle ashamed. “I am sorry, Farley. Do you have in English the proverb about the man who, once bitten by a dog, stays clear of dogs thereafter? Well, I have a reflex action, you might say. The way those young fellows talk – I must admire them – but perhaps I am too sensitive.”

Sensitive he may have been, and doubtless with sufficient reason, but he must have felt some guilt about his abrupt action at the meeting. A few nights later he introduced me to three other students, and over cognac in a small café they expanded on some of the themes discussed earlier.

“There is a very strong conflict in this country now between old and young,” one of them explained. “It is not yet an angry struggle but it is being waged very stubbornly. The old revolutionaries and party leaders suffered a lot, and they did good work, but things have changed, and their thinking has not changed enough. We don’t disagree with them about the principles of communism. We are just as good communists as they, but we are of a different kind. Their main job was to defend the vulnerable young communist infant and improve the physical conditions of our people, and they had to accomplish miracles. They did, too; but that phase is nearly over. Now there has to be a new way of thinking about the future – the long-term future. For instance, they talk about a world without war, but few of them really believe in such a thing. We, on the other hand, not only believe
in it, we know it must be brought about. They are mostly ‘battle’ oriented. They still see the continuing survival of the socialist countries as a ‘battle’ with the capitalists. They see the development of undeveloped regions as a ‘battle’ with nature.
We
think the period of ‘battle’ thinking has to end.”

“We know about the peace movements amongst students in your country,” a second student interjected. “We think they feel the same way we do, but they have a difficulty. They have no clear idea what can be done, or how to do it. They don’t trust their system and they want to reject it, yet they have nothing to replace it with. We may not be entirely happy with ours, but that’s only because it isn’t working well. We believe it can be made to work better and this is what we intend to do. We will make the communist idea really serve man the way Lenin intended it should.”

“Aren’t you at all worried about talking this way to a stranger?” I asked.

“Would we talk to you if we were? Don’t underestimate us. You won’t read about us in
Pravda
, but there are many like us in the Soviet Union. And remember, we are not anti-revolutionaries. We are perhaps the new revolutionaries, helping the revolution to evolve.”

“About
Pravda
,” I said. “Are you in favour of what we in the west like to call a ‘free press’?”

The elder of the three raised his glass. “Here’s a toast to free ideas, anyway,” he said. We all drank, although I must admit that I first of all cast a glance over my shoulder to see if anyone was listening.

“We
do
have a free press but it doesn’t use printing machinery; it uses ideas in conversation. Do you know the saying that, these days, half of Russia is on wheels and the other half on wings? It is really true, you know. Everybody is on the move and our ‘free press’ goes all over the Soviet Union. It is far more effective than most printed papers. Who reads them anyhow? Have
you
tried to read our papers?”

“The day is coming when the grandfathers will realize they can withdraw with honour. Then there will be a wider spectrum of ideas and opinions in our printed press too. If communism
is
right – and we believe it is – we have nothing to fear from even adverse ideas. They can only serve to strengthen our resolve.”

They were an impressive trio of young men but I was not entirely convinced by their, to me, somewhat naïve belief that there is safety in numbers or that a rational dialogue such as they propose will be well tolerated.

For this reason I have not revealed these young men’s names and, in fact, have placed the interview out of its actual context.

D
URING
one of my visits to Irkutsk, a catastrophe struck. The city went dry! Not a bottle of vodka, cognac or alcohol was to be had in the stores. The mood of the city changed perceptibly. Men one met on the streets looked as if the Last Trump had sounded. On the other hand women, and in particular married women, seemed exceptionally sunny, almost smug.

The truth is that Siberian men do tend to take a drop over the ordinary limit. As the Siberian saying goes: One hundred versts (roughly a hundred miles) is no distance. A hundred rubles isn’t worthwhile money. And a hundred grams of vodka just makes you thirsty.

The cause of the drought seemed obscure. Yura attributed it to the presence of a huge convention of state and collective farmers. “They’ve drunk everything there is,” he said gloomily. Someone else saw the drought as part of a dark plot on the part of Them – the bureaucrats – to force temperance on the city. Mark thought it was a just a distribution bottleneck.