* Russian America existed from 1733 to 1867, when the territory was sold to the United States for a paltry US$7.2 million.
* A book I kept close at hand for three years: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014).
IN THE RUSSIAN STATE NAVAL ARCHIVES in St Petersburg, there is a revealing set of customs papers documenting the travails of a little clavichord – the earliest known record of such an instrument making it across Siberia. It belonged to a socially ambitious naval wife called Anna Bering who, in the 1730s, took this precious instrument from St Petersburg to the Sea of Okhotsk, and then travelled another six thousand miles home again on a magnificent transcontinental journey of exploration using only sleighs, boats and horses. Anna was married to Vitus Bering, a Danish-born sea captain in the service of Peter the Great. Known as the ‘Russian Columbus’, Bering’s job was to establish a postal route across Siberia, build ships on Russia’s Pacific coast, and then penetrate the American Northwest. Anna, along with her clavichord, accompanied him.
If the scale of Siberia is dumbfounding, it is even more so when the map is traced with instruments like Anna’s, which wove their way across the Empire before reasonable means of travel existed. They journeyed along Siberia’s expanding trade routes, usually setting off in the dead of winter when the ground was good for sledges, rather than in summer, when Siberia turned into a mire of mud covered with mosquitoes. Siberia’s rivers were another hindrance for travellers: instead of winding across the Empire from west to east, or vice versa, all the big waterways flowed south to north before emptying into a frozen Arctic Ocean.
Overland travel became easier when the Great Siberian Trakt opened during the reign of Catherine the Great. This was the main post road that ran from the brink of Siberia in the Ural Mountains to the city of Irkutsk, located close to Lake Baikal. The journey was infamous – a bumpy highway covered with slack beams of wood. The discomfort of traversing the road’s length by sledge recalled the sensation of a finger being dragged across all the keys of a piano, even the black notes, remarked a nineteenth-century Russian prince, who served as an officer in Siberia. ‘It is heavy going, very heavy,’ observed Anton Chekhov in 1890, ‘but it grows still heavier when you consider that this hideous, pock-marked strip of land, this foul smallpox of a road, is almost the sole artery linking Europe and Siberia! And we are told that along an artery like this civilisation is flowing into Siberia!’
Various methods available for travelling on ice in Siberia, according to the Jesuit explorer Father Philippe Avril in his 1692 work, Voyage en divers états d’Europe et d’Asie.
Chekhov had considered himself well prepared for his journey from Moscow through Siberia to reach the Tsarist penal colony of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Pacific, where he wrote an important piece of journalism about the brutality of the exile system. His mistake was the choice of season. Chekhov undertook his Siberian travels in spring – during rasputitsa, an evocative Russian word, as sticky as clods of earth, used to describe the muddy conditions that come with the thaw. He used a tarantass, a horse-drawn carriage with a half-hood, no springs, and wheels that could be interchanged for runners for the ice. Chekhov packed big boots, a sheepskin jacket, and an army officer’s waterproof leather coat, as well as a large knife – for hunting tigers, he joked. ‘I’m armed from head to foot,’ he wrote to his publisher. He passed chain gangs of convicts. The company he kept was poor. The coachmen were wolves. The women, who couldn’t sing, were colourless, cold and ‘coarse to the touch’. Inevitably, he got stuck in the seasonal mud, his tarantass caught like a fly in gooey jam.
The tarantass – depicted here crossing a tributary of Lake Baikal – was described by an English traveller in Russia in 1804 as a ‘wooden Machine precisely like a Cradle where People place their Beds and Sleep thro’ the entire of a Winter Journey’. The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (London: Macmillan and Co., 1935).
Travellers put up with the unpleasantness because until the Trans-Siberian Railway arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, the Great Siberian Trakt was the only significant road nourishing Siberia with new blood from European Russia – or at least what had survived the journey over Western Siberia’s malarial Baraba Steppe. As for the lures of Irkutsk, they might not have been quite on a par with St Petersburg – everything in Siberia ran a hundred years behind the rest of Russia, noted an early visitor – but its relative cosmopolitanism provided some relief for travellers. When Chekhov visited, he remarked that Siberia was a place you rarely heard an accordion, blaming the lack of art and music on a pitiless struggle with nature, as if survival and culture were mutually exclusive. But Irkutsk, known as the Paris of Siberia, was an exception. Chekhov thought it ‘a splendid town’ lively with music and theatre, as well as ‘hellishly expensive’, with a very good patisserie.
Irkutsk was sophisticated for the provinces, an upwardly mobile town where it was important to the educated classes to grasp any threads of connection with European culture, which Catherine’s reign had encouraged. In 1782, the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg despatched thirteen hundred books to Irkutsk. A public library went up, designed according to the fashionable European Russian style prevalent in the capital. An orchestra was founded, and a school teaching no less than five foreign languages. By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796, Irkutsk had turned into a critical junction of the two main trans-Siberian routes.
The southern route out of Irkutsk wound east over Lake Baikal, the water traversed either by sledge in winter or by ferry in summer. The road then spurred down towards the dusty Russia–China border town of Kiakhta, a famous staging post on the Eurasian tea route. The north-easterly passage from Irkutsk to Siberia’s Pacific rim was more forbidding: a thirty-day winter journey by dog-sled, reindeer-sled and horse-drawn cart east along the Yakutsk–Okhotsk Trakt to reach the shipbuilding yard of Okhotsk. One fifth of all the silk reaching Western Europe passed through Irkutsk, along with rhubarb – a precious commodity thought to be a miracle cure for a myriad of maladies – and a large share of China’s tea. For anyone of influence travelling across the Russian Empire, Irkutsk was an economic and geopolitical crucible in the heart of Eurasia – a significance symbolized by the elegant belfry at the top of the Church of the Raising of the Cross still dominating a small hill at the city centre where Arthur Psariov, a veteran of the Soviet–Afghan War,* has been ringing the church bells for the last three decades.
We had met the first winter of my search when Arthur led me through the nave, passing a tall priest with the poise of a chess piece, his neck held stiff in a rigid golden cassock. Incense drifted across the altar from a swinging ball and chain, the ball’s to-and-fro setting the measured pace of the priest’s holy incantations. Inside the bell tower, Arthur knew where the stairs’ rungs were weak, the wood spongy, the old nails unreliable with rust. When he skipped a step, I did the same, placing my feet into the crinkled prints he left in the thin membrane of frost that coated the tower’s throat, each staging post in the plexus of narrow steps more treacherous than the next.
At the top of the bell tower, its sides open to the weather, the snow absorbed the babble of the divine service going on downstairs: the priest chanting, babushki arriving with their trolley bags of shopping, the clunk and burst of heavy doors. The octagonal platform
