Siberia in the big, soft chords in Russian music that evoke the hush of silver birch trees and the billowing winter snows.
Covering an eleventh of the world’s landmass, Siberia is bordered by the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Mongolian steppe in the south. The Urals mark Siberia’s western edge, and the Pacific its eastern rim. It is the ultimate land beyond ‘The Rock’, as the Urals used to be described, an unwritten register of the missing and the uprooted, an almost-country perceived to be so far from Moscow that when some kind of falling star destroyed a patch of forest twice the size of the Russian capital in the famed ‘Tunguska Event’ of 1908, no one bothered to investigate for twenty years. Before air travel reduced distances, Siberia was too remote for anyone to go and look.
In the seventeenth century, wilderness was therefore ideal for banishing criminals and dissidents when the Tsars first transformed Siberia into the most feared penal colony on Earth. Some exiles had their nostrils split to mark them as outcasts. Others had their tongues removed. One half of their head was shaved to reveal smooth, blue-tinged skin. Among them were ordinary, innocent people labelled ‘convicts’ on the European side of the Urals, and ‘unfortunates’ in Siberia. Hence the habit among fellow exiles of leaving free bread on windowsills to help bedraggled newcomers. Empathy, it seems, has been seared into the Siberian psyche from the start, with these small acts of kindness the difference between life and death in an unimaginably vast realm. Siberia’s size also stands as testimony to our human capacity for indifference. We find it difficult to identify with places that are too far removed. That’s what happens with boundless scale. The effects are dizzying until it is hard to tell truth from fact, whether Siberia is a nightmare or a myth full of impenetrable forests and limitless plains, its murderous proportions strung with groaning oil derricks and sagging wires. Siberia is all these things, and more as well.
It is a modern economic miracle, with natural oil and gas reserves driving powerful shifts in the geopolitics of North Asia and the Arctic Ocean. It is the taste of wild strawberries sweet as sugar cubes, and tiny pine cones stewed in jam. It is home-made pike-and-mushroom pie, clean air and pure nature, the stinging slap of waves on Lake Baikal, and winter light spangled with powdered ice. It is land layered with a rich history of indigenous culture where a kind of magical belief-system still prevails. Despite widespread ecological destruction, including ‘black snow’ from coal mining, toxic lakes, and forest fires contributing to smoke clouds bigger than the EU, Siberia’s abundant nature still persuades you to believe in all sorts of mysteries carved into its petroglyphs and caves. But Siberia’s deep history also makes you realize how short our human story is, given the landscape’s raw tectonic scale.
In Siberia’s centre, a geographical fault, the Baikal Rift Zone, runs vertically through Russia to the Arctic Ocean. Every year the shores around Lake Baikal – the deepest lake on Earth, holding a fifth of the world’s fresh water – move another two centimetres apart, the lake holding the kinetic energy of an immense living landscape about to split. It is a crouched violence, a gathering strain, a power that sits just beneath the visible. The black iris of Russia’s ‘Sacred Sea’ is opening up, the rift so significant that when this eye of water blinks sometime in the far future, Baikal could mark the line where the Eurasian landmass splits in two: Europe on one side, Asia on the other, in one final cataclysmic divorce. Above all, Baikal’s magnificence reasserts the vulnerability of man. Beneath the lake’s quilt of snow in winter lies a mosaic of icy sheets, each fractured vein serving as a reminder that the lake’s surface might give way at any moment. Fissures in the ice look like the surface of a shattered mirror. Other cracks penetrate more deeply, like diamond necklaces suspended in the watery blues. The ice tricks you with its fixity when in fact Baikal can be deadly. Just look at how it devours the drowned. In Baikal there is a little omnivorous crustacean smaller than a grain of rice, with a staggering appetite. These greedy creatures are the reason why Baikal’s water is so clear: they filter the top fifty metres of the lake up to three times a year – another strange endemic aberration like Baikal’s bug-eyed nerpa seals, shaped like rugby balls, whose predecessors got trapped in the lake some two million years ago when the continental plates made their last big shift. Either that or the nerpa are an evolution of ringed seal that swam down from the Arctic into Siberia’s river systems and got stuck – like so much else in Siberia, unable to return to their homeland, re-learning how to survive.
Because Siberia isn’t sleeping. Its resources are under immense pressure from a ravenous economy. Climate change is also hitting Siberia hard. In the Far North, the permafrost is melting. More than half of Russia balances on this unstable layer of frozen ground, Siberia’s mutability revealed in cracks that slice through forlorn buildings, and giant plugs of tundra collapsing without a grunt of warning. Bubbles formed of methane explode then fall in like soufflés. But no one much notices – including Russians who have never visited, whose quality of life owes a debt to Siberia’s wealth – because even with modern air travel there are Siberians living in towns who still refer to European Russia as ‘the mainland’. They might as well be marooned on islands. Take Kolyma in Russia’s remote north-east, flanking an icy cul de sac of water called the Sea of Okhotsk. This chilling territory, where some of the worst of the twentieth-century forced-labour camps, or Gulags, were located, used to be almost impossible to access except by air or boat. Even today, the twelve hundred miles of highway linking Kolyma to Yakutsk, which is among the coldest cities on Earth, are often impassable. In his unflinching record of what occurred in the camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s choice of words – The Gulag Archipelago – is therefore rooted in fact, even if the phrase carries an immense metaphorical weight.
The Soviet Gulag – scattered throughout Russia, not just Siberia – was different from the Tsarist penal exile system which came before the 1917 Revolution, although the two are often confused. The Tsars could banish people to permanent settlement in Siberia, as well as condemn them to hard labour. Under the Soviets, the emphasis was on hard-labour camps only, wound together with curious methods of ‘cultural education’. Once your sentence was up (assuming you survived it), you could usually return home, though there were exceptions. Both systems had a great deal of brutality in common, with the Tsarist exile system turning Siberia into a prodigious breeding ground for revolutionary thought. Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin – they all spent time in Siberia as political exiles before the Revolution. So did some of Russia’s greatest writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in the mid-nineteenth century described convicts chained to the prison wall, unable to move more than a couple of metres for up to ten years. ‘Here was our own peculiar world, unlike anything else at all,’ he wrote – ‘a house of the living dead.’
Yet under winter’s spell, stories about the state’s history of repression slip away. Siberia’s summer bogs are turned into frosted doilies and pine needles into ruffs of Flemish lace. The snow dusts and coats the ground, swirling into mist whenever the surface is caught by wind, concealing the bones of not only Russians but also Italians, French, Spaniards, Poles, Swedes and many more besides who perished in this place of exile, their graves unmarked. In Siberia, everything feels ambiguous, even darkly ironic, given the words used to describe its extremes. Among nineteenth-century prisoners, shackles were called ‘music’, presumably from the jingle of the exiles’ chains. In Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, to ‘play the piano’ meant having your fingerprints taken when you first arrived in camp.
But there is also another story to Siberia. Dotted throughout this land are pianos, like the humble, Soviet-made upright in the photograph of a Kamchatka lava field, and a few modern imported instruments. There is an abundance of beautiful grand pianos in a bitterly cold town called Mirny – a fifties Soviet settlement enriched by the largest open-cast diamond mine in the world – and more than fifty Steinway pianos in a school for gifted children in Khanty-Mansiysk at the heart of Western Siberia’s oil fields. Such extravagances, however, are few and far between. What is more remarkable are the pianos dating from the boom years of the Empire’s nineteenth-century pianomania. Lost symbols of Western culture in an Asiatic realm, these instruments arrived in Siberia carrying the melodies of Europe’s musical salons a long way from the cultural context of their birth. How such instruments travelled into this wilderness in the
