The Books: “Among the Russians: From the Baltic To the Caucasus” (Colin Thubron)

Next on my history/travel bookshelf:

No more Paul Theroux! Say buh-bye, Mr. Theroux! Next book on the shelf is the first of what is known as the “Russian Trilogy” – and it’s called Among the Russians, by Colin Thubron.

First in a trilogy. The other two books are: The Lost Heart of Asia (P.S.) and In Siberia.

Colin Thubron took three separate trips to Russia (only one when it was the USSR) and each book is the chronicle of one particular trip. He has an extraordinary skill as a writer. He’s quite good on the whole historical side of storytelling as well, similar to Robert Kaplan is. As in: you travel to a town, and the town has a storied history, or a checkered past … and through the gift of the writing, you get to see the entire scope of what this one tiny particular town means. Thubron is fantastic at that. But he’s also amazing at giving you the FEEL of each particular trip.

Among the Russians is the first of the trilogy (actually, there’s a fourth book – about China. Thubron meant the 4 books to go together – but the China book is now not lumped in with the 3 Russian books. If you go to your History bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, you’ll probably see only three books, in a row.) Among the Russians was published in the early 80s. The first sentence of the book is: “I had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember.” He decides to confront that fear, and drives a car through Western Russia – stopping at Moscow, not going further into the country. But he travels up to Leningrad, goes to Estonia, Latvia … drives down to Kiev, Rostov-on-Don … etc. The book was recently re-released in paperback, and in his little introduction (setting up the whole trilogy), Thubron writes:

Later journeys took me deeper into these lands I had been brought up to fear, and a further three books charted them: Behind the Wall on China still shadowed by the Cultural Revolution; The Lost Heart of Asia on the Islamic republics emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union; and In Siberia on Russia’s eastern wilderness. Among the Russians is the first of this quartet, and perhaps the most innocent: a lone Westerner traveling into a Soviet world which still seemed impregnable.

Wonderful books. My favorite is The Lost Heart of Asia (of course – because it’s a journey through all the ‘stans!) – but they’re ALL good.

Among the Russians is interesting because Thubron is traveling through the country during the dying gasps of Communism. He gets a tour at some museum or something – and the guy giving the tour is still totally brainwashed by the Communist ideal … Thubron searches, in vain, for any cynicism in the guy, he wonders: “How can he still actually believe that crap??” Thubron is also followed by the KGB throughout his trip. His notes are confiscated at the border. He is dogged by “guides” who want to travel with him … The thought of this random British person just DRIVING HIS CAR??? THROUGH RUSSIA??? And … camping?? Setting up his tent and camping? What? And forming his own opinion about stuff?? All of this was very threatening. Obviously, the authorities assumed this dude was up to no good. Thubron was wily, though … cunning, and persistent. He had grown up being afraid of Russia. Once he got there, once he met people (some great scenes of him camping at campsites and the people he meets there – the vodka-soaked parties, the dancing … but also the insights into where the country is at, how people outside of the bureaucracy feel about Communism, etc.) – anyway, once he started to meet people, and travel, he lost his fear. He refused to submit to the control. There was no reason why he couldn’t drive wherever he wanted to. So off he went.

I love, too, how he meets someone – either an interpreter, or a guide, or someone like that – who starts to go on and on about his nostalgia for Stalin. The second there’s a pause, Thubron states, “Stalin was a monster.” And the guide stumbles a bit, and says, “We need that strength again …”

Thubron, having grown up terrified of Russia, came to the country with his guard up. He, of course, was angry at having been terrified. He actively despises Communism, and makes no bones about how stupid he thinks the whole thing is when he talks to people. And beautifully: once he starts getting invited into people’s private homes, once the vodka starts flowing at the campsites – 99% of the people, of course, have no belief in Communism – they just want to lead good lives, and have food on the table. The cynicism about it is incredible. But Thubron finds it so refreshing. After all of the bureaucratic zealotry, and talking-points, and posturing … cynicism starts to seem like evidence of truly independent thinking. He loved it.

I really waffled on this one – but I decided upon the following excerpt. Thubron reaches Rostov-on-Don.

From Among the Russians, by Colin Thubron.

So I came to Rostov-on-Don. This, too, might symbolize the march of industry over the steppes — the triumph of the new Russia over the old Cossack anarchy. It is the gateway to the Caucasus and the eatern shores of the Black Sea. Its citizens are proud of it, and the campsite authorities alighted on me — a rare, lone Westerner — with a language student as a guide.

“This is Yury,” they said. “He’s a Cossack.”

I looked into a near-featureless face, its gaze as grey and unfocused as his native wilderness. I remembered my experience at Minsk, but I had not the heart to send him away. I was his first “real Englishman,” he said.

For two days he showed me round the official attractions of Rostov. He recited his facts dutifully — good and bad — in a throaty, smothered voice. He showed none of the hectic evangelism of Alexander Intourist. One skyscraper, he said, had already taken fifteen years to build — he was a child when it had been started — and nobody knew when it would be finished. It was a half-standing joke. And the huge Gorky Theatre, built in the shape of a tractor — a last shout of Constructivism from the early thirties — only faintly stirred him.

Yet Yury was touchy. And he understood nothing of the West at all; he could scarcely focus his imagination for a coherent question about it. Around him the Soviet Union was so vast and hermetic that it comprised all the conceivable world.

One thing I remember with peculiar clarity. This was when I told Yury that we in the West were afraid of Russia. For an instant he stared at me open-mouthed, then burst into disbelieving laughter. It was the only time I heard him laugh, so preposterous to him, so manifestly silly, was the idea of his country’s dangerousness. This disbelief had already been echoed by other Russians along my route. Twice Yury asked me if I were not joking, then gazed at me for long moments, astonished at the depth of my delusion.

And I, in turn, became mesmerized by his enclosedness. Rostov to him was the measure of all things. He took me to the gates of the mammoth Rostelmash factory, the country’s biggest producer of agricultural machinery, which had won the Order of Lenin, he said, and the Order of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He chanted the orders like a liturgy. Then we went to a People’s Palace of Culture. We peered into music and ballet rooms, filming and sculpture studios. They were heavy with control. Yury sensed my distaste, but he could not gauge its cause. He grew disconsolate, and redoubled his efforts. He took me to leisure compounds run by trade unions on the south bank of the Don. They were compounds of tin-roofed huts, decorated by plants set in rubber tyres. Everything was violently painted. People came here in summer to escape their apartments, Yury said; the best compound had been visited by Gagarin, and displayed a commemorative fountain, which was falling to bits. No breath of proletarian jollity fired these camps. They were almost deserted. In three different compounds I saw only one netball pitch, a split table-tennis board and a billiard table whose pockets had rotted to shreds. It was the nightmare of some Marxist Butlin.

But Yury felt none of this. He liked the trees, and the sense of the river nearby. Living in a city, he was yet a countryman. He took the steppeland into the streets with him. It lumbered in his walk and filled his inarticulate gaze and hands. He typified, perhaps, the Russian whom Westerners underestimate: decent, conscientious, enduring.

His ancestry was as remote and glamourous to him as it was to me. We spent a morning at Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital — a town like any other now, he said. But two triumphal arches celebrated the entry of Platov’s Cossacks into Napoleon’s Paris, and the crypt of the forbidding cathedral was filled with the tombs of wild atamans. There were still a few old Cossack families living in the town, Yury said, but they kept to themselves and he did not know them. So we wandered around the Don Cossack museum, gazing at a booty of velvet, glass, carpets.

The Cossacks refuse any ideological mould. Refugees from serfdom or revolution, flamboyantly whiskered men and braided women, prodigal of life, roisterous, drunken, free — this seemingly indestructible people, coalesced into unruly democracies on the frontiers of empire, pushing it forward but half independent of it, and became in turn the martyrs of peasant revolution and the brutal instruments of imperial repression. The later tsars elevated them to an elite military caste, until they formed the hardest and most reactionary regiments of the army.

All this — royalist or revolutionary — was splashed about the museum in a tempestuous duality. But their later history had been reconvened into ghostly, half-recognisable shapes. Their role in supporting the Whtie armies had tactfully dwindled; so had those who fought for Germany in the Second World War and who were betrayed by the Treaty of Yalta; and so had Stalin’s collectivization of the kulaks, the richer farmers, which went ahead in a welter of violence and family feuds, to end in mass arrests and mass exile.

But the drift to the town was destroying Cossackdom more surely, and less painfully. “You can’t be a Cossack and live in a city,” Yury said, as we swallowed fish soup and beef pancakes in a self-consciously Cossack restaurant on the Don. “You have to stay in the village, the stanitsa. An urban Cossack’s a contradiction.”

We stared out at the river. Between its unequal banks — the northern high and tree-crowned, the southern low and merging into steppe — it flowed, rife with history, to the Sea of Azov. Over its surface a light, troubling ripple played all afternoon, but left its depths untouched, as if the great waters were scarcely moving. Upriver, said Yury, it no longer skirted the wattle-palisaded stanitsas of old, but emerged from a land of collectivized hamlets and forestation schemes.

“The whole society’s dying,” he said. “It’s happening very fast. When I think of my grandfather, who rode with the Red cavalry in the Civil War!” And in a rare moment of evocation, he conjured this ancient warrior before my eyes: a lean, choleric, sickle-whiskered barbarian, whose hair exploded in hoary thickets from under his sheepskin cap and whose gorilla arms were laced with burns. He had died of drink.

“But what happened to him in the thirties?”

Yury kept his eyes on the grey river and announced without emotion: “My grandparents were considered kulak because they owned a horse, a plough, and a patch of land. They were deported to Siberia. Before they went they placed my mother — she was a girl then — with one of my aunts. Those were bad years: famine. My mother’s still physically small. She came from deep Cossack country — a hundred miles north of here.” He gestured upriver. “But she doesn’t want to go back. She says they’re very bitter in those villages. They wouldn’t offer a stranger so much as a glass of water. And of course they hate the memory of Stalin. Three-quarters of our people loathe Stalin.”

Southward, a feeling of timelessness descends. In the west the Azov and Black Seas, where the great rivers spill, merge invisibly with the Mediterranean world. To the east stretch the cloudy steppes of the Caspian and Asia, ancient mother of half the earth’s peoples, whom it has loosed in a staunchless flood since before record. Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Parthians, Magyars — a myriad barbarians grew in this fearsome womb and flung themselves west and south and east, in spasm after spasm, towards the civilizing sea.