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 was topped with a stone cupola, its underbelly webbed with struts, many of them in poor repair. Circling the belfry was a balcony, its rim beaded in ice. Arthur warned me not to stand too close to the edge. Three of the wooden balusters were missing. Others were barely holding their place, hanging like loose teeth.
Beneath me lay the city’s wide boulevards. On a shallow incline stood historic wooden houses, and a few other bell towers puncturing the sky, their cupolas skinned in green, gold and peacock blue. With snow unable to stick to their pitch, the domes caught the sun, their satisfying shapes exactly as the author Jules Verne described them, like pot-bellied Chinese jars.
I looked for the train track to orientate me, and the river which runs through Irkutsk, winter’s grip holding it in frigid stasis. In the stillness, two figures in black moved through the whiteness below. One man shovelled snow from the cemetery path. Another swept up behind him, clearing the graves. I looked at them and wondered how they came to be there. Was the one with the dragging leg descended from a murderer, a tea trader, a political exile or a free settler? Or were they Old Siberians, born of the earliest Russian peasants, who intermarried with the indigenes? The pull of private histories is always present in Siberia. Every face informs the enigmatic texture of a place where the legacy of exile lingers, like the smell of incense, or the feeble gleam of traffic lights, with the complexity of Russia’s identity, and the mix of Europe and Asia, evident not just in the jumbled architecture of the Siberian baroque church I stood on top of in a snow-breeze in winter, but in the routes reaching out from every side.
Arthur guided me by the elbow to the edge of the belfry. He wanted to show me the nineteenth-century bell, which had been made in Berlin. The other bells came from the foundry towns ribboning the River Volga – a thousand-year-old tradition of Russian bell-making which had been significantly disrupted by the twentieth century’s atheist Soviet regime. In Irkutsk, the Soviets had turned the oldest church, into a cobbler’s shop, and another into a film studio. Bogoyavlensky Cathedral was used as a bakery, and the bell tower to store salt. These were fates to be preferred over that suffered by Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Though now rebuilt, it was torn down under Stalin’s orders and turned into Russia’s largest open-air swimming pool.
Arthur started to play – softly at first, the resonance making the snow tremble on the belfry’s flimsy balustrade as the bell’s tongue licked its copper skirt. Then the patterns started to build until all eight bells were singing. Arthur pushed and pulled the ropes with his hands, while his feet worked pedals to strike the largest bells, the pace an exhilarating distillation of music’s power, of chords at once melodically familiar and outlandishly foreign.
For five or six minutes Arthur held the city in thrall, sweat riding down the sides of his temples, his body moving with the ease of a dancer, not a giant of a man in clumsy shoes. The sequences quickened until the deepest bell tolled three bass notes. With the sound eddying over Irkutsk, I imagined the townspeople looking up. Would they ever know the identity of this person who found such intense pleasure in such an improbable place? When the last note began to fade, Arthur turned around to face me, wiping his brow.
‘I can play most things, except rock ’n’ roll,’ he said, a broad smile reaching across his face.
*
In 1591, a bell was among the first exiles to Siberia – the weight of a horse, cut down from the belfry in Uglich, a town on a bend in the River Volga in European Russia. The bell had committed the crime of being tolled as a rallying call to urge the citizens to join a small, bold and foolhardy uprising against the state. In response, and to establish his legitimacy, the Tsar Regent executed two hundred of the Uglich townspeople. In a final sadistic twist, those exiled to Siberia were forced to carry the Uglich bell, itself subject to a public lashing, some thirteen hundred miles across the Ural Mountains to Tobolsk. Like the men who bore the instrument on its journey, who had their tongues cut out, the bell was also rendered mute by having its clapper removed. It was a terrifying symbolic act: by silencing music in the belfry, the regime was exerting the alarming reach of its power over every facet of Russian life.
Nor did the horror abate