________________
* The clock can still be found encased in a protective glass box in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The birds lie still for most of the week, but every so often their two-hundred-year-old mechanisms are carefully wound to give visitors a glimpse of the performance that captivated the Empress.
* ‘It is thought that by the end of her reign well over half the population of the Russian Empire had become a slave class, every bit as subjugated as the Negro slaves of America.’ A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).
* ‘Polish’ is a simplification of the cultural nuances of the time, but is generally used to discuss the various ethnicities – Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, among others – sharing a region on Russia’s western edge with constantly shifting borders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
* Confusingly, most non-Russian readers will know this as ‘the Eastern Front’, where the Allies fought Germany for control of Eastern Europe. For the Soviet Union, however, this was most definitely a Western Front. The Soviets’ Eastern Front centred around the invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria in 1945.
* Dumka, op. 59.
Traces in the Snow: Khabarovsk
IF YOU MEASURE SIBERIA’S width from the Urals in the west to the last spit of land that makes up the Chukotka Peninsula on Russia’s Arctic seaboard, then Siberia is wider than Australia, its Pacific edge just fifty miles shy of North America to the east. In Siberia, there are lakes that are called seas, with some parts so thinly populated that travellers past and present have frequently compared Siberia to the moon.* This analogy would work if it weren’t for the animal life that thrives in Siberia’s icy vaults. Once upon a time, when Eurasia wasn’t such a mighty, contiguous landmass, the Urals formed the shore of an epicontinental sea dividing Europe from Asia. Flora and fauna migrated across the land when sea levels fell, except for one species that managed to more or less respect the borders of this long-forgotten biogeographical divide: a plucky little Siberian newt you seldom find west of the Urals. A fierce swimmer and evolutionary hero, the pencil-long Salamandrella keyserlingii can live for many years inside the permafrost, in temperatures hitting fifty degrees below. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how in Stalin’s labour camps, higher thoughts of ichthyology would be cast aside for a mouthful of the prehistoric flesh. If famished convicts were ever to chance upon such a thing, he pictured the scene: the salamander would be frantically thawed on the bonfire and devoured ‘with relish’ by hungry convicts elbowing each other out of the way.
On a cold winter morning in March 2016, I landed in the city of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, an eight-hour flight from Moscow and about a day’s drive from the Pacific, where the coast is so choked with ice you can walk out on to a frozen ocean. It felt about as far from home as I could get while remaining on this planet. With the idea of Siberia’s lost pianos nagging at my conscience, I had made a couple of cursory attempts to see if my quest had legs, but the real purpose of my trip wasn’t to find an instrument for the Mongolian pianist I had befriended. I had come to track something far rarer – to write about the Siberian, or Amur, tiger. If there were a decent story to tell, I would sell it to a British newspaper. In winter, when the forest is covered in snow, it is easier to see a tiger’s footprints.
Panthera tigris altaica, an icon of the Russian wilderness under heavy federal protection, is on a fragile edge. There are only an estimated five hundred of these creatures surviving in the wild, their rarity almost on a par with the few snow leopards left in Siberia’s Altai Mountains close to Mongolia, and the Amur leopard, which is down to eighty or so animals where Russia borders China and North Korea. For centuries, the Chinese came foraging for ginseng roots in these eastern forests, and to poach tigers for traditional medicine. Then in the late nineteenth century, big-game hunters shot them for trophy pelts until tiger hunting was banned in Russia in 1947. These days, professional conservationists are lucky to encounter a wild tiger more than once or twice in a lifetime. Before the Korean tiger researcher and filmmaker Sooyong Park started his work in 1995, less than an hour’s footage had ever been recorded of Siberian tigers in the wild.
I arrived in Khabarovsk expecting everything to be dead and infirm, unbearably cruel and devoid of enchantment. Siberia had functioned for more than three centuries as a prison. It had been shredded by revolution, civil war, Stalin’s reign of terror and the impact of the Great Patriotic War. I turned eighteen in 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. Twenty-five years later and numerous post-Soviet images were seared into my mind: a factory here, an abandoned tank there, and a sickly forest eaten away by industrial pollution.
Not that I was unique in my preconceptions. In 1770, Catherine the Great complained to the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire: ‘When this nation becomes better known in Europe, people will recover from the many errors and prejudices that they have about Russia.’ When Tchaikovsky met Liszt in 1877, he remarked on his nauseatingly deferential smile, which was heavily loaded with condescension.
‘Pay no heed to the boasting of Russians; they confuse splendour with elegance, luxury with refinement, policing and fear with the foundations of society,’ wrote the French traveller the Marquis de Custine, of the Russia he found around the time Liszt was in St Petersburg. ‘Up to now, as far as civilization is concerned, they have been satisfied with appearances, but if they were ever to avenge their real inferiority, they would make us pay cruelly for our advantages over them.’ De Custine – described by one historian as a camp, – was a powerful influence in the West’s early (and enduring) perception of backwards Russia: ‘The Russians have gone rotten without ever ripening!’ he wrote in 1839, citing a well-known aphorism of the time. If the West still looks down on Russia, it has an even more pronounced attitude towards Siberia – and it was ever thus. ‘There are few places on the earth’s surface about which the majority of mankind have such definite ideas with so little personal knowledge as Siberia,’ observed a British economist travelling through the country in 1919.
On first encounter, Khabarovsk was wrapped in this fog of stereotypes. It was a leaden sprawl in monochrome with neither the brutal beauty of Moscow nor the peppermint-coloured grace of St Petersburg. There was a museum about a bridge, another about fish, a third about the history of gas extraction. The snow was dirty, like the midnight stipple on an old television channel. Trails from smokestacks streaked the sky with worry lines. Signs of urban prosperity were thin: a European-style boulevard with blushes of pink paint, and a promenade with white railings used as a set for wedding photographs beside the frozen Amur River. At least I hadn’t come in summer, when the surrounding forest turns to swamp blackened with mosquitoes, their wings pricking the surface like drizzle, their swollen corpses falling into every spoonful of soup.
Aleksandr Batalov, the local tiger researcher I had come to meet, didn’t speak much at first. In his middle sixties, he was broad and short, with grey eyes and wide shoulders honed by the pull-ups he practised on a bar that hung across the doorway of his cabin in the forest. He wore a pair of felt boots gifted to him by a colonel in the Russian army, and mismatched camouflage fatigues. Following us in another van out to the forest was a driver carrying food supplies and extra blankets. The driver’s face was sallow, scored by a lifetime of pulling hard on cigarettes, his lack of charisma matching a description that the early-twentieth-century explorer Vladimir Arseniev gave to the local men who joined him on his expeditions through this territory. ‘The Siberians were selected not for their social qualifications,’ he wrote, ‘but because they were resourceful men accustomed to roughing