Among the Russians(2)

I gazed at all this with the passion of a newcomer, and scribbled it in a diary before I should forget the feel of ordinary, important things. These first hours shone with a peculiar intensity. In the fields of potato and alfalfa, labourers moved through a soft July sunlight—men and stout women in headscarves wielding billhooks and pitchforks. No collectivized glamour, no tractors or combine harvesters intruded into the sodden ritual of their haymaking. Instead, where marshy fields elbowed through the forests, black and white cattle grazed in isolated herds, and troops of herons paced nonchalantly across the meadows.

After a hundred miles I stopped the car and lay on the verge among butterflies and lupins. The country was steeped in silence. In this limitless terrain, details of plant or insect shone with the exposed distinctness of things seen in the desert. A dragonfly clattered onto my knee. Bright yellow toadflax squeezed up between my fingers. They were obscurely comforting.

But I was conscious above all of the stunned desolation which seems to permeate these plains. It has to do, I think, less with their actual poverty—sandy soil, poor drainage—than with the inarticulate vastness of which they form a part. Without the nearness of towns or the presence of hills, the sky takes on a terrible passive force. Stand anywhere here, and three-quarters of your field of vision is engulfed by it, adding a pitiless immensity to the size of the land. The sun and clouds hang permanent and immobile in its blue. They curve above you like a Tiepolo ceiling. Everything beneath is exposed. The weather itself assumes a threatening, total quality, so that the earth can momentarily wither under a flagellating sun, and rain burst like a cataclysm. Above all, people—their houses, traffic, cattle—grow pitifully incidental. The villages I passed generally stood far off the road—wooden cottages with asbestos or tin roofs pitched steep against snow. They were small, abstract—a civilization sketched puny in the fields, like a language I didn’t know. Its people, it seemed, were not enclosed and nurtured, made private or different by the folds of valleys and mountains. They were figures in a landscape, living under the naked sky in the glare of infinity.

Driving eastward through this anonymity, I became obsessed by the sheer magnitude of the country I was trying to pierce. Larger than South America, two and a half times bigger than the United States, it extends half way round the globe and contains one sixth of the land surface of the whole earth. My own journey—eastward to Moscow, north to Leningrad and the Baltic Sea, south to the Caucasus and the Turkish border, back across the Ukraine and the Crimea—comprised only the historic edge of a mighty wilderness. If I traced an imaginary line eastward from where I was driving, it would move for more than a thousand miles over country nearly identical to this, where the altitude changes by no more than 980 feet until the Ural Mountains. Another thousand-mile line extending south-east would meet the black earth and grasslands of the steppes, which I would reach that autumn. But the Soviet Union here has barely begun. Eastward again the black earth pales into the deserts of Kazakhstan, where in summer the temperature may stand at 105°F in the shade for weeks at a time. For hundreds of miles the earth is tossed into dunes or sets hard as a parquet floor, and the rivers wind into landlocked seas or die of exhaustion across the sands. Northward, in the valleys of the Ob river, spreads the hugest lowland on earth—the mosquito-plagued lakes and swamplands of the West Siberian plain, while eastward again lies the forbidding heart of this whole continent: Central Siberia, bounded by the glacial waters of the Arctic Ocean.

It is these Siberian lands—ice-glazed, wind-stricken—which sit behind the inner eye as you drive east. They lend their invisible enormity to everything around you. While I was driving here at midday, their farther reaches were still plunged in night. In the far north—land of the reindeer and snowy owl—three months of winter go by without daylight at all, and the mean winter temperature is—60°F, the coldest of all habitable regions of the world. The rivers and the very seas freeze in corridors and oceans of ice. Even in summer the tundra subsoil is perpetually frozen, and the sun squeezes from the earth only a liquid mud, where bulbs flower in a fleeting gasp of scent. Across the wastes of southern Siberia, in a region huger than Canada, more than two and a half million square miles of stunted conifers, larches and birches surround rivers which are barely known—the Yenisei, gouging out a passage 3,600 miles into the Arctic; the Lena, which already measures twenty miles across in its middle course and floods 2,550 miles into a delta which is ice-choked even in August. The very girdle of mountains massed along these southern fringes echoes with unreachable names—the Pamirs and the Tien Shan whose peaks are among the highest in the world, the Altai scattered with translucent lakes, and mountain chains still farther east which only peter out in the tiger-prowled heights along the Chinese border, and in Kamchatka’s Pacific peninsula.

All this lent a majestic and dwarfing dimension to my journey. Already the country was cast in the mould of those imagined tundras and rivers. It was slow, impersonal and absolute. I could not help wondering what effect such isolation might have on its inhabitants—the lack of visual stimuli, of anything varied or unique in the landscape at all. Was the easy Russian submissiveness to God or tyranny, I wondered, the result of a people crushed by the sheer size of their land? Could it be that the meandering, mystical, rough-hewn qualities of the Russian psyche—Russian novels, Russian music—that the unwieldly immensity of Russian bureaucracy….