Convinced of the eternity of life, Fiodorov believed that the most important element of Christian faith was the idea of resurrection. Excited by this thought, he devoted himself to deliberations about how to resuscitate all dead people. Everyone who ever died, in the whole world.
But what would the return of the dead of Vorkuta look like? Would there suddenly appear on the streets of the town columns of wretches driven on by guards? Starved human shadows covered with rags? A procession of skeletons? Nikolai Fiodorov dreamed of restoring them all to life. But — to what life?
On one of the streets I noticed a wooden booth. A swarthy Azerbaijani was selling the only flowers one could buy here — red carnations. “Pick out for me,” I said, “the prettiest ones you have.” He selected a dozen carnations and wrapped them carefully in newspaper. I wanted to place them somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I thought, I’ll stick them into some snowdrift, but there were people everywhere and I felt that doing so would be awkward. I walked farther, but on the next street, the same thing: many people. Meanwhile the flowers were starting to freeze and stiffen. I wanted to find an empty courtyard, but everywhere children were playing. I worried that they would find the carnations and take them. I roamed farther along the streets and alleys. I could feel between my fingers the flowers were becoming stiff and brittle like glass. So I went beyond the town limits, and there, calmly, I placed the flowers amid the snowdrifts.
TOMORROW, THE REVOLT OF THE BASHKIRS
FROM VORKUTA I returned to Moscow, to warm myself a bit, but also to find out what new winds were blowing at the summits of power.
Above all — at the summits of imperial power.
For in such a state as the former USSR (today, CIS, tomorrow …?) there exists a certain class of people whose calling is to think exclusively on an imperial scale, and even more — on a global one. One cannot ask them questions like “What’s happening in Vorkuta?” for they are utterly unable to answer them. They will even be surprised: And what is the significance of it? The Imperium will not fall because of anything that is happening there!
They exist for only one reason — to ensure the durability and development of the Imperium, irrespective of whatever it chooses to call itself. (And even if it should disintegrate, their task will be to set it back on its feet as soon as possible.)
In small and medium-sized countries there is no equivalent of this class of which we speak here. In such countries, the elite are busy with their own internal affairs, their local intrigues, their own closed backyard. But in the Imperium, the ruling class (and often the common people as well) are preoccupied with the imperial scale of thinking, and, even more, the global scale, the scale of large numbers, large spaces, of continents and oceans, of geographic meridians and parallels, of the atmosphere and the stratosphere, why, of the cosmos.
In Western Europe they were surprised to see on television that poor old women in Moscow abandoned the breadlines they had been standing in, gave up buying bread, to march down the street shouting the slogan “We will not give back the Kuril Islands!”
But why be surprised? The Kuril Islands are a part of the Imperium, and the Imperium was built at the cost of the feeding and clothing of these women, at the cost of their leaking shoes and cold apartments, and, what is most sad, at the cost of the blood and lives of their husbands and sons. And so they should give this back now? Never. Never ever.
Between the Russian and his Imperium a strong and vital symbiosis exists; the fortunes of the superpower truly and deeply move him. Even today.
THERE ARE two kinds of global maps printed in the world.
One type is disseminated by the National Geographic Society in America, and on it, in the middle, in the central spot, lies the American continent, surrounded by two oceans — the Atlantic and the Pacific. The former Soviet Union is cut in half and placed discreetly at both ends of the map so that it won’t frighten American children with its immense bulk. The Institute of Geography in Moscow prints an entirely different map. On it, in the middle, in the central spot, lies the former Soviet Union, which is so big that it overwhelms us with its expanse; America, on the other hand, is cut in half and placed discreetly at both ends so that the Russian child will not think: My God! How large this America is!
These two maps have been shaping two different visions of the world for generations.
In the course of my wanderings over the territories of the Imperium my attention was caught by, among other things, the fact that even in forsaken and tumbledown little towns, even in practically empty bookshops, there was for sale, as a rule, a large map of this country on which the rest of the world appeared to be almost in the background, in the margins, in shadow.
This map is for Russians a kind of visual recompense, a peculiar emotional sublimation, and also an object of unconcealed pride.
It also serves to explain and justify all shortages, mistakes, poverty, and marasmus. It is too big a country to be reformed! explain the opponents of reforms. It is too big a country to be cleaned up! janitors from Brest to Vladivostok throw up their hands. It is too big a country for goods to be delivered everywhere, grumble saleswomen in empty shops.
A great size, which explains and absolves everything. Sure, if we were a small country like Switzerland, everything here would run like clockwork, too! Look how tiny Holland is; it’s no trick to achieve prosperity in a state that one can barely see on a map! Just try to give everyone here what they want — here you’ll find that’s impossible!
BUT BEFORE I had the time to look around in Moscow, get some information, have several important and instructive conversations, the news exploded that a large city of a million inhabitants, situated between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains — Ufa — had been poisoned. It wasn’t just effluvia, combustion gases, and so forth, for these are commonplace; the city had been poisoned severely, dangerously, mortally.
“A new Chernobyl!” commented a friend who relayed the news to me.
“I’m going there,” I replied. “If I can get a seat, I’m flying tomorrow.”
Everyone in Moscow who was boarding the plane to Ufa was loaded with bottles, cans, canisters of water. For Ufa had been poisoned by phenol. Anyone who drinks the local water, my friend told me, will get sick or die.
Ufa is the capital of the Bashkir Republic, an autonomous republic at the western foot of the Urals. To the south stretches Kazakhstan, to the east Siberia, and to the west Tatarstan. Nature was once beautiful here, mountains covered with forests, six hundred rivers and streams, thousands of lakes. Hordes of all kinds of quadrupeds, clouds of bustling birds, swarms of industrious bees. Until the advent of chemicals. Bashkiria was transformed into a chemical practice range, into the center of the chemical industry of the former USSR. Smoke obscured the sky; dust hung in the air; phenol flowed down the rivers. Phenol, as I read in the encyclopedia, is a brown, extremely poisonous acid necessary for the production of explosives, plastics, dyes, tannins, and a hundred other things. Because chemical plants are shoddily built here and because the proper filters and cleaners are regarded as the fabrications and whims of ecological purists, the phenol was continuously leaking into the rivers, but it was leaking quietly, so that the poisoning of people could be spread out over time, so that the pestilence would not suddenly fell the entire city.