“The conspiracy continues!” the Standard Bearer cries out, and points at the enormous doors of the church, as if at any moment the international conspirators were going to burst in and throw us in jail.
“The conspiracy continues,” he repeats, “and the nation perishes.”
A long, mournful beating of the drum.
Silence, total silence in the audience.
Again the Ideologue speaks, this time recounting in a raatter-of-fact tone how Russians in the Imperium have the worst life of anyone. “If the average life expectancy in Lithuania is seventy-two and a half years, in Russia it is sixty-eight. The Lithuanian! The Lithuanian lives five years longer than the Russian!” He does not care merely that someone is living longer than someone else. The point is that an insignificant Lithuanian is living longer than a great Russian!
He is mainly concerned that Russia, native Russia, is becoming depopulated. In the five most Russian districts of the Imperium (Pskov, Tula, Kalinin, Tambov, Ivanovo), the population is progressively diminishing. The old Russia is emptying out. Most deserted is the countryside. Recently, the population of the countryside has been decreasing by ten percent annually. There are many abandoned villages. Drive in the summer; you may see in one place only some old women sunning themselves on an earthen bench outside a cottage. There are no men, not even old ones. You don’t see a horse; you don’t see a hen; you don’t see any livestock at all. And in the winter, you won’t even see those old women. In the winter, it’s as if a plague has passed through.
“What’s the solution?” he asks, staring so intently at the auditorium that one might assume he had driven the several thousand kilometers from Moscow to Irkutsk in the hope that here precisely he would find the answer to the questions tormenting him. But we sit in silence. Several men shift slightly in their seats, as if they feel obligated to speak up and give some salutary advice, but after a moment they too grow still.
“Russia is wise and eternal,” the Standard Bearer responds to our perplexed and ineffectual silence. “Russia will find a solution, Russia will be saved.”
He has a program for, as he puts it, the “reanimation of Russia.” It essentially comes down to transplanting Russians to Russia. So that they might return, as he puts it, to “the deserted cradle of Russia.” This is difficult, not only because Russians are trying to leave Russia, not return to it, but also on account of the dimensions and expense of such an operation: twenty-four million Russians live outside the borders of the Russian Federation.
“Return, return to the womb of Mother Russia!” the warriors cry out, crossing themselves and bowing down to the ground. But the nave does not react in any positive way.
During the course of this great campaign of returning the Russians to Russia, one will have to be careful that some Uzbeks, Turkomans, or Georgians do not use the occasion to move here themselves.
“Russia for Russians!” cries out the Standard Bearer (clarions, drum, the cross).
It is an important but problematic declaration. The problem is that the consciousness of the contemporary Russian is torn by an irreconcilable contradiction. It is the contradiction between the criterion of blood and the criterion of land. What should one strive for? According to the criterion of blood, the point is to maintain the ethnic purity of the Russian nation. But such an ethnically pure Russia is only part of today’s Imperium. And what about the rest? According to the criterion of land, the point is to maintain the full extent of the Imperium. But then there can be no hope of maintaining the ethnic purity of the Russians.
Contradictions, contradictions.
The Standard Bearer understands this, and having let fly the slogan “Russia for Russians,” he immediately backs down from it.
“Russia,” he calls, “must remain a great world power! They want us to become like the Indians on an American reservation. They are trying to make us drunk, they are trying to poison us. But we will not become Indians. We will not be a banana republic!” (Clarions, much drum beating.)
He threatens us with his fist. “Do not dance to the music of the West! Do not hang bottles of Coca-Cola around your necks!” (The drum alone.)
“Our objective is the salvation of the nation and the state,” he says emphatically, resolutely, forcefully. “Our objective is: one state, one territory, one spirit, one Russia!” (Many clarion calls, much drum beating.)
“Very soon,” he adds with hope, but also with conviction in his voice, “the nation will have had enough of this pluralistic chaos, of this whole messy masquerade, and will come to understand that only the czar can bring salvation!”
Yet another litany to Russia begins.
“Russia, forgive us our sins,” says the Standard Bearer, “the sin of faithlessness, the sin of weakness, the sin of losing sight of the goal. We vow to restore your strength, we vow fidelity. Let your sun, Russia, shine over the world in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!” (Long clarion calls, loud drumming, crosses and more crosses, bowing and more bowing.)
I WALKED OUTSIDE. It was a cold, starry night, beautiful, windless. I was returning to the hotel, which lay in the same direction as Lake Baikal. Yesterday, with Oleg Voronin, a splendid, brave young scholar from the local university, I took the bus to the lake, to a place called Listvyanka. A heavy rain mixed with snow was falling, obscuring everything.
The lake was frozen, rusty carcasses of barges jutted out through the ice. One could not see the other shore; one could not even see all of Listvganka well. There were two stores and a bar in the settlement — everything was closed. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Waiting for the bus, we walked for several hours along the empty road. Although I understand that it is very beautiful everywhere around here, mountains, forest, water, one must come in the summer, when there is sun.
We returned half-dead to the city, and strictly speaking I had not seen Baikal. But I bought a book in Irkutsk, from which I can learn much about it. The author — G. I. Gagazy — writes that Baikal is a very deep lake, with a great deal of water. He asks: If humanity’s only remaining source of water were Baikal, how much longer could it survive? And he replies: Forty years.
JUMPING OVER PUDDLES
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”
“Tanya.”
“And how old are you?”
“In two months I’ll be ten.”
“What are you doing?”
“Now? At this moment? I’m playing.”
“What are you playing?”
“I’m jumping over a puddle.”
“And you’re not afraid that you’ll get hit by a car?”
“No car is going to be able to drive through here!”
Tanya is right. The temperature went up yesterday, at noon it is even two degrees above freezing, and the entire city is sinking into mud. The city of Yakutsk, a veritable Siberian Kuwait, the capital of an extremely rich republic reposing on gold and diamonds. Half of all those diamond marvels with which rich ladies around the world adorn themselves, or that one can observe in the windows of jewelry shops in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam (to say nothing of the diamonds used for geological drilling and metal cutting), come from Yakutsk.
Tanya has a pale little face. It is always dark here in winter, and even when the sun does appear, it doesn’t feel warm; it shines brightly, hurts the eyes, but is distant and cool. The girl is dressed in a coat that is too short, made out of fabric with large green-and-brown checks. Too bad about its being short, but then after all one cannot have a new coat every year. Where would Mother get the money for that? And even if she had that much money — Tanya smiles dreamily — who is going to stand in lines and wait until they deliver to Yakutsk a shipment of coats perfectly sized for ten-year-old girls? And in addition ones so thin and tall?