*
Our conductor on the train from Vologda the night before was a native of the Communist north. Her eyes sparkled and she retained the same bustling dignity, whether she was swabbing the lavatory with a frayed rag and a pail of cold water, or bringing glasses of tea to her passengers in luxe. A burly man, waved off by a weeping babushka, blundered up and down our carriage for the first hour of the journey, demanding a drink. Uncowed by his bulk and inebriation, the conductor pushed him back into his compartment. ‘How much do you get paid for this?’ he mumbled, lurching past our open door. ‘Not enough to make it worth putting up with you!’ she answered with another shove. At Kharovsk, she resorted to the highest measures and called up two militiamen, who marched the alcoholic (now limp with need) down the corridor and off the train. ‘Arkhangelsk!?!? What are you going there for?’ the conductor asked us as we left him sitting head in hands on the edge of the track. ‘It’s not like abroad, you know.’ She mimed a spit over one shoulder. ‘Arkhangelsk, phoo! Poverty! Filth! Slush! Plague!’ I asked her where she liked best. ‘Egypt,’ she answered without missing a beat: ‘Egípet.’ She had been to ‘rest’ – twice – at Hourghada on the Red Sea. ‘Next time, Tunis!’ she announced, turning down the corridor, chest upraised. ‘Sophia Loren’s favourite!’
Until after midnight, I read about the legendary northern kingdom of Biyarmia in a Guide to the Russian North that I had found in the antiquarian section of ‘House of the Book’ on the Arbat. Published in 1899 by the Archangel–Murmansk steamship company, ‘at the request of the Ministry of Finance’, the small red morocco book still conveyed the style and entrepreneurial exuberance of the late-nineteenth-century travel industry, the sense of what travel could do to civilise and extend the reach of the Russian state. In that year, the Moscow–Archangel railway line, financed by the great art patron Savva Mamontov, had just been completed, and a hostel had been built to accommodate the large numbers of pilgrims on their way to visit the monastery on the island of Solovki. Railways and steamships were opening undiscovered country to the ‘scholar, the naturalist, the ethnographer, the artist, the professional traveller, the hunter, the pilgrim, the entrepreneur and the simple tourist’, all of whom the guide invited to discover ‘our mysterious north’, the vast Archangel region, where only 350,000 people, almost all of them peasants, inhabited a region of virgin tundra and swamp, of rivers and lakes, one and a half times the size of France. The original owner of the guide (whose name was Konstantin Belyachevsky) had pencilled ‘NB’ beside the price of a second-class fare from Archangel to Suma, where ‘Suomi’ (Finns) still lived, and an exclamation mark beside a passage about the delightful islands and villages in the Dvina delta where indigenous wooden ‘tent’ churches rise up from the landscape like creations of nature. I envied Belyachevsky his journey, the excitement of seeing the brand new electric lighting at the stations along the line.
I did not tell the conductor, when she came to wake us in her brass-buttoned uniform and fresh lipstick, that it was the words ‘Archangel 1944’, written in faint blue ink in the set of Pushkin I took from Sands, that had given her city its gravitational pull. I wanted a clearer picture of the young officer in the indigent bombarded city, where the people who had not starved had lived on wild food foraged in the woods, before the ships came in from Scotland and Iceland, bringing chubby tins of spam, jars of sausage, and Quaker sugar in sacks labelled ‘Pennsylvania’ and ‘Buffalo’. Did Sands find his Pushkin at some impromptu roadside stall, where the sorrowful people of Archangel sold broken crockery, children’s toys and precious books, while loudspeakers in the street played martial hymns and speeches calling them to fight to the death? Did he make his learned annotations on the text of Eugene Onegin here, I wondered, in the British Mission on Trade Union Street when the nights were white, or years later, in a pool of lamplight in his Cambridge rooms after dinner at High Table?
‘The time has not yet come to count the lives saved by this wheat from beyond the sea,’ Shalamov wrote in his Kolyma tale ‘Lend-Lease’. Then the time did come. I had brought with me to Archangel another of Sands’s books: The Northern Convoys, published in 1991 in commemoration of the arrival in Archangel fifty years earlier of the first of the aid convoys, code-named Dervish, which the editor called the ‘first friendly handshake between Great Britain and Soviet Russia since 1918’. Folded inside was a typed letter. ‘Respected Dr Sands,’ it began, ‘the historians of Archangel, together with colleagues from Norway, England and America propose to publish a series of memoirs under the working title, War in the North.’ Their aim was to clear away some of the one-sidedness of Soviet historiography, which had diminished the significance of Allied aid. The historians from the Lomonosov Pedagogical Institute on Lomonosov Avenue asked the now dying Sands (who never wrote for publication) for a memoir of his war: ten to fifteen typed pages, ‘photographs (glossy) would be especially appreciated’. Through the long decades of the Cold War, the heroic story of the convoys had been out of bounds, but the historians on Lomonosov Avenue had kept their records, awaiting the day when they could ask for memories and images from beyond the sea.
One British naval lieutenant (who, like Sands, went on to become a Russian fellow in an Oxbridge college) remembered the tact of the local authorities in wartime Archangel, who, before the British came ashore, had boxed up in wood the captured British tank that had served since 1918 as a monument to the failure of the Intervention. He shared his impressions of what Churchill had called the ‘sullen sinister Bolshevik state’, describing a ‘Lenin evening’ in Archangel. ‘The spirit of Lenin is everywhere,’ a speaker had intoned, convincing the lieutenant that the Lenin cult was essentially religious, an insight that directed the course of his research at Oxford after the war.
In our days in Archangel, we gravitated towards the waterfront – like everyone else, it seemed, in the pale, quiet city – to watch the swirling ice. Space and distance are even more of a riddle here than time. It was impossible to get one’s bearings. What are the physics of the river in spring? Sometimes the water rushed with ice all morning, then cleared into an ice-free flow of muscular brown water. By evening, the ice was back. One moment the industrial vistas across the water seemed close, the next, far off. By morning, washed in a deeper light, they had moved to another place altogether, as though the ice had shunted them out of the way. What looked a hundred miles away suddenly pulled close and I could pick out the monuments of the Soviet industrialisation of the north: smokestacks, cranes and pylons in the grey-brown tableau of Kyarostrov and derricks on the quays of the shipbuilding island of Solombala. All this metal abrading the softness of the sky signalled at once the filthying of the air and the diminution of the human, and the transformation of cold dark geological matter, coal, into warmth and light.