After the Borisov Museum, we ate in a log-cabin restaurant in the restored hostel of the Solovetsky Monastery: salmon and cod baked in clay pots with potatoes and sour cream, buttery blini with honey and curd cheese. Then we went to the old Lutheran church which now houses the local Philharmonia and spent the evening watching old ladies in sarafans and golden kokoshniks singing northern folk songs and dancing with vigorous old men in knee-high chamois boots. Before each song a statuesque announcer in a black-and-silver evening gown and elbow-length gloves delivered a short lecture on its regional pecularities, extolling the oral village culture which had kept the songs alive. In the interval we bought their homemade kazuly, spice biscuits in the shapes of reindeers and bears.
Were these songs that Likhachev heard when he first visited the north on a month-long school trip in the summer of 1921 and decided that this must be the most beautiful part of the planet? People should travel to the Russian north, he wrote, to experience its healing moral strength just as they travel to Italy to experience the healing moral strength of the European south. In the way that water, earth and sky combined with the terrible strength of stone, storm and cold, he perceived an encounter, whose drama astonished him, between past and present, man and nature, contemporaneity and history. And of all histories, Likhachev believed Russia’s to be the most significant, the most tragic, the most philosophical.
The schoolboys in Likhachev’s party travelled by rail from Petrograd to the just-built city of Murmansk, then by steam-yacht around the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea into the White Sea and down the Dvina Lip past Severodvinsk to Archangel, from where they took a river steamer down to Kotlas, before returning to Petrograd by rail. Sunset turned instantly into dawn, the colours of the water and the sky changed with every passing minute, there were virgin forests and tundra and waters that ran with strong fish. The scene was made sacred with churches and hermitages and shrines, filled with signs of the prayerfulness of the ascetics who had made the landscape itself their cathedral. Likhachev loved the trace of human touch in the wild, the sense it gave him of what his own tortured nation could create.
The city children visited Pomors in their huts, listening to their songs and fairy tales. The hunters and fishermen were beautiful, Likhachev remembered; their way of life seemed uniquely authentic: measured and light, a rhythm of labour and the simple satisfactions of labour, the comforts of houses made of wood, and bedcovers of eider down. Later, Likhachev came to see the far north as the most Russian part of Russia. Slavs had arrived from the west and south at the end of the tenth century, settling along riverbanks, mixing with more ancient peoples: Nenets and Sami. Under the Mongols, more Russians drifted north from Novgorod. There was less serfdom than further south, and the fairy-tale landscape of dark, endless forest invited the possibility of disappearance and escape. The north had preserved a tradition of freedom for Russia, Likhachev believed, and had saved the nation in its most terrible times: during the Polish-Swedish intervention of the early eighteenth century, and during the two world wars of the twentieth. The region also saved from oblivion the culture of Novgorod, whose colonies extended into the Archangel region, preserving the oral culture of folk epics (bylini), fairy tales and song, as well as wooden architecture, handicrafts and the skills of boat-building, fishing and polar exploration.
Likhachev perceived the northern landscape as otherworldly, just a step from paradise or hell. When in 1929 he returned to the north as a political prisoner in the first Soviet Gulag on the Solovki archipelago in the White Sea, he found himself sitting on a rock in the sun, sensing God, present but unknowable. At that moment, a camp guard who would, in the ordinary course of things, have shot the stray prisoner, lowered his gun.
Shalamov spent much longer than Likhachev in the hell that the Soviets created in the Russian north, in the infinitely crueller Arctic landscape of Kolyma over three thousand miles to the east. (On the mineral wealth of Kolyma, Molotov commented to Chuev, ‘We found just the country for socialism. Everything is here, you just have to look for it! And you can find whatever you want.’) ‘I gave away twenty years of my life to the north,’ Shalamov told Pasternak in 1956; ‘for years I never held a book in my hands, nor touched a leaf of paper or a pencil.’ He turned away from the God that Likhachev shared with the medieval ascetics, perceiving the landscape itself as filled with spirit and intention. ‘Even a stone did not appear dead to me, nor the grass, the trees, the river,’ he wrote. ‘The river was not only the incarnation of life, not just a symbol of life, but life itself. It possessed eternal movement, a calm, a silent and secret language of its own …’ He turned the landscape that tortured him into something he could love: a book. The permafrost and the stone, he wrote, will never forget. Shalamov reduced the understanding of self until there was nothing left in it but the idea of writing, the trace. Even the name tag on a prisoner’s foot in a mass grave was a kind of literature. In the north, he found substances that last longer than the ink with which death sentences are signed by men like Molotov, whose own initials ‘V.M.’ were the same as the acronym for the death penalty: vysshaya mera, highest measure. Graphite, the only writing instrument the zeks (the convicts) were allowed, is ‘eternity, the highest standard of hardness become the highest standard of softness’, Shalamov writes; graphite is a greater miracle than a diamond, whose chemical make-up is identical.
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Four-hundred-year-old memories of welcoming ships from abroad, ancient northern memories of freedom and the sensibilities of quiet scholars like Likhachev combine in this poor city’s particular tact about the past and other foreign places. It was tact which made the city authorities box up its captured British tank in 1941 so as not to offend men like Sands. It was tact which led the city’s historians to ask him for his memoirs fifty years later. The historical tact at work in the exhibition halls of the regional museum was of a far more costly kind. With a frankness and inventiveness that I have not encountered in any other Russian city, the museum laid out the story of the forced resettlement of the kulaks (46,261 families deported north to hellish ‘special settlements’ along the railway line) and the Gulag camps where slaves logged the forests till they died of hunger, disease and exhaustion. ‘We have never refuted the fact that healthy prisoners capable of normal labour are used for road and other public works,’ Molotov told the Congress of Soviets in 1931; ‘this is very good for society. It is also good for the prisoners themselves …’ In that year, almost two million peasants were deported to ‘special settlements’. Lining the walls of the main staircase of the museum at eye level were photographs of local victims of ‘repression’: Anton Minaev, from the Department of Finance of the Northern Region, repressed 1937, died in Magadan in 1940; Vasili Gorokhov, first rector of the Technical University, shot on 22 April 1938; Dmitri Nikitin, Tolstoy’s personal doctor, and Professor Boris Rosing, ‘inventor of the television’, deported to the Archangel region, died 1933. ‘In late 1937 and early 1938’, a small notice says, ‘there was an almost complete purge of the leadership of the Archangel region: many honest workers were condemned; thousands of people who were guilty of nothing were repressed.’