Vanya, the Russian driver my friend and I had hired in Irkutsk, was taking us on a detour to the village of Khurai-Kobok to visit the shaman who had recited a charm over his new Zhiguli. For miles we had followed the steel-blue waters of the Irkut, which flows out of the Angara and courses west through the Tunkin Valley to the border of Mongolia. The rocks on its shallow bed looked like boulders of snow. From Tunka, through which thousands of political exiles have passed after their collisions with the authority of the state, we took the smaller road which runs north straight to the foot of the eastern Sayan mountains, towards Arshan, whose name means ‘sacred spring’. Buryats call this the ‘land of Geser’. In one of the countless variants of Geser, the oral epic that Buryats share with Mongolians and Tibetans, the stone peaks of the Sayan that rise to over ten thousand feet at the north end of the valley are thirty-three celestial knights who decided not to return to the skies after they had cleansed the world of evil spirits, but remained on earth as faithful guardians.
Geser is the Iliad of Central Asia. It is traditionally recited by gesershins only after dark, over the course of nine nights. The exploits on earth of its heroes are the overspill of adventures and contests in the night sky. Khan Kurmas clashes in heaven with his enemy Altai-Ulan, carelessly chopping him into tiny pieces which fall to earth and become evil spirits. The petty demons pollute the earth with every kind of uncleanness and misfortune: darting about, crawling like worms, buzzing like flies, poisoning rivers at the source, making the earth barren and insects venomous. They bring sickness, poverty, hunger and ruin; they make men forget love and pity. At last Bukhe-Beligte, the middle of Khan Kurmas’s three sons, who is born as an earthly boy in a poor hut, takes up the challenge of ridding the earth of the plague of fiends.
Before Kultuk, on the westernmost tip of Baikal, we had filled up at a lone pump, visible from far off, which cast a stately shadow on the wide strip of sun-weathered asphalt under the dry blue of the Buryat sky. The pump, the gas station and the broken-down truck in front of it were all painted the same blue, in different stages of fade and corrosion. We stopped at a signal and watched a train pass on the Trans-Siberian Railway line carrying newly made tanks, hundreds of gun barrels rushing along the curve of the track into the purple haze of a cleft between birch-covered hills.
We stopped again at a bend in the road high above Baikal to buy beer and smoked omul, the trout of Siberia. The gutted bodies of the fish were laid out on oilcloth, their wrinkled pewter sides held athwart with toothpicks, revealing gelatinous vertebrated flesh, whose pale-pink fatness Vanya reckoned with sunburnt hands. At the lake shore, where we lingered to eat the fish that he had chosen for us with such pride, the ground was dry but still too cold to sit on, so we rested on our heels, looking across the slag heaps and rusted derricks on the wharf at the hills behind, where a fine mist plumed into the sky. Though it was late May, the thick pelt of crumbly ice on the lake had drawn back only a couple of feet from the rocky shoreline, so we had to imagine the fabled clarity of this great bow of fresh green water in which the omul swim.
‘Sacred sea, free Baikal / Sacred boat, an omul barrel’, run the first lines of ‘Thoughts of a Runaway’ by the mid-nineteenth-century district school supervisor Dmitri Davydov. Set to music by nameless prisoners working the silver mines of Nerchinsk, the poem soon became a folk song that everyone in the region can sing. The historical (as distinct from prehistorical) voice of Baikal is the voice of the runaway, attuned to every possibility of liberty in the natural environment, as well as every cruelty. With its mists and cliff-sheltered bays, from which a fugitive, unseen by any mountain patrol, might set out on the water in an abandoned fish barrel, this landscape has endeared itself to prisoners. And in the culture of the Baikal peasants, descendants of Cossacks, escaped convicts have long been held in reverence, given bread as they pass and makhorka tobacco to smoke on their way.
‘The Irkutsk administration is repulsive … without morals or sense,’ Molotov wrote to his friend Alexander Arosev, when he was exiled to a remote village called Manzurka in 1915. He had been in Moscow founding Bolshevik cells in factories until he and his comrades were denounced by an agent provocateur and arrested. As he liked to remember in his old age, he had travelled some of the Siberian journey shackled on foot. He spent several months in the Irkutsk region, drinking heavily, eating little and reinforcing his Bolshevik credentials. It was in Manzurka that he made friends with the Bolshevik Alexander Shcherbakov, who would later live in No. 3 in Moscow and is said to have begged Molotov to take over the leadership of the USSR from Stalin after the Nazi invasion, and Martin Lacis, one of the cruellest fanatics in Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. ‘Regarding books,’ Molotov wrote to Arosev from Siberia, ‘if you can send anything substantial, especially Marxist, I shall be extremely grateful … I am desperate for books …’
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The lineaments of past time are sketched lightly around Baikal, which was discovered late by the outsiders who record events as history and place as geography. The Siberian past falls quickly into prehistory, in which the world is explained through the myths and cosmologies of small groups of hunter-gatherers, for whom geology is the family drama of Father Sky and Mother Earth. In local legend, the Angara, the only river among Baikal’s many thousands that flows out of the lake, carrying its waters to the Arctic Ocean, is a rebellious daughter in love. The tall rock, known as the Shaman Rock, that rises above the village of Listvyanka at the headwaters of the Angara is the stone that Father Baikal threw into the swift run of his beautiful river-daughter when she defied him and broke through his shores to rush to the mountains to meet her betrothed, the Yenisei.
Unlike the southern steppe, this landscape has natural defences. Russians only reached the shores of the lake in the mid-seventeenth century, several years after they had arrived at the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles further east. The Evenks, reindeer-herders whom the Russians called ‘Tunguz’, told the Russian explorers that the lake was called ‘Lamu’ and the people who lived on its shores ‘Bratsky’, Buryats, who called it ‘Baigal’. For thousands of years, shamans had revered Baikal, which is the world’s largest reserve of fresh water, for its spiritual powers. Olkhon Island, a centre of shamanism, is said to be the burial place of Genghis Khan, the ‘World Conqueror’, whom the Buryat worshipped along with the mythical Geser, as an unconquered hero who would one day return to liberate his people.
Cossacks built the stockade town of Irkutsk and soon afterwards the fortress at Tunka, the first place in the Tunkin Valley where Russians settled among the roaming Soyot. The Cossacks took tribute from the Buryat tribesmen in ‘soft gold’, the fur of the Barguzin sable, and on its profit the state grew strong. And to this day Moscow extracts from Siberia the flow of treasure that makes the city glow at night: gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, natural gas and oil. Siberia is a place for men of energy. ‘You will hasten to me from Siberia,’ the wealthy Madame Khoklakova exclaims to Mitya Karamazov in a maddening non-sequitur as he begs her for the three thousand roubles that will save Grushenka from his father’s lust, ‘I have been watching you for the last month … saying to myself: that’s a man of energy … that’s a man who would find mines.’ But like his creator and so many before and since, Mitya was sent to Siberia by the prosecutor instead.