Recently, the Buryats of Tunkin have resisted the founding of mines in their valley, believing that it will disrupt the sacred energies of the landscape. The mines in the Sayan angered the local spirits, they say, and created sickness. Until Putin vetoed the plan in the name of the environment, an oil pipeline, to be jointly built by BP and the Russian oil company Yukos, was to have run through the Tunkin Valley. Now the founder of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another man of energy, was sitting in a prison in Chita in eastern Buryatia, arrested in October 2003 on his way to Irkutsk to give a lecture to students on democracy, and found guilty of fraud and tax evasion eighteen months later by a Moscow court.
We passed the entrance to a collective farm named Proletariat. Waiting at a bus stop was an old woman carrying a bag labelled in English ‘Born to Shop’. My Soviet-era guidebook said that the Tunkin Valley was famous for the energy of its labourers, like the Stakhanovite shock-workers of the 1930s, Stepan and Anna Baiborodin. We stopped to drink at a roadside spring on the edge of a forest. Tunkin, the ‘land of arshans’, is rich in mineral springs. On the arid pasture on the other side of the road, the chimney of a rusty iron field oven smoked, tended by two stout Buryat women in headscarves, who stoked it with fresh birch. We leaned on the fence and watched the women ladle potatoes out of its vat for the labourers in the adjoining field. Soyot nomads grazed their pale long-horned cattle on these aromatic silver grasslands, still living in yurts made of reindeer hides, felt and birch bark, until they were forced into collective farms in the late 1940s. Three fine-limbed children cantered up on ponies to look at us. The youngest, a boy of about seven, with only a folded blanket as his saddle, pulled his horse’s head so that it reared, higher and higher, his laughter carried away on the wind.
Just before Khurai-Kobok, death taunted us again. Vanya accelerated to overtake a small truck. His sudden rush of driverly will seemed more an aesthetic instinct than anything else, an urge to risk everything for the sake of a moment’s unbroken view down the avenue of pines that led to the foot of the Sayan. The oncoming bus seemed to accelerate too. And I am sure that when Vanya pulled out he had not seen the motorscooter with its sidecar that took up the whole lane in front of the truck, whose driver proved unwilling to yield an inch of road to anyone. The faces of my children flashed before me in the fraction of an instant in which a gap opened between the bus and the sidecar, into which Vanya (who like every other man in Russia eschews a safety belt on philosophical principle) swung the screaming shaman-charmed Zhiguli.
We stopped in the village to buy vodka for the shaman’s ritual. Besides vodka, the shop sold nothing but beer and stakanchiki of clean white ice cream, which we ate on the dusty roadside, savouring it as the taste of life itself. (‘There is vodka,’ Chekhov wrote from Baikal. ‘If you ask why they don’t eat meat or fish they explain that there is no transport, roads are bad and so on, but there’s as much vodka as you like even in the remotest villages.’) I asked Vanya why the shaman needed the vodka, and I think my laughter displeased him when he told me that after I had been carrying it in my hand for a few minutes it would begin to reflect my spiritual state. He would spit the vodka at my chest, Vanya warned. With a lurch of unease, I asked Vanya if he was sure that the shaman would not say anything about my future. I disdain auguries; I want no clouding of the vodka. No, Vanya said, the shaman only takes on minor disorders easily dealt with in the spirit world. He will call down spirits to dispel bad energies in your family, and sort out problems of sleep and digestion. (And also, perhaps, those mighty spirits who protect feeble Zhigulis whose drivers are possessed by a random death wish.)
The Tungus word ‘shaman’ first appeared in print in the self-written hagiography of Siberia’s first political exile, the seventeenth-century schismatic Archpriest Avvakum. In Avvakum’s sophisticated work of confessional literature, which introduced the Russian vernacular as a written language, he described the landscape and wildlife of Baikal, and the performance of a shaman, who screamed, danced and flung himself to the ground, foaming at the mouth. To Avvakum, the shaman was either a charlatan or a ‘devil’, possessed of dark supernatural energy. Catherine the Great’s German botanist Peter Simon Pallas, who came to Tunkin a hundred years later to record the wildlife, saw the shamanic ecstasies as elaborate trickery, fake terrors that kept the natives in thrall.
Mircea Eliade, the twentieth-century scholar of comparative religion, classified the shaman as a ‘specialist in the human soul’, who ‘alone “sees” it, for he knows its “form” and its “destiny”’. In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, he gathered ethnographers’ accounts of shamanist beliefs and practices from around the world. A native Siberian told an ethnographer that
… everything that exists is alive. The lamp walks around. The walls of the houses have voices of their own. Even the chamberpot has a separate land and a house. The skins sleeping in the bags talk at night. The antlers lying on the tombs arise at night and walk in procession around the mounds, while the dead get up and visit the living.
The Buryat believe, Eliade says, that the soul of the hereditary shaman is carried off by spirits on ecstatic night flights, to the east if he is destined to become a ‘white’ shaman, to the west if he is to become ‘black’. On these night journeys the shaman learns the forms of the gods and spirits and their names. People have animal doubles who come to their aid. Illnesses can be caused by spirits that wander away as a person sleeps, and get lost or captured on their night journeys.
While Eliade was compiling his findings in Paris, the shamans of Siberia were living underground, having been cruelly persecuted in the 1930s, many shot or dropped under the Baikal ice with weights on their feet. On their collective farms, the Buryats were taught to worship and propitiate Lenin and Stalin, heroes and deities of a new occult.
The shaman’s house of sun-burnished wood lay close to the road, surrounded by a paling fence, its shutters freshly painted white and trimmed in blue. A telegraph pole stood in the garden, its wires slung low over the roof. Behind the house, against the gleam of the Sayan, was a small hill, perfectly rounded like the hills in Roerich’s mystical paintings. A sacred hill, Vanya told me casually. According to shamanist belief, the three realms are linked by sacred rivers, trees or mountains. This was all as it should be. The shaman set apart from his community; the landscape conforming. Vanya’s shaman was taught the arts by his shaman grandfather, out of sight of the Soviet authorities. As his collective farm disintegrated at the end of the Soviet period, he began quietly to practise, and people began to come to him from far about. Across the road were the ruins of the collective farm, a necropolis of wrecked, scavenged agricultural buildings and machinery. At the door of a half-burned barn filled with boulders and incongruous columns of carved stone, the teeth of a broken plough curled into the dry earth.
A little cross-eyed boy in a stripy sweater stood in the middle of the road, grinning at us. As the shaman opened the door at the back of the house, the boy followed us in, smiling rapturously. Inside, in typical Siberian fashion, three rooms, their walls lined with wood, were arranged around a large stove. There was almost no furniture and everything was scrubbed clean. The shaman received us in the kitchen, by the mouth of the stove. He had no ritual paraphernalia: no feathers, no tambourine, no pendants or ceremonial dress of animal skins. He wore a suit jacket over a zip-up tracksuit, and kept his peaked leather cap on. We sat opposite one another at the table, on which lay an open polythene bag of dried herbs. I passed him the bottle that I had been piously holding for the past twenty minutes. He poured some vodka into a tin cup and looked into it. ‘Your blood is not pure,’ he said, regarding my face for the first time. Did the vodka tell him that? I noticed that the nail on his right index finger was black and so long that it curled right over the top of his finger. In the front room, the shaman’s grandson knelt on a chair, looking through the window at occasional cars passing in the bright sunshine, waiting for the ritual to end so that he could turn on the television. The shaman pinched some herbs into the cup, closed his eyes, and began to chant: ‘Hondolo, hondolo, hondolo’. He looked at me again and announced that some of my ancestors, long ago and far away, had been good souls and done good magic. Then he tipped the vodka into his mouth and spat it, not at my chest, but back into the tin cup. ‘I have done good blessings for your children and for your bad sleep,’ he said. The sun from the side window warmed the oilcloth and raised gentle scents of dried herbs, vodka and old wood.