Perhaps my sensibilities were still saturated with the active minerals of Tunkin, but Irkutsk on that wet morning seemed a place of almost unbearable pathos. Alexander Men was sent here in 1955, when the Institute of Fur was moved from Moscow to Irkutsk. It was here that he shared a room for three years with Gleb Yakunin, who converted from atheism to Christianity and became a dissident priest who denied the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate. As we boarded a bus for the city centre, a man running down the street dropped his briefcase. As he brushed the briefcase off, the bus that he had tried to catch accelerated into a large puddle, spraying him with filthy water. Before visiting the Decembrist houses, we stopped at a little cafe and ordered tea with lemon from the menu. ‘Net limona’ – ‘There’s no lemon’ – said the woman at the counter. ‘Isn’t that lemon?’ I asked, pointing to a saucer of lemon slices on the shelf behind her. She narrowed her eyes, sullenly dropped a slice into each cup with bare grimy fingers, and pushed the tea across the counter so hard it almost spilled.
Maria Volkonskaya’s house was a sudden revelation of enlightenment and style: a pale grey two-storeyed mansion, with many large windows and an entrance from a large courtyard surrounded by stables and outbuildings. It is a historic work of reconstruction. In the First World War the house was used as a barracks by Cossacks. From the 1920s until the 1970s, it was divided into communal apartments. Moving to Irkutsk from the village of Urik so that her son could attend the gymnasium was the closest Princess Maria Volkonskaya ever came to returning to the rich European civilisation she had left behind when she followed her husband Sergei Volkonsky into Siberian exile. Her fine house of larch was transported here from Urik, and, as she was not allowed to appear in public places, Irkutsk society came to her, making her home the centre of local cultural life. (The Tsar and his agents still believed that the energy of certain individuals should be carefully contained, not understanding how containment only intensifies its force.) She would hold balls and masquerades for the young people of Irkutsk, and many famous musicians passing through would give performances in her home.
Maria Volkonskaya came from a distinguished line. The polymathic scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov was her great-grandfather. Her father, General Nikolai Raevsky, was a hero of the Napoleonic wars. In her teens, she had visited spas with Pushkin. ‘Just for amusement’, as Pushkin recounted, Maria and her sister bathed in warm sulphur-acidulous and cold ferruginous springs at a fashionable resort in the Russian south, where in the evenings she would win at card games and lottery. Staying with the Raevskys, Pushkin rejoiced in a ‘carefree life surrounded by a dear family’. He loved and admired the simplicity and beauty of soul of General Raevsky, as he loved the ‘gay southern sky’. Walking by the Crimean seashore, he read Byron, Voltaire and André Chénier. In the margins of a draft of Eugene Onegin, he sketched the jolie laide Maria with errant curls and a determined chin.
General Raevsky opposed his daughter’s decision to follow her husband to Siberia and, on orders from the Tsar, she was forced to leave her baby son Nikolino with her parents in the capital. On her way east, Maria stopped in Moscow at the home of her sister-in-law Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya on Tverskaya Street. Zinaida arranged a concert in Maria’s honour, which Pushkin attended, at which she performed an aria from Paer’s opera Agnese in which a daughter begs forgiveness from her father. Zinaida’s voice gave way before she finished the song, and Maria began to weep and had to leave the room. Pushkin, for whom Decembrism was above all a matter of personal friendship, was so stirred by the encounter that he began work on the poem ‘Deep in the Siberian Mines’, hoping to finish it in time for her to take it on her journey. When little Nikolino died at the age of two, Pushkin composed his epitaph: ‘At the throne of the Eternal Creator, he looks on earthly exile with a smile, blesses his mother and prays for his father.’ Unsure of whether she would ‘give pleasure by reminding others of herself’, Maria conveyed her thanks to Pushkin for the words he had found ‘to console a mother’s love’.
*
Almost two centuries later, at the tender place where the personal and the political meet, reminders of Maria Volkonskaya still give not just pleasure but consolation and courage. As I stood outside in the corridor of the Meshchansky Courthouse in a tight crowd of journalists and well-wishers in the summer of 2005, Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave, from an iron cage, his final address to the court that had pronounced him guilty of fraud and tax evasion at the end of a false trial which concluded with the judge reading out, over the course of nine days, expressionlessly, at the speed of a racing commentator, a virtual facsimile of the prosecutor’s case. ‘This was not a trial,’ Khodorkovsky said, and then he thanked his wife Inna for her love, calling her a ‘true dekabristka’, a Decembrist wife.
In what may have been intended as mockery, the Kremlin or the Lubyanka (from whence, it would seem, all orders relating to Khodorkovsky’s case emanate) took up the historical thread of the oil tycoon’s heroic self-fashioning, answering his signal with a gesture of particular cruelty. In October Khodorkovsky, without being told where he was going, was covertly transported, alone in a sealed train carriage, to a prison colony in Krasnokamensk, six hundred miles from Chita, four thousand miles from Moscow, at the far eastern edge of Buryatia. A week later, through an advocate, he sent a message to his ‘friends’:
Since 16 October 2005 I have been in the land of the Decembrists, political convicts and uranium mines.
The Kremlin has tried to isolate me completely from the country and the people … they have tried to destroy me physically … They are hoping that Khodorkovsky will soon be forgotten. They are trying to convince you, my friends, that the fight is over. That one has to reconcile oneself to the rule of self-serving bureaucrats in Russia. That is not true. The fight is just beginning …
The time of conformists is passing – the time of Heroes is coming.
Khodorkovsky has not been forgotten. Through him, a public conversation that began with the Decembrists has continued into the age of Putin. Three years after Khodorkovsky’s first letter from Siberia, Russian Esquire magazine asked the writer Grigory Chkhvartishvili (also known as Boris Akunin, creator of the super-sleuth Erast Fandorin) whom he would most like to interview. Without hesitation, Chkhvartishvili replied that he wanted to interview Khodorkovsky, whose fate ‘gave him no peace’. In a lengthy interview, conducted by letter, the detective writer and the political prisoner discuss, among other matters, the reasons for Khodorkovsky’s arrest; the significance of his show trial (which Chkhvartishvili calls ‘the most shameful page in the history of post-Soviet justice’); corruption at the very highest echelons of power; the attitudes to his plight of his wife, his parents and his children; the nature of true freedom; the burdens of property (‘drowning in things’); his philosophical and religious convictions (‘if there is no God, and all our life is just a moment between dust and dust, then what is it all for? What are our dreams, our sufferings, our strivings for? What is knowledge for? What is love for?’); the lasting impact of the Mongol yoke (‘from the moment the “march to the east” began, the state has treated the population the way an occupier treats a conquered people’); and (with reference to the Decembrists, Herzen, Pushkin, Chaadaev, Sakharov and the poet Joseph Brodsky) the poignant history of Russian liberalism.
No thinking person, Chkhvartishvili says, seriously believes the official version of Khodorkovsky’s downfall (that his company was a ‘criminal group’ whose business was fraud and tax evasion). Was he arrested because he broke a spoken agreement between Putin and the ‘oligarchs’ of the 1990s that they would keep out of politics? Was it (as women of a certain age tend to believe) that Khodorkovsky was too beautiful, and taller than Putin, and once dared to turn up for a presidential audience without a tie? Was it because Putin believed he was planning to use his money to stage an ‘orange revolution’? Or was it, as Chkhvartishvili believes, because, having achieved his ambition to become the most successful entrepreneur of the new Russia by the age of forty, Khodorkovsky realised that ‘happiness does not lie in money’, and decided to devote his energies to helping Russia to become at last a civilised and competitive nation – a determination that gave someone in particular serious cause for anxiety?