Chkhvartishvili thinks about questions of legal justice. Why, he wonders, did the judges and the prosecutor go along with the farce? It is not like the days of Stalin’s Great Terror when people within the legal system lived in fear of their lives. It is not like the Brezhnev era when those who would not condemn the dissidents themselves risked prison or psychiatric hospital (the psikhushka). Khodorkovsky replies that, like so many in the nomenklatura and the bureaucracy, the judge and prosecutor in his case were probably motivated by kompromat, the fund of ‘compromising materials’ with which individuals are intimidated and coerced into corruption and conformity. He prefers to think of the hundreds of individuals who, he says, refused to give false evidence against him and his associates, even under threat of their own prosecutions. He names two: Anatoly Pozdnyakov, former director of the company Apatit, and Evgeny Komarov, former governor of the Murmansk region, who ‘under the most severe pressure, refused to act against their consciences’.
When Yakushkin visited the Volkonskys in Irkutsk in 1854, he found Sergei older-looking but still in vigorous good health. (Unlike Yakushkin, Sergei Volkonsky would live to see the liberation of the serfs in 1861.) At their home they discussed current affairs (the Crimean war against the ‘redheads’, as they called the English), and the terrible story of Pyotr and Andrei Borisov. The Decembrist brothers had devoted themselves to botany and to painting the birds of Siberia. In that year, Pyotr had died of a heart attack, and in his grief Andrei had set fire to their house and hanged himself.
We arrived as the rehearsal for an afternoon concert was about to begin. A thin soprano, in a synthetic evening gown, false eyelashes and elaborately dressed and lacquered hair, was swallowing nervously in the anteroom to the main salon, goosepimples appearing on her shoulders from the draughts that came in with the opening and closing of the doors. The attendants told us the museum was closed; when I explained how far we had come, they told us to hurry round its rooms without tickets and make sure we were out of the way before the audience arrived. Perhaps it was better to take in at speed its carefully composed exhibits. The story they told – of European high culture struggling to take root on the frontier of the Asiatic steppe – grew richer under Stalin and is still vividly active under Putin. The museum has a replica of the Viennese piano that Maria Volkonskaya had sent to her in Siberia; an aquarelle (by the Decembrist painter Nikolai Bestuzhev) of the Volkonskys in their room at the prison-fortress near Chita, with its empire-style birch seats; glass cases displaying the manuscripts of poems written to the Decembrists and by them, including Pushkin’s salutation from Moscow. I found myself gazing fixedly at the fine stitching on a tapestry pipe cover, for a long oriental-style pipe, that Maria Volkonskaya had worked for her husband in her early years in Siberia. In the next room, the soprano warmed her voice with ascending arpeggios. As I came on to the landing, I could hear through the door the opening measures of ‘Porgi Amor’, the Contessa’s long-drawn-out sigh of sorrowful wifely love from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
FOURTEEN
Ulan Ude and Kyakhta
‘Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’
PLAYER KING, Hamlet
Near the Blue Buddha, seated in adamantine pose on his lotus throne, were the ‘five long-lived sisters’. ‘In Buryatia we love the sisters,’ our guide Lida said, pointing her folded spectacles at the sinuous candy-coloured figures high above us on the wall of the Buddhist datsan. As she leaned against the car smoking a Vogue cigarette after our drive to Ivolginsk across the littered steppe, Lida had said with a low chuckle that she was both a Buddhist and a shamanist, and that she gave thanks to Lenin for the fact that she did not have to live in a yurt.
‘The wise men and gods of Asia, unlike the terrible figures in the Old Testament, are familiar with irony,’ the French communist Romain Rolland wrote in his introduction to the edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories in Molotov’s library. It was one of the most beautifully made of all his books, a classic of NEP publishing, with a graphic on its cover showing a yogi and a serene Buddha in the lotus pose. ‘Tagore’s voice is the voice of the brahmin – the Buddha’s smile,’ Rolland wrote. But the only words of Rolland’s marked in Molotov’s copy, in unsteady purple ink, were the words ‘our silence signified much more than we ever said’.
Lamaist Buddhism spread through Mongolia to Siberia from Tibet as Russian explorers were arriving here from the west. The Cossacks were more interested in receiving taxes from the natives in sable fur than in saving their souls through missionary activity, and by the early eighteenth century, when the border with Manchu China had been established, most Buryats had adopted Buddhism, which blended easily with their shamanist beliefs. In 1741, Buddhism was recognised as an official religion by Tsarina Elizabeth (she of the sugary baroque palaces, who would soon expel António Sanches from her empire on suspicion of being a Jew). By the middle of the nineteenth century there were scores of monasteries across the steppe, their brightly coloured temples, known here as datsans, rising in rich painted colour out of the scrubby sun-faded landscape. The monasteries were places of education where young men were initiated into the ‘inner sciences’, as well as the ‘secular sciences’ of grammar, medicine, logic and technology, and the ‘minor sciences’: poetry, metrics, music, astrology and dance. When the American explorer George Kennan (a distant cousin of the diplomat George F. Kennan) visited the lamasery at Gusinoe Ozero (Goose Lake) south of Ulan Ude, he was received by the chief lama, who asked him whether it was true, as Russian officers had told him, that the world was round, for such a belief was contrary to the old Tibetan books.
In 1945, when Stalin relaxed constraints on religious practice, the datsan at Ivolginsk was established as the only Buddhist spiritual centre in Russia, and to this day it is the residence of the Pandido Khambo-lama, head of the Russian lamas. In the new freedoms of 1991, a Buddhist Institute was founded here, and now the novice monks study old Mongolian, English, ethnography and information technology, as well as the ancient discipline of choira, or philosophical dispute.
Inside the Sogshin Dugan, as the main temple is called, everything was silken, richly dyed and painted gold, red, yellow and blue. Lida guided us through the pantheon and the symbolic landscape on the walls: paradise in the east; the syllable OM (which we had seen painted on rocks along the road) on the orb of the sun; a cup and a rosary of skulls; green Tara, goddess of devotion, mother of the Buddhas, and symbol of their enlightened deeds. In one corner were the Dakinis, who travel through space and guide practitioners of Buddhism towards enlightenment; they are also known as ‘space travellers’ or ‘sky walkers’. And further along was Dalha, the warrior or enemy god, who rides a white horse and is often shown in Buryat temples with his eight brothers, for there is a local cult of the Nine Brothers of Dalha, who distribute wealth unequally.