Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (12 page)

Igor interrupted. “We knew what we wanted freedom from. But not what we wanted it for.” Yes, that was what lent the edge to Natasha and Igor’s despair. As elite intellectuals, who opposed Communist Party rule, they assumed they were part of the solution.

“You in the West were our dream,” Natasha went on, hitting her stride, the Siberian Cassandra. Her wild curls stood up and her pale face shone. “And when it collapsed, we blamed you. You weren’t to blame. We just had no idea how to be free. We were like those prisoners who refuse to leave because they’ve nowhere else to go. However hard you try you’ll never really understand what it was like to live in a country that was one great concentration camp. I’m not using the word loosely. It’s no reflection on your intelligence or empathy. It’s just that you were born free.

“When the Soviet Union fell, the country went through a sort of nervous breakdown. We came here looking for a new beginning. We didn’t understand that there are no new beginnings in Russia, only long and terrible endings. We didn’t realize that nothing could change until people find themselves.”

That night, long after Natasha and Igor were asleep, I sat by the open window with the three-legged cat on my knee, arguing with myself. If Natasha was right, if there was no new beginning in sight, I really ought to pack up now, go home. I had come all this way only to find that the people of Marx had reacted to the future they were offered by closing in on themselves, giving in to ancient fears. Now, on top of that, there was Stepnoye and the sight of those “broken people” sitting in their brand-new houses. I had ventured into territory where no foreigner should go, learned what I did not want to learn. It was beyond weeping, impenetrably dark.

Hold on, now, hold on. What about your friends in Marx? Don’t you care what happens to them? And what about that trip to Zarafshan? Ira and I had caught only a glimpse of what was going on there. But the situation did seem to bear a vague resemblance to the events that had hit Marx. There, too, a coherent community appeared to have responded collectively, possibly also with collective hysteria, with its own local variant of the crisis triggered by the end of the communist empire. The people of Zarafshan had not given in to the same ancient fears, though. An aspect of the Russian psyche had been thrown up from the depths in that desert town that baffled me. But it was intriguing.

How absurd the premise was with which I had set off on my travels. I had come here expecting the Russians to behave in a Western, indeed Marxist way. I had assumed that they would be rebuilding Russia on a Western model, too. How arrogant! Slowly, from the vantage point of Russia’s provincial hinterland, I was starting to appreciate how differently many Russians responded to events from that Westernized elite in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Of course I had no idea what Russia’s future was going to look like. But if I was serious about wanting to understand the underlying forces shaping it, perhaps I should learn more about Zarafshan and the collective visions of those miners and engineers. I had been offered the opportunity of peering into the collective unconscious of this other Russia. How could I resist that?

THE ART OF MIND CONTROL

Back in London that winter, I tried to write up our trip to Zarafshan. Again, I found myself off the map, back in the terrain of fabulous monsters. I even thought of leaving the story out of this book, but that seemed faint-hearted. It was easy to write about those shining beings and hairy devils as a comical traveler’s tale. But that brought me no closer to understanding how someone like Vasya, an engineer and senior Communist Party member, could have believed what he heard, and been so changed by it.

Digging around, I learned that Soviet scientists had taken the esoteric powers of the mind much more seriously than we in the West, for reasons that went back before the Russian Revolution. The discipline of psychology was new then, and embraced everything from psychoanalysis to psychic research as well as the occult. Hypnosis was being studied by mainstream scientists in the West, too, as a physiological or neurological phenomenon. Only after the First World War did Western science settle for a purely materialist explanation of energy.

Once a socialist revolution had taken place in Russia, you might have expected the same to happen there. But the wild expectations bred by the new regime led to a different outcome. The new “scientific” ideology aspired to do more than redesign human nature; it dreamed of mastering the whole world of natural phenomena.

Some scientists saw the revolution as an opportunity to reclaim the Fourth Dimension from the mystics and occultists. They set out to tap the source of energy behind it in the name of socialism. So while the esoteric powers of the mind became taboo in the West because they defied a materialist paradigm, in the communist empire, ironically, these powers went on being studied.

The leading prerevolutionary authority on hypnosis was a scientist called Vladimir Bekhterev, who died before he could fall in the purges. He was interested in those realms of human behavior that bypass conscious processes: religious hysteria, pogroms, demonic possession. A radical himself, he welcomed the Revolution, though that did not stop him from regarding it as an example of hypnotic influence on a mass scale.

Bekhterev was not mystically inclined himself, but he could see no essential difference between physical and spiritual phenomena: to him, they all seemed to derive from the same “world energy.” After his death most of his ideas were publicly discredited. But he had used hypnosis effectively to treat mental illness, and his pioneering work remained a standard Soviet treatment. Nor was his research on hypnosis and other mysterious powers of the mind entirely abandoned. In secret laboratories his disciples carried on the work quietly, still funded by the state.

The early buzz of Soviet interest in the esoteric powers of the mind had other spin-offs, too. Under Stalin they became a branch of the Soviet entertainment industry. Telepathists and hypnotists regularly gave public performances. Stalin himself was so interested in the subject that he subjected the regime’s leading psychic, Wolf Messing, to a series of tests he devised himself. Commandeered in mid-performance, Messing was ordered to steal 100,000 rubles from Moscow’s Gosbank. Using his hypnotic powers, Messing was reported to have walked into the bank, under the scrutiny of official witnesses, and proceeded to sign a blank piece of paper in lieu of a check; the cashier duly handed the money over. Next, he was required to enter Stalin’s heavily guarded country dacha without a pass. Messing hypnotized the guards into believing he was Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s top secret policeman, whom he looked nothing like.

In the 1960s, triggered by Western press reports of America’s use of ESP, Soviet laboratories researching the subject opened all over the place. For a few years the subject was discussed in the Soviet press before the embargo fell again.

Some have claimed that Soviet interest in mind control played a part in the regime’s approach to controlling people’s hearts and minds. The writer Maxim Gorky was certainly well known to be interested in the Fourth Dimension, and he was one of the chief architects of Socialist Realism. I certainly remembered how, when I was researching
Epics of Everyday Life
, the strands of this Soviet preoccupation with the Fourth Dimension were surfacing all over the place. At the time, I laughed to see people rushing to their television sets for mass séances. But when I met Benya’s yellow-eyed
extrasensor
on the
N. Gastello
, I did not find it funny. In fact, for all my Western rationality, I was terrified. Now I was starting to understand why. Had the man tried to attack me physically, I would have known how to defend myself. But he attacked my mind, where I felt most intimately myself, and what is more he came very close to hypnotizing me. It was a humbling experience to find that, whether or not I believed in it, I was every bit as susceptible to the Fourth Dimension as all those credulous Russians.

1994–1996

T
HE
RUSSIAN ECONOMY WAS IN A STATE OF COLLAPSE BY NOW
. Most people were earning far too little to survive. Many of those still in work were not being paid for months, while their bosses, or the banks, speculated with their wages. So why were people not starving? Each family was its own mystery, unfathomable from outside. Professionals were abandoning their jobs and turning to trading. Someone’s daughter was selling herself to foreign businessmen, someone else was selling their father’s wartime medals. Grandparents were growing potatoes for their children’s families in the city. Teachers were fainting from hunger in classrooms. In the last year of communism the average life expectancy for men was sixty-eight. By 1995, that figure had plunged to fifty-eight.

By the end of 1994, the mass privatization program was over. But despite this huge shift in ownership, the old Soviet factory managers were still in charge of industry. The attempt to give citizens a stake in the privatization had failed; speculators and those in the know were making fortunes. Foreign investors were also realizing that chunks of Russia’s industry could be bought for a song.

The main goal of Yeltsin’s reform team now was to get inflation under control. For until that happened, the economy could not grow. But a battle was raging at the heart of government. While the reformers were trying to kick-start capitalism, the Central Bank was pumping money into the economy in the old Soviet way. The result was hyperinflation. By the end of 1994 consumer prices would be 2,000 percent higher than in 1990.

By 1995 Chubais had managed to lick inflation, but he got little credit. For a new problem had emerged: the government was running out of money. It was borrowing on capital markets. Soon, this would spiral out of control, sowing the seeds of the great financial crash of 1998.

Among the gamblers, a handful had emerged with vast assets. At this level, it was a rough game, involving bribery, blackmail, and violence. Each oligarch was running his own intelligence corps and corporate army. By 1996 the relationship between them and the government was entering a dangerous phase. Chubais offered the oligarchs a deal. They could take shares in Russia’s oil and mineral wealth in return for lending the government money. He knew that it was risky handing them such power. But he reckoned that they would make better owners than the old Soviet factory managers.

By now, two of these oligarchs were running television channels. Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV was joined at the end of 1994 by Boris Berezovsky’s ORT, a partnership with other oligarchs. This channel reached every home. Though not owned by the state, it had sworn loyalty to Yeltsin’s government. In the spring of 1995, ORT’s executive director was gunned down at his own front door. This murder shook Russia. People assumed that the assassins worked for someone in the state security services who was unhappy to see Berezovsky controlling the channel.

Russia had entered a murky period when the really significant changes that were happening were taking place in secret, a long way from the public eye. This was not helped by the fact that by 1995 Yeltsin’s health had broken down and he had retreated from public view. The country was awash with rumors about his drunkenness and the corruption of his inner circle. The election due in 1996 looked bound to return the Communist Party. Yeltsin’s cronies were urging him to cancel it.

Back in 1994, they had persuaded him that a brief, triumphant military campaign in Chechnya, to put down the secessionists, would boost his ratings. Instead the government was now bogged down in an unpopular war. Gusinsky’s television channel, NTV, was partly responsible for its unpopularity, as it had been capturing huge audiences with its reportage of bloody scenes.

The outcome of the coming election looked certain. Polls showed that the cheated, impoverished, humiliated, exhausted Russians wanted a strong leader to put things right. Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party was on the way back.

Zyuganov joined the election battle in the spring of 1996. Until then the frail president’s entourage managed to keep him isolated even from his own key ministers. He was about to succumb to their pressure to dissolve the Duma, postpone the election, and break the constitution when Prime Minister Chubais forced a meeting with him. Only then did Yeltsin learn what his entourage had been hiding: that only 3–4 percent of Russians were going to vote for him. Shocked, he rallied from his sickbed, accepted backing from the oligarchs, and set about stealing the election from Zyuganov.

Despite Zyuganov’s massive popular support, Yeltsin commanded all three national television channels, thanks to the oligarchs. After waging a very dirty campaign indeed, he went on to win the June election by a narrow margin, collecting 53.82 percent of the vote to Zyuganov’s 40.31 percent. After that, he returned to his sickbed, while the oligarchs joined the political scene.

Does the end justify the means? Nine years later, from his prison cell, the richest of those oligarchs, Khodorkovsky, would conclude that it does not: that by stealing the election for Yeltsin, the oligarchs had poisoned democracy’s chance of taking early root in Russia. “This was when the journalists stopped constructing public opinion and started serving the master, while independent social institutions became voices for their sponsors,” he wrote.

President Clinton, however, praised Yeltsin’s election victory as a milestone in Russia’s democratic progress. Russian voters had “turned their backs on tyranny,” he exulted. But Khodorkovsky was right. It would have been better if the Communist Party had been allowed to win that election, by democratic means. The Westernizers had won the battle, but lost the war.

1994

LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN WOMAN

Moscow was like Babel that summer. Everyone and everything was for sale. The city had cast off its penitential monochrome Soviet style, and with it all restraint. There was a terrible energy on the streets, and color, too: hoardings had appeared, bright dreams of Chrysler cars, Snickers bars, and cat food, dreams which felt like foreign conquest to an older generation. When the sun came out, the city stank from the piles of uncollected rubbish. Homeless people milled around the railway stations. The pavements were choked with struggling people, traders, beggars, drinkers, thieves. But the sound of the city was changing: above the ground bass of traffic rose the screech of car alarms, the signature tune of a new propertied class. And now and then the sinuous form of a glamorous young woman threaded through the shabby crowd.

On the streets, the mafias were in control, and shootings between rival gangs were not uncommon. Benya had turned up again, penniless, after a year’s disappearance, lucky to have escaped with his life. He was a determined loner, and his friends feared for him now that the mafias were organized.

Ira was just back from shooting a documentary film about Zarafshan. Late into the night she poured out stories, consulting her notes, showing me documents and scraps of film. From the start, Zarafshan’s was a tragic story. A deported Soviet German geologist called Kinder had discovered the site after the war. Wild with joy, certain that this would clear him of the charge of collective treachery which was still hanging over the Russian Germans, he peppered the Party with reports. They took no notice. When they did take a look, in the 1960s, they got terribly excited, too. But they ignored Kinder’s role. In despair, he hanged himself. Even that was not easy. For he was a tall man, and the ceilings of Tashkent’s residential blocks were so low that his feet trailed on the ground.

They used convict labor to build the settlement. After two years of working under the desert sun, short of water all the time, the prisoners staged a desperate revolt. They were gunned down by their Caucasian guards, and a fresh batch of prisoners completed the work.

Zarafshan was one of those secret, closed towns run directly from Moscow by the Communist Party headquarters. Its mines were incredibly rich. They produced sixty tons of the purest gold a year, as well as uranium, silver, and tin. The housing was good, the shops well-stocked, and the pay high. But when Uzbek nationalism resurfaced under Gorbachev, Zarafshan’s elite workers, who were mostly Russian, found themselves stranded: it was rumored that Uzbek nationalists were planning to cut the water pipe. When the empire fell, they lost the remaining privileges that made their jobs worthwhile. Inflation shriveled their pay and Zarafshan became a prison.

That was when the visions began. In Ira’s footage Zarafshan’s ex–Party bosses described how terrified people started coming to Oscar, the mayor, begging him to make “them” go away. The stories then became a flood: shifts of two hundred miners were all seeing the same silvery shapes, leaping sideways, disappearing, defying the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. Next, some mediums from the city of Tomsk, hundreds of miles away, reported receiving cosmic messages addressed to Oscar. Oscar delegated all this to Vasya, and said nothing to Party headquarters, fearing the men in white coats might come for him.

Then one day, a UFO brought work to a standstill in one whole section of the mine. For hours, in full view of the workforce, it hovered there, training its searchlights over one of the great machines which separated the ore from the rock. Normally, the machine was used day and night, but the operators refused to go near it while the silver disc hung there. Once the “visions” started affecting production, Oscar let Moscow know. To his surprise, they flew in teams to investigate.

The Ministry of Atomic Power and Industry produced a report which tentatively suggested that this remarkable outbreak of the paranormal was connected to the fact that “people are living in conditions of maximum extremity …” In other words, Zarafshan was an ecological disaster. The mines were not ventilated, and the incidence of lung cancer was high. The cyanide being used to separate the ore from the rock had poisoned the desert for miles around. There was also the problem of water. The nearest river, the Syr Dary’a, was seriously contaminated with pesticides, thanks to the cotton-growing settlements which had been built along it. In addition, extravagant extraction of water during the Soviet period had caused the world’s largest inland lake, the Aral Sea, to shrink to half its former size. Pesticides from its dried-out bed were being carried all over the region. Wherever they landed, people sickened.

What struck me about Ira’s footage was the way Zarafshan’s bosses kept trying to get Ira to understand, really understand, that all this was as real as their conversations with her. Their accounts suggested a widespread acceptance of the idea of aliens at a high level in the Communist Party hierarchy. This time, even the pragmatic Oscar admitted to Ira that “it happens everywhere—the only difference is that we accepted it.” He said that he had started taking the cosmic messages seriously when “they” pointed his men toward rich seams of ore the miners would have missed. Serious accidents had also been averted thanks to those messages, he said.

Official interest in Zarafshan came to a head two weeks before the Party’s attempted coup, in the summer of 1991. A message for Oscar from three hundred aliens, refugees from some planetary disaster, was intercepted by the Ministry of Defense’s mediums(!). They wanted Oscar’s permission to settle near the town. Without telling Oscar, the Party dispatched a helicopter full of troops to Zarafshan, led by one General Nazarov. The mobilization orders bore Gorbachev’s signature, and that of the last Soviet defense minister, General Yazov, ringleader of the Communist Party’s attempted coup, whose trembling hands would be captured by CNN’s cameras as the tanks rolled into Moscow.

General Nazarov and his men landed in Zarafshan, waited all day, arms at the ready, and finally received a message from the aliens, relayed via the Moscow mediums: “Your intentions are aggressive—we’re going to Orion instead.”

•  •  •

This deluge of weird information only compounded the problems I was having writing this story. I was reminded of the legend of the golden woman which European travelers to Russia had been bringing home with them for centuries. The Vikings were the first: they reported she was made of solid gold. Seven centuries later, when Muscovy threw off Tatar rule and reestablished links with Europe, the story resurfaced. Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, dispatched to Russia on diplomatic missions by the Habsburg court, featured her in his
Description of Moscow and Muscovy
, in 1549. The statue consisted of three figures, one inside another, he said, and had a hollow “singing” interior. A few decades later, when Richard Chancellor came home from Russia after his abortive search for a northern sea route to China, he brought back news that the golden woman was an oracle. Giles Fletcher, dispatched to Russia by Queen Elizabeth in 1588, even sent an expedition off in search of her. He concluded that the “golden hagge” was just an old wives’ tale, inspired by a rock shaped like a woman. But even in the mid-twentieth century there were still said to be Russians here and there in the countryside who maintained that there really was a golden woman hidden somewhere in Russia’s forests.

Some of those travelers must have believed, or half-believed, in the golden woman while they were in Russia. But by the time they reached home, she was just a tall story. I had no idea what had gone on in Zarafshan. But I had started to appreciate that quite a lot of Russians really did see reality very differently than I did.

THE PATH NOT TAKEN

My friends in Marx were muddling through somehow, concentrating on getting through from day to day. But they, like me, had expected that democracy would take root in Russia after the fall of the Soviet empire. With every year that passed, that was looking less and less likely. Now, they seemed depressed, rudderless. A huge, unresolved question was hanging over their lives: who are we now if we’re not communist? What does it mean to be Russian?

Under communism, nationality was meant to fade away, replaced by a new Soviet identity. Now, whatever their other difficulties, Russia’s ex-colonies in central Asia, Caucasus, and the Baltic states were enjoying a newly recovered sense of self. But for the Russians it was not so easy. Ethnicity was not enough, for the Russians were not all Slav. Territory could not be the defining factor either, for this vast land straddling Europe and Asia had no clear borders to the west or south.

Before the Revolution, the Orthodox Church had bound Russia’s imperial subjects together. But although opinion polls showed people were now fascinated by belief, they were not interested in their Church. As yet only 10 percent identified with it. This was hardly surprising. Orthodoxy had been savagely persecuted in the Soviet period. All but eight thousand churches had been destroyed or reused and some two hundred thousand churchmen lost their lives, the finest among them. As an institution, it had survived only by submitting itself to control by the militantly atheist state. The Church was going to take time to recover its voice and place in society.

All this was very much on my mind when I read an extraordinary story in the paper: some geologists on a field trip in the forests of Siberia had come across a community of Old Believers. They had been cut off from society for so long that they knew nothing about airplanes, let alone communism. They were survivors of the great schism in Russia’s Church in the eighteenth century, which had split the country in two. In order to escape persecution, they had fled to remote parts of the country. Under the tsars there were still thriving sectarian communities all over Russia, but after the Revolution information about them dried up.

I was amazed that these people, who had turned their backs on the very notion of progress, could have escaped communism while remaining in Russia. Surely these Russians must be part of the answer to that question: who are we, if we’re not communist? I started dreaming of visiting an Old Believer community. But it was only a dream. When I began traveling in Siberia, I found that, though there were sectarian villages all over Siberia, most were falling apart, their young having left for the cities. Even if I could identify one that was still vigorous, I could hardly turn up there on my own. For as an independent woman, a nonbeliever, and a Westerner, I represented everything they abhorred.

It was a rare piece of good fortune that I happened to meet one of the few people in Russia who could help me. Vladimir Nikolaevich Alekseev was on a visit to the British Library as part of a delegation of librarians. He was tall and deep-chested, with a bushy brown beard, and he ran the country’s greatest repository of Old Believer books, in Novosibirsk.

Every summer for thirty years, he told me, he and his wife had spent traveling down rivers, into the forests in search of outlying Old Believer communities. The Old Believers’ lives revolved around their old texts, he explained. As their communities dwindled, many were no longer being used. They did not relish the prospect of their books falling into the wrong hands and were happy to let him acquire them for Novosibirsk’s library.

In due course, when I met his wife, Professor Elena Ivanovna Dergacheva-Skop, a formidable personality and distinguished scholar of the Old Believers, they asked me to join them on their next trip. They were going to visit their favorite Old Believer community, where they considered the Old Belief was best preserved. The village was called Burny, which means “stormy,” and it lay deep in the forest, far way from any road or railway. To get there involved traveling north up the River Yenisei, then east down the Stony Tunguska River in boats. I did not appreciate as I traveled to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk for the start of the expedition quite how intrepid the Alekseevs were to organize it at that juncture. Inflation was still running at 19 percent a month; the economy was barely functioning and transport was paralyzed for lack of fuel and passengers.

Thirteen of us boarded the sturdy river steamer. There were a group of Elena Ivanovna’s students and a couple of other Britons: a history lecturer called Alan and his wife, Kirsty, who taught Russian. I sat on deck, my back to the throbbing engine, looking out over the cold, boiling waters of the Yenisei. We had left behind the rusting industrial hulks of Krasnoyarsk. Soon we would be passing the hidden bunker city which had been carved out of the ground in the paranoid Cold War years. I scanned the banks for signs of it. I had come up from below to get away from Alan, who was irritating me intensely. He knew a lot about Russia on paper. But never before had he been in a place where things did not work. He did not speak the language either. With every day that passed his plump, rubicund face was looking more aggrieved.

The Yenisei rises in the mountains on Mongolia’s northwestern border and runs through the landmass before debouching into the Arctic Ocean. It marks a natural boundary between the low swampy plains of western Siberia and the virgin forests of the central Siberian plateau. To the east, the forest stretched away, unbroken in places, for thousands of miles all the way to the Sea of Okhotsk.

The river was so wide here that the banks had shrunk to two green strokes of a pencil on either side. For centuries, these waterways were the main thoroughfares through the landmass. The Cossack commander Ermak brought his little expeditionary force down this network of rivers when he subdued the Mongol khanate of Kuchum and conquered Siberia in 1581. His was a commercial venture, paid for by rich merchants pursuing the fur trade. Later, from the mid-eighteenth century, rivers became the main conduit for transporting convicts and rebels to Siberia. The leaders of Russia’s two great early peasant rebellions, Stenka Razin and Emilian Pugachev, sailed up the Yenisei into exile. So did the Decembrists, those dilettante revolutionaries who tried to overthrow the tsar in 1825, after catching the democratic virus in Europe when they drove Napoleon’s troops back from Moscow. Stalin traveled up this river into exile, too, as did hundreds of thousands of Soviets consigned to the Gulag.