THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
Off to Siberia - Not by the Siberian Express - My Travelling Companions - The English Governess in Russia - Her Sphere of Influence - Prince Hilkoff - His Anglo-American Education - St. Petersburg and Moscow - En Route
THE bell in the big stuccoed and whitewashed 'JL' Moscow station gave a clang. Thereupon brawny and black-whiskered men took off their caps, put their arms about each other's necks, and gave a brother's kiss upon the lips.
There was uproar. The train for Siberia was starting. A bunch of officers, well-set young Russians, in neat white linen jackets with gold straps on the shoulders, crowded a window and laughed good-byes to friends.
From the windows of the next car were the uncouth faces of peasants, their hair tangled and matted, their red shirts open at the throat. They were stolid and brutal. They were the moudjiks emigrating to the mysterious, evil-omened Siberia. On the platform stood their wives-dumpy, unattractive women, in short skirts, and with gaudy handkerchiefs about their heads. They did not understand the language of farewell. With eyes tear-red and with quivering lips they looked upon the hulking hairy men with the sleepy animal faces. But they said nothing.
Three mechanics, drink laden, came reeling along, bumping everyone with their kits. Their eyes were glazed, and they grinned slobberingly and lurched like coal barges beating up against a gale.
The bell clanged twice. Everybody must get aboard now. Once more the brother's kiss. From the car window the young fellows got long and ardent hand grips. They were in the blush of life, and off to Siberia with laughter in their hearts.
Standing a little back was an ordinary soldier, a fair-haired lad, slim and beardless. He was at attention, his heels clapped, his arms taut by his side. He was more than head and shoulders taller than the wizened little woman, her tanned old face all seared with care, who was clutching at him, and kissing him on the tunic and dulling its whiteness with mother's tears. And she was praying a mother's prayer.
Clang, clang, clang! Three times, and all aboard now.
There was a shrill whistle. The cars creaked and moved. Everybody, in the train and on the platform, made the sign of the cross. The perilous unknown was ahead of them.
Some husky shouts of farewell were thrown from the windows, and there was some dimness of eyes. Even a scampering foreigner felt the solemnity of the occasion. But in a few seconds we were in the sunshine of a blazing afternoon, and the train was lumbering on its way to Siberia. It was Thursday afternoon, August 22nd, 1901.
This was not the famous Siberian Express about which so much has been written and which starts twice a week from Moscow, "the fairest jewel in the crown of the Czars," for the far-off city of Irkutsk in Central Siberia, a continent away indeed, 3,371 miles, and which is reached in exactly eight days. The Russians are an enthusiastic and credulous people, and in all the world they think there is nothing so magnificent as this Siberian Express. They come in their hundreds to the Moscow station every Tuesday and Saturday night, the grandees in their furs and their pearls, the red-shirted, matted-haired moudjiks, and the shaven-chinned, American felt-hatted commercial men who have the spice of the West in their veins, and they all stand and gaze at the people Siberia-bound as most of us will look at the first traveller to Mars. Siberia is a long way off. Has anybody ever returned from Siberia? Hearts grow big and words choke. Tears stain many cheeks. Yet laughter and merriment rings over sorrow.
Remembering this is slothful Russia and not slap-dash, bang-about America, it is a luxurious train, is the Siberian Express, with its electric lights, restaurant, library, observation car, bath rooms, ladies' boudoir, piano, and all that is considered "up-to-date" in travelling. Europe is now looking towards Siberia as half a century ago it looked towards Western America - it is the wheatfield of the world; it has the finest grazing to be found in the two hemispheres; no horses are like the Siberian horses; its butter is shouldering "best Danish" from the market; great areas yield coal and iron; its hills ooze gold. There is a Siberian "boom."
The rich speculators, engineers, Government officials, Germans searching for trade, to build a bridge or to open a store, all travel by this train. It is invariably crowded. You have to sleep four in a coupé, two on the seats and two on the improvised bunks above. To be sure of a place you must book weeks ahead.
I had no desire to travel like this. I am a vagabond fond of taking things slowly. So what did it matter if it took eight or eighteen or twenty-eight days to reach Irkutsk? I had no mining concession. It was the last thing in my mind to open a store. Mine was but a mission of curiosity. I wanted to see Russia; I wanted to see the poor, crushed, depraved Russian peasants; above all I wanted to see Siberia. So I did what no wise foreigner had ever been known to do before. I travelled by the ordinary daily train that jogs alone, slowly, stopping, at the wayside stations, picking up moudjiks, putting moudjiks down. It took very much longer, but there was a charm about that. Besides, it was much cheaper and it required only a very small bribe pressed into the hand of the black-whiskered, astrakan-capped conductor to get a carriage to myself. I spoke four words of Russian, and I carried all my belongings in a couple of bags.
Off to Siberia!
There is something uncanny in the phrase. The very word Siberia is one to make the blood run chill. It smells of fetters in the snow. You hear the thud of the knout on the shoulders of sickened men. For generations, to whisper Siberia in the car of a Russian has been to make the cheek blanch. No one ever went there but in chains. The haggard men that over came back told tales that made listeners breathe hard.
We have all supped of Siberian horrors. We shudder, cry out for their ending, but have a gruesome satisfaction in reading about them.
Yet Siberia, the land of criminals and exiles, is pushed into the dusk when we think of Siberia with its millions of miles of com-growing land, minerals waiting to be won, great tracks of country to be populated.
Siberia is the Canada of the eastern world.
For a fortnight before mounting this train I bustled about St. Petersburg and Moscow seeing Government officials, seeking advice and information and assistance. And after each interview I had with Ministers of the Czar my mind reverted to a lady I saw on the frontier when at Wirballen I entered Russia from Germany. I recognised her as a fellow country-woman: tall, angular, wearing spectacles, a woman of uncertain acre. There was only one thing on earth she could be - a governess. Governess was writ large all over her. I could read her story plain enough. There was poor pay and hard work at home, and now, after years of struggle, she was going to Russia to be English governess to some wealthy man's children. I am afraid I have the ordinary man's ungenerosity towards the tribe of governesses, and I thought as I looked upon her plainness that she was a weedy specimen of English womankind.
At St. Petersburg I met officials. Everyone spoke English. It was not mere courtesy that led them to speak appreciatively of things English. That kind of talk is easily to be seen through. But their liking was honest and deep-seated. They measured things by English standards.
More than once I remarked, "It seems strange that you, a Russian, should take such an interest in English life and methods." The answer was invariably the same: "I daresay it does; but you must remember that my nursery governess was an English-woman."
That impressed me. It was not long before I learned that the kindly regard for English folk you find among the upper classes of Russia is to be traced direct to the influence exercised in the nursery by spare-figured English governesses.
And in my heart I have apologised to the lady I saw at Wirballen.
A man I had two talks with was Prince Hilkoff, Minister of Ways of Communication, the chief of the railway administration, also of the post roads, rivers, and canals. When I was first received I found in the ante-room, awaiting audience, uniformed officials with rows of orders upon their breasts-a gorgeous, eye-aching display of picturesque garb. I half anticipated to find his Excellency in dazzling dress; but I was greeted by an elderly gentleman in a navy blue lounge suit, and with the easiest of manners. There was nothing Russian or official about him. He looked American, with his long, strong, bronzed face and little tuft of beard that the Americans call a goatee. He spoke English like an American.
"Yes," he said, "I studied engineering at Birkenhead and afterwards in America. It was when I was a deal younger than I am now. It was at the time of the liberation of the serfs, and my family and I didn't see that disputed point exactly in the same light. So I packed up and went abroad to shift for myself. It was a little rough, but I guess I got over that. I came back to Russia just when Russia was beginning to be interested in railways. I got a small position - oh! a very small position in the administration."
"And since then?" I urged.
"Oh, since then," he replied, "I've just worked. I'm just a working man, you know - a sort of blacksmith. But I never worry. What is the good of worrying? When my work is done, I like to shut it right away. Then I play tennis with my children, or I hunt or fish. That's a great thing I like about English business men. When their work is finished it is really finished, and they get out of doors for exercise. Now, an American can't play golf without thinking about business. The Americans are a fine go-ahead people, the most go-ahead in the world, but if they would just think there was something else besides business, why I guess they'd get some real value out of life."
He was very proud of this great Trans-Siberian line, was Prince Hilkoff.
Now the train had stirred to speed, and with a thump-clang, thump-clang thundered over the metals. Everyone was at the window, with body half hanging out to catch the last gleam of sunlight on the cupolas of the gilt and bedizened Greek churches in wonderful Moscow, the great city of the plain, ancient capital of Muscovy, now blend of garish Tartar and drab European.
St. Petersburg is too modern, too cosmopolitan to please eyes fond of the picturesque. The buildings are usually imitations of something else, and the marble, not infrequently, is painted plaster. There is a T-square arrangement of thoroughfares which is useful, but not pretty. There are the palaces to be seen. But palaces are the same the world over - the same endless galleries, with the same giant vases and gilt bedsteads and slippery floors. Palaces must be uncomfortable to live in. You cannot put your feet on the chairs, and you would probably be decapitated if you dropped cigar ash on the floor.
Moscow is far better. Here you get the clash of east and west. It is a city with distinction and individuality. It is crowded with churches, and the bells, beaten with wooden hammers, boom the day long, The style of the churches is Byzantine, with spiral flowers in flaming reds and greens and yellows. There is the Kremlin amazingly attractive and strange, with old-time grotesqueness.
As I strolled round the Kremlin, I seemed to slip back to the fantastic architecture in story book pictures, when I believed fairy tales. Had a fair lady appeared with a candle-snuffer hat twice as high as herself and tilted back, and trailing yards of muslin, I would have accepted it all as perfectly natural.
But dovetailing into and wrapping about the Tartar city is the strictly modern. There are horse tramcars in the town, and in the suburbs are whizzing electric cars that shriek as they tear along. There are charming gardens where, beneath the trees and in the candlelight, you may have dinner. You lounge and dawdle and puff your cigarette and imagine you are in the Champs Élysees. You understand the slow tread of civilisation, however, when the orchestra plays "There will be a hot time in the old town tonight" - a belated air, but reminiscent of home.
You get the English papers in Moscow about a week late. Should there be anything interesting about Russia, which, of course, you particularly want to read, you will find the column smeared out with the toughest of blacking. I have friends who confess to making periodic attempts to wash that blacking. They are never successful. The cartoon in Punch is frequently obliterated by a black smudge. A lady I know received a London illustrated paper. A half-page picture was blotted. Her innate feminine curiosity was aroused. She did her best to obliterate the obliteration. She failed. She was happily acquainted with an Englishman in diplomatic service who received his newspapers uncensored. She hastened to look at his paper. Her inquisitiveness was thereupon instantly appeased. The picture was an advertisement of the Czar receiving, with open hands and undoubted satisfaction, a box of much boomed pills manufactured in the neighbourhood of St. Helens, Lancashire!
All through that first hot afternoon the train went grudgingly along, as though it were loath to move Siberia-wards. It was made up of corridor carriages, first class painted blue, second class yellow, third class green.
There must be fifty little towns within fifty miles of Moscow. The train stopped at every one of them, sometimes for only five minutes, more often for twenty, and once for an hour and a half.
Everybody tumbled out on the platform, a motley throng. The men wore the conventional pancake-topped and peaked caps, and without exception top-boots, very soft about the ankle, so the leather clung in creases. The difference in the garb between the better class and poorer class Russian is in the matter of shirt. The better class Russian favours a shirt of soft tone, a puce, a grey, and now and then a white, and he tucks it away like a decorous European. The poorer Russian has a shirt of such glaring redness that, be it as dirty as it might, its flaming hue is never lost. He wears it hanging outside his trousers as though it were an embryo kilt.
As evening closes in and the train trundles over a prairie I see the meagre harvest has been garnered. There are no hedges, hardly a tree. It is possible to see all round, as though to the edge of the world, and that is not more than two miles away. The roads are ribbony tracks across the waste. Far off are awkward V-shaped carts, each making a huge wake of dust. A greyness hangs over the earth. Like the white sails of a ship looming out of a sea haze, a white object pierces the gloom. Nearer you see it is the cupola of the village church, always a massive, imposing building, whitewashed. The village is like a hem of rubbish thrown about.
There is the sadness of the sea on a plain that has no break in the horizon. As night closes a cold wind soughs.
The railway line stretches endlessly behind; it stretches endlessly in front. The train is like a fly trailing across a hemisphere.
Every verst there is a rude cabin made of logs, painted yellow. In each cabin is a peasant, and sometimes a wife and daughter. As the train comes along a little green flag must be shown to prove the line is clear. Each cabin is within sight of the next, a verst ahead, and the one behind. And these little green flags stretch from Moscow to the Pacific coast. It is usually the mother or the daughter who shows the flag. They are stunt women in scant clothing and bare feet. Only occasionally is the little banner unfurled. Generally it is wrapped round the stick and tied, and is held out just for form's sake. They are old and worn, many of the banners, and, like some umbrellas, look well while folded, but would show a tattered face if unfurled. When darkness comes it is a green lamp that is displayed.
The train creaks and groans and growls. On the engine front are three great lights, as if it would search a path through the wilderness. So we crawl into the night on our way to Siberia.
Chapter II: Over the Ural Mountains
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