THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
Chelyabinsk - An Anglophil Baroness - The Ante-room to Siberia - A Region with a Past - Siberia's New Leaf - Yermak - Freebooter and Empire-Maker - The Trans-Siberian Line - Some Figures and Facts
I saw Chelyabinsk under difficulties. We were all turned out of the train - which was an excellent thing to do, for the cars were in need of a wash and brush up - and there was a wait of five hours before another train was got ready in which we could proceed to Central Siberia.
It was raining in torrents. Everybody had an enormous excess of baggage, and as there is no left-luggage office at Chelyabinsk everything was carried or dragged or thrown into the buffet - all except the belongings of the emigrants, who camped on the platform, sitting on bundles and spreading their evil-odoured sheepskin coats to act as waterproofs.
I have joined in a scramble for food at an English railway station, but that was the decorum of a court reception compared with the fight at Chelyabinsk. Though there was so long to wait, we were all in as much hurry as if the train started within ten minutes.
I would have fared badly had I not made the acquaintance of a pleasant, stout and elderly baroness, who was on her way to visit her married son living at Ekaterinburg, on the eastern slopes of the Urals. I had seen her for half a day standing in the corridor smoking cigarettes. The car corridor has no extra width, and when I tried to pass the lady we jammed. It was awkward, and I grunted.
"Ah, you are an Englishman," she exclaimed. Then with a wrench we tore ourselves asunder; I raised my hat and she bowed, and we exchanged cards.
We became capital friends. I presented her with some English novels I had in my bag, and she presented me with a tin teapot. It is usual for everyone to make their own tea on Russian trains. She also gave me tea and sugar. Thereupon I proceeded to make the floor of my carriage in a mess with crunched sugar, and my papers became disreputably marked with tea stains. Amateur housekeeping in a railway carriage has its drawbacks.
My thanks were as profuse as I could make them, and I asked the baroness how I could relieve my obligations. "Give me a box of your English wax matches," she said; and I gave her the only box I had. An hour later she sent me fifty of her cigarettes.
She told me she loved the English. She wore an English cloth cap and carried a stick, and was much like an English country gentlewoman. When she found the buffet crowded at Chelyabinsk she took it as a personal insult, called the manager, and spoke to him vigorously. So we got a special table, and though we had been informed there wasn't another chair in the place two must have been speedily manufactured, for they were forthcoming instantly. I saw her to her train for Ekaterinburg, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
Then I explored Chelyabinsk.
Conceive a field in which, a cattle show has been held for a week, and it has been raining all the week. That will give you some idea of Chelyabinsk. The buildings were sheds, and the roadways mire.
And yet it is a place that has been muttered in tears for centuries. All convicts and exiles for Siberia were marched over the Urals to Chelyabinsk. It was the dividing station, one gang going to the and north, and another gang going to the mines in the far east; others condemned to labour on the waterways - all expelled from Russia, with the piled-up horrors of Siberia before them.
Siberia, however, is to be no longer the dumping ground for criminals. Siberia indeed intends to become respectable this century. It is crying out in protest, as Australia cried out to England years ago. The Czar and his Imperial Council have the matter in consideration, and before my hair grows grey the terrors of Siberia will be topics limited only to the pages of novels.
All State-aided immigrants coming to Siberia enter this land by the gate of Chelyabinsk. Their papers have to be examined, and they themselves have to be drafted into groups to be taken off, in charge of an official, to the land allotted to them. All this occupies time. And time is no value in Siberia. So the wait is for a week, ten days, two weeks, even six weeks. Spring is when the great incursion takes place. I was told that early that year (1901) as many as a dozen trains a day came over the Urals laden with emigrants, and that in May there were as many as 10,000 peasants living in the sheds erected for them and feeding at the State kitchens till they could be sent to the interior.
Comparatively speaking, the emigrants in the autumn are few. I talked to one group. There was an old man and an old woman, a youngish woman, and three children, the eldest not more than four years. They were sitting in the drenching rain, the elders munching black bread and onions, and the two children that could toddle dancing in a muddy puddle as happy as could be. I asked the old man if he hadn't got too far on in life to come to Siberia to face its fierce winters. He said he and his wife were going to live with their son, who had come to Siberia in the spring with a little money. The Government had given him land. Now he had a home ready, and he had sent for his wife and children and his mother and father.
Again it was a fight, like an excursion crowd, climbing into the train bound for the interior of Siberia. There were more folks than there was room for. I believe I was the only first-class passenger, but the wily second-class passengers, who understood the art of travelling, made no haste, allowed all the second-class places to be filled up, and then insisted, as they are entitled to do under Russian railway regulations, on travelling first. They stormed my particular stronghold, but as foreigners are supposed to ooze roubles, a six-foot-four conductor cleared them out and locked me in.
We were all in our places a full hour before the train started. I kicked my toes to keep myself warm. It was a bedraggled leaden day, and my window looked upon the goods yard, where stood rows of waggons. It was like a delay on a branch line in a colliery district.
At last came the clang of the bell, twice: "Get ready," three times: "Off you go," and the engine, with three preparatory shrieks, lumbered off with us across two thousand miles of land so flat that there wasn't a rise the whole distance that would serve as a tee-ing ground at golf.
The country was featureless. Here and there were clumps of silver-limbed larch which broke the monotony. But we ran for hours at a time with little else taller than grass blades between us and the horizon.
If you have been on a steamer in a dead calm, and seen nothing but a plain to the edge of the world, and heard nothing but the thump-thump of the engines, you will understand exactly how traversing Western Siberia impresses one: nothing but sun-scorched grass and deep grunting of the engine surging through the wilderness. There is one stretch of line without a yard of curve for eighty miles.
The line is raised about a foot above the level of the land, and there is no fence to protect it. I could see from the digging on either side, to obtain this slight bank, that the soil was black and rich. What the British corn-grower will say when Siberia is populated and given up to the production of cheap wheat he himself best knows.
It is a wonderful grazing country. Of that there is no doubt. I saw herds of horses and cows. One young Siberian, whipping up cattle, challenged our train to a race. That he won, amid the plaudits of us all, does not prove so much the swiftness of his horses as the slowness of our train. Fifteen miles an hour was its top speed.
Very seldom was a house to be seen except the guard huts stationed every verst. All the men in charge were good-conduct convicts. The stations were at long intervals, perhaps every twenty miles. There was, of course, the station building, neat and yellow painted. There was the inevitable water tower. In the background were one or two official-looking, yellow-hued, one-storey houses. That was all.
No, not all. For, as it is the proper thing for everybody to carry their own tea and sugar, there was on every platform a great cauldron of a samovar, where rich and poor alike could help themselves to hot water. Also, on one side was a long covered stall, where the local peasantry - where they came from I've no idea - sold cooked fowls, hot or cold, as you liked, for a shilling, very hot dumplings, with hashed meat and seasoning inside, for twopence-halfpenny, huge loaves of new made bread, bottles of beer, pats of excellent butter, pails of milk, apples and grapes, and fifty other things. Passengers loaded themselves with provender at the stall, and ate picnic fashion in the carriages until the next station was reached. There it all began over again.
Wasn't a journey through this great lone land dreary? Of course it was. The eye began to ache with the monotony of the horizon line, and peasants ceased to be picturesque because every group at every station was exactly like the other groups.
Yet, as the days passed and we went rolling on and on across a sea of prairie, with nothing before but two threads of steel stretching over the edge of the world, and nothing behind but two threads of steel stretching back to eternity, a glimmer of consciousness how big Siberia is, and what this thread of railway means to Russia, crept into the mind.
I got tired reading my novels. So I went and sat in the gangway and under the spell of the wide waste - so that the train, while crunching and grunting along, always seemed to be in the very middle of it - my thoughts strayed vagrant through all I had read about this mysterious land of Siberia. And there sprung up the name of Yermak. Yermak was a kind of Alfred the Great, with a difference. In the beginning he, like many other empire-founders, was a freebooter. He was a pirate on the Volga. He seized boats and their contents, and cut the throats of the crews. It was, therefore, but natural he and his companions were chased by the troops of Ivan the Terrible to the Urals. Yermak, however, was befriended by a great merchant, who knew there were wonderful sables to be got on the far side of the hills. It was on New Year's Day, 1581, that Yermak and his Cossacks set off. For years they fought and raided and traded. All his men were killed in time, and Yermak himself was drowned in the Irtish while trying to escape an old Tartar enemy. But he had captured Siberia for Russia. Ivan, who had despatched soldiers to hang him, sent, before the end came, the Imperial pardon, the title of prince, and a robe that had rested on his own shoulders. There was a dash and daring in Yermak's character that appeals to the imagination. He is the national hero, and his banner hangs in the cathedral of Tomsk.
So, as we rolled across the prairie in corridor cars and caught sight, now and then, of the old foot road - nothing but a rutted track, hardly over used since the coming of the train - I let my fancy play on the times of long ago, when adventurous traders came here after the precious sable, fought with the tribes, died in the snow, ate one another from brute hunger, and then I thought how many a weary procession of convicts had trudged across the steppes, taking two years to accomplish a journey the Siberian express will now do in a fortnight. I confess the railwty, a twin thread of steel spreading over the continent, began to fascinate me as nothing had done for a long time.
Here is a land, one and a-half times as large as Europe - forty times, indeed, as big as the United Kingdom - that has lain dormant through the ages, but is at last being tickled into life, as it were, by the railway, as a giant might be aroused from slumber by a wisp. Until ten years ago, when the building of the line began, there were more people in London alone than in all Siberia, Even now there are only ten millions of inhabitants, one person to every two square miles, and out of every hundred persons ninety-three are men. Half the people to-day are convicts or the descendants of convicts.
Looked at from the rear window of the tail car, the railway does not signify much. And yet never since the Great Wall of China was built has there been such a thing accomplished by the hand of man. It is 5,449 miles long, and cost 85 millions of pounds.
The first sod of the line was turned in 1891 by the present Czar when Grand Duke Nicholas. In nine years 3,375 miles were laid, including thirty miles of bridges, several of enormous height and length. The Great Canadian Pacific line, under far more favourable circumstances, took ten years to build 2,290 miles. By dividing the work into sections the Trans-Siberian line, year in and year out, was built at the rate of about a mile a day. The mind begins to be confused when it tries to grasp what this means.
Then the traffic. The main object Russia had in making the line was military, so that in time of war she might have a quick way of throwing her hundreds of thousands of troops into China or into her great port of Vladivostock on the Pacific. Immigration, commerce, and the development of Siberia came as an after-thought. In 1895, when the line was opened only as far as Central Siberia, the number of passengers was just over two hundred thousand. In 1900 there were a million and a half passengers - seven times as many.
But the solitude of this great lone land laid hold on one. It is an ocean of parched grass land, silent, awesome. And yet surely some day it will flourish, and be bountiful to the earth!
Chapter IV: In a Siberian Town
Return to Main Page