1
THE SLEEPING LAND
of the sixteenth century, Russia lay in ruins. War, famine,
plague, and police-state terror under Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first tsar, had depopulated the interior; Moscow itself had been burned to the ground. Its troops
in retreat, contained to the west by Poland and a resurgent Sweden, and to the
south by the Crimean Tatars backed by the Ottoman Turks, Russia turned to
the east, where Siberia, “mysterious and far-extending, opened her arms.”1 By an
accident of history comparable to Columbus’s discovery of America, a relatively
minor frontier action led, within the space of a few generations, to the conquest
and occupation of a territory larger than the Roman Empire.
So sudden was the acquisition that Russia never quite managed to take full
account of what it possessed; yet today that vast territory – the richest resource
area on the face of the Earth – is the hope of Russia’s desperate future and the
world’s last true frontier.
Siberia, as the Russians first encountered it, was a geological and anthropological wonder. Although part of it resembled the European Russian north, and
its level marshlands to the south continued the endless sweep of the Eastern
European plain, it was a subcontinent apart, and aside from its western margins,
unknown except by name. Large mountain ranges cut across it to the south and
east, majestic volcanoes on its far horizons formed part of the Pacific rim of
fire, and its mighty rivers, rivals to the Mississippi and the Nile, could, if linked
together, encircle the globe twenty-five times. Each one of its three major river
TOWARD THE END
24 | EAST OF THE SUN
basins was larger than the whole of Western Europe. In climate, it ranged from
the Arctic to the semi-tropical, supported animals as diverse as camels and polar
bears, and shared latitudes with areas as distant as Thule, Greenland, and Marseilles. Five million square miles, or about 7.5 percent of the total land surface of
the globe, lay within its compass, from the Urals to the Pacific, and from Mongolia to the Arctic seas. In trying to imagine what this means, one nineteenth-century explorer remarked:
If it were possible to move entire countries from one part of the globe to another,
you could take the whole United States of America from Maine to California and
from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, and set it down in the middle of Siberia,
without touching anywhere the boundaries of the latter territory. You could then take
Alaska and all the States of Europe, with the single exception of Russia, and fit
them into the remaining margin like the pieces of a dissected map; and after having
thus accommodated all of the United States, including Alaska, and all of Europe,
except Russia, you would still have more than 300,000 square miles of Siberian territory to spare.2
Siberia also included perhaps the oldest place on earth, north of Mongolia around
Lake Baikal.* At the turn of the century, an expedition to the area searched for
traces of the Garden of Eden, and although the Siberian north might seem
inimical to the ever-green idea of a garden of earthly delights, in its natural
resources, in fact, Siberia would prove beyond compare. Two parables explain
the paradoxical plenitude of its ice-bound wealth. One wittily provides that in
distributing earth’s bounty across the land, the hands of God momentarily froze
as they passed over Siberia and let riches fall upon it in disproportionately large
amounts. But another holds that when God saw that man was not worthy of
the wealth he had provided, he froze it and locked it away in frosty desolation,
and made the land itself lifeless in expiation of Adam’s sins. “Siberia” itself is a
mystical term, derived from the Mongolian siber (“beautiful,” “wonderful,” and
“pure”), and the Tatar sibir, which means “the sleeping land.”
The sleeping beauty at its heart was Lake Baikal, the oldest lake in the world,
the largest fresh-water lake by volume (with about a fifth of the fresh water on
the surface of the globe), and the deepest continental body on earth. Fed by some
336 tributary rivers and streams, it formed a crescent nearly 400 miles long, yet
had an isolated ecosystem comparable to that of the Galapagos Islands, where
the path of evolution could still be traced. Of its 1,700 indigenous species of
plant and animal life, 1,200 were unique – including a fish called the golomyanka,
* To compound the mysteries of this lake (where chronology, in a sense, has been reversed), in
1991 it was discovered that it was actually an ocean in the making, with hydrothermal vents,
like those in mid-ocean ridges, along its floor.
THE SLEEPING LAND | 25
which gave birth to live young. Baikal also had tens of thousands of freshwater
seals – although the nearest ocean was 1,000 miles away. To ancient Chinese
chroniclers, however, it was known as the “Northern Ocean,” and revered by a
number of Siberian tribes as the “Holy Sea.” Even the Russians, who developed
various superstitions about its sudden, apparently willful storms (whipped up by
winds sweeping down from its volcanic ramparts), would say that “it is only upon
Baikal in autumn that a man learns to pray from his heart.”3
THE OVERALL TOPOGRAPHY of Siberia divided rather neatly into three broad
horizontal zones. To the north lay a great treeless tundra, extending along the
whole Arctic coast from Novaya Zemlya to Bering Strait; through the middle
stretched a broad belt of forest from the Ural Mountains to the Okhotsk Sea;
and to the south, arable land that shaded into semi-arid desert steppes from the
southern Urals to beyond the Mongolian frontier.
Inhospitable and desolate, the desert-dry tundra was covered for most of the
year by trackless wastes of snow. Nothing grew upon it but tufts of coarse grass
or swards of moss and lichen, and fierce Arctic gales, known as purgas, drifted
and packed and scored its snowy surface into long, hard, fluted waves. Underneath was a thick substratum of “geological ice” or permafrost – eternally frozen
ground – that was so deep in places as to be “centrally defeated only by the heat
from the earth’s hot core.”4 In summer, the ground thawed to a depth of just a
few feet, and below that was impervious to water, and hard as iron. In a sense,
each spring it rained upward, since evaporation was the only way water could
escape. As melting snow saturated the topsoil, over time it had become covered
with a dense, luxuriant growth of gray Arctic moss. “Moss had grown out of
decaying moss, year after year,” until the whole tundra had become “one vast,
spongy bog.”5
Along the tundra’s southernmost margins, some trees took root, but in the
shallow soil they assumed grotesquely horizontal forms. The dwarf or trailing
cedar grew “like a neglected vine along the ground,”6 and other trees became remarkably gnarled and twisted from ever-turning toward the meager Arctic light.
As they revolved upon themselves, their short, knotty trunks appeared in time as
if entwined “with terrible growths like splints on broken bones.”7
Set against this arboreal grotesque was a landscape that also at times looked
as though it had been designed by a fastidious Creator devoted to geometry. By
a process still mysterious, but connected to the alternate thawing and freezing,
expanding and contracting of the soil, the early summer melt collected into perfectly round lakes, and stones squeezed to the surface were often arranged in
neat, decorously concentric circles, with the larger stones on the periphery and
26 | EAST OF THE SUN
the smaller stones within. Ice-wedges, made by melt-water trickling into cracks
or frost-fissures, also broke the soil into exactly drawn, even-sided polygons.
On the fringe of the tundra, 200 to 400 miles inland from the coast, the primeval coniferous forest, or taiga, began. Scattered larches, groping for a patch
of thawed ground, appeared first; and then, by degrees, came denser stands of
spruce, fir, cedar, birch, and pine, until their intertwining branches formed a thick
canopy above the forest floor. The heart of the taiga was bathed in twilight even
at noon, but its greater enchantment lay in the thousands upon thousands of
miles of its extent – “only migrating birds,”8 wrote Chekhov, “know where it
ends.” In contrast to the limited wildlife of the tundra (the reindeer, polar bear,
lemming, and Arctic fox), the taiga teemed with brown and black bear, wolves,
sables, squirrel, polecats, stoats, lynx, elk, hare, wild boar, badgers, wolverine, and
hundreds of species of birds, including ducks and geese.
The taiga gradually passed into a mixed forest zone of poplars, aspens, elms,
maples, and limes, which in turn thinned out toward the southern steppes, rich
in arable and pastureland. In places the Western Siberian steppe was as fertile as
the black earth of the Ukraine. On its margins, however, it turned to sand, and
for 2,000 miles Southern Siberia skirted a “land of summer snow” where thick
deposits of salt broiled beneath a desert sun.
Siberia’s temperature variations, indeed, touched both extremes, not only
north and south, but within the same locale. Even in the upper latitudes, brief
summers could be almost as hot as the winters were severe, and at Oimyakon,
“the world’s pole of cold,” on the Upper Indigirka River, temperatures could drop
to -90 degrees, yet climb toward 100 in July.
Interrupting the broad horizontal zones of tundra, taiga, and steppe were
several great mountain ranges – the Altai, Sayan, Yablonovy, Stanovoy, and Verkhoyansk, and the volcanic system of Kamchatka. The Altai swept from the West
Siberian Plain to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, and the Sayan from the Altai
to Lake Baikal. The Yablonovy, commencing in Mongolia, crossed the frontier
and divided Transbaikalia (between Lake Baikal and the upper Amur) into two
great terraces of almost equal size. The Verkhoyansk formed a huge arc east of
and parallel to the Lena River that reached to the Laptev Sea. In the Far East,
the Stanovoy arose on the Chinese frontier, closely followed the Okhotsk Sea
coast northward, and with its white peaks marked the southern boundary of
Kamchatka at the head of the Penzhina Gulf. Kamchatka in turn was divided
by a spine of rugged volcanic summits that formed an almost continuous ridge,
culminating in “the monarch of Siberian mountains,” the Klyuchevskaya Volcano, towering to 16,000 feet. Along the whole Far Eastern coast, in fact, various
ranges broke off into the sea in great shattered headlands and cliffs, where violent
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other cataclysms and deluges of the past
THE SLEEPING LAND | 27
had severed them from summits to which they had once been joined on the
Northwest Pacific Coast. In between were left chains of volcanic islands whose
bare, precipitous coasts appeared similarly sundered and torn.
From the mountains of Southern Siberia, the glaciers of the Altai, and the
borderlands of Mongolia arose Siberia’s three great river systems – the Ob, the
Yenisey, and the Lena – each among the mightiest and most majestic rivers in the
world. Giving off numerous lateral tributaries to the east and west, they wound
northward for thousands of miles toward the Arctic to ultimately release their
torrents into ice-laden seas. Siberia’s fourth great river was the Amur, which
formed on the Mongolian Plateau south of Lake Baikal, and flowed east-bynortheast in a series of great bends to its outlet on the coast of the Pacific between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. Opposite the Amur’s mouth lay
the island of Sakhalin, and to Sakhalin’s south and east the Kurile Island chain.
Still other rivers of importance lay along the Arctic coast – the Indigirka,
Yana, and Kolyma – and (toward the Bering Sea) the Anadyr. Extending offshore, or scattered through the Arctic seas, were also fantastic islands and huge
appendages of land, like Novaya Zemlya; the Yamal Peninsula (“ultimate land,”
in the language of the Samoyeds); the Taimyr Peninsula (the size of California
and the northernmost extension of Eurasia); and island clusters like the Lyakhov and New Siberian where the soil was nothing but “a mixture of sand and ice
and ivory and the petrified remains of giant prehistoric trees.”9
All this was Siberia.*
IN 1928, A peasant digging a cellar for his house in Siberia’s northeast discovered
an underground Paleolithic home in which mammoth tusks and sundry animal
bones, “pressed down at the base with limestone plates,”10 furnished the foundation. Reindeer antlers meshed together provided scaffolding for the roof, and
in the middle of the dwelling was a hearth with an oval grave, where a child had
been elaborately interred. Among the many ornaments found with the remains
were a headband resembling “the well-known diadems worn by ancient kings,”11
and a carved pendant depicting a bird in flight. Examination of the skull revealed
a double row of teeth, a defect that may account for the child’s sepulchral splendor, since deformity was once associated with supernatural powers.
Nearly prehistoric settlements have also been discovered from the Ob to the
Transbaikal, and the remnants of Neolithic abodes exist all over Siberia. Inscriptions and pictographs on the cliffs and stratified palisades of the Yenisey River
are of great antiquity, as are rock drawings along the Lena River that include a
* The southern Kuriles are still disputed territory, of course, and may or may not be considered
part of Siberia; eventually, they will probably be ceded to Japan.
28 | EAST OF THE SUN
giant horse, wild bison, and two elk. Such finds offer a partial (if indeterminate)
glimpse into the story of Siberia’s remote past.
During the Pleistocene Epoch (when mountain glaciers covered much of the
territory and the whole of its northwestern plain was locked in a glacial sheet),
“huge, stooping mammoths, with yellowish upturned tusks,”12 wandered up from
northern India into South-Central Siberia, where they browsed upon the greenery and flowers that had begun to come forth in patches across the steeply rolling
terrain. In that prehistoric animal kingdom were also the wooly rhinoceros, wild
bison, saber-toothed tiger, and steppe land antelope or saiga, the last of which
survives in Central Asia to this day.
As the glaciers receded, vast inland seas formed and trees flourished in the
Arctic, for the stomachs of some of the recovered mammoths contain vegetation
(like buttercups) now growing far to the south of where they died. Over many
thousands of years, Siberia’s landscape changed. The seas disappeared, there was
a reelevation of the land, and major rivers formed. People began to settle along
their banks and make for themselves some kind of home. The wolf was domesticated into the dog, timber used for dwellings, and the Siberian hunter improved
his stone tools, fashioning bows and arrows out of wood, harpoons out of reindeer antlers, and fishhooks out of bone. He also began to experiment with different kinds of arrowheads and spears, and along the rivers learned how to make
light and highly maneuverable birchbark canoes. By the end of the Neolithic
period, the whole of northern Asia was inhabited, most densely around Lake
Baikal in the heart of the taiga. From the forests the hunter ventured northward
into the tundra, reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and set up collapsible,
tall conical skin tents – a prototype of the familiar tepee that later spread to
America’s shores.
The first metal tools appeared around 2000 b.c. – knives, needles, and fishhooks cold-forged out of native copper found by hunters in the mountains. Much
later, the natives developed molds made of clay and used them to cast knives and
swords. By the beginning of the second millennium b.c., tribes of cattle breeders
roamed the steppes of Western Siberia and began to cultivate the soil, using a
stone hoe and grinding the grain by hand. Horse cultures also developed, and,
during the Bronze Age, the people living in the Minusinsk Basin (an oasis in the
upper part of the Yenisey River Valley between the Sayan and Altai mountains)
acquired such skill in metalwork that the collection of bronze implements from
their burial mounds is said to give “a more complete representation of the progress of art in the bronze age, and of the transition from the use of bronze to the
use of iron, than is to be found anywhere else in the world.”13
In the sixth century a.d., a people of Turkic stock founded a powerful empire centered in Mongolia, dominated by the Uighurs, who headed a tribal
THE SLEEPING LAND | 29
confederation known in Chinese annals as the Nine Clans. They carried on trade
with China and spread through the Yenisey Valley, where they built great tumuli,
adorned with monoliths, over their dead. Although originally pastoral nomads,
the Uighurs became fine agriculturists, irrigating wide tracts of land by means
of canals that more modern settlers have rediscovered and utilized. In the ninth
century, however, another Turkic people, the Kirghiz, coming from the upper
reaches of the Yenisey, put an end to their power. Of Europoid ethnic stock, the
Yenisey Kirghiz were able farmers, skilled in handicrafts, including metalware,
and carried on a brisk trade with the Tibetans and Chinese. They also had a runic system of writing, which survives in fragmentary inscriptions on clay vessels,
tombstones, and stone idols decorated with symbols of the sun.
In the thirteenth century, the Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan (the legendary warrior who united scattered Mongol tribes under his mighty rule) charged
into the Transbaikal and swept westward across Siberia, pillaging the local tribes
and wreaking havoc on their way of life. Within a short time, the dominion of
the Mongols had been extended over much of Asia, including parts of China
and India, and over all of Siberia (except the extreme north). Continuing their
conquest westward, the Mongols passed the southern spur of the Altai Mountains to the plains of Central Asia and drove down into “the Land of the Seven
Rivers and the Thousand Springs.”14 Overrunning Russia (at the time made up
of a number of feudal principalities), their immediate legacy was one of horror
and blood. After the capture of Ryazan, one contemporary wrote: “The prince,
with his mother, wife, sons, the boyars, and the inhabitants, without regard to age
or sex, were slaughtered with savage cruelty; some were impaled, some shot at
with arrows for sport, some were flayed or had nails or splinters of wood driven
under their nails. Priests were roasted alive, and nuns and maidens ravished in the
churches before their relatives. No eye remained open to weep for the dead.”15
In 1240, advancing toward Europe, the Mongols captured Kiev, razed the city to
the ground, and subjected the people to indiscriminate massacre. Only the death
of Ogdai, Genghis Khan’s successor, brought the onslaught to an end. In the
administrative division of the Mongol Empire, Western Siberia and Russia both
belonged to the Golden Horde; but its imperium was too decentralized to last.
Russia eventually freed itself from the Mongol yoke in 1480, and the Horde’s
succession states were born.
AT THE TIME the Russians prepared to cross the Urals – the long if attenuated divide between Europe and northern Asia – 140-odd native peoples had
already made Siberia their home. Pastoral nomads roamed the southwestern
steppes with their herds of cattle and sheep; forest nomads hunted and fished in
the taiga; and in the northern tundra, reindeer nomads drove their great herds
30 | EAST OF THE SUN
along fixed routes. Only the most elementary agriculture was practiced (in the
Amur River Valley), while in the extreme northeast were primitive tribes who
hunted wild reindeer or lived off whales, walruses, and seals along the shores
of the Bering and Okhotsk seas. Some of the tribes roaming the steppes and
forests had emerged from the Iron Age and developed links with China and
Central Asia, while the inhabitants of the tundra and Arctic regions belonged
to Stone Age tribes. Most of the natives (numbering altogether about a quarter of a million people) belonged to five broad ethnic, linguistic groups: Turkic,
Manchu-Tungus, Finno-Ugrian, Mongol, and the so-called “Paleosiberian,” of
predominantly Mongoloid stock. The Paleosiberians (the descendants of the
prehistoric inhabitants) were principally the Chukchi, Yukaghir, Koryak, Asiatic
Eskimo, and Kamchadal in the northeast; the “Yenisey Ostyak,” or Ket, on the
lower Yenisey; the Gilyak (or Nivkh) on the Amur and Sakhalin; and the mysteriously Caucasian, “hairy” Ainu in southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands.
Most Paleosiberians tended to be short and compact, with broad, flat, beardless faces, prominent cheekbones, small, rather sunken eyes, and nasal cavities
that were exceptionally narrow, apparently to protect their lungs from large
draughts of freezing air. The physical, cultural, and anthropological links between these people and Native Americans are regarded by anthropologists as incontrovertible, and it is believed that perhaps 25,000 years ago Siberians crossed
over from Asia to America by way of an isthmus connecting the two continents
across the Bering Sea.
From the third century on, Neosiberian tribes began to join the aboriginal
inhabitants – the Finno-Ugrian Voguls, Ostyaks, and Samoyeds; Turkic tribes
(like the Yakuts and Tatars); the Manchu-Tungus; and the Mongol-Buryats.
The semi-nomadic Ostyaks and Voguls inhabited the forests and marshes of the
Ob-Irtysh Basin; the reindeer-herding Samoyed roamed the Yamal and Taimyr
peninsulas and the tundra west of the Yenisey; the Yakuts inhabited the Lena
Valley, with settlements along the headwaters of the Yana, Indigirka, and Kolyma
rivers; and the Tungus were found from the Yenisey Valley east to the Pacific
Ocean. Cousin to the Tungus were the Lamuts on the shores of the Sea of
Okhotsk, and the Goldi and the Daurs in the Amur River Valley. Finally, in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Buryats had established themselves in
areas of steppeland around the southern end of Lake Baikal.
Aside from the Moslem Tatars, all the peoples of Siberia were pagans, and belonged to clans or other pretribal kinship groups, or to tribes linked by reciprocal
marriage relations. The Buryats and Yakuts (both descendants of Central Asian
pastoral nomads) were easily the most advanced; they kept cattle and horses,
and had clan chiefs. But the reindeer-herding peoples had no institutionalized
hierarchy and congregated regularly, as small family bands, only for councils and
THE SLEEPING LAND | 31
seasonal rituals, or to share the fruits of their hunt. Yet it often happened that
“all the efforts of man were not enough to wrench from raw nature the necessary
bit of food.”16 In the far north, the domestication of the reindeer compelled a
wandering life, as the Samoyeds, Koryaks, Chukchi, and other tundra nomads
followed their great herds from place to place, pausing only for so long as it took
the animals to paw up the snow for moss around their encampment. None led
lives more lonely than the Koryak of northern Kamchatka, who roamed over the
great moss-covered steppes, as one observer put it, “high up among extinct volcanic peaks, 4,000 feet above the sea, enveloped half the time in drifting clouds,
and swept by frequent storms of rain and snow.”17