Irkutsk's Cold Spring by Gregory Feiffer
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Irkutsk's Cold Spring By Gregory Feiffer IRKUTSK, Eastern Siberia Stepping onto the airfield five time zones east of Moscow, I braced myself for the cold. Minus 12 degrees Celsius in April was a rude shock nonetheless. On top of that came snow brought by winds sweeping the vast continental steppe, altering direction to change the weather by bringing blizzards one minute and bright sun the next. "If only we didn't have to suffer through the winter each year," an Irkutsk native glumly told me later, "then we'd have far fewer problems." Of course, it would be easier to envision our solar system without the sun, so central is winter to life here. I wasn't thinking about weather patterns initially while rattling across the Irkutsk airfield at five in the morning, however. I was breathing sighs of relief that I was finally out of earshot of an angry and intricately made-up female fel- low passenger on whom I'd very recently spilled my one glass of Aeroflot water while getting up to visit the toilet. Good I hadn't opted for red wine. My sensitivity to the climate picked up again when the old ZIL truck pulling the ancient airfield shuttle stalled while shifting gears in front of the airport's three equally ancient military Tupolev cargo planes. By the time got inside the main building accessible only after leaving the airfield and finding one's way intuitively to the front entrance I was freezing. assumed that since I'd flown from Moscow, I needed the domestic-flights building. Going in, I found nothing to tell me I was in the right place. Opening a door to a partition inside, I was A sudden downtown snowstorm disappeared five minutes after it arrived. greeted by a stern woman demanding to know what I was announced that the (nonexistent, as far as I could tell) pas- doing there. I told her. sengers from a flight from Vladivostok could now get their baggage. She came out again. No one came forward. She "God almighty!" she cried at my hopeless ignorance. left. Then: Would the passengers of Flight 167 from Perm "You have to go to the international building!" come forward? No one showed. Finally, a half-hour after Perm, our bags dropped onto the whirligig. Inside the building, bleary-eyed passengers anxious to recover their dunnage waited at a set of sooty barred glass After getting my baggage some time later came the task doors leading to a baggage room, whose conveyer, a funny- of finding a hotel room, impossible from Moscow because looking contraption below a crude trapdoor from outside, the telephone lines never connected, or no one answered, seemed more fitting as a children's playground round- or the person responsible for booking rooms was invari- about. ably on a break or had gone home for the day (at four o'clock in one case). Half an hour later, a corpulent woman standing on the other side of the doors still refused to open them. Instead, A brief taxi ride ensued in a broken-down Toyota (many she walked around a corner, picked up a megaphone and of the city's cars are right-hand drive Japanese autos bought second-hand for a few thousand dollars). The driver in- sisted his drunken friend come along. Both lit foul-smell- R U S''qi, A ing, fifth-class-tobacco cigarettes and grumbled when I asked for a window to be rolled down. S I B E,/RI A rv "; Lensko "What are you doing here?" barked the drunken friend. " "Business?" (The word still clearly evoked a sense of mys- tery and the excitement of imagined untold riches, as it did for many Russians before 1991.) "Something like that," I replied. Luckily, I found a vacancy in a seedy hotel on Irkutsk's central square, and cheap. At least cheap until I had to hand Baikal in my passport. When it became clear I was a foreigner, the Chita rate tripled. "Do you know that's against the Constitution and other MONGOLi R U S S ..," CHINA MONGOLIA 2 GF-4 stood the former Communist Party headquarters, a dreary, gray, stone Stalinist building now housing the re- gional administration. On another side loomed a half-constructed con- crete edifice on two-story stilts, the height of misdirected Soviet architec- tural innovation meant to be the new City Hall before the collapse of the Soviet Union finally dried up local coffers. I didn't get much sleep that day. Soon after I checked in, a telephone call woke me up. "Do you want to have some fun with a girl?" a bored female voice asked me. "Uhhh..." This wasn't a rhetori- cal question, I realized. "No thanks," I replied. But the voice on the other end of The "eternal" Second World War dead behind flame commemorating the line insistent. not?" the old died with the Soviet Union. proved "Why looming Party headquarters it asked. laws?" I asked, already knowing any protest would be futile. Two calls later, yanked the telephone line out of the wall. "What difference does that make to me?" the desk- woman predictably replied. Tired but anxious to explore, I got up to walk around the city. Most people on the streets stood around glumly, The room turned out to be on a floor taken over six many in dark overcoats in groups around the square, smok- years ago by a Russian-Chinese joint venture, outfitted with ing, spitting sunflower-seed shells or talking while wait- broken Chinese fixtures and furniture half-covered in fairly ing for buses or one of the 70 Japanese minivans bought by new but already peeling paint. Most tenants left their doors the local government several years ago to serve as open, and walking down the hallways to what was called "marshrutky," cheap taxis driving along bus routes to alle- breakfast, one had to concentrate to avoid witnessing people viate the city's public-transportation shortage. undertaking their morning toilet. All in all, it was a depressing sight of post-Soviet gloom, The Chinese connection is almost a natural one. Irkutsk certainly not what I had expected. As recently as my flight is isolated from the West, and looks to China and other Asian countries to sell its resources and in turn buy cheap consumer goods. Cheap Chinese labor also built the city's new market and train station in 1997. It seemed, however, that this floor had less to do with respectable business types than with the Chinese Mafia, apparent members of which lurked in the hallway. They, as did the other Chinese I saw in Irkutsk, seemed completely uninterested in their surroundings a natural reaction, perhaps, to Russians' general dislike of foreigners. Local police say Chinese make up Irkutsk's most pow- erful organized criminal groups. "No one can recruit people willing to die like the Chinese can," Sergei Predeyin, press secretary to Irkutsk Governor Boris Govorin, told me later. By the time I got to my room, the sun had risen to re- veal a grim central square peppered with blue spruces, the A city of 630,000 residents, sleepy Irkutsk same trees that line Moscow's Kremlin walls. On one end feels like it only has a fifth that number. institute of Current World Affairs 3 into the city, my head had been filled with vi- sions culled from years of having read about Irkutsk as a bustling commercial and cultural crossroads along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Tsarist exiles brought its aristocratic heritage from the West, I read, but that was tempered by Asi- atic influences from neighboring Mongolia and nearby China. All this amid the beautiful wilds around the gateway of sprawling Lake Baikal, one of the world's largest sources of fresh water. Had 70 years of Soviet rule and a decade of so-called democracy wiped it all away? The Paris of Siberia Irkutsk was founded in 1651 as a Cossack garrison to lord it over the indigenous Turkic Buryat population. In the 18th century the town to the far north served as the base for explorations Many blocks in the city center consist of and east. Furs and ivory were sent from all over ornate albeit crumbling wooden houses. eastern Siberia to Irkutsk, from where traders would carry them to Mongolia, Tibet and China in return Incredibly, Irkutsk even became known as "the Paris of for silk and tea. Monuments, plaques and architecture still Siberia." recall the memory of explorers such as Grigory Shelekhov, a famed 18th-century trader who crossed the Bering Strait Majestic neoclassical stone buildings and intricately into Alaska and California. Slavic-themed carved wooden houses lining this provin- cial capital's streets still speak of its former role as a com- Irkutsk is also well known for its exiles, which famously mercial crossroads in frontier Siberia's resource-rich sprawl. included Decembrist rebels and Polish separatists, who formed a local Siberian aristocracy. Sagging foundations, decaying beams and chipped fa- cades, however, now reflect not boom, but bust. Courtyards By the end of the 19 th century, the city boomed as are a clutter of garbage and mud, and most of the city's wealthy traders built brick mansions to replace log cabins. basements are almost permanently flooded, a result of a 1950s Soviet project to dam the Angara River, which flows through the city from Lake Baikal to the east. Most of the city's wooden structures also have no plumbing. Outhouses and sidewalk manual- pump wells for the latter, one per block serve many Irkutsk residents.