The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

In 1972 I was completing the tenth grade of a secondary school in Moscow. During this time frame, our family submitted the required documents for moving abroad. Three months prior to final examinations, I had to leave school since presenting these documents to OVIR [The Department of Visas and Registration of Foreign Citizens] would have led to immediate expulsion. Now, having become a “refusenik,” I had to decide where and how to continue my education. I began by submitting documentation to the division of external studies and took the final exams for the tenth grade. The next problem was more difficult—entry into an institute. I had long planned to enroll in a medical institute, but this was impossible in Moscow. Column five of the questionnaire impeded this [nationality]. Then, on the advice of relatives and acquaintances living in Siberia, in Irkutsk, I decided to enroll in the Irkutsk Medical Institute. Judging by accounts, there was not as much anti-Semitism there as there was in central Russia. This turned out to be true. Without thinking too long, I bought a plane ticket and after a seven-hour flight, I arrived at the capital of eastern Siberia—Irkutsk.

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Vladimir Azbel, Siberian Adversity

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Irkutsk was the city of my birth. When I was one-and-a-half years old, my family moved to Moscow. We came to Irkutsk twice after that to visit our relatives. During these trips we saw Siberia almost in the way that foreign tourists coming to Lake Baikal see it. The beautiful embankments of the Angara River, several new buildings in the center of town, a trip to Baikal, the new city of Angarsk—all this left a good impression. Now, having been a resident of Irkutsk for two years, I observed other, seamier sides of Siberian life.

I had very many acquaintances in Irkutsk; thus I was able to observe the life of Siberian society. From the beginning it was noticeable that the inhabitants of Siberia differed from those of Russia’s western provinces. It was surprising that no one expressed dissatisfaction with their lives. They considered that everything which occurred was in the scheme of things. Thus, for example, in Angarsk (forty kilometers from Irkutsk), the air was constantly poisoned by gases coming from the chemical plants. There were filtration systems, but they only operated during the week. Saturdays and Sundays were off days. The management went to their dachas. But the factories kept operating in order to fulfill the plans more quickly. The harmful gases were released bypassing the filters. This speeded the process but the people in the city choked. No residents spoke against this openly. Protests were heard only within circles of close friends and relatives. If the air was poisoned by gases, that meant that it was the way it had to be. The majority of the population was convinced of this. Generally speaking, very few people in the Soviet Union voiced their protests openly. The majority preferred to remain quiet. This was particularly noticeable in Siberia.

To this day people in Siberia live in the Stalinist atmosphere of terror before the national security organs. Siberians will never engage a foreigner in conversation and never mention their difficult life in the presence of a stranger.

An asphalt road leads from Irkutsk to Listvianichnyi Bay on Baikal, the part of the lake closest to the city. For forty years, only one boat has traversed Baikal. Even if people do reach distant spots on the lakeshore, only the local taiga dweller or hunter can live there. Therefore, the people of Irkutsk, living only fifty kilometers from the lake, go to the Black Sea for vacation even though in terms of beauty there is nothing comparable to Baikal. The mountain ranges and the taiga of Baikal remain as wild, remote, and unexplored as hundreds of years ago. I made it to places which civilization had not yet reached. There were remote Buriat settlements where people led a nomadic life of cattle-breeding and hunting. They spent months in the saddle returning to their own terrain only in winter.

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Chapter Thirty-Two