In Putin's Footsteps

8 ULAN-UDE, IRKUTSK, AND LAKE BAIKAL ^{ASIAN ABODES OF THE SPIRIT TIME ZONE: MSK+5; UTC+8}

The redeye flight from Moscow some three and a half thousand miles east, to Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, left us dazed, as much from the lack of sleep as from the stark change in scenery, almost equivalent to a change in planets. (If Russia was, as Obama famously declared, just a “regional power,” its “region” now seemed to us, at least from the plane’s windows, to encompass extraterrestrial realms.) Our Airbus descended through ragged skeins of mist paling with dawn light until, beneath us, we descried empty green hills stretching out in every direction, presaging the grassland steppes of Mongolia just a hundred and fifty miles or so to the south. Amid this expanse of green, Ulan-Ude, population 400,000, loomed into view, a jumble of concrete shacks and gray apartment buildings scattered about like trash on an abandoned lot, hugging the east bank of the Selenga River and bisected by the lesser currents of the Uda.

The Selenga! The Uda! The waterways’ names bespeak, to Russian ears, impossible, forbidding remoteness and exotic non-Slavic peoples. The airport turned out to be nothing more than a tarmac and a terminal one might well mistake for a bus station. Awaiting us in the lounge we found a crowd of stocky Buryats, whose Asian features recalled their consanguinity with Mongols, as did their language, a dialect of Mongolian, agglutinative and thick voweled, totally unrelated to Russian. Russians here were relative newcomers, arriving in the seventeenth century, bent on mining for gold and trapping for furs. They could not have felt especially warmly toward the Buryats, who descended from Mongols, the leader of whom, Genghis Khan, exploded out of Mongolia in the thirteenth century with his armies of crossbow-bearing horsemen to lay waste to almost all Russia, massacring perhaps a third of the population, and even threatening western Europe. The Mongol empire Genghis Khan established had lasting effects, all baleful, on Russia’s history, cutting the country off from Europe just as Europe was poised to undergo the Renaissance and, worse, introducing tyrannical rule to Eastern Slavs who had governed themselves democratically in the city-states of Kievan Rus. (Not that the Russian princes of the time should fully escape blame—they chose to pay their Mongol overlords to protect them from the Swedes and Lithuanians, instead of siding with Westerners against the Tatar-Mongolian yoke.)

Our taxi ride down potholed roads to Ulan-Ude’s center revealed a roughshod town of few comforts, with locals negotiating battered sidewalks or gravel walkways, at times subject to assault from whirling dust kicked up by the hectic traffic and sporadic wind.

Our Buryat driver sat and steered on the right—his cab was an import from Japan, as were so many other cars on the road around us.

“The federal authorities keep forbidding us from buying these right-hand-drive cars,” he said. “Putin wants us to buy Russian cars, not foreign ones. But it’s no use. These Japanese cars are so much better, even with the steering wheels on the wrong side.” The perennial dilemma of a country as large as Russia: what the central government in Moscow ordains does not always hold in the provinces, which may be nine time zones ahead of the capital.

Our hotel, the Geser, was a functional brick structure, but comfortable enough. To our surprise, it hosted tour groups of Westerners on their way to China and Mongolia. Yet outside the hotel the town appeared stark and hardscrabble, dominated by crumbling cement buildings painted, in places, gaudy colors and bearing gaudy signs, some in Chinese; and in fact Chinese businessmen were out and about. Ethnic Buryats, not Russians, made up the majority here; a good number of Buryat men had crew cuts, weathered faces, and jutting brows. Here and there scurried Mongols on shopping expeditions. All in all, Ulan-Ude resembled Moscow about as much as Portland, Maine, looks like Lima, Peru.

“What would we do out here without China?” our driver exclaimed. “They’ve built a lot here. Just look!”

He was right: ramshackle skyscrapers of blue-and-yellow glass and steel stood in colorful disarray against a leaden sky. Here and there were Chinese noodle shops, Chinese clothing shops, and Chinese bric-a-brac shops. Of course Chinese businessmen were out and about, too.

When local Russian friends met us as the hotel later that day and took us for a stroll, we could find no café open in which to sit down and talk. We espied the Venezia Restaurant, but it was closed. Even the sidewalk ice cream vendors had disappeared by nine in the evening. The city at such an hour, we thought, should have been bustling with people but instead stretched before us empty, its broad avenues sweeping away toward empty hills.

Our stroll took us to the Square of the Soviets. There we confronted, set against a row of larches, the gigantic weathered bronze Lenin head—the largest such statue on earth, standing twenty feet tall from nape to crown and resting atop a granite pedestal that raises it another twenty-five feet. If the streets were empty, Lenin, here, was always on duty, his brows furrowed in perpetual vigilance and subjecting passersby to his fierce gaze. Despite the monument’s size, the few out and about barely seemed to notice him, save for a group of skateboarders honing their skills on its pedestal—a familiar sight in other Russian cities. Another one who noticed was the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, who paid it a visit in 2011.

A few blocks away, on a promontory above the Uda River, we encountered a monument of a very different kind: one memorializing the city’s victims of the Stalin-era political purges. Fresh wreaths of roses, laid by the children and grandchildren of the murdered, testify to the ongoing interest on the part of the relatives of the perished. We visited it the next evening, as the sun, already set, lit from below a scattering of clouds, giving them the appearance of molten boulders floating above the verdure of the surrounding hills. A black granite wall engraved with the names of the victims and the dates of their birth and death (the latter predominantly having occurred in 1938, at the height of the Great Terror) rose beneath a tangle of barbed wire, in front of which stood a faceless citizen carved in bronze.

A plaque on the pedestal reads:

Another plaque says, simply, “Za chto?” (For what?)

Buryatia was the first place we visited with a large, distinct minority population professing a religion of purely Asian provenance. About one out of four people in Buryatia profess Orthodox Christianity and one out of five, Buddhism. (The number of believers may well be larger—older people who grew up in the USSR are often hesitant to formally disclose their religious beliefs.) Nonbelievers, the stats tell us, account for 14 percent of the population—another legacy of decades of atheist Soviet education. Nonetheless, near Ulan-Ude sits Ivolginsky Datsan, the most important Buddhist temple in Russia, one belonging to the Tibetan Vajrayana school and frequented by both Russians and Buryats.

“A Russian can go to church in the morning and light a candle for a dead relative, but then go in the evening to the temple and perform a Buddhist ritual or two for him there, just to be sure,” a Russian resident of Ulan-Ude told us. “Buddhists are tolerant. They recite their mantras and don’t give anyone any trouble, unlike the Muslims.” Other ethnic Russians we spoke to, though, talked of tensions with the Buryats, with the latter calling the former “occupiers.” Yet such hostile sentiments, we heard, usually emerged as a result of a surfeit of alcohol. The kind of tension characterizing relations between Russians and Muslims in the country’s North Caucasus region does not exist in Buryatia.

One cloudy morning, a taxi ferried us fifteen miles west of Ulan-Ude through the surrounding hills on the plain where the Ivolginsky Datsan dominates the horizon. Twenty-five years ago, the temples, with their Chinese-style flaring eaves, gilt spheres, and lama figurines, and their red, green, and blue decor, had once impressed visitors amid an empty steppe; now, they stood surrounded by a multicolored congeries of workaday shacks, log cabins, and souvenir shops and living quarters (housing visitors and monks, astrologers and healers and masseurs), the space between them crisscrossed with telephone cables droopily suspended between crooked poles. At the ticket office, we hired a guide—a monk in sneakers, burgundy robes, and a matching fisherman’s cap. He introduced himself as Torzho, a name, he told us, that in Buryat is translated as White Pearls, or, alternatively, Big Diamond, with the intended import of “peaceful.”

We set out on our tour. Around us were mostly Buryats, who come here to seek spiritual guidance from all over the area, some from hundreds of miles away. Many seemed poor local farmers, but others were clearly prosperous, in colorful traditional silk Mongolian robes.

Navigating among other groups on narrow unpaved paths, our guide mumbled his spiel in a barely audible staccato, as if bored and in a rush. As we trod the dirt walkways, we discovered that the temples each now charge a two-hundred-ruble (about $3) entrance fee and were for the most part similar: green plank floors, red columns around the walls, red tables covered with tapestries and holy books. Chintzy-looking portraits of lamas seem to hang on every wall. Perhaps because of the fee, we were always the only ones inside.

Outside, around us Buryats and a few Russians enthusiastically hurried to spin prayer wheels and affix prayer flags to their knobs, with a few doing the ritual circumambulation of the entire premises. Our guide recounted the details of samsara, the pursuit of nirvana; he talked of the region’s lamas and other holy men. He lamented the repression the Bolsheviks visited on the monks, who, at the time of the revolution, numbered some sixteen thousand.

Yet he praised Stalin for reopening the temple in 1946.

“He had a religious education, so he could see the value in it,” he told us flatly, alluding to the bloody tyrant’s years as a student at an Orthodox Christian seminary.

“Why did he see the value in these temples only in 1946?” we asked.

“There was a change in government.”

There was not. Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church during the war, understanding that it would help rally Soviet citizens for the fight to save his regime. He doubtless thought little of faraway Datsan, but surely Buddhism’s traditional pacifism weighed in the temple’s favor. Moreover, rebuilding the country after the war, Stalin reasoned, people needed all the faith they could get.

Our guide reserved the greatest praise for Putin, to whom he referred always by his full name.

“There are two thrones in our country,” Torzho announced. “One is occupied by our lama. The other by President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

“What?” we asked. “Putin on a throne?”

“In the Kremlin president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sits on a throne. As does our lama. We’re grateful to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for restoring our temples here. And he’s also restored our stadium.”

Our guide went on to explain that President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin shared a “holy background” with Prince Siddhartha, the Indian noble who, millennia ago, had become the Buddha.

“Putin?” we responded, amazed. “A holy background? He may act like a czar, but he has never claimed any such thing! Anyway, the Buddha renounced his throne. Putin is preparing to run for president yet again.”

“We are grateful to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who sits on a throne in the Kremlin. We really are.”

Putin sits on no throne, not physically at least, although his grand coronation-like inauguration for his fourth presidential term in May 2018 may suggest otherwise. The gratitude the monk voiced finds reflection in the president’s ever-high popularity ratings—up to 80 percent, even after almost two decades in power, and the perception that he is, indeed, all powerful.

Soon after this, we parted and hired a taxi back to Ulan-Ude and the giant Lenin head.

One of our Buryat drivers in Ulan-Ude waxed enthusiastically about shamans.

“Shamans have a lot of power, it’s really true. There are white shamans who do good. Best to stay away from the black shamans.” White shamans intervened, he said, in the lives of many, and generally helped people. Even during the Soviet decades people consulted them, asked for their aid. Or, if need be, they entreated black shamans to harm their enemies. White or black, though, shamans formed a part of the region’s age-old culture; Buddhism, in these parts, was an import.

Intent on visiting a shaman, one gloriously sunny, breezy morning we boarded a late-morning train for the eight-hour ride from Ulan-Ude west to Irkutsk, a city known as the Paris of Siberia and a jumping-off point for visits to Lake Baikal, the world’s largest (and deepest) body of freshwater, water so pure that one can see clear through to the rocky bottom from almost anywhere on its surface. The trains run in such a way that windows face the lake, affording views for which one would certainly be disposed to pay extra. We would share our car with a great number of Chinese, who spent little time looking out the windows, engrossed as they were with watching television series on their tablets or slurping noodles from Styrofoam buckets.

Yet the vistas of Baikal did more than impress; they instilled a peace of sorts, curative, uplifting, and enthralling. The lake appeared suddenly, sixty miles out of Ulan-Ude and about an hour into the trip. The railroad tracks veered away from the grassy clearings and larch forests to parallel the pebbly bank, with the far (northern) shore so distant as to be almost invisible. Azure sky and azure-green waters, at times still, at others frothy with the wind, swept away from us, with the taiga-covered low mountains—sopki in Russian—on either bank receding and shrinking away into the north. The shores, with their cliffs of schist in places, taiga in others, sheltered secluded coves on which nerpas (Baikal seals) sun themselves and moose and bears roam. When mists roll in, as they often do when the seasons are changing, the tableaus Baikal presents rival the finest work of the impressionists. This lake and its surroundings, one finds oneself thinking, seemed to exude a spirituality befitting notions of shamans; of lost, ancient worlds where peace reined and mankind lived as one with nature.

Such lofty Lake Baikal thoughts did not have much to do with Irkutsk, though. With its 600,000 inhabitants and chaotic, traffic-clogged roads, there is no hint of Baikal’s beauty, though the city does sit on the majestic Angara River as it flows into the lake some fifty miles to the southwest. Nevertheless, on the evening of our arrival, we strolled down Lenin Street and entered what the locals call the 130 Quarter, the pedestrian Third of July Street, the southern side of which opens onto views of the Angara, where you feel the sort of café-life languor and esprit de flâneur one might sense in Paris’s historic center. Except of course here the area in its current leisure incarnation is less than a decade old. On a typical evening bands played, terrace restaurants were crowded, and merchants hawked ice cream. Young women dressed in summer casual but with the highest of heels vied for the attention of equally hip young men with globally fashionable beards and man-buns; stately elderly women walked with canes holding the arms of men with handlebar moustaches, recalling grandees of old. Here and there renovated Soviet-era vending machines dispensed fizzy water in little cups, just as they would have decades ago.

That the Bolsheviks executed in Irkutsk the White Russian Admiral Kolchak, commemorated by a statue, seems fitting; after all, Czar Nicholas I exiled some of the Decembrist revolutionaries here, in order that they serve their sentences under the direct supervision of the Governor General of the Irkutsk Guberniya. Their houses, two-story, of wood yet of almost palatial grandeur, with gray or brown facades and ornate white trim, recalled their upper-class tastes and background. Being revolutionaries, the Decembrists had enjoyed the favor of the Bolsheviks, who left their dwellings intact. Otherwise, Irkutsk’s best-known son is perhaps the Buryat-Russian playwright Alexander Vampilov of the Soviet period; Vampilov authored a play, Last Summer in Chulimsk, in which the protagonist is determined to keep order, whether it makes sense to or not: every morning he rebuilds a fence the locals have trampled down because it obstructs their access to a park. More recently, Irkutsk impressed the world with its native daughter Nazí Paikidze, a chess wizard who, refusing to don the obligatory Islamic headscarf, boycotted the 2017 World Chess Championship in Tehran.

Dusk lingered long, the sky a glowing ashen canopy, with the air chilling fast. This was Paris perhaps, but Paris of Siberia.

Yet not Irkutsk but Lake Baikal and its alleged mystic powers drew us to this time zone. One gray morning, we boarded a marshrutka (minivan bus) for the trip north to the mostly Buryat village of Khuzhir, population 1,500, on Olkhon Island, halfway up the lake’s western shore, and accessible by ferry. Famous as a “pole of shamanistic energy,” Olkhon attracts Russian aficionados of the spiritual arts and of shamanism in particular. The island’s Cape Burkhan, with a cave within its bizarre marble boulder—called Shamanka—is regarded as the chosen abode of the deity Khan-Khute-Baabay, and draws worshippers from all over Russia. Nevertheless, the cramped, seven-hour ride through taiga and across drab, grassy plains hardly inspired. And neither did the island itself, a mostly barren rock outcropping dotted with scraggly conifers and gaunt grazing cows. Khuzhir stood on high ground, its weathered shacks and izbas (Russian log huts) lashed by winds that never let up and stirred dust storms on its sandy streets, causing people and the many stray dogs to wince. The island’s western bank faces the mainland’s majestic taiga, where bears prowl and moose roam. The eastern side flanks the open Baikal; on the high bluffs stand, here and there, firs, their branches covered in prayer ribbons—gifts, proffered by visitors, to the local gods.

In the age of tourism, shamanism, is, not surprisingly, a business in Khuzhir. As far as is understood, Asian shamanism originated with the region’s Turkic and Mongol peoples. It involves, essentially, self-induced trances, chants, and a beating of drums that permit practitioners ingress into the spirit world and the power to heal and do harm among temporal earthlings. We found the most accessible shamans to be those with yurts—broad, quasiconical tents of animal hides, held up by poles—standing on the outskirts of the village. For a modest fee, you can listen to a lecture on the basics of shamanism. This seemed like a good idea, so we dipped inside, paid, and took seats with a half-dozen Russians.

The shaman-instructor, a young Buryat man, explained that, long ago, the heavens sent ninety-nine tengri (deities) to earth to help us humans out. The tengri grant shamans their powers, which, in the case of the exalted Zarin shamans, include being able to fly. One who is called upon to be a shaman may die if he refuses. Becoming a shaman involves surviving a three-day ritual. The most prestigious and powerful shamans are the shamany-kuznetsy (blacksmith shamans). Blacksmiths are revered because they once forged items essential to life in the region. They also have a lot of sway in the two Other Worlds, being able to call for help from the seventy-seven blacksmith deities.

A man named Igor raised his hand. He had, he said, fought in various wars, but considered God his guardian angel. Nevertheless, he was critical of the Church.

“I don’t like how the Orthodox Church charges seven thousand rubles [$112] for a baptism, when a lot of people make only about twelve thousand a month. What do you shamans charge?”

“We have no set fee. Each gives us according to the wishes of his soul.”

We decided we needed more insight than the “shamanism 101” lecture we had just heard. So, we arranged to meet a prominent local shaman, Gennady Tugulov, who is a Buryat native of Khuzhir. Tugulov, in his late fifties, is a blacksmith shaman. He arrived at our inn one evening toting his tools—a tiny hammer, a tiny anvil, a tiny file, and a small silver bowl—along with his folded indigo blue felt shamanistic robes and matching cap, all emblazoned with silver suns, for a meeting out on the wooden porch.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked, setting his load down on the table.

“Is it allowed?” we asked.

“It is for me! After all, I’m a shaman.”

He promptly lit up. With his cigarette dangling from his lips, he put on his robes and cap and laid out his tools, puffing as he did so. No one really knows, he told us, who came first to this region—the Buryats, the Sakha (as the Yakuts call themselves), or the Mongols. He affixed a dagger to his leather belt, which sported a silver buckle and silver bangles; around his neck hung, on green-and-blue ribbons, disks of burnished silver and gold, one signifying the moon, the other the sun. “Their circularity symbolizes eternity,” he explained. He then gave us a rundown of his qualifications: he was a thirteenth-generation shaman; of the nine levels of shamanism, he has one left to attain. One does not decide to become a shaman but is selected for the honor by one’s clan.

“What are these tools for, exactly?” we asked.

“Well, I put this file in the fire to heat it up. When it’s hot, I sprinkle it with vodka from this silver bowl and sprinkle the drink on people to help them. This little hammer I use to pound the anvil and call spirits. The bear claw I have here protects me. The silver plate hanging from my neck means I’m a white shaman. The copper one wards off people’s bad energy. There’s a lot of that around these days, so it’s necessary for people in my profession. A shaman must never fear, even when meeting bad people.”

He took a drag on his cigarette.

“Shamans help people, help the sick; we were once the healers and judges here. We speak to our ancestors and consult them for advice. You have to be a shaman or you can’t hear them. We also divine things through reflection and can see things through dreams. We do a lot of good, as you see, that simple folk cannot do on their own. The Soviets repressed us, yet still they came to us when they needed us; in fact, the very ones doing the killing came to us and sought our aid in purifying themselves after their bad deeds. In the 1990s we revived our profession and now practice it freely.”

“So things are returning to normal here?”

“Normal? No. You have seen Shamanka?”

“The rocky outcropping on Cape Burkhan?”

“Yes. Well, it has a cave running right through it. Since Soviet times mankind has desecrated nature around the lake. People have built resorts on the shores. These have to close or they risk really angering Baikal. People even bathe and do their laundry in the lake, which they should never, ever do. They take from the lake but they don’t give back. They need to ask permission from the goddess of water, and she must be asked politely, as you would ask a woman. When the lake gets angry, its waters will rise in terrible revolt. Terrible.”

Shamans, he told us, commune in solitude with nature, learning the language of the birds, the bears.

“You talk to bears?” we asked.

“We listen to them. Bears are very perceptive. If you talk to them, they won’t bother you. But they can tell you a lot.”

He fiddled with the bear claw he wore on a black cord around his neck.

“All our world’s problems come from people going against nature. Yet we must observe nature and obey it. We cannot go against nature. Nature will take its own.”

Orthodox Christian Russians come to him for aid.

“They try to contact their ancestors, but they cannot. They say there’s too much lying and corruption in their church.”

That was a familiar complaint in Russia. We asked if shamanism allowed for an afterlife.

“Yes. When shamans die, we’re cremated so that our spirits can rise to heaven in the smoke. I don’t fear death. There is no hell. After death, I know future generations will be asking me for help.” He tamped out his cigarette. “What we shamans want most of all is peace, the peace we find in the beauty of nature. We want that peace to last forever, for man and nature.”

Later that windy, clear evening we attended a Russian Orthodox church service in a small chapel—the Church of the Ruling Icon—at Khuzhir’s edge, overlooking the lake. Its blue onion domes, topped by gilt crosses, harmonized with the sky and shimmering waters far below. The priest entered, draped in his gold chasuble and black frock, and initiated the liturgy, aided by two parishioners, chanting a melodic, haunting hymn that blended with the whoosh of winds above and the crash of waves far below.

Orthodox Christianity is relatively new out here, on the shores of Baikal, but nevertheless, its rituals, with their timeless melodies, blended in well with the lake’s otherworldly aura. If, thousands of miles to the west, the Decembrists had tried to overthrow the czar and found themselves exiled here, at the very least they could take solace in their homeland’s soothing, sparsely inhabited, and almost limitless expanses of forest and steppe, lake and river.

We were headed even farther east, into environs more alien and daunting to Russians who came later and lived under a different sort of czar—one who would turn such pristine expanses into abodes of misery and terror. But what would these environs evoke today?