Russians: The People behind the Power

9 Cold and Punishment

Russia has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth.

—Vissarion Belinsky on the Russian Orthodox Church, from a letter to Nikolai Gogol, 1847¹

Ihave no memory of my mother complaining about the cold when I was growing up in Connecticut except her saying that the worst moments of her childhood were when she was so cold she cried. I, too, approached tears more than once in Russia, including one memorable morning on the frozen Taimyr Peninsula at the top of Siberia. In the ramshackle village of Khatanga, four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, an assortment of corrugated metal barracks, wooden houses and a scattering of Soviet-era brick buildings are heated by steam pipes that would crack if they were buried above the permafrost. They originate at a coal generator in the settlement’s center that blackens the snow and fouls the pristine air with dark smoke. Beyond the village, stunted trees that form part of the world’s northernmost forest give way to an infinite expanse of tundra. From a helicopter, the only visible signs of life are occasional herds of reindeer: little specks making their way through the snow accompanied by dogsleds driven by the nomadic Dolgan tribesmen, a group of five thousand souls who live exclusively on Taimyr. From the ground on a crisp, sunny day, the beauty of the flat, endless white takes your breath away.

Although Cossacks seeking the fur of arctic fox, among other animals, founded Khatanga in the seventeenth century, its sedentary population remained negligible until the 1930s, when the Soviet authorities began sending prisoners into the forbidding far north of Siberia to build a chain of Gulag camps that would help establish the timber and mining industries. Enslaved laborers constructed much of the nearest city, Norilsk, near the world’s largest deposits of nickel, copper and palladium. The Norillag concentration camp held almost seventy thousand prisoners at its peak in the early 1950s.² (Today, oligarch-owned Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel producer, subsidizes life on the peninsula.) Driving on isolated roads in such regions in summer, I occasionally came across crude dugout shelters used by the prisoners who built the roads decades earlier.

The camps near Khatanga required no barbed wire because trying to travel alone on the tundra brought certain death. Therefore I was surprised to hear some residents claim that a life spent struggling against the crushing elements is liberating, even exhilarating. Boris Lebedev, a deeply weathered, gregarious native of Ivanovo, a city near Moscow, told me he had made his way to Khatanga in the 1970s to “escape” the Soviet regime. “I came here to be free,” he said of his life, which consists mainly of hunting and fishing. “Because only up here could someone truly belong to himself.”

In Khatanga’s canteen, dietary freedom extends to choosing between local reindeer meat and fish kept frozen in caves hacked out of the permafrost. Almost everything else is delivered by plane. For ten months of the year, Antonov An-24 twin turboprop planes carrying goods and produce arrive every two weeks or whenever weather permits them to land on the small airstrip that passes for a runway. It was there that I froze—on board one of the little planes in “only” minus-thirty-degree cold because it was just early October, not yet real winter. Lightly dressed passengers were kept violently shivering for almost two hours without heat because the crew members, who apparently had been celebrating the night before, had failed to show up. I was still cold hours later, when the plane, by then scorchingly overheated, finally landed in Norilsk.

But there’s no need to venture to the continent’s northernmost stretches to experience the kind of cold for which Russia is notorious. St. Petersburg’s winters, usually only a few degrees colder than Moscow’s bitter ones, feel much worse because they are very damp, thanks to the city’s location on former swampland bordering the Gulf of Finland. A thick layer of frost often gives the city’s magnificent buildings a sparkling white sheen. Marveling at their beauty made my struggle to comprehend the will and sacrifice necessary to maintain civilization there more complicated.

Illustrating both, the Marquis de Custine described the reconstruction of the monumental Winter Palace under Nicholas I after it had been damaged by fire in 1837:

In order to finish the work in the period specified by the Emperor, unprecedented efforts were required. The interior construction was continued during the bitterest cold of winter. Six thousand laborers were continually at work; a considerable number died each day, but, as the victims were replaced by other champions who filled their places, to perish in their turn in this inglorious gap, the losses were not apparent.

The practice of heating rooms to eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit to dry the walls more quickly during cold spells, when temperatures can plunge to minus twenty degrees, compounded the deaths. “Thus these wretches on entering and leaving this abode of death—now become, thanks to their sacrifice, the home of vanity, magnificence and pleasure—underwent a difference in temperature of 100 to 108 degrees.”³

As my father wrote in 1982, such trials helped shape the country’s history and character.

A hundred writers have said it before and a hundred will say it again, but it is no less true for being a commonplace that the way to an understanding of Russian life lies through the ordeal of a Russian winter. Russkaya zima, the great depressant of spirit and water of animation. It is not a season of the year like other seasons, not merely a longer, darker, crueler span of time than that which annually slows the countries of northern Europe and America. It is a life sentence to hardship that prowls near the center of the Russian consciousness, whatever the time of year. As a prime cause and a symbol of Russia’s fate, it molds a state of mind, an attitude toward life.⁴

Among those earlier writers, Chekhov lamented, “Cold to the utter limit… you go into a stupor, turn more malicious than the cold itself… [It] makes people mean, starts them slurping vodka.”

Russians are expert in the various kinds of cold. Muscovites who loudly complain when it’s twenty degrees say fifteen degrees is easier to take because it’s drier. Shivering in fifteen-degree weather, they recall visits to Siberia when it was minus fifty and lovely because, naturally, you’re bundled up properly there. There’s always somewhere colder and better in the imagination, perhaps because it helps people endure the misery of the present. Today’s Russians are far better prepared than they were even two decades ago for the type of winter that helped destroy the invading armies of Napoleon and Hitler. Gore-Tex, double-glazed windows and dependable foreign cars make life far easier. But climate and geography remain formative influences in a country where thousands of reindeer froze or starved to death in 1997 and the association of cold with punishment endures. Prisoners continue to be sent to Siberia, where the vast stretches of empty tundra, taiga and marsh contribute to Russia’s “ungovernability.” As an old Siberian lament has it, God is too high and the tsar is too far. The difficulty of policing the poorly controlled expanses also helps explain why punishment in Russia still appears draconian.

Unable to explain why such hardship was visited on them, Russians took to sanctifying it as a gift. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s proclamations about “intense suffering” helping Russia achieve a higher spirituality than the West are but some of the latest in a long line of Russian Orthodox champions of that argument for Russia’s special fate and virtue.

Exile to Siberia or the far north naturally began with a journey there, often a punishment that was as bad as or worse than what followed. Under tsarism, the passage on foot used to take six months from Moscow. Under Communist Party rule, it still took months by train for those who didn’t perish along the way. Among the tens of millions who endured the trip was Lev Mischenko, whom I first met in 2002, when veneration for Stalin was returning. I spoke to him in the kitchen of his small apartment in a sprawling concrete-slab Moscow suburb, where he lived with his wife, Svetlana. Razor sharp despite his frail appearance, he described the minutest details of everyday life in Siberia with Chekhovian irony.

Nine months old when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, Mischenko fled Moscow during the Russian Civil War along with the rest of his family to what his engineer father believed would be the relative safety of Siberia. In vain: Bolshevik revolutionaries shot both his parents. Raised by his grandmother, Mischenko nevertheless graduated from Moscow State University and began working at its Institute of Nuclear Physics just before the Soviet Union entered World War II.

Sent to the front as a junior officer, he was captured and imprisoned in a series of German concentration camps before an escape attempt landed him in Buchenwald. When Allied forces were closing in on Germany in 1944, Mischenko escaped again, this time from a convoy of a thousand captives being evacuated elsewhere. Making his way across the front lines to an American tank platoon, he turned down an offer to remain in the West from an American officer who recognized his engineering skills. Unwilling to leave his sweetheart Svetlana behind in Moscow, he rejoined the Red Army.

Millions of Soviets taken prisoner by the Germans died in captivity. Mischenko didn’t suspect that more than a million of those who survived would be sent straight to the Gulag. Still in Germany, he soon found himself under arrest, accused by the Red Army’s ruthless SMERSH counterintelligence service of aiding the Nazis. When by chance the miraculous appearance of an alibi led to his acquittal, he was promptly charged a second time. After four months of nightly interrogations and a hearing that lasted less than fifteen minutes, he was sentenced to ten years in an isolated logging camp in the far northern region of Komi.

Crammed together with sixty others, Mischenko set off from Germany in a cattle car equipped with planks for beds. Such prisoners’ journeys were called etapy, or “stages,” because they stopped at many camps and so-called transit prisons for those en route to their final places of incarceration. Mischenko’s trip took three months. It was December of 1945, but many of the prisoners, who had been arrested in summer, had no winter clothes. Much of what little they did have was stolen along the way by soldiers or urki, criminal—as opposed to political—prisoners, who received better treatment than the others. Urki traded with soldiers, usually for cigarettes or food. “We had practically nothing left by the time we got to the Soviet Union,” Mischenko said. “The stealing continued anyway.”

Prisoners—or zeki, derived from the Russian term for inmate, zakliuchionnyi—were “freezing all the time.” German prisoners unused to Soviet suffering constituted a high percentage of those who died on Mischenko’s train. During a stop, he caught sight of a former cell mate, an elderly German engineer whom he had witnessed losing his mind during the interrogations. “He couldn’t speak, even to his fellow Germans,” Mischenko said. “Now he was shivering outside, wearing a thin jacket and no hat. It was January. He couldn’t have survived.” Mischenko, who, like many, had no shoes when he arrived at his camp near a town called Pechora, wrapped his feet in rags.

Despite his hardships, Mischenko believed he was incredibly lucky. His camp produced lumber for the railroad servicing Vorkuta, the center of a massive Gulag system that mined the Soviet Union’s second-largest coal basin, four hundred miles to the northeast. During the two years before his arrival in Pechora in March 1946, almost two thousand prisoners had died, a staggering number for a camp that held fewer than a thousand zeki at a time. The major killers were hunger, cold, dystrophy and diseases such as pellagra, which is caused by vitamin deficiency. A fellow inmate who had been a military pilot later told Mischenko how chance had saved him from the brutal logging brigades. At death’s door, the pilot was recognized by the camp’s “technical director,” a former prisoner from his hometown, who helped arrange his transfer to a different work brigade. Joining a burial crew that carted corpses into the forest—after guards had stuck each one through with bayonets just to be sure—the pilot slowly regained his health because his new detail was considered important enough to be fed survival rations.

The work regimen, worsened by guards’ cruelty and neglect, eased for others after the war years, when it was acknowledged that the casualties were hurting NKVD secret police chief Lavrenty Beria’s drive to squeeze as much productivity as possible from the inmates. But although the death rate dropped to about one per month shortly before Mischenko’s arrival, conditions remained brutal. Assigned to general logging duties, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, he often helped haul out logs that had been floated down the Pechora River. That task, among the camp’s most grueling, killed many zeki.

Keeping dry was impossible because the two sleeves from an old quilted jacket that had replaced his disintegrating foot rags got soaked through during work in the snow-covered forest and stayed damp even after nights in the “dryer”—a dugout whose very hot stove only made it drippingly humid. So Mischenko was hugely fortunate when his expertise earned him work maintaining the camp’s power generator. That was “heaven” because the premises were warm and the work was relatively easy. The plant even had its own shower.

Freed nine years later, Mischenko joined hundreds of thousands of prisoners streaming back from labor camps in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death. However, his sentence banned him from coming within a hundred kilometers of Moscow for another five years and he was unable to secure work as a physicist for another fourteen. Svetlana had waited for him during his thirteen-year absence, trekking thousands of miles to visit him in Pechora several times. Now reunited, they finally married and raised a family.

My question to Mischenko about how he interpreted the growing nostalgia for the Soviet Union prompted him to describe running into an old childhood friend several years after returning from the camps. “When I told him where I’d been, he began to shake with fear of being seen with me and quickly left,” he said. “That’s how much people were enslaved by the system.” Society’s failure to acknowledge the crimes of communist rule, Mischenko said, was perpetuating their catastrophic effect on the Russian psyche.

Incredible as they may seem, the twists and turns of Mischenko’s story reflect common experience because the Gulag played a central role in the Soviet economy while enabling Stalin to perpetrate terror by incarcerating tens of millions of innocent people. They included my grandmother’s husband, Zhora.

More than three months after his arrest at the height of the Great Terror in November of 1937, Serafima received a short letter from him. It had been sent from another logging camp, near a town called Ivdel in the Ural Mountains region of Sverdlovsk. Sentenced to ten years’ hard labor—with the “right” to correspond—he was one of Ivdellag’s first inmates, an especially difficult fate because most early arrivals had to build their own camps with rudimentary supplies in the middle of nowhere. Serafima immediately wrote back, then sent three more letters before finally receiving a reply:

May 10, 1938

My dear, dear, darling, wise one,

How joyous it is to get letters here, especially yours! I feel I’m not alone, that somewhere there’s a kindred heart. But my dear, kind little wife, why are you worried that I’m smoking makhorka [low-grade tobacco] under the influence of bad people? How little you know the real situation! Here are my friends: the rector of a Leningrad university, a senior scholar from the Belarusian agriculture academy, the assistant to the director of a perfume enterprise. They are the members of my work brigade and my friends, and we are not an island amid the general mass. These people give you an idea of the general contingent—and we all smoke makhorka… Makhorka is nothing! Much more serious is that I haven’t had a bite of protein for several months now. We get mainly water and dry cabbage and sometimes bread dumplings, but no trace of protein. Even lousy, old protein would be welcome.

My dear, kind Simusia, why were you crying when you were writing your first letter and maybe your second one, too? I could recognize the tear streaks I know so well. I remembered them from the letters from Alupka [in Crimea where Serafima was treated after the death of their daughter Natasha] and I felt very bad and couldn’t hold myself back.

Zhora went on to answer Serafima’s questions about what had happened to him. There had been no trial, he said, only interrogations that repeated questions he’d already answered the previous summer, when he had been questioned at his aircraft design bureau.

“Why do you have a German name? When did you arrive from abroad? If it was your grandfather’s name, when did he arrive? Whom do you know abroad?” No one, I repeatedly replied. “Do you correspond with anyone? Who are your relatives here and what do they do? Where have you worked?”… Two days later, around the 27th or 28th of November, I was brought in again to hear information about me even I myself didn’t know. It turns out I was a spy recruited by the Gestapo to conduct counterrevolutionary Fascist activities… There was no word about who recruited me or which foreigners I met. No word about the name of the counterrevolutionary organization to which I belonged. I got the impression they didn’t really care about my activities, just that they wanted me to understand those things about myself I didn’t know.

It was all very polite. Not a single word was spoken in anger. I wasn’t even directly named an enemy or counterrevolutionary or a spy. It all took about forty minutes. Then on the night between November 30th and December 1st, I was sent to [a prison on Moscow’s central] Taganka [Square]. I was held there four days in an overcrowded basement because the cells were overflowing, until I was finally put in a cell on December 4th. On December 15th, I was ordered to sign a little piece of paper titled “Protocol,” then the results of a “hearing,” my name and a declaration that I was to be sentenced to ten years in correctional work camps for my counterrevolutionary activities. I was sent to the Urals on March 1st, along with a group of Germans and Latvians, and remain here today. That’s it, the answer to your question.

As you can see, I was never tried… There were no concrete accusations, no witnesses, no confrontations. Finally, there was no investigation and no trial. If I’m a spy, I should have been tried by a tribunal. If I’m an agitator engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, I should have been tried by a special collegium of the Supreme Court… I treated everything that took place with suspicion and disbelief, like many here… But because everyone is sentenced for exactly the same thing and to the same term, you don’t feel lonely and lost amid all these people of your level—engineers, pilots, chairmen, managers, directors…

Apologizing for not having replied earlier to Serafima’s four letters, he explained that he’d spent three months away from Ivdellag in a brigade that floated lumber down rivers. “It’s not the imprisonment and labor that’s frightening,” he wrote, “but the terror of stupefaction from a slow death of exhaustion.”

The graveyard has been growing from the first day of our arrival, along with the cases of periodontitis and broken-off, frostbitten extremities. Oh well, you can never foresee where your fate will take you. My dear one, my joy, let’s hope for the best. Everything will find its right course… When I was out with the brigade, I would often sit at night on the plunging bank of the gloomy taiga [forest] river and remember and kiss you, my dear wife. I wanted so much to caress you and to be caressed.

I don’t need anything for the time being, especially please don’t think of sending underwear. If you do, however, please include a towel, but not our towel from home, that would be very difficult for me to bear. Better a new one, and a piece of soap, cheap, of course, because expensive soap is useless here.

My dear one, we’ll be together again someday. I’m no criminal, after all, and have done nothing wrong. All this is temporary; we just need fortitude and time. Often while walking along taiga paths—how wild the taiga is!—I would while away my time remembering moments from our life, especially the winter of ’36 and ’37… the table, the lamp with the blue shade, the warm stove. Something warm and soft would begin flowing inside me out on the freezing taiga and my soul would glow. Only the death of another of my slow-plodding comrades would distract me from my dreams. Because he was remembering his own table, his own stove. Otherwise we didn’t say a word to each other, didn’t dare intrude on those memories.

The degree of civilization in a society,” Dostoevsky wrote in The House of the Dead, “can be judged on entering its prisons.” Far as Russia’s current penal system is from the KGB-run Gulag, the legacy of its sadism and neglect very much endures. Prisoners in pretrial detention are still tortured into giving confessions, as the notorious case of Sergei Magnitsky showed the world in 2009. Arrested by the same police investigators he had exposed, those who had committed tax fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Magnitsky was beaten, became ill, was denied medical care and left to die on a cell floor after refusing to retract his accusations. Some of the officials involved later received awards and promotions, and the less prominent killings that regularly surface continue to illustrate the same sad points, even after Medvedev signed highly publicized legislation aimed at fighting the widespread lawlessness among police.

The majority of the country’s six hundred thousand prisoners are incarcerated in penal colonies, where they live in barracks that differ little from the Gulag’s. Russia has only seven large prisons, including Vladimir Central, a collection of solid brick structures in the medieval city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. Conditions there—one of the few prisons foreign journalists can visit without having to file more than the usual reams of paperwork—are relatively good. Nevertheless, very little inside the thick walls seems to have changed in the two centuries since they were built.

In one cramped, wood-floored cell, four prisoners with shaved heads and downcast eyes said they had no complaints about their treatment. That wasn’t surprising because they spoke under a guard’s watchful eye. Elsewhere, it was hard to miss signs that the prison authorities were hiding the real conditions. Across a courtyard, in a building they declined to show, faces peered from the windows of what appeared to be cells jammed with many more inmates. Although Russia’s prison population, second in size only to that of the United States, has significantly diminished in recent years thanks to new sentencing rules, conditions inside remain little changed, and former prisoners speak of raging disease together with the overcrowding.

Women’s prisons are little better. Reports describe an almost complete lack of privacy—including no partitions between the holes in the ground that pass for toilets—humiliation and punishment for soiling sheets, even accidentally, with menstrual blood.⁵ Much more than men, women convicts tend to be treated as outcasts in society, even after their release.

Some describe far more disturbing conditions. Among them is a youthful-looking, soft-spoken former inmate named Vladimir Gladkov, who spent a total of fifteen years in Vladimir Central and other penal institutions, including a so-called torture prison: Kopeisk, a transit prison—for the temporary incarceration of inmates bound elsewhere—in the Ural Mountains region of Chelyabinsk, where Gladkov said guards systematically abused prisoners.

Gladkov, a former driver who said police framed him for murder, described regular mass beatings that began with his arrival: “They’d force us from our cells, order us to spread our legs and put our hands against the wall, then whack us with batons until we had to help drag each other back to our cells.” Guards exerted psychological pressure through a steady stream of insults directed especially at dark-skinned minorities from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Gladkov met an ethnic Tajik whose skull was fractured when he was thrown against a wall. Apologizing and begging him not to complain, the guards delayed his transfer until his skin had healed. “The most frightening is hearing others scream while you’re waiting your turn,” Gladkov said. “The fear turns you into an animal.” Doctors routinely refused to record injuries. Prosecutors accepted complaints before dropping investigations for a supposed lack of evidence.

The journeys between prisons and penal colonies, still called etapy, are also still made in the same kind of train cars that took inmates to Gulag camps. Traveling in winter, Gladkov froze in his light tracksuit and slippers. Later devoting himself to studying the judicial code, he appealed and complained at every step of his incarceration—risky behavior because most who make trouble that way are singled out for especially harsh treatment. “We’ll rape you if we want and we’ll kill you if we want,” Gladkov said a prison warden in another prison had told him. “Nothing will happen to us because prisoners are meant to be punished.”

Another former Kopeisk inmate named Yuri Skogarev corroborated Gladkov’s account. During his four years in solitary confinement, he told me, “guards would take me out, handcuff me to a shower, then beat and kick me until I fainted and woke up back in my cell.” Skogarev told me prisoners were regularly stripped and made to clean filthy toilets with a single rag. Much of the abuse was doled out by prisoners who were enticed to beat their fellow inmates by perks, including drugs as well as extra food and cigarettes. Use of such enforcers and informants, called activists, is an integral part of the discipline system, meant to generate constant fear.

Skogarev said prisoners regularly die. Four inmates were killed at the Kopeisk prison in 2008 when the authorities accused them of attacking guards. But human rights groups said their black-and-blue corpses indicated they were probably beaten to death for having protested their treatment. Nevertheless, hundreds of other Kopeisk inmates made headlines in late 2011, when they revolted against cruel treatment and extortion. Failing to provide the prison authorities with regular payments, usually made by relatives, was said to result in more beatings and torture.

Such conditions are no secret. Rights groups have posted smuggled videos of prison torture on the Internet. In one clip, what appear to be guards dressed in riot helmets and face masks force cowering inmates to strip outside, then beat them with rubber truncheons. Inmates often attempt to escape such beatings by mutilating themselves with cuts or by swallowing pieces of wire. Hundreds of them sometimes slash their arms and wrists in mass protest. Others commit suicide. News of such events barely registers in a country where there’s virtually no sympathy for prisoners, who are seen as deserving of their fates.

The human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov described dozens of torture colonies like Kopeisk throughout Russia. “The system of incarceration is meant to destroy people psychologically,” he told me. “They’re told they’re not human. They’re punished for trying to defend their dignity.” The Soviets, he added, used to say the system turns people into “Gulag camp dust.”

Sitting at his desk in his cramped office on an old Moscow side street, Ponomaryov showed me a page-long letter carefully handwritten in what looked like brown ink but was actually the blood of an inmate who had no pen. Pleading for help in his smuggled appeal, he said he feared for his life.

Denying the existence of torture prisons, the authorities claim that all penal institutions are regularly inspected by government officials and all complaints investigated. But Ponomaryov said there was a clear rationale: spreading fear and compliance among the general prison population, a style of enforcement that is integral to Putin’s authoritarianism. “Torture prisons are places in which totalitarianism rules,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to stop it: that kind of system spreads to other parts of society.”

Some former prisoners estimate that 70 percent of the people incarcerated in Russia’s prison system are abused. “God help you,” an ex-inmate told me, “if you end up in a Russian jail.”

The difficulty of governing the mostly inhospitable land of the world’s largest country in area may partly explain the brutal nature of Russian punishment as well as its penchant for authoritarianism. According to Slavic legend, based largely on the Primary Chronicle of Kievan Rus’—a highly untrustworthy source primarily written by monks in the twelfth century—quarreling Slavs asked Scandinavian Viking warriors known as Varangians to rule them in order to establish some form of order and prosperity. In fact, trade was responsible for the initial expansion of nonindigenous settlers into the states that preceded Russia. Archaeological evidence shows that Scandinavians sailed down Russian rivers to trade with the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century and established control over the various settlements along the way. Historians have argued that the Varangians, who probably called themselves Rus’, gave rise to the state of Kievan Rus’ and established the Riurik dynasty, which ruled Moscow until the death of Fyodor I, son of Ivan IV (the Terrible) in 1598. Real events notwithstanding, the appeal to a strong ruler to rescue the people from enemies and chaos is rooted in Russia’s cultural tradition. Citing the Varangian legend in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical character Levin praises the merits of political submissiveness by calling their rule a “privilege [the people] had bought at such a high price.”

When Slavs first began crossing the Ural Mountains into the Turkic Siberian Khanate in the middle of the sixteenth century, very few indigenous people lived there to slow their expansion.⁶ As usual, trade, especially in furs—chiefly sable, fox and ermine, which were central to Muscovite finance and foreign transactions—drove the explorers into virgin lands. The Stroganov merchant family would soon dominate the business. Granted estates by Ivan IV, it sponsored Cossack-led expeditions into Siberia in the seventeenth century before enlisting a Cossack leader named Ermak to defeat the Siberian khan. Scoring important victories before their leader was killed and his men forced to withdraw, Ermak’s soldiers opened the way for others who followed. Then expansion began in earnest and took only decades to reach the Pacific Ocean.

Once territory was “settled,” provincial governors charged with enforcing Muscovite law had too few resources to do so in any comprehensive way. The Kremlin relied on a harsh code of punishment, mostly for “political” crimes, to keep the lid on chaos by reinforcing fear. Slovo i delo, the sovereign’s “word and deed” legislation, called for a series of punishments, usually against peasants and other low-ranking subjects, who had been accused of maligning officials. Singing a song impugning the tsar’s reputation was enough to prompt flogging, breaking on the wheel or subjection to other heinous torture. Denunciation by others often served as evidence.

Rather than the terrible wrath of an almighty tsar, slovo i delo reflected something closer to desperation. Unable to punish most lawbreakers, the governors protected the myth of his power by making examples of a few.⁷ Tellingly, the punishment system was most used under relatively weak tsars, such as the first Romanov, Mikhail I, whose coronation at the age of seventeen in 1613 ended the Time of Troubles, which followed the end of the Riurik dynasty. Although Catherine the Great formally ended the system in 1762, the practice of making examples of a few in a country where lawbreaking is frequent lived on.

Randomness was a hallmark of Stalin’s Great Terror, too. Unlike Hitler’s Holocaust, which killed clearly defined groups of people, Soviet repression swept up victims who didn’t understand why they were punished. That also applied to society at large: many people didn’t know why their relatives had been taken or whether they’d be next. Although its proportions are vastly smaller today, fear still functions as the glue in Putin’s system of top-down administration, partly by helping to ensure that widespread lawbreaking doesn’t extend beyond prescribed boundaries.

Foreigners jostling in line at the so-called passport control booths in the arrivals sections of the country’s international airports aren’t exempt from that system. I’d believed that the long, hard stares the sour-faced border-guard officials train on each discomfited passenger were meant mainly for show until one encounter after a trip from Washington. The young woman behind the glass was clearly trying to identify me before she silently reached across her desk to push a button. I was traveling with my wife, Elizabeth, and our one-year-old son, Sebastian, whom the guards allowed to pass through before two of their thick-necked colleagues materialized to escort me away.

“You’re leaving on the next flight back!” they barked. Their response to my demand for an explanation was, “We don’t have to tell you anything!” After they’d left me next to a group of dejected-looking Pakistanis at a wall in the rear of the arrivals hall, frantic calls to the US embassy and the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed that the officials were legally obligated to explain. That was a tense time in late 2007, shortly before parliamentary elections that a number of foreign election observers were barred from monitoring. My cell-phone battery died. I was left to wonder which of my broadcast reports the authorities may not have liked or whether I’d been targeted by an official who had overstepped his powers in an attempt to show his zeal.

After four hours of arguing and waiting, during which the American ambassador told me the Kremlin had been informed that expelling an NPR reporter would be a serious mistake, I was allowed into Russia minutes before the scheduled departure of the Washington-bound plane I’d nearly been forced to board. I never learned the reason for my treatment.

Lack of uniformity in the enormous bureaucratic machine that runs the Russian state has much to do with the selective punishment and enforcement that is often left to the whims of local leaders charged with maintaining order. The same was true under communism, when terrible inefficiency in the Gulag often left its prisoners unable to “fulfill the norms” of work calculated by the system’s directors. That put well-qualified engineers like Zhora Leimer in great demand for their skills, which they used to help build roads, railroads and other infrastructure. My grandmother’s husband was even able to obtain a temporary permit to leave the “zone”—the camp territory where prisoners lived—unescorted, a coveted privilege he described in letters written over periods of weeks and months.

Ivdel, December 8, 1938

My golden Simulinka,

Happy New Year’s once again, my dear one! Tell me, how did you greet it? How I met it is clear—I was utterly with you. I decided to lose myself in dreams and went to bed at ten, drifting into a nervous sleep. As I was falling asleep I thought about life and of you… I woke before dawn and went outside into the frosty night. I looked at the stars and absently thought that they are also shining where you are. I remembered how they shined for me in childhood… Then it began to snow and I lay down in the predawn silence while others were sleeping…

Simulinka, how beautiful life really is; it’s only that people seriously dirty it with all kinds of “isms” and complications. Apparently it’s a result of their becoming ultracultured: they forget life is the most important thing we have. Of course, everyone must contribute to culture and live for the betterment of society, but without forgetting about one’s own life… No one has the right to build godliness by feeding on people’s lives, on fresh human blood. I tell that to myself when a cloud of gloom passes over me.

Why are my brows so sullen,

To what end is my heart burning?

My end is an Asian truth,

A little muffled shot point-blank

And September will cry rain

Over my hillside grave.⁸

Apologizing for being too gloomy—the result of “depression and a temporary loss of perspective”—Zhora said the camp’s atmosphere had taken a turn for the worse. “Pressures have unexpectedly begun, repressions and all kinds of harassment,” he wrote. “Wild, senseless, and unnecessary.”

Probably it’s being done just for the sake of it, just in case. There’s an apparatus for exerting pressure and it must earn its bread.

Did you give my statement to the Supreme Soviet Presidium? Of course I don’t have high hopes for a fair analysis of my case. Now isn’t the time to be dealing with such nonsense as fairness and truth in practice. It’s enough they exist in theory…

But I’ve been distracted trying to reason things over and haven’t finished describing my New Year’s. I celebrated it on the following day. Andrei Fyodorovich [a fellow engineer] and I sat down in our barracks, made some cocoa and drank it with crackers he was sent from Moscow. He got a touching New Year’s package with an evergreen twig and congratulations. We sat in front of that twig to drink our cocoa. Then the days followed each other with no changes.

In another letter two and a half months later, Zhora transcribed for Serafima the words to a fox-trot called “Counting the Hours,” which he said was “very characteristic of our mood.”

Ivdel, February 23, 1939

We’re parting, perhaps forever

On an autumn day, deliberately and simply

But I remember years past

And feel sharp, tormenting pain.

Counting the hours, to measure by hours,

I’ll learn to live in separation

I will await you, I will believe,

I will remember, and I will love.

You’re my only lighthouse,

Where my hopes fly in the spray

Fate will decide

When and where and how

We will be close again.

What awaits is unknown,

The past foggy and forgotten.

But the heart feels we’ll meet again

On life’s journey sooner or later.

That’s the way it is, the sum of me.

A certain young woman here arrived from Harbin [the Chinese city where many Russian émigrés settled], who was of course arrested as a spy. She sings that song with a very good voice. What feeling she conveys, and what oppression we feel listening! Lambs put on skewers by those punitive organizations, abundantly coated with seasonings: spying, terrorism and other nonsense. And you say my case will be appealed!

By the summer, Zhora’s description of some of his plans for construction projects appeared to suggest he’d at least partly reconciled himself to his imprisonment.

August 18, 1939

I remember how I sat during the fall and winter evenings and days, reading and thinking how best to build them. Because nothing like them has ever before been built according to my plans; in the past I just did student work. Now I see rows of machines in the workshops brought in to realize my projects. Those machines are building foundations I drafted. Now cars are driving on an overpass I remember planning. When it was first under construction, I was afraid about what would happen if my work was good for nothing. No, everything functions and it seems they’re happy with them. Apparently I’m good for something.

When Anton Chekhov undertook to visit a notorious penal colony on the far-eastern island of Sakhalin in 1890, he traveled more than two months from Moscow by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer to reach his destination. Although he praised parts of Siberia for their beauty and relative freedom from tsarist repression, what struck him most was the squalor he encountered. “Poverty, ignorance, and worthlessness that might drive one to despair,” he wrote about the far-eastern region of Primoriye.⁹ He saw Sakhalin as a “perfect hell.”

Together with advocating reform, Chekhov’s motive was to study “unbearable suffering, the sort of which only man, free or subjugated, is capable.”¹⁰ He described the flogging of a prisoner sentenced to ninety lashes, when “after only five or ten blows his flesh, covered with weals from former beatings, turned crimson and deep blue; his skin peeled with each blow. ‘Your Worship!’ we heard through the screams and tears, ‘your Worship! Spare me, your Worship!’ ”¹¹ Chekhov dreamed about the incident for several nights.

The brutal tsarist penal system was nevertheless far kinder to inmates than what would follow under the Soviet Union, when millions died building the cities and mining and lumber industries of the far east.

Logging remains a major occupation today. Much of the poorly regulated industry is illegal, including the clearing of vast swaths of timber sold very cheaply to China, Japan and elsewhere. Finding workers willing to undertake the backbreaking work of filling even legal quotas remains a problem, so some companies rely on another Soviet legacy: cooperation with North Korea. During the Cold War, Pyongyang sent prisoners to logging camps in remote stretches of the Russian far east to help pay its debts to Moscow. Two decades after the collapse of communism, North Koreans are still a source of very cheap labor for Russian firms. No longer prisoners, they continue doing dangerous work, isolated from the local population. Hoping to learn at least a little about their working conditions, I traveled to a timber camp in the Amur region on a cold day in March.

Boarding a train in the dilapidated city of Blagoveshchensk, across the Amur River from the Chinese city of Heihe and its shiny skyscrapers, I headed north through endless forests and taiga. Watching the totally unpopulated landscape pass by my window was alternately exhilarating and monotonous: you wouldn’t want to be stranded there. My destination was the snowbound town of Tynda, a collection of Soviet-era concrete-slab buildings built to serve as the main crossroads of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a colossal railway project intended to help develop the region for no discernible reason other than settling it. Considered one of the great follies of the late Soviet era, the so-called BAM railway remains unfinished. Nestled among gently rolling forested hills, isolated Tynda was only thirty years old when I visited, but seriously decrepit. That didn’t make it much different from many other Soviet-era settlements except for its compound of long, single-story wooden buildings on the edge of town: barracks for North Korean workers.

The complex stood at the end of a narrow road, where a tall gate next to a guardhouse and a big searchlight blocked the entrance. It was surrounded by an old wooden fence topped by a string of rusting barbed wire. Inside, conditions looked very basic. A large North Korean flag flew at the top of a tall pole, near banners and monuments bearing slogans written in red Korean characters. Occasionally, the gate opened to allow laborers through, usually in groups of three. Sitting on the snow-swept road, they looked bedraggled and weather-beaten. When I tried to speak to one, he told me in broken Russian that he didn’t understand me. Others appeared to want to talk but were visibly afraid.

Residents of nearby houses seemed oblivious to the foreigners living among them. A kindly middle-aged woman named Liudmilla Alexandrovna told me that the workers keep to themselves. “When we come across them in the forest, they’re afraid of us. We used to feel sorry for them, looking very poor, dressed in their black work clothes. Now we’re used to them.”

Despite rumors of abuses, frequent accidents and food shortages in the camps, local police don’t concern themselves with the North Koreans’ affairs unless they learn of murders and other serious crimes. The few officials who agreed to speak to me said the government’s agreement with North Korea gives them no jurisdiction over the camps. However, it was clear that the authorities in Tynda were receiving a steady stream of fees and, by many accounts, payoffs for issuing work permits. Before being unceremoniously ejected, I glimpsed stacks of North Korean passports waiting to be processed inside the local office of the Federal Migration Service, which implements immigration policy. An official later told me that sixteen hundred North Koreans work in the region, usually for three-year stints, but others said the number was probably far higher. A former manager of Tynda’s main logging company estimated that his one firm alone may have employed more than six thousand people.

At a processing plant I managed to visit in the forest twenty miles south of Tynda, massive saws cut logs into boards. It was desolate and freezing, and the situation was little better in summer, when the hot and humid forests swarm with mosquitoes. Unlike the members of the few Russian work brigades around Tynda, North Koreans cut and clear wood by hand, without the help of timber harvesters and other heavy machinery. A local who had worked alongside them told me that conditions were dangerous and workers were under constant surveillance. Nevertheless, life in Tynda, however punishing, gives circumstantial evidence of the much worse conditions back home: only those in good standing with the North Korean authorities are allowed to travel to Russia.

The need to cope with the cold helps explain Russians’ abiding love of one of their great pleasures, the public baths called banyi. From homemade wood-heated huts ubiquitous in the countryside to large establishments in cities, banyi provide escape from the drudgery of daily life, especially the seemingly endless stretches of freezing, overcast weather, when roads are dangerously icy and bundled-up pedestrians look weighted with grim determination.

Under Soviet rule, the banya fulfilled another important function by providing the millions living in crammed communal apartments a place to bathe, and some have kept prices low as a kind of social service. Every Moscow neighborhood has at least one banya, usually housed on the first or second floor of an ordinary-looking apartment building. Most are single-sex. Patrons typically enter a large room filled with high-backed benches, where they undress, wrap a sheet around themselves and head to the baths. They return to the main room between sessions in the steam room to relax, drink tea or vodka and talk.

The steam room itself, or parilka, resembles a sauna, although it’s larger and more humid. An employee called a banshik regulates the furnace, usually fueled by gas, and produces the desired amount of steam by throwing in ladles of water, often infused with mint, eucalyptus and other scents. Some banshiki have fan clubs that come at the same time every week to sit on the wooden platforms or beat each other with dried birch-leaf besoms, which may sound masochistic but feels much like a massage when done by experts. Heading out of the banya after a session in a typical Moscow establishment called the Donskiye Baths, a regular named Gennady Novitsky described the process as “a whole science.”

“You use the birch leaves to draw the steam close and open your pores,” he explained. “That helps you sweat out the poisons.” True or not, it’s supremely relaxing. After the scorching-hot parilka, many jump into a pool of cold water—or, in the countryside, into snow—before heading back to the steam room to repeat the routine. Novitsky said the feeling of absolute abandon erased all concerns about daily life, including its hierarchies. “There’s no such thing as a general in a banya,” he said. “Everyone’s equal.” Another patron claimed the banya routine is as necessary for Russians as eating and drinking: “They say church purifies the soul and the banya purifies the body.”

Little has changed in banyi since Soviet days except the prices. Although many at the Donskiye Baths considered the ten-dollar fee high, Muscovites can pay hundreds elsewhere for slightly better surroundings and a few beers. Moscow’s oldest and fanciest banya, the gilded Sanduny Baths, near the Kremlin, was built for nobles in the nineteenth century and said to have been frequented by the likes of Pushkin and Tolstoy. The main room has an ornate Gothic wooden ceiling and mosaics depicting idyllic Black Sea scenes; marble pillars surround the large pool. Before the rising price of attendance limited our visits, I would often go with my friend Kolya, whose father had regularly taken him when he was a boy—and with my own banya-devoted father when he visited me in Moscow.

Although my wife, Elizabeth, often questioned why Kolya and I would voluntarily spend hours sitting in steamy rooms staring at other not-very-fit naked men, it was there where we relaxed enough to develop our most unrealistic ideas for journalistic collaborations: journeys across Russia to document the best vodkas; larks to Afghanistan—whose landscape and cuisine Kolya and I both loved—to research a book I was writing about the Soviet war. When I dared question our chances of accomplishing our most fanciful plans, I was rebuked for raining on the spirit of our parade. “Of course we’ll do it,” Kolya admonished me. “How could we not? We’re the best! Now lie flat!” Kolya’s skill with the birch besoms on my back, along with the beer and steamed shrimp we devoured afterward, made our visits among the activities I’ve most enjoyed in life.

Despite its many renovations, however, Sanduny maintains a noticeably seedy look and its employees are as gruff as their Soviet predecessors. Explaining the exorbitant cost, a banya director told me customers demand the high prices “because they want fewer people to jostle them.” That failed to impress Gennady Novitsky back in the downscale Donskiye Baths. He said it doesn’t matter which banya you visit: “When you emerge on the street afterward, you feel so light that you think you might float away.”

Many foreigners who agree find another winter tradition, that of plunging into swimming holes sawed out of ice-covered ponds and rivers, less tempting. The popular custom, which has made a comeback since Soviet days, takes place en masse at midnight on the Russian Orthodox observation of Epiphany, in January, and according to superstition brings very cold weather called the Epiphany frosts. I observed one session five days into the coldest winter in twenty-six years, in 2006, when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees Celsius and an Arctic freeze was pushing mercury levels in Siberia down to minus fifty. In Moscow, automatic teller machines were malfunctioning and electric trolleybuses ground to a halt. Traffic was greatly reduced since it seemed that only the lucky few with heated garages or those who kept their cars running all day were able to get on the road.

First-aid workers who stood by a tributary of the Moscow River lined with elite dachas admitted that its icy water conferred only negative health consequences. Nevertheless, dazed-looking swimmers wrapped in towels after bathing said they felt exhilarated. Some insisted that more than just a physical sensation, their experience of the cold was a rite of passage important to their identity as Russians.

The cold and other hardships have persuaded generations of Russians that they behave a certain way because they think differently from others, as a much-quoted passage from Vassily Aksyonov’s semiautobiographical 1980 novel The Burn describes.

In Europe there are frivolous democracies with warm climates, where an intellectual spends his life flitting from the dentist’s drill to the wheel of a Citroen, from a computer to an espresso bar, from the conductor’s podium to a woman’s bed, and where literature is something almost as refined, witty and useful as a silver dish of oysters laid out on brown seaweed and garnished with cracked ice.

Russia, with its six-month winter, its tsarism, Marxism and Stalinism, is not like that. What we like is some heavy masochistic problem, which we can prod with a tired, exhausted, not very clean but honest finger. That’s what we need, and it’s not our fault.¹²

Aksyonov, who was later expelled from the Soviet Union, presents a typically idealized picture of Europe, laden with envy. As Edward Keenan has pointed out, the passage also reflects a belief that the Russian concern with deeper matters bestows moral superiority.¹³

Forty years earlier, a prominent Soviet educator named Anton Makarenko decried Russian intellectuals’ “passionate love of slovenliness and disorder… Perhaps they had a special taste that could discern in this disorder a gleam of something higher, something attractive, something that touched them deeply—a precious gleam of freedom.”¹⁴ But Aksyonov—the son of journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg, whose Journey into the Whirlwind remains one of the best accounts of life in the Gulag—undermines such views by blaming Russians for their own plight. “Not our fault? Really?… Who cut themselves off from the people… licked the boots of Europe, isolated themselves from Europe… submitted obediently to dim-witted dictators? We did all that—we, the Russian intelligentsia.”¹⁵

The passages tap into the central nineteenth-century debate that, regardless of its merits, came to define Russians’ conception of themselves: Who is to blame for the country’s ills? That leads to another eternal question—What is to be done?—that has prompted one grandiose solution after another. If the Westernizers sought to rescue Russia by imposing foreign values—often with a very Russian call for revolutionary upheaval, as I mentioned—their rivals, the Slavophiles, looked inward. Emerging in the late 1830s, they believed Russia’s problems lay in having abandoned its patriarchal traditions and Orthodox Christian principles in favor of Western rationalism and individualism. Peter the Great bore the greatest blame for derailing Russia from its supposedly natural path toward harmony and salvation based on the values of the Slavic peasant commune, a view based on nostalgic yearning for an imagined “lost” country.

The Slavophiles drew on an old tradition of dissent begun in the fifteenth century in the monasteries of principalities such as Novgorod that were conquered by Moscow. Their monks influenced the sons of elite families exiled there in disgrace, who continued to share in many of the assumptions central to the “dominant” culture. Among them were the same despairing, conservative views about the weakness of man’s nature. Rather than seeking to overthrow the tsar, they criticized his moral imperfection, often using a traditionally religious vocabulary.

Russia’s first historian, Nikolai Karamzin, helped lay the foundation for the Slavophile tradition by attacking constitutional reforms drawn up by Alexander I’s adviser Mikhail Speransky, a founder of Russian liberalism who in 1809 advocated the establishment of a series of legislatures to check the tsar’s powers. Although Karamzin—a conservative who defended autocratic monarchy in the wake of the French Revolution—didn’t believe Russia to be fundamentally different from Western countries, later Slavophiles argued for Russian exceptionalism. Most were products of wealthy families who attended universities and traveled abroad. Like the Westernizers, they came of age under the spell of German Idealism; its emphasis on mysticism and intuition for divining universal truths naturally appealed to those who argued against the belief that Russia was inferior. The Slavophiles believed their country was no worse than the West, just different. More than that, Russia’s deeper spiritual principles would eventually triumph.

The chief Slavophile philosopher, Ivan Kireevsky, who believed that Europeans’ “logical reason” had reached “the highest possible level of its development,” credited them with the awareness that “the higher truths, the living insights, the basic convictions of the mind all lie outside the abstract circle of its dialectics.”¹⁶ Luckily for Russia, he continued, “the essence of Russian civilization still lives on among the people and, what is most important, in the Holy Orthodox Church. Hence it is on this foundation and on no other that we must erect the solid edifice of Russian enlightenment, built heretofore out of mixed and for the most part foreign materials and therefore needing to be rebuilt with pure native stone.” Among those who took up the Slavophiles’ rejection of Western modernity, Dostoevsky, in his novel The Devils, depicts the radicals of the 1860s as devoted to blind self-destruction by following foreign ideas they didn’t really understand.

Another fellow traveler, Tolstoy, advocated a return to the values of the patriarchal peasantry. The “great writer of the Russian land,” as Turgenev called the author of two of the novels widely considered among the greatest ever, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), was a complicated figure. Known for his moralistic philosophy and prescriptions for social reform, Tolstoy respected anarchism and advocated nonviolence, positions he derived from his literal interpretations of the Bible. No other literary shrine compares in hallowed status to his modest family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, where he set up a school and experimented with farming methods.

Descended from old Russian nobility, Tolstoy began writing in 1852 soon after joining the army to earn money to pay off gambling debts. His experience fighting in the Caucasus would later provide him with material for his brilliant novella Hadji Murad. Defying simple characterization, War and Peace explores his theory about individuals’ powerlessness against the forces of history. Partly an account of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, it includes almost six hundred characters, historical as well as fictional. The sweeping novel moves from the lives of two aristocratic families to the tsar’s St. Petersburg court, Napoleon’s headquarters and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino.

Anna Karenina tells parallel stories of two marriages. One is of the well-regarded title character, who begins an affair but—unable to bear society’s deceit and hypocrisy—becomes trapped by social conventions. The second involves an independent landowner prone to philosophizing whose character mirrors Tolstoy’s. Also concerned about the tension between the individual and society, the semiautobiographical character Levin works in the field with his peasants and seeks to reform their lives.

Tolstoy’s later works explore his radical Christian philosophy, which resulted in his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Although many of his works were censored, his literary fame helped ensure his freedom from arrest. But the end of his life was marked by ill health and an inglorious struggle for influence between his disciples and his longtime wife, Sofia Andreevna. Her nighttime searches of his papers are believed to have finally driven Tolstoy to abandon Yasnaya Polyana for a life of ascetic wandering in the middle of winter. The year was 1910; Tolstoy was ninety-two years old. He got as far as the train station at the nearby town of Astapovo, where he fell ill and soon died of pneumonia. Thousands of peasants lined his funeral procession.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who believed the Bolsheviks hijacked Russia from its true path, was among those who continued the Slavophile tradition half a century later. The dissident who exposed the Gulag’s horrors in his best-known books, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, later shocked the audience at a Harvard University graduation ceremony in 1978 by delivering an infamous address that railed against Western culture. People in the West, he said, lived in overly legalistic societies made morally weak by prosperity. “Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity,” he thundered, “that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.”

Solzhenitsyn, who called for a restoration of the monarchy after his return to Russia from exile in 1994, was hardly unique among Russian intellectuals for being inflexibly dogmatic. His heroism in attacking the Soviet Union blunted criticism of him in the West, however. My father, who co-wrote a biography of him shortly before he was exiled in 1974, had communicated with him through secret notes passed through relatives of Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalia Ryshatovskaya. The relatives would burn the notes after my dad had read them. Despite that implicit authorization of the book and all the information in it, however—my father smuggled the manuscript back into Russia so that Solzhenitsyn’s relatives could criticize it—Solzhenitsyn later accused him of publicizing KGB lies about him. “That was very Russian,” my dad told me. “Here was another prophet fighting for truth by lying. He denounced my book without having read a word, and I stupidly thought I was helping him by increasing his fame in the West, his only real protection.”

Earlier, Solzhenitsyn’s friend Ilya Zilberberg had risked his young family’s safety by hiding some of the writer’s manuscripts in his communal apartment. They were eventually discovered, evidently because Solzhenitsyn—although usually enormously cautious—had mentioned them over the telephone. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn blamed the mistake on Zilberberg, because, my father said, “Solzhenitsyn could do no wrong, he had to be a saint. In that way, he was much like Lenin whom he so fiercely opposed.”

Despite their conservatism, most Slavophiles called for the abolition of serfdom and scorned the state ideology under autocratic Nicholas I. Drawn up in 1833 by the education minister, a count named Sergei Uvarov, the doctrine of Official Nationality propounded three pillars for the Russian state: orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality. Chief among them, autocracy meant the tsar’s absolute power, which the other two components served to support. Nationality—narodnost in Russian, which also means “populism”—signified the Russian special “national spirit.” Orthodoxy stipulated obedience to the Church’s values.

The formulation reflected the Orthodox Church’s traditional role as a subservient enforcer of state authority, sealed by Peter the Great, who first established the Synod, the governing church council, as a state department in 1721. That function, critics believed, helped explain the Church’s repressive nature. “The church has always favored whips and prisons,” wrote Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic who is considered the main father of Russia’s revolutionary tradition, in a famous letter to Nikolai Gogol. Responding to Gogol’s growing support for autocracy late in his life, Belinsky assailed his assertion that Russians were innately religious. The Church “has always groveled to despotism,” he wrote. “But what has that to do with Christ?”

Richard Pipes later interpreted the Church’s basic doctrine as “the creed of resignation.” Russian Orthodoxy “considers earthly existence an abomination, and prefers retirement to involvement… preaches patient acceptance of one’s fate and silent suffering.”¹⁷ The lack of independence, Pipes argued, was responsible for the Church’s rapid demise under the Bolsheviks, who were able to strip and destroy thousands of churches and subject tens of thousands of priests and monks to torture, arrest, and murder in a country of millions of supposedly devout believers.

Still, the Russian Orthodox Church, as the historian James Billington has argued, was central to developing the first recognizably Russian culture by providing the mediums for artistic expression, attacking secular literature and music and focusing painting on the icon. “The Orthodox Church brought Russia out of its dark ages,” he wrote, “providing a sense of unity for its scattered people, higher purpose for its princes, and inspiration for its creative artists.”¹⁸ The Church also reinforced the Russian claim of a special destiny. Inherited from Kievan Rus’, which adopted Christianity in the tenth century, Byzantine Orthodoxy had the effect of helping isolate Moscow from the West following the decline of Byzantium. At the center of its ideology, Billington argues, is the belief that “Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history” and that “Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.”¹⁹ Orthodoxy remains especially hostile to the Catholic Church, which it often accuses of seeking to convert Russians.

For centuries, the Church and nationality were considered virtually synonymous: Russians were unquestioningly Orthodox. The word for “peasant,” krestianin, is a version of “Christian,” khristianin. Little surprise, then, that after almost a century of turmoil and state-enforced atheism under communism, the Church’s resurgence has played an important, if mostly superficial, role in the ongoing quest for a national identity. Onion domes and icons are instantly recognizable as Russian around the world, symbols of a religion with a powerful aesthetic appeal. Even Pipes praises the “beauty of its art and ritual.” Standing under the vaulted ceilings of one of Moscow’s old churches during a daily service today imparts a serene sense of timelessness, as if nothing has changed for centuries. The air is usually thick with the smell of incense and smoke from candles crackling in front of gilded icons. There are no pews; worshippers stand, coming and going as choirs sing and priests recite centuries-old texts in Church Slavonic.

Although church and state remain formally separate, many Russians now see Orthodoxy as official in all but name. In the 1990s, Yeltsin gave the Church tax breaks on trade in alcohol and tobacco, enabling it to do very lucrative business. Patriarch Alexiy II, who spearheaded the Church’s revival before his death in 2008, was often seen on state television with Yeltsin and, later, Putin. His publicly intimate relationship with the former KGB officer turned president was not as unlikely as it may have appeared. Like most Soviet-era priests, Alexiy is believed to have been a KGB agent; his code name was Drozdov.

The Church continues to flourish under Putin, who attends services regularly, wears a cross and claims to have hid his faith under communism. State officials and businessmen have endowed religious orders, built new churches and restored old ones. Alexiy in turn endorsed Medvedev’s presidency in 2008, then blessed his inauguration, as he did Putin’s in 2012. But although the alliance between Orthodox Church and Kremlin has served both well, some members of the Church, which is now flush with wealth and influence, have shown signs of trying to forge a measure of independence—most visibly during the street protests against parliamentary elections in December 2011, when various Church authorities temporarily joined demonstrators in criticizing the rigging of votes.

However, the Church has been hobbled by a lack of devout supporters. Although more than two-thirds of Russians, almost a hundred million people, claim to believe, only some 10 percent regularly attend services. One opinion poll revealed that a mere 4 percent of those questioned said they look to religion as a source of moral values. Most of those who identify with religion appear to be motivated chiefly by nationalistic views that extol Orthodoxy. Some conservative voices in the Church blame its ongoing attempt to cultivate political influence with the Kremlin for undermining its authority among Russians.

Among them is a young but prominent deacon named Andrei Kuraev, who teaches philosophy at Moscow State University and a seminary in Sergiyev Possad, site of Russia’s most important monastery. When I spoke to the youthful-looking bearded priest with long brown hair in the study of his expensively decorated Moscow apartment, he was dressed in a traditional black cassock and round wire-rimmed glasses and kept glancing between two mobile phones on his desk and a flat-screen television mounted on a wall, which was broadcasting news on a state-run station. He told me the Church had been forced to sacrifice its independence. “It must serve the people, not the authorities,” he said. “Without an independent Church that plays the key role in society, Russians will lose their power in this part of the world and become just another ethnic group.” Russia was on the threshold of becoming an “Islamic state,” he concluded, never mind that only 6 percent of the population is believed to be Muslim.

Seeking to boost the number of young believers, the Church has successfully lobbied to make classes about Russian Orthodoxy mandatory in state schools. It has also railed against foreign missionaries and campaigned against reconciling with the Vatican, partly because Russians for centuries saw the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, a once powerful Catholic state, as an existential threat. But critics say the Church’s leverage against the government is still limited by its general lack of concern with serving ordinary people. Although some individual priests have worked hard to help the needy, the hierarchy leaves most charity work to foreign aid organizations, its official position being that those who do not succeed don’t deserve pity.

Yuri Samodurov, a soft-spoken human rights activist who is the former director of Moscow’s Sakharov Museum, told me the Church was bent on “monopolizing” Russians’ religious beliefs. “It insists on dictating our morality and ideology,” he said, “because its main goal isn’t helping people but increasing its own power.” Church leaders denounced Samodurov for organizing a controversial art exhibit in 2003 called Caution! Religion, which featured works such as Jesus’s face on a Coca-Cola logo with the words “This is my blood.” After Orthodox believers vandalized some of the works, a court cleared them of “hooliganism” charges. The Church then sued Samodurov and other organizers, who were found guilty of “instigating religious and ethnic hatred.”

The current Russian Orthodox patriarch is a sharp-tongued former Church spokesman who has criticized “human rights” as “a cover for lies and insults to religious and ethnic values” and praised Putin’s rule as a “miracle of God.” Although billed a modernizer when he took over in 2008, Kirill I has done little to satisfy supporters’ hopes that he would oversee a regeneration of the Church by transforming it into a real moral ballast for Russians still battling with communism’s terrible legacy. When bloggers noticed in 2012 that an official photograph of Kirill had been doctored to remove a Breguet watch worth more than thirty thousand dollars—although its reflection on a well-polished table remained visible—public anger at the patriarch, who had denied rumors he owned a Breguet, prompted more accusations the Church is little more than another corrupt government department.

Kirill’s response to the arrest of members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot helped seal that image. Dressed in bright neon dresses and balaclavas, the women—more a performance-art group sustained by a rotating cast of about thirty women than a traditional rock band—became an icon of protest after creating videos of impromptu public appearances during which members cavorted and profanely criticized Putin before his reelection to a third term in 2011. After they’d managed to perform for several minutes in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral, Christ the Savior—where they called on the “Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin” to “chase Putin out”—three of the women were arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism,” a common catchall charge used against dissidents. One member was later released.

Thanks to their stoic demeanor and eloquent, even literary statements during their trial, the young women have come to be seen as true inheritors of the Soviet dissident tradition. Although they apologized, saying they’d been making a political statement about the government’s ties to the Church, prosecutors sought to build a broad spiritual indictment against them by accusing them of inflicting moral damage on Russia and inciting religious hatred. Outside the courtroom, nationalist groups burned pictures of the group’s members. Abroad, however, Pussy Riot—which had emerged from the street-art collective Voina—generated a chorus of support from pop stars and politicians. Amnesty International described the women—two of whom had small children at home—as “prisoners of conscience.”

Nevertheless, one particularly outspoken minister responded by calling the singer Madonna—who had supported the defendants during a concert in Moscow—a “whore.” Such behavior appeared to provide another striking sign of the Kremlin’s blindness or indifference to the terrible press it all but courted by making the previously unknown group an international cause célèbre. However, prosecuting Pussy Riot appeared to fit Putin’s drive to split society by stoking his version of a culture war. Unwilling to respond to calls for change with anything other than a crackdown, the authorities banked on support from the majority of conservative Russians by portraying a minor disturbance as an assault on Russian Orthodoxy. For his part, Kirill, leader of a church with which many still sympathize after its repression under the communist regime, accused Pussy Riot of blasphemy and doing the devil’s work. The following year, Putin enacted a so-called blasphemy law that punishes “public actions expressing obvious disrespect toward society and committed to abuse the religious feelings of believers” with fines and up to three years in prison.

The affair provided more evidence of the Church’s closeness to the authorities and reinforced its reputation for remaining rigidly hierarchical, intolerant of dissent and wary of competition. After a Gorbachev-era Soviet law declared all faiths equal in 1990, the Church successfully lobbied to marginalize other religions. It also continues to help isolate Russia from the West by advocating a vision of the country’s future that is rooted in nationalism, opposed to liberal democracy and little changed in the last thousand years.

Much like the enduring Slavophile-Westernizer debate, Russia’s ongoing, sometimes tortured search for its place in the world will continue to be influenced by Church leaders, advocates of a Russian-led “Eurasian Union” and others who make various claims for the country’s exceptionalism. Their views will keep feeding Russians’ ideas about themselves and their country, which also remain affected by its difficult climate and geography.

Hundreds of deaths from cold each winter help reinforce a sense that life is cheaper in Russia than in the West together with the very old corollary that individuals aren’t suited for making it on their own. And although Siberians exhibit fierce pride in their region, Siberia and the far north still loom large in the collective imagination as places of involuntary exile, where the cold is additional punishment.

The notion of individual weakness has helped buttress Russia’s age-old fatalism. In the summer of 1939, just after the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, when the Gulag system was approaching its full size, Zhora wrote Serafima that something was “hanging over the camp’s atmosphere” in Ivdellag: “People are suffering from evil so much they’re trying to convince themselves it’s for the better.”

Ivdel, July 22, 1939

Let the end come quickly. Some kind of end, freedom or death, to the happiness of healthy human life or to the bloody wall of murder—forward to humanism or backward straight to Robespierre’s slaughterhouse. Let mine be a lonely, unnamed grave under the Urals cliffs or the parquet floor of a jolly dance hall. I don’t care. To the end, to the end!

Ivdel, August 23, 1939

Dearest one,

I’m writing my last letter to you. This morning we received a telephonogram [message dictated by telephone] about sending me from Ivdellag together with an engineer… No one knows anything about where I’m being sent or why. It just said there was an order that I be sent away immediately. Others disappeared in such cases. They promised to write, but not a single person has.

I’m probably being sent to another camp. Oh, how I don’t want to go, how difficult it is to travel to a strange new place! Nothing good comes of winters in unfamiliar places. The battle is not over survival but death. You’re put in the worst situations doing the hardest work. All your friends are left behind in the old place. Indeed, I have a privileged position here, and who knows what awaits me there. Maybe I’m being sent where I’ll have no contact with the world. Whatever happens to me, remember that I love you and will be with you. Even if I disappear without a trace for years, I’ll immediately find you the moment I free myself…

I embrace you and Mother. Love and remember me.