The Spirit-Wrestlers

PHILIP MARSDEN

The Spirit-Wrestlers

And Other Survivors of the Russian Century

For Charlotte, whose expertise made it all possible

Cover

Title Page

PRELUDE: A WINTER IN MOSCOW

PART 1 Steppe

The Victorious Tractor

Kolkhoz Lenina

How to Build a Church in One Night

A Little Miracle

The Coming of Allah and the KGB

Solzhenitsyn and the Trousers of Prince Vaja

The Death of Kuzma Alekseyevich

PART II Mountain

The True Meaning of the Stag

The Forests of Romantika

A Cossack Wedding

A Short History of Vodka

Only the Malformed Need Wear Clothes

Puppets for Peace

Pushkin and the Old People

School No. 5

Rabbit Samvel and the Yezidi

Of Pearls and Peacocks

Tolstoy’s Grave

GLOSSARY

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For the best part of one post-Soviet Moscow winter I travelled in to the Lenin Library and read stories of Cossacks and Old Believers and plotted a journey to the south.

It was a long winter. Over the months it drained the colour from the city’s public face – from the fur-coated bundles on the metro trains, the ranks of anonymous buildings, the milky skies. The only exception was upriver from the Lenin Library where a host of orange hard-hats swarmed over the reconstruction of the cathedral.

Of that improbable building, nothing had existed until New Year’s Day when the Patriarch of Moscow and All The Russias, Aleksei II, bent his patriarchal back and laid the first stone. Originally the cathedral had been built to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon’s Grande Armee and dedicated to he whom they had most to thank: Christ the Saviour. It had been a vast building, big enough for ten thousand worshippers. But in 1931 Stalin dynamited it to make room for his Palace of the Soviets. The palace was to be thirteen hundred feet high, topped by a statue of Lenin so large that even his index finger would be nineteen feet long – until the planners realised the clay beneath would not support such a structure. An open-air swimming-pool was put there instead.

For reasons I could not fathom, the Lenin Library issued me with a reader’s card usually reserved for eminent professors and high-ranking government officials. The card gave me access to Zal no. 1, where pallid scholars sat all day hunched over volumes from which they never looked up. They never noticed, therefore, the little marks of privilege that distinguished Zal no. 1 from all the other zals – the succulents and ferns on top of each desk, the bun-haired woman who watered them, or the billows of pink curtains which bordered thirty-foot-high windows. Too much of my time, however, was spent gazing out of those windows at the golden cupolas of the Kremlin, and out beyond them to the factory chimneys which leaked streams of grey smoke into the grey sky.

In September 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte stood at the Kremlin windows. He was gazing out at the city he had conquered. It was ablaze. Whole quarters were subsiding beneath flames which had been ignited by the Russians themselves. He saw at once that the fire was the ‘herald of great disasters’.

‘What extraordinary resolve!’ he muttered. ‘What men! These are Scythians!’

The emperor knew the passage in Book IV of Herodotus’s Histories in which the Scythians defeat the Persians by drawing the enemy back into their own territory, then destroying everything.

But talk of Russians and Scythians put me on my guard. It filled me with the suspicion I’d reserved for glib phrases like ‘Asiatic cruelty’ and ‘the Slavic soul’. Pitfalls for outsiders, I concluded, and steering round them, aimed for the dissenters and misfits of the Russian fringe.

There, by chance, I stumbled on a mystical movement known as Scythianism. Instigated at the time of the Revolution, it counted Aleksandr Blok among its devotees, and in his poem ‘Scythians’ he wrote: ‘Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asiatics …/Russia is a sphinx, triumphant and mournful.’

Several years earlier, I had been to St Petersburg for the first time. It was mid-summer and the air was thick with flies. The city’s benign grid of canals, its cliff-like façades, its by-the-yard classicism left me unmoved. Only in the collection of Scythian gold in the Hermitage was there any sense of the vigour which Peter’s capital so lacked. The collection had been gathered -largely by looting Cossacks – from graves in the Ukraine and the south of Russia. At the time I had looked at it with awe, at those miraculous curled-up Scythian wolves, the running golden stags, all the fluency and ease of the animal style, and saw no relevance at all to the present. But after reading Blok, I refiled those Scythian beasts with the things about the Russian winter that were conspiring to send me south.