Siberia and Beyond

Text and Photos by William Craft Brumfield

To live in Russia is to come to a new understanding of space and time. The country devours time because of its space--and the roads that cover that space. With characteristic self-deprecation, Russians will quote their 19th-century proverb: "The only thing Russia has in abundance is idiots and bad roads."

Then there is the climate. Everything takes more time when the temperature is minus 10 or 20, when every step on paths rutted with black ice is an invitation to disaster. Or in brief but fierce summers in a country that has no defense against 90-degree temperatures, except to retreat to shade and leave serious work for another time.

Over the past three decades, I have done research and photography in some very distant parts of Russia, such as the far north, and I have gained great respect for drivers of all ages who have negotiated that terrain for me. Apart from native skills, they have an important ally from an unexpected source: the Russian automotive industry. The new Russians may have their Mercedes and Cherokees, but the true connoisseur of the Russian road prefers the UAZIK, Russia's equivalent of the classic Jeep. Four-wheel drive, two gear sticks, taut suspension, high clearance. Seat belts? Don't ask. The top speed is 100 kmh, but you rarely reach that if you drive it over the rutted tracks and potholed backroads for which it was designed.

No place in Russia has more of such roads than Arkhangelsk Province, which extends from the White and Barents seas in the north to the Vologda Province in the south. A combination of poverty, government default and huge distances have created some of the worst roads in European Russia.

The fact is, roads were an afterthought here. Settlers, hunters and traders moved over a network of rivers, lakes and portages that defined the area as geographically distinct. Indeed, the settlement of this part of northern Russia, its gradual development, and eventual assimilation by Muscovy were based on a paradoxical set of circumstances. The wealth of its forests, rivers, lakes and the White Sea promised considerable rewards to those capable of mastering the area; and yet the remoteness, relative paucity of arable land and length of the harsh winters discouraged growth. Those who succeeded in settling the area proved to be sturdy, self-reliant farmers and craftsmen, a mix of Slavs and Finnic tribes.

Moscow colonized the area during the next two centuries, and by the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, the Dvina River system had become Russia's primary path eastward to the Ural Mountains and westward to Europe. The importance of these routes faded after St. Petersburg's founding in 1703, but again became a critical artery during World War II and the Cold War submarine race.

As a result, Western visitors were banned from the area until the late 1980s and have only been able to move with relative freedom since 1991. Although my introduction to the Russian North began in 1988 with a trip to the fabled isle of Kizhi, my real study of that forbidding territory began only in 1995, when I first arrived in Vologda, capital of the province of the same name. Since then my cameras and I have made several forays to the Arkhangelsk and Vologda regions in order to document the stunning, and perilously endangered, architectural treasures of the Russian North.

Such a large territory as the Russian North could easily have occupied the rest of my career. As a matter of fact, I continue my field work there on a regular basis with support from sources such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the American Council for International Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities and, of course, Tulane University. During the course of this work, I have witnessed the beginnings of environmental and social change brought about by major oil exploration in the north.

But an altogether new dimension in my exploration of Russia came in 1999 when the Library of Congress and its director, James Billington, invited me to participate in a joint Russian-American cultural and educational program known as "Meeting of Frontiers." The program is based on the premise that for all of the obvious differences in Russian and American history and culture, there are significant parallels in the Russian move east and the American move west in pursuit of a national, transcontinental destiny. The fact that these two national movements end at the Pacific Ocean is the "meeting of frontiers."

The goal of the program is to develop a bilingual Web site with a massive array of materials on the American West and the Russian East, including rare visual materials and documents from libraries in both countries. This site is available to anyone with Internet access, but the primary audience is teachers and students. My role was to photograph and document historic Russian architecture as a reflection of the Russian move east, from the Far North to the Far East, from the 15th century to the 20th. My previous years of work as a photographer and cultural historian had given me a thorough grounding in the European traditions of Russian architecture, but now I was to see that culture in a different, Eurasian setting. On Aug. 17, 1999, I hoisted cameras, film and copies of my published work on board the train at Moscow's Yaroslavl Station and set off for the east. Ultimate destination: Siberia.

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