Reeling In Russia: An American Angler In Russia

PROLOGUE

If it had been up to me, I would never have headed into the White Sea in that little wooden boat. But I had long ago lost control of the situation. Stepan Dashkevich—a fearless, fatalistic Belorussian with a pronounced fondness for grain spirits—was at the helm. And as a storm bore down on us from the Karelian coast, thirty miles distant, Dashkevich shot a glance westward—where bolts of lightning arced down to the water out of a purple-black sky—and gave the slightest shrug of his shoulders. Then he throttled up his sputtering diesel engine and plowed into the whitecaps. As the sandy shore of the remote island of Anzer receded, I knew there would be no getting off this ride.

As a captain, Dashkevich did not inspire confidence. I had first met him several days earlier when he showed up at my friend Yuri Brodsky’s apartment to take me fishing. Dashkevich was so drunk he could scarcely walk. He was not, however, too drunk to drive. I hopped into the cab of his blue Zil dump truck with my fly rod and noticed an empty bottle of Russkaya vodka rattling around on the floor. Dashkevich—an enormous man with a bovine face and beady eyes—looked faintly embarrassed, muttering something about its being Sunday, and Sunday was a day to relax. My first thought was that it was unwise to ride in a three-ton truck with a driver who had lost control of his fine motor skills. But I settled down after a few minutes, concluding the dirt roads were so potholed, and his truck so slow, that even were Dashkevich to lose consciousness, the worst outcome would be a slow slide into a ditch and a bloody nose.

Dashkevich and I bounced along in silence through a landscape of alien northern beauty. The Solovetsky archipelago, situated in Russia’s White Sea, one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, is a windswept, heavily forested outpost dominated by a rock-walled, sixteenth-century monastery on the main island. We rumbled past the wood-domed monastery and surrounding fortress, orange lichen coating its enormous boulders. My traveling companion—sputnik, in Russian—was verging on a vegetative state, yet he was treating me to a view of one of the wonders of Russian architecture. In Russia, you get used to this sort of dissonance, being in a lovely spot where things are not quite right.

As we neared Dashkevich’s apartment, his wife spotted us and flagged us down.

You’re already stewed, aren’t you, said his wife, a lively woman with short, red hair. She looked as if she deserved a kinder fate than caring for this hulking inebriate.

Get me some cigarettes, commanded Dashkevich.

She obliged, heading toward the brown, two-story, wooden building that housed their apartment. Nearby was a gutted brick edifice, once the headquarters of the secret police who tormented thousands of prisoners here. The Solovetsky archipelago—known by Russians simply as Solovki—was the birthplace of the Soviet gulag. In 1923, as Lenin lay near death from a stroke, Stalin and his Bolshevik cronies began shipping enemies of the people to this remote island chain. The main Solovetsky monastery, as well as numerous other monastery buildings scattered around the islands, made splendid prisons. In the late 1920s, as Stalin’s terror gathered steam, the word Solovki became synonymous throughout the USSR with the totalitarian nightmare that had engulfed the country. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece on Stalin’s terror, The Gulag Archipelago, takes its name from the Solovetsky island chain.

So, as Dashkevich and I hopped out of his truck, we were landing on bones. Not far away was the site where, in 1929, guards executed czarist officers, aristocrats, scientists, merchants, and other unfortunate souls who had run afoul of the Bolshevik regime. But this little concerned Dashkevich, who was grabbing fishing nets and tossing them into the bed of his truck.

Soon, we were out of the main Solovetsky hamlet, population one thousand, and heading toward Dashkevich’s boat on Long Bay. On the half-sand, half-dirt road, we slipped in and out of craters like a rowboat riding the waves. At the edge of town, we passed two stout women in flowered housecoats weeding a large potato patch, their substantial, rounded derrieres pointing heavenward as they bent to their work. I looked over at Stepan, who was eyeing the potato weeders. I wouldn’t say he had a leer on his face. Perhaps if he had been sober, his expression might have ripened into a leer. In his condition, he merely stared dumbly at the women.

We rode at a snail’s pace for ten minutes through birch forests and bogs. Stepan posed rambling questions about life in America, asking about my salary, my home, and my cars, culminating in an inquiry as to whether I owned my own airplane. I asked if he wasn’t worried about being thrown in jail for driving deeply under the influence. He replied that, as chief game warden on the Solovetsky archipelago, he feared nothing and no one.

I am the main protector of the environment here, he slurred. I am the most important person on the island. No one interferes with me, no one slows me down. I work for the Arkhangelsk regional government, and they are far away.

Then, quoting a Stalin-era saying that highlighted the independence of the gulag bosses on the archipelago, Stepan said, Soviet land. Solovetsky power.

We arrived at the water, easing down a slippery, grassy incline to the head of Long Bay. In front of us was a coastline reminiscent of Maine or Sweden, with birch and fir trees lining a rocky shore. The water was crystal clear and inviting. We jumped out of the truck, and the wind—howling on other parts of the island on a blustery, overcast Sunday evening—was barely blowing on Long Bay, surrounded as it was by thick forest. Mosquitoes started to swarm, but that scarcely dampened my enthusiasm. I was about to fly-fish for herring on this tranquil body of water, dotted with small, picturesque islands. It would be the first time I had unsheathed my fly rod in Russia.

The boat’s not here, mumbled Dashkevich.

What do you mean it’s not here?

It’s not here.

Stepan was swaying to and fro, staring hard at the rocky shore, where two battered wooden skiffs were tethered. I could see him struggling to figure out what had happened to his boat, his memory slogging through the vodka-sodden realms of his brain in search of an answer. Suddenly it hit him.

My son-in-law has the boat, said Dashkevich. He wasn’t at all apologetic, as if this were a fine way to end our fishing trip.

We piled back into his dump truck. Dashkevich ground the gears into reverse and floored it. We were on a steep slope, and the grass was slick from a recent rain. The wheels spun, digging deeper into the grass and mud. I hopped out to help, but Dashkevich just kept gunning the motor, turning the bank into a wallow. The tires were smoking. The engine was smoking. Dashkevich was silent as he continued revving the truck’s motor. We were stuck.

*   *   *

Five days later, this was the man at the tiller as the storm rushed toward us off the neighboring island of Anzer. This time he was sober, but you had to wonder: How many functioning brain cells did this comrade have left?

Save for a monk or two who live there in summer, Anzer is an uninhabited island. Only ten miles long, it possesses an otherworldly loveliness. On its rocky, windswept capes, several spiral-shaped, stone labyrinths—now covered with lichen and scrub—are still visible. Russian archaeologists say they are at least four thousand years old and may have been sites where Saami or other arctic peoples communed with cosmic deities and buried their leaders. Anzer’s capes are strewn with thousands of sun-bleached drift logs, piled helter-skelter along the shoreline; they are testament to the prodigality of Soviet managers, who floated the timber down northern rivers, then lost track of it when it hit the sea. On the wildest of the capes, Kolguyev, fifteen-foot, wooden Russian Orthodox crosses, some standing since before the Revolution, have been jammed into the barren ground by sailors thankful to have survived storms off Anzer’s shores. The day we were there, a herd of one hundred caribou browsed lichen and tundra grasses on the cape. I am not inclined to give credence to New Age mumbo jumbo about cosmic energy. But Cape Kolguyev had an unmistakable end-of-the-earth feel to it, and if I were looking for a direct uplink to the Almighty, I think I’d start there.

After wandering around the cape, Brodsky and I walked a mile to a quiet, sandy bay, where Dashkevich lay at anchor. We were about to jump into his boat when we heard the distant thunder and first noticed the angry-looking sky. To get back to our camp, we had to navigate the turbulent waters off Kolguyev, then travel five miles west, hugging Anzer’s coastline. At first, what worried me most was the lightning. You could see it from miles away, set against the dark gray thunderclouds, as it flashed over the White Sea. The storm was racing toward us, and there was no way we would outrun it. Over the clatter of the engine, I suggested to Brodsky and Dashkevich that we return to the sheltered bay, several hundred yards back, and wait out the tempest in the half-ruined boat shed of an abandoned lighthouse.

The lightning’s not a problem, hollered Dashkevich.

I wondered what water-safety manual he’d been reading.

As we rounded Cape Kolguyev, high winds and waves from the east buffeted our fifteen-foot boat. We turned nearly 180 degrees and headed directly into the storm, which was less than a mile away. Thunder boomed and the sky crackled with lightning. The White Sea turned black as I made one last attempt to persuade Brodsky and Dashkevich to head to shore. It’s too late, Brodsky yelled over the approaching gale. It’s too rough now.

Then, staring down the storm from his position at the front of the pitching boat, Brodsky—a professional photographer—snapped a picture, smiled, and said, It’s beautiful.

At the time, preoccupied as I was with the coming cataclysm, I didn’t fully appreciate that Brodsky was giving me a lesson in the Russian attitude toward death. Three months later, after I had crossed all of Russia, a friend from Magadan, Misha Skopets, summed things up this way: On the whole, Russians don’t value life that much—certainly not as much as Westerners. Life is not so great for Russians that they want to hold on to it with all their might. If an American has to ride in a small boat, he’ll check out its condition and see if it has life preservers. Russians are more fatalistic. They know they can expect anything from their government, or from nature.

Though they certainly valued their lives, Brodsky and Dashkevich didn’t seem to view a potentially fatal dip in the White Sea with the same hysterical alarm I did. I am an upper-middle-class American, born in 1952, a product of the most pampered generation the planet has ever seen. I have a lovely wife, two beautiful young daughters, interesting work. My life is sweet, and I hold on to it with a certain maniacal zeal that I did not detect in Brodsky or Dashkevich.

The storm hit with surreal intensity. First, a white bank of clouds—more like fog—sailed just over our heads. Then a blast of hot air struck us, as if from an oven. Immediately, the wind began howling at sixty miles per hour and the sky went black. The gusts from the storm collided with the prevailing wind and waves from the opposite direction, whipping the sea into a froth. Rain, then hail, pelted the steel gray waters, turning them a sparkling silver. Water began shipping over the sides and bow of the skiff, drenching us. The gale-force winds were hitting us head-on, and I began to worry that the gusts would flip the bow and dump us into the White Sea. I scarcely took note of the lightning that sizzled around us, for at that moment lightning seemed like the least of our worries. Drowning had become my chief preoccupation. We were only about two hundred yards from Anzer’s shoreline, but I quickly concluded that swimming that distance in forty-five-degree water in frenzied seas was an unlikely feat. What a stupid way to go, I thought, and so early in my trip.

Dashkevich, dressed in a heavy, camouflage coat, was standing in the stern, wiping sheets of water from his face as he tried to steer around rocks. He was quiet and steady, which gave me some hope we might get out of this mess. Then the bilge pump broke. With water rising steadily in the bottom of the boat, Dashkevich grabbed a dented tin can and started bailing. Brodsky took over, though it seemed to me that more of the White Sea was coming into our boat than going out.

Then, abruptly, the squall stopped. The rain ceased, and the storm clouds flew past with astonishing speed. Soaked, I watched in awe as the bolts of lightning continued to shoot down out of the eastern sky. The squall had lasted no more than ten minutes, and now the remnant clouds were breaking up, revealing patches of blue sky. The sea grew calm. The temperature had risen twenty-five degrees and the air felt more tropical than arctic. Brodsky was smiling, and Dashkevich was feeling cocksure enough to say, Really, you call that a storm? That wasn’t a storm.

We chugged back to our beachfront camp, bailing as we went. I felt euphoric. It was seven-thirty in the evening, and the northern sun shone brightly. Soon, I caught sight of the forty-foot, conical, earthen mound that lay in the tidal zone in front of our hut, yet another of the little geological mysteries that graced the island. We cruised slowly over the limpid waters of the small bay, long, wide strands of brown seaweed swaying in the current. I smiled at Brodsky. We both understood: in Russia, just when you’re sure you’re about to sink, things have a way of quieting down.

1.

SOLOVKI

A name can exert a strange pull. Such was the case for me with Anzer.

Four years earlier, while working as a Moscow correspondent, I had visited the Solovetsky Islands in late September with Brodsky, who had devoted his life to studying the archipelago and its role as progenitor of the gulag. Like Brodsky, I instantly fell for the place, drawn to its wild, unsullied coastline, its architecture, its crystalline northern light, its hundreds of lakes and ponds, its tragic past. Brodsky and I spent several days poking around the main island. On the day before we were to leave, we rode in a boat down the coast to a spit of land just a half dozen miles from Anzer. A nature preserve, Anzer had been uninhabited for half a century. In summer, Brodsky would live there for weeks in a nineteenth-century cabin, photographing the vestiges of monastery buildings and the gulag. He was anxious to show me the island, and we were both disappointed when the wind kicked up, whitecaps appeared on the sea, and it became impossible to motor to Anzer—plainly visible a few miles away—in a small skiff. Flying to Moscow the next day, Brodsky said to me, Well, you’ll just have to come back, and we’ll make it to Anzer.

In mid-1993, after completing my three-year tour as Moscow correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I came home to America with my family. I did not communicate with Brodsky for nearly two years. He refused, however, to lose contact with me. Two or three times a year, I would receive a small, brown envelope in the mail. Inside would be several photographs of Solovetsky Island scenes. Scrawled on the back were short notes, ending with these words: Anzer awaits!

Ever since my homecoming, I had been pestered by a desire to return to Russia, and Anzer became a symbol of that longing. To some foreigners, Russia was anathema, a place grim beyond description. But to others, such as myself, Russia was an affliction, an incurable habit. From the very beginning, I was drawn to her dilapidated landscape, inhabited by people who knew hardship as intimately as we might a member of the family.

*   *   *

I first set foot in the former Soviet Union in November 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was crumbling and Communism was vanishing across Eastern Europe. Driving from Sheremetyevo Airport to downtown Moscow, I felt I had landed in another dimension. It was 5 P.M. and pitch-dark. Bundled-up figures with shopping bags shuffled down ill-lit, impossibly wide avenues. There was no color, few cars, oppressive Stalinist architecture. The capital reminded me of a city at war, under blackout. I loved it.

The next morning, emerging from a shoddy concrete high-rise onto October Square, I was confronted by an enormous statue of Lenin, his overcoat billowing out in a flourish of socialist realism. There were few stores, no advertisements, neat little kiosks selling Pravda, theater tickets, and ice cream. Black Volga sedans shot down sparsely trafficked streets, emitting a distinctive guttural, coughing sound every time their drivers shifted gears.

I walked into the metro station and was pushed toward a steep escalator, seventy-five yards long. Riding down the creaking, vertiginous contraption, I watched the parade of people coming up the opposite escalator, their worn, gray faces reflecting the toll that life in the Soviet Union had taken on its citizens. The subway station was handsome and clean. I will never forget the smell of the car as I crammed into it with dozens of Russians. It was a pungent, sour mélange of garlic, unwashed bodies, vodka, musty woolen overcoats, and Bulgarian tobacco. For me, that fragrance would forever be linked with Russia.

I spent the next several years covering the reign and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rebirth of a capitalist Russia. Witnessing these events and writing about them made a deep impression. Once back in America, where I was edging toward leaving the newspaper business, my desire to revisit Russia grew. I missed the people, missed speaking the language. I wanted to travel through the vast swaths of territory I had not seen as a correspondent, spending time not in cities, but in the Russian countryside, a haunted, lovely place of timeworn villages, sprawling garden plots, and ruined brick Orthodox churches. It had always been my favorite part of Russia, far from the legions of mobsters and nouveau riche businessmen who had popped up all across the country. Visiting rural Russia was like time travel; much of it—especially Siberia—was reminiscent of the American West in the late nineteenth century, a boundless expanse of forests and plains where many people still lived close to the land in log cabins, growing and catching much of their food.

Unconstrained by pressures of time and work, and driven by an ill-starred desire to plumb the depths of the Russian psyche, I wanted to lose myself in the Russian countryside.

*   *   *

The idea for the trip came to me on a winter afternoon. Since returning from Moscow, I had combined my passion for fishing and hunting with work and had taken to writing about the outdoors. I was contemplating the fly-fishing opportunities in Russia—Atlantic salmon on the Kola Peninsula; taimen, a legendary, salmonlike fish found in Siberia; grayling on Lake Baikal; steelhead trout on the wild, tundra rivers of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. I realized what I had to do. Beginning on Anzer, I would fly-fish from one end of Russia to the other. Few countries offered the angling opportunities that existed there, and with the right documents I could do what was once unthinkable—traverse all ten time zones of this enormous land, wandering where I pleased. Vast regions, as huge and wild as Alaska, were now open to anyone foolhardy enough to ramble into them.

From the start, I knew I wasn’t so much after fish as I was after a glimpse of Russia from the bottom up. My fly rod would be my divining stick, defining my route and taking me places few other Westerners had trod. Almost no one fly-fished in Russia—the practitioners of the sport numbered only in the hundreds—and I imagined that brandishing a fly rod would ease my way into village life. For Russians loved to fish, many using long poles called udochki. No matter how befouled a river or lake, there usually was a Russian standing on its banks, dipping his worm into a rainbow sheen of pollution in the hopes of catching some stunted perch or pike. And though fishermen are legendary prevaricators, I figured there was no finer group to guide me through this vast wonderland, as Russians sardonically referred to their cursed, puzzling country.

As it turned out, the fly rod opened more doors than I could have imagined.

The fishing was not at all what I had expected.

And the Russian countryside? It was a world turned on its head, inhabited by people abandoned by their government and fending for themselves.

God is a long way up, goes the old Russian proverb, and the czar a long way off.

*   *   *

A dusty, golden three-quarter moon hovered over Moscow as I rode at midnight to the Leningrad Station. The Garden Ring Road encircling the city center was nearly deserted, in merciful contrast to the eye-stinging traffic jams that paralyzed the ten-lane asphalt band during the daytime. I had flown into Moscow the day before—election day—and Boris Yeltsin had just won a second term as president, soundly beating his cretinous Communist opponent. With that vote, the country may have turned its back once and for all on its Bolshevik past. But the occasion felt less than historic. Many people had cast their ballots, then headed on a sunny, breezy day to their dachas. Muscovites were weary of making history.

Leningrad Station, encased in scaffolding, was the scene of chaotic bustle generally associated with the movement of wartime refugees. Travelers staggered under the weight of massive sacks. People elbowed one another aside at ticket windows amid grunts and recriminations. Squadrons of unkempt, weary-looking Russians stood near rows of the ubiquitous kiosks, drinking beer and shots of vodka. Men hacked out wads of tubercular phlegm on the sidewalk. Gazing at these lost souls, I was amazed that the abysmally low life expectancy of Russian men—fifty-eight—wasn’t even lower.

I stood by the green and red cars of Train Number 20, the overnight express to St. Petersburg. The conductors were firing up the little boilers that heated their cars’ tea water, and the smell of coal smoke wafted over the platform. The scent set off a chain reaction of memories, and I recalled countless Russian train rides, nights when I stood on platforms slick with black ice, ready to board an express to some disintegrating quadrant of the Soviet empire.

This time, I was waiting for Yuri Brodsky. We were going, at last, to Anzer.

Yuri’s love of the Solovetsky Islands had fascinated me ever since I had first met him five years before. In twenty-five years, he had taken thousands of photographs, spent countless hours in archives, interviewed scores of survivors of the Solovki camps, and whiled away months on the islands wandering through the ruins of Stalin’s prisons. He resembled an obsessed archaeologist, slowly piecing together disparate shards of history—scrawled messages on walls, graves in dense forest, early newspapers from the camps—into a devastating picture of the genesis of Stalin’s terror.

Now, his labor of love had been reposited in a dense, riveting book of more than six hundred pages, a tome crammed with photographs, archival documents, and reminiscences. It was probably the single most exhaustive volume ever produced on one of Stalin’s camps, and Brodsky had absolutely no guarantee it would ever see the light of day. He had been searching for a publisher for several years, but in the jaded era that followed glasnost and the implosion of the USSR, Russian publishers were hardly scrambling to bring such material to light.

From the beginning, I liked Yuri Brodsky because he was such a gentle soul. Although I never heard him speak of God or his native Judaism, he had the tranquil air of a religious seeker. He was short and slight, with a full head of hair and neatly trimmed beard. In the time I had known him, both hair and beard had gone from salt-and-pepper to silver. Brodsky smiled often, and when he did, his head tilted slightly and his eyes nearly narrowed shut. In conversation, Brodsky, who was fifty-one, often emitted an endearing noise, a kind of throat-clearing, affirmative Hmmmmm. He was well loved, in part because of his habit of constantly dispensing little presents to friends and strangers. His pockets were crammed with candy that he bestowed upon children, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats, friendly and unfriendly alike. Yuri’s quiet charm could win over even the hardest Russian heart. Women were strongly drawn to him, and I think it was because he was simply a kindhearted man in a land where many men, often under the influence of alcohol, treated their women so shabbily.

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes before the train’s 1 A.M. departure, Brodsky came strolling down the platform, a knapsack on his back. Piling into our two-person compartment, we talked nonstop; there was a lot of catching up to do. Yuri’s life was insane in a peculiarly Russian way. He had been estranged from his wife for twenty years, yet because of the dire shortage of housing in Russia, had continued to live with her in the same small apartment in the town of Electrostal, about thirty-five miles from Moscow. Their twenty-year-old daughter was crammed into the apartment as well. Yuri had a girlfriend in Moscow, who surprised him the previous year with the news she was pregnant with his child. He was supporting his girlfriend, his baby, and his grown daughter on the 1.3 million rubles—about $260—he received each month from his job as photographer at a plant that made components for nuclear reactors. He also earned extra money from his freelance photography. This unorthodox and tenuous state of affairs seemed to trouble him only slightly. I would have come unglued years ago.

As we prepared for sleep, the conductress opened the door to our compartment. She handed us a short stick, which she told us to jam into the door to deter robbers. She said the gassings that had once plagued the Moscow–St. Petersburg trains—enterprising thieves would open the door in the middle of the night, anesthetize you, and strip you of everything but your Skivvies—had almost stopped. But common thieves, armed with master keys, were still a problem.

St. Petersburg sparkled the next morning under uncommonly blue skies and balmy temperatures. As our train moved through the suburbs, I spied fishermen with cloth caps and long wooden rods trying to conjure up fish from stagnant, debris-strewn canals. Their efforts were testimony that anglers everywhere will chase fish under any conditions, no matter how dismal.

At seven that evening, Brodsky and I boarded the Polar Express, the St. Petersburg–Murmansk train that would take us up the Karelian coast toward Solovki. We headed north through a landscape of swamps and birch forests, passing villages where wooden houses and log cabins, faded to a drab gray and listing slightly, lined dirt streets. At seven-thirty, Yuri and I went to the dining car, where the service and the food reeked of the