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Just as he had imagined doing since he was a boy in Northern Ireland, Miles Clark made a 5,000-km (3,000-mi) journey through the heart of Russia, plying a maze of canals, lakes, and rivers from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Accompanied by a small crew of British and Russian sailors, Clark made the three-month passage aboard the Wild Goose, his 10-m (34-ft) sailboat, in 1992. This June 1994 National Geographic article chronicles the people and places that Clark encountered along the way.
By Miles Clark
The welcome party arrives from nowhere. We haven't seen a soul all morning as we've sailed east around the northern tip of Norway into the frigid Barents Sea. But now a huge, gray tramp ship suddenly appears, steaming straight toward us. She is joined by first one, then two Russian patrol boats, a torpedo boat, and a light cruiser. In minutes our 34-foot wooden cutter, Wild Goose, is surrounded.
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Davits are swung from the cruiser and a boat is lowered, followed by a scramble net and swarm of life-jacketed figures who immediately take to the oars. Heavy boots land on our side deck, and six armed sailors take up positions from bow to stern.
For the past 40 years the only foreign vessels to enter these cold northern waters have been fishing boats, research ships, and NATO submarines listening to the comings and goings of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Now here we come in our Irish sailboat, intending to penetrate the very heart of Russia.
The officer in charge of the boarding party is a picture of courtesy—black side hat, brown shirt, black tie, black uniform, outstretched hand, and the faintest hint of a smile.
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'Good morning, Captain. I am Lieutenant Popov,' he says.
'Dobrayooh ootra. Minya savoot Miles Clark,' I reply.
We have exhausted our knowledge of each other's languages.
After our papers are checked and rechecked, Wild Goose is escorted into an uncharted anchorage. At last Lieutenant Popov pulls out a small battered phrase book. He studies it for a moment, then hands me an open page. At the top are the lines:
YOU ARE ARRESTED.
I AM SEARCHING FOR THE SPACESHIP IN DISTRESS.
AERIAL BOMBING IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN THIS ZONE.
And finally, at the bottom: WE ARE GLAD TO BID YOU WELCOME ON OUR HOSPITABLE SOVIET SOIL AND WISH YOU EVERY SUCCESS.
'Welcome to Russia,' he says. 'Have a best journey.'
I have dreamed of this voyage since I was a boy. On imaginary wanderings across the pages of my world atlas I would run my finger along the thin blue line that twisted and turned from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, following a 3,000-mile maze of canals, lakes, and rivers through the wilderness of western Russia. The journey, I knew, would take me down the continent's greatest natural highway from the dense timberlands of the northern lakes to the giant reservoirs of the Volga River to the open steppes of Cossack country. It would carry me to historic, exotic cities: Archangel, Nizhniy Novgorod, Volgograd.
Not until the failed coup of August 1991, however, did I dare to imagine that such a voyage was possible. For decades Soviet xenophobia barred the way. Now in the fall of 1991 a fragile window was opening—and fragile was the operative word. Several parts of the route were still officially closed. Month by month, corruption and organized crime were threatening to strangle Moscow. The Soviet Union itself was stumbling toward dissolution.
There was no time to lose. By February 1992 I had arranged for a crew; Hugh Clay and Willy Ker, my British crewmen, who would leave once we entered Russia; Vitaly Chankseliani, a 28-year-old interpreter from Omsk, who would accompany me for the entire Russian voyage; Nikolai Litau, 38, a skipper from Moscow, who would go as far as the middle Volga; and Arkady Gershuni, 40, an experienced sailor from Moscow, who would sail from Nizhniy Novgorod to the Black Sea.
The risks would be high. A severe gale, iceberg, or mishap with a freighter could disable or sink our 60-year-old sailboat. Political permissions could be withdrawn or simply held up for a few disastrous weeks. Because the White Sea is normally covered by ice until mid-June and weather on the Black Sea becomes savage by mid-September, any delay en route—locks closed for repairs, a severe grounding, civil unrest, an engine breakdown from contaminated diesel fuel—could leave Wild Goose a permanent feature of the Russian landscape.
My seafaring father, usually an optimist, reckoned our odds as two to one against.
'But never mind,' he told me. 'She's an old boat, we've had a lot of fun with her over the years, and if you have to abandon her in Russia, so be it.'
We pick up Vitaly Chankseliani in Archangel, capital of Russia's northern timber industries. The air is sweet with the smell of sawdust, and lumberyards run for a mile along the river. Wooden beacons lead past wooden boats tied to wooden jetties by wooden houses.
'So you are really here,' says Vitaly, whose mop of red hair is rumpled by sleep when I collect him at dawn from the city's ramshackle, tsarist-era yacht club. 'I didn't believe it would happen until I saw your boat coming through the timber rafts.'
Of my three Russian crew members, Vitaly is the toughest to decipher. Having grown up in Siberia, he is less sophisticated than Nikolai or Arkady and acts moody and uncooperative at first. But later I realize that his occasionally sullen exterior hides a steadiness and loyalty more important than social graces.
Vitaly's first day aboard is miserable. Leaving Archangel in a heavy storm, we toss for hours on choppy waves in the White Sea, motoring into a driving rain. Vitaly, who has never before traveled on a sailboat, takes refuge in his cramped quarters below. His face wears the vacant expression of a man wondering if he has taken the wrong train.
By the time we reach the Solovetskiye Islands the next day, the sea is calm once more and the skies are clear. The Solovetskiyes, cut off from the outside world for seven months a year by storms and ice, were the site of a historic monastery in the 15th century. More recently the isolated chain served as headquarters of the northern labor camps.
The scent of pine wafts across the water from northernmost Anzerskiy Island, still officially closed in the guise of a nature reserve. But there is no one to stop us. Leaving Wild Goose in a small bay, Vitaly and I climb through dog roses, heather, forget-me-nots, and sages—all buzzing with insects—to the hilltop remains of the Golgotha Crucifixion Monastery. It is a place I will never forget.
At one end of the narrow nave stands the vestibule where, during some of the darkest days of this century, frozen corpses of political prisoners were stacked to take up less room.
From 1923 to 1939 some 83,000 'counter-revolutionaries' and common criminals were held here in the most brutal conditions, starving and often semi-naked. Every race, creed, and profession was represented: bishops, doctors, murderers, princesses, and prostitutes. Beatings, drownings, shootings, epidemics, and the 'mosquito treatment,' in which offenders were tied naked to boulders and trees, were only part of a litany of terror that claimed more than 43,000 lives.
The next evening we anchor under the great kremlin on Solovetskiy Island, where a chapel echoes with the hypnotic tones of the Old Slavonic liturgy. In the 1400s two monks sowed the seeds here of a community that came to rank among the most honored in the Eastern Orthodox world. Today six monks minister to the island residents. I ask one if tranquillity can ever return to the scene of so much misery.
'Certainly, it is a place full of emotions,' says Father Peter, an expressionless face in a simple black cowl. 'So many people died here that the land is almost running with blood. And yet, what could offer a more plaintive call to future generations to follow the ways of mercy and peace?'
The barometer is falling like a stone as we leave the Solovetskiyes. This is our last open-sea passage for three months, and it turns out to be the most difficult sailing of the entire trip. Squalls and heavy rain cut visibility to less than a mile, and a gale-force wind blasts from the southwest. I steadily reduce sail, erring on the side of caution not only because of the boat's advanced age but also because of Vitaly's nervousness.
Struggling to make out the outermost buoy, I search for the narrow, labyrinthine channel, crudely marked by tree trunks, that leads to the White Sea-Baltic Canal. At last we reach the town of Belomorsk, guarding the northern entrance to the canal. A wilderness of broken buildings and prowling dogs, the city strikes me as a scene of irretrievable gloom. Here, in a freezing, horizontal rain, we find Nikolai Litau waiting on a wooden pier.
'I knew it was you the moment I spotted a tiny white speck on the horizon,' he says. 'No Russian yachtsman would ever go out in weather like this if he could avoid it.'
A descendant of German immigrants, Nikolai has film-star looks and a talent for persuasion. He has arranged for us to enter the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the first time a foreign vessel has been allowed in sight of it. Built by prison labor from 1930 to 1933—at a cost of 200,000 lives—it cuts through 130 miles of forest and swamp to Lake Onega.
To guard against officialdom, Vitaly now replaces the British ensign on Wild Goose with the Russian tricolor, and on June 24 we begin motoring south through the canal. Here the landscape is bleak. But every now and then the forest opens onto scenes of irreducible simplicity: a flock of goats tended by a figure in a sackcloth shawl, a cluster of rain-stained cabins, the echo of a woodpecker, and the scent of smoke climbing upward through the trees.
The deal I make with Nikolai is that he steers and works the engine, while I do the cooking. It has to be that way because only I can read the instructions on the tins and packets I have brought from Ireland. Fortunately, we usually find better food in local markets: peppers, smoked sausages, slabs of butter and cream cheese, and heavy Russian bread.
Nikolai is a pleasure to cook for, but Vitaly is a picky eater. He spends hours removing the carrots from my soups and stews, and he teases Nikolai, the only member of my Russian crew who once belonged to the Communist Party.
'You're a sellout to bourgeois Westerners,' he tells him. 'You eat everything they give you.' I sincerely hope he's joking.
Emerging from the canal into the 70-mile expanse of Lake Vyg this afternoon, we anchor off a low, narrow island where a dozen small izbas, or cottages, are gathered in a meadow of buttercups and cowslips. What was once a small fishing community is now home only to Aleksei and Nastasia Antsiferov, an aging couple with sallow eyes. Their tumbledown house, guarded by two vicious dogs, is made of logs, the cracks chinked with local grass.
Nastasia invites us inside into a small dark room, where winter clothing hangs on birch twigs nailed to the wall. There is almost nothing to indicate that we are in the 20th century.
'We have a generator and a small transistor radio,' Aleksei says, 'but we hardly ever use them. What's the point? We're old and have no education. Only ourselves.' In the gaps of our conversation, the sound of mosquitoes becomes an audible whine, ceasing only when Nastasia drops a smoldering log into a bucket to drive the insects away with smoke.
For 30 years salting and drying pike for local fishermen provided them with a small trickle of income, says Aleksei, whose shirt cuffs are completely worn away. 'But now it's very difficult. Food is very expensive, and the fishermen come only two or three times a month. Next year, we will probably have to leave.'
The only thing Aleksei asks for is insect repellent, and the next morning he judges the brand we give him even more effective than vodka, his usual anesthetic.
'Bug juice very good!' he says, laughing until a fit of coughing rakes the very bottom of his lungs. I'm still convinced he drank it.
Nikolai's charm proves valuable in negotiations for supplies. On a trek ashore to search for diesel fuel, we come across a dilapidated gas station supervised by a shy, freckled young woman. She looks at us with suspicion.
'I'm not supposed to sell you diesel unless you have ration cards,' she says. 'Why lose my job for a few liters of fuel?'
Nikolai fixes her with a frank, steady gaze, calculated to instill confidence.
'I work for a transport company in Moscow, and if they fire you, I'll make sure you get a better job in Moscow. Believe me. I'll reward you well for the risk you're taking.'
She shrugs, gives a demure smile, and begins filling our canisters, but only after naming a price well above the norm.
Before leaving Northern Ireland, I had secretly doubted the consuming fondness that the Russians are said to feel for the great Volga River—mother, lifeline, and savior of the nation. But over the 1,200 miles that we follow it, from Rybinsk to Volgograd, the river seems to confirm everything I have heard.
Draining nearly a third of European Russia, the river flows 2,300 miles from the Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow to the Caspian Sea. Until early in this century the idea of taming it was regarded as absurd. Each spring the river became a swollen torrent of broken ice and each autumn a maze of invisible shallows. All manner of ships and men coped with its vagaries, from horse-driven paddle barges to the sweating, singing burlaki in human harness—the famous Volga boatmen.
Then in 1941 Joseph Stalin sent Russian 'volunteers' and German prisoners of war to construct a huge dam near Rybinsk, where the river turns southeast toward the distant Caspian Sea. Over the next six years the gathering waters of the Volga, Sheksua, and Mologa Rivers rose steadily northwest through forests, villages, and towns. The resulting reservoir was the third in a chain of monumental dams and power stations that turned the Volga from a river into a series of six massive inland seas, some with coastlines of more than 3,000 miles.
Fifty years later the Rybinsk Reservoir remains an unsettling stretch of water. The charts still warn of submerged forests, and a few miles south of Cherepovets the dome of Lyubets Church still stands precariously above the waves.
On our 14-hour passage to Rybinsk, much of it out of sight of land, there is never more than 15 feet under the keel, and once or twice the depth gauge flickers alarmingly. The next day we mention this to a rather humorless Rybinsk archivist. She allows herself a laugh.
'I'm not surprised,' she says. 'Only 20 years ago, when my husband went out fishing, you could still see the houses and streets beneath the water. Now everything is covered by silt and mud.'
The only sailboats we have seen till now have been owned by chemical plants, trade unions, or textile factories. But today, north of Gorodets, Vitaly spots a schooner beating toward us. The binoculars reveal an unlikely crew: a man in a sailor's cap and Hawaiian shorts, a woman in a pink designer track suit, a boy panning with a video camera.
'We are private yacht on holiday from Kostroma,' the man announces on a loud-speaker. 'We have good meat and French wine. You are very welcome to Russia.' And then, just in case the uniqueness has been lost on us, he repeats. 'We … are … private … yacht.'
Vadim Romanov, 38, is both a son of the Volga and a shining product of the country's embryonic market reforms. His card introduces him as foreign economic relations director of a Russian-Danish textile venture in Kostroma, heart of Russia's linen industry and spiritual home of the Romanov dynasty. Whether or not he is really descended from the tsars, the difficulty of proving the lineage has in no way stunted his pride.
'I am hoping my son Roman will also call his son Roman,' he says, 'so that my grandson will be Roman Romanovich Romanov.'
Farther north I had met the widespread feeling that it is now impossible for an honest Russian to make money, so that evening, after plenty of French wine, Glenn Miller, and Bruce Springsteen, I put it to Vadim.
'Listen,' he says, 'for 70 years our mentality has been completely spoiled. Now each person has to make a change for himself. Our private company took two years to create and faced 16 different administrative bodies. If people sit and wait for the government to help them, then they will have nothing.'
As a successful businessman, he says, he could live in any country he wanted to. But he prefers to stay in Russia.
'Of course, if there is another putsch [takeover], my family and I will be killed in the front row.'
Below the great dam at Gorodets, almost halfway through our journey, the river suddenly narrows to less than 350 feet. The Volga, newly fed by water from the reservoir we have just left, streams south between steep muddy banks lined with grazing cattle. All the time the volume of traffic is increasing. A month earlier, the idea of threading Wild Goose through this chicane of tugs, tankers, and hydrofoils would have had my eyes revolving in opposite directions, but by now it is simply an accepted part of the journey.
Once, however, as we are motoring around a narrow bend, we are almost driven to the bottom of the river by a 5,000-ton tanker. The ship, issuing warning honks from astern, forces Wild Goose into the center of the channel just as another tanker appears from the bend ahead. To make matters worse, I see a large dredger—a mass of rusty buckets and protesting pulleys—creeping slowly into the channel from the opposite shore. There's no time to turn, no time to run ourselves aground outside the buoys, no way even to judge our chances.
I shout a warning to Nikolai. But he's already staring at the gap between the tankers. Two immense bows loom over us and for a long moment Wild Goose seems to stand still, held in a sliding canyon of steel plate and rivet heads that tears past us at a combined speed of more than 20 knots. We're passed by two roaring engine rooms. And then, just as suddenly, we burst out onto the marbled brown water of opposing wakes.
Nikolai gives a short, rather nervous laugh. 'You see,' he says with a shrug. 'Nothing is impossible for a good Bolshevik.'
Balding and bespectacled, with a neatly trimmed gray mustache, Arkady Gershuni joins us at Nizhniy Novgorod, where Nikolai takes his leave. 'I hope you know what you're getting into,' Nikolai warns him.
A former engineer, Arkady has a perfect sense of how to deal with bureaucrats—when to plead, when to banter, when to stand firm. As we're passing through a canal, a lock keeper tries to stop us. 'You are to go straight back to the entrance,' he screams down at us. 'The chief inspector says you should not be here.'
Arkady calmly but firmly stands his ground, insisting that permission has been granted—it actually has, but only orally—and hoping that no one demands written proof. Finally the lockkeeper relents.
'It's late Friday afternoon.' Arkady explains. 'The entire management of the canal is about to go away for the weekend. They obviously want us to go back and wait at the entrance until Monday. But I know, and they know, that if we quietly keep on going, we'll be a hundred miles south by then and everybody will have forgotten all about us.'
The city of Nizhniy Novgorod, until recently, has been off limits to foreigners. Known as Gorkiy under the communists, its factories were the very heart of the Soviet military machine, producing fighter aircraft, submarines, and nuclear weapons. Today the town is being hailed as a model of market reform. And so, in some respects, it is.
The main hotels are full of foreign businessmen brokering deals they prefer not to discuss. State-owned shops are being auctioned into private ownership. And only a few miles from the small drab apartment where Andrei Sakharov endured his long exile from Moscow, the city's first American restaurant is selling everything from fried chicken to T-shirts.
'The people here are super nice, super naive, and very hospitable,' chirps owner Mary Khoury, a Texan commodity broker who, with her husband, Viktor, has shipped in everything except the building. Posters of New Orleans and Tina Turner parade across the walls.
For their part the people of Nizhniy Novgorod are making no headlong dash to privatization: Less than half the shops so far offered at auction have found a buyer. Throughout the spring, inflation was running at more than 800 percent, and by July most banks are hoarding cash for wage payments and major withdrawals. Few will exchange even small amounts for foreign currency.
For interest I try the state bank in Nizhniy Novgorod, but a policeman stops me at an inner door. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'it's impossible for you to obtain rubles here now.' He glances around and then leans forward. 'How much do you want to change?'
I suggest a hundred dollars.
'Come back in ten minutes.'
Five minutes later, in full uniform and full view, he is waiting on the steps of the bank.
Vitaly gives me a resigned smile. 'Corrupt policemen are a very small example of the cancer in our country. There probably isn't a ministry or department or factory in Russia where someone doesn't expect money for his agreement or for turning his back. There has always been corruption in Russia, but never like now. I'm afraid it will ruin our country.'
From here on I sense something increasingly unnatural about the Volga, now swollen to more than a mile wide. Along the northern shore the water has crept deep into the forests where the bleached bodies of the largest trees are sometimes all that remain above a thickening soup of decaying vegetation.
Sixty years ago a raindrop entering the river's source would reach the Caspian Sea in 50 days. The Volga was able to flush and renew herself. Now the same journey through six giant reservoirs takes nearly 18 months. Though the river may look clean—in more than a thousand miles, I have seen hardly any rubbish—it is not.
'You might not be able to see the pollution,' says Asahat Kayumov, a young ecologist in Nizhniy Novgorod. 'But every day the toxics and heavy metals accumulate on the floor of the inland seas.'
Later we hear on Moscow radio that fighting has broken out in the Black Sea resort of Sokhumi in northwestern Georgia, where Vitaly's wife, Larisa, and their daughter, Yana, have gone for a holiday. The streets are said to be echoing with small-arms fire between government troops and Abkhazians, an ancient people bent on secession.
Vitaly takes it in stride. Because of the Russian telephone system, he must call Nikolai in Moscow for word about his family. But even then, the only news is that there is no news.
Every day reports grow worse. There is talk of artillery exchanges and approaching tanks, of volunteer fighters from the northern Caucasus streaming in to aid the Abkhazians. All appeals for a cease-fire have been ignored.
Powerless to help, Vitaly stubbornly remains on board, determined to finish the voyage. 'Even if I could get to Sokhumi,' he says, 'I wouldn't know where to look.'
Willing ourselves a little faster now to the Black Sea, we reach Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, at last light. Fifty years after the German siege of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest in history, we sight the cranes and smokestacks of the metropolis that has grown from the rubble. There is still hardly a family that does not count a loved one among those who died—some 800,000, according to the government.
Beneath the shattered brickwork of Flour Mill No. 17, left unrepaired as a memorial to the fighting, members of a small choir are being fed vegetables and rice from a Red Army field kitchen. The women wear white blouses and long scarlet dresses adorned with tiny badges. Vitaly asks them who they are.
'We are the Children of Stalingrad,' says Nadia Nikolayeva, a silver-haired babushka whose father and mother both died somewhere in the city. 'All of us here went through that nightmare, living as best we could among the rubble. Every five years we come to this spot to remember.' Her own badges cover six previous reunions.
Today Volgograd faces another enemy: pollution. In the southern district of Krasnoarmeysk, between the river and the Volga-Don Canal, there is a blighted landscape of apocalyptic proportions. At one end of a miniature industrial city, a huge chemical plant spews effluent into 50 square miles of settling ponds, some cracked into hideous patterns of orange and brown, others so glutinous that the wind barely riffles their surface.
We enter the Volga-Don Canal. Almost nowhere else in the world do two great rivers flow so close to each other as do the Volga and the Don and still drain into different seas—the Volga into the Caspian and the Don into the Azov. Yet not until 1953 was a canal carved between the two. As we pass into the first lock, arms reach down the walls to sell us apples and tomatoes. Parents chatter, children stare, and cruise passengers wave.
'Where are you going?' they ask.
'From the White to the Black,' Arkady shouts. We have traveled 2,500 miles of our 3,000-mile journey.
On the second evening the final gates of the canal open onto the country of the Cossacks, the free-spirited peasant horsemen who for 300 years protected the southern margins of imperial Russia. To the north lie naked hills and purple-shadowed valleys, to the south the semidesert. And yet, for devotees of Mikhail Sholokhov's epic novel of Cossack life, And Quiet Flows the Don, the scene before us is enough to make the spirits plummet. Within the broad 130-mile expanse of the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, the Don now barely flows at all.
Below the dam at Volgodonsk the river recovers its legendary character. Between the narrow banks of willow there are kingfishers, herons, egrets, and sea eagles, and in the older villages life still follows seasons with an almost biblical simplicity. Troops of wild horses stand switching their talls in the shallows. In the evening tens of thousands of crows congregate in the trees around us, and a hundred miles from the sea the first cormorants appear, flying stiff-winged over the water.
At one o'clock this morning—after two and a half months, nearly 3,000 miles, 52 locks, and some unnervingly low bridges—the banks finally run out. Arkady trails a hand over the side, licks his finger, and laughs.
'Over 20 years of sailing,' he says, 'and finally I get to sea!'
All next day and the following night, before a northeasterly gale, Wild Goose surfs south across the Azov, the world's shallowest sea. By afternoon she enters the strait between the Caucasus and Crimea, and at last light we sail out into the dark blue water of the Black Sea, led by a twisting vanguard of dolphins.
For the moment our euphoria is muted, since we still do not know whether Vitaly's wife and daughter are trapped in fighting up the coast. Only two days later does word finally arrive from Moscow that they are safe.
They escaped by chance, Vitaly learns. Their friends' home was in the heart of the fighting, and a neighbor was killed trying to buy flour. Larisa and Yana got out on one of the last two ships to leave Sokhumi, taking with them only what Larisa could carry.
First light reveals the far-off shoulders of the Bosporus, and by evening we are sailing into the wonderful floating madness of Istanbul. Passing beneath the bridge linking Europe to Asia, we come upon ferries crisscrossing the water, dinghies dodging Volga freighters. Turkish torpedo boats speeding north, and fishing boats easing back to port.
We have come a long way, my Russian companions and I, across the heart of a vast country. And yet, in the great chronicle of comings and goings, I know that ours is simply another arrival—the culmination of a voyage made possible only through untold sacrifice. As for those I have met along the way, the strangers who never showed me an open palm but only a helping hand. I hope that their prodigious spirit can sustain them forever.
About the author: Born in Northern Ireland, Miles Clair was part of a team that sailed a replica of a 16th-century galley from Ireland to Scotland in 1991. The author of books and articles on subjects from Chinese medicine to skydiving, he died in April 1993 at the age of 32.
Source: Clark, Miles. “A Russian Voyage from the White to the Black Sea.” National Geographic, June 1994.
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