Read Travels in Siberia for Free Online

had no choice but to explore the Eastern front instead. Entering via the Caucasus, Reed continued north through the war zone into Russia. He had not been there long before the infatuation struck. In a dispatch published in
Metropolitan
magazine in 1916 (and in Reed’s subsequent book,
The War in Eastern Europe
), he wrote:
     
    Russia’s is an original civilization that spreads by its own power. Loose and easy and strong, it invades the life of the far-flung savage tribes of Asia; it crosses the frontiers into Rumania, Galicia, East Prussia—in spite of organized efforts to stop it . . . And it takes hold of the minds of men because it is the most comfortable, the most liberal way of life. Russian ideas are the most exhilarating, Russian thought the freest, Russian art the most exuberant; Russian food and drink are to me the best, and Russians themselves are, perhaps, the most interesting human beings that exist.
     
    Later, other American intellectuals of Reed’s generation would get even more worked up (“The whole beautiful land is even more glorious than I thought, and no one should stay away from here a minute”), but by then the encomia were directly political, and all leftist. I think Russia-infatuationmay be like the messianic and other religious exaltations that sometimes seize visitors to Jerusalem. The contributing factors seem to be text (Bible, Koran; Tolstoy, Marx) plus the actual earthly location where the text was fulfilled, or is to be. The combination of holy writ and earthly realization may act as a kind of psychic force-multiplier to unhinge the mind.
    In Reed’s case, his malady turned out to be fatal. The following year he returned to Russia and witnessed the October Revolution; back in America he holed up for two months in a rented room in Greenwich Village and produced
Ten Days That Shook the World
. After it was published to wide acclaim (Lenin himself admired it), Reed became a figure of the revolution in his own right and went to the new USSR to participate in the conferences and torturous political machinations of the day. While attending the Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku, he caught typhus. Trying to return to America, he ended up in prison in Finland, where his health deteriorated more. Returning finally to Moscow, he died there in 1920. He was not quite thirty-three. The Soviets buried him with honors in the Kremlin Wall. He is one of only two Americans buried there. His politics may have been crazy, and he may have gone overboard about Russia, but there never was a braver writer than John Reed.
    On that first trip, after about ten days in Moscow, Alex and Katya and I continued on to Siberia. The story of how that came about is long. A few months earlier, Alex had received a letter from a friend he’d known in college named Sasha Khamarkhanov. Sasha was a poet, and a Buryat. The Buryat are an indigenous people of Siberia with their own republic east of Lake Baikal. The Buryat Autonomous Republic is part of the Russian Federation and its capital is Ulan-Ude (pronounced OO-LAHN OO-DAY ). In his letter, Sasha said that he was now an official in the Ministry of Culture of the Buryat Republic, and that he was inviting Alex to come to Ulan-Ude, and bring any other American artists or writers who wanted to join him, for the purpose of cultural exchange. Alex wrote back saying he would certainly come. Afterward he asked me if I would like to go to Siberia with him, and I said yes. That plan, tentative and theoretical as it was, had existed before the later details about the gallery show and the trip to Moscow.
    I half doubted the Siberia trip would really happen. In Moscow, trying to set it up, Katya made many phone calls at odd hours to find out when and from where flights left for Ulan-Ude. Such Western conveniences as reserving airline tickets over the phone had not yet become routine in Russia. Finally she found a flight, and one afternoon Stas drove us and our luggage out to