In 1901, British Journalist John Foster Fraser travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok, and back again, mostly by rail. On his return, he recorded his experiences (and prejudices) in “The Real Siberia”.
In today’s excerpt, Fraser recounts his arrival in Irkutsk, the Paris of Siberia:
That the greatest city of Siberia was at hand was shown in the altered appearance of the passengers as they sprang from the cars and hastened to the buffet for tea, coffee, and fresh rolls. Men who had worn the same flannel shirt for a week came forth in white front and collar and bright tie. Razors had been busy, for many a ten days’ scrub of whisker was gone. Women whom I had seen with light shawl thrown over head and shoulders fluttered in the glory of tailor-made jackets and radiant hats.
The only folk who still wore the same clothes, the bright shirts and patched baggy trousers and cumbrous big boots, and who hadn’t shaved or washed or combed, were the peasants.
At the wayside station were other passengers waiting. They were boys and girls from ten to sixteen, the lads in grey, with a black belt round the waist and a peaked cap, and on their backs cow-hide bags containing school-books - smart lads going into Irkutsk to the Gymnasium. The girls were dressed exactly the same as you find school-girls of the same age in Leeds or Manchester or Edinburgh. They carried their school-bags neatly strapped and behaved demurely, as young misses should, though their brothers were noisy youngsters, crowding into the same carriage and yelling and behaving exactly as their Anglichani cousins five thousand miles away behave when they go from their suburb to school in the big town.
It was a raw, grey morning, that Thursday, September 5th, as the train crawled upon the wooden bridge spanning the dead blue Irkut river, broad, sullen, and strong, sweeping to the mighty Yenisei, and emptying thousands of miles away within the Arctic circle. Over the low-hanging fog peered the dome of a cathedral, and great buildings loomed. There was the whistling and shrieking of engines. As we waited on the bridge for the signal to go on I thought of the stop on Grosvenor Bridge, over the Thames, before the south country trains rumble into Victoria Station.
Slowly we went on. There was a road crossing, with a mass of carts and people waiting till the train had passed. The axles creaked through a goods yard. Then, before we quite realised it, we were in Irkutsk Station. Porters boarded the train like banditti, and fought with one another to carry baggage. The corridors were blocked, and people got angry, and there was swearing and indignation, and - well, the scene was not at all peculiarly Siberian. It might have been any European station.
When my belongings were packed on a droshki, away I was carried, humpity-bumpity, over the vile, uneven road. I felt. I and the droshki were playing a game of cup and ball. I was caught every time. There was a tributary of the Irkut to be crossed, the Angara, by a jolting, uneven bridge of boats. We banged across it. And so we were in Irkutsk, four thousand miles east of Moscow, further east, indeed, than Mandalay: a thriving, jostling, gay city “the Paris of Siberia” you call it when you want to please.
It is not a description I would apply myself. Irkutsk is more like a restless, bustling Western American town near the region of gold diggings. There is one street two miles long, and all the others are at right angles.
It is a white and green town. Most of the buildings are stucco-faced, whitewashed, with sheet-iron roofs painted green. The effect is one of cleanness and coolness.
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It is getting ahead in public buildings. The Greek Cathedral is an imposing building of heavy-domed architecture. There is a resplendent Opera House that cost £32,000. There is a museum of all things Siberian from the days of the mammoth to the latest device in gold-washing, in charge of an intelligent young Russian. There is a school of art, a public library, and, besides the gymnasium for the better class boys and a high school for the better class girls, there are thirty-two other schools, and all sorts of philanthropic institutions, including an orphan home.
The town is under the control of a municipality, elected every four years. It consists of sixty members, and the mayor is chosen from their number. The rates imposed are slight. Still I have seen some shrugging of the shoulders as to what becomes of all the money.
There are houses which for outward appearance rival some in Park Lane. The restaurant where I lunched and dined each day was Parisian, save that there was one of those huge hurdy-gurdy organs playing archaic music-hall tunes. Fancy “A Bicycle Made for Two” being played in Eastern Siberia!
The shops are fine. You can buy anything in them - even English patent medicines. There are drapery stores that seem like a bit of Regent Street. The hairdresser’s shop near my hotel was as well fitted up as any such establishment on the Boulevard des Italiens. The electric light blazed everywhere.
And yet with all these there is a rawness about Irkutsk that made me exclaim a hundred times, “It is just like a mushroom city in Western America.”
The roads were no better than tracks, either all dust or all mire. The pavement was a side walk of boards, some of which were missing. A grand new building had as neighbour a rough wooden shanty. All the sanitary arrangements were insanitary. Everything costs about three times as much as it does in London.
There is a small fortune awaiting the man who will build a good hotel. There are several hotels, but, while they are all dear, they are all dirty. I have met several Europeans here - Europeans as distinct from Russians - and after mutual agreement that the popular idea in England and America about Siberia is all wrong, the conversation has invariably turned to the domestic habits of the Russian people - which are not cleanly - then to the filthy state of the Irkutsk hotels, and finally - not a polite topic perhaps - to the size, behaviour, and intelligence of the Siberian bug.
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If of the towns I know I sought one that Irkutsk is really suggestive of, I would select San Francisco. Physically they are unlike. But the social atmosphere is the same. There is the same free-and-easy, happy-go-lucky, easy-come, easy-go, devil-may-care style of living.
All the business is one of dealing, importing European goods, re-selling to far-away towns in Siberia, working mines, buying skins, and exporting to Europe. The smash-ahead commercial people here are Russians from the Baltic provinces, really Germans. They are all energy. The Russian himself - with that ineradicable strain of the Tartar in him - is more dilatory. The impulsive Britisher or American, hustling about, is to him something of a madman -clever, but still mad.
Money-making in Irkutsk has been so easy for several generations that the new whirl that has come into the town with the Trans-Siberian Railway has startled even the millionaires. They are sturdy old men, most of them, with character written deep on their strong faces. For all the new-fangled Western ideas that have swept into the town they have a little contempt. Several of the wealthiest still keep to their rude peasant clothes.
But Irkutsk is beginning to put on airs, and even a grimy millionaire in red shirt and dirty top-boots will not be tolerated in the fashionable restaurants. A police order was issued recently that anyone not wearing a white shirt and collar could be refused admittance. Also there are notices stuck up requesting the guests not to get drunk, but to remember they belong to a civilised country!
This post is one of a series of excerpts from John Foster Fraser’s “The Real Siberia”. Further excerpts can be found in the Siberian Light archive.
The full text of The Real Siberia is available online at Friends & Partners.
