Executive Times
		2006 Book Reviews
		River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
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	Journey Jeffrey Tayler’s new book, River of No Reprieve, tells the story of the 2,400 mile journey he took with a guide on a raft on the Lena River, re-creating the path the Cossacks followed in the 17^th century that set Russia’s eastern border, and annexed Siberia for Ivan the Terrible. The people and places on this journey will keep readers engaged throughout. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 4, pp. 32-35: Coaxed out of sleep by the mosquito’s whine, the horsefly’s buzz, or the plaintive ha-hoo! ha-hoo! of a cuckoo perched somewhere in the taiga high above us, I now found awakening in my tent a languorous transition from dreamland into a pristine world without the carks, cares, or accoutrements that often intruded on my life back home. I had with me no alarm clock, no computer, no access to e-mail (or mail of any sort, of course), no telephone, no bills to pay, no deadlines to meet. Even the shortwave radio I carried proved less useful than expected, given that we were due north of China and heading for the Arctic; for the most part, the only news bulletins I could get were in Chinese. The civilized world lost its grip on me, and I lived according to the rhythms and exigencies of our voyage, immersing myself in the sounds and smells of the moment. So far, at least, far from vexing me with “wild villagers,” the Lena was granting me a peace that I had rarely known. Our fourth dawn found us camped on an incurved bank beneath a soaring forested slope. The scent of pine needles drifted down on the breeze and permeated my first moments of wakefulness. My eyes opened to focus on the silhouettes of more newly hatched dragonflies drying their wings on the walls of my tent. I unzipped the door and stepped barefoot onto rounded crunching pebbles to observe the river’s crystalline currents flowing over a white stony bed. The sun had not yet surmounted the sopki, but it beamed its rays from beneath the horizon, tinting pink the puffy clouds set against a firmament of blue céleste. Vadim had gone fishing, so I was alone on the bank. I turned to face the firs behind me: how silent they were, how deep the hollows beneath their majestic boughs! The noisy skylarks and magpies and crows of western Russia were nowhere to be seen. Several minutes passed before I detected audible signs of life: the faint dwindling screech of a hawk, the throaty grunt-caw of a raven. Sleeping land, I thought, sleeping land. Fifty yards upriver a stream burbled down the sopka into the Lena, a cottony mist clinging to its surface like some sort of vaporous fur. At its mouth Vadim was rowing our boat among bobbing bottle floats, retrieving the fishing nets he had set the previous evening. Twenty minutes later he was standing at my side, dumping his catch, still twitching and gasping, onto the pebbles: okun’ (perch), footlong and golden green; and krasnoperka, a larger, greener fish resembling a walleye. He set about cleaning them, ripping out the gills, slicing open and gutting the bellies, hacking off the heads. “The krasnoperka, with its tiny scales, will be good for smoking,” he said. “I’ll salt the okun’ and we can fry it for dinner.” “How are you going to smoke fish out here?” He pointed with his chin at what looked like a charred metal shoe-box with grass sticking out from beneath the lid. “In that. You’ll see. You’ll never have tasted better fish. It will be much better than that prefabricated crap Americans eat.” “Not all Americans eat TV dinners. I don’t.” “America doesn’t have its own cuisine. Your national dish is hamburgers. I just can’t understand how you can stand it. And why do people rave about Italian or French food?” He grabbed a flapping okun’ and severed its head. “Macaroni and snails!” “Aren’t you being a little close-minded? Don’t you think you —” “Westerners ought to look at how Russians eat and learn from us. What people has suffered the most in history? Russians! This means we’ve learned an awful lot, much more than peoples who live in luxury, like you all. So watch and learn.” Apart from excoriating city dwellers, Vadim had talked little since Ust’-Kut. But if the tone of his few words grated, he was here expressing stereotypical ideas about the West common enough in Russia. The morning was too beautiful for an argument. I dropped the subject and returned to my tent to pack. A day later we were sailing past rounded bluffs of tawny limestone, five hundred feet high and striated diagonally with reddened rivulets — what locals call shchoki (cheeks). In the West, where the peaks of the Rocky Mountains or the valleys of the Alps stand as examples of nature’s artistic flair, the shchoki might not really impress, but they excited Vadim to cries of wonder; after all, mountains are rare across most of Russia, and sopki here generally repose under a dense layer of taiga. Throughout the trip he would display a zealous appreciation for natural beauty equaled only by his contempt for mankind. The cheeks didn’t last long, and eventually the taiga receded from the banks to leave clearings from which scattered trash and scrap metal announced the town of Kirensk, just around the bend at the confluence of the Lena and the Kirenga, a river emptying out of the wilderness to the south. Wrecked barges and ruined boats soon littered the shores, but between them stretched beaches teeming with bathers. Mothers frolicked in the shallows with their children; grandmothers in plastic bathing caps and one-piece swimsuits sunbathed standing, as Russians often do, posed like Hellenic statues with flabby midriffs and varicose veins; shirtless men with bronzed arms and sallow chests sat around campfires, roasting kebabs on skewers, now and then raising shot glasses for a toast and a gulp. Then a dirt road began paralleling the river, and along it putted 1930s—style motorcycles with sidecars, their leather-helmeted drivers bouncing up and down and swerving to avoid potholes. Finally, ahead, beneath more limestone bluffs, we spotted Kirensk, a colorful hodgepodge of slatted wooden houses interspersed with drooping poplars that formed a crown of foliage atop a hilly island in midriver. This was the old town; newer Soviet-era neighborhoods stood on the banks, marked with cranes and petrol barges. Vadim grumbled. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I hate returning to civilization.” “Civilization? Kirensk is pretty remote.” “Well, there’ll be drunks and thieves here. After all, it’s a town. Where’re we going to camp?” A good question. We steered around Kirensk and made for a low island a half-mile downriver, and pulled up to the shelter of a willow grove at its head. Beneath the trees, tufts of chartreuse grass sprouted on soggy ground sloping up toward a meadow. Vadim steered us into an inlet that led right to the grove. Just above the mud, on dry ground, we put up camp. “A lot of islands on the Lena disappear under the springtime floods, but not this one,” he said. “I think it’ll do for now.” Later I learned that this was Monastyrskiy Ostrov (Monastery Island) — home only to a shepherd, a cowherd, and a few bedraggled animals enjoying cloistral solitude beneath the limestone cheeks. Greedy for yasak, in 1628 the Cossack Vasily Bugor quit Yeniseysk and headed east into the taiga, leading a division often men. Down the rapids of the Indirma River to the Kut they sailed and portaged, emerging — with much relief, to be sure — a year later onto the Lena’s tranquil expanses. In 1630 they reached the Kirenga. Loaded down with furs collected on the way, Bugor returned to Yeniseysk, leaving four men on the midriver island to build a zimov’ye (an insulated, well-stocked shelter) in which to pass the winter. The next year the thirtystrong Cossack division of Petr Beketov arrived with orders to secure Muscovy’s hold on the Lena by expanding the zimov’ye into a pogost, a noun that now means “churchyard” but that once probably meant “gathering place for a region obliged to pay tribute to the tsar.” In Siberia, the Russian quest for wealth went hand in hand with the spread of Orthodox Christianity, as did the search for gold and proselytizing in the conquest of the New World taking place on the other side of the planet at the same time. Beketov christened the pogost in honor of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia and the protector of travelers, and charged his men with collecting yasak from the Evenks, animal herders roaming the surrounding taiga. (The pogost became Kirensk only in 1775.) On the whole, collection from the animist tribes went peaceably, and Cossacks married Evenk women, thereby acquiring knowledgeable guides who swore fealty to the tsar and helped in exploring Siberia. Eventually Bugor returned to the Lena, but he and his men ended badly. Some years later, they sailed downriver to the ostrog of Yakutsk, fell out with its despotic Cossack administrator, and suffered imprisonment, but managed to escape. Once free, they turned renegade, plundering other Cossacks of yasak, boats, and provisions. Vicarious armchair adventurers don’t have to deal with the weather Tayler and his guide encountered, and all the images have to come from the descriptions in the book. Tayler doesn’t skimp on describing what they see and feel. River of No Reprieve presents a description of places most readers will never see and a journey few would ever take. That special nature makes this book a special joy to read. Steve Hopkins, October 25, 2006
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