Vladimir Alekseevich Chivilikhin

"Have you turned your attention to the way in which Vladimir Chivilikhin ends his essays on the Siberian woods?" asks Aleksandr Petrovich Kazarkin, a critic and docent at Kemerovo State University. "Double and triple afterwords and epilogues—that is, a chronicle of ever-mounting calamity. Is that not why the two-volume Pamiat 'exploded in the popular consciousness, because the novel struck a nerve regarding a superproblem—the prehistory of the ecological crisis?"^[87]

Like the ethnographer Lev Gumilëv, Chivilikhin believed that the major sources of life and hope and meaning are the people's national memory, especially their shared environmental experience. "The Russian people have never lived without forests and can never do so," insisted Chivilikhin.^[88]

Chivilikhin was not always the Russian nationalist–environmental determinist of his later works, particularly Pamiat , which won him a USSR State Prize in 1982. He began as a Soviet patriot, in the very thick of the Komsomol movement—a journalist and then editor of the newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda . Nonetheless, his provincial Siberian background provided the seeds of Russian chauvinism. Born in the coal-rich Kuzbas of southwest Siberia, he studied in Mariinsk and Taiga before completing his education at Moscow State University. One of his earliest literary heroes and models was Leonid Leonov, who began to smuggle in themes of "Russian" nature from the late 1940s.^[89] Chivilikhin was already influenced by an incipient body of works in Russian letters voicing the tragic trope of the desecration of the Russian land and of heroic efforts to save that land. But, like Leonov, Chivilikhin had not yet disentangled the two not always compatible ideologies of Soviet patriotism and Russian nationalism. Only as a result of the bruising struggle over Kedrograd did the Russian element come to full consciousness.

Later, Chivilikhin would identify Leonov as the fount of his new ideology of literary Russian environmental nationalism: "In the novels of Leonov we may first notice the linkage between national character and the forest. . . . The books of Leonov breathe 'Russia' . . . and in them are the cast and logic of the Russian mind."^[90] One only need look at the list of contributors to the various anthologies dedicated to and honoring Leonov's opus to appreciate his position as the godfather of this current.

Like Leonov, Chivilikhin was not actually against exploiting the taiga; the question was how : "Logging the taiga is necessary: there are trees rotting in it, and priceless national wealth is going to waste—marvelous construction materials, irreplaceable chemical raw materials and food supplies. But the time has come when we need soberly to weigh the resources of the taiga and to give serious thought to how to operate in that environment so that the taiga will produce the most benefit for the people."^[91]

Kazarkin writes that "the works of Chivilikhin from the mid-1950s have sketched a scene of a thoughtless and therefore terrible process of the destruction of forests over a great territory from Arkhangel'sk to Vladivostok." By the late 1960s, Chivilikhin began to see this as nothing less than a struggle for the cultural and physical survival of the Russian people: "This foundation is the reserve of national ecological ideas, the people's perceptions about the land as their fate and about history as a link between the generations."^[92] The deciding battle would be fought in Siberia.^[93]

Like Gumilëv, Chivilikhin developed a notion of "the ecology of culture." Such an ecology was, in the words of Kazarkin, "that which insures its stability, a reserve of resilience of its way of life, an unsullied consciousness of one's identity, which is oriented toward things vital and permanent. One wants to call his historical conception a 'forest' conception."^[94] The forest, for Chivilikhin, was the key to the survival of the Russian people during the years of Mongol-Tatar rule. Only forested Rus' preserved the pure genotype of the Russian people and their cultural heritage. Vladimir Chivilikhin was the "writer-intercessor  . . .  sent by the Siberian forests to plead the case for living nature." "The natural environment creates what, poetically, we call the soul of the people and in reality determines the salient characteristics of national culture. In preserving our traditional natural environment the people can count on preserving their creative originality. A writer as far back as N[ikolai] Leskov said it—the Russian character is impossible to imagine without [Russia's] expanses of forest."^[95] This struggle to preserve the alleged aboriginal arboreal environment of the Russian people also took place in Siberia, according to Chivilikhin; he held that as far back as the first centuries of this millennium proto-Europeans there (Di, or Dinlins) had been in conflict with the Huns. Their descendants today, Chivilikhin claimed, are the Ket.^[96] If the Russian people were to survive, they needed to preserve not one but two key elements undergirding Russian culture: the (Siberian) forest and cultural memory. For Chivilikhin they were intertwined, for at the center of the people's memory was the memory of the forest. And when a people forgets its folkways, Chivilikhin believed, echoing Gumilëv, it becomes a "a rapacious mongrel-group" (khishchnaia khimera ) bringing environmental (and then cultural) collapse upon itself.

By 1967, when he was awarded Komsomol's special medal for his reportage on Kedrograd, Chivilikhin openly paraded his urgent concern for the survival of the Russian people. At the time, it took a bit of daring to cast the ethnic Russians as an oppressed group, particularly in an organization officially dedicated to promoting Soviet patriotism, which strove therefore to replace ethnic particularism with a "supraethnic" Soviet nationality, even if the cultural forms of that nationality, including language, were derived in good part from the Russian one. "The past of our people, our fathers and mothers," the Russian past—the embodiment of historical memory,

that organ of national survival—was under attack from within and without, warned Chivilikhin. With pain and resentment he spoke of "attempts to insult and denigrate, to devalue that which is dearest to us."^[97]

Chivilikhin did seek to soften the Russocentric core of his message. "I am introducing this subject," he continued, "because in several works of literature, and, unfortunately, not only in antisocial [podonochnye] underground publications, there is a tendency to paint Russians, for example, as a meek people, passively enduring torments, weak, without will and dull-witted, incapable of attaining the heights of culture and at the same time nationally self-centered, and there are attempts as well to belittle other nations inhabiting our Motherland."^[98] Above all, Chivilikhin was concerned to refute the "Western," cosmopolitan assessment of Russia as backward and especially as weak:

At the beginning of this century my people, allegedly willing to put up with any suffering, under the leadership of the Bolshevik party and the great Lenin, together with other peoples . . . made three social revolutions and [then] saved the world from fascism. The Russian people gave the world Pushkin and Lenin, built Rostov and Kizhi, and in our day the Soviet people . . . built Magnitka and Dneproges, Bratsk and Rudnyi, . . . and were first to go to space! Meanwhile, heroes of stories and films pronounce even such words as ancestor or patriot with a kind of loathing snickering intonation!^[99]

To these snickers of the cosmopolites, Chivilikhin quoted Voronezh poet Vladimir Gordeichev's response:

And when over the ashes of patriots
Foreign wits amuse themselves
I stand up to meet their barbs
Baring my boils unflinchingly.^[100]

Later, after his epic Pamiat'appeared, Chivilikhin provided an emotional credo in response to an interviewer who wanted to know why he had "focused precisely on the history of the soul of the people":

I am a Russian and my heart overflows with love for my homeland, for the path she has trod, and I am grateful to her for the happiness of living on Russian soil. Our people—builders and warriors—has something to be proud of. It is the only people on the face of the earth that has withstood three world-scale invasions. And my duty before the past, before the land that has sustained me and raised me, is to dedicate myself to studying the history of my people.^[101]

The highest contribution anyone could make was to preserve and disseminate the nation's history. Sounding like a Stalinist cultural boss of the late 1940s, Chivilikhin said that the historian's task was to remind the people of Russia's greatness, of its innumerable priorities: "Memory is one of the strongest weapons on earth."^[102]

Throughout Chivilikhin's writings the tincture of an anti-steppe, anti-

steppe peoples, and anti-Asian bias is discernible, as is Chivilikhin's conviction that ethnic differences are deeply engraved: "Yes, humans have only one Earth, but if we try to apply this standard to our theme, then what disorder and confusion we discover in our common human home, the biosphere, what a complex, variegated, and changeable picture of the world emerges, what striking dissimilarities exist among the historical, geographical, social, and other conditions of life for every people!"^[103]

Contra Gumilëv, whose accounts softened the destructive impact of the Mongols, Chivilikhin restores the Mongolian invasion to the level of an epic historical trauma.^[104] One region, however, escaped the burden of Russia's traumatic history. During an interview the journalist Ol'ga Plakhotnaia once told Chivilikhin: "Vladimir Alekseevich, I know that you have a special feeling for Siberia, your homeland." Chivilikhin's response again reflected his belief that the Siberians were the purest, the most "Russian" of Russians, to the extent that they had evaded the effects and aftereffects of the Mongolian yoke, serfdom, and the taint of Western invaders and immigrants: "Siberians are a punctual, hardworking, and knowledgeable narod .  .  .  . Almost every summer I come down with a 'Siberia' attack and travel to my homeland, to Baikal, the Sayans, the Altai." Siberia, a land of "strong characters and uncorrupted language," with its forests, was the new hearth of Russia.^[105] As a prototype and standard of Russian nature, Siberia remained at the center of Chivilikhin's concerns even while the "battle for Kedrograd" was still raging.

After Chivilikhin's first articles, a flood of letters came to Kedrograd from all over the USSR complaining of other abuses. Among the topics most frequently brought up by his correspondents was that of the threats to Lake Baikal. In 1962 while still in Kedrograd, Chivilikhin wrote his "Sacred Eye of Siberia" (Svetloe oko Sibiri ) dedicated to the lake's problems, one of the first wake-up calls on the threat to Baikal from military-related nylon and cellulose mills on the lake's southern shore.^[106] Chivilikhin also turned his attention to the problem of land use, seeking to publish a long essay called "Land in Trouble" (Zemlia v bede ). Here, however, Chivilikhin began to run up against the hand of the censor, who banned half of the manuscript and the title besides. The remainder of the essay was eventually published under the title "The Land—Our Food-Giver" (Zemlia -kormilitsa ), an alternative suggested by the helpful censor.^[107]

With his critique of economic structures such as the Baikal plants and the sovnarkhozy it would seem as though Chivilikhin were inching toward a critique of the Soviet system based on an analysis of its political economy. However, a culturally and ethnically based critique proved easier and more attractive to him (and others). In contrast to a seductively slick cultural model based on "Western cunning," Chivilikhin praised the honest young people like the volunteers of Kedrograd, who were continuing the fight for the soul of Russia:

The voting folk don't complain; whining and skepticism is alien to their nature. . . . Our everyday heroes think, they struggle, and they are accumulating experience in the social defense of our natural resources. They don't intend to . . . use cunning or chemical trickery to win their cause. . . . To remain on the moral high ground, to maintain their lifelong youthful ardor for work, to keep their principled political attitudes—that is the task for them and for all of us! And meanwhile I have faith that the economic reforms taken on the initiative of the Party will be extended to other spheres, in particular to that of resource use, or else we shall impoverish our native land and consequently impoverish ourselves, both materially and spiritually. . . . Love of nature, like love for the Motherland, is not only in the sphere of feelings but in the sphere of deeds as well. And here, facing the Komsomol, is an enormous unplowed field, virgin lands in every direction.^[108]

Despite his Komsomol background and his opposition to the "fetishizing of nature," Chivilikhin's attitudes toward modern mechanized society remained ambivalent:

Does the introduction of such good things as electricity and residential neighborhoods obligatorily have to be accompanied by the crushing of the flowers? Must industrial beauty replace natural beauty? . . . Why then were the people of Krasnoiarsk able to preserve a large tract of "wild" taiga right in the middle of their city? Why haven't they leveled the taiga, then, in Angarsk and Akademgorodok, but instead integrated their residential areas into it? . . . All of that, however, amounts to a few small islands of good relations with nature in a sea of evil.^[109]

In another work Chivilikhin's antiurban feelings were more explicit, as he quoted Le Corbusier's observation that "cities were dangerous and unworthy machines for life in our epoch." Indeed, Chivilikhin himself added, "the specter of urbanization hangs like a black shadow on the horizon."^[110]

The question was how to allow those islands of good to triumph over that sea of evil. Was it simply a matter of culture, or was that evil embedded somehow in the structural aspects of the system? "My lifelong and difficult love—the cedar—the symbol of powerful and generous Siberian nature . . . to this day mercilessly is being logged out with impunity all across Siberia despite a special clause banning that in the Law on Nature Protection," he protested.^[111] True, writers could make a difference; "by its urgency the problem of nature protection is the theme of the age," he declared in 1978.^[112] Yet, as he complained to Leonov, the rapacious bureaucrats and managers did not read, or at least were not affected by what they did read.

To improve the environment, in the last analysis, human societies needed to be harmonized and humanized, argued Chivilikhin. The "fullest development of the human personality," as he understood it, needed to take precedence over industrial production. That meant taking the road back to the Volk . "The aggression of 'mass culture,' the total illiteracy of almost a bil-

lion people, the standardization of life, violence, the spirit of acquisitiveness [priobretatel'stvo ], the forgetting of the principles of humanism, cosmopolitan stereotypes in art," as well as the arms race and the greed of the well-off countries were at the root of the global environmental and cultural crisis. Beckoning as a lone, arduous way out was "the tormented processes of national, creative, self-expression . . . the only guarantee of the spiritual development of the world."^[113]

Chivilikhin's ideological odyssey was repeated by Fatei Shipunov and resembled the attitudes of Soloukhin, Rasputin, Viktor Astaf'ev, Proskurin, Shukshin, and a host of others. These represented a new set of social actors—journalists, writers, foresters, engineers, and other ordinary people—distinct from the "lost tribe" of ecologists, botanists, zoologists, and geographers who were still fighting on behalf of "pristine" nature and the zapovednik ideal. This new group was composed of upwardly mobile beneficiaries of the system who had conformed but who felt disillusioned and betrayed. What pushed these otherwise average Soviet subjects into environmental activism was the sense that their environmental "homeland" was being destroyed and that the system on its own would not stop it. Whereas the Moscow-and Leningrad-based naturalists looked to their Western colleagues for information, solidarity, and new approaches, seeing themselves as part of an international community tackling global problems, the new stratum of activists concerned over the despoliation of Russia regarded that cosmopolitan, "Western" orientation as one of the main sources of the problem. For ethnic Russians, ironically, the nationalist-environmental movement was more democratic and inclusive; ethnicity, not erudition, was the only criterion for membership.^[114]

United in their outrage over the bureaucrats' wanton and heedless attitudes toward such rare and disappearing habitats as the Altai "cedar" forests and Lake Baikal and over their treatment of the students, the cosmopolites and the nationalists joined together to give these struggles unusually high visibility in the early 1960s. The MGU druzhina and the kedrogradtsy worked together, despite the strains generated by their vastly different backgrounds. These "camps" continued to cooperate on such other major issues as the river-diversion project of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but this cooperation tended to occlude an important underlying reality: the existence of not one, but several environmental movements. The divorce of kedrogradets Fatei Shipunov and druzhinnik Maria Cherkasova is a metaphor for the eventual fate of the temporarily unified strands of the Russian environmental movement.