Field Notes from the Empire's Edge

Vladimir Arsenyev, a giant among Russian explorers, is little known in the West. He made his name a century ago in the Russian Far East, where he led survey teams thousands of kilometers across mountains and swamps, through blizzards and floods. Three of Arsenyev’s expeditions in the Ussuri Kray (in 1902, 1906, and 1907) were depicted in Akira Kurosawa’s Academy Award-winning film (1976), Dersu Uzala. [bit.ly/rl1609-dersu]

The Ussuri Kray, now called Primorsky Kray,* is the splinter of Russia that stretched along the western shores of the Sea of Japan. First-time visitors today are often surprised that, for a place in the heart of northeast Asia, there’s little apparent Asian influence. In fact, Primorsky Kray is decidedly Russian: the same ornate window frames seen in Golden Ring towns adorn houses here, and village stores are fragrant with the same aromas. As recently as a hundred years ago, however, the Kray was highly diverse; populated by a motley collection of Russian settlers, Chinese hunters, Korean farmers, and indigenous Udege and Nanai nomads.

The Ussuri Kray had been Chinese land until 1860, when a treaty transferred ownership to the tsar. The Russian Empire, eager to strengthen its foothold on the Pacific, offered incentives (similar to a program today bit.ly/rl1609a) to any of its subjects willing to start anew, sight unseen, in this far off land. Whereas the settlement incentive today is but a single hectare of land per settler, in 1861 peasants were lured by 109 hectares of land, no taxes for 20 years, and a waiver on military service for a decade.

Arsenyev first came to the region in 1900, as a 28-year-old military topographer tasked with leading teams to survey the mountains and forests of the Kray. His duties included assessing lands for possible future Russian settlement, mapping trails, and generally taking stock of the Russian Empire’s resources in the region.

Arsenyev’s formal education was at a military academy; ample training for the survey tasks at hand. But the young topographer was breathlessly fascinated by the diversities of nature and culture he found in the Ussuri Kray. History is fortunate that Arsenyev was gifted with a stubborn attention to detail and armed with an eloquent pen. In addition to his meticulously-drawn topographical maps, Arsenyev also outlined the systems of Chinese commerce in the Kray, described cold nights as a guest in Udege yurts, and cataloged the birds, mammals, insects, and vegetation he encountered.

In 1906 Arsenyev’s surveys took on additional urgency. The disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was fresh in citizen’s minds and exposed the Empire’s vulnerabilities. This led to Arsenyev’s first significant expedition: six months and 1,626 kilometers across the Ussuri Kray. He and his detachment of a dozen Siberian riflemen snaked up and down rivers, weaved back and forth over the crest of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, all the while assessing the commercial value of the forests, taking stock of wild game, and tallying the populations of Korean farmers, Russian Old Believers, and Chinese sable trappers. He described their daily routine:

We were able to cover 15 to 25 kilometers a day, depending on the terrain, the weather, and the kinds of things we did along the way. Campsites were always located somewhere near a stream. As the meal was prepared and tents set up, I had time to finish describing the route we had just walked. My colleagues dried plants, prepared bird specimens, packed insects in boxes, and cataloged geological material. We combined our lunch and dinner into one meal that we ate at about five o’clock. After that, rifle in hand, I’d investigate our surroundings, sometimes going so far that I wouldn’t make it back until after nightfall. The darkness would catch me on the trail, and those walks on moonlit nights in the forest have left indelible impressions on me. At about nine o’clock at night we’d drink tea one last time, then the riflemen would go about their own business cleaning rifles, mending clothes and footwear, straightening the saddles, and so on. During this time I’d record observations from the day in my journal.

It is important to note that the areas he explored were not wilderness untouched by human hand. Yes, the forests were vast, largely undisturbed, and full of wildlife, but Arsenyev and his team rarely bushwhacked. They typically followed a network of trails; lifelines connecting strings of Chinese hunting cabins or seasonal Udege settlements. While they camped in tents most of the time, they also spent the night in hunting cabins anytime the opportunity presented itself: respite from the rain, snow, or biting flies. Similarly, in the flatter, wider river valleys that supported agriculture, Arsenyev and his team were often guests of Chinese farmers; men with a half-dozen to dozen Chinese peasants that worked the fields of wheat, corn, millet, oats, poppy, tobacco, and more. Arsenyev, always meticulous with his notes, offered rare insights into daily life of the Chinese residents of the Kray:

The evening meal of these working men consisted of some watery corn gruel, a few pickled vegetables, and two small loaves of dark bread – that’s it. They ate in silence while squatting around the small table. After dinner, they undressed and lay on the sleeping platform. Some smoked tobacco, others drank tea, and they talked among themselves. This conversation lasted about an hour before talk started to slowly subside and was indiscernibly replaced by snores. The only oil lamp that remained lit was in the corner, where an old Chinese man smoked opium.

As I was still up working while my companions slept, the Chinese were under the impression that I was no more than a clerk, and it was in fact Anofriyev who was in charge. This conclusion was supported by their observations that it was he who constantly yelled at them, cursed, and chased them from the cleaner half of the hut, ensuring that they stayed in the workers’ quarters. I recalled that he acted the same way in other huts as well, and the Chinese feared him as though he were fire. When someone in our detachment couldn’t get something out of the workers, all they’d have to do was go talk to Anofriyev, who immediately made the Chinese yield and follow orders without complaint. It was clear to them who was in charge, and this news spread from hut to hut. There was nothing I could do about it. When I got up the next morning and asked the Chinese for tea, they pointed to a sleeping Anofriyev and whispered that we had to wait until the “captain himself” awoke. I went over, shook him awake, and asked him to make it happen. Anofriyev shouted at the Chinese and they got busy, bringing me some tea and steam-cooked buns.

There were few Russian villages in the Kray at the time – most were clustered in the fertile Lake Khanka lowlands and around the city of Vladivostok – and the further Arsenyev went into the mountains, the fewer Russians he encountered. For those he did meet, he learned that the transition to this new world had not necessarily been smooth. The first settlers to the Kray were transported by boat to the Sea of Japan coast; an exotic, humid place under the looming green and grey of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains. For these peasants, accustomed to the flat, open steppe, this was a landscape as foreign as the moon. Arsenyev recorded their story:

They told us about the hardships they endured their first years settling this strange land. They were brought to the Ussuri Kray in 1859 – dropped off at St. Olga Bay – and left to fend for themselves. They first established a small village called Novinka [“new”], which was only a kilometer inland from the bay, but they soon understood that the further they got from the coast, the less fog there was. So they relocated up the Vay-Fudzin River. By 1906, all that remained of Novinka was a single occupied house and empty spaces where the others had once stood.

The immigrants met more misfortune on the Vay-Fudzin. They naively planted fields low in the valley, and all their crops and hay were obliterated by the first flood. Tigers depredated all of their livestock and even started to attack the villagers. There was only one firearm among them, and it was a percussion lock at that. They resorted to working for the Chinese to keep from starving and were paid their wages in millet: 400 grams per day of work. Accounts were settled monthly, and it was up to the peasants to collect this millet themselves, which they hauled on their backs a distance of 68 kilometers.

In addition to relating his interactions with the human residents of the Kray, Arsenyev was meticulous in his descriptions of the natural world. He detailed his encounters with deer, wild boar, bears, and the kings of the Ussuri taiga: Amur tigers. In fact, tigers were never far from the minds of Arsenyev or his team. They regularly found tracks, heard roars, and saw them in the flesh on several occasions. In one notable event, a tiger approached Arsenyev and two companions (Zagursky and Turtygin) after dark, at their camp on a river bank:

I added some wood to the fire and began to write in my journal, when both dogs suddenly raised their heads and growled low. I stood up and looked around, saw nothing, but heard something moving away. “Probably a badger or a raccoon dog,” I thought, and returned to my task. Then I heard some pebbles loosen and fall to the left of camp. Something was moving down the embankment to the river; by my guess no more than 50 meters away. I shielded my eyes from the fire with my hands, and watched intently. The dogs were beside themselves with fear; Alpa huddled as deep in the lean-to as she could go. Then I heard something walking cautiously along the spit and the hollow crunch of pebbles yielding to its weight as it did so. This was not an ungulate. Red deer or sika deer tend to step with greater force, but it could not be anything smaller than that because body mass would not be sufficient to generate the sounds I was hearing. This was something large with wide, soft feet.

I heard the hollow jangle of pebbles moving toward the river, when suddenly I discerned a long, dark shape there. The word “tiger!” flashed through my mind. I blindly reached for my rifle without taking my eyes off the animal, but unluckily it was not within reach.

What followed next was chaos: I knocked into Zagursky as I grabbed for my rifle, and in turn the sleepy rifleman shoved one of the dogs. The terrified Alpa ran to the other side of the tent and sat on Turtygin’s head. At that moment I took my shot.
The animal, standing in the shallow water, emitted some curt noises that sounded like a snore, then leapt into the water and disappeared into the bushes on
the far bank.

Sleep was forgotten and the camp was in uproar. The men shouted and the dogs bayed. Everyone was saying what they had seen. Zagursky was convinced he had seen a wild boar, while Turtygin argued that it had been a bear. The dogs rushed barking away from the fire but immediately returned. They calmed only with the approach of dawn.

Arsenyev oftentimes described a location’s mood in addition as its physical attributes. Here he wrote of the magic of a warm summer evening:

The air was filled with bluish, flashing sparks – fireflies. The light they emitted was intermittent, and lasted no more than a second, and by following a single such spark, I could trace the flight of an individual insect. They didn’t all start at once; rather they appeared gradually, one by one. They say that some early Russian immigrants, seeing these blinking lights for the first time, shot at them in fear then ran off. And what I was seeing was not just a few insects – there were thousands upon thousands; possibly millions. They flew low to the ground and through the grasses; they hovered in bushes and rushed about above the trees. The insects blinked and the stars twinkled – it was a dance of light.

Suddenly, a bright flash lit everything up. A huge meteor swept across the sky, followed by a long tail. After a moment, the fireball disintegrated into a thousand sparks and fell somewhere on the far side of the mountains. The brightness in the sky and the phosphorescent insects disappeared as if a magic wand had been waved. Two or three minutes passed, then a single light flickered once more in the bushes, followed by another, then ten more. Half a minute later the sky was once again filled with thousands of these circling, glowing elves.

Arsenyev was the perfect person to be wandering the forests in that place and time; an articulate profiler of the Ussuri Kray at its most culturally diverse and biologically rich. Indeed, Arsenyev’s ability to distill a moment to its essence is a key reason for his enduring legacy.

Today, landmarks across Primorsky Kray bear Arsenyev’s name: a city, a river, museums, and streets. With his words, Arsenyev started a conversation with generations of Russians about the wonders of the Kray; dialogue that continues today.

As I walk the same forests Arsenyev did, my Russian colleagues and I regularly point out bends in the river where Arsenyev camped, mountain passes where some adventure unfolded, or comment on the same majestic views that caught his eye. Arsenyev devoted his life to studying and describing the Ussuri Kray and, in doing so, wove himself inextricably into its fabric; a symbiosis of man and place. RL

* Kray is the Russian word for region, but also edge, thus Ukraine = “at the edge” of the Russian empire.

Jonathan Slaght’s full transation of Arsenyev’s writings have been published as Across the Ussuri Krai, by Vladimir Arsenyev, available directly from Indiana University Press (bit.ly/rl1609-ussuri), through online sellers like Amazon, and through fine brick and mortar booksellers.