Siberia

THE ROAD TO OBLIVION--Vladimir Zenzinov & Isaac Don Levine--McBride ($3).

Three times Revolutionist Vladimir Zenzinov was sent to Siberia by the Tsarist Government. Twice he escaped; the third time he served his full four-year term. In this book he tells about it.

The Siberian village to which he was assigned was 7,300 miles distant. Guarded by a Cossack, he made the trip by rail, on foot, aboard barges, by horse-team, reindeer, dogs. Zenzinov planned to escape again when he had reached his destination, the six-house village of Russkoye Ustye, but when he got there found it was too isolated, too far from everywhere. "There were no relations with the outside world. Fish was the constant food all the year round. Bread was unobtainable. Traders did not come there. . . ." He settled down in his "house" (six feet by six), prepared to make the best of things. It was cold. In winter he could never get the temperature in his room higher than 50DEG. Outside it would be anything from 40DEG to 72DEG below Zero.

Zenzinov got along well with the northern natives, who thought he was a wonderworker. None of them had ever seen a lamp before. "No one knew how bread was raised. . . . They had never seen milk or butter. . . . Neither the women nor the children had ever beheld a living tree." (Their firewood was flotsam from the Indigirka River.) The natives had plenty of caviar but did not know how to treat it, usually gave it to the dogs.

One year Zenzinov went with the village hunters on their annual wild-goose chase to the Arctic Ocean. In the summer when they are moulting, wild geese cannot fly. Siberian goose-hunters surround a moulting flock in their canoes, maneuver them into a low enclosure on the land, jump in and wring their necks. The carcasses are buried on the spot; when winter comes they are dug up, fed to the dogs.

But Russkoye Ustye began to pall after a time. Zenzinov had been given permission to move around anywhere in the district. Again with the idea of eventual escape, he set out to Verkhoyansk, "the pole of cold." This village was many miles to the south but set in a basin where cold air settles and few winds blow. Zenzinov one day in January, 1913 noted a temperature of 95.4DEG below Zero. In Verkhoyansk, says he, if "you take a glass of water and dash it high into the air, the liquid will come down in the form of ringing crystals of ice. Spittle will freeze before reaching the ground. . . . Live wood becomes petrified, and when one chops it, sparks fly as if from flint. . . . Even rum would freeze in my traveling flask. Only pure alcohol withstood the cold."

Zenzinov left Verkhoyansk by reindeer sled in a last attempt to escape; had it not been for the alcohol he carried with him he might have succeeded. Encamped one night with a Chukchi herder Zenzinov foolishly gave him some alcohol to drink. The Chukchi liked it so much he kept Zenzinov a prisoner until a Russian trader came along, rescued him. By that time the authorities had their eye on Zenzinov again; he gave up hope, served out his term.

A revolutionist but no Bolshevik, Vladimir Zenzinov was later a member of the Government in the Urals which fought against the Soviets in 1918. When Dictator Alexander Kolchak overthrew the Ural Government Zenzinov escaped, now lives in Paris, foments trouble for the Soviets.

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