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| Ulan Ude |
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| Russia |
The central Soviet Square sports the city’s only item of note – a giant head of Lenin (see later). From there a wide pedestrian street called, inevitably, Lenin Street descends some 800 metres to the half-restored Cathedral. Lenin Street has fountains and modern sculptures and is lined with some of the town’s less dowdy shops; elsewhere there is little but rattling trams, soviet-style apartment blocks and soviet-style industrial dereliction. So soviet is the town, in fact, that in cold war days Ulan Ude was closed to foreigners - more, one feels, in a spirit of Stalinist bloody-mindedness than because it had anything to excite a western spy.
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| Lenin Street, Ulan Ude |
Svieta's Apartment
Andre met us at the station and drove us the short
distance to a dingy courtyard behind a forbidding apartment block. In the
semi-darkness of the stair-well we lugged our cases up to the third floor and
Andre knocked gently on a heavily armoured metal door. Had we been met by a
nervous, shifty-eyed dissident and passwords been hissed through clenched jaws
I would not have been surprised. In reality, we were welcomed by a smiling,
diminutive old lady who introduced herself as Svieta and ushered us into her
equally diminutive apartment.
Andre left as we chose one of the two basic but clean
guest rooms. The third room, which contained a television as well as a bed, was
Svieta’s. It seemed she either lay down or stood up, sitting in chairs was not
part of her repertoire. There was a tiny kitchen and an even smaller bathroom
with an ancient shower. We made good use of this pleasingly efficient antique
while Svieta bustled about in the kitchen preparing breakfast.
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| Rattling soviet tram - the view from Svieta's apartment, Ulan Ude |
Ivolgonsk Datsan
Clean and relaxed we sipped black tea, nibbled equally
black bread and enjoyed a mound of scrambled egg lurking beneath the inevitable
carpet of dill. As we finished, a tap on the door signalled the return of
Andre, who was to drive us to the Ivolginsk Datsan some thirty kilometres from
town.
Once beyond the urban sprawl, we were in rolling open grassland with a big sky and low hills on a distant horizon; steppes which stretch all the way from Lake Baikal to the fringe of the Gobi desert.
The highway was narrow, but well surfaced and more than adequate for the small volume of traffic. At one junction a sign pointed 450 km back to Irkutsk, a journey which had taken us twelve hours. The Trans-Siberian Railway is real enough, but the Trans-Siberian Express exists only in fiction.
A distinctive low hill became a prominent landmark. From a distance it resembled a breaking wave, but closer to we could see it was more of a cone with a shattered apex. The hill stood above the small wooden town of Ivolginsk. In a circle below its peak stones spelled out Om Mane Padme Om in Cyrillic.
It was strange visiting a Buddhist temple in Russia,
particularly in the company of Andre, a local man of obvious European descent.
Ulan Ude is the capital of the Buryat Republic, a constituent republic of the
Russian Federation, and the Buryats, like their Mongolian cousins, are
traditionally Buddhist. Very possibly, the Mongols are not so much cousins as
exactly the same people. Buryatia has been Russian since the seventeenth
century and whilst Inner and Outer Mongolia suffered under imperial Chinese
rule, the Buryats traded with the incoming Russians and enjoyed comparative
freedom and prosperity.
The Buryat Republic
“Have you heard of the Old Believers?” Andre asked as he
piloted his Lada out of the courtyard, which seemed a little less dingy and
forbidding now the sun was fully up. I had been reading about them and found
them a strange, even lunatic bunch, which, fortunately, was not what I said as
Andre’s next remark was: “My mother was an Old Believer.”
I could think of no appropriate reply, but Andre did not
seem to want one, and anyway we were on our way to a Buddhist temple.
Once beyond the urban sprawl, we were in rolling open grassland with a big sky and low hills on a distant horizon; steppes which stretch all the way from Lake Baikal to the fringe of the Gobi desert.
The highway was narrow, but well surfaced and more than adequate for the small volume of traffic. At one junction a sign pointed 450 km back to Irkutsk, a journey which had taken us twelve hours. The Trans-Siberian Railway is real enough, but the Trans-Siberian Express exists only in fiction.
A distinctive low hill became a prominent landmark. From a distance it resembled a breaking wave, but closer to we could see it was more of a cone with a shattered apex. The hill stood above the small wooden town of Ivolginsk. In a circle below its peak stones spelled out Om Mane Padme Om in Cyrillic.
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| Om Mane Padme Om, Ivolginsk |
The Buryat Republic
In the early twentieth century, Sukhbaator’s communist-inspired rebellion freed Outer Mongolia from the Chinese, although Inner
Mongolia remained, and still is, a province of China. The Russians liked having
a buffer state between them and the imperial giant to the east, particularly
after they had murdered Sukhbaator and installed their own man to lead the new
Mongolian Republic. Realising that Russia’s Mongol population might be glancing
enviously at an independent Mongolia run, ostensibly, by Mongolians, Stalin set
out to create a distinctive Buryat identity as dissimilar as possible from
Mongolian culture. The policy has been partly successful. Buryats still have a
love of archery and an insatiable appetite for mutton, just like Mongolians,
but while many Mongolians remain nomadic herdsmen, Buryats are settled, living
in Ulan Ude or one of the many typically Russian villages of wooden houses and
grassy streets. The policy has been aided by the influx of Russians, which has
continued unabated since the seventeenth century so that today Buryats are
out-numbered two to one in their own country.
Before the revolution, there were hundreds of Datsans in Buryatia and thousands of monks, but by the 1930’s the Datsans had all been closed and the monks dispatched to the Gulags. In the 1940s Stalin decided it was time for more religious tolerance and Ivolginsk was among the results.
The Datsan, which opened in 1947 on a site carefully chosen by astrologers, is a large, flat rectangular compound surrounded by a low wall. We paid our photography fee and entered. A couple of lack-lustre stalls selling trinkets, fridge magnets and religious gewgaws guarded the entrance, but little effort was made to sell us anything. The officially post-communist Russians have taken to petty capitalism with far less flair than the still officially communist Chinese.
Inside the compound, the structures were largely wooden;
the style of the temples and stupas reminiscent of Tibet, whilst other
buildings are clearly Russian.
We ambled in the approved clockwise direction, wandering
in and out of temples inspecting statues of the Buddha, thangkas and libraries
of tantric texts. Compared with other Buddhist temples there is little special about
Ivolginsk and the most sacred and perhaps the strangest sight is not for
general viewing. In 1927, Dasha-Dorjo Itigelov, the 12th Khambo Lama (the head
of Russian Buddhism) died whilst at prayer. In accordance with his wishes, he
was buried in the lotus position and dug up at regular intervals, in the belief
that the physical bodies of those who have attained Nirvana do not decay. In
1955, 1973 and again 2002 he was found to be remarkably well – for a man of his
age and condition. After the most recent exhumation, the current Khambo Lama decreed that Dasha-Dorjo
should henceforth sit in a
glass case in an upstairs room. Devotees may pay their respects on one
of the seven sacred days in the year. He was not open for business the day we
visited.
Temples are a reflection of those who use them. In
materialistic Hong Kong, where spirituality lies well hidden, temple visits are
a way of assuring good luck. An act of devotion is followed by a visit to the
fortune-tellers who pronounce on the likely success of their latest venture. In
Beijing, years of state atheism have made temple-goers unsure of what they are
supposed to do, and there is much giggling and confusion. By contrast, pilgrims
in Lhasa form a sweeping clockwise tide encircling palaces and temples, twirling
their prayer wheels. Inside, among the jostling throngs, the atmosphere is of
intense spirituality, the pilgrim’s belief as powerful as the odour of wood
smoke and yak-butter they carry with them.
At Ivolginsk, however, atmosphere seemed absent. The monastery
is of the same Yelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect as the Tibetans; the Dalai Lama
himself has made several visits, but still I felt we were seeing not so much a living
temple as a museum. Buryatia is, allegedly, undergoing a Buddhist revival but at
Ivolginsk there were few visitors, no tourists except us, and the monks kept a
low profile. In Lhasa the prayer wheels turn incessantly, the bearings are
always oiled and the handles polished by the devoted grasp of generations of
pilgrims. Here we could have been the first to turn the creaky wheels that day,
or maybe even that week.
Seeds from a sacred Bo Tree – the tree under which the
Buddha sat and meditated – were brought from Delhi in 1956 and the result is
carefully enclosed in a glasshouse. On a summer’s day it might well have felt
comfortable, but the Siberian winter is not the winter of northern India so it
needs the protection. It looked well enough, for a plant so far from its
natural habitat. Buddhism, on the other hand, has been in Buryatia for millennia
and was once well acclimatised; now it too seems in need of the glasshouse
treatment.
As we left Ivolginsk Lynne remarked how peaceful and
spiritual it had been, so my take on it is clearly not the only one. We drove
westwards for a while, then, as the road swung left to by-pass a village of
wooden houses Andre swung right and took us down the main street.
Before the revolution, there were hundreds of Datsans in Buryatia and thousands of monks, but by the 1930’s the Datsans had all been closed and the monks dispatched to the Gulags. In the 1940s Stalin decided it was time for more religious tolerance and Ivolginsk was among the results.
The Datsan, which opened in 1947 on a site carefully chosen by astrologers, is a large, flat rectangular compound surrounded by a low wall. We paid our photography fee and entered. A couple of lack-lustre stalls selling trinkets, fridge magnets and religious gewgaws guarded the entrance, but little effort was made to sell us anything. The officially post-communist Russians have taken to petty capitalism with far less flair than the still officially communist Chinese.
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| Ivolginsk Datsan |
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| Monk and stupas, Ivolginsk Datsan |
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| At Ivolginsk Datsan |
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| Turning a prayer wheel, Ivolginsk Datsan |
“This is an Old Believer’s village,” he informed us, although it looked like every other village we had seen on the five and a half thousand kilometre journey from Moscow. Confidently navigating the maze of streets he parked beside the churchyard.
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| Old Believer's Church, near Ivolginsk |
The Old Believers split from the Russian Orthodox in 1667
over reforms instituted by the Patriarch Nikon. The Patriarch had set up a
commission to examine the drift of Russian Orthodoxy away from its Greek
template, and so claimed the weight of scholarship behind his reforms as well
as the support of Tsar Alexis I. The real driving force was Alexis’ ambition to
become the liberator of all Orthodox lands then under Ottoman control.
Sweetening the near-eastern patriarchs did no harm to this ambition, nor to
Nikon’s chances of becoming the new Patriarch of Constantinople.
Among the reforms were an alteration in the spelling of
Jesus from Ісусъ to Іисусъ (effectively Isus to Iisus), a change in the
direction of processions from sunwise to counter-sunwise and the use of three
straightened fingers instead of two when making the sign of the cross. These
were not the most trivial of the modifications.Andre and the pastor’s wife chatted as we looked round, they were obviously well acquainted. After we had seen enough of the church, she took as across the road to a building resembling a large church hall.
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| The pastor's private museum |
Sheep for Lunch
As we ate, Andre told us of his scheme to build the Baikal trail, a venture bringing the youth of Russia and the USA together to work on projects to serve the community, and of the visit of the Dalai Lama in 1991. “I am not a Buddhist,” he said, “and I only came within fifty metres of him, but I could feel the energy radiating from him.”
An Enormous Head of Lenin
Back in the city we explored a little and took some photographs of the enormous head of Lenin. On the Mongolian border we met three Spanish students who had been beaten up for not showing the head sufficient respect. That, though, happened late at night; in the afternoon sunshine there was nothing more threatening than Lenin's half smile.
Svieta provided an evening meal of stuffed cabbage leaves with cheese, aubergine slices and a dill laced salad, followed by ice cream and jam. Not wishing to cause offence, we consumed it all, despite being still full of lunchtime sheep.
We joined the rest of Ulan Ude in a stroll up and down Lenin Street in the evening sunshine, stopping for a beer at a pavement café. It was fortunate that we were not interested in eating, as the only food available consisted of unidentifiable triangles of greasy mush served on paper plates. As we left I saw that I had been sitting in front of a large picture of a gondolier and the Rialto Bridge. Only then did I realise the greasy mush was pizza. In the course of our travels we have seen some sad things served up in the name of pizza, but never anything quite as dire as that.
Back in the city we explored a little and took some photographs of the enormous head of Lenin. On the Mongolian border we met three Spanish students who had been beaten up for not showing the head sufficient respect. That, though, happened late at night; in the afternoon sunshine there was nothing more threatening than Lenin's half smile.
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| Lenin's enormous head, Soviet Square, Ulan Ude |
Svieta provided an evening meal of stuffed cabbage leaves with cheese, aubergine slices and a dill laced salad, followed by ice cream and jam. Not wishing to cause offence, we consumed it all, despite being still full of lunchtime sheep.
Beer in Lenin Street
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| The beer's okay, but I wouldn't trust the pizza Lenin Street, Ulan Ude |
We joined the rest of Ulan Ude in a stroll up and down Lenin Street in the evening sunshine, stopping for a beer at a pavement café. It was fortunate that we were not interested in eating, as the only food available consisted of unidentifiable triangles of greasy mush served on paper plates. As we left I saw that I had been sitting in front of a large picture of a gondolier and the Rialto Bridge. Only then did I realise the greasy mush was pizza. In the course of our travels we have seen some sad things served up in the name of pizza, but never anything quite as dire as that.
The Trans-Siberian Railway
Part 10:With the Mongolian Nomads
Part 11 Ulan Bator
