16 JULY 2005, Page 37

Among the Siberian gentry

Jonathan Mirsky

OLGA’S STORY by Stephanie Williams Viking, £20, pp. 412, ISBN 0670913766 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The first half of Olga’s Story is as good as Doctor Zhivago. If you recall, the backdrop to the love story of Zhivago and Lara was the end of civilised Russian bourgeois life, slowly and frighteningly, and the imposition of the horrors of civil war and the greater horrors of Leninism. Although none of the characters in this true story rivals Zhivago and Lara, we ‘see’ them, as Joseph Conrad demanded of great literature. Here, as vividly as in Pasternak, is the destruction by anarchy and Bolshevism, thousands of miles from the genteel Moscow salons of Dr Zhivago, of the rougher but cultured life of the Siberian gentry at the turn of the 20th century.

One of the treats of terrific literature is how it opens the doors to worlds we know nothing about. I knew a bit about Siberia’s political exiles (some of Russia’s most famous exiled intellectuals were deeply respected where Olga grew up), and of the Russian empire’s push eastwards, across its great lakes and rivers for furs and gold and for a Pacific seaport. There, in its Far East, Russia challenged China and was confronted, almost fatally, by Japan.

But what Stephanie Williams has done superbly in this biography of her Russian maternal grandmother, Olga Yunter, born in 1900, is to bring to vibrant life the world of middleand upper-class Russians in Siberian towns. These remind us immediately of their counterparts in Moscow, as portrayed in Dr Zhivago. ‘The merchants’ own quarters were tastefully furnished. Paintings, tapestries and libraries were brought all the way from St Petersburg, London and Paris The women were dressed by Worth in Paris.’ Around that sophisticated upper class teemed Chinese, Mongols — Mongolia was just across the border — Kazakhs, Jews and Buryats, attending camel caravans and working as hunters, fishermen and miners. On that frontier, too, where Olga was born and grew into her teens, her school demanded the highest standards of academic work, deportment and discipline and sent its best students to university in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Without making it ‘enchanted’, Williams leads us into an admirable world just before the cataclysm of the Russian revolution. Olga’s family spent days every year preparing for the Russian Christmas by making the tree decorations and went by sledge through thick snow into the forest to choose and cut down the perfect tree. We see what foods were eaten at Christmas and exactly what happened at church services. In some places the air was cold enough to freeze one’s nose hairs, and mountains were so steep that when the reindeer pulling the sledges reached the top they ‘would have to be tied to the backs of the sledges to slow the pace of the descent’. Olga’s father, an adventurous merchant, heard that sables of unparalleled quality could be found in Kamchatka hundreds of miles away. The trip by horse and sledge would take eight months: ‘The danger from avalanches was so acute that the natives would not speak for fear of dislodging them.’ He carried a sleeping bag of ‘reindeer fur, lined with soft pyzhik, the skins of still-born reindeers; he would wear soft fur boots up to the knee, fur trousers, a kind of chamois shirt with the fur worn next to the skin, covered with a second shirt with the fur outside, and a large fur hat for exception ally cold weather’. When Olga’s father returned he was so weathered she barely recognised him. But what a haul! Out tumbled ‘dozens of furs, long-haired fox, yellow, light brown and grey, black silky pelts and glossy white ones. The riches lay on the warm sand at his feet, their musky scent rising in the air.’ The 1905 revolution was greeted with happiness by the Siberian gentry, who despised the corruption of the tsars, but in 1914 the Great War began, Olga’s brothers entered the army to fight the Germans, and then came the Bolshevik revolution. The Yunters, for whom Lenin was a virtually unknown figure, so erratic were communications to Siberia, sided with the Whites — often as brutal as the Reds. Siberia’s gentry and their world fell apart. Young men were executed on the spot when caught, women were raped, houses were sacked and goods confiscated by thugs on both sides. Olga, already an acrobatic rider in the Mongol fashion, escaped — she never saw her family again — wrapped in a sack and slung over the back of a horse, then by hellish train to Vladivostok, a perilous place for a respectable Russian girl, and finally to Tiantsin in north China, where there was a sizeable, often impoverished, Russian exile community.

Stephanie Williams got some of this dramatic story from Olga herself, who finally reached England after many years in China. What she absorbed from that distinguished, proud, demanding old lady, always beautifully dressed and with a houseful of Chinese objects, was atmospheric. Olga rightly forbade her granddaughter to go to the Soviet Union to seek out the long-lost Yunter family: ‘They will find out about me and then they will find my family and then they will punish them or treat them badly.’ Olga burned most of her papers. She died in 1974 and Williams did not get to Siberia until 1994, where what she found ‘persuaded me that Olga’s stories were true’.

The absorbing detail about those years in Siberia comes from Olga’s surviving relations whom Williams met in Russia when she tracked them down, together with letters, diaries, local newspapers and archives. The Chinese, Canadian, and British parts of the story are rather pedestrian by contrast and rarely come thrillingly alive like the Siberian years, sad, depressing, romantic, and frightening though Olga’s life in exile plainly was.

Never mind. To write over 200 pages as well as Pasternak is a great thing. And what a tribute Olga’s sister Lydia, whom she never saw again after her hair-rising journeys, reportedly paid to her: ‘Olga’s flight saved not only herself but the rest of the family. She was the one the police would have arrested first, then they would have come to take the rest of us.’