Architecture at The End of The Earth
Architecture at The End of The Earth
Architecture at The End of The Earth
Cover: Kimzha. Church of the Hodegetria Icon of the Virgin, southwest view.
ix Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Exploring the Russian North
207 Five Along the Northern Dvina and Beyond to the Arctic Circle
243 Postscript
What Will Remain of the Heritage of the Russian North?
Acknowledgments
The journey through the Russian North that I present in this book has unfolded
over many years. During that period I have experienced the generosity of many
individuals and organizations, both in the United States and in Russia. I will not
attempt to place order on my memory; rather, the names are listed as they come to
me: Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, for many years of interest in
my work and for providing the support that sent me to so many remote corners of
Russia; Dr. Dan E. Davidson, president of American Councils for International
Education, who has done so much to keep me in the field; Dr. Blair A. Ruble, for-
merly director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Wash-
ington, who supported many publications of my fieldwork. Tulane University
has over the years provided the essential base for my work. Specific projects and
periods in the Russian North have been supported by the John Simon Guggen-
heim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National En-
dowment for the Humanities (with their excellent magazine Humanities), the
National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, and the American
Councils for International Education. Special thanks are due to the Photographic
Archives (now Image Collections) at the National Gallery of Art, which has
housed the basic collection of my photographic work since 1985 with the steady
guidance of curator Andrea Gibbs.
In Russia I am daunted by the challenge of acknowledging the generosity of so
many people, a number of whom are no longer with us: Dr. Aleksei I. Komech, di-
rector of the State Institute of Art History during critical years of my work in the
1990s until 2007; colleagues at Pomor State University (now renamed Northern
Arctic Federal University) in Arkhangelsk; Nelli Belova, for many years director
of the Vologda Regional Library; Oleg Samusenko and Olga Bakhareva, friends in
Cherepovets; Father Andrei Kozlov and his family (St. Petersburg). And to Mos-
cow colleagues at the website Russia Beyond the Headlines for their supportive
interest in my work over the past half decade.
The book itself would not have been possible without the extraordinary gener-
osity and friendship of Richard and Betty Hedreen. In 2004 their support made
possible a new edition of my fundamental work, A History of Russian Architecture.
And now the Hedreens have enabled this present work with the dedicated profes-
sionals at Duke University Press, with whom I have had a productive relationship
going back to the 1990s, when Duke published my Lost Russia: Photographing the
Ruins of Russian Architecture. At the press I owe a special debt to the editor of this
book, Miriam Angress.
The journey continues.
x | Acknowledgments
Introduction
Exploring the Russian North
In the popular imagination, virtually all Russia is “north,” cold and imponderable.
Yet within this immense Eurasian landmass, there is a region traditionally known
as the “Russian North” that includes territories located within or near the basin
of the White Sea. This space is crossed by water networks extending from the
White Lake (Beloe Ozero) to the White Sea (Beloe Morye). (The names them-
selves speak volumes.) Of special interest are the contemporary regions of Vo-
logda and Arkhangelsk. Despite the cataclysms of the twentieth century, this area
of the Russian North still lays claim to a deeply rooted cultural coherence created
by those who settled in its forests and moved along its rivers and lakes.
Today, the rivers have silted, and travel in the north occurs by road—or what
passes for a road. The vehicle is all. The new Russians have their Mercedes and
Cherokees, but for the true connoisseur of the Russian road, the ultimate ma-
chine is the uazik, Russia’s closest equivalent to the classic Jeep. Four-wheeled
drive, two gear sticks, two gas tanks (left and right), taut suspension, high clear-
ance. Seat belts? Don’t ask. The top speed is one hundred kilometers per hour, but
you rarely reach that if you drive it over the rutted tracks and potholed back roads
for which it was designed.
No place in Russia has more of such roads than Arkhangelsk Province, a vast
territory that extends from the White and Barents Seas in the north to its bound-
ary with Vologda Province to the south. A combination of poverty, government
default on both a local and national level, and distances that exceed those of most
KOLA
PENINSULA
Kandalaksha
Umba N
Kovda Ka Varzuga
n da Mezen
lak Kuzomen Kamenka
sha Me
Bay Kimzha zen
River
WHITE SEA
Solovetsky
Islands Dvina
Bay Izhma
Kem
Arkhangelsk
Onega Kholmogory
Bay
The White
Sea Canal Virma Siya
On
or
N
the
eg
rn
aR
Dv
ina Verkhniaia
iver
Ri v Uftiuga
er
Vychegda
Verkhniaia Toima River
Cherevkovo
Permogorye
Kondopoga Krasnoborsk
Niandoma Solvychegodsk Kotlas
Kizhi
Liadiny Kargopol Veliky Ustiug
Lake
Petrozavodsk Onega Velsk
Lake Lacha
Verkhovazhye r
Vytegra ve
i
aR
te g
Vy
Vozhega
on
Lake
kh
ra
Ladoga Totma
Su
R
White Lake
iver
Belozersk Kirillov
western European countries have created some of the worst roads in European Area of the Russian
North covered by the
Russia.
photography in this
Hence the uazik, whose name derives from the acronym for Ulyanovsk Auto book.
Factory, located in the city of Ulyanovsk on the Volga River. Comfortable it is
not, but an experienced driver can take this machine over rutted ice tracks in the
middle of a snowstorm and not miss a beat. I should say at the outset that I am
not such a driver, and I have only a vague idea as to how the machine works. I am,
however, fluent in the Russian language, and that ability rescued many a challeng-
ing situation.
Although my first photographs of Russia were taken during the summer of
2 | Introduction
Driver engaging 1970, my first limited foray to the North did not occur until 1988 (Kizhi Island),
front-wheel drive on
with return trips to the same area in 1991 and 1993. My deeper exploration of
partially submerged
uazik at village of the area began only in 1995, but over the preceding two and a half decades I had
Fedkovo, near Velsk.
created a substantial photographic archive and published fundamental books on
Photograph:
June 14, 2000. Russian architectural history—including A History of Russian Architecture (1993,
with a second edition in 2004). By the time physical and bureaucratic obstacles to
travel in the North were overcome, I was prepared to see this area as an expression
of time-honored traditions that I had long studied. After research came the road
trips, and the drivers got me where I needed to go. My job was to keep the cam-
eras ready and scan the horizon for onion domes. And in my travels throughout
the North, the uazik performed superbly with or without roads.
The fact is, roads were an afterthought in the Arkhangelsk territory. Settlers,
hunters, and traders moved primarily over a network of rivers, lakes, and portages
that defined the area as a geographically distinct cultural entity. Indeed, the settle-
ment of this part of northern Russia, its gradual development, and its eventual
assimilation by Muscovy were based on a paradoxical set of circumstances. The
wealth of its forests, rivers, lakes, and the White Sea itself promised considerable
rewards to those capable of mastering the area; and yet the remoteness of the area,
the relative paucity of arable land (usually limited to certain river plains), and the
length of the harsh winters discouraged extensive population growth. Those who
4 | Introduction
vided by a motor launch lashed to the side of the barge. That first trip, in July
1996, presented an empty landing on a chilly Sunday morning, and no one seemed
certain that there would be a ferry at all. But after an anxious half hour, a few
people with packs appeared, and shortly thereafter the ferry made its deliberate
way toward our bank. When offered pay, the ferrymen refused with gruff good
humor: “Today is the National Day of the River Fleet.” And to prove the point,
they turned up the radio with rousing music of Russian riverboat chanteys. The
ride was choppy, but it was an ideal way to see this northern river, cold and wind-
swept like the landscape. On the opposite side the barge ramp clanked down, and
vehicles plunged into the sandy bank, as if from an amphibious carrier. A rutted
track led through flat, marshy fields with small villages, and finally connected
with a graveled road to Solvychegodsk.
Entering Solvychegodsk, which has some four thousand souls, is another of
those Russian experiences that transport you back to the nineteenth century.
One-story dwellings, usually of wood, mingle with low brick structures of the
town’s few Soviet-era enterprises and workshops. The first Russian settlements
in the area probably arose in the fourteenth century with the support of medi-
eval Russia’s mercantile power Novgorod, whose explorers and traders would have
recognized the value of a site near the crossing of two major river routes: north
to the White Sea and east to the Urals. The merchant dynasty of the Stroganovs
did not arrive until the middle of the sixteenth century, and soon thereafter the
town was founded. As new trading routes led to a decline in its significance in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the town became a small resort, known for
its mineral waters and springs.
At the beginning of this century there were at least twelve brick churches here,
of which eight were destroyed in the Soviet period, and two others left in various
states of damage. But the jewels in the crown, the two Stroganov “cathedrals,”
still stand relatively unscathed. The earlier is a sixteenth-century cathedral dedi-
cated to the Annunciation, and the other is an elaborately decorated seventeenth-
century church dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin.
Why were such grand structures built in so remote a location? One answer
lies not far from the Presentation Church, in a salt spring now covered with a
small log tower, a replica of the earlier Stroganov stockade. The area is replete
with such springs, as well as a small brackish river, the Usol, and a salt lake, the
Solonikha. The production of salt is now taken for granted, but in the medieval
era, it was one of the most valuable of commodities. In this part of the Russian
North, an enormously profitable salt monopoly, derived from ample sources of
brine, allowed the Stroganovs to create a private empire at Solvychegodsk. Al-
6 | Introduction
wealthy trading center that time and fortune have passed by. And like Solvyche-
godsk, it is not easy to reach. The trains stop at Niandoma, a singularly graceless
settlement whose main occupation—apart from the railroad—is the local forest
products industry. From Niandoma Station, regular bus service runs to Kargopol,
one hundred kilometers to the west.
The other, and faster, possibility is to hire a car for a fare that can be split three
ways if there are additional passengers. For my first trip, at the end of February
1998, I chose the car. My train arrived at two in the morning, and in blustery
winter weather I did not care to wait another forty minutes for a bus whose exis-
tence seemed very doubtful. (I later heard that the bus was right on time.) The
car proved a mixed blessing: five passengers jammed into a small Zhiguli, whose
driver played an endless, mediocre rock tape at ear-splitting level as he careened
over a snowy road at eighty to one hundred kilometers an hour.
After an hour and a half, I finally stumbled out of the car into a snow drift
while the driver vaguely pointed in the direction of the “hotel,” and drove off. A
brisk wind, a meter of snow, a barking dog, a couple of dimly lit windows, and one
street light. I felt a sense of isolation intensified by the dull roar that remained in
my head after the rock tape from hell. Although the refuge turned out to be only a
block from where I uncertainly stood, my disorientation was so great that it took
another half hour of stumbling and disturbing law-abiding local citizens before I
desperately rang the bell at the small and very discreet two-storied hotel. Miracu-
lously, a concierge appeared with an electric kettle and a space heater, and I—the
only guest in the entire hotel—was escorted to a room on the second floor.
Kargopol still preserves the feel of a northern provincial town of the nine-
teenth (or eighteenth) century. By the turn of this century it had approximately
three thousand residents and twenty-two churches (including those of wood),
as well as two monasteries. Like other ancient Russian towns that were bypassed
by railroad construction, such as Suzdal, Kargopol became a backwater. Unfor-
tunately, this did not save its monuments of art and architecture after the revo-
lution. During the Soviet period, half of the town’s churches vanished through
neglect or demolition.
Yet however difficult the struggle to preserve the legacy of historic architecture
in Kargopol itself, the crisis is more acute still in the villages of the surrounding
region, renowned for containing some of the best examples of log architecture
and folk art in Russia. On a gray day in late February, I had my first view of this
abandoned rural treasure as Viktor Sheludko and his wife took me over snow-
covered lanes in a Niva vehicle of respectable age. When we got to the village of
Oshevensk, sixty kilometers to the northwest of Kargopol, there was momentary
8 | Introduction
But just as there were signs of improvement, tragedy struck in a most literal
sense. On Easter morning, May 6, 2013, the tower of the Intercession Church was
struck by lightning. Although a lightning rod seems to have been in place, that
is apparently not a guarantee of protection again certain strikes. The fire quickly
consumed the tower and the main structure. With the intense heat, the nearby
bell tower also caught fire. Fortunately, quick response enabled the Epiphany
Church to survive. But the jewel in the crown, the Intercession Church, was de-
stroyed. Even should funds be found to construct a reasonable copy of the church
(unlikely), the unique interior, beautifully painted and adorned, can never be re-
gained. My copious documentation of the interior will provide a record, but that
is slight consolation.
The Onega River flows north and empties into the Onega Bay, in the southern
part of the White Sea. Nearby are the Solovetsky Islands, the culminating point
of a journey through Arkhangelsk Province. Geographically, the islands form one
of the most curious natural environments in Russia. Historically, the very name
“Solovetsky archipelago” resonates with both tragedy and heroic endurance, for
it was here, in 1923, that the first specially designated concentration camp was
established by the Soviet regime. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has already given us an
incomparable account of that monstrosity, which metastasized throughout the
Soviet Union in the 1930s and gave rise to the phrase “Gulag archipelago.”
The most impressive way to approach the islands is by boat from the Karelian
town of Kem. The monastery rises from the water, a floating citadel of towers and
domes. For the strong of stomach, there is also an air option, from Arkhangelsk,
on a twin-engine plane. Although less haunting than the approach by boat, the
small plane provides an unforgettable view of the northern forests—pine, fir,
larch, aspen, birch—merging into the taiga along the White Sea.
There is evidence that the Solovetsky archipelago was settled—or visited—by
humans as early as four millennia ago. Not until the beginning of the fifteenth
century did the island chain attract the attention of a few hardy monks, part of a
wave of monastic expansion throughout the Russian North in the late fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The first, tentative settlement occurred in 1429 when the
monk Savvaty joined forces with one Herman, an illiterate hermit who had ex-
plored the archipelago. Despite the severe winters, sea currents moderated the cli-
mate, and the surroundings provided sufficient food for survival.
The elderly Savvaty’s death, in 1435, brought an end to this first attempt, but
the following year, another monk, Zosima, returned to the island and founded
the Transfiguration Monastery. All three men were canonized by the Russian
Orthodox Church. The great flourishing of the monastery occurred in the six-
10 | Introduction
Toward the Arctic Circle: The Enchantment of Kimzha
And then there is Kimzha. On the upper reaches of the Mezen River, in north-
east Arkhangelsk Province, there are pockets of population that seem to exist in
another time. Among them is Kimzha, located near the Arctic Circle and perhaps
the most distinctive village I have seen in decades of travel throughout Russia.
Most maps do not show this rural hamlet, though it stands near the intersection
of two rivers, the Mezen and the much smaller Kimzha. Its population varies be-
tween winter and summer: a couple of hundred in the winter, and a hundred or
so more during the summer, when relatives visit.
Because Kimzha lies buried under severe winter conditions for much of the
year, it was appropriate that my first experience of the place occurred in early
March 2000. The summer prior, in 1999, I had seen a photograph of the Kimzha
church, consecrated in the 1760s and dedicated to the Odigitria Icon of Mary. It
showed five soaring towers and cupolas over a structure of massive larch logs. It
was enough to convince me that I had to reach this place. Friends in Arkhangelsk
warned me of the difficulties: Kimzha would be impossible to reach by land in the
summer because of the lack of roads.
Formerly, there was limited scheduled transportation by water from Arkh-
angelsk, but that had ceased with the collapse of state subsidies. Another possi-
bility was to travel by small plane from Arkhangelsk to Mezen. But I wanted to
experience the terrain between Arkhangelsk and the Mezen River, and for that I
was told of another mode of travel: over a temporary winter road or zimnik.
Fortunately, I had blat, an essential Russian concept that combines “pull” and
“connections.” Since 1998 I had maintained close contacts with Pomor State Uni-
versity in Arkhangelsk, at that time the leading university in the White Sea ter-
ritory (Pomorye). The first vice-rector of the university, Yury Kudriashov, was a
native of Mezen; and while he had long since left the area, he had maintained
contact with childhood friends such as Peter Kondratyev, the director of a lum-
ber factory in Kamenka. Kondratyev provided me with a driver from his com-
pany motor pool and a Land Rover, one of several that made weekly runs between
Arkhangelsk—the power center—and the twin towns of Mezen and Kamenka.
For the driver, this was a regular, if demanding, shuttle trip. For me it was some-
thing else entirely.
When we left Arkhangelsk in the early afternoon of March 7, the sun was
bright and the frost hard. The Land Rover sped over a paved road along the right
bank of the Northern Dvina River until we approached the mouth of the Pinega
12 | Introduction
trip. The next hour brought a new weather front of
constant snow and wind for the next three days. But
in that brief moment I could clearly see the looming
specter of the Kimzha church.
As for my accommodations, I had been told that
the house was new—unfinished, as it turned out.
But the small abode was warm and dry, and I had
no trouble with the spartan room, with its window
that looked out upon the village. The next morning
my host, Georgy Fedorkov, and his brother (both re-
tired on a pension from the lumber plant) provided a
hearty breakfast of kasha, fresh milk, and simmering
beef stew. The wind and snow continued unabated,
and my attempts to call Mezen from a neighbor’s
house failed; the telephones were out. Kondratyev
had planned to bring me from Kimzha to Mezen, but
I was stranded in the middle of a snowstorm.
Despite the stiff wind and treacherous snow drifts,
Drawing of author with I decided to photograph as much as I could, partly as a way to relieve the tension.
Kimzha village and Church
The church, of course, was my primary objective. This was the sole surviving ex-
of the Hodegetria Icon of the
Virgin in the background. ample of its type, apparently created by a group of carpenters active only in this
Artist: Aleksandr Tiarin.
part of the North. The brilliance of their design, perfectly proportioned, is still a
Originally published March
22, 2001, in the Arkhangelsk source of amazement to me.
daily Pravda Severa to ac
But for all of the monumental power of the church, what surprised me still
company the article “William
Brumfield, Enchanted Wan more was the extent to which the village’s massive log houses, built during the
derer,” by Sergei Domoro
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been preserved. This was not an
shchenov. Republished in
Domoroshchenov’s book Svoi open-air museum, with a few reconstructed log buildings. Yes, some of the houses
korabl [My ship] (Arkhan
had been abandoned or at least shuttered for the winter, while a few others had
gelsk: Pravda Severa, 2002).
been modified with plank siding. Yet the main thing was that Kimzha remained a
functioning, living environment.
How to explain this degree of preservation—of the buildings and of the com-
munity? Perhaps the very absence of roads, the “isolation factor,” protected the in-
tegrity of the environment. Yet that alone was not sufficient to explain the survival
of Kimzha, when hundreds of other villages throughout the North had vanished.
It occurred to me that the existence of the church, although closed until 1999,
might have contributed to the village’s endurance. I decided to revisit Kimzha
under more favorable conditions, during the summer, in order to explore further
the sources of its strength.
14 | Introduction
of respect for tradition and cultural legacy. Indeed, it has been easier for certain
Russians to accept me as the representative of a region (even one they know pri-
marily through the translation of Gone with the Wind) than as a citizen of the
United States.
But the affinity between Russia and the American South first struck me during
a stay in Leningrad in 1971. The beauty of the city, even in its decrepitude, haunted
me—and reminded me of New Orleans, founded fifteen years after Petersburg.
The original designs of both owe much to French military engineering. That year
I also gained a deeper appreciation of the appeal of southern literature in Russia.
Translations of Faulkner’s novels and productions of Tennessee Williams plays
were the most obvious examples, and my still imperfect Russian described myste-
rious New Orleans to Russian listeners.
The Russian North has in common with the American South the feeling that,
as Faulkner himself put it, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” In
the Russian North I visited dozens of villages whose surviving architecture bears
witness to creative and resilient cultural traditions. Unfortunately, many villages
have disappeared or been depopulated as the result of demographic shifts and the
aftermath of the Soviet regime’s economic and social policies (including ruthless
collectivization).
Russia and the South also both have ghosts in a more traditional sense: those
who have fallen in battle on blood-stained ground. In the course of travels through-
out Russia, I have noted—and in many cases photographed—war memorials that
exist in almost all Russian settlements, even small villages such as Kimzha. One
can endlessly debate the reasons and responsibilities for this huge loss of life, but
the scale of the sacrifice is beyond debate. Growing up in the American South,
I gained an interest in military history that has continued to play a role in my
understanding of Russia. I have taken this interest—in a very personal sense—as a
lesson in defiance: to take from every setback a determination to recoup. By going
north I return to the South.
After the winter visit, I could think only of returning to Kimzha with summer
light. In late July 2000, again in Arkhangelsk, I purchased a plane ticket to Mezen
and left from the small regional Vaskovo airport. The view from the air was spec-
tacular during the hour-long trip. The taiga forests, bogs, and meandering rivers
took on an otherworldly look. I could scarcely imagine the terrain that I had
covered with such difficulty a few months earlier.
Upon arrival in Mezen I was escorted by the major who headed the local mili-
tia and, after due formalities, was driven in a brand-new uazik to the village of
16 | Introduction
time for mushrooms, a time for hunting and fishing. Late one afternoon Elena Re-
pitskaya and Antonina Mamontova arranged a tasting session at which I sampled
over a dozen types of jams and other concoctions from the various types of local
berries. No Moscow restaurant could offer better.
It also came as a surprise to find that Kimzha has retained a number of resi-
dents in their thirties, with young children. These families tend to be large and are
of modest means. Much of their income will eventually go to educating their chil-
dren in a large town. But in the meantime these families—and others who come
for the summer—are quietly proud of being a part of the village.
Like all complex environments, Kimzha does not submit to easy definition. I
came to realize that it was not some isolated pocket of the past. The villagers no
longer sit around singing authentic folk songs. Many of the residents are retirees
from the lumber plant, and their children have moved to larger places. When they
return for the summer, more urban elements appear in the culture of the village.
Television is widespread. In other words, life here shares much with life anywhere
in Russia. And yet, these surviving ancient villages are essential microcosms of
Russian traditions, many of them now forgotten.
Fortunately, I had succeeded in photographing the Odigitria Church before
a decision was made to restore it a few years later. As is often the case in such re-
mote locations, the project was clumsily managed from Arkhangelsk, and as late
as 2010, there were concerns that the components would rot before the task was
completed. More recent information suggests that at least the roof is back in
place. One can only hope that this unique, soaring wooden church will remain,
when so many others have been lost.
18 | Introduction
Author with abandoned log house in the background, Shelomya village, Arkhangelsk Province. Photograph: June 22, 2000.
We did, despite a tense interval of several kilometers when we turned north
from the shore onto a deeply rutted sandy track through a pine forest leading to
Varzuga. I saw the towering form of the Dormition Church just as we cleared
the forest on a short descent into the village. The car had not come to a complete
stop before I was out the door with my cameras. For the next hour (already after
ten in the evening), I photographed the Dormition Church and its neighbor, the
nineteenth-century “winter” Church of St. Afanasy, until the bemused driver in-
sisted that he had to get us across the river to the house of Peter Zaborshchikov,
our host for the next few days. As we crossed the Varzuga in a low, wooden skiff, I
saw the Dormition Church not so much receding as taking more clearly its place
in the surrounding landscape.
Although there may have been a settlement on the site as early as the twelfth
century, initial references to the village of Varzuga date from the fifteenth cen-
tury, when it served as an outpost of Novgorod and flourished through its advan-
tageous location on the Varzuga River, near the abundant fishing grounds of the
White Sea. In 1450 the prominent Novgorodian Marfa Boretskaia (Marfa posad-
nitsa, renowned in Russian history for her attempt to defend Novgorod’s ancient
independence against the encroaching power of Muscovy) donated her holdings
along the White Sea to the recently established Solovetsky Monastery.
As the village developed along both sides of the river, churches were also built
on both sides. But nothing in Varzuga would rival the elevated form of the Dor-
mition Church, created by a master builder known as Kliment in 1674. An early
twentieth-century photograph reproduced in the first edition of Igor Grabar’s Is-
toriia russkogo iskusstva shows a soaring tower clad in planks and painted white—
a modification that dated to the middle of the nineteenth century. Fortunately,
other changes in 1867 did not substantially affect the original form, which was
largely restored (at least on the exterior) in 1973. The remarkable stability of
this, as well as other large tower churches of the Russian North, is grounded in
a thorough understanding of the properties and strength of the pine logs com-
posing the main structure.
Both Kimzha and Varzuga are living environments that exist in a rapidly
changing world with new hopes and expectations. They are not museum displays.
At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about preserving their traditional
wooden architecture. Each village will survive in some form, but Russia can ill af-
ford to lose the aesthetic and cultural traditions so richly embodied in these two
outposts of the North.
20 | Introduction