Between the Rivers
Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik
Here, in these safer cartographies, banks of clay hold all the footprints of our innocence. The river, strained by seasons, earth-dyed, struggles south. The wind, drawing heat from teas, sets a metronome of stillness.
A landscape can contain our memories, but we can’t return the blessing. A landscape is a secret known only to itself.
We glance, we play, we listen, we sing
we lose our footing to the earth, but we never know it.
My babushka (grandmother) taught me to look down. Step carefully around each sapling, look for the sweetest berry under the tucked leaves. Be careful. An ogorod (garden) is a reversed cemetery – walk accordingly through the rows.
Looking across is harder. This forest, our horizon, is averse to observance. Brazen pines and ferns block sight lines, hogweeds close over our attempted path-conversations. The Ural’s forests are to be respected, though not feared. Fear is the opposite of gift.
Russia is a shorthand for a question it doesn’t ask itself. Beyond breadth, beyond history, beyond fallout, what are we (what am I)? This empire-continent of mixtures, migrations, and expulsions; a vastness that overwhelms its own plurality; a composition of unscrolled lives and misunderstood lands.
This story falls from a few lives in one land, the unceded land of the Udmurt people. A land of dense forests and dense awe, that came to be seen as a land of glass, oil and industry.
In 1941, my grandmother, her sisters and her mother were evacuated from southern Belarus to the Russian Urals. As their village was swallowed by the Holocaust by Bullets, Udmurtia became sanctuary. In another rush of fortune, thousands of miles away, my grandfather, his sister and mother were evacuated from the Black Sea port of Odessa to a refugee camp outside the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. After the Unforgivable War, my grandparents returned to the wreckage of their birthplaces, to homes no longer that.
Eventually, life would return my grandparents east. My grandmother was able to do her teacher training in the city that had given her family safety, and my grandfather was posted by the army to Udmurtia. Two of the few Jews in the entire province, they met at a dance and swiftly married. They brought life to my uncle, and a few years later, to the mother that would bring life to me.
My memory of my grandparents – Dora and Shmil – is inseparable from the fragments of land they loved. A patch beside the forest, and a wedge of communal land nearer to a hilltop spring. Thanks to them, my childhood tastes of flowering dill, thorned cucumbers, and bitter redcurrants.
Unrooted in the dawn, the eve of my grandparents’ lives was spent tending to roots. Learning from their neighbours, from the original custodians of that territory, from their own ancestors, they nourished berry shrubs, tomato vines, beetroot rows, beanstalks.
With them, the garden and the dinner table were always classrooms; few days would go by, without my grandfather reminding me of the privilege of abundance, of what it meant for me to have never undergone hunger. You will never even imagine what it was like.
The meagre war rations in the refugee camps they endured were always in sharp contrast to the verdant allotment they had nourished. This land, this adopted land, was kind to them. They would pickle and preserve the surplus, and eat it over the winter months, which they spent waiting for the snow to thaw, in order to return to their roots. I am still only reckoning with the intimacy they grew. I am still only recognising the questions they seeded.
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In Russia, history feels inseparable from extractivism. These lands have seen constant clearances, furnaces, and impositions. They are haunted by the echo of lagerii (labour camps) and serfdom, for so much of the infrastructural knotwork impelled into this territory was laid by enslaved, incarcerated or exploited labour. These landscapes, unwritable, have been silenced to force way for a monocultural terrain and a single vision: development as the desecration and relentless extraction of nature.
This vision – also known as extractivism – enforces a misunderstanding. Life, which is sacred, is actually cheap, and valuable only in its service to the economy. What matters and what being means are not ongoing questions, but simple equations.
As a child, I felt these issues without knowing. Trans-Siberian passenger trains stop for a maximum of two minutes at the railway station of Glaz-kar, Udmurtia. You have two minutes to hug relatives farewell, show your documents, and load your bags onto the train. It takes far longer for the cargo trains – loaded with coal, oil, and timber from the East – to even pass through the city. With my brother, we would count and then lose count of the carriages in their procession towards distant ports.
And yet these carriages rumble through thousands of villages and their ogorods (small, family-owned and communally-owned allotments). This patchwork of dachas provides the country with around 40% of its food, and is bound up with an entire culture of foraging and caring for the forests that border allotments. The practices in dachas are paradoxical – they are relatively mainstream yet unacknowledged, they considered part of a folcloric national identity although they are radically antithetical in their ethos to the country’s highly-extractivist political economy.
How do you unthread an infrastructure of mendacity? How do you turn the ingrained hierarchy – life under lucre – on its head?
The practice of challenging deep-seated extractivist mentalities, especially in the post-Soviet space, can often seem an impossible task. And yet how can it be, when the cracks of dominant models are filled with abundant dissent? What does the persistence of such a rich agro-ecological heritage of small-scale regenerative farming, particularly amongst older generations, have to teach us?
Scattered beside the linear path laid out by the railroad are the ogorods, the possibilities, the gardens of difference. It’s a matter of looking down.
Solutions, revolutions, innovations – these synonyms of distance suggest the world we want is over there, over the horizon, alive only in what will come. But often, the very things we dream of are here. It’s a matter of turning toward them, or returning toward them. The places where we are possible are not found on maps but through compasses. These compasses we build. These compasses we retrieve. These compasses we become.
About Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik
Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik is a researcher, campaigner, and artist, based in Barcelona. His work focuses on historical memory, climate justice, and the health of bodies and territories.
