Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

7. Across the Steppe and into the Black Sea

163 7 Across the Steppe and into the Black Sea One of th e ver y firs t thin gs I l ea r ned, back in high school, when I made inquiries about the School of Soil Science, was that it prided itself on its zonalka. Students from other schools within Moscow University, including the snobs from Law and Journalism, usually knew about the zonalka and envied the would-be soil scientists. Zonalka is a casual abbreviation of zonal’naia praktika (literally: zonal practicum), a two-month summer expedition , which soil science students participated in after the sophomore year. There were two established routes, Moscow–Crimea and Moscow– Caucasus, and each year a class was divided into two groups according to one’s future specialization. We traveled in two separate columns from Moscow due south in the general direction of the Black Sea. Each half came back from the journey convinced that their route was more exciting , and factions of “Crimeans” and “Caucasians” continued to argue the point. As a future “general” soil scientist, I traveled to the Caucasus (for details of the route, see the expedition map in ill. 26). The logic behind the zonalka was to introduce us to zonal transformations in nature. We observed both horizontal and vertical changes of climate and vegetation zones. We experienced variations in landscape, soil, flora, and even fauna, from north to south, then into the high mountains of the Caucasus, and finally from the mountains down to the coast of the Black Sea. In terms of the specific vegetation zones, we began our journey in the area of mixed forest, traveling through the area of broad-leaf forest and forest steppe to the area of meadow steppe and southern and even arid 164 | The Expediti on steppe to the western foothills of the Greater Caucasus mountain range. Once near the mountains, we were able to see how altitude and elevation above sea level created vertical variation, from steppes and grasslands to forests to Alpine meadows, and to permafrost and glaciers. Finally, after a week of mountaineering we descended to the coast, for some rest amid lush maritime forests and wild, scraggy beaches. Different instructors had different expectations of us and taught with varying degrees of rigor; I recall one professor telling us right away that he wanted us to master one hundred plant species, both Russian and Latin names, by the end of the journey. Geobotany, ecology, geology, geography, soil classification, and other subjects were taught in context, and nature itself was our classroom. But there was also cultural and historical logic to the zonalka, which made the experience particularly meaningful for someone like myself, a humanist who thought not of iron oxide but of Adam the primal man when digging up and measuring a red soil section. The journey from Moscow took me through the black soil belt of central-southern Russia. This area, known in Russian as chernozem’e (from chernozëm, black soil, a humus-rich fertile topsoil) forms a near tetrangle or rhomboid on the map, its vortices marked by the great Russian cities of Orel, Tambov, Kursk, and Voronezh. The black soil belt is simultaneously Russia’s breadbasket and its cultural heartland. Especially in the nineteenth century, a great number of Russian writers came from former country estates we passed on the route or visited . South and southeast of the black soil belt, along what had once been the frontier of the Russian state, I encountered the heritage of the Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossacks. And once we reached the mountains of Northwest Caucasus in the area of Karachai-Cherkessia, the rich ethnic and linguistic diversity and the Muslim patrimony of the region came alive before my eyes. The experience of North Caucasus revealed the oozing legacy of Russia’s colonial conquest; only a few years later, Chechnya would explode in a violent revolt. Finally, a respite on the Russian coast of the Black Sea at Pshada, some thirty miles down the coast from Gelendzhik, was a minor window onto an ancient Hellenic past opulent with mythology. For me personally, the expedition took place against the backdrop of what had been a turbulent year. But for all of the participants of the expedition , including the former marines and paratroopers who acted like they Ac r oss th e St eppe a n d in t o th e Bl a c k Sea...