Today, Perm is a cultural capital in Russia. it is well known for its theatre, ballet, universities, and museums. Perm is home to Russia's only museum of political oppression.

​

​

​

A Town Something Like Perm

By Ronald Bryden

​

In the autumn of 1900, Anton Chekhov wrote his friend Maxim Gorky that he was working on a new play about three young women living in a provincial town "something like Perm." It helps to understand Three Sisters, the play he was working on, if you know a thing or two about the town he had in mind.

​

Chekhov knew that Perm would be familiar to Gorky, who had spent part of is vagabond youth washing dishes on the steamboats that plied the Volga River system. Perm is the largest town on the Kama River, fourth longest in Europe, which collects the run-off from the western slopes of the Ural Mountains and empties it into the Volga below Kazan. "You have a wide, splendid river," says Colonel Vershinin, new commander of the artillery regiment quartered in the town in Chekhov's play. "Yes, but it's cold here," replies Olga, eldest daughter of the garrison's late commander, "and there are mosquitoes." Perm lies on the same latitude as [Canada's] Fort McMurray in northern Albert, ten degrees below the Arctic Circle. ...

​

Chekhov had spent a long day in Perm on 27 April 1980, waiting for a train to take him over the Urals to Tiumen, railhead of the infant Trans-Siberian Railway. He was on his way to the far end of the Russian Empire, to write about conditions on the prison island of Sakhalin in the Pacific. It had taken him six days traveling on trains and riverboats to cover 1,200 miles from Moscow to Perm, and it would take him another 75 days to reach Sakhalin. This may help to explain why the Prozorov sisters feel so far from their native city and all that they think of as civilization. In a town like Perm, they could be forgiven for thinking of their place of exile as the last gasp of Europe, the final outpost on the frontier between Europe and Asia, Russia and Siberia.

​

Long before it had a name or became a town, the riverbank where Perm stood had been a jumping off place for Siberia. The Stroganoff family, who held monopolies on salt and furs from Ivan the Terrible, brought loads here from over the Urals to ship down the Kama. It was from here in 1581 that an army of Cossack irregulars, engaged by the Stroganoffs to stop Tatar raids on their caravans, crossed the mountains to destroy the Tatar Khan of Siberia's capital on the river Irtysh, and then, fighting over bog, taiga, and tundra for thousands of miles, made their way to the Pacific, an adventure as extraordinary as any achieved by the Spanish conquistadors in Americas.

​

Perm, founded by the 18th century by a friend of Peter the Great, the mining engineer V. N. Tattischev, became known as the place the empire's salt came from, and its inhabitants, who made their livings hoisting salt-sacks onto bags, as "the salty-eared Permyaks." It was Tattischev who took pity on them and had the idea of bringing together the Urals' wealth of wood and iron in a cooperage, making barrels and casks for the river trade. On that foundation grew shipyards, machine stops, and even an arms factory - a giant cannon that made to celebrate Alexander III's coronation in 1873 still sits in a park above the Kama and has an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. A professor coming from St. Petersburg to help launch a university in 1916, twelve years after Chekhov's death, described what he found as "a provincial town peacefully sleeping in the anteroom of culture."

​

Because of its frontier history as the gate to Siberia, Perm was from early on a garrison town. It tells something that Chekhov chose it as his background for Three Sisters, his main study of the place of the military in Russian life. It was on his journey to Sakhalin that he discovered the extent to which the army was the instrument that held the empire together. He never said publicly whether he thought the empire a good thing - he had no wish to return to Siberia - though he envied the modernization that imperialism had brought to Hong Kong and Singapore, stops on his way home from Sakhalin. But you didn't have to approve of the empire to admire the ill-rewarded service of the men who mapped the Asian wilderness, defended Russia's borders with China on the Amur, and kept order in the far-flung outposts of the largest country on earth, with little hope of ever seeing their homes again.

​

"Other places may be different," says Masha, the middle Prozorov sister, to Colonel Vershinin, "but in this town, the most decent, the most civilized and cultivated people are the military." She is flattering the man with whom she is falling in love, as well as herself - she still thinks of herself as a general's daughter rather than a  teacher's wife - but although none of the garrison officers is brilliant intellectually, Chekhov seems to agree with her. He had been surprised  by the intellectual level of the army posts he passed through along the Amur, and knew that  army officers were better educated than most Russian citizens. Peter the Great had made that part of his plan when he created the Russian army in the 18th century. Common soldiers must learn to read weapon manuals, officers must attend servants of the emperor. To signal this, Peter required them, like his courtiers, to go clean-shaven in the Western manner, shedding the full beards that traditional Russian males regarded as their pious duty to display. (Tolstoy in War and Peace writes of peasant boys being "taken and shaven for a soldier.") There's a piteous piece of comedy near the end of Three Sisters when the schoolmaster Kulygin comes on clean-shaven. He is volunteering to replace his wife's lover after the garrison's departure. Masha cries, laughs when he dons a false beard he confiscated from a pupil, then cries again.

​

Peter the Great designed an army which would have no loyalties to anything but the empire and its emperors. To create it, he conscripted Russian peasant boys from their villages - none of the mercenaries and criminals which made up most European armies - and made them soldiers for life, never to see their homes again. The army itself became their home, their family. Each unit formed an artel, modeled on village collectives, to be a kind of bank and commissariat, to make up any deficiencies in food, clothing, or transport. Perpetually underfunded, regiments were expected to be self-sufficient, producing their own bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, saddlers, tailors, and wheelwrights, and to sell their skills to enrich the artel when necessary. A regiment in Saratov, down the Volga, ran a profitable sideline in undertaking, making coffins and hiring out horses and mourners for funerals. Lieutenant Rode in Three Sisters teaches gymnastics at the local high school. His salary may enable him to buy flowers for Irina's name day, but most if it probably goes into the garrison's general fund.

​

To ensure that garrisons didn’t go native, bonding with the local population, they were always quartered outside towns, in their own fortress or kremlin. Between the town and the kremlin would grow up a suburb or quarter housing other people with official connections to the state—in effect, a colony of the taxers maintaining a certain distance from the taxed. The Prozorov girls in Three Sisters obviously live in such a suburb, while Vershinin and the other officers clearly maintain quarters nearby outside the kremlin; but whereas in towns further west the houses would be built of brick and stone, reflecting the wealth of the untaxed, in this town they seem to be built of wood, like the towns in Siberia—fire destroys a whole street overnight, and would probably have spread further but for the action of the garrison, carrying water from the river up through the Prozorovs’ garden.

​

In many ways, the garrison is an occupying power, there to enforce the will of the emperor on the populace if necessary. (Perm was to be one of the hotbeds of the 1905 revolution.) Chekhov shows little sympathy for Natasha, the local girl who marries Andrey Prozorov and gradually drives his sisters from their house, and he makes it clear she is a thoroughly unlikable human being. But from her own point of view, she is something like an Irish girl in the 19th century, married into a family of “ascendancy” British who keep trying to correct her manners and accent. The revenge she takes on the Prozorovs is terrible, but she has cause for revenge.

​

Above all, the empire made sure its garrisons didn’t go native by moving them regularly. At the end of Three Sisters, the artillery brigade which has been quartered in the town for more than 15 years is transferred to Poland—there is no longer any threat of war on the old Siberian frontier, but clouds are gathering in the Far East and in the West, on the Polish frontier with Germany. The garrison marches away, except for Solyony’s battery, 41 which goes down river by barge, and the sisters are left behind, unable to understand what life has done to them.

​

You could compare them to bees left behind when their hive has been moved. I had a friend who put himself through college working for a bee farmer who rented his hives to the fruit farmers of the Niagara peninsula. For several weeks in the spring he would drive a truck of hives from orchard to orchard, setting the hives under the trees as they came into blossom to do the work of pollination for which the local bee population was insufficient. At the end of the week, he claimed, you could hear the bees singing with satisfaction in their hives, but there were always a few bees left outside, flying in bewildered circles, their places in the world gone forever. They could never live apart from their hives. One cold spring night would be enough to carry them off. It made you shudder, my friend said.

​

Chekhov admired much about the imperial army, but he could not overlook that it was part of the state and its apparatus, not of Russia. It contributed its share to the process he had observed in his own home town of Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov—the centralization of the empire was gradually stripping the provinces of their best young men (including the five Chekhov brothers), leaving whole districts overpopulated with young women unable to find suitable husbands, sending regiments of young males to the far ends of the earth. The best world for humans, as for bees, is one in which everyone is at home, but the century of great empires in which he lived had created one in which more and more people were displaced and homesick. That was another of the lessons he had brought back from Sakhalin.