Making Martyrs
The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin
Yuliya Minkova
Publication of this book was made possible with financial support from the Faculty Book Publishing Subvention Fund at Virginia Tech.
Copyright © 2018 by Yuliya Minkova
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2018
University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-914-2
ISSN: 1528-4808
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Minkova, Yuliya, author.
Title: Making martyrs : the language of sacrifice in Russian culture from Stalin to Putin / Yuliya Minkova.
Description: Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2018. | Series: Rochester studies in East and Central Europe, ISSN 1528-4808 ; v. 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053904 | ISBN 9781580469142 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—Intellectual life. | Russia (Federation)— Intellectual life. | Political culture—Russia (Federation) | Political culture—Soviet Union. | Heroes—Mythology—Soviet Union. | Heroes— Mythology—Russia (Federation) | Idealism—Social aspects—Soviet Union. | Idealism—Social aspects—Russia (Federation)
Classification: LCC DK266.4 .M563 2018 | DDC 947.84--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053904
This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.
1 Werewolves, Vampires, and the “Sacred Wo/men” of Soviet Discourse in Pravda and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s
2 Drawing Borders in the Sky: Pirates and Damsels in Distress of Aerial Hijackings in Soviet Press, Literature, and Film
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my appreciation to the following people and institutions for their help and support during my work on this book. I am deeply grateful to Eliot Borenstein for his steadfast mentorship and guidance over the years. His sharp wit and warmth improve everything that I do. Mark Lipovetsky generously shared invaluable ideas at various stages of this project. Ilya Kliger’s insightfulness and erudition have broadened my horizons both as a scholar and a person. Suggestions and observations from the readers who evaluated the manuscript for the University of Rochester Press went a long way toward bringing it to completion. The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Niles Research Grant at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University funded my research trip to collect materials for this book. I have benefited from the moral, financial, and logistical support of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, and from the critique and encouragement of my colleagues who read and commented on the chapter drafts. Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 3 appeared as, respectively, “Werewolves, Vampires, and the ‘Sacred Wo/men’ of Soviet Discourse in Pravda and beyond in the 1930s and 40s,” in Slavic and East European Journal 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 587–605; and “Our Man in Chile, or Victor Jara’s Posthumous Life in Soviet Media and Popular Culture,” in Slavic and East European Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 605–27. I wish to thank the Slavic and East European Journal for kind permission to reprint. For the past few years I have been lucky to enjoy the friendship of Kelley and Chris Olsen, who bring lightness to my life. I am indebted to my daughter’s caregivers who made it possible for me to go to work. I dedicate this book to my beloved parents, who have supported me in every possible way, and to my daughter, Molly, who inspires me and makes me happy.
Introduction
A young girl bites her lip as she maintains a stubborn silence in the face of her Nazi tormentors. A flight attendant falls from the sky, shot by a father-andson hijacking team. A Chilean folk singer lies dead, his hands shattered by right-wing thugs. A once-reviled oligarch acquires the halo of a saint as he rots in a prison camp. Though these four figures are from different times, places, and even hemispheres, all of them entered a pantheon of Soviet and postSoviet “heroes” whose status stems primarily from their victimhood. And all of them are featured in this book, which examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. I argue that early Soviet narratives constructed the stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person’s “true self.” The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioning among Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained sacrificial imagery as a means of asserting ideology’s continued hold on society, while the post-Soviet discourse of victimhood appeals to nationalist nostalgia. The book’s final chapter proposes that the Russian intelligentsia’s fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky testifies to the persistent hold of sacrificial mythology in contemporary culture, while the conclusion addresses its most recent deployments in media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and propaganda of homosexuality among minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and current usage of the phrase “sacred victim” in public discourse. In covering these cases, the book delineates the sacrificial language’s trajectory from molding the individual to lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state.
My choice of examples is guided by their vividness and variety. While they span from the 1930s through the 2010s, my goal is not to cover the entire Soviet and post-Soviet time line but rather to identify a course in the development of the discourse about the sacred victim. This analysis engages with newspaper articles as well as fiction, memoirs, and film. Soviet print media
was especially helpful in mapping out this trend as it reproduces ideology in a concise and repetitive manner while being highly reactive to changes in policy, official attitudes, and eschatology. The phenomenon of “enemies of the people,” as well as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and other wartime heroes, began in the newspapers and eventually made the transition into other artistic forms such as sculpture, literature, and film. Popular culture often reshaped such narratives as stories about “regular people,” which were meant to serve as behavioral models. By dint of being part and parcel of Soviet society, literary production could rarely avoid reflecting political and social events; in addition, various degrees of government control over literary output, the Party’s directives to depict a certain type of hero, and the individual writers’ initiatives assured the ideology’s implicit and overt presence in these works. Using both types of sources—news accounts as well as film and literature—allows for a more detailed and extensive examination of sacrificial mythology as a means of establishing transcendent values and promoting patriotism.
The broader topic of this book is cultural mythology, which is a necessary component in the study of any culture. Examining a discourse that places such great emphasis on self-sacrifice presents a curious alternative to the West’s human rights discourse by advancing the individual’s value in relationship to the collective. According to this system, human life achieves its highest value as it sacrifices itself for the good of the many. This mythology has been closely linked with ideological and political developments and has gone through periods of varying intensity in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, but its continued cultural presence deserves a place in contemporary Russian scholarship. The explicit endorsement of the cult of World War II in official discourse is one of the ways in which a reflexive search for heroes still plays itself out in contemporary Russian culture.
This project’s contribution to the growing field of Soviet cultural studies is not only to uncover a persistent trend in Soviet discourse but also to demonstrate how it has influenced the ways in which Russians perceive themselves today. The book argues that Soviet discourse not only introduced various heroic figures into the popular consciousness but also established a discursive space that is continuously filled with new examples of martyrdom. If mainstream fiction is any indication, post–Soviet Russia is a field of competitive victimhood where groups like Russian ethnic nationalists, champions of the state, creative intelligentsia, and exiled or imprisoned oligarchs vie for the title of the homo sacer, a ritualistic figure established by the Stalinist media in the 1930s and 1940s. In view of Russian government’s policies toward its neighbors such as Georgia and Ukraine, this book contextualizes nationalist
tendencies in post-Soviet discourse and investigates the cultural mechanisms that seemingly allow the coexistence of aggressive behavior and self-identified victimhood in the same political subject.
The book relies on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and Oleg Kharkhordin’s The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices for its overall theoretical framework. Agamben describes homo sacer as an individual expelled from the city in ancient Rome who may now be killed with impunity but not sacrificed. He traces this figure through the European Middle Ages and all the way to concentration camp prisoners and displaced populations, arguing that homo sacer’s position outside the law connects him to the sovereign, whose power is expressed through the ability to suspend the law. By linking this political figure to Soviet discursive practices, I demonstrate that the sacrificial figures created by Soviet narratives are similarly connected to sovereignty and sanctify the state’s mythology.
While Agamben believes that the figure of the homo sacer who is caught in the sovereign ban, or exception, lies at the foundation of the modern state, the sacrificial topos proves especially attractive in the Soviet context. The long-lasting popularity of the sacrificial mechanism may be accounted for by its contribution to the creation of a Soviet personality, which, according to Kharkhordin, was one of the regime’s early cultural imperatives. He explains that the denunciation (oblichenie) that was performed at the trials “may be said to almost literally mean ‘en-personalization’ (ob-lichenie), the endowment of someone with litso (face or juridical person) or lichnost’ (personality).”1 Alternatively, another way of revealing one’s “true core” in Soviet wartime narratives was through the performance of a heroic deed. Throughout the book I look at the examples of both modes of “en-personalization,” such as the media’s canonization of Soviet flight attendants murdered during the plane hijackings from the 1960s to 1990s and of the Chilean Communist singer and songwriter Victor Jara, killed by the junta in 1973 at the Stadium in Santiago; the creation of an innocent hero who personifies Russia in post-Soviet nationalist fiction; and the vilification of various “enemies of the people” who arise out of such stories, as mechanisms that engage with the perceived traumatic experience for propagandistic, culture-building purposes.
Agamben’s exposition of the sacrificial topos provides this book with a starting point for exploring Soviet and post-Soviet examples of heroism and victimization. In an effort to supplement the work of Michel Foucault in the field of biopolitics, or the kind of politics that places biological life at its center, Agamben argues that bare life and state power are intimately connected through the figure of the homo sacer,
who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridical order (ordinamento) solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries.2
Drawing on the works of the influential twentieth-century jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, Agamben explains that bare life and sovereignty are mutually dependent and constitute each other in the modern institutions of statehood through the mechanism of the state of exception. According to Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who has the power to enact the state of exception, which involves suspension of the law in such extraordinary circumstances as war, invasion, or natural disaster. Without the juridical restraint, the sovereign is able to rule directly on issues of life and death. Homo sacer lives in the sphere of the exception where the law is suspended because he may be killed by anyone without fear of punishment: “At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”3 Agamben defines the exception as “a kind of exclusion” that relates to the general rule in the form of that rule’s suspension; “The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it.”4 In a way, exception defines the rule (or the territory where the rule of law applies) by delineating its boundaries: “What is at issue in the sovereign exception is . . . the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity. . . . In this sense, the sovereign decision on the exception is the originary juridico-political structure on the basis of which what is included in the juridical order and what is excluded from it acquire their meaning.”5 Thus, in Homo Sacer, the author posits the element of victimization in the relationship between state power and the individual at the foundation of the modern state, which is especially relevant to the study of a totalitarian society.
Invoking Aristotle, Agamben distinguishes between zoe, a natural reproductive life, and bios, a life invested with social and political meaning, and argues that “the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes a decisive event of modernity.”6 Ultimately, since the power to decide over life and death is what defines sovereignty, it is not a meaningful life but the ability to be killed that becomes a decisive element of citizenship, “vitae necisque potestas [the power over life and death] attaches
itself to every free male citizen from birth and thus seems to define the very model of political power in general. Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element.”7 Bare life, or the life that is stripped of every protection afforded by the law of the land, exists in the zone of the sovereign’s exception.
Agamben’s emphasis on bare life underscores the importance of the human body in calculations of the modern state. He mentions the writ of habeas corpus of 1678, which demands the presence of a defendant’s “body” at the trial, as a seminal document of modern democracy that replaced the concepts of subject or citizen with a “pure and simple corpus.”8 The capture of bare life in the exception lies at the foundation of both totalitarian states and democracies, producing “naked” bodies every time citizenship is revoked: “In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of the state.”9
As chapter 1 will demonstrate, the identities of enemies of the people, most of whom were prominent party members prior to being accused of treason, were purposefully taken apart by the official press to reveal their “true” nature, which was often portrayed in animalistic metaphors. In a way, the Stalinist media’s tendency to “undress” the bodies of the defendants at the show trials represents, ironically, a “laying bare” of one of the foundational mechanisms of the Soviet state: its capacity to produce sacred victims.
Agamben refers to Aristotle’s differentiation between voice and language: the voice “is a sign of pleasure and pain” while language is “for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust,” which is a requirement of good citizenship.10 By substituting language for bios and voice for zoe, Agamben describes the birth of the language as a kind of violence performed on the voice:
The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. . . . There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.11
This contrast between the voice as a lower stratum of expression and the language as constitutive of a good and meaningful life is especially relevant to the stock depictions of captured soldiers’ or partisans’ heroic behavior in official Soviet sources, especially in repeated imagery where refusing to betray pain during torture was tantamount to refusing to speak during the interrogations.
Agamben traces the homo sacer through the centuries of Western civilization and identifies his ancient and medieval precursors in the figures of the consecrated warrior, the emperor’s colossus, and the werewolf. While having the ability to be killed with impunity, the homo sacer may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. This caveat sets him apart from the ancient figure of a warrior “who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger.”12 If such a devotee failed to die in the ensuing battle, then he became a “living corpse,” separated from the living while inhabiting the zone between life and death, until his image was burned in a symbolic ritual in order to repay his debt to the underworld.13 However, while the life of the consecrated warrior may be symbolically redeemed, no such expiation is available to the homo sacer, whose “very body . . . is, in its capacity to be killed but not sacrificed, a living pledge to his subjection to a power of death. And yet this pledge is, nevertheless, absolute and unconditional, and not the fulfillment of a consecration.”14 This exposure to senseless death without the possibility of redemption is what constitutes the homo sacer as bare life:
In the body of the surviving devotee and even more unconditionally, in the body of homo sacer, the ancient world finds itself confronted for the first time with a life that, excepting itself in a double exclusion from the real context of both the profane and the religious forms of life, is defined solely by virtue of having entered into an intimate symbiosis with death without, nevertheless, belonging to the world of the deceased. In the figure of this “sacred life,” something like a bare life makes its appearance in the Western world. What is decisive, however, is that from the beginning this sacred life has an eminently political character and exhibits an essential link with the terrain on which sovereign power is founded.15
Just as the devotee’s life is redeemed and the consecration is symbolically lifted through the burning of his colossus, a similar procedure was in place for preserving the “royal dignitas” of a dying emperor.16 Drawing on Ernst Kantorowicz’s book The Emperor’s Two Bodies, Agamben considers the medieval French ceremony of treating the king’s effigy as a living person before it was burned, as an example of the king’s “political body” becoming indistinguishable from “the body of homo sacer, which can be killed but not sacrificed.”17 Moreover, this treatment of the effigy suggests that the king’s body bears two lives: one biological, the other sacred, with the latter surviving his physical death, while the burning ritual disposes of this excess in a ritualistic fashion. Both rituals, for the devotee and the emperor, separate and dispose of the sacred life, which cannot remain in the city.18 While the excess of sacred
life may be disposed of for the consecrated warrior and given final respects for the emperor, the homo sacer cannot be separated from his sacred life. Especially interesting is the intimate connection between the emperor and the homo sacer as an element of sacred life that seems to dwell in the body of the sovereign, while it is the power over sacred life that constitutes his ultimate authority:
It is as if, by means of striking symmetry, supreme power—which, as we have seen, is always vitae necisque potestas and always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed—required that the very person of sovereign authority assume within itself the life held in its power. And if, for the surviving devotee, a missing death liberates this sacred life, for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed. 19
While delving into the homo sacer’s connection with the sovereign, Agamben explores another figure that lends more depth to this comparison. This figure is the werewolf of Indo-European folklore, who, according to Agamben, represented an outcast with a special connection to the king. For example, in Marie de France’s Bisclavret, it is the king’s close adviser who turns into a werewolf at night.20 After being betrayed by his wife who hides his clothes, thus making it impossible for him to return to the human form, the werewolf approaches the king during a hunt, becomes a favorite, and turns back into a human while lying on the sovereign’s bed. Moreover, the werewolf’s human and animal duality suggests the figure of an outlaw who is banned from the city: “What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf— is, therefore in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city.”21 Agamben considers the werewolf’s animal side while interpreting the Hobbesian concept of “the state of nature” as “a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else . . . ,” a “lupinization of man and humanization of the wolf,” which occurs when the law is suspended in a state of exception and is a latent possibility or an “operative presupposition of sovereignty.”22 He emphasizes the importance of this duality as “a threshold of indistinction and of a passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.”23 Contrary to the notion that the modern state exists by citizens’ agreement, Agamben argues that it is founded on the sovereign’s power to punish, with its immediate counterpart
in the figure of the homo sacer; thus, “in the person of the sovereign, the werewolf, the wolf-man of man, dwells permanently in the city.”24
This fundamental connection between the figures of the homo sacer and the sovereign is important in my exposition of the peculiar, personal, and even intimate relationships between the sacred victim and his ultimate persecutor during the Moscow trials of the 1930s as well as the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in post–Soviet Russia. Often, these opposing figures were not only acquainted personally but also worked on the same side of the political aisle until conflict brought on the breakdown that led to the trials. Moreover, this connection may be pointed out even in relationships between the victim and the sovereign benefactor, for example, when Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya identifies herself as Stalin’s daughter, or in the coverage of Victor Jara’s torture and murder, where his broken body would reaffirm the continuous presence of the Big Other at the helm of Soviet ideological power. Then, the enemies of the people on trial as well as, and especially, the martyred heroes may be argued to illustrate Agamben’s point that an exposure to death is the “originary political element” that pays for admission to Soviet citizenship.25
In his examination of the politicization of bare life in the twentieth century, Agamben discusses Karl Binding’s brochure on euthanasia called Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived. Published in 1920, the brochure clearly implied that the decision on a life that may be eliminated without legal consequences was in the hands of the state. Agamben goes on to argue that since each society sets its own threshold beyond which the life of a citizen turns into the bare life of the homo sacer, which may be taken without fear of punishment, anyone may find himself or herself in this situation. “Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.”26 As will be seen in the chapters that follow, the notion that any life can be “downgraded” in this manner resonates with the violent verbal treatment dished out by the Soviet media at the “enemies of the people” during the Stalinist trials as well as to the later figures of the hijackers, Chilean junta’s strongmen, and even post-Soviet oligarchs, often influencing the public in favor of the annihilation of their physical (zoe) or political and symbolic (bios) lives.
The relationship between the sovereign state and the homo sacer, as outlined by Agamben, culminates in the twentieth-century concentration and labor camps. The camps presented a localized version of the state of exception, or a space where the exception became the rule, thereby turning all the inmates into homines sacri while giving the guards the actual, extrajudiciary power over life and death. As Agamben explains, “Insofar as its inhabitants were stripped
of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. This is why the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.”27 In this crucial respect, Soviet and post-Soviet labor camps are comparable to the death camps constructed by the Nazis throughout Europe during World War II as well as to any place of incarceration that exists outside the law. While even the Russian prison may sometimes allow acts of lawlessness, as demonstrated in the case of Sergei Magnitsky’s death, the ultimate authority for the verdict, nonetheless, generally belongs not to the prison guards but to the court of law. As we know from many popular memoirs, from Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov to Eduard Limonov, the Soviet and post-Soviet labor camps are another story; there, the guards, the doctors, and even fellow inmates may often play the role of the executioner or contribute to this outcome without the expectation of punishment. Such spaces are distinct in the Russian context for the general fascination they hold for the intelligentsia as spiritual reformatories. They imbue the select surviving inmates with a “sacred” status, not only as if they had been consecrated to death and returned from the underworld, but also as the repositories of the sacred excess that they carry through the rest of their lives. This perception is the focus of chapter 5 on the formerly imprisoned Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
While the intelligentsia has found a potential for spiritual transformation in the liminal space of the prison camp, Soviet ideology widely used the notion of debt to the motherland as an effective propagandistic tool to promote the “correct” behavioral models. Agamben argues that the law relates to its subjects through the notion of guilt, the original meaning of which was debt rather than transgression; “Guilt refers not to transgression . . . but to the pure force of the law, to the law’s simple reference to something. This is the ultimate ground of the juridical maxim, which is foreign to all morality, according to which ignorance of the rule does not eliminate guilt.”28 In contrast to the Christian redemption scenario, however, the Soviet citizen’s debt to the country could never be fully paid, as even the ultimate sacrifice represented aspirational behavior rather than the cancellation of the collective debt. The sacrificial mechanism, popularized by means of the secondary school’s readings, newspapers, films, and songs, among others, served as an effective tool in “shaming” the debtors into performing acts of heroic self-abnegation, such as soldiers’ sacrifice in the Afghan war in the 1980s, for example. Svetlana Alexievich’s book Tsinkovye mal’chiki, which contains interviews with the
Afghan war veterans and their mothers, testifies to this paradigm’s persistent hold in the late Soviet society. Their stories demonstrate in the most tragic way the society’s disappointment with having made crippling sacrifices for an entity that has now ceased to exist. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the ensuing period of lawlessness as well as an ideological vacuum in the 1990s temporarily dislodged the state’s role as the collector of the moral debt, and the successful revival of many elements of Soviet culture in the era of Putin may be at least partially explained by the public’s desire to reassign debt/guilt.
As the movie critic Dmitry Komm argues in an insightful review of Aleksei Balabanov’s popular film Brat-2 (Brother-2), contemporary Russians often engage in “the myth of the universal symbolic debt,” which moves them to support the ideology of pravdosila (truthpower), promoting the use of power to collect this symbolic debt.29 Danila Bagrov, the hero of Brat-2, personifies sovereignty dispersed in the citizenry; by representing the viewers in the role of the symbolic creditor, he takes over the function formerly held by the state.
As I discuss in chapter 4, the shattering of Soviet sacrificial discourse during perestroika led to a more individualized form of nationalism and a neo-Soviet nostalgia in the popular culture of the 2000s.
The language of sacrifice, by necessity, is a language of violence. It is a highly emotional language filled with hyperbole, literalized metaphors, and depictions of physical or emotional strife, and as such, it creates its own body politics. Generally, physicality underscores the protagonists’ heroism, after which it becomes replaced by the language of ideological redemption. The female bodies of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Nadezhda Kurchenko, and Tamara Zharkaya are largely desexed, and even in their attractive fictional counterparts, such as Natasha and Tamara from the films Eshche raz pro liubov’ (Once more about love) and Ekipazh (The crew), respectively, or Gwen from Arthur Hailey’s novel Airport, sex appeal ultimately brings the men into the fold. On the other hand, male bodies are chastened through injury: the maimed body of Victor Jara, with his hands—the instrument of rebellion—left flaccid, becomes a spectacle that demonstrates the state’s power; the American pilot Ben from Posledniy dyuym (The last inch) is bitten by sharks; and the Russian pilot Igor Skvortsov from Ekipazh freezes his hand while trying to fix the plane’s fuselage. These post-Stalinist plot lines continue to portray the hero as what Lilya Kaganovsky describes as the ideal male self under Stalin: “the perverse logic of Stalinism: the desire to produce maimed, wounded, and disabled bodies whose damaged forms would point to notions of sacrifice and submission.”30 The post-Soviet narratives produce the protagonists in search of an ideal worthy of their martyrdom: the soldiers in Prilepin’s novel Patologii
are a brotherhood of chaste warrior monks who redirect their sacrifice from the state toward each other; Sankya, the eponymous hero of Prilepin’s novel, commits a suicide by cop in his last stand against the state’s corruption; while Khodorkovsky chooses prison over exile in order to promote the values of individualism and democracy in Russia.
The goal of the Soviet martyr was to fulfill his or her heroic potential by serving a higher good, namely, the advent of communism, which was often understood as service to the state: “Freedom of the individual in the Soviet state consists in the real opportunity for each working man to reveal [proiavit’] all his physical and spiritual powers in order to achieve his own material or cultural well-being and in order to strengthen socialist society.”31 Agamben argues that the homo sacer exemplifies the relationship between the individual and the modern state, a relationship in which power confronts the bare life of its subjects while representing the authority over life and death. This model applies easily to the Soviet Union, where the culture of war and the ubiquity of enemies, which constitute the state of exception, supported the state’s ability to enact drastic measures. The Soviet state’s transcendent authority also had a historical precedent in the notion of the sanctity of the tsar. Yuri Lotman explains how the religious “act of unconditional self-giving,” as opposed to a two-sided contract, became central to the tsar’s authority in medieval Russia, thereby turning the sovereign into a “living icon” and a source of all “semiotic value” while transferring the demand for “practical activity” (or what Khrakhordin calls a “revelation by deeds”) to everyone else.32 As this centralized form of government was rooted in religion, the Russian state came to represent the ultimate sublime. Boris Uspenskii notes the connection between the very first anointment of a Russian tsar and the appearance of pretenders who often believed in their own divine royal predestination because of signs such as a birthmark.33 Uspenskii’s idea that “Royal imposture, then, is perceived in early Russia as anti-behavior. The fact that False Dmitri was regarded as a sorcerer (‘a heretic’), i.e. that features characteristic of the behavior of sorcerers were ascribed to him in the popular consciousness, is indicative of this” would explain the treatment of the enemies at trials: they were described as powerful almost to a supernatural degree and accused of double dealing, that is, of pretending.34 As may be seen from the proliferation of “Putin art,” such as an exhibition depicting the president as a hero of Herculean strength, these concepts continue to play a part in shaping the perception of a “sublime” relationship between the citizen and the state.35
This book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 establishes the two main protagonists of the sacrificial narrative: the enemies of the people and the partisan
hero of World War II, and explains how the official discourse’s manipulation of their zoe and bios produced a blueprint for subsequent media canonizations. While violence in the form of mass arrests and petitions for the death penalty surrounded the Soviet population in the 1930s, official literature steered clear of its realistic depictions. World War II provided a psychological and artistic release by presenting an enemy whose very actions demanded a violent response. As a result, a language of physical struggle based on a new war mythology emerged. Typically, the official discourse of World War II works toward establishing murder as self-defense and avoids portraying the Soviet warriors doing anything morally suspect; there is a clear and unambiguous line between right and wrong, between the Russians and the Germans.
Of particular interest within this mythology is the treatment of the human body, with its inconvenient needs and the tendency to encroach on the life of consciousness, ideological or otherwise. Soviet war stories often show the Nazis going to impossible lengths in their torture of captured partisans, and the Russians persevering through seemingly impossible hardships. While Elaine Scarry demonstrates that torture creates a balance of power that destroys the victim’s world (identity) and turns him or her into a body, in Soviet war stories the bodies of the tortured partisans all but disappear.36 If, according to Victor Erofeev, prostitutes in the works of psychological realism sold the bodies they did not have, in Russian war stories partisans submit to torture bodies that are immune to pain.37 Without disputing the issue of historical accuracy, this chapter investigates such stylization and its various vantage points in the context of the Soviet aesthetic.
I believe that the body’s disappearance should be read in the larger context of its treatment in the official narratives of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, in the coverage of the show trials, the accused are presented not only as fully embodied but also obscured by camouflage, which must be stripped away to reveal the “body” of crime. In Homo Sacer, Agamben points out that the history and etymology of the writ of habeas corpus, or the law that demands the presence of the accused at the trial, demonstrates the “law’s desire to have a body.”38 Soviet discourse goes so far as to treat the very presence of the “enemy bodies” as a method of making concrete their alleged crimes of plotting and spying. On the other hand, the wartime body necessary for the story as an object of torture and violence is converted into pure transcendence and disappears from sight. These slightly later narratives walk a thin line between treating the human body as a “source of analogical verification,” where abstract doctrines, whether political or religious, acquire objective reality through
the infliction of bodily hurt, and preempting this pain with a discourse of transcendence.39
During the Thaw, a period of relative political openness after the death of Stalin, the sacrificial mechanism that was part and parcel of the Stalinist culture was reimagined to reflect the optimism of the 1960s, symbolized by Yury Gagarin’s first flight into space, while preserving its ideological grip. Drawing on revolutionary hubris, which is traditionally associated with human attempts to fly, Soviet official culture continuously imbued flight with ideological significance. Katerina Clark notes that the very etymology of flight suggests “dramatic verticality” and a “potential for adventure and suspense.”40 Popular culture broadly engaged in linking the flight’s dramatic potential with sacrifice thus asserting a more universal agency for the state while demonstrating that sacrificial values continued to be an important element of the Soviet identity.
From the mid-1950s through the 1980s, the Soviet Union experienced a surge in aerial hijackings, the goal of which for the dissidents, refuseniks, and various malcontents who attempted them was fleeing to the West. Chapter 2 explores two real-life hijackings alongside many earlier and contemporaneous fictional examples. While the actual hijackings occurred after the Thaw, they still carried the optimistic charge inherited from that period’s emphasis on the Soviet individual’s ability to make the right moral and ideological choices. The chapter introduces the figure of a heroic flight attendant in media, literature, and film as an heiress to the legacy of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and other martyrs of World War II, while examining how hijackers were cast as traitors to their Soviet homeland much like the “enemies of the people” from the Stalinist show trials. These hijackings became a source of international controversy in the politics of the Cold War period. Internally, they provided an opportunity to reactivate the homo sacer mechanism, by means of which the regime sought to deflect popular antagonism onto a set of ready-made culprits.
As I have argued, Soviet culture created two types of homo sacer: the selfsacrificing hero and the defendant at the show trials. Both of them came into existence through the discursive practices in Stalinist media and literature, though they may also be traced back to the Orthodox customs of monastic self-discipline and publicizing the sinner’s guilt.41 The official media reporting on the hijackings invoked these earlier figures, which also found resonance in popular culture of this period. The government seized on the instances of open resistance in order to renew its symbolic contract with the public. When two of the hijackings resulted in the deaths of young female flight attendants, their fate became fodder for the revival of the canonical ritual in Soviet media,
which along with the representations of pilots and flight attendants in popular culture, is the subject of analysis in this chapter.
My contention is that the metaphor of the sacred victim was crucial to Soviet discourse and remained operative even at this later date and despite the absence of war or mass repressions. The homo sacer mechanism, which relied on various methods of self-discipline and surveillance, was inherent in Stalinist culture, with its constant demand for heroic self-sacrifice in labor and war and paranoid insistence on the ubiquitous presence of hidden enemies, waiting to be unmasked. This emphasis on vigilance over oneself and others was ostensibly justified when the state was in danger after the revolution or when the Soviet Union was attacked in World War II. However, many elements of this ritualistic language, which I outline here, survived the war and a public denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality, and continued to be used to describe and interpret various crises.
Chapter 3 discusses how the popular depictions of the Chilean singer Victor Jara’s violent death at the hands of General Pinochet’s junta reaffirmed the state’s authority in the 1970s and 1980s. When the junta took over the government of Chile in September 1973 and detained thousands of people in a concentration camp at the National Stadium in Santiago on suspicion of resistance, the folk singer, theater director, and Communist Victor Jara was among the victims. He was murdered in a particularly gruesome and symbolically suggestive way: before being shot to death, he was tortured, and his hands were broken, so as to separate the bard from his guitar. The Chilean martyr for communism comes to occupy the ideological space of the homo sacer in the Soviet press of the 1970s, where his image strengthened and legitimized the regime.
Agamben demonstrates how the power of the state has always been connected to and expressed through this figure, whose biological life is subject to the king’s state of exception, that is, his ability to suspend the law in order to apply capital punishment.42 Victor Jara’s highly publicized heroic death occurred soon after the end of the Thaw, when the Soviet government’s internal policy shifted in a more conservative direction of downplaying the crimes committed under Stalin and reinstating the status quo. In Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea, Svetlana Boym notes that beginning in the mid1960s, public denunciations of Stalin became prohibited, while his various crimes became glossed over in the name of patriotism.43 Mikhail Sholokhov’s address to the Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1966, in which the writer wistfully imagined what would have become of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the writers who were charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for publishing
their works abroad, had they been put on trial in the 1920s without the constraints of the law, and the article in Evening Moscow with its Stalinist title of “Turncoats” clearly mark the government’s ease with regressive tactics.44 If the deaths of the female flight attendants during the hijackings were framed as uplifting examples of heroic self-sacrifice and feats of self-possession in Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya’s mold, the lingering focus on Victor Jara’s lifeless body amounted to a disturbing display of violence. In the absence of mass purges, Jara’s body implied that politics is a high-stakes game and warned against entering its sacred space. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows that, in the seventeenth century, public displays of execution and torture reasserted the power of the state on the body of the offender.45 Similarly, public and graphic descriptions of the death and suffering of Jara asserted the power of the Soviet state before the frightened gaze of its citizens. Soviet discourse demonstrates Jara’s injured body by placing it at the center of its narrative while “revealing” the power at this site. I specifically explore how these narratives establish the agency of the state as the authoritative and punishing subject outside of the culprit/pain causality through the exhibition of Victor Jara’s body.
Chapter 4 discusses the return of the wartime hero in late-Soviet and postSoviet literature and popular culture. The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the military operations in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as the recent conflict in eastern Ukraine, all created favorable conditions for revisiting one of the original figures at the center of the Soviet sacrificial mechanism several decades later. By the time of perestroika, the influence and prestige of Soviet ideology collapsed together with the state that promoted it. However, the public was not always ready to let go of Soviet idealism. The breakaway pieces of sacrificial discourse landed in unexpected places and were later picked up in a resurgence of nationalist fiction and official culture in Putin’s Russia. As a result, there emerged a different kind of hero, who embodies the notion of sovereignty in its mythological, neo-Soviet incarnation.
While reading contemporary nationalist fiction, one may observe a transformation of the soldier from the heroic captured partisan of World War II to a naive and beleaguered protagonist fighting in Chechnya; this reflects a turn toward more individualized forms of nationalism than those promoted by the official Soviet culture. Serguei Oushakine notes that the controversy surrounding the official definition of the Chechen campaigns as “antiterrorist” military operations rather than war, and ambiguity in the social status of the veterans, as well as the government’s reluctance to pay compensation to those who were injured or displaced during the hostilities, underscored the soldiers’ dependence on the state’s meaning-giving function for their sacrifices: “the state’s
retreat from performing a necessary symbolic work stripped its subjects of categories of perception and rituals of recognition that were used to legitimize the experience through which these subjects were constituted in the first place.”46 The fictional protagonists of contemporary nationalist literature reflect this paradox. In particular, the solders’ sense of being abandoned by the state produces a nostalgic search for father figures, and this quest’s failure results in the creation of a different support structure—a community of ethnically marked soldiers fighting for each other.
The sense of abandonment may be traced back to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which lasted from 1981 through 1989. Here, the mechanisms of Soviet propaganda that deal specifically with war were tested for the last time before the country, which formerly called its citizens to arms, formally lost its agency. What is especially important is that the Afghan war occurred on the threshold of major political changes that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the responses to this war represent an interesting case study in the breakdown of the sacrificial mechanism on the one hand, and its perceived relevance and attractiveness on the other.
The treatment of the sacrificial figures of the 1980s and 1990s in literature and the media demonstrate a continued appeal of this paradigm in late-Soviet and early post-Soviet culture. While the official narrative was no longer viable, its pieces resettled into the emerging new discourses. The painful realization that official language no longer sustained the sacrifices of the Afghan war veterans and their families is followed in the early 1990s by the reemergence of semiofficial discourses on their triumphant sacrifices in the media, literature, and cinema. The works of Zakhar Prilepin, German Sadulaev, and Dmitry Cherkasov reimagine this mechanism in the early 2000s, each in its own way, yet all three demonstrate the resurgence of neo-Soviet nationalism as well as a redistribution of heroic agency and victimhood.
Chapter 5 argues that Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s treatment in the media and popular culture reveals the Russian intelligentsia’s persistent epistemological involvement with the Soviet sacrificial paradigm. Since being first put on trial in what appeared to be a rigged and politically motivated prosecution, Mikhail Khodorkovsky became something of a heroic figure for the Russian intelligentsia. Certainly some objective facts—such as the court’s apparent bias, Putin’s personal involvement, and Khodorkovsky’s stoicism—undoubtedly played a part in creating this ethos. The media, both in Russia and abroad, directly compared this affair to the Soviet political trials against dissidents and writers, and even to the Stalinist show trials. For the thick journals, this connection also pertains to the issue of Russian history’s cyclical nature, which has been
widely debated in recent literary reviews. There is no doubt that the two trials’ familiar setting was a contributing factor in galvanizing the intelligentsia to Khodorkovsky’s defense because it supplied a field upon which to project, test, and play out the assumptions of similarity between the contemporary political system and its Soviet predecessor. Along with creating the character of a businessman-hero for popular culture, the trials also provided an opportunity to work out a new definition of personhood, such as, according to Kharkhordin, was revealed by the Soviet trials. I am particularly interested in the construction of heroic victimhood and the ways in which these contemporary notions echo the official Soviet discourse on “scapegoats” and “sacred men and women” (such as the partisan hero or the defendants at the show trials) while invoking more appropriate cultural references, be it religious mythology, the nineteenth-century literary behavioral models, “progressive values,” or patriotism. Khodorkovsky’s ability to speak for himself throughout the duration of the trials added a new element to this setting and often subverted his defenders’ expectations. The intelligentsia’s vehement denial of litso to Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, underscores the inherent connection between the figures of the sovereign and the homo sacer. My goal is to outline the extent to which contemporary Russian intelligentsia continues to use this discursive framework while promoting an antitotalitarian agenda. To this end I examine the correspondence between Khodorkovsky and the writers Liudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, and Boris Strugatsky, as well as various echoes of the trials in Russian and Western media and popular culture.
This book’s conclusion discusses the most recent examples of sacrificial language, such as the revival of the cult of the Great Patriotic War, the alleged crucifixion of a little boy in Ukraine, and the various uses of the phrase “sakral’naia zhertva” (sacred victim) by Vladimir Putin as well as the opposition media, among others, all of which suggests that the homo sacer paradigm continues to play a role in Russian culture and society.
Whether told in newspapers, fiction, music, or film, Soviet and post-Soviet stories of sacrifice follow some of the same narrative conventions and rules of emplotment as socialist realist fiction as well as its medieval and prerevolutionary predecessors. Therefore, such works are treated and analyzed here as texts. According to Katerina Clark’s book The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, the main plot of the Stalinist novel may be compared to “the rite of passage of traditional culture,” which includes death and rebirth “as a function of the collective” thereby writing the ultimate sacrifice into the very ritual of becoming an adult in the Soviet novel.47 In Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature, Marcia Morris, on the other hand, links the socialist realist
protagonist to the traditional depictions of the ascetic in Russian literature as well as to the Bakhtinian paradigmatic plot of separation—initiation—(non) return for the adventure hero.48 Much as in saints’ lives, form dominates content in Soviet sacrificial narratives, which also results in a high degree of depersonalization of the hero.49 While the heroes glorified in the official media tend to be more stock figures than fictional characters, both types of martyr ultimately follow the same story line in which the hero goes through a “moment of truth,” makes the right choice, and dies or gets injured in the process. In spite of the purges’ claim to individuation, the “revelation by deeds” narratives do not produce lichnosti (personalities).50 What is of interest here is not the individual protagonists but the extrapersonal characteristics of a Soviet martyr as well as the historical context, which determine how these typical qualities of heroism are distributed in a particular portrayal.
Sacrificial narratives are filled with many familiar tropes from the saints’ lives as well as earlier revolutionary literature, such as a sublime message, explicit religious references, the hero’s special destiny and a strength of spirit, the presence of tempters (or informants and traitors), cruel interrogations (among other forms of testing), as well as an extreme situation that brings out the heroic. Among the common features the stories in this book share is the presence of a body and spirit dichotomy, which in Agamben’s terms may be described as a conflict between zoe and bios; the partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya attempts to suppress her physical reaction to pain, while the flight attendant Nadya Kurchenko does not betray her fear of the hijackers; Victor Jara continues to sing and write ideological poetry until his death, while Khodorkovsky mortifies his flesh in a prison cell.
In addition, there is a strong element of publicity to the heroes’ feats: the show trials of enemies of the people are highly publicized; Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya makes a patriotic speech at the gallows and this moment of public speaking solidifies her role as a martyr; the brave and self-sacrificing flight attendants become popular characters in fiction and film; Victor Jara’s image of dying with his guitar is emulated by several Soviet performers; and Zakhar Prilepin’s protagonist Sasha Tishin participates in public actions to foment a revolution. The perceived necessity of recording the prison experience in writing leads to the letters between Liudmila Ulitskaya and Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky sees himself as a Komsomol hero like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and prides himself on not betraying his comrades and principles. At the same time, imitating the contemplation and dispossession of a monk, Khodorkovsky observes that prison helped him to become a regular person for whom being is more important than having.51 Before embracing
Khodorkovsky as an “enemy of the people” put on trial by a tyrant, Ulitskaya casts him in a crime-and-punishment plot as Raskolnikov while comparing his cell to an anchoritic cave—“one cannot fall lower than that”—in contrast to “the height of unbroken spirit and a tensely working mind.”52 It also becomes increasingly more difficult for a consumer of media and popular culture not to cast real-life sacrificial figures like Khodorkovsky in overly familiar traditional narratives, such as that of the first Russian saints Boris and Gleb for being similarly persecuted by a rival sibling vying for power (as Putin often presented himself to the oligarchs), because of his refusal to flee the country.
There is also a supernatural element to the conflict between good and evil: the enemies are portrayed as animal-like, greedy, and traitorous, often through metaphors and with hints of sorcery: the enemies at the show trials are compared to werewolves, vampires, snakes, and hollowed-out humans; Pinochet’s junta is described in animal-like language reminiscent of the traditional depiction of the devil as goats and snakes in saints’ lives; the Seven Simons, a jazz band that hijacked a plane and killed a flight attendant, are described as “bristling with machine guns”; and the post-Soviet opposition writers and journalists refer to Putin as a faceless dissimulator. The heroes, on the other hand, often resemble saints and monks: in her mother’s biography, Zoya appears as a serious and thoughtful girl, the traits that usually distinguish saints in childhood. The flight attendant Tamara loves the sky in a narrative that sharply juxtaposes high and low. Victor Jara’s name carries the legacy of magic and light. The brotherhood of chaste soldier-monks in Prilepin’s Patologii realizes the biblical phrase of “giving one’s life for his friends,” and the novel’s protagonist Egor follows his instincts rather than logic, thus imitating medieval Russian saints: “Pagan ascetics . . . achieved self-mastery in part through learning and culture. The early Christian ascetic rejected learning (often enough he was illiterate) and concentrated instead on mortification of the flesh.”53 In Prilepin and Sadulaev’s contemporary wartime literature, suffering determines national belonging, thus restoring a strong bond between the sacred and the state.
Everything is connected to World War II and refers back to it as a foundational event of faith. History is presented as teleology: the stories of Zoya, Jara, the flight attendants, the Afghan war veterans interviewed in Svetlana Alexievich’s Tsinkovye mal’chiki, Prilepin and Sadualev’s protagonists, and Khodorkovsky’s self-identification as well as that by Ulitskaya, all reference the respective heroes who preceded them, just as medieval saints’ lives often began with stories from the Bible. Post-Soviet wartime heroes search for an appropriate preexisting teleological narrative for their bios.
Finally, these narratives rely on sharp contrasts: high and low, exalted goodness and unmediated evil, loyalty and betrayal, or right and wrong. Drawing on the work of Lotman and Uspenskii, Morris points out that the Russian ascetic’s “quest for perfection . . . rests on a strongly dualist pattern of thought; whenever the hero is confronted by the need to make a choice, he makes an extreme one. . . . He sees only two paths: the path to salvation and the path to damnation.”54 The sacrificial narratives focus on the dichotomy between heroes and villains: Zoya and the Nazis, enemies of the people and the Soviet people, Victor Jara and the junta, the stewardesses and the hijackers or the elements, the soldiers versus the corrupt army brass, traditionalism versus secular (Western) lifestyle, the lone Slavic hero versus the mendacious West, and the regime versus the victim on trial. Depending on their political position, various journalists call Khodorkovsky the opposition’s messiah and a spiritual leader or a criminal and a murderer who must repent his sins.55 The behavior models are limited; however, they are emphasized as a matter of choice. To look ahead to book’s last chapter, Alexander Goldfarb attempts to divest Khodorkovsky’s persona of its symbolic status by insisting that Putin simply needed to jail a random rich man in order to intimidate the others.56 These commonalities of plot demonstrate the difficulty of speaking in a language that is completely free of cultural predetermination; thus, such politically antagonistic figures as Liudmila Ulitskaya and Zakhar Prilepin seem to be drawing their vastly different values from the same symbolic well.
While Oushakine demonstrates that the “community of suffering” is a tool for crafting an identity in the post-Soviet world, I would argue that the narratives of martyrdom do not build a sense of community but rather delimit it by raising the ante.57 The language of sacrifice focuses on the purity of the community by naming what is alien and excluding it whether it is in the name of nationalism in Prilepin, Sadulaev, and Cherkasov, or a community of believers in the Soviet Union’s special destiny of shining light on the corrupt world of capitalism, or a Western-style democracy. By doing so it becomes complicit in providing an ideological basis for political militarism that is responsible for the current enactment of the state of exception.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Roderick Murchison to foretell the discovery of gold in Australia, as we have already explained; and similar knowledge places similar predictions within the power of other geologists.
We happen to have before us, at this present moment, a geological map of Nova Scotia. Two such maps have been published, one by Messrs Alger and Jackson, of Boston, and another by Dr Gesner, late colonial geologist for the province of New Brunswick. In these maps the north-western part of the province is skirted by a fringe of old primary rocks, partly metamorphic, and sometimes fossiliferous, and resting on a back ground of igneous rocks, which cover, according to Gesner, the largest portion of this end of the province. Were we inclined to try our hand at a geological prediction, we should counsel our friends in the vale of Annapolis to look out for yellow particles along the course of the Annapolis river, and especially at the mouths and up the beds of the cross streams that descend into the valley from the southern highlands.
Nature, indeed, has given the Nova Scotians in this Annapolis valley a miniature of the more famed valley of the Sacramento. Their north and south mountains represent respectively the coast range and the Sierra Nevada of the Sacramento Basin. The tributaries in both valleys descend chiefly from the hills on the left of the main rivers. The Sacramento and the Annapolis rivers both terminate in a lake or basin, and each finally escapes through a narrow chasm in the coast ridge by which its terminating basin communicates with the open sea. The Gut of Digby is, in the small, what the opening into the harbour of San Francisco now called the “Golden Gate” and the “Narrows” is in the large; and if the Sacramento has its plains of drifted sand and gravel, barren and unpropitious to the husbandman, the Annapolis river, besides its other poor lands, on which only the sweet fern luxuriates, has its celebrated Aylesford sand plain, or devil’s goose pasture—a broad flat “given up to the geese, who are so wretched that the foxes won’t eat them, they hurt their teeth so bad.” Then the south mountains, as we have said, consist of old primary rocks, such as may carry gold—disturbed, traversed by dykes, and changed or metamorphosed, as gold-bearing rocks usually are. Whether quartz veins abound in them we cannot tell; but the idle boys of Clare, Digby, Clements, Annapolis, Aylesford, and Horton, may as well keep their eyes about them, and
the woodmen, as they hew and float down the pine logs for the supply of the Boston market. A few days spent with a “long Californian Tom,” in rocking the Aylesford and other sands and gravel-drifts of their beautiful valley, may not prove labour in vain. What if the rich alluvials of Horton and Cornwallis should hide beneath more glittering riches, and more suddenly enriching, than the famed crops of which they so justly boast? Geological considerations also suggest that the streams which descend from the northern slopes of the Cobequid Mountains should not be overlooked. It may well be that the name given to Cap d’Or by the early French settlers two hundred years ago, may have had its origin in the real, and not in the imaginary presence of glittering gold.
But to return from this digression. Second, The same facts which thus enable us to predict or to suggest inquiry, serve also to test the truth or falsehood of ancient traditions regarding the former fruitfulness in gold of countries which now possess only the fading memory of such natural but bygone wealth. Our geological maps direct us to European countries, in which all the necessary geological conditions coexist, and in which, were the world still young, a geologist would stake a fair reputation on the hazard of discovering gold. But the art of extracting gold from auriferous sands is simple, and easily practised. It is followed as successfully by the black barbarians of Africa as by the whitest savages of California. The longer a country has been inhabited, therefore, by a people among whom gold is valued, the less abundant the region is likely to be in profitable washings of gold. The more will it approach to the condition of Bohemia, where gold prevailed to a great extent, and was very productive in the middle ages, though it has been long worked out, and the very localities of its mines forgotten.[7]
Were it to become, for example, a matter of doubtful tradition, which the historian was inclined to pass by, that in the reign of Queen Elizabeth three hundred men were employed near Elvan’s Foot—not far, we believe, from Wanlockhead in Scotland—at a place called the Gold Scour, in washing for the precious metal, who in a few summers collected as much as was valued at £100,000; or that in 1796, ten thousand pounds’ worth of gold was collected in the alluvial soil of a small district in Wicklow—the geologist would come to his aid and assure him that the natural history of the
neighbourhood rendered the occurrence of gold probable, and the traditions, therefore, worthy of reliance.
Third, They explain, also, why it is that, where streams flowing from one slope of a chain or ridge of mountains are found to yield rich returns to the gold-seekers, those which descend from the opposite slope often prove wholly unproductive. In the Ural, rich mines occur almost solely on the eastern, or Siberian slope of the great chain. On the western, or European slope, a few inconsiderable mines only are worked. So, as yet, in the Sierra Nevada in California, the chief treasures occur in the feeders of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which descend from its western side. The eastern slope, which falls towards the broad arid valley of the Mormons, is as yet unfamed, and may probably never prove rich in gold. These circumstances are accounted for by the fact that, in the Ural, the older rocks, of which we have spoken as being especially goldbearing, form the eastern slope of the ridge only, the western flank of the range being covered for the most part by rocks of a more modern epoch. The same may be the case also with the Sierra Nevada where it is still unexplored; and the Utah Lake, though remote, by its saltness lends probability to this conjecture.
Fourth, and lastly, they make clear the distinction between the “dry and wet diggins” we read of in our Californian news—why in so many countries the beds of rivers have been deserted by the goldfinders, and why the river banks, and even distant dry and elevated spots, have proved more productive than the channel itself.[8]
Let us attempt to realise for a moment the condition of a country like California, at the period, not geologically remote, when the goldbearing drift was spread over its magnificent valley. The whole region was covered by the sea to an unknown depth. The snowy ridge, (Nevada,) and probably the coast ridge, also formed lines of rocky islands or peaks, which withstood the fury of the waves, and, if they were covered with ice, the wearing and degrading action also of the moving glaciers. The spoils of the crumbling rocks sank into the waters, and were distributed by tides and currents along the bottom of the valley. The narrow opening through the coast chain, by which the bay of San Francisco now communicates with the Northern Pacific, would, at the period we speak of, prevent the debris of the Nevada rocks from being washed out into the main basin of the
Pacific, and this would enable the metallic, as well as the other spoils of these rocks, to accumulate in the bottom, and along the slopes of what is now the valley of California.
By a great physical change the country was lifted out of the sea, either at once or by successive stages, and it presented then the appearance of a valley long and wide, covered almost everywhere by a deep clothing of sands, gravels, and shingles, with which were intermingled—not without some degree of method, but at various depths, and in various proportions—the lumps and grains of metallic gold which had formerly existed in the rocks, of which the sands and shingles had formed a part.
And now the tiny streams, which had formerly terminated their short courses in the sea itself, flowed down the mountain slopes, united their waters in the bottom, and formed large rivers. These gradually cut their way into the superficial sands, washed them as the modern gold-washer does in his cradle, and collected, in certain parts of their beds, the heavier particles of gold which they happened to meet with in their descent. Hence the golden sands of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, and of so many of the rivers celebrated in ancient story. But the beds of these rivers could never be the receptacle of all the gold of such a district. They derived nearly all their wealth from the sands and clays or gravels they had scooped out in forming their channels; and as these channels occupy only a small fraction of the surface of the bottoms and slopes of most river valleys, they could, or were likely to contain, only an equally small fraction of the mineral wealth of their several regions. The more ancient waters had distributed the gold throughout the whole drift of the country. The river, like a “long Tom,” had cradled a small part of it, and proved its richness. The rest of the drift, if rocked by art, would prove equally, it might be even more, productive.
It is in this old virgin drift, usually untouched by the river, that the so-called dry diggings are situated. The reader will readily understand that, while no estimate can be formed of the quantity of gold which an entire valley like that of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, or which wide sandy plains like those of Australia, may ultimately yield, yet it will require great sagacity to discover, it may even be that only accident and long lapse of time will reveal, in what
spots and at what depths the gold is most abundantly accumulated, and where it will best pay the cost of extraction.
We do not now advert to any of the other points connected with the history of gold on which our geological facts throw light. These illustrations are sufficient to show how rich in practical inferences and suggestions geological and chemical science is, in this as in many other special branches of mineral inquiry.
Nor need we say much in answer to our question,—“Why the ability to predict, as in the Australian case,” or generally to draw such conclusions and offer such suggestions and explanations, has remained so long unanswered, or been so lately acquired? Geology and chemistry are both young sciences, almost unknown till within a few years, rapidly advancing, and every day applying themselves more widely and directly to those subjects which effect the material prosperity and individual comforts of mankind. Knowledge which was not possessed before our day, could obviously neither be applied at all by ancient nations, nor earlier by the moderns.
To the consideration of the absolute extent and probable productive durability of the gold regions newly brought to light—of their extent and richness compared with those known in former times—and of their probable effects on the social and financial relations of mankind, we shall now turn our attention.
In the preceding part we have explained the circumstances in which gold occurs—the geological conditions which appear to be necessary to its occurrence—and where, therefore, we may expect to find it. But no conditions chemical or geological at present known are able to indicate—a priori, and apart from personal examination and trial—in what quantity the precious metal is likely to occur, either in the living rocks of a gold-bearing district, or in the sands and gravels by which it may be covered. Yet, next to the fact of the existence of gold in a country, the quantity in which it is likely to occur, and the length of time during which a profitable yield may be obtained, are the questions which most interest, not only individuals on the spot, but all other countries to which the produce of its mines is usually sent, or from which adventurers are likely to proceed.
We have already remarked, that, in nearly all the gold regions which have been celebrated in past times, their mineral riches have been for the most part extracted from the drifted sands and gravels which overspread the surface. We have also drawn attention to the small amount of skill and intelligence which this extraction requires, and to the brief time in which such washings may be exhausted even by ignorant people. Most of our modern gold mines are situated in similar drifts. We may instance, from among the less generally known, those of Africa, from which are drawn the supplies that come to us yearly from the gold coast.
“Of all the African mines those of Bambouk are supposed to be the richest. They are about thirty miles south of the Senegal river; and the inhabitants are chiefly occupied in gold-washing during the eight months of dry weather. About two miles from Natakou is a small round-topped hill, about 300 feet high, the whole of which is an alluvial formation of sand and pulverised emery, with grains of iron ore and gold, in lumps, grains, and scales. This hill is worked throughout; and it is said the richest lumps are found deepest. There are 1200 pits or workings, some 40 feet deep but mere holes unplanked. This basin includes at least 500 square miles. Forty miles north, at the foot of the Tabwara mountains, are the mines of Semayla, in a hill. This is of quartz slate; and the gold is got by pounding the rock in large mortars. In the river Semayla are alluvial deposits, containing emery impregnated with gold. The earth is washed by the women in calabashes. The mine of Nambia is in another part of the Tabwara mountains, in a hillock worked in pits. The whole gold district of Bambouk is supposed to extend over 10,000 square miles.
“Close to the Ashantee country is that of the Bunkatoos, who have rich gold workings, in pits at Bukanti and Kentosoe.” (W , p. 44.)
From this description we see that all the mines in the Senegal country are gold-washings, with the exception of those of Semayla, to which we shall hereafter allude. No skill is required to work them; and should European constitutions ever permit European nations to obtain an ascendancy in this part of Africa, such mines may be effectually exhausted before an opportunity is afforded for the application of European skill. And so in California and Australia, should the gold repositories be all of the same easily explored character, the metal may be suddenly worked out by the hordes of all classes who have been rushing in; and thus the influence of the
mines may die away after a few brief years of extraordinary excitement.
When California first became famous, the popular inquiry everywhere was simply, what amount of immediate profit is likely to be realised by an industrious adventurer? What individual temptation, in other words, is there for me or my connections to join the crowd of eager emigrants?
Passing over the inflated and suspicious recitals which found their way into American and European journals, such statements as the following, from trustworthy sources, could not fail to have a most stimulating effect—
“To give you an instance, however, of the amount of metal in the soil which I had from a miner on the spot, three Englishmen bought a claim, 30 feet by 100 feet, for fourteen hundred dollars. It had been twice before bought and sold for considerable sums, each party who sold it supposing it to be nearly exhausted. In three weeks the Englishmen paid their fourteen hundred dollars, and cleared thirteen dollars a-day besides for their trouble. This claim, which is not an unusually rich one, though it has perhaps been more successfully worked, has produced in eighteen months over twenty thousand dollars, or five thousand pounds’ worth of gold.”[9]
Mr Coke is here describing the riches of a spot on the immediate banks of the river, where circumstances had caused a larger proportion than usual of that gold to be collected, or thrown together —which the river, in cutting out its gravelly channel, had separated or rocked out, as we have described in the previous part of this article. This rich spot, therefore, is by no means a fair sample of the country, though, from Mr Coke’s matter-of-fact language, many might be led to think so. Few spots so small in size could reasonably be expected to yield so rich a store of gold, though its accumulation in this spot certainly does imply that the quantity of gold diffused through the drift of the country may in reality be very great. It may be so, however, and yet not pay for the labour required to extract it.
That many rich prizes have been obtained by fortunate and steady men in these diggings, there can be no doubt; and yet, if we ask what benefit the emigrant diggers, as a whole, have obtained, the information we possess shows it to be far from encouraging. On this
subject we find, in one of the books before us, the following information:—[10]
“The inaccessibility of the placers, the diseases, the hardships, and the very moderate remuneration resulting to the great mass of the miners, were quite forgotten or omitted in the communications and reports of a few only excepted.
“A few have made, and will hereafter make, fortunes there, and very many of those who remain long enough will accumulate something; but the great mass, all of whom expected to acquire large amounts of gold in a short time, must be comparatively disappointed. I visited California to dig gold, but chose to abandon that purpose rather than expose life and health in the mines; and as numbers were already seeking employment in San Francisco without success, and I had neither the means nor the inclination to speculate, I resolved to return to my family, and resume my business at home.” (P. 207.)
Thousands, we believe, have followed Mr Johnson’s example; and thousands more would have lived longer and happier, had they been courageous enough, like him, to return home unsuccessful.
“The estimate in a former chapter of three or four dollars per day per man, as the average yield during my late visit to the gold regions, has been most extensively and generally confirmed since that period. Innumerable letters, and persons lately returned from the diggings, (including successful miners,) now fix the average at from three to four dollars per day for each digger during the season. ” (P. 243.)
“Thus far the number of successful men may have been one in every hundred. In this estimate those only should be considered successful who have realized and safely invested their fortunes. The thousands who thus far have made their fortunes, but are still immersed in speculations, do not belong as yet to the foregoing number.” (P. 245.)
This is applying the just principle, “Nemo ante obitum beatus,” which is too generally forgotten when the first sudden shower of riches falls upon ourselves or our neighbours.
“Individual efforts, as a general rule, must prove abortive. So far as my knowledge enables me to judge, they already have. I do not know of a single instance of great success at the mines on the part of a single member of the passengers or ship’s company with whom I came round Cape Horn: of the former
there were a hundred, and of the latter twenty. Many have returned home, who can tell the truth.” (P. 249.)
This last extract does not contain Mr Johnson’s own experience, but that of a physician settled at San Francisco, from whose communication he quotes; and the same writer adds many distressing particulars, which we pass by, of the fearful misery to which those free men, of their own free will, from the thirst of gold, have cheerfully exposed themselves.
“Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames?”
The latest news from Australia contains a repetition of the Californian experience. A recent Australian and New Zealand Gazette speaks thus of the gold-hunters—
“In all parts of the colony, labour is quitting its legitimate employment for the lottery of gold-hunting; and, as a natural consequence, industrial produce is suffering. Abundant as is the metal, misery among its devotees is quite as abundant. The haggard look of the unsuccessful, returning disheartened in search of ordinary labour, is fully equalled by the squalor of the successful, who, the more they get, appear to labour the harder, amidst filth and deprivation of every kind, till their wasted frames vie with those of their less lucky neighbours. With all its results, gold-finding is both a body and soul debasing occupation; and even amongst so small a body of men, the vices and degradation of California are being enacted, in spite of all wholesome check imposed by the authorities.”
It is indeed a melancholy reflection that, wherever such mines of the precious metals have occurred, there misery of the most extreme kind has speedily been witnessed. The cruelties of the Spanish conquerors towards the Indian nations of Mexico and Peru, are familiar to all. They are now brought back fresh upon our memories by the new fortunes and prospects of the western shores of America. Yet of such cruelties the Spaniards were not the inventors. They only imitated in the New, what thousands of years before the same thirst for gold had led other conquerers to do in the Old World. Diodorus, after mentioning that, in the confines of Egypt and the neighbouring
countries, there are parts full of gold mines, from which, by the labour of a vast multitude of people, much gold is dug, adds—
“The kings of Egypt condemn to these mines, not only notorious criminals, captives in war, persons falsely accused, and those with whom the king is offended, but also all their kindred and relations. These are sent to this work, either as a punishment, or that the profit and gain of the king may be increased by their labours. There are thus infinite numbers thrust into these mines, all bound in fetters, kept at work night and day, and so strictly guarded that there is no possibility of their effecting an escape. They are guarded by mercenary soldiers of various barbarous nations, whose language is foreign to them and to each other; so that there are no means either of forming conspiracies, or of corrupting those who are set to watch them. They are kept to incessant work by the overseer, who, besides, lashes them severely. Not the least care is taken of the bodies of these poor creatures; they have not a rag to cover their nakedness; and whosoever sees them must compassionate their melancholy and deplorable condition; for though they may be sick, or maimed, or lame, no rest, nor any intermission of labour, is allowed them. Neither the weakness of old age, nor the infirmity of females, excuses any from that work to which all are driven by blows and cudgels, till at length, borne down by the intolerable weight of their misery, many fall dead in the midst of their insufferable labours. Thus these miserable creatures, being destitute of all hope, expect their future days to be worse than the present, and long for death as more desirable than life.”[11]
How truly might we apply to gold the words of Horace—
“Te semper anteit sæva necessitas, Clavos trabaleis et cuneos manu, Gestans ahena, nec severus Uncus abest, liquidumque plumbum.”
There was both irony and wisdom in the counsel given by the Mormon leaders to their followers after their settlement on the Salt Lake. “The true use of gold is for paving streets, covering houses, making culinary dishes; and when the saints shall have preached the gospel, raised grain, and built up cities enough, the Lord will open up the way for a supply of gold to the perfect satisfaction of his people.” This kept the mass of their followers from moving to the diggings of Western California. They remained around the lake “to be healthy and happy, to raise grain and build cities.”[12]
But the occurrence of individual disappointment, or misery in procuring it, will not prevent the gold itself from afterwards exercising its natural influence upon society when it has been brought into the markets of the world. When the riches of California began to arrive, therefore, graver minds, whose thoughts were turned to the future as much as to the present, inquired, first, how much gold are these new diggings sending into the markets?—and, second, how long is this yield likely to last?
1st, To the first of these questions—owing to the numerous channels along which the gold of California finds its way into commerce—it seems impossible to obtain more than an approximate answer. Mr Theodore Johnson (p. 246) estimates the produce for
1848, at 8 million dollars. 1849, from 22 to 37 million dollars.
Or in the latter year, from four to seven millions sterling. It would, of course, be more in 1850, as it is assumed to be by Mr Wyld, from whose pamphlet (p. 22) we copy the following table of the estimated total yield of gold and silver by all the known mines of the world, in the five years named in the first column:—
1848 7,000,000 6,750,000 13,750,000
1850 17,500,000 7,500,000 25,000,000 1851 22,500,000 7,500,000 30,000,000
Supposing the Russian mines, from which upwards of four millions’ worth of the gold of 1848 was derived, to have remained equally productive in 1850 and 1851, this estimate assigns a yield of £10,000,000 worth of gold to California in 1850, and £15,000,000 to California and Australia together in 1851.
The New York Herald (October 31st, 1851) estimates the produce of the Californian mines alone, for the years 1850 and 1851, at
1850, 68,587,000 dollars, or £13,717,000
1851, 75,000,000 „ £15,000,000
These large returns may be exaggerations, but they profess to be based on the custom-house books, and may be quite as near the truth as the lower sums of Mr Wyld. But supposing either statement to contain only a tolerable guess at the truth, it may well induce us anxiously to inquire, in the second place, how long is such a supply to continue?
2d, Two different branches of scientific inquiry must be followed up in order to arrive at anything like a satisfactory answer to this second question. We must investigate both the probable durability of the surface diggings, and the probable occurrence of gold in the native rocks.
Now, the duration of profitable gold-washing in a region depends, first, on the extent of country over which the gold is spread, and the universality of its diffusion. Second, on the minimum proportion of gold in the sands which will pay for washing; and this, again, on the price of labour.
The valley of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, in California, is 500 miles long, by an average of 50 miles broad; comprehending an area, therefore, of 25,000 square miles.
We do not know as yet over how much of this the gold is distributed; nor whether, after the richest and most accessible spots have been hunted out, and apparently exhausted, the surface of the country generally will admit of being washed over with a profit. We cannot draw a conclusion in reference to this point from any of the statements yet published as to the productiveness of particular spots. But, at the same time, we ought to bear in mind that deserted spots may often be returned to several times, and may yield, to more careful treatment, and more skilful methods in after years, returns of gold not less considerable than those which were obtained by the first adventurers. Besides, if we are to believe Mr Theodore Johnson,
“There is no reason to doubt that the whole range of mountains extending from the cascades in Oregon to the Cordilleras in South America, contain greater or less deposits of the precious metals; and it is well known that Sonora, the northern
state of Mexico, is equally rich in gold as the adjoining country of Alta California. The Mexicans have hitherto proved too feeble to resist the warlike Apaches in that region, consequently its treasure remains comparatively undisturbed.” (P. 231.)
Passing by Mr Johnson’s opinion about the Oregon mountains, what he says of Sénora has probably a foundation in truth, and justifies us in expecting from that region a supply of gold which may make up for any falling off in the produce of the diggings of California for many years to come.
The question as to the minimum proportion of gold in the sands of California, or in those of Australia—the state of society, the workmen and the tools, in both countries being much the same—which can be extracted with a profit, or the minimum daily yield which will make it worth extracting, has scarcely as yet become a practical one.
As a matter of curiosity, however, connected with this subject, it is interesting to know what is the experience of other gold regions in these particulars.
In Bohemia, on the lower part of the river Iser, there were formerly gold-washings. “The sand does not now yield more than one grain of gold in a hundredweight; and it is supposed that so much is not regularly to be obtained. There are at present no people searching for gold, and there have been none for several centuries.”[13] This, therefore, may be considered less than the minimum proportion which will enable washers to live even in that cheap country. In the famed gold country of Minas Geraes, in Brazil, where gangs of slaves are employed in washing, the net annual amount of gold extracted seems to be little more than £4 a-head; and in Columbia, where provisions are dearer, “a mine, which employs sixty slaves, and produces 20 lb. of gold of 18 carats annually, is considered a good estate.”[14]
These also approach so near to the unprofitable point, that goldwashing, where possible, has long been gradually giving way, in that country, to the cultivation of sugar and other agricultural productions.
In regard to Siberia, Rose, in his account of his visit to the mines of the Ural and the Altai, gives the results of numerous determinations of the proportion of gold in the sands which are considered worth
washing at the various places he visited. Thus on the Altai, at Katharinenburg, near Beresowsk, and at Neiwinskoi, near Neujansk, and at Wiluyskoi, near Nischni Tagilsk, the proportions of gold in 100 poods[15] of sand, were respectively—
Katharinenburg, 1.1 to 2.5, or an average of 1.3 solotniks. Neiwinskoi, ½ solotnik. Wiluyskoi, 1½ solotnik.
These are respectively 72, 26, and 80 troy grains to the ton of sand; and although the proportion of 26 grains to the ton is little more than is found unworth the extraction from the sands of the Iser, and implies that nearly 19 tons of sand must be washed to obtain one troy ounce of gold, yet it is found that this washing can in Siberia be carried on with a profit.
In the gold-washings of the Eastern slopes of the Ural, near Miask, the average of fourteen mines in 1829 was about 1⅛ solotniks to the 100 poods, or 60 grains to the ton of sand. The productive layers varied in thickness, from 2 to 10 feet, and were covered by an equally variable thickness of sand and gravel, which was too poor in gold to pay for washing.[16]
We have no data, as yet, from which to judge of the richness of the Californian and Australian sands, compared with those of Siberia. And, if we had, no safe conclusion could be drawn from them as to the prolonged productiveness of the mines, in consequence of another interesting circumstance, which the prosecution of the Uralian mines has brought to light. It is in every country the case that the richest sands are first washed out, and thus a gradual falling off in every locality takes place, till spot by spot the whole country is deserted by the washers. We give an example of this falling off in four of the Ural mines in five successive years. The yield of gold is in solotniks from the 100 poods of sand—
1826, 1.43 „ 0.83 „ 2.46 „ 7.28 sol. 1827, 0.64 „ 0.77 „ 1.43 „ 5.0 „ 1828, 0.58 „ 0.29 „ 1.92 „ 3.52 „
As all the Ural diggings exhibit this kind of falling off, it has been anticipated, from time to time, that the general and total yield of gold by the Siberian mines would speedily diminish. But so far have these expectations been disappointed, that the produce has constantly increased from 1829 until now. On an average of the last five years, the quantity of gold yielded by the Russian, and chiefly by the Siberian mines, is now greater than that obtained from the South American gold mines in their richest days.[17]
While, therefore, it is certain that the new American and Australian diggings will individually, or on each spot, become poorer year by year, yet, as in Siberia, the extension of the search, and the employment of improved methods, may not only keep up the yield for a long period of years, but may augment the yearly supply even beyond what it has yet been.
But while so much uncertainty attends the consideration of the extent, richness, and durability of mines situated in the gold-bearing sands and gravels, something more precise and definite can be arrived at in regard to the gold-bearing rocks. In nearly all the gold countries of past times, the chief extraction of the precious metal, as we have said, has been from the drifted sands. It is so also now in Siberia, and it was naturally expected that the same would be the case in California. And as other countries had for a time yielded largely, and then become exhausted, so it was predicted of this new region, and it was too hastily asserted that the increasing thousands of diggers who were employed upon its sands must render preeminently shortlived its gold-bearing capability. This opinion was based upon the two considerations—first, that there is no source of reproduction for these golden sands, inasmuch as it is only in very rare cases that existing rivers have brought down from native rocks the metallic particles which give their value to the sands and gravels
through which they flow—and second, that no available quantity of gold was likely to be found in any living rocks.
But in respect of the living rocks, two circumstances have been found to coexist in California, which have not been observed in any region of gold-washings hitherto explored, and which are likely to have much effect on the special question we are now considering. These two circumstances are the occurrence of numerous and, it is said, extensive deposits of the precious metals in the solid quartz veins among the spurs of the Sierra Nevada, and of apparently inexhaustible beds of the ores of quicksilver.
The discovery of gold in the native rock was by no means a novelty. The ancient Egyptians possessed mines in the Sahara and other neighbouring mountains. “This soil,” says Diodorus, “is naturally black; but in the body of the earth there are many veins shining with white marble, (quartz?) and glittering with all sorts of bright metals, out of which those appointed to be overseers cause the gold to be dug by the labourers—a vast multitude of people.”[18]
At Altenberg also, in Bohemia, in the middle ages, the mixed metals (gold and silver) were found in beds of gneiss;[19] and, at present, in the Ural and Altai, a small portion of the gold obtained is extracted from quartz veins, which penetrate the granite and other rocks; but these and other cases, ancient and modern, though not forgotten, were not considered of consequence enough to justify the expectation of finding gold-bearing rocks of any consequence in California. It is to another circumstance that we owe the so early discovery of such rocks in this new country, and, as in so many other instances, to a class of men ignorant of what history relates in regard to other regions.
As early as 1824, the inner country of North Carolina was discovered to be productive of gold. The amount extracted in that year was only 6000 dollars, but it had reached in 1829 to 128,000 dollars. The washings were extended both east and west, and finally it was made out that a gold region girdles the northern part of Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia. This region is situated towards the foot of the mountains, and where the igneous rocks begin to disturb and penetrate the primary stratified deposits. As the sands became poorer in this region, the ardent miners had followed up their stream-washings to the parent rock, and in veins of rusty
quartz had discovered grains and scales of native gold. To obtain these, like the Africans at Semayla, they blasted, crushed, and washed the rock.
Now, among the first who, fired by fresher hopes, pushed to the new treasure-house in California, came the experienced gold-seekers from the Carolinian borders. Following the gold trail into the gulches and ravines of the Snowy ridge, some of them were able to fix their trained eyes on quartz veins such as they had seen at home, and, scattered through the solid rock, to detect sparkling grains of gold which might long have escaped less practised observers. And through the same men, skilled in the fashion and use of the machinery found best and simplest for crushing and separating the gold, the necessary apparatus was speedily obtained and set to work to prove the richness of the new deposits. This richness may be judged of by the following statements:—
“Some of the chief quartz workings are in Nevada and Mariposa Counties, but the best known are on the rancho or large estate bought by Colonel Fremont from Alvarado, the Mexican governor. They are those of Mariposa, Agua Fria, Nouveau Monde, West Mariposa, and Ave Maria the first leased by an American company, the third by a French, and the others by English companies. Some of the quartz has been assayed for £7000 in the ton of rock. A Mariposa specimen was in the Great Exhibition.
“The Agua Fria mine was surveyed and examined by Captain W. A. Jackson, the well-known engineer of Virginia, U.S., in October 1850, for which purpose openings were made by a cross-cut of sufficient depth to test the size of the vein and the richness of the ore. The vein appears to be of a nearly uniform thickness of from three and a half to four and a half feet and its direction a few points to the north of east; the inclination of the vein being 45°. Of the ore, some specimens were transmitted to the United States Mint in January 1851; and the report of the assays then made, showed that 277 lb. of ore produced 173 oz. of gold value 3222 dollars, or upwards of £650 sterling; being at the rate of £5256 a ton.
“The contents of the vein running through the property, which is about 600 feet in length, and crops out on a hill rising about 150 to 200 feet above the level of the Agua Fria Creek, is estimated at about 18,000 tons of ore to the water level only; and how far it may descend below that, is not at present known.
“The West Mariposa mine, under Colonel Fremont’s lease, has a vein of quartz which runs the whole length of the allotment, averages six feet in thickness, and has been opened in several places. The assay of Messrs Johnson and Mathey states that a poor specimen of 11 oz. 9 dwt. 18 grains, produced of gold 2 dwt. 17 grains,
which would give £1347 per ton; and a rich specimen, weighing 17 oz. 12 dwt. gave 3 oz. 15 dwt. 9 grains, being at the rate of £24,482 per ton.” (W , pp. 36–39.)
The nature and durability of the influence which the discovery and working of these rich veins is likely to have, depends upon their requiring capital, and upon their being in the hands of a limited number of adventurers. In consequence of this they cannot be suddenly exhausted, but may continue to yield a constant supply for an indefinite number of years.
In connection with the durability of this supply from the quartz veins—besides the unsettled question as to the actual number and extent of such veins which further exploration will make out—there is the additional question as to how deep these veins will prove rich in gold. Our readers are probably aware that what are called veins are walls, more or less upright, which rise up from an unknown depth through the beds of rock which we have described as overlying each other like the leaves of a book. This wall generally consists of a different material from that of which the rocks themselves consist, and, where a cliff occurs, penetrated by such veins, can readily be distinguished by its colour from the rocks through which it passes. Now, when these veins contain metallic minerals, it has been long observed that, in descending from the surface, the mineral value of the vein undergoes important alterations. Some are rich immediately under the surface of the ground; others do not become so till a considerable depth is reached; while in others, again, the kind of mineral changes altogether as we descend. In Hungary the richest minerals are met with at a depth of eighty or a hundred fathoms. In Transylvania, veins of gold, in descending, become degraded into veins of lead. In Cornwall, some of the copper veins increase in richness the greater the depth to which the mine is carried; while others, which have yielded copper near the surface, have gradually become rich in tin as the depth increased.[20]
Now, in regard to the auriferous quartz veins, it is the result of past experience that they are often rich in the upper part, but become poorer as the explorations are deepened, and soon cease to pay the expense of working. In this respect it is just possible that the Californian veins may not agree with those of the Ural and of other regions, though this is a point which the lapse of years only can
settle. Two things, however, are in favour of the greater yield of the Californian veins than those of other countries in past times—that they will be explored by a people who abound in capital, in engineering skill, and in energy, and that it is now ascertained that veins may be profitably rich in gold, though the particles are too small to be discerned by the naked eye. Thus, while all the explorations will be made with skill and economy, many veins will be mined into, which in other countries have been passed over with neglect; and the extraction of gold from all—but especially from the poorer sands and veins—will be aided by the second circumstance to which we have adverted as peculiar to California, the possession of vast stores of quicksilver.
“The most important, if not the most valuable, of the mineral products of this wonderful country, is its quicksilver. The localities of several mines of this metal are already known, but the richest yet discovered is the one called Forbes’s mines, about sixty miles from San Francisco, near San José. Originally discovered and denounced, according to the Mexican laws then in force, it fell under the commercial management of Forbes of Tepic, who also has some interest in it. The original owner of the property on which it is situated, endeavoured to set aside the validity of the denouncement; but whether on tenable grounds or otherwise, I know not. At this mine, by the employment of a small number of labourers, and two common iron kettles for smelting, they have already sold quicksilver to the amount of 200,000 dollars, and have now some two hundred tons of ore awaiting the smelting process. The cinnabar is said to yield from sixty to eighty per cent of pure metal, and there is no doubt that its average product reaches fifty per cent. The effect of these immensely rich deposits of quicksilver, upon the wealth and commerce of the world, can scarcely be too highly estimated, provided they are kept from the clutches of the great monopolists. Not only will its present usefulness in the arts be indefinitely extended and increased by new discoveries of science, but the extensive mines of gold and silver in Mexico, Chili, and Peru, hitherto unproductive, will now be made available by its application.” (J ’ Sights in the Gold Region, p. 201.)
By mere washing with water, it is impossible to extract the finer particles and scales of gold either from the natural sand or from the pounded rock. But an admixture and agitation with quicksilver licks up and dissolves every shining speck, and carries it, with the fluid metal, to the bottom of the vessel. The amalgam, as it is called, of gold and quicksilver thus obtained, when distilled in a close vessel,
yields up its quicksilver again with little loss, and leaves the pure gold behind. For the perfect extraction of the gold, therefore, from its ores, quicksilver is absolutely necessary, and it can be performed most cheaply where the latter metal is cheapest and most abundant. Hence the mineral conditions of California seem specially fitted to make it an exception to all gold countries heretofore investigated, or of which we have any detailed accounts. They promise it the ability to supply a large export of gold, probably long after the remunerative freshness of the diggings, properly so called, whether wet or dry, shall have been worn off.
But both the actual yearly produce of gold, and the probable permanence of the supply, have been greatly increased by the still more recent discoveries in Australia. A wider field has been opened up here for speculation and adventure than North-Western America in its best days ever presented. We have already adverted to the circumstances which preceded and attended the discovery of gold in this country, and new research seems daily to add to the number of districts over which the precious metal is spread. It is impossible, however, even to guess over how much of this vast country the gold field may extend, and of richness enough to make washing possible and profitable. The basin of the river Murray, in the feeders of which gold has been found in very many places, has a mean length from north to south of 1400 miles, and a breadth of 400—comprising an area of from 500,000 to 600,000 square miles. This is four times the area of California, and five times that of the British Islands; but whether the gold is generally diffused over this wide area, or whether it is confined to particular and limited localities, there has not as yet been time to ascertain.
It is chiefly in the head waters or feeders of the greater streams which flow through this vast basin that the metal has hitherto been met with; but the peculiar physical character of the creeks, and of the climate in these regions, suggests the probability that the search will be profitably extended downwards along the entire course of the larger rivers. Every reader of Australian tours and travels is aware of the deep and sudden floods to which the great rivers of the country are subject, and of the disastrous inundations to which the banks of the river Murray are liable. The lesser creeks or feeders of this river, in which the washings are now prosecuted, are liable to similar
