Tell me what you know about Irkutsk.

I’ve asked many people that lately – not to rate their knowledge or embarrass them by their lack of it, but simply to find out what comes to mind when “Irkutsk” is laid before them.

“The word’s never reached my ears before,” claims one friend. I spell it, thinking my pronunciation threw her off. “No,” she says again. “Never heard of it.”

To another friend, I prompt, “It’s a place.” His face tightens slightly with the effort of trolling his brain bank. “In Russia,” I add generously. “Oh yes,” he nods slowly, but without conviction. If I’d said Chernobyl, he’d have nailed it in a second.

“Risk?” says someone else when I put the question to him in a noisy café. “No, no. IRKUTSK,” I say louder. “Risk!” he repeats, also louder. “The board game. One of the territories was Irkutsk.” Ah. Thanks to global domination as an educational tool, I have contact.

Modern office glass sculpture. - Georgina Montgomery

In truth, until I stepped off the Trans-Siberian train last August, my own knowledge of Irkutsk was little better than that of my friends. I did know where it was on the map: a pencil-eraser distance from Lake Baikal and almost two full pencil-lengths from Moscow. I also knew it lay in that vastness known as Siberia: land of gulags, labour camps and hoary landscapes filled with the spirits of banished criminals, Bolsheviks and other exiles who dared cross the ruling power of the day. I’d once read that fortune-telling, illegal tree-chopping and “begging with false distress” could be reason enough in tsarist Russia to win yourself a one-way trip to Siberia.

It was these scraps of knowledge that – even in 2005 – made me expect Irkutsk to be little more than a backwater town, stranded at the taiga frontier.

Disembarking at the large, posh train station brought me face to face with my appalling ignorance. My first thought was “How could I have known so little about this place before?”

“Welcome,” said Alya, the Russian Intourist guide tasked with meeting this group of foreigners and hastening them to a bank to pour roubles into the void left where Mongolian tögrögs (offloaded at the border) used to be. From professionally streaked hair to a fitted jacket and slim-cut jeans, Alya was hip, attractive and very European. She led us to a small van while we gawked about like hillbillies in Manhattan for the first time.

My second thought as we drove through rush hour traffic to downtown was the same as my first one, only with greater self-flagellation. Streets named Karla Marxa and Lenina I’d expected, and the domes of Russian Orthodox churches visible in the distance, and the 20-foot tall statue of Lenin in a town square. But a sprawling metropolis, with ubiquitous Internet cafés and cell phone boutiques, and modern office towers down the street from 18th and 19th century buildings – this surprised me. Irkutsk was certainly no backwater town, and neither was it a new Brasilia conjured up from nothing. It had been around for some time but I’d neglected to notice.

Irkutsk port and sprawling suburbs; - Shelagh Montgomery

Russian writer Anton Chekhov called Irkutsk the Paris of Siberia. Visiting in 1890, he discovered a fatly prosperous city where timber, fur, silver and gold had made a lot of people very wealthy. Their millions enabled them to build mansions, pave streets and import the best of what the rich folks were drinking, wearing and being entertained by in the European centres back west. Chekhov marvelled at the “theatre, museum, urban garden with music, and good hotels” of Irkutsk, declaring it all “quite Europe.”

A decade later, in 1901, British traveller John Foster Fraser expressed similar surprise at the unexpectedness of this remote oasis of affluence and evolving civility. After a trip on the recently opened Trans-Siberian train line, he wrote in The Real Siberia (1902):
“Money-making in Irkutsk has been so easy for several generations that the new whirl that has come into the town with the Trans-Siberian Railway has startled even the millionaires. … Several of the wealthiest still keep to their rude peasant clothes, [but] Irkutsk is beginning to put on airs, and even a grimy millionaire in red shirt and dirty top-boots will not be tolerated in the fashionable restaurants.”

Today, more than a century since Fraser’s observations, it seems that foreigners continue to pile off the train in Irkutsk and be taken aback. The city has a population nearing 630,000 and is a thriving centre of industry, education and culture. Oil and gas, pulp, gold and aluminum are big business – as is higher learning, in area’s 10 universities and eight scientific institutes.

Irkutsk began as a Cossack garrison in 1651, an outpost in the traditional lands of the indigenous Buryat people. It lies on an ancient trading route, where the Angara and Irkut Rivers meet, about 64 kilometres northwest of Lake Baikal. The fort became a city within a few decades. Positioned on the doorstep of an enormous region with an overwhelming abundance of natural resources, the young town benefited from the action on almost every enterprise. It was also the staging point from which Russia launched expeditions to Kamchatka and the Pacific. Land-locked maybe, but Irkutsk became the nominal home port of Vitus Bering when he set sail in 1725. Aside from crossing the strait now named for him, Bering explored coastal Alaska and laid claim to it for the Russian Empire. For a time, Alaska was even known as the American District of Irkutsk.

Modern office glass sculpture. - Georgina Montgomery

The arrival of the “Decembrists” shaped the city’s character, too. In December 1825, a large political movement headed by noblemen, military officers and members of the intelligentsia mounted a coup against Tsar Nicholas I in St. Petersburg. It did not go well. The rebellion was crushed, and while five of the leaders were publicly executed, eight others (along with hundreds of followers) faced exile to Siberia. Several of them ended up in Irkutsk with their wives, children and strong social ideals. They pushed for the building of an orphanage, schools and a hospital, and organized concerts, recitals and balls. The sophistication brought to Irkutsk by the Decembrists and other well-educated exiles is still an evident point of pride in the community today.

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A few months after my visit to Siberia, I came across the theory, expressed by a writer on an Irkutsk website, that so many “brainy Russians” exiled to the city over a couple of centuries has produced a current populace with above-average IQ levels.

The thought that this might be true gets me thinking. “Tell me,” I imagine one smart Irkutskian saying to another, “what you know about Yellowknife.”