No time discount. The unique journey of Gleb Travin on a bicycle along the borders of the USSR

(1902-04-28 )

Bicycle crossing

Gleb Travin went on a bicycle trip on October 10, 1928. He reached Vladivostok by steamship, then overland on a bicycle through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia - 17 thousand [ ] kilometers along land borders.

Travin crossed the entire Arctic part of the border along the Arctic Ocean from the Kola Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka on a bicycle, hunting skis, dog sled, walking - 10-13 thousand [ ] kilometers. Visited Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, the islands of Vaygach and Dikson, the villages of Khatanga, Russkoye Ustye, Uelen and others. The trip ended with a return to Kamchatka.

Erroneous estimates of route length

In A. Kharitanovsky’s work “The Man with the Iron Deer,” published in 1959 and 1965, Travin’s route is estimated at 85 thousand kilometers, but with such a length Travin had to travel an average of 77 km every day for three years, which does not agree with figures obtained when restoring the route based on the data of the route book-recorder [ ] .

Travin's journey in art

Travin’s journey is dedicated to Vivian Itin’s essay “The Earth Has Become Our Own,” published in the magazine “Siberian Lights” and the book “Exit to the Sea” in 1935.

In 1960, A. Kharitanovsky’s book “The Man with an Iron Deer” was published. The Tale of a Forgotten Feat”, which went through several reprints.

In 1981, Tsentrnauchfilm director Vladlen Kryuchkin made a documentary about Travin.

Memory

see also

Notes

1. Gleb Travin - VeloWiki
2. Sergey Golikov. Gleb Travin: 85,000 km by bike along the borders of the Soviet Union (undefined) .
3. Reconstruction of the Travina route, based on route book data
4. On our way to the North... (undefined) . Pskov Alarm (October 13, 1929). Retrieved November 28, 2014.

The Tale of a Forgotten Exploit

There was such a man - Gleb Travin.

More than 200 cycling clubs around the world are named after him.
In 1928-1931 a young resident of Kamchatka, electrician, athlete, reserve commander G.L. Travin made an extraordinary journey.
He rode alone, without any support, along the borders of the Soviet Union, including the country's Arctic coast, on a bicycle.

A tightrope walker works under a circus big top with a safety net. He can repeat his dangerous act every evening and expect to survive if he fails. I didn't have any insurance. And much of what happened along the way, I would not be able to repeat again. There are things that you don’t want to remember. And anyone in my place would probably resist, for example, retelling how he froze like a frog into the ice not far from Novaya Zemlya.

This happened in the early spring of 1930. I walked back along the ice west coast Novaya Zemlya to the south, to the island of Vaygach. A hurricane-force east wind blew all day. Its squalls threw me off the bike and dragged me across the ice to the west. The knife came to the rescue. I stuck it into the ice and held on to the handle until the wind died down a little. I settled down for the night far from the shore, in the open sea. As always, I used a hatchet to cut out several bricks from snow compacted by the wind and bound by frost, and made a wind-funeral out of them. I placed the bike at the head of the bed with the front wheel facing south so as not to waste time on orientation in the morning, scooped up more plump snow from the sides instead of a blanket and fell asleep. I slept on my back with my arms crossed over my chest - it was warmer that way. When I woke up, I could neither unclench my hands nor turn around... At night, a crack appeared next to my sleeping quarters. Water came out, and the snow that had covered me turned into ice. In a word, I found myself in an ice trap, or rather, in an ice suit.

I had a knife on my belt. With great difficulty, he freed one hand, took out the knife and began to break the ice around him. It was tedious work. The ice broke off into small pieces. I was pretty tired before I freed myself from the sides. But it was impossible to hit yourself from behind. He rushed forward with his whole body - and felt that he had acquired an ice hump. And the boots could not be completely released either. I cleared the ice from the top, and when I pulled my feet out, both soles remained in the ice. The hair was frozen and stuck out like a stake on the head, and the legs were almost bare. Frozen clothes made it difficult to get on the bike. I had to walk with him through the snowy crust.

I was lucky: I came across a deer track. Someone recently rode on a sled. The trail was fresh, not yet covered with snow. I followed this trail for a long time. Eventually it led to housing. I climbed onto the island and saw smoke on the hillock.

My legs suddenly went numb with joy. I crawled on my hands towards the Nenets tent.

The Nenets, noticing me, started to run. I looked like an alien from another planet: an icy hump on my back, long stripes without a cap, and even a bicycle, which they probably saw for the first time.

With difficulty I rose to my feet. An old man separated from the frightened Nenets, but stood aside. I took a step towards him, and he took a step away from me. I began to explain to him that I had frostbite on my feet - it seemed to me that the old man understood Russian - but he still backed away. Exhausted, I fell. The old man finally approached, helped him up and invited him into the tent.

With his help, I took off my clothes, or rather, I didn’t take them off, but cut them into pieces. The wool on the sweater was frozen, the body underneath was white, frostbitten. I jumped out of the chum and began to rub myself with snow.

Meanwhile, lunch was prepared in the tent. The old man called me. I drank a mug of hot tea, ate a piece of venison - and suddenly felt severe pain in my legs. By evening, the thumbs were swollen, and instead of them there were blue balls. The pain did not subside. I feared gangrene and decided to have surgery.

In the plague there was nowhere to hide from watchful eyes. I had to amputate my frostbitten fingers in front of everyone. I cut off the swollen mass with a knife and removed it, like a stocking, along with my nail. I moistened the wound with glycerin (I poured it into the bicycle inner tubes so that they would better retain air in the cold). I asked the old man for a bandage - and suddenly a woman shouted “Keli! Keli! rushed out of the chum. I bandaged the wound with a handkerchief, tearing it in half, and began working on the second finger.

Then, when the operation was over and the women returned to the tent, I asked what “Keli” was. The old man explained that this is a cannibal devil. “You,” he says, “cut yourself and don’t cry. And only the devil can do that!”

I was already taken for a devil in Central Asia. In Dushanbe in May 1929, I went to the editorial office of a local newspaper with a request to translate the inscription on the armband into Tajik: “Bicycle traveler Gleb Travin.” The editor was confused, not knowing how to translate the word “bicycle.” There were almost no bicycles in those parts at that time, and few people understood this word. In the end, the bicycle was translated as shaitan-arba - “devil’s cart.”

Another armband was printed in Samarkand - in the Uzbek language. But the translation of shaitan-arba was left as is. There was no more suitable word for bicycle in the Turkmen language. I also went from Ashgabat to the sands of the Karakum Desert on the “devil’s cart”.
I was also suspected of having connections with evil spirits in Karelia. There are continuous lakes, and I drove straight through them along the first November ice. Before this I already had experience of such movement. On Baikal, the lighthouse keeper suggested that in winter in Siberia it is most convenient to travel on ice. On his advice, I crossed frozen Baikal on a bicycle, and then made my way through the taiga along frost-bound river beds. So the frozen lakes in Karelia were not an obstacle. Rather, the obstacle was the rumor that a strange man with an iron hoop on his head was riding across the lakes on a strange beast. A lacquered strap was taken for a hoop, with which I tied my long hair so that it would not fall over my eyes. I made a vow to myself not to cut my hair until I finished my journey.

The rumor about a strange man on a bicycle reached Murmansk before me. When I drove to the outskirts of the city, a man in felt boots stopped me. He turned out to be a doctor named Andrusenko. An old-timer of the North, he didn’t believe in any devils, but what he heard about me he considered supernatural. The doctor touched my fur jacket and boots, and then asked permission to examine me. I agreed. He felt his pulse, listened to his lungs, tapped his back and chest and said with satisfaction:

You, brother, have enough health for two centuries!

A photograph of this meeting has been preserved. Sometimes I look at her with a smile: an atheist doctor - and he did not immediately believe that I was just a well-trained person, carried away by an extraordinary dream! Yes, Albert Einstein is right: “Prejudice is harder to split than an atom!”

My three favorite heroes are Faust, Odysseus, Don Quixote. Faust captivated me with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Odysseus perfectly withstands the blows of fate. Don Quixote had a sublime idea of ​​selfless service to beauty and justice. All three embody a challenge to conventional norms and assumptions. All three gave me strength in difficult times, because by going to the Arctic on a bicycle, I, too, challenged the well-known.

The unusual frightens both man and beast. When I was making my way through the Ussuri taiga, my bike was scared... by a tiger! The beast chased me for a long time, hiding in the bushes, growling menacingly, cracking branches, but never dared to attack. The tiger had never seen such a strange beast “on wheels” and chose to refrain from aggressive actions. I didn’t even have a gun with me then.

Later, I became convinced more than once that all the animals - whether in the taiga, desert or tundra - were careful not to attack me precisely because of the bicycle. They were scared off by its bright red paint, shiny nickel-plated spokes, oil lantern and flag fluttering in the wind. The bicycle was my reliable bodyguard.

Fear of the unusual is instinctive. I myself experienced it more than once during my travels. The day when I left the hospital after surgery was especially scary for me. I could hardly move my pain-filled legs and was so weak that a hungry Arctic fox dared to attack me. This is a cunning, evil animal. He is usually careful not to attack people, but then he began to grab the torso that the old Nenets gave me. I fell into the snow and the arctic fox attacked me from behind. He threw him off and threw the knife. But the arctic fox is nimble and it’s not easy to hit him. He began to take a knife out of the snowdrift - the arctic fox dug into his hand and bit him. Still, I outsmarted him. He reached for the knife again with his left hand, the arctic fox rushed towards her, and I grabbed his collar with my right hand.

The skin of this arctic fox then traveled with me to Chukotka. I wrapped it around my throat instead of a scarf. But the thought of an arctic fox attack haunted me for a long time like a nightmare. I was tormented by doubts: is this a mad fox? After all, they never attack a person alone! Or am I really so weak that the arctic fox chose me as his prey? How then can you compete with the ice elements?

I prepared myself for the journey only relying on my own strength. Help from outside turned out to be just a hindrance for me. I felt this especially acutely on board the icebreaker Lenin, which was covered in ice near Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea. Ice conditions in July 1930 were very severe. The path to the mouth of the Yenisei, where the icebreaker was leading a whole caravan of Soviet and foreign ships behind the forest, was blocked by ice. Having learned about this, I took an old boat from the trading post on Vaygach Island, repaired it, set a sail and went with a doctor and two other fellow travelers to the place where the icebreaker was “imprisoned”. Having reached the ice! fields, we disembarked from the boat and got to the side of the ship on foot... We still managed to ride part of the way on a bicycle.

Then, during a press conference that the captain of the icebreaker held in the wardroom, I said that Gleb Travin is not the first cyclist in the polar latitudes. The bicycle was used during Robert Scott's last expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1912. It was used for walks at the expedition's main base in Antarctica.

I said that I had been traveling by bicycle along the borders of the USSR since September 1928. Started from Kamchatka, traveled Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Crimea, middle zone, Karelia. And now I’m going to get to Chukotka.

I also talked about preparations for this trip. It began on May 24, 1923, when the Dutch cyclist Adolf de Groot, who had traveled almost all of Europe, reached Pskov.

“The Dutch can do it,” I thought then, “but can’t I?” This question sparked my interest in ultra-long-haul flights.

It took five and a half years to prepare. During this time, I traveled thousands of kilometers on a bicycle in my Pskov region, and rode in any weather and on any roads. As a child, my father, a forester, taught me to find food and shelter in the forest and in the field, and taught me to eat raw meat. I tried to develop these skills even more in myself.

During my army service, which I served at the headquarters of the Leningrad Military District, I intensively studied geography, geodesy, zoology and botany, photography, plumbing (for bicycle repair) - in a word, everything that could be useful for a long journey. And of course, I trained myself physically by participating in swimming, weightlifting, bicycle and boat racing competitions.

After being demobilized from the army in 1927, he received special permission from the commander of the Leningrad Military District to travel to Kamchatka. I wanted to test myself in completely unfamiliar conditions.

In Kamchatka he built the first power plant, which produced electricity in March 1928, and then worked there as an electrician. And all my free time was spent training. I also tried my bike on mountain trails, crossing fast rivers, and in impenetrable forests. This training took a whole year. And, only after making sure that the bike would not let me down anywhere, I set off from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Vladivostok.

I told all this while standing, refusing the invitation of the icebreaker captain to sit down. He stood, shifting from foot to foot to muffle the unabated pain, and was afraid that people would notice it. Then, I thought, they won’t let me off the ship. Those gathered in the wardroom already had enough objections. The head of the Marine Kara Expedition, Professor N.I. Evgenov, for example, stated that he studied Taimyr and the mouth of the Yenisei for 10 years and knows that even wolves do not stay there in winter. Frosts and snow storms in these parts drive all living things to the south.

In response to my remark that in winter I prefer to drive on ice rather than along the ocean coast, the famous hydrographer simply waved his hands and called me a suicide.

But I already knew: no matter how severe the winter in the coastal arctic ice, life there does not completely freeze. Severe frosts cause cracks to form in the ice. Each such crack makes itself felt with a noticeable hum. Along with the water, fish rush into this crack. Later I got the hang of catching it with a hook from a bicycle spoke. Two fish was enough for me a day. I ate one fresh, the other frozen, like plantain.

In addition to fish, my menu included raw meat. From local hunters I learned to track and shoot northern animals - arctic fox, seal, walrus, deer, polar bear. The habit of eating only raw food was confirmed by the French doctor Alain Bombard. While sailing on a rubber dinghy through Atlantic Ocean he ate raw fish and plankton for more than two months. I ate food twice a day - at 6 am and 6 pm. 8 hours every day were spent on the road, 8 hours on sleep, the rest of the time on searching for food, arranging lodgings for the night, and diary entries.

Riding a bicycle on hard snow crust seems impossible only at first glance. Along the shore, the ebb and flow of the tides pile up hummocks. I went tens of kilometers deep into the ocean, where there were ice fields that sometimes allowed me to develop high speed...

And yet, then, on the icebreaker, none of those gathered in the wardroom took seriously my intention to ride a bicycle to Chukotka. They listened to me with interest, some even admired me, but everyone agreed that the idea was impossible.

I was accommodated for the night in the ship's infirmary. There was no free cabin on the icebreaker, and yet I suspected that someone had noticed that my legs were not all right. These fears tormented me all night. In the morning, to prove that my legs were healthy, I rode a bicycle on the deck. And then he thanked the sailors for their hospitality and announced that I was leaving for the Volodarsky steamship, which was stuck in the ice about thirty kilometers from the Lenin icebreaker.

Only after that they agreed to let me off the icebreaker, although it was not easy to find the ship among the ice.

I left the icebreaker at 6 o'clock in the morning. Despite the early hour, the entire deck was filled with people, as if they had been alerted. I felt like I was at a trial, going down the storm ladder onto the ice with the pilot B. G. Chukhnovsky - he took a farewell photograph of me.

As soon as he left the icebreaker, three beeps followed...

It took me a lot of effort not to look in the direction of the icebreaker. I tried to quickly get behind the hummocks so that he would disappear from sight. I was afraid that I would be drawn back to him. I was aware that I was leaving life - from warmth, food, a roof over my head.

I got to the Volodarsky steamship on time: the next day the wind dispersed the ice around it, and it reached Dikson under its own power. Then my path lay to Taimyr.

Taimyr... How many times has the sailors' plan to continue their journey along the coast of Siberia to the east been dashed against it! Only in 1878-1879 was it possible to complete this route by a Russian-Swedish expedition led by E. Nordenskiöld, and even then in two years with wintering. And the first through flight in one navigation was made only in 1932 by the famous Sibiryakov. Two years before this flight, Taimyr subjected me to a severe test.

At the end of October 1930, I crossed the Pyasina, the largest river in Taimyr. Six years later, Norilsk began to be built on it. The river had recently frozen, the ice was thin and slippery. Already closer to the opposite bank, I fell off my bike and broke the ice. It was very difficult to get out of the hole. The ice crumbled under my hands and broke under the weight of my body. When I felt that the ice was holding me, I sprawled on it, spreading my arms and legs. I will never forget this day. The sun had not been visible for a week; instead, mirror ice The scarlet reflections of the midday dawn played. They gradually faded away. I felt like my life was fading away along with them. The wet clothes immediately froze and froze in the cold. With an effort of will, I forced myself to move. Carefully, pushing off with his hands, like a seal with flippers, he crawled across the ice to the bicycle and pulled it away from the dangerous place.

After this icy plunge, Taimyr still rewarded me. Having got out to the shore of Pyasina, I came across hummocks barely covered with snow. They turned out to be skinned carcasses of deer, stuck upright in the snow. There was a pile of removed skins right there. Apparently, on the eve of the freeze-up, a herd of wild deer crossed here to the other side, and the Nenets stabbed them in the water. The hunt was successful; some of the meat was left in reserve.

The first thing I did was climb into the middle of the stack of deer skins to keep warm. My clothes were melting on me from body heat. Having dined on frozen meat, I fell soundly asleep. In the morning I woke up healthy and cheerful, feeling a surge of strength. Soon I came across a dog sled. The owner of the team, a Nenets, gave me a little ride and suggested the best way to get to Khatanga.

In Taimyr I saw a mammoth cemetery. Huge tusks protruded from the ground near the ocean coast. With great difficulty I managed to loosen and pull out the smallest tusk from the ground. I gave it to a skilled bone carver in Chukotka. He sawed the tusk into plates and on one of them he drew a whale, a walrus, a seal and wrote the inscription: “Bicycle traveler Gleb Travin.” This miniature is now kept in the Pskov Art and History Museum.
Where did I find joy during my journey?

First of all, in the movement itself towards the intended goal. Every day I took the exam. He survived and remained alive. Failure meant death. No matter how hard it was for me, I prepared myself for the fact that the most difficult thing was yet to come. Having overcome the danger, I felt great joy in the knowledge that I was one step closer to my goal. Joy came after danger, like tide after ebb. It was the primordial joy of being, the joy of realizing the liberation of one’s powers.

In the Arctic I had to live and act completely differently than in the taiga or in the desert. And for this it was necessary to constantly observe and learn from both people and animals.

Were there moments when I regretted going on this risky journey? No! Did not have. There was pain in my legs, there was a fear that I would not reach the goal... But all this was forgotten, say, in front of the beauty of icebergs frozen into the ice. This beauty filled me with both joy and strength.

Getting to know the people of the North brought no less joy.

Once I had a chance to listen to a shaman. I was invited to see him by an old Yakut, with whom I spent the night in a yaranga. The old man helped me fix my cracked steering wheel. Instead of a steering wheel, he suggested the barrel of an old Norwegian rifle, having previously bent it over the fire. And I must say that the new steering wheel never let me down. It is still preserved on my bicycle, exhibited in the Pskov Museum. I didn’t know how to thank the old man for the repair, and he didn’t want to accept anything. In the end, the Yakut admitted that he was tormented by worms. I gave him some medicine, which I took with me on the road just in case. The medicine helped. The old man told the whole camp about this and, wanting to please me with something else, suggested that I go to the shaman.

Yakut harnessed the reindeer and took me to the mountains. The shaman's yaranga was larger than that of other residents. He came out to us from behind the canopy in the light of the fat store. The Yakuts were already sitting in a circle in the yaranga. The shaman shook his trinkets and beat the tambourine rhythmically, gradually speeding up the rhythm. He danced, singing mournfully, and those gathered in the yaranga echoed him, swaying.

I looked at the shadow of the shaman falling on the wall. He seemed to hypnotize the audience with his playing and movements and somehow seemed to me like a cobra, which swayed just like that in front of me in the gorge on the border with Afghanistan...

I drove through this gorge with a strong tailwind. It was getting dark. He lit an oil lantern, hoping to get through the gorge before it got completely dark. And suddenly a light flashed in front of me. I pressed the brake, jumped off and froze in surprise. A meter from the front wheel a cobra stood on its tail. Unraveling her hood, she shook her head. The light from the oil lantern reflected in her eyes.

I slowly backed away and only then noticed that on the walls of the gorge there were balls of coiled snakes. Paralyzed by fear, I moved in slow motion and kept my eyes on the cobra. She stood at attention in front of me, like a sentry. I took a few more steps back, each of which could have been fatal for me. The cobra didn't move. Then I carefully turned the bike around and sat on it, drenched in cold sweat. My legs pressed on the pedals with all my might, and it seemed to me that the bicycle was rooted to the ground...

Suddenly the old Yakut, who led me to the shaman, pulled me by the sleeve towards the exit. I didn’t immediately understand what he wanted. Only his eyes showed that he was worried.

On the street, an old man said that the shaman didn’t like me for some reason. The shaman, using his tambourine, composed a whole story, as if there were two more companions with me, but I killed and ate them. The old man did not believe the shaman: he was not from here, he came to these places from somewhere in the south.

Then a shaman came out of the yaranga wearing a fur coat draped over his naked body. Now, in the light, I could see his face better. It was overgrown with a thick black beard, and the eyes were not slanted.

Doctor, bandage my finger! - he said in a breaking voice. His accent was not Yakut.

I am the same doctor as you are a shaman!

I jumped into the old man’s sleigh, and he drove the reindeer as hard as he could.

A few days later I reached the Russian Ustye on Indigirka. In this village, which consisted of a dozen log huts, lived Russian hunters who hunted fur-bearing animals. Their “mouths” - huge traps made of logs - were placed for hundreds of kilometers along the ocean coast. At the mouths of rivers I came across hunting dugouts, log houses or yarangas lined with turf. In them one could find some firewood and some food.

I was surprised by the soft melodious speech of the Russian-Ustyinsky people. The youth respectfully called the elders fathers. From them I learned a legend that their village has existed since the time of Ivan the Terrible. It was founded by the Pomors, who arrived here from the west on kochas - small flat-bottomed sailing ships. The Pomors, in turn, came from Novgorod land. And I myself am a Pskovian, so I was almost a fellow countryman to the Russian-Ustyinsk people...

I was received very cordially. I was a guest in every house, ate caviar cakes and festive stroganina. He drank brick tea and told everything he knew about life in Central Russia and along the polar coast. And I also told them about the Pskovites - the pioneers of the northern seas who visited these parts - Dmitry and Khariton Laptev, about Wrangel.

I lived in Russkoe Ustye for several happy days. There was no teacher at school; instead, I gave the children geography lessons. They listened to me with great interest and asked me several times to tell me about warm regions. And of course, I rode them all on my bike.

But these happy days were overshadowed by bandits. Not far from the village they killed a Komsomol teacher who was returning to school from the regional center. Together with other residents of the village, I went in search of the gang. The leader was captured. It turned out to be an old friend of mine - a “shaman”. It was, as it turned out later, a former White Guard officer...

From hunters in the Russian Ustye I learned about the drift of the famous Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen in 1918-1920 on the ship Maud near the Bear Islands in the East Siberian Sea. Making their way to the east, Roald Amundsen and his companions made a stop on the island of Four Pillars. I decided to find this parking lot. The way to the island was suggested to me by the residents of Russky Ustye, who came to the Bear Islands in winter while hunting.

I approached Four-Pillar Island from the northeast side. There, near a large stone, there was a platform. On it I found a Norwegian hatchet with a long handle, four tea cups and a dark wine bottle, dusted with snow. It was sealed with sealing wax. Through the glass one could see the signature on the note: “Amundsen.”

The sad news of the death of this brave man who conquered South Pole in 1911. Roald Amundsen died in 1928 in the Barents Sea. Soviet fishermen accidentally caught in the area of ​​his death the float and tank of the plane on which he was looking for the crashed airship "Italy" with Nobile on board.

Piously honoring the laws of the North, I did not touch the Amundsen relics on the island of Four Pillars. Next to them I left my relics: several cartridges, some pellets, broken parts from a bicycle and a bottle of glycerin, where I included a description of the route I had taken. I sealed the bottle with a piece of stearin suppository.

From Four-Pillar Island I again went to the mainland. Approaching the rocky, steep shore, I noticed a white spot from a distance. I mistook this spot for an arctic fox. Up close, it turned out to be a polar bear. I wounded her with the first shot. Fortunately, she did not immediately attack, but, taking some white lump in her teeth, climbed up the rock with it. I could not reload the gun due to the transverse rupture of the cartridge case. I couldn’t manage to knock her out, and the bear climbed higher and higher on the rock.

Finally I knocked the stuck cartridge out of the barrel and fired again. The bear froze on a steep rock with her neck outstretched.

With difficulty I reached my prey. And then I understood why the bear did not attack. She was saving her teddy bear. The maternal instinct turned out to be stronger than the predator instinct.

I lowered the bear by the paw onto the ice and skinned her. Its skin turned out to be six steps long. And the bear cub was very small. I took him with me and traveled with him for a month and a half.

We became friends. I named him Mishutka. It was more fun and warmer for me on the road with him. We slept together, huddled close to each other. The bear's fur coat is shaggy and warms well. It was only when I was sleeping that the bear cub sometimes tried to bite my hand. It was impossible to take off the mittens.

He and I ate together, mostly fish. One day during breakfast he bit my hand - I got angry with him and decided to punish him. I threw him behind a high hummock so that he would not see me, and I got on my bike and rode along the dense snow crust. Mishutka immediately began shouting: “Vakulik! Vakulika!” Say, forgive me.

He caught up with me, somersaulted under the front wheel and didn’t let me go anywhere all day. Apparently, he was really afraid to be alone.

I traveled with a bear cub to Pevek. Here the local residents - the Chukchi - marveled at the friendship between man and bear no less than at the bicycle. Among the Chukchi, the bear is a sacred animal.

In Pevek, I stayed with him at the owner of the trading post. Mishutka, as always, getting angry while eating, knocked over the bowl of hot soup that his owner had treated him to on the floor. As punishment, I sent the bear cub out into the hallway. But the owner was very worried about him and persuaded me to lay a bear skin in the hallway so that Mishutka would be warmer. In the morning we found the bear cub dead. I had several bear skins and mistakenly laid his mother's skin on him. Now I wanted to say to Mishutka: “Vakulik!”

Since then I have not killed any more polar bears. I felt ashamed to destroy such a huge and rare animal for the sake of a few kilograms of meat that I could eat or take with me on the road.

Every living being is dear to me. I killed the beast only out of necessity. Nature could have killed me too, but she spared me. She spared me because I treated her with respect, trying to comprehend and apply her laws.

In 1965, A. Kharitanovsky’s book “THE MAN WITH AN IRON DEER. A Tale of a Forgotten Feat” was published.

Source here http://nub1an.livejournal.com/154933.html

Gleb Leontyevich Travin (1902 - 1979, Pskov) - Soviet traveler. In 1928-1931, he traveled by bicycle along the borders of the USSR, including the Arctic coast with a total length of 85 thousand kilometers.

Travin loved nature, in his youth he led a circle of “hunter-pathfinders”. His father taught him the science of survival - to find food and shelter in the forest and in the field, and, if necessary, eat raw meat. In 1923, a Dutch cyclist arrived in Pskov, having traveled all over Europe. Then Travin decides to make a longer and more difficult journey.

It took 5 years to prepare for the bicycle crossing, during which Travin traveled thousands of kilometers across the Pskov land. He studied geography, geodesy, zoology, botany, photography and plumbing while serving in the army. After finishing his service, he went to Kamchatka, where he continued his training on a Japanese-made bicycle.

G.L. Travin went on a bicycle trip on October 10, 1928 from Kamchatka. Then he sailed to Vladivostok by steamship, after which he traveled overland on an American bicycle through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia - 45 thousand kilometers along land borders.

The second half of the journey is along the Arctic part of the border of the Arctic Ocean from Kola Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka - Travin covered 40 thousand kilometers by bicycle, hunting skis, and dog sled. Visited Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, the islands of Vaygach and Dikson, the villages of Khatanga, Russkoe Ustye, Uelen and others. The trip ended with a return to Kamchatka. Then Travin intended to continue his journey to Alaska, but did not receive permission.

The documentary story by A. Kharitanovsky “The Man with the Iron Deer” provides eyewitness accounts. The famous polar pilot Hero of the Soviet Union B.G. Chukhnovsky saw Travin near Novaya Zemlya and on Dikson Island. The oldest Russian hydrographer, head of the Marine Kara Expedition of the 30s, N.I. Evgenov, met with him in Varnek Bay in Yugorsky Shar. The commander of polar aviation, M.I. Shevelev, testifies in this book that the pilots saw a cyclist at the mouth of the Yenisei. Finally, the first radio operator of Chukotka, I.K. Duzhkin, lives in Moscow, who recently confirmed Travin’s arrival in Uelen. In honor of Travin’s Arctic bicycle crossing, Komsomol members of Chukotka erected a memorial sign on Cape Dezhnev in July 1931. Now there is a monument made in the homeland of the brave traveler - in Pskov.

The Pskov Art and History Museum displays the bicycle and equipment that Gleb Leontyevich took with him on the road - a compass, a knife, a gun, a trunk with spare parts and tools. Travel clubs in Lviv, as well as abroad, are named after Gleb Travin

Gleb grew up in a large family (in the photo he is in the top row on the right). His father was a wealthy forester and had several houses before the revolution.

Below is an exact prototype of the American bicycle ordered by Gleb in 1928, on which he made this journey:

Two photographs were taken in the Arctic during the second half of his journey by people who happened to be on Gleb's path:

In his registration passport, stamps confirm the arrival of the cyclist in 1929-1931 in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, on the islands of Vaygach and Dikson, in the villages of Khatanga, Russkoe Ustye, Uelen and others.

By today's standards, a 3-year journey spanning two equators seems like something fantastic. Gleb writes that when he started, his bicycle and provisions weighed 80 kilograms. He ate and drank water only 2 times a day - morning and evening. Nowadays, if a cyclist doesn’t drink water within an hour, it’s already a disaster. He slept wherever he could - in the tundra, in the snow, in the desert, in the mountains. I rode without any headgear at all.

The unparalleled endurance, endurance, willpower, and courage amazes. Nothing like this has happened in the entire subsequent history of our state. What is surprising is that the Russian nation practically does not know Gleb Travin. A man who stands on a par with Magellan and Columbus.

A tightrope walker works under a circus big top with a safety net. He can repeat his dangerous act every evening and expect to survive if he fails. I didn't have any insurance. And much of what happened along the way, I would not be able to repeat again. There are things that you don’t want to remember. And anyone in my place would probably resist, for example, retelling how he froze like a frog into the ice not far from Novaya Zemlya.

This happened in the early spring of 1930. I returned along the ice along the western coast of Novaya Zemlya to the south, to the island of Vaygach. A hurricane-force east wind blew all day. Its squalls threw me off the bike and dragged me across the ice to the west. The knife came to the rescue. I stuck it into the ice and held on to the handle until the wind died down a little. I settled down for the night far from the shore, in the open sea. As always, I used a hatchet to cut out several bricks from snow compacted by the wind and bound by frost, and made a wind-funeral out of them. I placed the bike at the head of the bed with the front wheel facing south so as not to waste time on orientation in the morning, scooped up more plump snow from the sides instead of a blanket and fell asleep. I slept on my back with my arms crossed over my chest - it was warmer that way. When I woke up, I could neither unclench my hands nor turn around... At night, a crack appeared next to my sleeping quarters. Water came out, and the snow that had covered me turned into ice. In a word, I found myself in an ice trap, or rather, in an ice suit.

I had a knife on my belt. With great difficulty, he freed one hand, took out the knife and began to break the ice around him. It was tedious work. The ice broke off into small pieces. I was pretty tired before I freed myself from the sides. But it was impossible to hit yourself from behind. He rushed forward with his whole body - and felt that he had acquired an ice hump. And the boots could not be completely released either. I cleared the ice from the top, and when I pulled my feet out, both soles remained in the ice. The hair was frozen and stuck out like a stake on the head, and the legs were almost bare. Frozen clothes made it difficult to get on the bike. I had to walk with him through the snowy crust.

I was lucky: I came across a deer track. Someone recently rode on a sled. The trail was fresh, not yet covered with snow. I followed this trail for a long time. Eventually it led to housing. I climbed onto the island and saw smoke on the hillock.

My legs suddenly went numb with joy. I crawled on my hands towards the Nenets tent. The Nenets, noticing me, started to run. I looked like an alien from another planet: an icy hump on my back, long stripes without a hat, and even a bicycle, which they probably saw for the first time. With difficulty I rose to my feet. An old man separated from the frightened Nenets, but stood aside. I took a step towards him, and he took a step away from me. I began to explain to him that I had frostbite on my feet - it seemed to me that the old man understood Russian - but he still backed away. Exhausted, I fell. The old man finally approached, helped him up and invited him into the tent.

With his help, I took off my clothes, or rather, I didn’t take them off, but cut them into pieces. The wool on the sweater was frozen, the body underneath was white, frostbitten. I jumped out of the tent and began to rub myself with snow. Meanwhile, lunch was prepared in the tent. The old man called me. I drank a mug of hot tea, ate a piece of venison - and suddenly felt severe pain in my legs. By evening, the thumbs were swollen, and instead of them there were blue balls. The pain did not subside. I feared gangrene and decided to have surgery.
In the plague there was nowhere to hide from watchful eyes. I had to amputate my frostbitten fingers in front of everyone. I cut off the swollen mass with a knife and removed it, like a stocking, along with my nail. I moistened the wound with glycerin (I poured it into the bicycle inner tubes so that they would better retain air in the cold). I asked the old man for a bandage - and suddenly a woman shouted “Keli! Keli! rushed out of the chum. I bandaged the wound with a handkerchief, tearing it in half, and began working on the second finger.

Then, when the operation was over and the women returned to the tent, I asked what “Keli” was. The old man explained that this is a cannibal devil. “You,” he says, “cut yourself and don’t cry. And only the devil can do that!”
I was already taken for a devil in Central Asia. In Dushanbe in May 1929, I went to the editorial office of a local newspaper with a request to translate the inscription on the armband into Tajik: “Bicycle traveler Gleb Travin.” The editor was confused, not knowing how to translate the word “bicycle.” There were almost no bicycles in those parts at that time, and few people understood this word. In the end, the bicycle was translated as shaitan-arba - “devil’s cart.”
Another armband was printed in Samarkand - in the Uzbek language. But the translation of shaitan-arba was left as is. There was no more suitable word for bicycle in the Turkmen language. I also went from Ashgabat to the sands of the Karakum Desert on the “devil’s cart”.
I was also suspected of having connections with evil spirits in Karelia. There are solid lakes there, and I drove straight through them on the first November ice. Before this I already had experience of such movement. On Baikal, the lighthouse keeper suggested that in winter in Siberia it is most convenient to travel on ice. On his advice, I crossed frozen Baikal on a bicycle, and then made my way through the taiga along frost-bound river beds. So the frozen lakes in Karelia were not an obstacle. Rather, the obstacle was the rumor that a strange man with an iron hoop on his head was riding across the lakes on a strange beast. A lacquered strap was taken for a hoop, with which I tied my long hair so that it would not fall over my eyes. I made a vow to myself not to cut my hair until I finished my journey.

The rumor about a strange man on a bicycle reached Murmansk before me. When I drove to the outskirts of the city, a man in felt boots stopped me. He turned out to be a doctor named Andrusenko. An old-timer of the North, he didn’t believe in any devils, but what he heard about me he considered supernatural. The doctor touched my fur jacket and boots, and then asked permission to examine me. I agreed. He felt his pulse, listened to his lungs, tapped his back and chest and said with satisfaction:
- You, brother, have enough health for two centuries!

A photograph of this meeting has been preserved. Sometimes I look at her with a smile: an atheist doctor - and he did not immediately believe that I was just a well-trained person, carried away by an extraordinary dream! Yes, Albert Einstein is right: “Prejudice is harder to split than an atom!”

My three favorite heroes are Faust, Odysseus, Don Quixote. Faust captivated me with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Odysseus perfectly withstands the blows of fate. Don Quixote had a sublime idea of ​​selfless service to beauty and justice. All three embody a challenge to conventional norms and assumptions. All three gave me strength in difficult times, because by going to the Arctic on a bicycle, I, too, challenged the well-known.

The unusual frightens both man and beast. When I was making my way through the Ussuri taiga, my bike was scared... by a tiger! The beast chased me for a long time, hiding in the bushes, growling menacingly, cracking branches, but never dared to attack. The tiger had never seen such a strange beast “on wheels” and chose to refrain from aggressive actions. I didn’t even have a gun with me then.
Later, I became convinced more than once that all the animals - whether in the taiga, desert or tundra - were careful not to attack me precisely because of the bicycle. They were scared off by its bright red paint, shiny nickel-plated spokes, oil lantern and flag fluttering in the wind. The bicycle was my reliable bodyguard.

Fear of the unusual is instinctive. I myself experienced it more than once during my travels. The day when I left the hospital after surgery was especially scary for me. I could hardly move my pain-filled legs and was so weak that a hungry Arctic fox dared to attack me. This is a cunning, evil animal. He is usually careful not to attack people, but then he began to grab the torso that the old Nenets gave me. I fell into the snow and the arctic fox attacked me from behind. He threw him off and threw the knife. But the arctic fox is nimble and it’s not easy to hit him. He began to take a knife out of the snowdrift - the arctic fox dug into his hand and bit him. Still, I outsmarted him. He reached for the knife again with his left hand, the arctic fox rushed towards her, and I grabbed his collar with my right hand.
The skin of this arctic fox then traveled with me to Chukotka. I wrapped it around my throat instead of a scarf. But the thought of an arctic fox attack haunted me for a long time like a nightmare. I was tormented by doubts: is this a mad fox? After all, they never attack a person alone! Or am I really so weak that the arctic fox chose me as his prey? How then can you compete with the ice elements?

I prepared myself for the journey only relying on my own strength. Help from outside turned out to be just a hindrance for me. I felt this especially acutely on board the icebreaker Lenin, which was covered in ice near Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea. Ice conditions in July 1930 were very severe. The path to the mouth of the Yenisei, where the icebreaker was leading a whole caravan of Soviet and foreign ships behind the forest, was blocked by ice. Having learned about this, I took an old boat from the trading post on Vaygach Island, repaired it, set a sail and went with a doctor and two other fellow travelers to the place where the icebreaker was “imprisoned”. Having reached the ice! fields, we disembarked from the boat and got to the side of the ship on foot... We still managed to ride part of the way on a bicycle.

Then, during a press conference that the captain of the icebreaker held in the wardroom, I said that Gleb Travin is not the first cyclist in the polar latitudes. The bicycle was used during Robert Scott's last expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1912. It was used for walks at the expedition's main base in Antarctica.

I said that I had been traveling by bicycle along the borders of the USSR since September 1928. I started from Kamchatka, traveled through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Crimea, the middle zone, Karelia. And now I’m going to get to Chukotka.
I also talked about preparations for this trip. It began on May 24, 1923, when the Dutch cyclist Adolf de Groot, who had traveled almost all of Europe, reached Pskov.
“The Dutch can do it,” I thought then, “but can’t I?” This question sparked my interest in ultra-long-haul flights.

It took five and a half years to prepare. During this time, I traveled thousands of kilometers on a bicycle in my Pskov region, and rode in any weather and on any roads. As a child, my father, a forester, taught me to find food and shelter in the forest and in the field, and taught me to eat raw meat. I tried to develop these skills even more in myself.

During my army service, which I served at the headquarters of the Leningrad Military District, I intensively studied geography, geodesy, zoology and botany, photography, plumbing (for bicycle repair) - in a word, everything that could be useful for a long journey. And of course, I trained myself physically by participating in swimming, weightlifting, bicycle and boat racing competitions.
After being demobilized from the army in 1927, he received special permission from the commander of the Leningrad Military District to travel to Kamchatka. I wanted to test myself in completely unfamiliar conditions.
In Kamchatka he built the first power plant, which produced electricity in March 1928, and then worked there as an electrician. And all my free time was spent training. I also tried my bike on mountain trails, crossing fast rivers, and in impenetrable forests. This training took a whole year. And, only after making sure that the bike would not let me down anywhere, I set off from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Vladivostok.

I told all this while standing, refusing the invitation of the icebreaker captain to sit down. He stood, shifting from foot to foot to muffle the unabated pain, and was afraid that people would notice it. Then, I thought, they won’t let me off the ship. Those gathered in the wardroom already had enough objections. The head of the Marine Kara Expedition, Professor N.I. Evgenov, for example, stated that he studied Taimyr and the mouth of the Yenisei for 10 years and knows that even wolves do not stay there in winter. Frosts and snow storms in these parts drive all living things to the south.
In response to my remark that in winter I prefer to drive on ice rather than along the ocean coast, the famous hydrographer simply waved his hands and called me a suicide.

But I already knew: no matter how severe the winter is in the coastal Arctic ice, life there does not completely stop. Severe frosts cause cracks to form in the ice. Each such crack makes itself felt with a noticeable hum. Along with the water, fish rush into this crack. Later I got the hang of catching it with a hook from a bicycle spoke. Two fish was enough for me a day. I ate one fresh, the other frozen, like plantain.

In addition to fish, my menu included raw meat. From local hunters I learned to track and shoot northern animals - arctic fox, seal, walrus, deer, polar bear. The habit of eating only raw food was confirmed by the French doctor Alain Bombard. While sailing on a rubber dinghy across the Atlantic Ocean, he ate raw fish and plankton for more than two months. I ate food twice a day - at 6 am and 6 pm. 8 hours every day were spent on the road, 8 hours on sleep, the rest of the time on searching for food, arranging lodgings for the night, and diary entries.

Riding a bicycle on hard snow crust seems impossible only at first glance. Along the shore, the ebb and flow of the tides pile up hummocks. I went tens of kilometers deep into the ocean, where there were ice fields that sometimes allowed me to develop high speed...

And yet, then, on the icebreaker, none of those gathered in the wardroom took seriously my intention to ride a bicycle to Chukotka. They listened to me with interest, some even admired me, but everyone agreed that the idea was impossible.

I was accommodated for the night in the ship's infirmary. There was no free cabin on the icebreaker, and yet I suspected that someone had noticed that my legs were not all right. These fears tormented me all night. In the morning, to prove that my legs were healthy, I rode a bicycle on the deck. And then he thanked the sailors for their hospitality and announced that I was leaving for the Volodarsky steamship, which was stuck in the ice about thirty kilometers from the Lenin icebreaker.

Only after that they agreed to let me off the icebreaker, although it was not easy to find the ship among the ice.
I left the icebreaker at 6 o'clock in the morning. Despite the early hour, the entire deck was filled with people, as if they had been alerted. I felt like I was at a trial, going down the storm ladder onto the ice with the pilot B. G. Chukhnovsky - he took a farewell photograph of me.
As soon as he left the icebreaker, three beeps followed...

It took me a lot of effort not to look in the direction of the icebreaker. I tried to quickly get behind the hummocks so that he would disappear from sight. I was afraid that I would be drawn back to him. I was aware that I was leaving life - from warmth, food, a roof over my head.

I got to the Volodarsky steamship on time: the next day the wind dispersed the ice around it, and it reached Dikson under its own power. Then my path lay to Taimyr.

Taimyr... How many times has the sailors' plan to continue their journey along the coast of Siberia to the east been dashed against it! Only in 1878-1879 was it possible to complete this route by a Russian-Swedish expedition led by E. Nordenskiöld, and even then in two years with wintering. And the first through flight in one navigation was made only in 1932 by the famous Sibiryakov. Two years before this flight, Taimyr subjected me to a severe test.

At the end of October 1930, I crossed the Pyasina, the largest river in Taimyr. Six years later, Norilsk began to be built on it. The river had recently frozen, the ice was thin and slippery. Already closer to the opposite bank, I fell off my bike and broke the ice. It was very difficult to get out of the hole. The ice crumbled under my hands and broke under the weight of my body. When I felt that the ice was holding me, I sprawled on it, spreading my arms and legs. I will never forget this day. The sun had not been visible for a week; instead, the scarlet reflections of the midday dawn played on the mirror-like ice. They gradually faded away. I felt like my life was fading away along with them. The wet clothes immediately froze and froze in the cold. With an effort of will, I forced myself to move. Carefully, pushing off with his hands, like a seal with flippers, he crawled across the ice to the bicycle and pulled it away from the dangerous place.

After this icy plunge, Taimyr still rewarded me. Having got out to the shore of Pyasina, I came across hummocks barely covered with snow. They turned out to be skinned carcasses of deer, stuck upright in the snow. There was a pile of removed skins right there. Apparently, on the eve of the freeze-up, a herd of wild deer crossed here to the other side, and the Nenets stabbed them in the water. The hunt was successful; some of the meat was left in reserve.
The first thing I did was climb into the middle of the stack of deer skins to keep warm. My clothes were melting on me from body heat. Having dined on frozen meat, I fell soundly asleep. In the morning I woke up healthy and cheerful, feeling a surge of strength. Soon I came across a dog sled. The owner of the team, a Nenets, gave me a little ride and suggested the best way to get to Khatanga.

In Taimyr I saw a mammoth cemetery. Huge tusks protruded from the ground near the ocean coast. With great difficulty I managed to loosen and pull out the smallest tusk from the ground. I gave it to a skilled bone carver in Chukotka. He sawed the tusk into plates and on one of them he drew a whale, a walrus, a seal and wrote the inscription: “Bicycle traveler Gleb Travin.” This miniature is now kept in the Pskov Art and History Museum.

Where did I find joy during my journey?
First of all, in the movement itself towards the intended goal. Every day I took the exam. He survived and remained alive. Failure meant death. No matter how hard it was for me, I prepared myself for the fact that the most difficult thing was yet to come. Having overcome the danger, I felt great joy in the knowledge that I was one step closer to my goal. Joy came after danger, like tide after ebb. It was the primordial joy of being, the joy of realizing the liberation of one’s powers.

In the Arctic I had to live and act completely differently than in the taiga or in the desert. And for this it was necessary to constantly observe and learn from both people and animals.
Were there moments when I regretted going on this risky journey? No! Did not have. There was pain in my legs, there was a fear that I would not reach the goal... But all this was forgotten, say, in front of the beauty of icebergs frozen into the ice. This beauty filled me with both joy and strength.

Getting to know the people of the North brought no less joy.
Once I had a chance to listen to a shaman. I was invited to see him by an old Yakut, with whom I spent the night in a yaranga. The old man helped me fix my cracked steering wheel. Instead of a steering wheel, he suggested the barrel of an old Norwegian rifle, having previously bent it over the fire. And I must say that the new steering wheel never let me down. It is still preserved on my bicycle, exhibited in the Pskov Museum. I didn’t know how to thank the old man for the repair, and he didn’t want to accept anything. In the end, the Yakut admitted that he was tormented by worms. I gave him some medicine, which I took with me on the road just in case. The medicine helped. The old man told the whole camp about this and, wanting to please me with something else, suggested that I go to the shaman.

Yakut harnessed the reindeer and took me to the mountains. The shaman's yaranga was larger than that of other residents. He came out to us from behind the canopy in the light of the fat store. The Yakuts were already sitting in a circle in the yaranga. The shaman shook his trinkets and beat the tambourine rhythmically, gradually speeding up the rhythm. He danced, singing mournfully, and those gathered in the yaranga echoed him, swaying.
I looked at the shadow of the shaman falling on the wall. He seemed to hypnotize the audience with his playing and movements and somehow seemed to me like a cobra, which swayed just like that in front of me in the gorge on the border with Afghanistan...

I drove through this gorge with a strong tailwind. It was getting dark. He lit an oil lantern, hoping to get through the gorge before it got completely dark. And suddenly a light flashed in front of me. I pressed the brake, jumped off and froze in surprise. A meter from the front wheel a cobra stood on its tail. Unraveling her hood, she shook her head. The light from the oil lantern reflected in her eyes.
I slowly backed away and only then noticed that on the walls of the gorge there were balls of coiled snakes. Paralyzed by fear, I moved in slow motion and kept my eyes on the cobra. She stood at attention in front of me, like a sentry. I took a few more steps back, each of which could have been fatal for me. The cobra didn't move. Then I carefully turned the bike around and sat on it, drenched in cold sweat. My legs pressed on the pedals with all my might, and it seemed to me that the bicycle was rooted to the ground...

Suddenly the old Yakut, who led me to the shaman, pulled me by the sleeve towards the exit. I didn’t immediately understand what he wanted. Only his eyes showed that he was worried.
On the street, an old man said that the shaman didn’t like me for some reason. The shaman, using his tambourine, composed a whole story, as if there were two more companions with me, but I killed and ate them. The old man did not believe the shaman: he was not from here, he came to these places from somewhere in the south.
Then a shaman came out of the yaranga wearing a fur coat draped over his naked body. Now, in the light, I could see his face better. It was overgrown with a thick black beard, and the eyes were not slanted.
- Doctor, bandage my finger! - he said in a breaking voice. His accent was not Yakut.

I am the same doctor as you are a shaman!
I jumped into the old man’s sleigh, and he drove the reindeer as hard as he could.

A few days later I reached the Russian Ustye on Indigirka. In this village, which consisted of a dozen log huts, lived Russian hunters who hunted fur-bearing animals. Their “mouths” - huge traps made of logs - were placed for hundreds of kilometers along the ocean coast. At the mouths of rivers I came across hunting dugouts, log houses or yarangas lined with turf. In them one could find some firewood and some food.

I was surprised by the soft melodious speech of the Russian-Ustyinsky people. The youth respectfully called the elders fathers. From them I learned a legend that their village has existed since the time of Ivan the Terrible. It was founded by the Pomors, who arrived here from the west on kochas - small flat-bottomed sailing ships. The Pomors, in turn, came from the Novgorod land. And I myself am a Pskovian, so I was almost a fellow countryman to the Russian-Ustyinsk people...

I was received very cordially. I was a guest in every house, ate caviar cakes and festive stroganina. He drank brick tea and told everything he knew about life in Central Russia and along the polar coast. And I also told them about the Pskovites - the pioneers of the northern seas who visited these parts - Dmitry and Khariton Laptev, about Wrangel.

I lived in Russkoe Ustye for several happy days. There was no teacher at school; instead, I gave the children geography lessons. They listened to me with great interest and asked me several times to tell me about warm regions. And of course, I rode them all on my bike.
But these happy days were overshadowed by bandits. Not far from the village they killed a Komsomol teacher who was returning to school from the regional center. Together with other residents of the village, I went in search of the gang. The leader was captured. It turned out to be an old friend of mine - a “shaman”. It was, as it turned out later, a former White Guard officer...

From hunters in the Russian Ustye I learned about the drift of the famous Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen in 1918-1920 on the ship Maud near the Bear Islands in the East Siberian Sea. Making their way to the east, Roald Amundsen and his companions made a stop on the island of Four Pillars. I decided to find this parking lot. The way to the island was suggested to me by the residents of Russky Ustye, who came to the Bear Islands in winter while hunting.

I approached Four-Pillar Island from the northeast side. There, near a large stone, there was a platform. On it I found a Norwegian hatchet with a long handle, four tea cups and a dark wine bottle, dusted with snow. It was sealed with sealing wax. Through the glass one could see the signature on the note: “Amundsen.”
The sad news of the death of this brave man who conquered the South Pole in 1911 was still fresh in my memory. Roald Amundsen died in 1928 in the Barents Sea. Soviet fishermen accidentally caught in the area of ​​his death the float and tank of the plane on which he was looking for the crashed airship "Italy" with Nobile on board.
Piously honoring the laws of the North, I did not touch the Amundsen relics on the island of Four Pillars. Next to them I left my relics: several cartridges, some pellets, broken parts from a bicycle and a bottle of glycerin, where I included a description of the route I had taken. I sealed the bottle with a piece of stearin suppository.

From Four-Pillar Island I again went to the mainland. Approaching the rocky, steep shore, I noticed a white spot from a distance. I mistook this spot for an arctic fox. Up close, it turned out to be a polar bear. I wounded her with the first shot. Fortunately, she did not immediately attack, but, taking some white lump in her teeth, climbed up the rock with it. I could not reload the gun due to the transverse rupture of the cartridge case. I couldn’t manage to knock her out, and the bear climbed higher and higher on the rock.
Finally I knocked the stuck cartridge out of the barrel and fired again. The bear froze on a steep rock with her neck outstretched.
With difficulty I reached my prey. And then I understood why the bear did not attack. She was saving her teddy bear. The maternal instinct turned out to be stronger than the predator instinct.

I lowered the bear by the paw onto the ice and skinned her. Its skin turned out to be six steps long. And the bear cub was very small. I took him with me and traveled with him for a month and a half.

We became friends. I named him Mishutka. It was more fun and warmer for me on the road with him. We slept together, huddled close to each other. The bear's fur coat is shaggy and warms well. It was only when I was sleeping that the bear cub sometimes tried to bite my hand. It was impossible to take off the mittens.
He and I ate together, mostly fish. One day during breakfast he bit my hand - I got angry with him and decided to punish him. I threw him behind a high hummock so that he would not see me, and I got on my bike and rode along the dense snow crust. Mishutka immediately began shouting: “Vakulik! Vakulika!” Say, forgive me.

He caught up with me, somersaulted under the front wheel and didn’t let me go anywhere all day. Apparently, he was really afraid to be alone.

I traveled with a bear cub to Pevek. Here the local residents - the Chukchi - marveled at the friendship between man and bear no less than at the bicycle. Among the Chukchi, the bear is a sacred animal.

In Pevek, I stayed with him at the owner of the trading post. Mishutka, as always, getting angry while eating, knocked over the bowl of hot soup that his owner had treated him to on the floor. As punishment, I sent the bear cub out into the hallway. But the owner was very worried about him and persuaded me to lay a bear skin in the hallway so that Mishutka would be warmer. In the morning we found the bear cub dead. I had several bear skins and mistakenly laid his mother's skin on him. Now I wanted to say to Mishutka: “Vakulik!”

Since then I have not killed any more polar bears. I felt ashamed to destroy such a huge and rare animal for the sake of a few kilograms of meat that I could eat or take with me on the road.

Every living being is dear to me. I killed the beast only out of necessity. Nature could have killed me too, but she spared me. She spared me because I treated her with respect, trying to comprehend and apply her laws.

In 1965, A. Kharitanovsky’s book “THE MAN WITH AN IRON DEER. A Tale of a Forgotten Feat” was published.

Gleb Leontievich Travin(April 28, 1902, Pskov district - October 1979, Pskov) - Soviet traveler.

A native of the Pskov region. In 1928-1931, he traveled by bicycle along the borders of the USSR, including the Arctic coast with a total length of 27-30 [unacceptable 860 days] thousand kilometers.

Family

Father is a forester. The family moved to Pskov in 1913.

Journey

Prerequisites for cycling

Travin loved nature, in his youth he led a circle of “hunter-pathfinders”. His father taught him the science of survival - to find food and shelter in the forest and in the field, and, if necessary, eat raw meat. In 1923, a Dutch cyclist arrived in Pskov, having traveled all over Europe. Then Travin decides to make a longer and more difficult journey.

Preparing for your trip

It took 5 years to prepare for the bicycle crossing, during which Travin traveled thousands of kilometers across the Pskov land. He studied geography, geodesy, zoology, botany, photography and plumbing while serving in the army. After finishing his service, he went to Kamchatka, where he continued his training on a Leitner army folding bicycle.

Bicycle crossing

Gleb Travin went on a bicycle trip on October 10, 1928. He reached Vladivostok by steamship, then overland by bicycle through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia - 17 thousand [unacceptably 860 days] kilometers along land borders.

Travin covered the entire Arctic part of the border along the Arctic Ocean from the Kola Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev on Chukotka by bicycle, hunting skis, dog sled, and on foot - 10-13 thousand [unacceptably 860 days] kilometers. Visited Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, the islands of Vaygach and Dikson, the villages of Khatanga, Russkoe Ustye, Uelen and others. The trip ended with a return to Kamchatka.

Erroneous estimates of route length

In A. Kharitanovsky’s work “The Man with the Iron Deer,” published in 1959 and 1965, Travin’s route is estimated at 85 thousand kilometers, but with such a length Travin had to travel an average of 77 km every day for three years, which does not agree with figures obtained when restoring the route based on the data from the route book-recorder [unauthorized source? 860 days].

A short article in the newspaper “Pskov Alarm” dated October 13, 1929 indicates the length of the route already covered is 80 thousand kilometers, however, at the time of writing the newspaper article, the duration of the journey was one third of the total time spent (12 months), which gives an average daily mileage of 220 km per day .

Sections of the route covered by ships

Based on the data of the Travin Registrar, stored in the Pskov State Museum-Reserve, the following sections of the route were covered by ships:

• Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky - Vladivostok, October 10 - 23, 1928, 2600 km.
• Krasnovodsk - Baku, July 26 - 28, 1929, 280 km.
• Rostov-on-Don - Yalta, August 22 - 26, 1929, 580 km.
• Vaygach Island - Dikson Island, August 20 - September 11, 1930, 850 km.
• Gulf of Lawrence - Ust-Kamchatsk, September 30 - October 17, 1931, 1900 km

In total, the ships covered 6,210 km.

The following areas may be covered by ships:

• Murmansk - Arkhangelsk, November 21 - December 5, 1929, 820 km. To pass this section, Travin had to cross the Gorlo Strait, which separates the White Sea from the Barents Sea, but the strait is covered with drifting ice for most of the winter season, and ships from the port of Arkhangelsk navigate through this strait; in winter, ships are escorted using icebreakers .
• Ust-Kamchatsk - Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, October 17 - 24, 1931, distance by coastline 560 km, by road 737 km [unacceptable 860 days].

Later years of life

After returning, Travin trained cyclists, motorcyclists and motorists, continued to play sports himself and involved young people in sports. During the Great Patriotic War he worked as a teacher of military affairs at the Kamchatka Marine and Fisheries Technical School. In 1962 he returned to Pskov.

G. L. Travin died in October 1979.

Personal life

He married Vera Shantina (d. 1959) after returning from a trip. He had five children: three daughters and two sons.

Travin's journey in art

Travin’s journey is dedicated to Vivian Itin’s essay “The Earth Has Become Our Own,” published in the magazine “Siberian Lights” and the book “Exit to the Sea” in 1935.

In 1960, A. Kharitanovsky’s book “The Man with an Iron Deer” was published. The Tale of a Forgotten Feat”, which went through several reprints.

In 1981, Tsentrnauchfilm director Vladlen Kryuchkin made a documentary about Travin.

Memory

• In honor of Travin’s Arctic bicycle crossing, Komsomol members of Chukotka erected a memorial sign on Cape Dezhnev in July 1931.
• Travel clubs in Lozovaya, Lvov, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, as well as abroad - in the cities of Gera and Berlin are named after Gleb Travin.
• Travin's bicycle, hard drive, compass, documents and photographs are kept in the Pskov Museum-Reserve.

Literature

• A. Kharitanovsky. The Man with the Iron Deer (The Tale of a Forgotten Feat) / A. B. Somakh. - Petropavlovsk printing house of the Kamchatka regional polygraphic data, 1959.

Gleb Leontievich Travin (1902-1979) - great Soviet traveler. For three years (1928-1931), he cycled around the perimeter of the Soviet Union, including the Arctic coast. The total length of the route was over 85,000 kilometers. And we must not forget that in the late 20s, bicycles were incomparably less comfortable and reliable than they are now!

When in the fall of 1928 G. Travin, taking with him only a knife, a compass, a gun and a suitcase with spare parts and tools, rode out alone on a bicycle from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, people called him an eccentric and a suicide. Having reached Vladivostok, Gleb Leontievich, on an American-made bicycle, crossed the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia. Leaving behind him 45,000 kilometers along the land borders of the USSR, the traveler decided not to stop and set off to conquer the Arctic, where dense and impassable snow reigned for many hundreds of kilometers.

His path lay along the Arctic Ocean, starting from the Kola Peninsula and all the way to Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka. Travin traveled by bicycle and hunting skis through Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, the islands of Dikson and Vaygach, the villages of Uelen, Russkoe Ustye, Khatanga and many, many others. settlements to the final goal of his entire breathtaking journey - back to Kamchatka.

The Yakuts, Nenets, Chukchi and other northern peoples, who had never seen bicycles, called the correct vehicle Gleb Leontievich "Iron Deer". None of the residents of cities, villages, hunting and fishing villages believed that Travin would reach his goal alive. Their skepticism can be easily understood - often it was a long months' journey to the nearest village. But Gleb Leontievich stubbornly moved forward, falling into Arctic ice holes, shooting back from predators, catching arctic foxes with his hands, amputating his frostbitten toes, but in spite of the entire hostile world and common sense, he did not lose faith in his own strength. It was truly inhuman will.

Travin ate raw fish for months, catching it with bent bicycle spokes instead of hooks. He wrapped himself in the skins of hunted animals, repaired his clothes with them, washed himself with snow twice a day at -30 C, and built overnight shelters by cutting bricks from the snow. And I drove and drove and drove for eight hours every day. He considered his bicycle a faithful bodyguard: its bright color, shiny spokes and the light of an oil lantern scared away wild animals. The steering wheel, which had somehow cracked, was replaced with the barrel of an old Norwegian rifle, which was given to the traveler by a Yakut shaman.

Today, over 200 cycling clubs on the planet bear Travin’s name. A memorial sign was erected to the traveler at Cape Dezhnev. And Gleb Leontyevich’s bicycle is now kept in the museum-reserve of the city of Pskov.

Here are some excerpts from the memoirs of G.L. Travin:

"...I have been traveling by bicycle along the borders of the USSR since September 1928. I started from Kamchatka, traveled through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Crimea, middle zone, Karelia. And now I’m going to get to Chukotka.

I also talked about preparations for this trip. It began on May 24, 1923, when the Dutch cyclist Adolf de Groot, who had traveled almost all of Europe, reached Pskov.
“The Dutch can do it,” I thought then, “but can’t I?” "

"My three favorite heroes are Faust, Odysseus, Don Quixote. Faust captivated me with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Odysseus perfectly withstands the blows of fate. Don Quixote had a sublime idea of ​​selfless service to beauty and justice. All three embody a challenge to generally accepted norms and ideas. All three gave me strength in difficult times, because by going to the Arctic on a bicycle, I, too, threw down such a challenge to the generally known."

"...I was returning along the ice along the western coast of Novaya Zemlya to the south, to the island of Vaygach. A hurricane east wind blew all day. Its squalls threw me off the bike and dragged me along the ice to the west. A knife came to the rescue. I stuck it into the ice and I held onto the handle until the wind died down a little."

"...In the plague there was nowhere to hide from watchful eyes. I had to amputate the frostbitten fingers in front of everyone. I cut off the swollen mass with a knife, took it off like a stocking, along with the nail. I moistened the wound with glycerin (I poured it into the inner tubes of the bicycle so that they held air better in the cold). I asked the old man for a bandage, tied the wound with a handkerchief, tearing it in half, and began working on the second finger."

"...I approached Four-Pillar Island from the north-eastern side. There, near a large stone, there was a platform. On it I found a Norwegian hatchet with a long handle, four tea cups and a dark wine bottle, covered with snow. It was sealed sealing wax. Through the glass one could see the signature on the note: “Amundsen”..."

<"...Where did I find joy during my journey? First of all, in the very movement towards the intended goal. Every day I took the exam. I passed it and remained alive. Failure meant death. No matter how hard it was for me, I set myself up to that the most difficult thing was yet to come. Having overcome the danger, I felt great joy from the consciousness that I had become one step closer to the goal. Joy came after the danger, like the tide after the ebb. It was the primordial joy of being, the joy from the consciousness of the liberation of one’s powers."

You can read the Wikipedia article about G. Travin