Pskov track “man with an iron deer. The unique journey of Gleb Travin on a bicycle along the border of the USSR

Name Gleba Travina today is almost forgotten, despite the fact that the story of his life is so fascinating that it could easily become the script for an adventure film. Travin can be called a pioneer of cycling in the USSR and a real hero: on a two-wheeled vehicle, he rode a route of 85 thousand km along the borders of the largest country in the world, thereby proving that the capabilities of the human body are almost limitless! However, at home the achievement was not appreciated...

Famous traveler. At the beginning of the 20th century, he traveled along the border of the USSR with a total length of 85,000 km

Date of death: 1979

Place of birth: Russia, Pskov region

Gleb Leontievich Travin was born on April 28, 1902. He is a famous traveler who made a unique bicycle journey for three years along the borders Soviet Union, including the Arctic, that is, in a vicious circle with a length of 85 thousand kilometers.

Biography

Gleb Leontievich was born in the village of Kasyevo, Pskov district, in the family of a forester. In 1913, the Travin family moved to Pskov.

Already as a child, he fell in love with nature very much.

In his youth, Gleb organized a club of young hunters and trackers in Pskov. His father taught him to find food and lodging in the forest and field, and to eat raw meat, if necessary. After a Dutch cyclist arrived in Pskov in 1923, having traveled almost all of Europe, Travin decided to make a longer journey in more difficult conditions. It took five and a half years to prepare. During this time, he traveled thousands of kilometers on a bicycle in his Pskov region, and rode in any weather and on any roads.

Service in the army taught him a lot: he studied geography, geodesy, zoology, botany, photography and plumbing - in a word, everything that could be useful for a long journey and, of course, toughened himself physically. After demobilization from the army in 1927, Travin went with his comrades to distant Kamchatka, participated in the construction of the first power plant there, and worked as an electrician. This is where it started regular workouts on a Japanese bicycle on sled tracks on the ice of Avacha Bay and climbing volcanic hills. He went deeper along the slopes of the ridges into the blast furnace of Kamchatka and to the ocean coast.

In the summer of 1928, Travin made a bicycle trip from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Ust-Kamchatsk. This journey involved both crossing rivers and overcoming high-mountain tundra. At the same time, he was preparing equipment for the big campaign. From America, by special order, Gleb received a bright red bicycle with white enamel arrows, equipped it with two hermetically sealed bags that could serve as pantones. Attached to the trunk was a bag containing NZ rations - 7 pounds of pressed biscuits and a kilogram of chocolate. There was also a camera and winter clothes there. By decision of the Kamchatka sports club “Dynamo”, Travin went on October 10, 1928 on a propaganda bicycle ride, sailed by steamship from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Vladivostok, and then on a bicycle. Gleb Leontievich established a strict regime - to move in any weather, regardless of the condition of the roads, for 8 hours every day. He ate 2 times a day: in the morning and in the evening, drank only during meals, spent the night where night fell, and got food for dinner and breakfast there.

Travin traveled the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia - 45 thousand kilometers along land borders in a little more than a year.

He crossed the entire Arctic part of the border along the Arctic Ocean from the Kola Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka on an “iron deer” - as the Chukchi called the bicycle - and on hunting skis. This is 40 thousand kilometers. Gleb Leontievich visited Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, the islands of Vaygach and Dikson, the villages of Khatanga, Russkoe Ustye, Uelen and others. Everywhere he was greeted as a hero.

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, leader 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, lived in Moscow, who confirmed Travin’s arrival in Uelen in the mid-70s. 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.

This journey was full of various dangers. Moving along the southern borders, he had to meet with a cobra, snakes, jackals, a 2-meter long monitor lizard and clouds of locusts. The section of the Arctic route was very difficult; Travin passed it mostly by sea. On this route, he often skied on loose snow and only covered 8% of the entire route by steamboat, reindeer and dogs. He fell into ice holes, froze into ice and ended up in snow piles. There was a case on the ice of the Pechora Sea when he froze into the ice at night due to a crack that had formed. Having with difficulty freed himself from the ice captivity and reached Nenets housing, he had to perform an operation on himself, saving his frostbitten legs from gangrene.

In July 1931, Travin arrived in the village of Uelen. The entire population came out to meet the traveler with an unprecedented two-wheeled vehicle.

In honor of cycling along the Great Arctic Route, the youth erected a memorial sign on the high shore of Cape Dezhnev - a shell casing with a flag was fixed in a cast-iron frame.

The Chukchi carved a plate of walrus ivory as a souvenir for the athlete and embroidered arm ruffles with beads with the inscription “Tourist.” Around the world by bike. Gleb Leontyevich Travin."

From there he went to Providence Bay. I walked across the ice to a whaling ship, on which I sailed to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. On October 24, 1931, Gleb Leontievich Travin again arrived in Avacha Bay, where his unprecedented journey, full of dangers, risks and adventures, ended.

The traveler's registration passport contained about 500 stamps and registration marks - elongated, square, round, elliptical, of all colors. For example: “Temporary Organizational Commission of the Nenets District”, “Bolshezemelsky Nomadic Samoyed Council”, “Avam Tribal Council”.

“Were there moments when I regretted that I went on this risky journey? No, it was not. There was pain in my legs, there was fear that I would not reach my goal. But all this was forgotten before the beauty of the icebergs frozen in the ice. This beauty filled me with both joy and strength,” recalled Gleb Leontievich.

In total, Travin lived in Kamchatka for more than 30 years. He participated in the construction of the first power plant in Petropavlovsk and worked at it, and after returning from a trip, he trained cyclists, motorcyclists and motorists. During the Great Patriotic War, he commanded a coastal defense regiment, and after the war he worked as deputy director of a naval school.

In 1962, Travin moved to Pskov, where he spent his youth and a crazy dream of traveling was born. This is where he lived last years. Gleb Leontievich Travin died in 1979.

Over the years, some daredevils tried to partially follow Travin’s path, but these were only small segments.

In the Pskov Museum-Reserve, visitors can see this unique bicycle, for which the old Yakut made a new handlebar from the barrel of a Norwegian rifle instead of a cracked one, as well as his hunting skis, a hard drive, a compass, a passport recorder and other things that Travin used on the road. The museum also contains photographs and documents telling about the life of this amazing man.

Cycling along the USSR border

From 1928 to 1931, a young resident of Kamchatka - electrician, athlete and reserve commander Gleb Leontyevich Travin - made an extraordinary journey: he rode alone, without any support, along the borders of the Soviet Union, including also the Arctic coast of the country on a bicycle. Below is an essay by Gleb Leontyevich, where he talks about his incredible journey in the first person.

"No time discount"

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 in 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, grabbed more plump snow from the sides instead of a blanket and fell asleep. I slept on my back, crossing my arms on my chest - it was warmer. 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 a knife and began to crush 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 icy 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 from 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: there was an icy hump on my back, long hair 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 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 have already been mistaken for the devil in Central Asia. In Dushanbe in May 1929, I went to the editorial office of a local newspaper with a request to translate into Tajik the inscription on the armband: “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.”

In Samarkand, another armband was printed - in the Uzbek language. But the translation of shaitan-arba was left as is. No more found the right word for bicycles and in Turkmen language. I also went from Ashgabat to the sands of the Karakum Desert on a “damn 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 and Don Quixote. Faust captivated me with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Odysseus withstood the blows of fate well. 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 difficult moments, because, having gone to the Arctic on a bicycle, I also threw down such a challenge to the generally 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. I 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. But still I outsmarted him. He again reached for the knife 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 and mechanics 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 get to Chukotka by bicycle. 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 this did they agree to let me leave 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 I 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: “Gleb Travin, a traveler on a bicycle.” 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 has 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 of 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 as if 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 Italia 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 locals - 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.

85 thousand kilometers by bike along the borders of the Soviet Union. 40 of them - along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, from the Yamal Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev - a madness that not a single person in history has dared to do. Fate has turned out in such a way that now the name of Travin is practically forgotten.

Little is known about Gleb Travin. There is a book that describes his journey, there is a detailed essay, several notes and articles of varying degrees of vintage. But in his case this is clearly not enough. Vivian Itin is the first author to describe the journey of Gleb Travin.

A "real" traveler or professional athlete Gleb Travin was not, and the practical or scientific meaning of his journey was not determined.

Gleb Travin is the son of a janitor from Pskov, a young commander of the Red Army, just transferred to the reserve, an electrician who implemented the GOELRO plan in Kamchatka, a romantic who dreamed with his friends about using the energy of the Kamchatka volcanic hills. 26-year-old Gleb Travin got to Kamchatka in an unusual way - after the army he took advantage of the right of free travel to his homeland, but named Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka as his hometown. In the mind of a resident of Pskov, it is the end of the world, the farthest city in the country.

Travel route

Gleb Travin dreamed of traveling around the world. I realized that they would not be allowed to leave the country, changed plans and decided to travel along the borders of the young Soviet Union - for training.

Having declared his trip as propaganda for physical education, during the first five-year plan, Gleb Travin for his trip received from the executive committee of Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka an excellent American bicycle, which was specially delivered for him by ferry - a road Princeton, model 404 in one of two standard colors - red with white enamel arrows on the frame. And since we’re talking about exotic bicycles, Gleb Travin trained on an army folding Leitner, which either he himself or his biographer Alexander Kharitanovsky mistakenly called foreign, but it was assembled in Riga, at the factory of a Russian engineer, entrepreneur and pioneer of domestic bicycle construction Alexander Leitner, whose story deserves a separate story.

Some equipment arrived with the ferry, including a Japanese Kodak - with its help many unique shots were taken, very few of which survived. This concluded Travin's preparations. I did not take warm clothes, since I was an extremely seasoned man, had extensive hiking experience and rare health. Shorts, T-shirt, tights and light jacket. Instead of a hat, he has long hair, which he specially grew before the trip. From food supplies - only biscuits and chocolate. Some money. It was important for Travin to travel light and not burden himself with everyday amenities.

In October 1928, the cyclist left Vladivostok, reached Khabarovsk and turned west along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal. A funny detail: in the Chita area on the road he met a strange man named Kolyakov. He walked from Primorye to Moscow and returned back! Kolyakov criticized Gleb Travin’s method of movement, and Travin laughed:

"Woe Walker."

From Novosibirsk - to the south, to the deserts and mountains - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan. A strict regime - at least eight to ten hours in the saddle, food and water twice a day - at six o'clock in the morning and at six o'clock in the evening. He ate what he could get in the area by hunting and fishing, slept exactly where night fell, on the bare ground, with a folded jacket under his head.

He reached the Caspian Sea, crossed it by ferry, crossed the Caucasus, reached the European part of the country - Travin remembers this huge stretch as a pleasant walk. Neither the waterless desert, nor the mountain gorge infested with snakes, nor the invasion of hordes of locusts could be compared with what awaited him in the North. In November 1929, the traveler reached Murmansk. From there began a 40,000-kilometer stretch of journey that he would travel along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, most of the way straight along its smooth frozen surface.

Travin's travels are described in detail in two books:“The Man with the Iron Deer” by Alexander Kharitanovsky, as well as Itin’s essay “The Earth Has Become Our Own.”

Kharitanovsky’s story is the only book that describes the entire journey in detail, while Itin, being a polar explorer, is more concerned with the “polar odyssey”, which, however, is the most interesting.

Waking up after spending the night in the area of ​​Dolgy Island, Gleb Travin discovered that his boots and new fur overalls, which he had acquired in one of the northern villages, were frozen into the ice - he slept, as usual, buried in a snowdrift; at night a sea ​​water, soaked the wool and froze.

With the help of a knife, Travin barely managed to get out, but his things were hopelessly damaged - his overalls turned into rags, the soles of his boots, which were already becoming unusable, broke through. For almost a day, the cyclist raced non-stop in search of housing. When Gleb Travin finally stumbled into the Nenets tent, his feet were severely frostbitten. Fearing gangrene, he decided that it was better to amputate the darkened and swollen thumbs, and immediately cut them off with a knife. Looking at this, the Nenets decided that this was not a person, but a spirit. So the news spread throughout the surrounding area - the devil himself was riding across the tundra on an iron deer. It feeds on charcoal itself, but the deer does not need food at all.

Approaching the Taimyr Peninsula, Gleb Travin fell through the ice. The first thing he did was pull out the bike, then he got out himself, completely wet. He took off his wet clothes, rubbed himself with snow and buried himself naked in a snowdrift - the only shelter for many kilometers around. It is unknown how long he sat there, waiting for his clothes to dry in the cold. Then Travin put on his still wet clothes and ran around the neighborhood for several hours, drying them with his own heat. Nearby he found a pile of deer carcasses dumped by local hunters, climbed into it and slept serenely, rejoicing that he finally had a chance to rest in warmth and comfort.

And here is an excerpt from the traveler’s diary, miraculously preserved in Itin’s essay:

“I killed the old polar bear. The length of the skinned skin is six steps. Two small cubs were captured alive. For five days the cubs were my companions. One of them, the larger one, had previously come to terms with the situation and began to take the meat from his hands and suck his finger. But since it was quite difficult to deal with both of them, when all the meat was gone, I had to kill the older one, and I dragged the younger one with me to the Cape Pevek trading post. I wanted to send the bear cub to the mainland, but the shamans said that all the bears would go after the bear cub and there would be no hunting. Therefore, the head. trading post Semyonov, who at first was delighted with the bear cub, did not want to bother with it. I had the idea to move to Fr. Wrangel and could not take the bear cub with him.”

There is also a story with a polar bear: once a snowstorm knocked Gleb Travin off his feet, covered him with snow, he lost consciousness for a while, and he dreamed that he was lying on the bank of a river and basking in the sun. Having come to his senses, Travin discovered that the bear had dug up the snow and was greedily sniffing his face.

In July 1931, Gleb Travin reached Cape Dezhnev, the extreme point of the northeastern part of Russia. There he erected a modest memorial sign in honor of the end of the polar crossing and immediately began sending telegrams - again asking permission to travel abroad so as to continue the journey without delay - driving along the west coast of both Americas, reaching Tierra del Fuego, crossing into Africa, crossing the Sahara and Arabia , from there - to India and China, in order to return to Russia through Tibet and Mongolia. The response telegram refused to leave and offered to return with the nearest ship to the starting point of their journey. In August, Gleb Travin returned to Kamchatka on a whaling ship.

In Kamchatka, Gleb Travin was presented with a pennant with a memorable inscription:

“Kamchatka Regional Council of Physical Education to an active member of the physical education movement in Kamchatka.”

And they gave me the GTO badge.

After completing his great journey, Gleb Travin returned to ordinary life, cut his hair, worked as a mechanic at a power plant, as an instructor, and taught military science. Kharitanovsky recalls that when he first came home to the now middle-aged traveler, he had to work hard, looking for artifacts of his journey throughout the house.

“Apparently, the relics in the house were not often remembered,” concluded Kharitanovsky.

They say that Travin died in 1979. Now only regulars of cycling forums remember him. They remember and again begin to criticize frames, forks, rims - these break, these bend. And the antediluvian “Princeton” traveled 85 thousand kilometers, overcame deserts, mountains, the Arctic - and nothing. And with him is Gleb Travin, a great traveler about whom a film should be made someday.

Hooked

I heard the legendAs if once upon a time
Our country was inhabited by giants,
As if they were livingStrange fate
We were ready to work and fight.

From lackBread and meat
They raved about Marx, Victory and Mars,
Snowy taiga,Arctic gloomy,
Bright stars above Baikonur,

Hot flame Bottomless abyss...
They built mines, dams and blast furnaces.
And they were mistakenAnd they won
We were waiting for guests from an unimaginable distance...

Through the cannonadeBloody carnage
We rushed to collapse in the tall grass,
Blackened in the snow, Into water and clay...
They raised their scarlet flag over Berlin,

We walked from the collective farm Onion bed
To the Olympics, Afghanistan, detente,
We walked through templates and stencils,
They walked, carrying the planet with them

They wrote in bloodGood fairy tale
Even their mistakes were gigantic
Believe, believeCherishing in my heart
In the infallibility of speeches from the Mausoleum,

Knew they were rightTheir hammer and sickle
They knew that the world would only be split for a while
What is not foreverPain and sorrow...
But they crushed it. Alas, they crushed...

Their descendantsThey hide timidly
In the musty silence of cabinet boxes.
They think in a standard way They don’t delusional about the distance
Reduce credit lifeless with debit
They dream smallThey rarely think...
There is nothing left of their ancestors in them.

Guskov Alexey

I bring to your attention the book by Alexander Kharitanovsky - “The Man with the Iron Deer” (The Tale of a Forgotten Feat).

On Cape Dezhnev, an hour’s walk from the village of Uelen, stands a huge pyramidal stone. It is visible both from the north - from the Chukchi Sea, and from the east - from the Bering Strait. At its top there is a shrapnel shell with an inscription carved with a core:

THE USSR.
Tourist traveler on bicycle
GLEB TRAVIN
12.VII. 1931.

A bicycle and the Arctic!... An elegant lacquer parallelogram of blown tubes, thin nickel-plated strings of spokes - and not a single kilometer of roads?!... Who is he, this Gleb Travin, who chose such a strange way of traveling around the Far North? Did this really happen?

It was,” answers the outstanding Soviet pilot, pioneer of polar flights Boris Grigorievich Chukhnovsky. - I can confirm that the athlete Travin stopped by Dixon.

It was, - the oldest hydrographer, head of the Kara marine expedition of the 30s, Doctor of Geographical Sciences Nikolai Ivanovich Evgenov, just as decisively asserts. - We met Travin in the Yugorsky ball - in Varnek Bay.

It was,” says the commander of polar aviation, Hero of the Soviet Union, Mark Ivanovich Shevelev, “The comrades who told me about Travin saw him at the mouth of the Yenisei.

Yes, I myself, together with other Komsomol members of Uelen, erected a memorial sign on Cape Dezhnev in honor of Travin’s polar crossing,” said teacher Anastasia Semyonovna Abramova. The same Asya Abramova, whom the famous Soviet geologist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Sergei Vladimirovich Obruchev mentions with great warmth and respect in the book “Across the Mountains and Tundra of Chukotka”*.

* * *

The plane was flying over central Kamchatka. They swam under the wing mountain ranges. Majestic, needle-sharp peaks gave way to the orange cones of dead volcanoes. In the valleys there are poisonous green patches of tundra, on the hills there is a dense forest. No roads, no paths...

In this region, all that remains is to fly,” I remarked out loud.

Do you think?... Here, on Partizanskaya, lives an eccentric - Travin. “He tried to travel here on a bicycle,” my neighbor, an old Petropavlovsk resident, grinned.

I remembered the phrase I caught out of the blue. I wanted to see this man and talk to him. Like many of those who write, I really value meetings with so-called eccentrics, with those whom rumor often characterizes as strange, impractical people only because they undertake the seemingly impossible. For a long time, Polikarp Mikhailovich Ageenko, also a resident of Petropavlovsk, a pensioner who “went crazy” in a Kamchatka orchard, walked among such eccentrics for a long time. He invested all his savings in extracting countless seedlings, which he tested for years.

“The Far North - and an orchard? “It’s eccentric,” said the neighbors. But last fall, Polikarp Mikhailovich treated me to a real apple from one tree, and a handful of cherries from another. The fruits have ripened on Kamchatka soil!..

Who hasn’t been called eccentrics and dreamers by ordinary people of all times and peoples! And all just because they measured a person’s capabilities to their own yardstick...

I had to circle around thoroughly, climbing steep alleys to the last of the streets that crowned Petrovskaya Sopka, where, they told me, the Travins lived.

“A lazy person, even just a fat person with hypertension from many years of sitting at an office desk, will not get along here. “You definitely need to have strong legs,” I muttered, wiping away the profusely flowing sweat. “That’s right, an energetic old man...”

The portrait of a person emerges long before the meeting. You imagine one thing yourself, the other - reliable - you strengthen. Once you get used to it, it’s hard to be disappointed... However, there was no need to be disappointed.

Yes, I'm Travin.

A clean-shaven, tanned face with large features. Of average height, but judging by his wide chest, very strong man, looked at me expectantly.

It was already clear that this was exactly the Travin we were talking about on the plane: in the back of the room, on the wall, I managed to notice a large photographic portrait - a head with a mane of thick hair, intercepted either with a ribbon or with a shiny hoop. The photograph is embedded in a piece of a map of the Arctic Ocean. A bone plate with the same inscription as given at the beginning is nailed to the frame:

“tourist-traveler...”, etc.

And so, after a greeting and a preliminary explanation, we sit at the table. On the tablecloth are documents, old films from a Kodak camera, and Certificates of Honor. Gleb Leontievich carried all this from different places. He rummaged through the closets and chest. Apparently, the “relics” of personal glory were not often remembered in the house.

“In the attic are the remains, or rather the remains, of a bicycle,” he noted with a smile. - You can view.

What interested me most was the tourist’s passport-registrar, a plump book bound in black leather. In the passport with official stamps government agencies, mainly the executive committees of the Soviets, confirmed the arrival of the cyclist in every settlement on the huge route, from Kamchatka to... Kamchatka. First along the southern borders of the country, then along the western borders and, finally, along the coastal strip of the Arctic Ocean.

"G. L. Travin from 10.H. 1928 to 24.X.1931 made a bicycle journey around the USSR of 85,000 kilometers, including the Great Northern Route to Cape Dezhnev, where a sign was erected to commemorate this transition.

Regional Committee for Physical Education and Sports."

This is what the final entry in the passport says.

I decided to study the extraordinary hike.

* This is what S.V. Obruchev writes, who explored Chukotka in the thirties and once met with teachers Abramova and Volokitina:

“Each of them had very few students - two, three, rarely - up to six. The migratory environment is also not conducive to learning: after a little tea, the canopy is removed, and you can only study in the cold, somewhere near a herd, or in the smoke of a fire in a yaranga. And in the evening, when the canopy is set up, they drink tea again, eat and go to bed. Apparently, the main reason for the negative attitude of the Chukchi were the shamans - they considered the teaching dangerous. The owner of the yaranga in which Abramova lived soon called the shaman and guiltily informed him that he had two misfortunes: firstly, he was elected to the national council, and secondly, he had to shelter a Russian woman. And the spirits are already angry: the wolves killed two deer. But he promises that in the national council he will do only what corresponds to Chukchi customs, and as for the Russian, she is harmless and almost Chukchi, and if she still does something wrong now, she will learn later...

...Both teachers got along with the reindeer herders, took part in the work of Chukchi women and earned the full approval of the Chukchi, so that the Chukchi even wooed Volokitina twice, considering her quite suitable for running the Chukchi economy.

One cannot help but admire the selfless work of these first pioneers of Soviet culture, who, in such difficult conditions, had to teach and fight the influence of shamans.” (“Across the mountains and tundra of Chukotka.” S. V. Obruchev, ed. Geographizdat, 1957, pp. 34–35).

Today, the legendary traveler-countryman is remembered mainly by people of the older generation. This is understandable. Other times and other feats. However, so far there has not been a single person who would dare to repeat such a journey - to cover 85 thousand kilometers on a bicycle in three years!

It is known that Gleb Leontyevich Travin was born on April 28, 1902 in the village of Kasyevo, Pskov district. His father was a forester. The family moved to Pskov in 1913.

His father taught Gleb the main thing, namely the science of survival: to find food and shelter in the forest and in the field, to eat, if necessary, raw meat.

In 1923, a Dutch cyclist arrived in Pskov, having traveled all over Europe. Impressed by meeting him, Travin decided to make a longer and more difficult journey. The preparation took five years, during which Travin traveled thousands of kilometers across Pskov land. He studied geography, geodesy, zoology, botany, photography and plumbing. After serving in the army, he went to Kamchatka, where he continued training.

Gleb went on a bicycle trip on October 10, 1928. I sailed to Vladivostok by steamship, then overland by bicycle through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Central and Northwestern Russia - 45 thousand kilometers along land borders. Travin covered 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, and dog sled - 40 thousand kilometers. 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 in Kamchatka. In 1962 he returned to Pskov. Gleb Travin died in October 1979.

From exposition to funds

These are the dry lines of the biography of the famous traveler, gleaned from the Internet. But a living person is not visible behind them, which is why “Pskovskaya Pravda - Veche” decided to find people who lived nearby and communicated with Travin.

We started our search from the Pskov Museum-Reserve. As it turned out, in the late 70s an entire exhibition dedicated to Gleb Travin was opened there. It featured a bicycle, a registration passport, a knife, a hard drive, signs (there is one embroidered with beads - a gift during a trip to the south of the country) and stripes that Gleb Leontievich used during the trip. Pskov was incredibly lucky. All of them came to our city from Leningrad, where they were in the collections of the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Following the opening of the exhibition dedicated to Gleb Travin, guests came to Pskov frequently. Thus, walkers from Kharkov were interested in the brand of the bicycle on which Gleb Leontievich made his journey. It can be assumed that to join the glory

the Kharkov plant, which produced sports bikes. However, they were disappointed. Travin hit the road on a Princeton bicycle, specially ordered through a joint stock company in the USA. However, the guests also had a very specific interest. The guys intended to travel along the south part of the Travinsky route. Their letters were greatly expected in Pskov, but they did not arrive. Perhaps the trip did not take place.

And about three years ago a guest from Switzerland came to the museum. The young man goes in for cycling and travels a lot. He learned about Travin and specially came to look at the bicycle of the legendary traveler. By that time, there was no longer a separate exhibition in the museum, but the chief curator allowed the bicycle to be taken away from the collections for a while. In the courtyard of the museum, the guy took a few pictures with the bicycle and - happy - went home. Pavel, brother of Fyodor Konyukhov, was also photographed with Travin’s bicycle.

Rich "forester"

The Pskov Museum-Reserve told about the events of many years ago, but could not say anything about today, in particular, about the children of Gleb Travin. What have you become? Where live?

Attempts to find the traveler’s relatives using phone numbers once recorded by museum employees were unsuccessful. Last chance - a few old addresses. The first is Khrushchev on Lepeshinsky Street. Without much hope, we dial the apartment number on the intercom. And now the door is open - Valentin Travin is rushing towards. The man does not hide his surprise. He had not been asked about his father for a long time.

My father was taciturn, and when I, as a child, asked about my grandfather, he fell silent for a long time, then answered that he was a forester,” recalls Valentin Glebovich. - Later, during a walk around Pskov, he showed several houses and mentioned that they once belonged to his grandfather. I think that our ancestors were of noble blood. Fearing reprisals, the father, apparently, hurried to leave for Kamchatka in the 30s. But our other relatives were much less fortunate. Some were sent to Siberia...

There could be three of them

Three demobilized friends, commanders of the Red Army, were initially planning to go on a trip along the borders of the USSR. Together they ordered three completely identical American bicycles, three registration passports to mark the journey. But only Travin set off on the road. Strong, healthy, stocky Gleb was on the verge of death more than once in three years. He drowned with a bicycle, froze to the ice, drifted on an ice floe, starved, suffered severe frostbite and was forced to amputate several of his toes, and fought with a polar bear. He later told a TASS journalist about all the twists and turns of his journey. Alexander Kharitonovsky(see his book “The Man with the Iron Deer”).

In Kamchatka, a journalist came to us every day, and I, a ten-year-old child, held my breath, hanging on every word,” our interlocutor recalls. “That’s how I learned that during a trip to Central Asia, my father was captured by the Basmachi. He owed his release to a White Guard officer. It is clear that this episode was not included in the book, because it was all written in the spirit of communist ideas.

I'll ride my bike for a long time

The bicycle on which Gleb Leontyevich traveled 85 thousand kilometers served his son for a long time.

At first, the bicycle was lying in the attic of the house, but around the 50s, my father restored it, clarifies Valentin Glebovich. - The chain on it was special, very strong. And he remembered the headlights well. They were kerosene. You fill it with kerosene, and the headlights glow: on the right there is a red peephole, on the left there is a green one, like on a steamboat. The frame was reinforced two-tube. My father broke the steering wheel somewhere in the north, and local residents helped replace it with a homemade one, which they made from a rifle barrel. The bicycle loaded for travel weighed approximately 80 kilograms. By the way, you can still drive it.

In 2002, the museum held an exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the birth of Gleb Travin. This bicycle and other things were displayed on it.

Twice into the same river

But the diaries of Gleb Travin were not lucky. He left several travel diaries to his sisters, whom he visited in the city of Dzerzhinsk under Nizhny Novgorod. By that time, Gleb had already completed more than half the journey, and the diaries had become a serious burden.

The sisters promised to preserve the unique records, but in 1936-37 they burned them, fearing reprisals. Therefore, the passport recorder with notes on visits to certain settlements, stored today in the Pskov Museum-Reserve, is perhaps the only written evidence of Travin’s journey.

Today, few people know that Gleb Travin made his journey twice. The first time - in 1928-1931 on a bicycle, and the second - 40 years later - on an airplane. Together with a correspondent, he repeated his route in 1969, flying 85 thousand kilometers on board the plane.

Three loves of Gleb Travin

Gleb Travin lived with his first wife Vera for more than thirty years. In this marriage he had four children: Yuri and Valentin, Gertrude and Taisiya.

“I’m the youngest in the family,” clarifies Valentin Glebovich. - I don’t keep in touch with Yuri. Taisiya lives in Kamchatka, but we see Gertrude often. She moved to Palkino.

After his mother's death in 1952, Valentin was often left at home alone. My father worked in the office “Zagotzhivsyrye”. In Chukotka and Kamchatka he was engaged in the procurement of venison and furs. He took sables and arctic foxes for sale to Moscow. Valya remained in the care of the lodgers.

Unexpectedly, I received a telegram: “Meet me. Dad. Mom,” the interlocutor recalls. - I was very surprised, and my father, it turns out, got married during a business trip to Leningrad. The wife taught at a pediatric institute. Together with her father, she flew to Kamchatka, adopted me and took me to Leningrad. Later I learned that she also had a son, whom his father recognized as his own. However, my relationship with this woman did not work out, and six months later I was sent to an orphanage. From there I fled to my father’s sisters, who lived near Nizhny Novgorod.

However, the happiness in the new family did not last long. In the summer of 1963, Gleb Travin arrived in Pskov.

We were received very well here,” recalls Valentin Glebovich. - My father was immediately given a comfortable apartment on Jan Fabricius Street. If I’m not mistaken, this was payment for the fact that my father rented his house to the state before leaving for the army. From that time on we lived together. After the army, I married a girl from a neighboring house, and my father and I parted ways forever. I know that he had a third official marriage. Gleb's chosen one is 28 years younger than him...

Kamchadal Valentin

Valentin Travin is a radio engineer by profession. He served in the police for some time, then left for railway, where he worked for 25 years. Now retired. It is curious that Valentin Glebovich’s life also had a “Kamchatka” period.

In 1977, there was terrible heat in Pskov, so instead of the south we decided to go to Murmansk, where my wife’s relatives lived,” recalls Valentin Glebovich. - There I saw the bay, felt the smell of the sea, the ebb and flow of the tides. I stood on the shore and tears rolled down. After all, I was in Kamchatka! I went to the local police department to check in, and they encouraged me to move. The salary was doubled and the apartment was immediately provided. He returned back to Pskov only in 1990. The devastation has begun. True, it didn’t affect us much, thanks to my work on the railway.

"A path two equators long"

This was the name of the film that was made by a group of Pskov film lovers about the journey of Gleb Travin in the early 70s.

Then the whole country was passionate about film-loving, - recalls Tinch Ryazanov. - I led a circle that worked in the Pskov House of Builders. We made several films. One of them was about Travin and lasted 12 minutes. Three other guys worked on the film with me. The film told, of course, about a journey along the borders of the USSR and how Gleb promoted cycling. In Moscow, at an amateur film competition, our work received a prize, and we, as its creators, received two tour packages along the Golden Ring. But they received money for the vouchers, which they divided among four. Later, fragments from our film were used by Senkevich in his “Film Travelers Club”. Now the original film is kept in the Pskov Museum-Reserve. True, without a soundtrack. She was never returned from Moscow.

Photo from the family album of Valentin TRAVIN and the Pskov Museum-Reserve

By the way

Gleb Travin is an honorary citizen of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

Gleb crossed polynyas in the North... by swimming. The temperature of salty sea water in the Arctic in winter reached minus two degrees Celsius.

Gleb Travin was buried at the Orletsovsky cemetery in Pskov.

FROM THE HOURS

“Rides on an iron deer, holds on to iron horns, this is not good!” - shamans in the Arctic spoke about Gleb Travin.

“With hair below his shoulders, bearded, with chill scars on his face, with stiff arms, barely moving his feet, on which he himself had cut off his frostbitten fingers, Travin appeared in my imagination as a living Amundsen,” - this is how the head of one of the trading posts in the east told about the meeting with the traveler coast of Taimyr.

85 thousand kilometers by bike along the borders of the Soviet Union. 40 of them - along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, from the Yamal Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev - a madness that not a single person in history has dared to do. Little is known about Gleb Travin. There is a book that describes his journey, there is a detailed essay, several notes and articles of varying degrees of vintage. But in his case this is clearly not enough.

The son of a janitor from Pskov, a young commander of the Red Army, just retired, an electrician who implemented the GOELRO plan in Kamchatka, a romantic who, together with his friends, dreamed of using the energy of the Kamchatka volcanic hills. 26-year-old Gleb Travin got to Kamchatka in a very adventurous way - after the army he took advantage of the right of free travel to his homeland, but named Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka as his hometown. In the mind of a resident of Pskov, it is the end of the world, the farthest city in the country.

Travin dreamed of traveling around the world. I realized that they would not be allowed to leave the country, changed plans and decided to travel along the borders of the young Soviet Union - for training. Having declared his campaign as propaganda for physical education, under the guise of the first five-year plan, Travin begged from the executive committee of Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka an excellent American bicycle, which was specially delivered for him by ferry - a road Princeton, model 404 in one of two standard colors - red with white enamel arrows on frame. And since we’re talking about exotic bicycles, Travin trained on an army folding Leitner, which either he himself or his biographer Alexander Kharitanovsky mistakenly called foreign, but it was assembled in Riga, at the factory of the Russian engineer, entrepreneur and pioneer of domestic bicycle construction Alexander Leitner, whose story deserves a separate story.

Some equipment arrived with the ferry, including a Japanese Kodak - with its help many unique shots were taken, very few of which survived. This concluded Travin's preparations. I did not take warm clothes, since I was an extremely seasoned man, had extensive hiking experience and rare health. Shorts, T-shirt, tights and light jacket. Instead of a hat, he has long hair, which he specially grew before the trip. From food supplies - only biscuits and chocolate. Some money. It was important for Travin to travel light and not burden himself with everyday amenities.

Gleb Travin's path lay along the Arctic Ocean, starting from the Kola Peninsula and all the way to Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka. Travin moved on a bicycle and hunting skis through Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, the islands of Dikson and Vaygach, the villages of Uelen, Russkoe Ustye, Khatanga and many, many other settlements to the final goal of his entire breathtaking campaign - 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.

In September 1928, the cyclist left Vladivostok, reached Khabarovsk and turned west along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal. From Novosibirsk - to the south, to the deserts and mountains - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan. A strict regime - at least eight to ten hours in the saddle, food and water twice a day - at six o'clock in the morning and at six o'clock in the evening. He ate what he could get in the area by hunting and fishing, slept exactly where night fell, on the bare ground, with a folded jacket under his head.

He reached the Caspian Sea, crossed it by ferry, crossed the Caucasus, reached the European part of the country - Travin remembers this huge stretch as a pleasant walk. Neither the waterless desert, nor the mountain gorge infested with snakes, nor the invasion of hordes of locusts could be compared with what awaited him in the North. In November 1929, the traveler reached Murmansk. From there began a 40,000-kilometer stretch of journey that he would travel along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, most of the way straight along its smooth frozen surface. Waking up after spending the night in the area of ​​​​Dolgiy Island, Travin discovered that his boots and new fur overalls, which he had acquired in one of the northern villages, were frozen into the ice - he slept, as usual, buried in a snowdrift, at night sea water came out of a crack and soaked the wool froze.

With the help of a knife, Travin barely managed to get out, but his things were hopelessly damaged - his overalls turned into rags, the soles of his boots, which were already becoming unusable, broke through. For almost a day, the cyclist raced non-stop in search of housing. When Travin finally fell into the Nenets tent, his feet were severely frostbitten. Fearing gangrene, he decided that it was better to amputate the darkened and swollen thumbs, and immediately cut them off with a knife. Looking at this, the Nenets decided that this was not a person, but a spirit. So the news spread throughout the surrounding area - the devil himself was riding across the tundra on an iron deer. It feeds on charcoal itself, but the deer does not need food at all.

Approaching the Taimyr Peninsula, Travin fell through the ice. The first thing he did was pull out the bike, then he got out himself, completely wet. He took off his wet clothes, rubbed himself with snow and buried himself naked in a snowdrift - the only shelter for many kilometers around. It is unknown how long he sat there, waiting for his clothes to dry in the cold. Then Travin put on his still wet clothes and ran around the neighborhood for several hours, drying them with his own heat. Nearby he found a pile of deer carcasses dumped by local hunters, climbed into it and slept serenely, rejoicing that he finally had a chance to rest in warmth and comfort.

And here is an excerpt from the traveler’s diary, miraculously preserved in Itin’s essay: “I killed the old polar bear. The length of the skinned skin is six steps. Two small cubs were captured alive. For five days the cubs were my companions. One of them, the larger one, had previously come to terms with the situation and began to take the meat from his hands and suck his finger. But since it was quite difficult to deal with both of them, when all the meat was gone, I had to kill the older one, and I dragged the younger one with me to the Cape Pevek trading post. I wanted to send the bear cub to the mainland, but the shamans said that all the bears would go after the bear cub and there would be no hunting. Therefore, the head. trading post Semyonov, who at first was delighted with the bear cub, did not want to bother with it. I had the idea to move to Fr. Wrangel and could not take the bear cub with him.”

There is also a story with a polar bear: once a snowstorm knocked Travin off his feet, covered him with snow, he lost consciousness for a while, and he dreamed that he was lying on the bank of a river and basking in the sun. Having come to his senses, Travin discovered that the bear had dug up the snow and was greedily sniffing his face.

In July 1931, Travin reached Cape Dezhnev, the extreme point of the northeastern part of Russia. There he erected a modest memorial sign in honor of the end of the polar crossing and immediately began sending telegrams - again asking permission to travel abroad so as to continue the journey without delay - driving along the west coast of both Americas, reaching Tierra del Fuego, crossing into Africa, crossing the Sahara and Arabia , from there - to India and China, in order to return to Russia through Tibet and Mongolia. The response telegram refused to leave and offered to return with the nearest ship to the starting point of their journey. In August, Travin returned to Kamchatka on a whaling ship.

What happened next? Travin was presented with a pennant with a memorable inscription: “Kamchatka Regional Council of Physical Education to an active member of the Kamchatka physical education movement.” And the GTO badge. Travin returned to normal life, cut his hair, worked as a mechanic at a power plant, as an instructor, and taught military science. Kharitanovsky recalls that when he first came home to the now middle-aged traveler, he had to work hard, looking for artifacts of his journey throughout the house. “Apparently, the relics in the house were not often remembered,” concluded Kharitanovsky. They say that Travin, forgotten by everyone, died in 1979. And the antediluvian “Princeton” traveled 85 thousand kilometers, overcame deserts, mountains, the Arctic - and nothing. And with him is Gleb Travin, a great traveler about whom a film should be made someday. 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.

From the memoirs of Gleb Travin

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 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 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 speeds... And yet, then, on the icebreaker, none of those gathered in the wardroom took seriously my intention to get to Chukotka by bicycle. 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 I left the icebreaker, three beeps followed... It took a lot of effort for me 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 listeners with his playing and movements and somehow seemed to me like a cobra, which was also swaying in front of me in the gorge on the border with Afghanistan... I was driving along 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 the pedals with all my might, and it seemed to me that the bicycle was rooted to the ground... Suddenly the old Yakut, who had 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.