I even dreamt of buckwheat kasha. I dreamt of it for hours on end.
Chekhov, ‘A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire’
IN THE HALLWAY of a block towards the northern edge of town, a man was tucking a baby into a pram. The handlebar had a circular holder for a baby’s bottle or, in this case, paternal beer. The man, short and flat-faced like all ethnic peoples of the Russian Arctic, threw out his chest and swigged hard before sallying into the street. In an office off the hallway, posters advertised Bering Sea Biodiversity, and on a bank of desks miniature Chukotka flags fluttered gaily from jam jars when a breeze sneaked in through the ill-fitting windows. Eduard Dzor was preoccupied with negotiations for an increased whale quota. ‘The quota for the whole of Chukotka is five bowhead and 135 grey whales,’ he explained as we drank bitter coffee brewed on a portable gas burner. ‘Bowheads are difficult to harvest here because they actually swim through Chukchi waters when the surface is frozen, whereas they reach Barrow in Alaska in the spring, so our neighbours there can pick them off from floes. Alaskan Inuit don’t hunt greys. But it doesn’t mean that those of us west of the Bering Strait might as well switch to grey whales.’ As President of the Chukotka Marine Mammal Hunters’ Association, Dzor instinctively recognised the role the bowhead played in native Chukchi communities, economically and psychically.
Dzor’s people were once known as the bravest polar Russians. As early as the seventeenth century Muscovites considered Chukchi the most savage northerners, natural warriors who regularly raided the Yukagir and Koryak to the south and fought off Cossack bands who galloped as far as the Anadyr River. They ate deer maggots, killed migrating geese by hurling balls at them, and built antler towers as seal-oil lighthouses. They milked their reindeer by sucking the udders and spitting the milk into a bowl made of seal intestine and walrus bone. They lived long, and shored up the world with a cast of evil spirits with pointed heads, while their legends bristled with young girls who shoved their fathers off cliffs and mated with an underwater penis. Young men tattooed their arms with a dot for every enemy killed. In 1769 the defeated Russian authorities abandoned their fort in the Anadyr region, and the Chukchi, alone among northern natives, won a formal truce. An anthropologist who travelled in Chukotka some decades later found women wearing necklaces strung with the handles of broken teacups and pacifying their babies with pipes (they traded both alcohol and tobacco with the whalers). Chukotka was and is uniquely inaccessible by land, and it was this remote location, so far from the expanding empire, that saved the Chukchi from fully-fledged subjugation until well into the last century.
Far from Moscow: but next door to America. Alaskans can see Chukotskiy Avtonomnyy Okrug from their kitchen windows, as Sarah Palin memorably reminded the electorate in the doomed 2008 Republican campaign. At one point only five kilometres of pack ice and the Date Line separate the two; yet they share no transport links. Dzor was not the only person I met who had travelled from Chukotka to Anchorage via Moscow and Atlanta. Effectively uncoupled from the rest of the country, Chukotka is so remote it didn’t even have a proper gulag. To get to it, the traveller passes through Gorky’s land of death and chains. If the sea has solidified he may continue on foot, past Chukotka to Alaska, like the hunters who picked up their harpoons and walked to the uninhabited Americas. Chukotka is not only literally on the edge: it is the edge. Indigenous Chukchi are among the most brutally dispossessed of circumpolar peoples. An ethnic group whose presence predates that of the Russians by thousands of years, Chukchi are, or were, reindeer herders, like most native Arctic Russians, or hunters of sea mammals. In the post-Soviet chaos they are clutching the threads of what they once were and struggling desperately with the consequences of radical social change. Chukotka is the ideal sub-Arctic environment in which to observe the collision between old and new, as well as enigmatically exotic. As a further incentive to finding my way there, a distinguished regional parliamentarian granted me an interview. Petr Omrynto was a former herder who had risen through the post-Soviet hierarchy to become the sole indigenous representative in the Chukotka Duma, or parliamentary assembly.
A place can be too exotic. Like many parts of the Russian Arctic, Chukotka is closed to non-nationals. Forbidden zones were familiar to the point of institutionalisation in the Soviet system, but over forty ‘sensitive’ cities remain shut off from the rest of the world. In the elation of the mid-1990s, Federal authorities abolished entry restrictions. But they soon changed their minds, as they did about many things, and portcullises crashed down from the Baltic to the Pacific. Aliens without complex sets of official papers are denied access to Chukotka on account of its proximity to America, still in some unspoken sense an enemy. In pursuit of these elusive documents I had spent eighteen months engaged in a process too labyrinthine to warrant transcription here. But I had done it, inserting myself as an artistically inclined scientist onto the books of the Chukotka Science Support Group. I set off at the last possible moment before the Big Freeze, as my papers had not emerged from the catacombs of bureaucratic inertia until the tail end of the Arctic summer. My contact on the ground was Gennady (Gena) Zelinsky, logistics Man Friday for the science consortium. Landing in the capital, Anadyr, was only the first hurdle, he emailed. Getting into town from the airport was the next: one had to cross a bay which in late September might or might not be frozen. Gena sweetly arranged for a colleague to meet me, sending a photograph of a figure resembling a Mongol horseman. I printed out the photograph and folded it inside my passport along with ‘A Reg on a Sledge’. In the days before departure I paced around our house, packing and repacking my thermals and following my husband from room to room. A friend said she found it interesting that I was so anxious about this particular trip. Was it the myth of Siberia, the man in chains for ever exiled on the ice fields?
The Transaero 747 to Anadyr took off from a distant runway of Moscow’s Domododevo Airport, and, when the doors returned to manual eight hours later and laboured arthritically open, cold air whooshed down the aisles. A squad of armed military personnel stomped on board, planting themselves at the front of each cabin to check documents. When my turn came, a woman sergeant peered at my papers before stretching across the middle row of seats to hand them to her colleague. She was slight, with downy cheeks. But her stiff peaked cap made up for it, and so did her gun. People coughed and stamped their feet in the invading cold. Mobile phones leapt to life. Then the second officer waved me through. At the time, it seemed like a minor Old Testament miracle. In the baggage hall, everyone else’s luggage tumbled onto the carousel tightly wrapped in thief-proof blue cling film, so it was easy to recognise mine. Through the glass wall of the arrivals hall, a crowd of Mongol horsemen jostled for position. But my man, his face pressed against the glass, was holding up a sheet of paper inscribed with the Roman letters S – A – R – A. My name had never looked so good.
After warm handshakes and introductions in a language tantalisingly close to English, we boarded a bus of a type familiar from footage of the Korean War. The road followed a conveyor belt trundling wagons of coal across the tundra to a rusting military shipyard. Yuri, my escort, stared out of the window and fiddled with the ripped plastic covering of the seat in front. A sturdy figure with the short, thick legs of all ethnic Chukchi (and of the Inuit they so closely resemble), he had black hair and blue eyes and wore a pair of spectacles with tinted purple lenses. We decanted from the bus, and everyone squinted across the bay at a ferry breasting the water. Platelets of ice turned slowly in the shallows. When the ferry docked, people began pushing to get on. Yuri, moving his head from side to side like a startled tortoise, propelled me into a cabin in which brown frilly curtains heavy with grime hung from windows smeared with salted grease. But the water, an embayment of the Bering Sea, sparkled with cold sunlight, and three beluga fluked between us and the diminutive buildings of Anadyr on the far shore. On the white cliffs to the north-east, the blades of a zigzagging formation of wind turbines lolloped through endless rotations. Yuri’s anxieties had vanished, and he chattered for the entire twenty-minute journey, apologising all the time for his ‘bad’ English while careering forward into exciting hinterlands of syntax. Once the bay freezes (I think he said), passengers travel to town on an ice road. In the short period when the freezing is actually happening, a helicopter shuttles to and fro. But sometimes the machine, leased from another region, fails to arrive. It turned out that the bay was an Arctic Styx: once across, return passage was unlikely. Yuri’s sister had waited at the airport for three days, as it was too risky to trek back to Anadyr, in case the plane came and went while one was attempting to re-cross the bay. When I expressed horror at the idea, Yuri shrugged. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I know person who waited thirty days.’
The main hotel charged $265 a night. So the oligarchs had got this far too. Gena had arranged homestay bed-and-breakfast accommodation through the regional tourist agency, an otherwise mysteriously purposeless organisation. When we docked, Yuri escorted me in a shared taxi van to a block of flats in the centre of town. In a small, two-bedroom apartment on the second floor, I met Marina and her husband Sasha, and we began the first of many ‘conversations’ in which we battered our heads against a linguistic brick wall. When I hung my parka in their small hall, the wall-mounted coatrack crashed to the linoleum. Neither of my hosts took the slightest notice. The flat was dangerously hot – throughout the Russian Arctic, coal-fired heating is centrally controlled – and Marina and Sasha, both in their sixties, wore shorts and vests, basking in the last rays of the dying star of Soviet munificence. In my room a tin can shaded a bulb that dangled over a Formica table, beaming a tube of light onto the table, and leaving the corners of the room in darkness.
Anadyr, capital of a region well in excess of a quarter of a million square miles, gave one the sense of a being only half evolved – out of the water, but short of the dunes. It had many features of urban development, such as a dozen sets of traffic lights, many of which worked, and a new supermarket stocked with a variety of imported products. All 15,000 residents lived in the five-storey khrushchevka apartment blocks indigenous to the Russian far north, but they were, uniquely, freshly painted in primary colours that highlighted the faded greys of the washing strung like bunting from window to window. The town had attracted little metropolitan detritus; one sensed that golden arches were a long way off. Anadyr lacked the hallmark decay of many Russian provincial centres, dumps of stained concrete ringed with semi-rural poverty or industrial decline. There was not yet any advertising, and no wonder, as with an average monthly wage just above $200 there was little disposable income either. Nor were there any kiosks, those functional stalwarts of the landscape elsewhere in the Federation. In the park outside my flat I counted dozens of shuffling baboushki muttering to themselves while picking up errant newspaper pages and dropping them into plastic bags. Instead of advertising, the 200-foot walls at the end of the blocks had been painted with attractive images of traditional Chukchi life – a bowhead whale, a fishing boat or a reindeer herd. The murals were even more unusual in the Arctic than the bright, fresh colours on the front walls of the blocks. I wondered what lay behind them.
Gena, the logistics coordinator for the science consortium, had, through sponsoring my official papers, acquired the role of personal minder. He came to pick me up on the first morning on his way to the Hunters’ Association office, where the interview with the parliamentary deputy was to take place. The temperature was hovering at 7º above zero, and the park had already blossomed with old-fashioned hooded prams. When I emerged from my block, Gena was leaning against a taxi van. A bluff thirty-five, he was short and stumpy, and almost permanently plugged in to one of his many phones. After shaking hands he presented me with a mobile for the duration of my stay, ‘so I know where you are’ (was it fitted with a tracking device?). I saw Gena every day when I was in Chukotka. He was kind to me and I appreciated it, especially as he had never really chosen to have me as a ward, and he was always busy. If he put all his phones into his pocket at the same time, one of them would immediately begin to chirrup, and Gena would frown, pull it out, and fire off machine-gun volleys of gruff Russian inflected with the hard vowels of his native Khabarovsk.
Once we were installed in his office, Dzor, the association president, unearthed a pile of photographs and we leafed through images of hunting camps garlanded with rusted oil drums. ‘Part of the goal of our organisation,’ Dzor explained, ‘is to raise living standards. Unemployment runs at seventy per cent in the villages. Food supplies are even more costly in rural areas than they are in Anadyr as everything has to come in by ship in summer, plane in winter.’ Later that day I paid £8 for five bananas and £5 for three apples. ‘There is a lot of talk in Europe of Russia’s emerging middle class,’ Gena added. ‘I can tell you there are no middle classes in Chukchi villages.’ Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the word avtonomnyy in the full name of the Chukotka region. While it is true that Moscow mostly ignores the furthest outpost of its empire, when it comes to its oil and gas, Chukotka and its people have no autonomy at all. The issue of how native peoples should or could benefit from mineral extraction was to pursue me around the sub-Arctic.
Gena, Eduard Dzor and I sat back in our chairs thinking about this, returning to the upright to dip our fingers into a bowl of sunflower seeds. Before anyone spoke, the door opened and a fourth person came through it, momentarily blocking the light. He was a tall, square man with teaky skin, black cropped hair, a generous moustache and exflorescent eyebrows, and his neat, dark suit displayed an enamel Chukotka Deputy badge on the lapel. Petr Omrynto, according to Gena, was ‘the most famous man in Chukotka’. He was certainly among the tallest. But there was no mistaking his Mongoloid features. After a blustery start involving too much ribald laughter for me to request a translation, Omrynto began to talk. He liked to talk, especially about reindeer, and Gena struggled to keep up with a translation. Before entering politics Omrynto had worked as a herder, ultimately as director of one of the biggest collective farms. ‘Reindeer’, he said as he settled into a chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him, ‘are the glue that bind Chukchi culture and society. Even the word Chukchi is the Russian adaptation of the word chavchu, meaning reindeer people. During the Soviet period, we had half a million animals. The Soviets saw us as a meat factory.’
In the early years state planners had got themselves into a Soviet-size muddle as they tried to apply Marxist ideology to a society which had no industry, no agriculture and no formal leaders. First, how were they to prosecute class war in a classless society? ‘Chukotka was already communist,’ said Omrynto. ‘No class, no leaders, no clans.’ How then were junior party cadres to find rich, bourgeois ‘exploiters’ in order to have someone to punish? Unless they identified class enemies among the natives, they risked becoming class enemies themselves. At last someone hit on a solution. The herder with most animals could be the class enemy! This was how de-kulakisation proceeded in the Russian north. It was a caricature of the Arctic capacity to reveal and enlarge systemic social and political expressions. Second, conversion of northern peoples to a sedentary life was an important Soviet goal, yet herders cannot earn a living sitting still: they must follow the migrations. But the Soviets ploughed on. ‘One should simply tell the nomads,’ read one official document, ‘enough of this wandering around; it’s time to get settled.’ In 1927 a government representative called a meeting in a yaranga (the traditional walrus-skin tent held up with whale jawbones) and told a group of Chukchi to elect members for a camp committee. The Chukchi replied that they didn’t need a committee because they had always lived without one, and that if they did have one, the number of walrus would not increase. After the Great Transformation of 1928, when Stalin decided to speed up modernisation, officials harangued one another about what to do with the north in interminable plenums, whereupon nothing meaningful happened beyond the expression of rhetoric, the setting of targets and the announcement of five-year plans. By the time news of decisions reached the Arctic north-east, the decision-makers had been shot and their replacements were already formulating new policy – or perhaps by that time it was their replacements’ replacements. By 1932 even Stalin realised his pharaonic fantasies were not working in the north. Collectivisation slowed down while high taxation speeded up and low production penalties rocketed; and nothing improved for the Chukchi. Nothing ever improved for the Chukchi. That the herd survived at all was a measure of their tenacity. Their own survival was miraculous. They had not emerged unscathed, or even intact; but Omrynto was living proof that some ineffable integrity had won through.
Through it all, supply lines to Arctic trading centres were so long and so corrupt that little was left by the time goods reached Chukotka except things nobody wanted, such as the fabled 10,000 left-foot gumboots. As everywhere in the circumpolar lands, geography made meaningful centralised state intervention hard, if not impossible. The Soviets went to extraordinary expense in their attempts to homogenise their territory. In the sixties helicopters landed on the tundra to ferry five-year-old Chukchi to boarding schools like herds of reindeer calves. Russian builders put up houses which sank into the permafrost when the top layer softened, attracted snowdrifts, let in the wind, or all three, and sensible Chukchi pitched their yarangi outside their new homes: even in the late eighties, of the houses built in the Arctic north for indigenous peoples, only 0.4 per cent had running water. As for the reindeer, they simply refused to cooperate, migrating every year as if nothing had happened.
Omrynto remembered disintegration on all fronts. He was a mesmerising speaker, his deep voice filling the scrappy room and his hands, big as root vegetables, conjuring the shapes of the herd flowing across the tundra. He even exuded the rich, smoky smell of reindeer. ‘Between the sixties and eighties,’ he said, ‘when I was herding, average life expectancy dropped twenty years, to forty-five for men and fifty-five for women.’ Omrynto winced, as if in pain. ‘Every single good social indicator fell and all the bad ones leapt, suicide and murder rates among them. Whenever it looked like it could never get worse, it did.’ De-Sovietisation turned out to be as disastrous as Sovietisation had been. ‘In the nineties people starved. I remember going to one village and all that was in the store was vinegar and rice. Don’t forget that we had no radio and no roads. Imports just stopped.’ The indifference of a market economy filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the communist state. ‘They had forced us to become kolkhozniki – workers on collective farms. We tried to divvy up the herds, so that every reindeer belonged to someone again, but thieves took the equipment, and it was too late to go back to the old ways, when herders made everything they needed.’ The collapse of reindeer herding in Chukotka was the most catastrophic in the Federation – by 2000 there were only 100,000 animals left, and that was the critical number: if the population dipped further, the herd would no longer be sustainable. Chukchi migrated to Anadyr to look for work while Russians left in their thousands when their jobs disappeared along with the old regime. In Anadyr, one resident stuck a fly-poster on a telegraph pole advertising his flat in exchange for a one-way air ticket to Moscow.
Over the past decade, reindeer numbers have climbed back to 200,000. ‘We have even started to sell meat,’ said Omrynto, ‘though the long supply chains kill us.’ Gena and Dzor groaned. Not only were there no rail links to the outside world, there were no roads either. The old Russia had gone, but the new one had yet to arrive to replace it. I asked Omrynto what he considered the most challenging problem facing his constituents. ‘Alcoholism, without a doubt,’ he shot back, suddenly grave. ‘Eighty per cent of villagers I represent are drunk on any given day.’ Dzor, sitting behind his desk, chipped in, ‘Every time Petr comes back from the villages he is in shock.’ Everyone looked gloomy. ‘You need to add to that other health issues,’ Omrynto continued, wincing again. ‘Syphilis is still rife in the villages’, and here he told a long tale about patients nullifying the effect of expensive antibiotics with drunken binges. ‘I see a lot of TB. In the worst post-collapse years of the nineties there was scurvy.’ It was the first place I had ever been where scurvy was still close. Cut off from modern food supplies, Chukchi had forgotten which berries or whale organs to eat to fulfil their vitamin C requirements. They were stranded in no-man’s-land between the past and the future. What with a sky-high suicide rate and rampant levels of fatal drink-related accidents, it seemed that death was always close in Chukotka. Death, and reindeer.
‘But look, I’m optimistic,’ said Omrynto, waving the root vegetables. ‘Almost everything has changed for the better since 2000. The population is rebuilding. We are the richest in the Russian Far East when it comes to oil and minerals,’ and he pointed to a map on the wall marked with coloured triangles indicating potential deposits of this and that, including uranium. Canadian-based Kinross had just wrested the first gold and silver from its Kupol mines above the Arctic Circle. Triangles notwithstanding, the striking feature of the map was its emptiness. The low tundra contours, veined with rivers, were barely settled at all. But the mention of minerals sounded a knell. Oil represented hope to Omrynto. But it had destroyed Siberian polar communities after pollutants and effluents poisoned grazing land in the seventies and eighties. When I stood up to leave, Omrynto leapt to his feet, a bear of a man. He fished a business card out of a deep pocket. It was printed in both Roman and Cyrillic, and before handing it over, he autographed it.
In 1890 Chekhov travelled thousands of miles across Siberia, tramping through mud like jelly, swooning over ‘the smoky, dreamy mountains’ and ‘lithe’ rivers and dreaming of turbot, asparagus and buckwheat kasha. He crossed the taiga on a sodden grass and dirt track that remained the sole connecting artery between European Russia and its Pacific hinterland.1 In the towns (‘everything hellishly expensive’) the playwright sampled the whores, finding ‘Asiatic’ bordellos to his taste (‘no washbasins or objects made out of rubber or portraits of generals’), and on the whole he loved Siberia, though wind and rain lashed his face ‘to fish scales’, and he had trouble with his haemorrhoids. When he reached the Pacific island of Sakhalin, among the most feared places of exile, he interviewed ‘thousands’ of convicts and many smallpox-ravaged Gilyak families. Chekhov had a humane attitude to both groups (‘Our primary concern should not be our own needs, but theirs,’ he wrote of attempts to ‘Russify’ the Gilyak). He was preparing a travel book, but found it hard to make the leap from fiction to fact in a place where the two were intertwined; he told his brother that when he sat down with his pen and travel notebook he felt he was wearing the wrong trousers. The main impression that emerges both from his letters and his account, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, is how foreign he found the landscape. He wrote that he felt like a European there on the edges of the Russian empire. ‘It seems to me’, he said, ‘that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here.’
News of my arrival had spread, and Radio Chukotka rang one of Gena’s phones requesting an interview. I had nothing against the proposal; and refusing anything semi-official in this semi-police state seemed unwise. But when Gena and I arrived in the lobby of the radio station, the receptionist panicked. After long minutes in which she and her colleagues bumped into one another as they rushed to and fro, a man in a suit appeared with a device in his ear. ‘Problem,’ said Gena after the two had spoken. In the background, people were hurrying around carrying coils of cable. Generalised anxiety about President Medvedev’s arrival in three days had resulted in station bosses banning any foreigner who had got through the regional no-alien rule. Specifically, this meant they were banning me, as there were no other foreigners in Anadyr. But Russians meet their difficulties with lateral guile. We arranged to meet the interviewer that night in Gena’s flat, and do the recording there.
This reporter, Alyona Vakarit, arrived with a spindly male sidekick and a bag of beer bottles. She was tall and handsome, about my age, with a mane of red hair which from time to time she tossed theatrically. We did the interview at the kitchen table. When the tape recorder was switched off, conversation turned to Chukotka. ‘What is the West’s opinion of Chukotka?’ asked Vakarit. It was difficult to tell her that it doesn’t have one. But it turns out that the rest of Russia doesn’t have one either. ‘National radio announces what time it is in all the zones,’ Vakarit complained, ‘and ends at Kamchatka, as if that were the end of Russia. But Chukotka is beyond that!’ (Kamchatka, the peninsula south-west of Chukotka, long ago entered the language as a metaphor for remoteness; in 1840 Gogol wrote in a letter, ‘I would not have hesitated to travel as far as Kamchatka,’ meaning, to the ends of the earth, and today the seats at the back of football stadiums are ‘out in Kamchatka’.)2 ‘If they do think of us at all in Moscow,’ continued Vakarit, throwing her hair back in indignation, ‘they think of flying dogs, as it is so windy here in winter. And of course the jokes.’ The region’s most significant role in the Federation is as the butt of a thousand jokes. A Chukchi comes into a shop and asks: ‘Do you have colour TVs?’ ‘Yes, we do.’ ‘Give me a green one.’3 In the old days travellers returned to the capital with tales of a people who had mouths on the top of their heads and ate by placing food under their hats and moving their shoulders up and down. ‘They think we have to stay connected to our houses with ropes in snowstorms,’ moaned the thin sidekick, ‘and that we still all earn big salaries.’ In the Soviet era, civil servants received ‘the long rouble’ to compensate for the hardships of polar posts. Those inflated wages had perished with perestroika, along with a raft of other state subsidies.
My landlords Sasha and Marina were hunched over the kitchen table when I got back, each using a teaspoon to tease individual salmon eggs from a roe. Once they had amassed a batch of the gelatinous orange spheres, they sealed them in jars. The rest of the salmon poked out of a bucket in the sink. The next morning they were still at it, though a badminton racket had been pressed into service. Sasha was gently rubbing a fresh block of roe over the strings so the eggs fell onto a plate. It was less labour-intensive than the teaspoon method. Where had the badminton racket come from? Possibly a landfill site, as it had already reached a scientifically interesting stage of decomposition. The eggs were delicious.
On Saturday the sun was gone, and white horses played on the bay. In the shortening days, you felt winter shouldering in: cold air tickled high in the nostrils, and distant vistas shivered in advance of their swaddling snow. The bunting-washing hung stiff as salt cod. The interview with Omrynto over, I had planned to explore the area. But I had not reckoned on an absence of roads. Anadyr was a prison and I was an inmate, along with the rest of the population. To take our minds off incarceration, a brass band played stirring tunes on the steps of the House of Culture, a central-casting Soviet monster with a swooping metal roof and a facade that said, ‘Don’t come in here.’ On the gritty shore behind, a group of men lit a barbecue with a blowtorch. Everywhere else, the town was out for its constitutional. The Mongol horseman impression at the airport had been misleading. I was expecting to find a city of Tartars, but in physiognomy I found Moscow-on-the-tundra. The horsemen who rode up from the shores of the Black Sea in the thirteenth century proceeded no further than the wealthy principalities of Rus. Their blood had diluted the southern populations, hence the frequently expressed assertion that in the north, one finds ‘the true Russia’. Indigenous groups represent a small minority throughout the far north, and there are more ethnic peoples in Moscow than in Anadyr. Still, the juxtaposition is striking: a Mongol minority in the Arctic and a Mongol majority in the south, the two separated by a thousand miles of long-nosed Russians.
If the town had a centre, it was the new supermarket. All roads led to its swing doors: if anyone wanted to meet, they did so on its forecourt. It was the first supermarket ever to exist in Chukotka and nobody could stay away, preferring to go in three times a day to purchase three separate items rather than get everything at once. In this respect and others Anadyr was different from any other town I had ever been in. Cars tended towards the large and flashy, mostly land cruisers with names such as Toyota Tundrabird T4, and the majority had the steering wheel on the right side, which is the wrong side. Gena explained that the Russian Far East imports fleets of knackered or sub-standard Nissans and Toyotas from Japan. Doesn’t it seem odd to spend an unfeasibly huge sum of money on a car which has the steering wheel in the wrong place?4 Also, in a town known to be almost crime-free, why were both the supermarket and the Coffee Studio crawling with security guards? ‘They’re a status symbol,’ Gena revealed. The shadow economy, so vigorous in the Russian Federation, was barely stirring in Chukotka, and the protection racketeers who had taken over many of the roles of state in the first years of democracy elsewhere in the Far East, notably Vladivostok, were non-existent. Connections, however, were everything, and you could get anything that was in short supply if you knew the right people. And that was like breathing to a Russian.
I sensed an unfathomable paradox at the heart of the city. Apartment blocks were externally pristine and uniquely bright, but their stairwells still stank of urine, and someone had invariably stolen the light bulbs. The split-level Coffee Studio above the supermarket offered a world-class range of cocktails, but each lurid glass cost almost half the average weekly wage. Gas-guzzlers lumbered through the streets like tanks, but on the stable dunes east of the docks a pair of old Chukchi hunters were smoking fish for the winter outside a yaranga. Stranded on the margins of the Federation and the continent, Anadyr was struggling to plug in to the global economy and the free world. One was unable to shake off the image of a police state. I had to register with the authorities within three business days of arrival, or incur a heavy fine. When one day I bought pirozhki (meat turnovers) and sat on the steps of the telephone exchange eating them before going in to look at emails at one of the public terminals, a policeman approached me and began barking. When I stammered that I didn’t speak Russian, he shouted, ‘No eat!’ and waved me off angrily with a thumb. Young people overcompensated in the rush to catch up with the world they watched on television. The collective female wardrobe was a horror show of synthetic frilly shirts, cheap jeans and high-heeled plastic boots with studs, buckles and anything else the Chinese manufacturer could glue on. Young couples flocked to the Coffee Studio simply because it had an English name, whereas that fashion had long run its course in Moscow. The Studio had its good points. In it I found the only decent espresso machine in Anadyr. But it also had banks of plasma screens belting out Muscovite music videos day and night. Inside the tinted windows of the Studio, Moscow was a faraway paradise of the Chekhovian variety (‘Oh to go to Moscow!’ the eponymous Three Sisters wail as they fend off provincial stupor.) But Irina and her family were an arm’s length from the capital. This lot were four thousand miles away.
Anadyr was a microcosm of the whole of Arctic Russia, a place where sequinned trousers co-exist with persistent, elemental toughness. The post-Soviet transition had been disorientating for everyone, but one couldn’t help feeling that it had hit hardest up in this forgotten corner.
It was already owl light when I hurried up the wooden steps of the cathedral for the five o’clock Saturday service, and the taffeta sheen of the golden domes had flattened. The whole building, appropriately scaled up from the modest local churches, was made of weathered aspen boards: a magnificent chalet of a cathedral. Inside, candlelight flickered over painted faces, the tidal drone of a male choir rose and fell and pony-tailed young monks strode around noiselessly, following the muttered instructions of the priest, a tall, broad figure whose stomach swelled tight against the black fabric of his robe. Puffs of incense smoke trailed woozily among the dozen worshippers, and they shifted from foot to foot, touching their headscarves. Here were the obedient servants of the eastern Church quietly commemorating their martyrs, their lilting low prayers echoing back to a time before oligarchs and collectives, though not before reindeer. Here too was the abiding spiritual calm that the Soviets failed to obliterate, coming down on us few like a benediction.
Or was it? The peace of the cloisters was not, regrettably, the one that passed all understanding. Father Agafangel, the officiating priest, was embroiled in a fight with his bishop that had just made the national press amid a hailstorm of denunciations. The bishop, a known nationalist renegade and arch-conservative, had himself publicly denounced the Patriarch for his support of democracy and cellphones. (A week after my return, the Patriarch dismissed the bishop.) Chukotka attracted misfits and outsiders. It was a tough place to live, but if I heard a refrain, it insisted that life in Chukotka was better than it used to be. And if there was a name in the refrain, it was that of Roman Abramovich, maverick outsider extraordinaire.
In 1995, in one of the most profitable privatisations of that chaotic decade, Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky had bought national oil conglomerate Sibneft for $200 million. Abramovich knew nothing of Chukotka, but he registered his companies in Anadyr to benefit from its low tax base. Municipal budgets rocketed, and in 2000 the electorate returned Abramovich as governor with a robust 99 per cent of the vote. In addition to his tax millions, Abramovich invested heavily. He paid for the illumination of Anadyr’s streets, and for buses to run through them. (There were two bus routes, and both were free. It took sixteen minutes to get from one end of the main route to the other.) In the first four years of his tenure as governor, capital investment in Chukotka increased twelvefold. The wind turbines flapping on the clifftops were among his many schemes, and it was he who had paid for the 200-foot murals of whales and reindeer, having hired a modish Moscow design consultancy. Abramovich didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t eat well on his monthly visits to the rim of Russia. He was fond of the folksy German restaurants he had patronised on business trips to Munich, so he built one and flew in a Bavarian chef. I had dinner at this place, which Abramovich had called Baklan (Cormorant). It was near the cathedral, and featured home-brewed beer and a live oompah-band. I ordered sauerkraut with a Russian twist, the twist being an absence of cabbage. A visitor returning to Anadyr after a ten-year absence would find it transformed by the Abramovich millions. Besides the supermarket and the Coffee Studio with its Harvey Wallbangers, both urban and rural living conditions had improved from the nadir of the nineties, as had healthcare (rural scurvy notwithstanding). Abramovich was more popular in Chukotka than anywhere else in the world, including Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC, and Omsk, where he had bought and invigorated the Avangard ice hockey team. Meanwhile, Sibneft began to drill in Anadyr Bay, and the poor remained as disenfranchised as they always had been. But Abramovich couldn’t do anything about that. Or could he, if he wanted? I did hear dissenting voices. Yelena, an articulate gallery owner in her fifties, told me she wished the authorities would spend less on paint and more on pensions. ‘These walls have to be repainted every year,’ she said, gesturing out of the window of her craft gallery near the Duma at the flats on the other side of Otke Street. ‘Food is expensive, and there is still malnourishment among the poorest. There is too much attention paid to appearances and not enough to the substance of people’s lives.’
Yelena had approached me in her gallery as I pored over captions beneath the artefacts with a pocket Russian–English dictionary. Introducing herself as an English-speaker, she peered with me into glass cases filled with walrus-bone whales and men. ‘Look at this polar bear,’ said Yelena, fishing out a hoe handle featuring a recumbent beast. ‘If you tip it this way, the bear’s body looks like a human face. Masses of early Chukchi carvings depict anthropomorphic animals and zoomorphic humans. It represents a belief in the inter-relationship of all living beings.’ Many pieces were exceptionally beautiful. ‘The interesting thing is,’ Yelena explained, ‘animal–human interchangeability was a feature of Stone Age art – from, say, 20,000 years ago. It vanished everywhere else, but the fact that it was still going strong here in Chukotka between about 100 BC and AD 100 is a reflection of our isolation.’ That again. ‘And of human tenacity.’
Abrupt climate change froze the carvers out at the end of the first century AD, and archaeologists have found few artefacts from the next 1,500 years. ‘When Russians began arriving in the 1600s,’ Yelena continued, picking up a sealskin scraper, ‘they traded new tools and materials. Here’s a copper helmet – see the verdigris?’ Fine garments hung on the walls of the third room. ‘The artists went on absorbing the influences of whoever was around,’ said Yelena, pointing at a beaded coat. On the north-east Chukchi coast, a community of 1,500 Inuit speak Yupik, like west Alaskan Inuit. Until the 1950s, the two groups regularly camped together on the sea ice off one of the islands straddling the US–USSR border. In the end Soviet authorities banned the visits on the grounds that it was unfair to show American Inuit how well their Soviet kin lived. ‘In the thirties,’ said Yelena, ‘Eskimo at Naukan on the Bering Strait started making sealskin carpets in which traditional geometric motifs appeared alongside Soviet symbols. Sculptors don’t go in for symbolism any more; it’s mostly representational figures.’ She showed me a trio of doe-eyed seal pups playing on a floe. It was the kind of thing one might buy at Boots. These carvers too had absorbed the spirit of the age. Unfortunately, it was ours.
In September 2005, in Russia’s largest corporate takeover, Gazprom acquired 72 per cent of Sibneft for US$13.01 billion. Not a single one of the many investigations into tax evasion within Sibneft had stuck. Since the sale, municipal income in Chukotka had plunged. Abramovich stood for a second term as governor, even though he didn’t want to; pundits said that his friend Putin pressurised him into it. He resigned in July 2008, five months after Putin had done the same, without completing his second term. But he was still there, and not just in the sulphurous glow of his streetlights and the ditties blaring out of his German restaurant. He was gazing into the tundra from the windows of every building, as he was standing again in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, and his team had not taken any chances when it came to the distribution of posters. I was loitering outside the Duma one day, waiting with Gena’s friend Anatoli for another friend who was supposed to be delivering a box of computer cables. Anatoli was an Anadyr-born engineer who had trained in Virginia; his father, a mining consultant, had taken a secondment in the US, and the family had been able to accompany him abroad. Although Anatoli had returned to Anadyr to work for a mining firm, he was keen to get out again, and to go to Moscow. The Duma was an unassuming neoclassical building hard by the main street, facing its own small car park. As we waited, Anatoli explained that Abramovich was not just standing to be a deputy. ‘He wants to be chairman as well,’ he said, scanning the traffic. ‘Why aren’t there any posters of the opposition?’ I asked. Anatoli turned to me with a look so withering that I blushed. ‘Effectively there is no opposition,’ he said, his tone of voice indicating that he was addressing a person with a small brain. ‘Except some insane far right party which nobody takes seriously. You must know that we don’t really choose whom we vote for.’ Anatoli tugged on his nineteenth cigarette of the afternoon. ‘Since 2004, even the governor is appointed by the president unilaterally – I mean, technically the Duma has to ratify the appointment, but it’s a rubber-stamping procedure. It’s all part of Putin’s system of Vertical Rule.’ Had that been a good thing? ‘In some respects it was needed, as tinpot governors were treating their territory like a personal fiefdom. They were like Cossack-trader warriors. But it has gone too far.’
An aircraft-sized Nissan squealed into the car park, and once it had stopped alongside us, a figure emerged carrying a cardboard box. Greetings were exchanged, the box handed over, and the aircraft-jeep wheeled away down Otke. Anatoli tucked the box under one arm, pulled up his collar with the other hand, and we set off back to Gena’s flat. ‘In the middle nineties,’ Anatoli finished up, ‘we had more democracy in Chukotka and less money. Now we have less democracy and more money.’ From which we can conclude, I said, that democracy is a bad thing? But at that he just laughed bitterly, and lit another cigarette.5
A dairy stood halfway down Gena’s street. Workers bottled milk products in the back and sold them in the front. I had been inside and bought yoghurt. Later that day, drinking tea in Gena’s kitchen, I asked where the cows grazed. ‘No cows,’ Gena said. ‘Powdered milk, imported from Voronezh.’ Improvisation was the key. It always had been. Elena Russell grew up in the fifties and sixties in a barracks in the Bilibino goldfields, where her father was a geologist. After Elena was born the midwife stitched her mother up with the portal vein of a reindeer. The family ate powdered vegetables, powdered egg, powdered everything, except reindeer. When she was a teenager, Russell wrote in her autobiography, ‘Moscow came up with the idea of building the world’s first atomic power station within the Arctic Circle,’ but it was hard to find a site in Bilibino, as ‘wherever the bulldozers crashed through the earth, there was gold flashing back at them’. Surveyors took many weeks to get to Chukotka from Moscow, their planes delayed in Omsk for so long, according to Russell, that they had time to get divorced, have their teeth crowned and grow a long beard. But despite the challenges, engineers built the reactor.
When Russians eventually rode east out of their European enclaves and crossed the Urals, they came like conquistadors. They wanted sable, a commodity in such demand that at one stage it accounted for a third of imperial revenues. Yet the Russians were in the dark as to what lay behind the Urals. The odd wanderer brought back stories of tribesmen who froze to the ground in winter (besides having their mouths on top of their heads). But the rewards were fabulous: a single hunt could make a man’s fortune. In the sixteenth century, freebooting Cossacks rode east in bands of fighter-explorers, trading tin, flour and beads for fur. It was the beginning of the great territorial expansion of the tsarist state, and imperial foot soldiers followed the sables across the wide Siberian rivers that surge from the Mongolian steppe to the Arctic coast: first the Ob, then the 3,400-mile Yenesei (‘cramped by its banks’, according to Chekhov), then the Lena. In 1639, the first Russian saw the Pacific. He and his colleagues traded with Chukchi herders who had tattooed faces and fragments of walrus ivory pierced through their upper lip. By the end of the eighteenth century the entire Arctic coast of Asia belonged to the empire in addition to the many thousands of square miles to the south. Moscow had conquered Siberia through a mix of individual fortune-seeking and government policy, the latter a reflection of a profound Russian longing, expressed since Peter the Great, certainly since Catherine the Great, to populate the spaces to the east. Tolstoy referred to it as a ‘mission’. The indigenous peoples, lumped together as Tartars (originally Tatars), simply got in the way of this quasi-mystical vision of a continent-wide Russian state. They rose up from time to time, but the allure of the Russian’s goods, and the superiority of his arms, always triumphed. According to one tale, a Tungus herder once accepted a chunk of bread as a gift from the first Russian he had ever met. After chewing it for a while, the herder said to his friend, in their own language, ‘Good.’ Then he took a cracker from the Russian, ate it, and said, ‘Delicious.’ After that the Russian offered a spoon of sugar. ‘Don’t even think about killing these good men,’ the Tungus told his friend after consuming the sugar. So they threw away their bows and arrows and tucked into more bread, crackers and sugar.
The most attractive item among the goods was vodka, and the Russians exploited the native fondness for their spirits. One traveller reported that among the Ostiak (Khanty) people on the Ob the usual procedure was ‘to give each Ostiak a cup of good vodka, free of charge; then sell the first bottle for one rouble; two more bottles – mixed half and half with water – for one and a half roubles; and then three bottles of pure water for three roubles each’.
After the fur traders, poor farmers straggled through the passes of the Urals into the unfeudalised lands of Siberia, followed by religious dissenters fleeing the control of the Orthodox Church. But the immigrants who made an indelible mark on history were exiles and prisoners; in English and every other European language, ‘Siberia’ is synonymous with penal servitude – a Russian heart of darkness. The Arctic in particular was ideal for prison camps: so far away that everyone in Moscow forgot about the prisoners’ existence; too remote for viable escape; and a really horrible workplace. By 1753, when the tsar abolished the death penalty, the range of offences punishable with Siberian exile included fortune-telling, taking snuff and driving a cart without using reins. The nineteenth century alone saw a million convicts march into oblivion, the journey itself a two-year via dolorosa which killed thousands. Many stayed in Siberia after their release. In House of the Dead, the fictionalised account of his own incarceration and his first great novel, Dostoevsky conjures a kind of Asian Australia peopled with former prisoners.6 (Sentenced to death for his involvement in a group that printed anti-establishment literature, Dostoevsky was standing in front of a firing squad when he learned that his punishment had been commuted to four years hard labour.)
In this great continent-empire on which the sun never set, nobody had the slightest interest in the Chukchi, or any other Arctic peoples. A distinguished nineteenth-century observer referred to them as ‘half-thawed humanity’, going on to call the Chukchi ‘descendants of fish’. (Aren’t we all?) In Anna Karenina, the heroine’s husband, government minister Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, embodies the theoretical attitude of Moscow to its distant northern tribes. The important thing was to commission plenty of commissions. Karenin determined, ‘if it were to turn out that the position of the national minorities was really what it appeared to be according to the official data in the hands of the committee, that still another scientific commission be appointed to investigate the reasons . . .’ Unfortunately nobody could make out, from the information submitted to the commission, whether the minorities were starving to death or perfectly all right, a state of affairs necessitating a further commission. As usual, fiction could not compete with fact. In 1827 two commissions had actually spent eight years à la Karenin counting natives.
That said, Russian efforts to colonise and modernise rarely got beyond 60ºN, and the Arctic regions remained largely unmolested outside the prison camps. Peasants had never settled on the tundra: how could they? There was no wood for the izbi (huts) and no black earth which steamed after spring rains to nourish rye, buckwheat, flax, hemp or turnips. The authorities mostly ignored their Arctic responsibilities, concentrating their energies on the fratricidal theatricality of Russia’s volatile southern frontiers, or poking around in the Balkans. After all, the northern border could not fray.
Besides the Chukchi who once hunted seal from coracles with obsidian-tipped spears, Khanty men fished the Ob from leaf-shaped dugout canoes, bands of Evenk built bark-covered tepees in the forest and Dolgan clans migrated with the reindeer, pulling huts mounted on ski-runners, called balok, between the Arctic coast and the Yenesei hinterland. The many languages spoken across the Russian Arctic and sub-Arctic include Turkic, Uralic, Tungus-Manchu and Ket, the latter unrelated to any other tongue. Most of the peoples were and remain reindeer-based, and no group was originally fully settled. The nature of herding and hunting requires periodic movement: you have to move with the reindeer and marine mammals, even if the authorities make you live in a house. A minority everywhere, and lacking political and economic muscle, the northern peoples have never had Transcaucasian-style elites to act as spokesmen.
Piers Vitebsky’s affecting book Reindeer People, published in 2005, distils nearly twenty years fieldwork in Sebyan, a community of a few hundred Tungus-speaking Eveny in the vast east Siberian Republic of Yakutia, also called Sakha.7 Well over 2,000 kilometres west of Anadyr, Sebyan is still very far indeed from Moscow. Eveny have herded reindeer among the Verkhoyansk Mountains for many generations, following the spring and autumn migrations and surviving winter temperatures which cause human teeth to shatter. Their technical vocabulary is one of the largest in the history of speech, featuring, across all dialects and regions, 1,500 words for parts, shapes, diseases, diet and moods of reindeer. Eveny have a wide range of nicknames for their beasts, and are not as isolated from the rest of the world as one might imagine: in the 1990s a male reindeer who never tired sexually was called Bill Clinton. Men, women and children wear, almost exclusively, garments made from reindeer, with the result, according to Vitebsky, that ethnic Eveny look and smell like reindeer. Each hollow hair has such fabulous insulating properties that the blood and organs of a dead deer do not freeze under uncut skin: they ferment.
Vitebsky’s portrait is deeply sympathetic. He camped with Eveny herders for many months, living with them a life that was an interplay between ice and fire; he learned that cold is the basic state in the universe, while heat is a limited resource. His book is infused with the perfume of larch and resin, and with the meaty smell of a reindeer-camp fire. An entire ecosystem has evolved round the deer. One particular female fly hovers around a reindeer’s nostrils and shoots in a jet of eggs when the animal inhales. Ten months later, a baby fly cannons out fully formed when the reindeer sneezes. But as the nineties progressed, Vitebsky writes of Sebyan, alcohol tightened its grip. ‘The village came to resemble a horror movie in which people succumbed one by one to a zombie plague . . . each time I returned, I found that someone I thought would hold on for ever had gone under.’ That might be the saddest line I ever read about the Arctic. The advent of aviation had reduced mobility rather than increased it, as young people no longer learned the skills of long-distance travel – skills that are gone for good once they vanish. My vymyrayuschiy narod, an Eveny elder told the author over the campfire and the vodka bottle; we are a dying people, a people on the verge of extinction. There are about 17,000 Eveny left. They accept what is happening to them (according to Vitebsky), sensing that they, like all peoples, are clinging to the face of the earth for a fleeting moment. Noting how much they have been through since the Russians invaded their land, Vitebsky concludes that their ‘inner spiritual life and reserves of irony allow them to survive, even while they see their world for what it is. The emotional journey of the reindeer peoples of Russia has been hard, and the feeling of loss that I sense in so many does not come from naïve nostalgia, whether theirs or mine. The Soviet ideal of progress was based on a rejection of the past: graves were to be forgotten, children were to be separated from their primitive, deported or murdered parents, dead shamans were not to be reborn. This catalogue of sacrifices is now seen to have been in vain.’
The expansion of the gulag system facilitated the fanatical industrialisation at the heart of Stalin’s vision for Russia and almost completed the spiritual annihilation of the small peoples. The gulag existed at least in part to address the imperial failure to harvest the natural resources of remoter regions. After Stalin unveiled the second Five-Year Plan in 1932, geological expeditions set out over the tundra in search of fresh sources of coal, gas, oil, gold, nickel, graphite – anything the government could extract with enforced labour and use or export. Traditional hunting grounds and reindeer pastures emerged as major repositories of resources from phosphates to mica and tungsten, and armies of zeki (prisoner-workers) built mines, refineries, ports, power stations and factories, all connected to service cities by networks of railways and roads.
One hesitates to nominate the ‘worst’ Arctic gulag. The worst was the one you were in. But three of the harshest were Vorkuta in the west, Norilsk in the middle, and Kolyma in the east, all not only isolated but virtually inaccessible. In the summer, prisoners endured the martydom of mosquitoes, and in winter they froze to their bunks. In Vorkuta, the temperature only struggles above zero Celsius for four months a year. If a person fell into the snow on the march to the mine, his body lay unnoticed until spring. In the multiple camps of the Kolyma region abutting Chukotka, prisoners could down pickaxes in the goldfields when the temperature fell to -50ºC. But in the winter of 1928–9, the rule changed to -60ºC. Only the camp commander had a thermometer, the regulation did not apply to woodcutting teams, and the wind chill was not part of the equation. By 1940, Kolyma was producing one third of the world’s gold, and every kilogram cost a human life. Slave workers travelled to Vladivostok by rail, crammed into Stolypin compartments in which robbers took their food and clothes, then north on one of Andrei Sakharov’s ‘death ships of the Okhotsk Sea’, disembarking at Nagayevo, the port serving Magadan, gateway to the Kolyma River valley. Out of every hundred men who built the road connecting Magadan with the web of gold camps, one survived. The pits themselves filled up twice a day with blasted ammonal, and the miners coughed up bits of their lungs. Virtually nobody made a successful escape. According to Solzhenitsyn, when prisoners tried to run away from a Kolyma camp, the authorities baited local ethnic Yakut people with rewards for turning them in such as dried herring, flour and tea. Children shouted, ‘There’s a herring coming’ when they spotted a stranger. (Yakut had little cause to think fondly of Russians, prisoners or not.) Between two and three million died working the mines and camps of the north-eastern gulag. Teacher and journalist Eugenia Ginzburg survived for eighteen years – just – and after reading her autobiographical account of the children’s camps at Kolyma, I felt as if I would never read another book again.
By 1952, the Kolyma complex covered an area three times the size of Texas. Soviet historians call this period ‘the opening up of the far north’; just as the Cold War unsealed the Canadian Arctic, the gulag brought infrastructure and people to the Russian north. When Khrushchev closed most of the gulag camps, incentives attracted a fresh immigrant population to sustain the new industrial base. One might have assumed that the north with its permafrost would at least have been immune from the ravages of Khrushchev’s crazed agricultural policies. But minerals under Khibiny (later Khibinogorsk, subsequently Kirovsk) in Russian Lapland provided the Soviet Union with its entire requirement of apatite for phosphate fertiliser. Thus in a twist of geography the unfertile landscapes of the sub-Arctic enabled the meadows of Transcaucasia to bear fruit. In the sixties, geologists found massive reserves of oil and gas directly under reindeer pasture in the West Siberian and Timan-Pechora basins. Pipelines were poorly maintained, if they were maintained at all, and leaks resulted in chronic contamination which badly affected herders. In 1994 a 52-kilometre section of pipeline in the Komi Republic ruptured in twenty-three places. A dam thrown up to contain the spill made the situation worse when in excess of 100,000 tonnes of oil poured over the land and into the Kolva and Usa riverways. Fourteen years earlier, in 1980, the oil and gas condensate well Kumzha-9 in the Pechora delta suffered a blowout. Engineers detonated an underground nuclear explosion in an attempt to arrest the flow. This failed, in part because workers drilled the well for the nuclear device in the wrong direction. It took the Soviets six-and-a-half years to repair the blowout. Every day of that period, two million cubic metres of gas and hundreds of tonnes of condensate spewed out of the well.
Communist mismanagement reduced the country to economic ruin and left a legacy of rotting industrial plant – rotting literally, and metaphorically. Most Arctic factories cost the exchequer more than they put into it, so, naturally, after the regime fell, the new leaders in Moscow had to close them down if they were to have any hope of rebuilding an economy. As a result, many of the industrial towns that spearheaded the Soviet ‘mastery of the North’ are dead or dying. Gena referred to the port of Providenya in Chukotka as ‘Death City’. Shipping had dropped off along with everything else and Providenya, which once had a meat processing plant, a tannery, a dairy, a factory and even a film studio, was little but a wilderness of broken windows, its population of almost 15,000 shrunk to 2,000 or fewer. Down at Petropavlosk, the abandoned Kamchatka fleet rusted in the harbour. The Arctic Ocean ports of Chersky and Tiksi had fallen to precipitate decline, as had Magadan, the mining town on the Okhotsk Sea that once funnelled hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the camps of the north-east. The Russians who stayed are practically destitute.
Whilst failing production centres have shut down, the few successful enterprises have acquired a life of their own. It was a paradigm of what was happening across the sub-Arctic belt. Industrial pollution, vigorous as a virus, delivers some fresh ecological catastrophe to the tundra as every month passes. As mentioned at the start of this book, the Arctic produces about a tenth of the world’s oil and a quarter of its gas.8 Most of that comes out of the Russian Arctic: 80 per cent of the oil, and as much as 99 per cent of the gas, according to figures produced in 2007 by AMAP (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme). In an optimistic gesture towards integration, the resource-rich Yamal-Nenets region depicts on its crest a pair of polar bears, a reindeer and an oil derrick. But flares burning off gas in Gazprom’s Yamsavey gasfields near Nadym in Yamal are among many releasing pollutants onto a vulnerable ecosystem in which cold and dramatic seasonal variations inhibit recovery. In the pan-polar pollutant stakes, however, the nickel city of Norilsk on the Taimyr Peninsula emerges a clear winner. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three metal smelting plants pump out waste which even company directors admit is mostly sulphur dioxide. Situated just east of the Yenesei, on which it depends for transport, Norilsk is the largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle. In 2007 Norilsk Nickel published metals sales totalling 15,909 million US dollars. Its board of directors includes Oleg Deripaska, one of the young oligarchs who made quick billions from the resources of the far north. In addition to its role as the world’s leading producer of nickel (295,000 tonnes a year) and of palladium, the key component in catalytic converters, the group, via global subsidiaries, produces cobalt, rhodium, silver, gold, iridium, ruthenium, selenium, tellurium and sulphur, as well as ranking among the largest producers of platinum and copper (423,000 tonnes a year). Its critics say it is also the world’s largest producer of acid rain. According to company figures, the total amount of sulphur dioxide produced by the three Norilsk plants is almost two million tonnes a year – a figure which has only decreased by about 16 per cent since the last days of the Soviet Union. Once in the atmosphere, this gas turns into acid rain. Men in Norilsk have the highest lung cancer rate in the world, and one local doctor, Svetlana Golubkova, recently told a BBC reporter who managed to get in (like Chukotka, Norilsk is closed to foreigners) that ‘very, very few healthy children are being born here’. Greenpeace Russia cites evidence that acid rain has spread across an area equivalent in size to Germany. The deputy general director of Norilsk Nickel, Tav Morgan, told the BBC that the company was taking action to cut pollution. ‘For the period up to 2015–2020,’ Morgan said, ‘we expect to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions by approximately two-thirds.’ But he later admitted it was hard to guarantee those figures because company men were still developing the technology to facilitate reduction at any pace.
I was no longer the only westerner in Anadyr. Gena had acquired a house guest, a Fairbanks-based German anthropologist who had procured an entry permit to conduct field research. He had been working in the settlements to the north for three months. He was also a cook, and on Sunday prepared a meal of Teutonic heft for me and Gena. Tobias Holzlehner was a sharp-eyed university lecturer with woolly ash-blond hair, and his Spätzle dumplings were delicious. A fluent Russian and English speaker, he was collecting data for the multi-authored project Moved by the State: Perspectives on Relocation and Resettlement in the Circumpolar North. From 1957 to the mid-eighties, the practice of ukrupneniye had ‘centralised’ semi-nomadic Chukchi reindeer herders and walrus hunters, rounding them up into purpose-built factory towns. The goal – to boost production – was never achieved; the consequence, as Petr Omrynto had indicated, was social and cultural disaster. Over the following days, as I learned about his work, Tobias introduced me to Restaurant Anadyr, up the pedestrian avenue from the radio station. I was always hungry by lunchtime: the underemployed tourist bureau advertised their accommodation as B & B, but one B would have been enough, as no breakfast ever made an appearance. To arrive at the Anadyr one entered a large, anonymous building and mounted a flight of swerving wooden stairs, entering the restaurant, on the first floor, though a pair of saloon swing doors inlaid with frosted glass. The cavernous room featured improbably high ceilings, strip lighting, net curtains and, at the far end, a low stage equipped with a drum kit and two standing mikes. A pair of mini-skirted elderly waitresses with dyed hair ferried carafes of vodka to lone diners. A tower of white bread teetered on every linen cloth, and alongside the prices the menus displayed the weight in grammes of each portion – a relic of the Communist years. On successive days Tobias and I worked our way through the fare, devouring cabbage soup, pickled herring, liver stroganoff with puree, pork dumplings and doughy pelmeni packets stuffed with beef. After the purgatorial flash and blare of the Coffee Studio, the Anadyr was old-fashioned heaven. The teaspoons had holes punched in them. ‘So they can’t be stolen,’ said Tobias. Was it stigma that made them unstealable, or their unsuitability for certain teaspoon-orientated tasks such as . . . but I couldn’t think of a single one, except melting rocks of crack cocaine.
The ‘disaster’ Tobias had witnessed in the villages was not the result of Soviet collectivisation, but of the years following 1991. He returned to the subject again and again, using the phrase ‘post-apocalypse’ to mean ‘after the collapse of the Soviet Union’ – for example he spoke of the abandoned villages he had visited as ‘post-apocalyptic ghost towns’. He told me he was interested in how people relate to their empty villages when they return. ‘Why do they go back?’ I asked. ‘To hunt,’ he said, ‘and to escape the shattered utopia of Soviet modernisation.’ In the words of Yuri Slevkine, author of the best book on what Russian academics call ‘the small peoples of the north’ (malye narody Severa), ‘No matter how fast the circumpolar peoples adapted to their changing economic circumstances, for most of them it was not fast enough.’ Like every regime that had preceded it, the new Russia that emerged after the collapse failed to embrace its indigenous peoples, particularly when Putin’s ‘vertical power’ strategy removed the little autonomy enjoyed by the regions. This was particularly evident in Chukotka. The Russian nationalism that seeped into the space left vacant by Communism further alienated peoples not considered quite Russian enough. When powerful voices of the right express a longing for a traditional Russia, they do not mean reindeer and walrus.
After many years working with indigenous peoples in the Arctic, Tobias had an informed idea about the reality of their lives. But he was able to find redemption in the spirit he encountered among the hunters who had not succumbed to despair and booze. More than once, as we were talking over a diminishing tower of bread, he cited Hemingway to express what he discovered in Chukotkan villages: The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. ‘They have a certain resilience,’ Tobias continued. ‘They have carved out a place in a hostile world.’
The following morning I went to Abramovich’s Fitness Centre (three-foot Cyrillic letters spelled out the English words over the entrance). It was as if a spaceship had landed. Abramovich and his people had foisted the aspirations of Chelsea footballers’ wives onto the permafrost, and their gym dazzled the eye with its array of Swedish equipment. I set to, working my way from machine to machine as hip-hop rasped from the Finnish speakers and sunlight poured through the windows, lacquering the leather seats of the exercise bikes. Besides me, only one customer disturbed the columns of fine dust suspended in the sunshine. He was an impressive specimen, biceps and pectorals bulging as he cracked his gloved knuckles before swinging a few hundred kilograms over his head. He too looked as though he had landed from Outer Space. Had Abramovich imported him with the treadmills? Eventually he spoke to me, apparently asking if I minded a window being opened. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t speak Russian.’ Wreathed suddenly in smiles, he advanced towards me, gloved hand extended in greeting. ‘Americanka!’ he wrongly concluded. His well developed eyes widened in awe. ‘My hero is very much Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is your friend?’ I floundered as he pumped my hand, crushing a few unimportant bones.
Later, after borscht and dumplings at the Anadyr, Tobias showed me round the museum, another product of Abramovich munificence. The modern rooms were a showcase for what Chukotka had once been, and was now. The top floor consisted of a themed display of Chukchi life, traditional and modern: yaranga to GPS, bone togglehead harpoon to steel togglehead harpoon, seal oil lamp to locally-generated nuclear electricity. When we arrived at the top of the stairs, an elderly attendant put down her crossword book and shuffled heavily across the polished wood in her slippers to switch on the lights. ‘Governor Abramovich’s special project,’ she said, gesturing towards an array of interactive displays. She watched us closely as Tobias translated the Russian panels below the models, and, when we turned back to the stairs, she rushed over, slippers whooshing. We had missed a display in the corridor, a glass case devoted to the Chukchi writer Yuri Rytkheu, the most famous figure to emerge from the region in the twentieth century, or ever. When his first book came out in English, Hemingway sent him a telegram which read, ‘Way to go.’
Rytkheu was born in 1930 on the easternmost tip of Chukotka; his father was a hunter, his grandfather a shaman. One of the first of the post-war generation of Soviet-educated native intellectuals, like his contemporary, Kirgiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, he spent much time away from his homeland and made it in Moscow as a party man, which of course was the only way you could make it. (Both Aitmatov and Rytkheu died in 2008, revered as cultural heroes.) In his lifetime Rytkheu sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his novels, magical dramas set among his own people. Critics perceive him as a Soviet stooge, and it is true that in his fiction he praises, for example, the relocation of Chukotka Eskimos and the blond-haired Russian heroes who made Chukchi dreams come true. In his 1981 autobiography, Rytkheu lathered Soviet housing with praise (much better than those crummy old yarangi). But like Aitmatov, he could be critical below the surface, especially after Krushchev’s thaw. One had to read between the lines. Whatever the truth, Rytkheu points up the difficulties faced by intellectuals in regimes that wield an excess of power. When the choices were silence, compromise or death, it was braver to compromise than to keep silent, and dying wasn’t going to help anyone, as even Hemingway acknowledged. Osip Mandelstam tried to steer a middle course, writing public odes to Stalin while reciting lampoons in private. He died in a transit camp in Vladivostok at the end of some bitter December.
Rytkheu and his indigenous contemporaries were caught up, whether they liked it or not (they didn’t), in the Soviet notion of The Long Journey. This was the process by which the unenlightened Chukchi or Kirgiz herder ‘attained consciousness’, which meant catching up with everyone else and becoming a paid-up Homo sovieticus. Ideologists perceived the Soviet role as one that brought light to polar darkness, and Rytkheu enshrined the metaphorical progress towards truth in his fiction. To ensure the success of The Long Journey, folklore too had to be Sovietised. One anthropologist recorded a song the progress-obsessed regime had introduced among the reindeer herders of the Arctic north:
The northern lights are flashing cheerfully!
My heart is filled with joy!
When I get back, I’ll start listening to the radio.
Stalin’s non-Russian peoples had no place in a technologically advanced brotherhood. They were an embarrassment. And it wasn’t just their ‘primitive’ ways. Nationhood itself was a capitalist snare, according to Lenin, and the aim of socialism was to merge nations. When it came to forming policy, Soviet social scientists squared circles with unfailing regularity until the next kink in the great socialist path revealed fresh puzzles. Committees grappled to create theories into which they could shoehorn the northern peoples, much as Karenin had done before them. Why should ethnology not alter to suit the changing demands of ideology, as the Soviet version of history did? But the fact was that indigenous cultures were among the many things Stalin determined to destroy, in the south as well as the Arctic. He liquidated the Buryat lamaseries along the Russian–Mongolian border with their medieval libraries and statuary, and murdered thousands of lamas. His henchmen burnt the tenth-century Alan churches in Karachai-Cherkessia. During the Great Patriotic War he deported two million Chechens, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush and others from their ancient homelands. Further north, shamans were obvious examples of the anti-scientific backwardness he had vowed to root out. Party stooges took shamans from many tribes up in planes and said, ‘You say you can fly, here is your chance.’ Then they pushed them out.
As for Rytkheu, he wrote in Russian. He had to, at least at first: Chukchi was not a written tongue. The many Arctic languages posed a problem for the Soviets in their commitment to likbez (the liquidation of illiteracy), but they were confident that it was one a committee could solve.9 In 1930 members appointed to that committee, sitting in session in Moscow, decided to codify the northern languages in Roman script. Factories duly printed primers and distributed them throughout the land, though no teacher could use them, as Russians could not read Roman writing, and anyway the corrupt and interminable supply chain meant that primers in the wrong language frequently arrived above the Arctic Circle. Concepts were even harder than linguistics. The Chukchi primer bizarrely translated ‘the First of May’, the great Soviet holiday, as the English word ‘Christmas’. In 1938 Cyrillic replaced the newly created northern writing system and the linguists who had devised the latter were arrested on the grounds that the Roman script was ‘a bourgeois alphabet’. So that solved that problem.
My benevolent landlord was bent on solving a linguistic problem of his own. Sasha had acquired a Soviet-era Russian–English primer, and took to lying in wait for me with specifically prepared phrases. ‘How does it strike you here?’ was one. We fought through many sessions, undaunted by the evidence that no matter how hard we tried, the primer refused to supply an answer to any of its own questions.
After a gruelling bout with the primer on Saturday morning, when Sasha did not have to go off to his job as a delivery driver, I set off on a hike across the tundra. Sunlight bounced off the mosses of the plain, lingering on the water pooled in swampy hollows. Only the faintest breath of wind moved the blades of sedge, and silence hung heavily, except for the whee-hee of Aleutian terns. The oceanic surface of the earth puckered with low growths of cottongrass, stands of alders, or a bilberry bush. When I turned away from its bitter grandeur, the castellations of Anadyr rose, self-contained as a medieval citadel. That day the smoke from the central heating plant went up straight, like a plumb line. Then my phone rang. It was Gena. He asked me where I was, and when I told him, he exploded. ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed to leave the town. This is a border zone! You will be picked up by the police and I would be held responsible,’ he thundered, ‘because I am your official sponsor. You have let me down.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I whined, felled by this well-judged combo of hurt and aggression. He ordered me to return immediately (‘I’ll meet you outside the supermarket’), and, in case I hadn’t got the message, lobbed a Parthian shot. ‘Be careful where you tread. There are land mines.’
The following morning, in preparation for the one-day presidential visit, gangs of workers filed into the park outside my window soon after sunrise, picking up stray bits of rubbish and stuffing them into hemp sacks. The regional authorities were taking no chances: they had even repainted the zebra crossings. Medvedev arrived at ten, and Anadyr was tense all day, unfamiliar figures in dark glasses patrolling its streets and Federal choppers buzzing across the sky. By 6 p.m., several hundred Russians were swarming around the entrance of the Chukotka Hotel hoping for a final glimpse of the big man. People tugged at their collars and stamped their feet as the chill of a leafless polar autumn gusted in from the bay. I wedged myself alongside a group of women on the platform at the top of the supermarket steps, looking down at the crowd, and at the police line holding it back. A security van blocked both ends of the road. Despite the menace of the vans, and of the tall, stocky men who stood smoking by the hotel entrance, the night had a fairground ambience. A pair of schoolboys wrestled one another to the pavement, parents rocked prams, and mobile phones, held aloft, captured pictures of a Black Maria backed up tight to the double doors of the hotel.
At 8.20 p.m., three men in suits hurried out of the hotel lobby. A murmur rippled through the crowd. Two more men appeared, carrying silver metal cases. Then it was him. A thrill swelled among the people, they clapped, and whistled, and their cameras flashed. It was really him! We had assumed Medvedev would bundle straight into the back of the Black Maria, avoiding the crowd and the sniper’s bullet. But he didn’t. He strolled to the side of the vehicle, acknowledging the cheers by raising both arms and smiling. He was wearing a thigh-length leather jacket, and, like most famous people, he was short. Then he got into the van through the sliding side door, a small fleet of limousines appeared, and the cortège drew away. The flushed crowd dispersed in a thrum of chatter. I returned to my billet on Otke Street, keen to report a presidential sighting to Sasha and Marina, who were playing bingo in the kitchen with neighbours. They had been watching events unfold on television, and had even unearthed a large Federation flag with which they had draped the top of the fridge. The television station was replaying Medvedev’s speech to the Security Council earlier in the week; the one in which he said, ‘Our biggest task is to turn the Arctic into Russia’s resource base for the twenty-first century.’10 In a single generation the Arctic had shifted, in the minds of herders, pensioners and presidents, from backwater to repository of hope and wealth. To support its claims to the Arctic seabed, Russia had already funded two expeditions, to the Mendeleyev underwater mountain chain in 2005 and to the 1,200-mile Lomonosov Ridge in 2007. Promises had been made of scientific evidence demonstrating that Russian boundaries extended, on the continental shelf, well beyond the 322-kilometre (200-mile) economic zone granted to the Arctic nations under international law. So the northern frontier, no longer a fixed line, had become as fluid as its southern counterpart. And Russians, like their neighbours, were pouring in resources. A few days after Medvedev’s visit, on the plane leaving Anadyr, I sat next to a young man who had just finished an expedition. I recognised the unkempt hair, wind-scoured face and unshaven chin. An engineer for the Federal government, he revealed, over packets of stale sunflower seeds and tins of out-of-date orange juice, that he designed submarine robots which could explore the seabed. That summer he had been working with a team of twenty scientists on the ice-strengthened Akademik M. A. Lavrentyev in the Bering Strait.
Gena was leaving on the same day as me, flying down to Khabarovsk to join his wife and son. Tobias had evidently hosed him down, and there was no further mention of my poor behaviour. He even gave me a parting gift. It was a walrus baculum (penis bone), two feet long with a face carved on the tip. The walrus has the largest baculum, absolute and relative, of any mammal. After this pleasant episode Gena and I went to the airport together, planning to cross the bay in a Second World War barge, one of a fleet operating as shuttles on flight days (where the barges had been when I arrived, there was no clue). Taxis had converged to wait on the bank, drivers and passengers smoking furiously in the weak late afternoon sun. Beluga were fluking in the bay again. In the shallows, ivory shards of porcelain ice washed in and out with the ragged edges of the waves from the barges. As the horn of our own barge lowed, I looked back for the last time at the central heating plant puffing out its dark grey steeples, Abramovich’s five-storey paintings of reindeer glowing in the last of the sun like postage stamps, and dogs scavenging on the docks. All around the town, the sky reached down to the tundra. All quiet on the Eastern Front. Like a lot of far-flung and neglected places, Anadyr had grown on me. It had its own charm. But God, it seemed far, and remote, and nothing to do with anywhere else. Not only is Chukotka not Siberian – it’s not really part of the Russian Far East either. Petr Omrynto had said as much. ‘Separate and on our own!’ he had cried out more than once as his root vegetable hands excavated sunflower seeds in the Hunting Association office. If Russia’s lawless edge lingered anywhere, it was in Arctic Chukotka. No wonder the inhabitants referred to the rest of Russia as ‘the mainland’.
It was the period in which airlines were going bankrupt all over the world – in July oil had reached a new record of $147 a barrel – and financial disaster had engulfed the developed world. Only two airlines flew to Anadyr from Moscow: Domododevo and Transaero (even Aeroflot didn’t bother). Domododevo had that week ceased operations, though the government was negotiating a bailout, and when I got to the airport, the incoming Domododevo flight from Moscow was listed on the board as ‘awaited’, even though it had been due for three days. Whey-faced passengers were sleeping on the bucket seats in Abramovich’s new terminal. Gena’s airline had in fact also collapsed, but the government had stepped in, this time more decisively, as the airline sold the only route south from Chukotka to the Russian Far East. We sat in the coffee bar and waited. People around us were engaged in obsessive wrapping of luggage in tape and blue cling film as an anti-theft measure. ‘Are cases often robbed here then?’ I asked Gena, nervously eyeing my own bag. ‘No, never,’ he said.
1 The completion of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1903 linked the headquarters of empire with the Far East. It was a fantastically ambitious engineering project conceived as a way of consolidating Moscow’s influence and power in Asia.
2 Marina Tsvetaeva, among the greatest poets of Russia’s bitter years, refers in her 1934 poem ‘Homesickness’ to her withdrawal into ‘my separate internal / World’, comparing exile to that of ‘a Kamchatka bear without ice’.
3 Ethnic Chukchi naturally fight back. A Chukchi and a Russian go hunting polar bears. They track one down at last. Seeing the bear, the Chukchi shouts, ‘Run!’, and starts running away. The Russian raises his gun and shoots the bear. ‘Russian hunter bad hunter,’ says the Chukchi. ‘Now you haul this bear ten miles to the yaranga yourself!’
4 I may have underestimated the practical issues. How easy would it be, I asked a mechanically-minded friend when I got back, to move a steering wheel from one side to the other? ‘Well,’ he said, after some reflection, ‘it would be easier to turn the car over and put the wheels on the roof.’
5 Two weeks after I returned from Chukotka, Abramovich was returned as a deputy and as parliamentary chairman, polling, according to the Central Election Commission, 97 per cent of the vote.
6 Who can forget Dostoevsky’s prison bath-house? Two hundred men in a room twelve paces square, the floor inches thick in slime, the convicts, their leg chains clanking, piled on benches pouring dirty water onto the shaven heads of the men crouched below – a phantasmagoria of crimson steaming bodies ridged with the scars of the lash. ‘It was not heat: it was hell.’
7 Eveny (formally known as Lamut) are not the same people as the more numerous Evenk (Tungus) living to the west.
8 As long ago as 2000, the United States Geological Survey judged that ‘the Arctic contains 25 per cent of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves’. This much-quoted statement, a shibboleth in the context of Arctic politics, is one which the USGS no longer officially endorses, some say because its experts now consider the figure to be higher.
9 By the late 1920s, Union-wide, ethnologists had identified 192 languages.
10 This was a case of déjà vu several times over. In 1986 Gorbachev emphasised the crucial economic role of the region in a speech delivered in Murmansk in which he promised to open up the Soviet Arctic. Fifty years before him, an older generation of Soviet apologists called the Russian Arctic, ‘Tomorrow’s America’.
