Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  Long an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, Yakutia signed a Declaration of State Sovereignty in 1990 and created its own government and parliament. It has a Yakut president who presides over a series of ministries, but I was hard-pressed to discover exactly what these government bodies did. One local cynic described them to me as ‘toy ministries’, because the fact remains that Moscow still calls the shots. And it is unlikely ever to let go because Yakutia is the archetypal Siberian treasure house of mineral wealth awaiting exploitation. Oil, gas, coal, antimony and iron ore are here in abundance, but diamonds and gold top the region’s impressive list of natural resources. Yakutia turns out about a quarter of the world’s diamond production, and more gold nuggets are found here than anywhere else on Earth.

  It was the discovery of gold in the Kolyma region of Yakutia that inspired the building of the road we now travelled on. Known in polite circles as the Kolyma Route, Russians have also dubbed it ‘the road built on bones’ because it was constructed by inmates of Stalin’s gulags who froze to death and could not be buried in the permafrost, so their skeletons were used as ballast for the road. The few survivors called Kolyma the ‘White Hell’.

  Construction of the Kolyma Route started in the 1920s at Magadan and continued inland. The road stretches for more than 1,200 kilometres and they say that every metre cost a human life. I had heard a lot of talk about the soul in Siberia and until today my soul had been having a pretty good time. The walrus dip was supposed to be good for the soul, the frequent shots of vodka were good for the soul, but the day we started driving along this ‘Road of Bones’, my soul’s condition took a definite turn for the worse.

  I kept thinking that it was obscene just to be here and that I shouldn’t be doing it. But then I thought that it would be just as obscene not to drive along this road since it was here and all those people had perished in its making. Then the driver would stop and we’d all pile out for a pee and I’d be standing there with the matter in hand and suddenly I’d start to feel guilty because I was probably pissing on some poor bastard’s grave. Then a wind would get up and the cold would begin to bite, making all exposed areas of skin start to burn and the full horror of the convicts’ plight would begin to sink in. The Kolyma region was a white cold furnace that Stalin had stoked with human bodies in order to fuel a great socialist search for gold that would pay for his experiments.

  Let’s face it; Stalin was the best mass murderer the twentieth century ever saw. The boy from Georgia done good. His exploits make Cambodia’s Pol Pot look like a cuddly toy, makes Adolf Hitler’s extermination of the Jews seem like a training exercise. Twenty million … thirty million people, no one will ever know. The system he devised for mass killing was the best. Send them out to Siberia, don’t clothe them properly, don’t give them enough to eat and just work them to death. And when they are about to die you just leave them outside in the ‘White Hell’. You don’t even have to waste a bullet or develop some special gas canister to do away with them. And finally, the ultimate irony, get them to die on the road and hey presto there’s the next metre of aggregate for you in the morning. It was all so fiendishly simple.

  And who was it that wanted this road anyway? Not the people who lived in this region. They were just a bunch of nomadic reindeer herders. What would they have wanted with a road? No, the reason was more convoluted in its logic, in a way that typified the Soviet Union. Old Joe Stalin, sitting with his cronies in the nice warm Kremlin, set up Kolyma’s gulags to build a road to go to other gulags that manned the mines to produce the gold to pay for the system that ran the gulags. That was it.

  It’s a strange place, Siberia. I really hadn’t expected to come all this way to get so irate about a piece of transport infrastructure.

  Stalin was by no means the first to see Siberia as a dumping ground for Russian subjects he didn’t like. The practice may have begun as early as 1591, when 500 insurrectionists were said to have been exiled by Boris Godunoff, later a very unpopular Czar. The historical accuracy of this tale is questionable, but not that of several thousand undesirables who were dispatched in chains to various parts of Siberia after an uprising in Ukraine towards the end of the seventeenth century. The idea of banishment to Siberia as both a punishment but also as a means of settling the vast tracts of bountiful wilderness had become firmly established by the mid-nineteenth century. Hence the range of crimes that earned their perpetrators a one-way ticket east was widened to include a number of more petty offences. Murderers and political offenders were joined by those convicted of eluding military service, vagrancy, horse stealing, debt and insubordination to lawful authority. Even in the latter half of the nineteenth century, these miserable exiles were still forced to walk to Siberia in chains. The journey from Moscow to Yakutsk was more than 8,000 kilometres. It took them two and a half years. At least Stalin offered transport.

  After the gulag system was officially disbanded in the late 1950s, the stick was superseded by the carrot as forced occupation of Siberia was replaced by the ‘long rouble’. Workers were lured to the region by the offer of salaries as much as eight times higher than corresponding Moscow wages, along with low prices and abundant supplies. Thousands of remote communities sprung up to serve the Soviet mining, oil and nuclear power industries, attracting pampered pioneers who dreamt of making a quick killing in the permafrost and retiring to the warmer latitudes of the ‘mainland’ – non-Arctic European Russia.

  Nezhdaninskoye was more of a village than a town, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with the sole purpose of excavating gold from the Verkhoyansk mountains that hemmed it in on all sides. In its heyday in the 1980s, it drew so many volunteers that they had to live in railroad cars while waiting for enough housing to be built. The thriving community supported a kindergarten, a school, a gym, a library and a small hospital. They even had a music institute with its own brass band. They were still building the post office when the state-owned mining company pulled the plug. Today it is like a post-Soviet version of the Mary Celeste, just a dot on the map that Moscow has tried to rub out.

  I wandered into a two-storey wooden apartment block where doors had been pulled off at the hinges and burnt by people left behind after the village was liquidated in 1998 and the coal supplies had run out. A kitchen was littered with broken bits of equipment, a lonely pepper shaker and some dried mushrooms scattered across the room. There were frozen piles of human excrement surrounded by soiled pages pulled from books. Old shoes lay forlornly on the floor.

  In another dilapidated apartment was a child’s exercise book, its first few pages full of spelling tests that had lost their significance. Floorboards had been ripped up and broken glass lay everywhere, partially concealing a torn picture of the Madonna and child. It was a sad epitaph for Moscow’s attempts to colonize Siberia. I guess in this case Siberia won.

  Few of the village’s inhabitants had been local people. According to an old legend, a rare and beautiful firebird once flew over Yakutia and dropped her gold feathers that turned into the belts of alluvial and ore deposits of precious metal common to the area today. The Yakuts believe that finding this gold brings misfortune. Andrei told me that when the pioneers were evacuated from Nezhdaninskoye they were taken on ships up the river to Yakutsk and from there further west. But although many had relatives in western parts of Siberia and European Russia, Nezhdaninskoye had been their home. ‘It was very traumatic for them to leave,’ Andrei said simply.

  The evacuation had been slow, leaving a few to fend for themselves. As winter set in, not only were they burning anything that they could lay their hands on, but the village dogs started mysteriously disappearing until someone admitted that the local canine community was helping to keep the remaining human population alive. A village of golden dreams had turned into a prison camp without the barbed wire.

  I was beginning to get used to Siberia’s little surprises, but Andrei still shocked me when he declared that we would spend the night in this ghost town. ‘Where
exactly?’ I asked tentatively. ‘You will see,’ he said.

  On the outside the tenement block that was to be our ‘hotel’ for the night had been finished with such appalling attention to detail that it gave the concrete a stucco effect. The same plasterer had been assigned to the interior décor on the bunker-like walls that appeared through the usual heavily padded double doors. I realized that this place must still be inhabited when I saw a single bare, but lit, light bulb. It revealed a tangle of electric cables running along the walls and a rickety wooden staircase that looked as if it had never been new. Beneath the staircase on the cracked concrete floor stood an ancient iron bedstead, a couple of metal buckets and a dirty cardboard box. I put my hand on an antique radiator. It was warm, but still unable to disperse a growth of ice that clung to the concrete above the doorway like a giant white fungus.

  The surprises had only just begun. A figure appeared from the stairway and moved towards me. The young man’s Yakut face peered out from beneath a bouffant of shoulder-length black hair that he flicked from his eyes to give me a glimpse of the gold stud adorning his earlobe. ‘Welcome,’ he said in a broad North American accent, ‘welcome to our happy home.’ The leather of his trousers, black to match his flowing locks, gave off the faintest creak as he proffered an outstretched hand. ‘My name’s Sasha by the way. Did you have a good journey?’

  The fact that Nezhdaninskoye is still considered to be a world-class gold deposit is testament to the efficacy of Soviet economics. Three years after the village’s liquidation, a small part of the settlement was up and running again courtesy of a Dublin-based natural resources company that had bought a 50 per cent stake in the mine. Sasha was an interpreter, one of the small Celtic Resources team that at the time of my visit only included one expatriate, an electrical engineer named Chris. The company was still waiting for all the paperwork concerning their operation in Yakutia to be processed. This meant there wasn’t a great deal of interpreting for Sasha to do. He told me that his main duties were to translate Chris’s daily report and the menu in the canteen. ‘What do you do the rest of the time?’ I asked him. ‘We have some videos in the canteen. I listen to music,’ he replied in the Midwestern accent he had picked up from an American English teacher in Yakutsk. ‘But most of the time I just hang out, y’know.’

  Chris was originally from Wales. I talked to him briefly when I arrived that evening, although not exactly in person. We spoke through the door of his bedroom. Although it was only 8 o’clock he had already turned in and he wasn’t going to get up for an idle chat with an itinerant Englishman. There was something about this behaviour that struck me as slightly odd.

  Although born in Wales, Chris had lived in Australia for the last 20 years. There were plenty of mines in Australia, he told me the following morning when we met face-to-face, and he had worked in most of them. He was a red-haired giant of a man who had also done stints in several other far-flung places. How did this compare, I wondered. He looked at me from behind the cover of one of the small desks in his office. The desks were really tables, covered in plastic tablecloths that came with a flowery design. ‘It’s the most bizarre,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve been in mines in a lot of remote spots all over the world, but this is the most remote.’

  Chris’s office was on the ground floor opposite the canteen. It had no doubt originally been part of an apartment. A computer sat on one flowery desk next to a pile of glossy brochures for belt conveyors and power tools and a guide to satellite communications pulled from a magazine. A short row of airport paperbacks rested against one wall. Pinned to another was a Russian technical drawing of some kind of industrial processing plant. Lined up on the chunky windowsill was a display of old metal serial number plates from Soviet mining equipment made in Novosibirsk by a company named Trud, which means ‘labour’. There was a major accumulation of ice on the inside of the double glazed windows.

  ‘But I have e-mail,’ Chris continued, ‘I’m not completely cut off here, and Sasha and the other guys are good company. It could be worse.’ I did a good job of not saying that I found it difficult to imagine how.

  Chris was well into a three-month stint at Nezhdaninskoye that had included Christmas and New Year. He wasn’t very forthcoming when I asked him how he’d spent the festive period, but he did tell me he had gone for a walk each day. ‘I walked up the track, up this side of the valley,’ he said. During the shortest days the ghost town had never emerged from the shadows of the surrounding mountains. Chris’s daily stroll up the hillside was so that he could see the sun. ‘I felt that was important,’ he told me.

  Meanwhile, he had set about organizing his personal life as best he could. ‘There’s a woman who gets me beer,’ he said. ‘She commissions truck drivers to bring it to town. I wander down to her shop most days to see if there’s been a delivery. It’s a bit of exercise too, although it’s a bloody cold walk.’ ‘There’s a shop here?’ I asked incredulously. ‘But this is a ghost town.’ ‘It’s only a little shop,’ he said almost apologetically. ‘There are a few people still living here, but I don’t think she can make much of a living out of it. I buy what I can, but there’s not much of a selection.’ Chris’s major complaint was the lack of decent chocolate. ‘She only ever has Mars bars, and I hate Mars bars. It’s the caramel that doesn’t agree with me.’

  I joined Chris for his daily constitutional down towards Nezhdaninskoye’s shop. A bright sun was hovering above a sharply drawn horizon, bathing the surrounding wooded peaks in a primrose glow. ‘They’ve all got names …’ Chris said, squinting at the mountaintops, ‘the highest one’s called Fairytale. There’s another mountain they say looks like the Sleeping Beauty in profile, her face, nipples, everything. But you have to switch on your fantasy button to see it.’

  We passed the shattered remains of several wooden houses and the music institute before coming to the snow-covered airfield that Chris told me had last been used a couple of months previously. The small wooden terminal building, topped by a sagging windsock, looked as if it might indeed still be operational. A snow shovel was propped beside its brown door, which was locked with a padlock. Nailed on the wall beside the doorway was a large painted sign in English that read ‘Nezhdaninskoye International Airport’. I couldn’t decide whether this was in hope or in jest.

  The shop had a brightly painted sign too. It said Magazin in red on a white background bordered by blue and white stylized flowers. The red lettering seemed incongruous in the snowscape. The sign sat above a long window with six panes of glass, none of which I could see through because they were thick with frost. The lady who ran the shop smiled broadly to reveal a gold front tooth when Chris appeared through the doorway. She welcomed me too, but conversation was limited because neither Chris nor I could speak more than a handful of words in Russian. It felt all wrong to be among the few inhabitants of a ghost town and not be able to talk to each other.

  The shop was actually a corner of the woman’s front room equipped with rough wooden shelves bearing neat piles of stock. There were tins of Nesquick and coffee, little gherkins in jars, cans of peas and sweetcorn, as well as several types of fish. Four bottles of beer, two each of two different brands, sat on the top shelf alongside four bottles of what looked like Russian champagne. At one end of this shelf were three huge white tubs of Golden Mayonnaise with yellow tops. At the other, a large black cat that had its eyes fixed on the lady’s fur hat as she stood, arms folded, waiting for our order. Down below were packets of biscuits and tea and a row of snow-white eggs. Several brands of cigarettes were also available. Chris’s hated Mars bars were in a box next to a pile of garlic bulbs. Oddly enough, there was a postcard of a girl with big bosoms stuck on the wall beside them.

  Beneath the window, where a blanket had been laid to keep out the weather and had become set fast inside a great wad of ice, there were cartons of milk, tubes of shampoo and a cardboard box full of frozen fish. Beside this were more giant tubs of Golden Mayonnaise.

  Chris boug
ht a plastic litre-bottle of very red fizzy pop and asked the woman whether there were any pistachio nuts. She smiled and shook her head. ‘They do have pistachios sometimes,’ he mused, ‘but not today, right out of supplies.’

  I felt for Chris, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with so little to do that a trip to the shop had become the highlight of his day. So much so that I gave him one of my prized chocolate bars before I left. His eyes lit up. ‘Oh boy! Thanks mate.’ I imagined him secretly scoffing it in his bed at 8 o’clock that evening.

  Ever since I’d arrived, I had been having trouble pronouncing the ghost town’s name. As we drove off the following morning, I asked Andrei if he could translate ‘Nezhdaninskoye’. Andrei paused for a short while and said, ‘Approximately, this word means “unexpected”.’

  F O U R

  We continued along the Road of Bones through kilometre after kilometre of virgin territory. The occasional fenced corral for horses or cattle that had marked our first day out of Yakutsk had long gone with the flat plain of the Lena River. The road twisted and turned as it took us further into the untouched hills and mountains where the slopes became steeper and the valleys deeper. For an entire morning, the heavy frost and snow that covered every bush and tree looked as though the make-up department had tried to simulate a nativity scene but had overdone it. Then the trees became skeletal, with no needles that I could see, just black and dark brown silhouettes against the snow, some of them leaning over drunkenly. They had climbed up the mountainsides as far as they could go and had grown weary with the effort. As they thinned out into the distance the mountains looked as if they were sporting stubble.