Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “Well, you know, Irkutsk wasn’t used to entertaining heads of big foreign states and we were not ready for him. So things began to hum. Special experts came in from Leningrad and Moscow to help. The first thing was to pave the road from Irkutsk to Baikal. Then they decided to build this special road to the top of the mountain so Eisenhower could have the best of views.

  “Well, he never came. The American U-2 spy plane was shot down over our country and the visit was cancelled. All the same, we in Irkutsk are grateful to Ike. Sometimes when we drive along this nice pavement to Baikal we give a friendly little thought to him.”

  Five

  DURING my first stay in Irkutsk I avoided visiting industrial plants. Such enterprises afflict me with a feeling of unease. However, when I returned to the city in 1969 with John de Visser, it became necessary to visit at least one plant so John could photograph people at work. Arrangements were made to tour the aluminum smelter at Shelekhov.

  We were accompanied by a rotund little man we had hired from Intourist to act as John’s interpreter. Sergei Saltikov had spent many years lazing about on Black Sea cruise ships with parties of European tourists, and he was furious at being dispatched to Siberia. He joined us only a few hours before we left Moscow and so we did not find out, until too late, that he was a lush, and that his concept of the English language was uniquely his own. Although perhaps capable of directing lady tourists to the nearest toilet, he sank into the absolute depths of obscurantism when he tried to explain something of any greater complexity.

  Once when we were being driven across the taiga our Russian guide asked Sergei to draw our attention to something.

  “Take your optic suspension position for observation independently in the reverse direction!” Sergei instructed us.

  By the time John and I had worked that one out, whatever it was we were supposed to see had long since vanished astern.

  Then there was the time we were being shown through a power house, one of whose turbines was out of action and under repair. As we approached the silent machine Sergei translated the guide’s explanation: “His tubule is steady for the prophylactic,” a statement which produced such an appalling mental image that I hustled past the unfortunate turbine without even a sideways look.

  Sergei was cast in an unmistakable mould. His little pink hands were horribly reminiscent of trotters, and his pointed ears and enormous jowls heightened the porcine effect. At the table he was a sight to behold. He engulfed his food with a single-minded fury which suggested that the ultimate Worm Of The World was resident in his rotund tummy.

  It was inevitable that we should privately give him the sobriquet of Piggy, and equally inevitable that he should get wind of it. From that moment he became our sworn enemy. His method of obtaining revenge was to intimate to others that, far from being what we seemed, we were in reality Yankee spies. Some of our Russian friends relayed this accusation back to us. They thought it hilariously funny, but there were times when the fun wore a little thin.

  The night before we were to tour the aluminum plant Piggy engaged in a monumental binge. In the morning he refused to budge out of his bed. “I am too many strengths down for this work continually,” he snorted, head buried in his pillow. “And which, therefore, is not in the paragraphs of my estimation working to plus four hours in the day!”

  By this time experience had made interpreters out of us; so we knew what he meant. According to the trade union regulations, an interpreter is not obliged to work at his profession more than four hours in any one day. However, this day had only just begun, and we had our four hours coming to us. The threat of being fired on the spot finally roused Piggy, but we would have been wiser had we left him in his bed.

  We were trebly unfortunate that day because Mark Sergei was out of town, and his place had been taken by a failed opera singer turned journalist who possessed the amiability of a trained bear, but lacked the bear’s native intelligence. Yura, who might have saved the situation, refused to accompany us on the reasonable grounds that factories gave him headaches.

  After a twenty-mile drive through rolling forest we descended into a valley dominated by an immense sprawl of factory buildings whose high chimneys spewed out the continuing pall of smoke and fumes I had noted with distaste on my first arrival in Irkutsk. I had mentioned this blight to my conservationist friends in the city, and they assured me that the management of the aluminum plant had promised to install air filtration equipment “as soon as possible.” My friends probably knew as well as I that such promises from industrialists, whether of the capitalist or communist persuasion, tend to have an illusive quality.

  There was a delay in the foyer of the main office building while a sullen Piggy went off to find the official who was to receive us. He proved to be a cool young man who was introduced as the Party Secretary for the factory.

  He did not seem pleased to see us. For once the warm welcome we were used to was notably lacking. In fact he looked at us as if he was of two minds whether or not to send for the militiamen – as policemen in the Soviet Union are called. John glanced at Piggy, and then at me with a wild surmise.

  “My God!” he muttered. “Do you suppose the little bastard’s done it again?”

  We were ushered into the Soviet version of a boardroom, equipped with a T-shaped, green, baize-covered table, and there we were treated to a succinct résumé, at the high school level, of how aluminum is extracted from bauxite. My questions about the people who worked at the plant, or indeed about anything, were fielded. We were then perfunctorily dismissed into the care of a lesser luminary who treated us with the suspicious abruptness of a prison warden. There followed a truncated tour of one smelting room, but at such a rapid pace that I recall almost nothing about it except that the magnetism from the electric furnaces deranged my watch forever.

  Before we left the office to see the plant, the Party Secretary put a firm hand on John’s camera bag.

  “You will take no pictures!”

  Despite our best efforts to persuade him otherwise, he remained adamant. Appeals to the failed opera singer to contact someone in authority in Irkutsk and obtain permission fell on deaf ears. Through it all Sergei stood with his pink little paws shoved into his coat pockets, smiling to himself. Revenge was sweet!

  As we drove back to Irkutsk without a single photograph to show for the expedition, John was building to a seething rage. When we reached the bridge across the Angara he ordered the driver to stop so he could shoot some pictures of the fishermen on the river. As he got out of the car, Piggy tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Forbidden photographics to bridging is make with Soviet Union!” he said smugly.

  Now John is a big man, and for one awful moment I was sure Sergei was going to perform an involuntary high dive into the river. It would have solved nothing. He would simply have floated safely to the shore like a toy balloon.

  John evidently realized that violence was not the answer, but he turned on Piggy like a bull elephant at bay. “Listen, you little bugger! One more word out of you and we’ll fix you with a new assignment. Intourist guide for polar bears on the New Siberian Islands … for ten years!”

  This was the sort of language Piggy understood. He deflated so spectacularly one could almost hear the air hissing out of him. For the brief period he remained to burden us he was as innocuous as a tub of lard.

  The visit to Shelekhov was a washout for John but it turned out reasonably well for me. That evening I described the incident to a group of friends and they were convulsed. After they had laughed themselves out, Lev Amisov undertook to repair the damage. He introduced me to a charming brunette named Luba Karamova, who had been one of the first shock workers on the Shelekhov project.

  Luba explained that when the decision was first taken to build the aluminum plant there were no trained construction workers available in the Irkutsk region.

  “It is the greatest problem we have – lack of manpower and [with a smile] womanpower too. Although now t
here are thirty million people in Siberia, it is not enough for the work we have to do. Hundreds of thousands of new people come every year but we could easily use millions more.

  “When they planned Shelekhov they could only get a few hundred technicians and trained people, so the Party sent out letters to all the Komsomol groups [Young Communist League] asking for volunteers who would help build the plant and the town. That was in 1959. I was eighteen then, and a student at Kharkov in the Ukraine. The idea of going to far away Siberia was exciting. It would be a new thing, I thought; an adventure, and something worthwhile doing, too.

  “There were nine hundred and five of us volunteers who started the work here. Few were older than nineteen and most were even younger than that. There were no professionals amongst us, and hardly any had special skills. We lived in tents pitched in the taiga and the first winter was rather dreadful. Sometimes it was forty-five degrees below zero. We kept the tents warm somehow, and we kept ourselves warm working, because clearing and preparing the construction site went on all winter. We learned skills as we needed them. Boys and girls worked at the same jobs and the girls worked just as hard as the boys.

  “In the spring we began getting new crowds of Komsomol youngsters and things looked up. We built log barracks and that was the end of the tents. A few people got fed up with the summer heat, the flies, the winter frosts and the hard work, and went home; but others came out to take their places.

  “By 1961 the factory buildings were nearly finished and there were several apartment blocks and stores and theatres and things in the new town. That autumn the first electric furnace was started up in the plant.

  “The job of the Komsomol youth was really over then, but the new city had become our home without our realizing what was happening. It was the biggest and perhaps the best thing most of us will ever do in our lifetimes. We had done it together and we didn’t want to let it go.

  “New workers were arriving and we were jealous of the newcomers. After all we had built the place, and so we decided we would stay and run it too.

  “So that is how it is, you see? We are Siberians now. We belong to Shelekhov and it to us. No regrets about it either! Although there is one thing I sometimes wish … now that we have everything for comfort, sometimes I wish I could do it all again.… I really envy the kids who are coming out to Siberia to start building their own cities, like Ust’Illim, and in the far north. They’ve got a great job ahead of them.…”

  Luba did not add much to my knowledge of aluminum production in Siberia although, like most Russians, she could probably have reeled off yards of imposing statistics if I had asked for them; but she did provide further confirmation for the existence of a phenomenon which seems to have escaped the notice of professional observers both inside and outside Russia.

  While grudgingly admitting to the speed and scope of developments in Siberia, most western observers assume that this fantastic efflorescence occurred primarily because Russia is a totalitarian state with absolute power to enforce compliance to its will. Setting aside the new technological capabilities common to both east and west, the experts conclude that the trick has been made possible by the manipulation and exploitation of servile labour. On the other hand the mandarins in the Kremlin seem to believe (or at least to want us to believe) that the Siberian transfiguration is entirely due to the righteousness of communist doctrine, and its ability to spur its believers to the accomplishments of prodigious feats.

  Neither conclusion is correct. The massive surge of human energy and effort which is transforming Siberia is substantially a phenomenon of freedom seeking. Before the Second World War, and for some years after it, a major attempt was made to develop Siberia by the use of forced labour – and the results were minimal. It was after the virtual abolition of labour camps that the Sleeping Giant truly came alive.

  The real reason for the explosion in Siberia is a compulsive desire on the part of many Russians to break out of the more and more rigidly mechanistic society which is dehumanizing the people of all “advanced” nations. It is an inchoate and instinctive urge to discover and to justify reality of self on the testing grounds of physical – which is to say, natural – adversity. Soviet people, and in particular the young, have become increasingly aware of the abnormal constraint the Brave New World is imposing on essential man. They are trying to find ways and means of again functioning as natural beings. In this way they are no different from young people in other technologically threatened societies – except that they have found an area of action where they can at least temporarily reject the concept that man is destined to be trapped within the confines of a machine-made and machine-dominated world. They have discovered the wilderness of Siberia, and they are flocking to it.

  It is a sad paradox that the result of their struggle to avoid being obliterated by the machine should so often end with the addition of yet another gigantic factory or power plant to sustain and further strengthen the juggernaut. This is apparent to some of them. Here are the words of a young dam builder who, at twenty-four, had already spent seven years in Siberia.

  “When we finished Bratsk they told us we had built the biggest power dam in the world. It was going to power enough industries to employ 400,000 people. We were supposed to be very proud of that, and some of the bright-eyed young Party people were proud of it. But you didn’t hear much talk about that amongst my crowd. When the last forms came off and the clean-up was completed, we could have got jobs with big pay in the new industries, but that was not for me. I came here to get away from being the slave of some machine. There’s a new power dam to be built up the Kolyma River, away into the arctic … a really tough proposition, that one. A lot of us are heading there. What’ll we do when that one’s built?” He took a long drink of beer. “Listen, with the electric maniacs we’ve got in Moscow, they’ll go right on giving us power dams to build until the world blows up!”

  Most of the freedom seekers are not so articulate, and not so clear about their motives. Some, like Luba, are filled with nostalgia for a freedom briefly tasted then lost again – and without a clear understanding of why that nostalgia should still haunt them. But there is a group of young (and not so young) artists, poets, novelists and others who think they understand what is happening to them. They are rather disparagingly referred to by the established literary elite as the “nature kids.”

  Here are excerpts from a letter I received from one of them while I was still in Siberia.

  We were all brought up to believe very much in the New Man who is the ultimate goal of Communism. Creating that Man was our sacred duty. He was to be the perfect human being. But as time passed some of us began to wonder about the kind of New Man we were trying so hard to make. When they sent Gagarin into space he was supposed to be the prototype, yet when we thought hard about it we realized Gagarin didn’t matter much. He was along for the ride. It was the machine we sent into space that was the essence of the New Man!

  We began then to understand that the New Man was going to be truly a creation of man! It was a short way from there to realizing we were creating a monster, and in so doing we would become monsters ourselves, taking on the character of the machine.…

  Man is not a machine; he is a living thing subject to natural laws, and if he is going to prosper he must abide by those laws. This is the way we must understand ourselves. This is the “New Man” we must recover.

  We talk very much about our Russian soul. Do you know what that soul really is? It is the primitive in us. This presence has been in constant conflict with the illusion we have been creating about ourselves. Out of this conflict came much of the agony that is the greatness of our music, of our best writers.…

  Some people sneer at us. They think we are advocating a return to the idea of the Noble Savage! They are incapable of understanding! We do not want to “return” to anything; we only want to peel off the layers of paint and varnish, chrome and plastic behind which we human beings have hidden ourselves from ourselves,
and so come to the true man buried underneath.…

  One afternoon I went to meet a group of students at Irkutsk State University. It was a brilliant winter day and the air had a peculiar lucidity as if there was no atmospheric roof at all over this ancient city on its high plateau.

  We passed a great new hotel being built by Intourist, all glass and glitter and slab concrete in the sterile style of new hotels the world over. However, this one had a peculiar anomaly. The Moscow designers had planned a huge cantilevered aluminum and concrete canopy to project out from the façade to the very edge of the roadway.

  When construction began on this canopy it was found that an ancient tree stood in the way. In almost any other place in the world the tree would have been summarily condemned, for it stood in the path of progress. Not, however, in Irkutsk. With some considerable difficulty the canopy was modified and a gaping hole was left in it through which the old tree could continue to thrust its massive trunk toward the pale Siberian sky.

  As we walked past it one of my companions gave the tree a friendly pat. “Do you know who saved this tree? Not the planners, I can tell you! It was the workmen themselves. They refused to cut it down and the people of the city stood right behind them.”

  Perhaps this is only another example of incurable romanticism in the Russian psyche, but it may have a deeper meaning. Certainly some of my Irkutsk friends look upon the old tree as a kind of symbol of a new resistance movement – a peaceful movement directed at slowing the onrush of the mechanical colossus, Progress, so that men can at least try to regain meaningful control of it.