Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “We simply got sick of it. Too many people. Too much confusion. Too many regulations. Not enough time to stop and talk and smile a bit. Who knows if we’ll ever go west again? Our Yakut friends say the taiga has claimed us, and they may well be right.”

  There is an apparent paradox in the Yakut approach to modern society. Although most of the ordinary workers show little desire to become cogs in a technological machine, their intellectuals display a phenomenal ability in all fields of knowledge, including the most esoteric realms of science. They go after higher education with a single mindedness and concentrated effort which appears peculiarly at odds with their devotion to their Yakut heritage and their desire to retain their national singularity.

  The explanation for this purposeful pursuit of knowledge turned out to be both obvious and simple. It came to me from a rather remarkable source – a Yakut Communist Party member holding a high post in the state hierarchy.

  “Knowledge is power. This is a truism but it is something which must never be forgotten by a Small People. As a Small People we have the choice of turning our whole destiny over to a stronger people – letting them direct us where to go – or we can try and keep the leadership ourselves. If we are going to do this we must have as much knowledge as they do and, since we are weaker in numbers, we must be even more effective in using it.

  “The willing horse may lead a good life – but the driver leads a better one! What is even more important is that the horse cannot choose the path he wishes to follow. Although we are happy to share our sleigh with our good friends and brothers from other places in the Soviet Union, and though we all hope to arrive some day at the same haven, we intend to keep a hold upon the reins.”

  As far back as 1921 Lenin proclaimed the policy of preserving national entities within the Soviet Union and of helping them make the most of their own cultural resources for the ultimate enrichment of the entire state.

  Lenin’s vision has not always been in favour with subsequent arbiters of Soviet policy. There have been powerful men who espoused the melting-pot principle with such vigour that a good many “nationalistic” leaders of Small Peoples (and some not so small) simply vanished from the scene. It is impossible to know exactly how Lenin’s principles of self-determination for minority peoples are now viewed in the Kremlin but, hopefully, the proponents of the melting pot seem to be losing ground. If so, it is probably because so many of the Small Peoples have demonstrated that Lenin was right and that the Soviet Union as a whole has been the gainer from the tremendous efforts the Small Peoples have made in their insistent and largely successful struggle to survive as spiritual, cultural and ethnic entities.

  “Without the existence of a vigorous native population led by their own knowledgeable elite, the Soviet development of the Far North and the Near North would not have been possible or, at least, would not have been practicable on anything like the present scale.”

  This flat statement was made to me by a director of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad, himself one of the most knowledgeable men in the Soviet Union on things relating to the north.

  “In their search for ways to maintain their identities while moving out of the past, the so-called Small Peoples needed a thorough understanding of all aspects of modern life. We could have made it difficult for them to obtain this but we did not choose to do so. Instead we went to great lengths to make higher educational facilities available to them and they, in their turn, went to great lengths to take advantage of them. The result is that there now exists a very large cadre of native people, inured to the north, almost instinctively understanding it as we never can, and equipped and trained to use the most sophisticated instruments and information of modern science. It is these people, as much as any, who are solving the essential problems of how we can grow and prosper in the polar regions of this planet. They are helping their own people to prosper in the changing world; but they are helping the rest of us even more.”

  I did not have to take his word for this. I saw it demonstrated in many places; but perhaps most spectacularly in the Yakutsk Eternal Frost Institute.

  Eternal frost equals permafrost in our less romantic terminology, but by any name it is the most important single factor bearing on the development of arctic and sub-arctic lands. One fifth of the earth’s land surface, three-quarters of Siberia, and the whole of Yakutia sits on a crust of ice, frozen bog, soil, gravel, and rock – a crust with a maximum frost depth of 1,500 metres in northwest Yakutia and an average depth under the whole of the republic of 320 metres.

  It is hard to conceive of the ferocious climatic conditions which froze the earth to such a depth – froze it so thoroughly that it still remains at a constant temperature of minus 04° C, despite the efforts of the planet’s hot interior and of the sun to melt it. The sun does have some effect, but a minimal and transient one. Near the southern limits of permafrost the surface may thaw each summer to a depth of several feet and, in the far north, to a depth of a few inches. In winter, however, it all freezes into one solid block again.

  The effects of this underlying shield of frost are tremendously far-reaching. For one thing there is no drainage through it and so all precipitation must escape by running off the surface or, if it cannot do that, it remains to form gigantic morasses like those which characterize the West Siberian Plain. The presence of permafrost is responsible for the size and flow of the great Siberian rivers and, in northern Canada, is largely responsible for the astronomical numbers of lakes and ponds which in some regions cover more than two-thirds of the tundra surface. Paradoxically, it is also largely responsible for the existence of the immense northern forests, since it acts to conserve the rather scanty precipitation. Without permafrost as a basement sealant, much of the northern interior of America and Asia would probably be desert. These are only a few of the ways permafrost affects the polar world. It affects human activity in that world just as strongly.

  Much of the upper level of the permafrost structure underlying Siberia is a mixture of soils, gravels, shattered rock and other unstable materials cemented by frozen water into something approaching the consistency and strength of bedrock. However, strong as it is, this cement must melt if its temperature rises above freezing point. When this happens, an area that appears to be as stable as a granite plain turns into a jelly-like bog which, in summer, absorbs more water and then, on refreezing in the winter, expands and bursts upward like a miniature mountain range being born.

  Anything which disturbs the delicate temperature balance protecting permafrost can bring about a horrendous change. A tracked vehicle grinding over summer tundra and breaking through the thin insulating layer of moss and lichen can create vast, heaving ditches which will endure for centuries. Casual damage to the forest floor during timbering operations can cause a fatal thaw which leaves the shallow-rooted trees with no hold on anything but quaking bog, and finally sends them toppling into chaos. And structures built by man can, through the slight temperature rise created by their own weight, or by heat radiated from them, create a local swamp into which the buildings sink, totter and collapse. The same thing can happen to roads, or in fact to anything man tries to build upon the frozen ground.

  Sitting in the office of the Director of the Eternal Frost Institute, I listened to senior research scientist, Marina Kuzminichna Gavrilova, talk about this curious world in which she, and her ancestors through countless generations, had been born.

  “The idea of a rock-solid frozen arctic is terribly misleading,” said this middle-aged Yakut matron. “Everything on the surface of the land is delicately balanced on the edge of potential disruption. We people of the north have always understood this, but since we never attempted to change the surface it had no great effect upon our lives. Now all is different. There is hardly one single thing modern man wants to do, or hopes to do, in the far north that is not influenced by the eternal frost, or which cannot influence it. Man has had to learn to come to terms with it, to understand it. At first he t
ried to fight it, and every time he failed. The engineers who tried to build one of the first power dams on Siberia’s eternal frost were sure their hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete would withstand any stress of nature. An earthquake would probably not have hurt their dam, but its weight melted the frost in the frozen rocks on which it stood. The rocks crumbled and the dam split open.

  “People finally realized that here was an antagonist which would not be conquered so easily. Studies were begun, but I can say it was not until some of the people who were born on eternal frost began to join the studies that the attitudes really changed. Instead of trying to conquer the frost, our scientists began to learn how to make friends with it. We are still doing that, and it is a successful effort.”

  The Director, Pavel Melnikov, who is a Russian although he has lived in Siberia for more than thirty years, took up the story.

  “Marina Kuzminichna is correct. Eternal frost used to be considered the worst enemy to those developing the north. Now it has become our biggest ally. Instead of trying to destroy it, we protect it. Instead of trying to push it aside, we use it. Whenever planners or constructors come to Siberia to begin work on a new project we tell them: ‘Be nice to the Eternal Frost Queen. Keep her well covered under nice thick blankets and she will let you do anything you wish. But if you strip off her clothes, you had better watch out!’ ”

  This was a somewhat risqué simile in the Soviet Union, where prudery in conversation is something of a fetish. I got the point. I was to see the “be nice” principle demonstrated scores of times before I left Siberia.

  Meantime I toured the Institute and I was as fascinated by the people I met as by the work they were doing.

  At the age of forty, Marina Gavrilova, born on a reindeer farm near Oimyakon, commands some thirty scientists and two of the most important laboratories in the Institute – Geophysics and Heat Dynamics.

  At the age of nineteen, she resolved to spend her working life studying the eternal frost. After graduating from the Yakut State University (in one of the first classes), she went to Moscow and then to Leningrad for advanced studies. Her doctorate thesis on arctic climate won her a Gold Medal and was published in scientific periodicals abroad. In 1958 she returned to Yakutsk and got down to work, but as a married woman with a family to raise. Her husband, Vasily Gosikov (it is common for married people to keep their own last names), who is the Director of the Yakutsk Music Theatre, told me something about the marriage:

  “A very good woman, Marina. But when we were going to get married some of my friends did a bit of joking about it. Better to marry an iceberg, one of them said. All the same, it works out very well. She has so much of cold in that underground laboratory of hers, she really appreciates a warm-blooded chap when she gets home at night.”

  Marina’s staff was about a third European and two-thirds native. All held degrees of Bachelor or Master value. If there was any racial tension, it did not show, and the respect and regard which the European staff members demonstrated toward Marina could hardly have been contrived.

  There are fourteen major labs in the Institute. Eight are headed by Siberian natives and three of these by Yakut women! There is a lab devoted to permafrost and ground transportation; one to airfields; one to deep mining in permafrost; several to theoretical research; one to agriculture on permafrost, and so on.

  Another Yakut lady, Lilia Everstova, who holds her doctorate in advanced mathematics, showed me the computer lab, which is her domain. Her staff was assembling a monstrous digital computer to support two other digitals and an analog computer which, she told us, were so overworked they were getting tired. I could understand that, if the way she worked her human staff was an indication of the way she drove her electronic slaves. Her second-in-command, a lean young Evenk named Leonid Lee (also holder of a mathematics doctorate) told me he pitied the new computer. “Lilia will give it a nervous breakdown in six weeks, poor thing!”

  Since I have small affinity for laboratories, no matter how sparkling and complex they may be (and these were both), and none at all for computers, I was glad when Marina took me into her holy of holies – a lab built thirty metres underground in the permafrost itself. This was a fascinating maze of tunnels entered through heavily insulated doors, in which a variety of experiments under natural conditions were in progress. It was an eerie place, ice-cold of course, with feathery ice crystals clustering like hibernating butterflies on the frozen sand of which the roof and walls were composed. Marina proudly showed me a Carbon-14 apparatus for dating permafrost samples which she and her staff had designed and built themselves; and she lingered long over a working model of a method of piping natural gas through unlined tunnels drilled deep below the surface.

  “You see,” she explained, “in eternal frost there is no need for shoring or supports for a tunnel. And, since the material is homogeneous, gas can be pumped through it without danger of its leaking out. The biggest problem was how to keep the gas at a temperature below minus 04°, and this we solved by compressing the gas and so lowering its temperature. We will soon build our first experimental transmission line here in Yakutsk and some day gas from the big new fields at Vilyuisk (three hundred miles northwest of Yakutsk) will flow over, or rather under, much of Siberia in eternal frost tunnels bored by mechanical moles.”

  Impressive. But I was more intrigued by one of Marina’s personal projects. She wants to build an Eternal Frost Museum in which will be preserved samples of plants, fruits, animals, and other perishables, for the edification of our descendants in some distant future.

  “Think how exciting it would be! Nature did the same thing with the mammoths that have been found preserved in eternal frost here in Yakutia. We could have all sorts of things – not stuffed, but real. Of course we should have to have some people, too – after they had died naturally, of course. Would you like to represent the people of your country? We would make a very special niche in the Hall Of Northern People, and you could wear that lovely Scottish skirt I’ve heard about.”

  “Why not?” I replied, suppressing a shiver at this macabre suggestion. “I’ll put it in my will.”

  On several occasions I had long talks with Director Pavel Melnikov, a loquacious man whose enthusiasm for eternal frost has grown stronger with the years. He is also a very forthright man.

  “I do not understand you Canadians and Americans. Almost your whole north is eternal frost country, yet you made no real attempt to study it until the 1950s when it became a military problem at the time you were building your Distant Early Warning Line. From what your scientists have told me, it is still largely a military problem for you, and only a few of your best men are studying it.

  “We, on the other hand, have been actively studying the problem of how eternal frost affects economic and human development of the north for the past forty years. I myself have done nothing else for thirty-four years. This Institute employs 320 people, of whom seventy-five are scientists with high degrees, and 130 are engineers and technicians; and we will have twice as many people in three or four more years. We are building branches all over the Soviet north. There is one in Chernychevsky devoted to the construction of power dams using eternal frost in place of concrete; there is one in west Siberia for studying problems concerning the production and handling of oil and gas. We are building others in Irkutsk and Magadan.

  “We think it extraordinarily stupid that you people and we should be duplicating the same work. The problems are essentially the same in your country as in ours. The efforts you have put into solving those problems are fractional compared with ours, so you would hardly be the losers in a reciprocal exchange of information and a sharing of research work. We have tried to bring this about. I have twice visited Canada and have shared all possible information with your scientists, but have received little in return. We invited your Minister for the North, Mr. Chrétien, to send two or three Canadian scientists here to spend a year studying our methods. He has not done so. Last year we held an Internati
onal Symposium here and invited eight Americans from the small U.S.A. Permafrost Lab. It was agreed it would be a reciprocal visit. Well, the Americans came and saw all we had to show them, but we are still waiting to be invited to visit their country.

  “Overall total planning is the only way to develop the north as opposed to simple exploitation of its resources. And even in exploitation, which is the North American approach, everything you do has to take eternal frost into account. There is a terrible danger that if we interfere with it without sufficient knowledge, we will bring calamities to the northern regions. With all our efforts we don’t begin to have enough knowledge yet. You people have far less. It is not a matter of politics or competing economies; it is a matter of simple common sense that we should work together to ensure the preservation of a great part of the earth for the use of future generations.

  “In earlier times man used to learn by experience what he could and could not do with his environment. I don’t believe he learned very much by that method. Now it has become dangerous to his survival to follow such absurd procedures. We think this is a criminal way to act!”

  Eleven

  THIRTY-SEVEN years after Yermak broke through the Ural wall, a band of Cossacks rowed rough-built boats along the wide Yenisei to the mouth of an unknown tributary flowing westward out of an immense mountain plateau. This region was inhabited by a forest dwelling people whom the Cossacks called Tungus, but who called themselves Evenk. The land of the Evenk was full of fine sable, which drew the Cossacks up the new river (Tunguska they named it), over rapids, around roaring falls, deep into mountain valleys and finally to the height of land. A small party crossed the height of land, built new boats, launched them on a mountain brook then descended it towards the east. They had discovered the headwaters of the Vilyui River, which was to lead them to its mother stream, the Lena, and so open the whole of northeastern Siberia to Cossack depradations.