Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  In the autumn of the year 1618 or 1619, these Russian voyageurs were stopped by ice and forced to winter on the Vilyui bank near the mouth of a small stream called Malaya Bortuobuya. They somehow survived the winter and when the ice went out launched their boats on the spring flood and were flung down the foaming Vilyui to emerge upon the placid Lena.

  With the founding of Yakutsk a few years later, the difficult Tunguska-Vilyui route was abandoned. For two hundred years the Vilyui wilderness was forgotten except by the Evenk whose home it was. As the centuries passed the Evenk shrank to a scattered remnant and the Vilyui region became a void of white rivers, dark forests and looming hills into which only a handful of placer gold seekers ever penetrated.

  This was how it was on a June day in 1955 when Yuri Kabardon, a young geologist, set up a portable radio transmitter near the site of the long-vanished Cossack winter camp at Malaya Bortuobuya, and tapped out a message:

  HAVE STARTED SMOKING PIPE OF PEACE TOBACCO GOOD

  The “pipe” was a tube of grey-blue rock a mile in diameter extending down toward the earth’s molten magma core. The tobacco was diamond-laden kimberlite.

  Fourteen years after Kabardon sent his message, I stood beside a table in the city of Mirny (Peace) near the site of Kabardon’s discovery camp and watched two young women sifting through a pile of glittering jewels which, although worth several million dollars, represented only a minute part of the riches that lay at the end of one of the longest and most frustrating treasure hunts in human history.

  Soon after their arrival on the Lena some of the Cossack intruders heard of certain strange Fire Stones prized by the Yakut for their miraculous powers. Alas, most of the stones proved to be embedded only in Yakut legend, although a few real examples apparently fell into Russian hands. At any rate, something gave birth to rumours which grew and spread until they reached St. Petersburg. In 1736, M. W. Lomonosov, an erudite intellectual of scientific bent whose dictum, “The power of Russia will grow as Siberia grows!” is now one of the guiding principles of the Soviet Union, flatly stated that diamonds existed in Sibir, and predicted they would be found in quantity if men would seek them with proper diligence.

  Men sought for them all right, but for a long time only a few small gems, of no great value, were discovered.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of merchants from Irkutsk and Yakutsk organized a major and continuing search in the Lena valley and along its tributaries. Lured on year after year by the discovery of occasional scattered gems in gravel bars these men spent fortunes without any real success.

  After the Revolution, success, though still elusive, became increasingly desirable because of a “gentleman’s agreement” amongst the non-communist countries which was intended to prevent the new Soviet states from buying diamonds from the international diamond cartel. Since industrial diamonds were vital if the U.S.S.R. was to transform herself into a modern nation, or even if she was to survive at all, the search for a source of domestic diamonds began anew … and failed again.

  The Soviet Union was forced to buy what stones she could get on the world’s black market at fantastically inflated prices.

  In the middle 1930s Vladimir Sobolev, a young graduate of the Leningrad Mining Institute who had meticulously studied everything available concerning the structure and character of South African diamond-bearing zones, went to Siberia and spent several years exploring the taiga-covered hills and the deep river valleys of the wild country lying between the Lena and the Yenisei. Early in 1941 he presented a report to Gosplan – the Soviet master-planning organization in Moscow.

  “The Central Siberian geological platform,” wrote Sobolev, “is to all intents and purposes identical with the South African diamond-bearing region. Here, if anywhere, we will find diamonds. I particularly direct attention to the valley of the Vilyui River and recommend that detailed prospecting be started there at once.”

  Unfortunately Hitler invaded Russia shortly thereafter, and Sobolev’s report was buried under the debris of war.

  During the next few years it hardly mattered. The western nations relaxed their restrictions and sold industrial diamonds to the hard-pressed Russians, who had now become their allies. When the war ended and the West reverted to its tactics of denying the Soviets whatever might be of help to them, diamonds were high on the new prohibited list.

  Once again the age-old search was renewed. Someone recalled that Sobolev had specifically suggested trying the Vilyui basin. On August 12, 1949, Gregory Finstein, a young Jewish geologist, panned six diamonds on the Vilyui sand bars, and before the season ended the largest collection of gems ever taken from Siberia had been assembled.

  It was still a pitiful handful, and there was still no sign of a pipe; but because the shortage of industrial diamonds was now gravely hampering industrial development, the search for the source of the Fire Stones was intensified.

  It was an infuriating and frustrating business. Scattered stones continued to be found, but their source remained hidden. As one of the diamond seekers of that time described it, “The whole country was blanketed by taiga and muskeg. If any pipes existed, they gave no indication of their presence beneath the forest floor. The chances of selecting just the right spot in all that wilderness were astronomically small unless we happened on a pipe cut open by a stream or a river and exposed to view. That’s what we were looking for. It seemed a hopeless search. The few diamonds we found offered no really useful clues, because diamonds are practically indestructible and are dispersed by river action, glaciers, or other natural forces over huge areas. What we needed was a tracer of some sort; a pointer to tell us when a pipe was near at hand.”

  Now it happens that almost everyone in the U.S.S.R. is a science-fiction fan. A pair of young Leningrad geologists, Natalia Sarsadskikh and Larissa Popugaeva, were no exceptions. One day in 1952 Natalia was thumbing through a tattered sci-fi magazine published in 1944, when she came across a story called “The Diamond Pipe,” in which the author described the imaginary discovery of Siberia’s first diamond mine. In order to flesh out his account he wrote a paragraph describing certain reddish crystals called pyropes. He referred to them as the “poor cousins” of diamonds because, although the two gems are often found in association, pyropes are practically worthless.

  By coincidence Larissa and Natalia had recently examined some sand samples taken from diamond-bearing bars on the Vilyui River, and Natalia remembered that a number of these samples contained pyropes. The two women discussed the matter and began re-examining the samples. They noted that although the size of the pyropes in each sample was rather uniform, the pyropes in some were larger than in others. It seemed like a meaningless fact until Larissa recalled that, unlike diamonds, pyropes are very soft. Considering this, they reasoned that pyropes ought to be significantly affected by the erosive action of sand and water, consequently the farther they were carried away from their origins, the smaller they ought to become. If this was indeed true, then the poor cousins of diamonds might be made to betray the common home of both.

  Nobody paid much attention to their idea. There was one notable exception. Twenty-two-year-old Nikolai Bobkov was excited by it. In 1953 he set out to see if it was possible to trace a pyrope trail on the Vilyui. The spring flood was still on and the river roared in spate, sending white water spewing over the rapids. Nevertheless Bobkov picked up a pyrope trail and began following it. In his journal he noted that the pyropes grew larger as he approached the valley of the Malaya Bortuobuya. Two days later Bobkov was dead, drowned when his boat was swept over the rapid known to the Evenk as Big Blood Falls.

  The following summer Larissa Popugaeva herself led a prospecting party to the Vilyui. Although Bobkov’s journal had been saved, she chose her own path, following a trace of pyropes upstream, watching the reddish specks grow larger until they abruptly ended. At this point her party abandoned the river and began searching outward into the taiga. Within a week they had uncovered the first Siberian d
iamond pipe.

  They called it Dawn. It proved to be too poor in diamonds to be an economical mining proposition, but it was composed of true kimberlite and so gave promise that other, perhaps richer pipes existed.

  A year later the search which had extended through almost three centuries came to a triumphant end. Following the pyropes, and Bobkov’s lead, Yuri Kabardon discovered Mirny. A hundred and fifty miles to the northeast the pyropes led Vladimir Shukin to the pipe called Udachnaya. Both were extraordinarily rich in diamonds.

  Early reports about these finds were derided in the western press. It was assumed they were propaganda; but even if there was something to them the experts concluded that the difficulties of trying to mine diamonds in permafrost and in such an utterly remote area, would preclude production on any significant scale.

  The West was whistling in the dark. By 1969, with the help of airborne magnetometers, Soviet geologists had located, but had not yet had time to evaluate, more than three hundred pipes in a vast region now known as the Yakutian diamond province. Four pipes which have been evaluated, Mirny, Irkholt, Dachna and Udachnaya, have a potential equal to the best South African mines. All the needs of communist countries for gem stones (gem stone production at Mirny is twenty per cent of total production) and for industrial diamonds are being met from limited production at just three mines, and there is a considerable export (nobody will say just how considerable) to capitalist countries. The Fire Stones of Yakutia have come into their own.

  I asked the Director of the Yakutian Diamond Combine, Lev Soldatov, an urbane and dynamic Muscovite, whether the Soviet Union had ever thought of flooding the market and putting the DeBeers syndicate right out of business.

  He smiled. “It’s been a temptation, one can’t deny it. We don’t forget how your diamond merchants squeezed us for fifty years, and we have a lot of money to recover. But we can do that better while prices remain high. No socialist countries now suffer from high diamond prices; but capitalist countries do. Why should we ease that pressure? There is an even more important thing, of course. If we flooded the market all the ladies in the world would find their diamonds worth very little. We certainly wouldn’t want to rouse the fury of world womanhood against us. I am not sure even the Soviet Union could cope with that!”

  When John de Visser, Yuri Rytkheu and I boarded a plane for Mirny at Yakutsk airport, we stepped directly into another dimension of the Siberian story. The plane, an Antonov-24, was of new design and construction, with a modern decor that shone icily with space-age plastics. There were no Yakut or Evenk passengers aboard, except for young Sasha Yakimov, the editor of Polar Star and our guide for the trip. The remainder of the passengers were men and women from all parts of the Soviet Union who, with one exception, reflected the gloss of our brave new world. They were all quite young. Most of the men wore well-cut suits and overcoats and some even carried briefcases. The women were dressed in the height of Moscow style and were redolent of the pungent but pleasant Russian perfumes that are a symbol of Soviet affluence.

  Sasha seemed slightly ill at ease. As we climbed high above the taiga and headed for Mirny, five hundred miles to the westward, he unburdened himself a little.

  “These people are the new Siberians. They are not yet a part of this land. Perhaps the years will change them. In the meantime they are changing the world we knew. These are the people who are building the new cities in new places. We admire them, of course. Like us, they are good Soviet citizens, but they are not quite like us.”

  “You mean they seem like foreigners to you?” I asked pointedly.

  Sasha looked at me for a moment then appeared to change the subject. “Did you notice the old man who got on last? He too was a Russian once; but now he is a true Yakutian.”

  This old man fascinated me. He seemed incredibly ancient, with a face so seamed and lined it was almost featureless except for his pale blue eyes. He had come staggering across the tarmac bent almost double under a tremendous load; a huge and blackened packsack with a bedroll poised on top of it; two great bundles of steel traps; a worn and filthy gun case, and half a dozen miscellaneous bundles hanging by strings and straps from his narrow shoulders. The stewardess, a bandbox beauty, immaculately uniformed and totally impersonal, had not greeted the old fellow with noticeable warmth. Her disapproval did not seem to bother him. As he bumped into people in the process of trying to stow his huge load under and on top of seats, he grinned a toothless, friendly grin and joked in so heavy an accent that few of his fellow passengers seemed to understand him. Or perhaps they simply did not want to understand.

  “Tell me about him, Sasha.”

  “He is Yakob Mashukov and he was born in Muktuyak, an ancient little village on the Lena not far from where I too was born. His people came from Russia, but so long ago they do not remember when their ancestors first reached Yakutia. Yakob is a trapper. Once he was amongst the best in our country. Now he is seventy years old, but still he goes every winter into the far taiga. He says it is the only place he still feels at home. We will be landing at Muktuyak. When you see it, perhaps you will understand what Yakob means.”

  “But why is he going to Mirny?”

  “Because the world has changed. Once he would have taken his boat and gone down the Lena to the Vilyui and then up it to the Markha River and up that until he reached his trapping grounds beyond Udachnaya. It would have taken him a month or more. Now he can fly to Mirny, and from there to Udachnaya in half-a-day. He and I were talking about the diamond mines not long ago and he said to me, ‘Sasha, it is true that the Fire Stones work miracles. Is it not a miracle that, because of them, I can reach my taiga cabin in two days?”

  We began to lose altitude. Mounded hills and heavy forest lay below us, lit by the afterglow of the fallen larch needles. The broad coils of the Lena appeared, rolling heavily between high, wooded banks and then we were over a large town sprawled along the river bank. A maze of docks fronted on the water and scores of ungainly, barge-like vessels were tied up to them. Concrete and multi-storeyed wooden apartment blocks marched row on row back to the edge of the taiga, pushing the forest remorselessly away from the moving waters. Trucks crawled busily along the streets.

  “The town of Lensk,” Sasha said. “Thirteen years ago there were twenty-six cabins here and the name of the village was Muktuyak. It had only a few Evenk families and a dozen of the Old Russian families. Now that Muktuyak has become Lensk it has 12,000 people. It is a new city in the north. Yakob Mashukov liked Muktuyak better.”

  Lensk, too, is a product of the Fire Stones. In little more than a decade it has become a major transportation centre serving the sister cities of Mirny and Chernychevsky, which is the site of a major hydro-electric development on the Vilyui. Supplies and equipment of all kinds, including immense turbine rotors and prefabricated ships up to one hundred tons displacement for use on the newly created Vilyui Sea (the reservoir created by the Chernychevsky dam) pass through Lensk. These things come from all parts of the Soviet Union via the Trans Siberian Railway to yet another newly built city, Osetrovo, on the upper Lena not far from Bratsk. All during the summer a great river fleet is busy moving freight from Osetrovo down nearly seven hundred miles of river to Lensk where it is stockpiled until winter comes. Then snow and ice roads are opened up to Mirny, two hundred miles due north, and the freight moves on to its final destination in fleets of trucks.

  However, with all its shipyards and its storage depots, Lensk is more than a transportation centre. Obedient to Soviet principles for northern development, it has already produced viable secondary industries. Amongst these are a number of state and collective farms operated by the Evenk, producing cattle, milk products and a surprising quantity and diversity of vegetables, including cucumbers, for Lensk, Mirny and Chernychevsky. The success of these farms is due to the fact that the Lena has thawed the surface permafrost for a distance of as much as three kilometres back from its banks, so that the deep alluvial soil has been freed for cultivation. />
  Timber resources are also being harvested both for construction at the new city sites, and for export. Diamonds do not take up much freight space and there is no point in sending the river ships back to Osetrovo empty, so they carry lumber. During the summer great timber rafts go north down the Lena to satisfy the needs of Yakutsk and other communities along the river banks. Some of the rafts continue down the full 2,000 miles to the river’s mouth and to the arctic seaport of Tiksi, where the timber is loaded on ocean-going ships that travel east and west along the Northern Sea Route into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

  Seen from the air the region around Mirny looks like the point of impact of a meteor. In the centre of a broad plateau of muskeg taiga is a titanic hole, well over a mile in diameter. Surrounding it, and stretching for miles in all directions, the thin forest cover has been incinerated, reduced to a tangle of blackened skeletons. Radiating out from the crater a star-burst tracery of survey lines runs through the debris of the dead taiga. To the north lies a huge area of a different kind of desolation; there the land looks as if it has been churned up by giant plows and then flooded by a mighty inundation.

  Sasha and I stared at this appalling spectacle together; this example of what man can do to the natural environment in his frantic haste to rob the earth of buried riches.

  “Do you call that the New Siberia?” I asked in disgust.

  Sasha shook his head. “No. That is a mistake. It is a tragedy. They were so anxious to get the diamonds that nothing else seemed to matter. In order to make the survey work easier, the taiga and ground cover was deliberately burned. Because very many diamonds were needed in a hurry, there was no attempt to plan the work in order to save the land. Opening the mine itself was slow, so when they discovered diamonds spread about in the nearby muskeg, they brought in converted gold dredges to speed production, and these turned the valley over there into a swamp.