Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  The co-pilot came aft and leaned over us. “Oimyakon and the Indigirka River. We just called them on the radio. They have no passengers so we won’t stop today. Too bad, because they’re having a regular summer morning. It’s only minus 56° down there.”

  I took advantage of the moment. “Excuse me, but just where is Tchersky?”

  The young man grinned, winked at Ivan and Yura, and nodded toward the cockpit. “Just up ahead there. Not so far. I’d better get back to my job.”

  I was beginning to catch on. There was a conspiracy on foot. Nobody was going to tell me where Tchersky was. I did not really care. Beyond the valley of the Indigirka the mountains went savage again, towering even higher than before and so violently jumbled that they seemed like the debris of a stellar explosion. They are known as the Tchersky Range, but they do not deserve such a civilized identity; they are a glimpse into another time than ours, a time of primal tumult beyond anything we, hopefully, will ever know. The 11,000-foot peaks of the Moma Mountains drifted past under a wing and there seemed to be no end to this weird wilderness. I suggested to Claire that our pilot must have gone the wrong way and this must be Tibet. The idea did not seem so unreasonable.

  In all we flew more than six hundred miles in a direct line across the massif and when the peaks lowered again toward a forested highland, it was not for long. To the eastward new peaks lifted to a white sky, marching beyond the most distant horizon to the ultimate northeastern tip of Asia. This mighty mountain complex represents nearly a quarter of the Siberian landmass, occupying almost the whole region east and northeast of the Lena valley. It is kith and kin with its Alaskan neighbours, but covers twice the area.

  The aircraft let down in a gentle descent toward the wind-burnished ice of a big river that emerged from a gap in the mountains and flowed northward into a wide reach of stunted forest.

  “Kolyma River!” Yura called to us, pointing down.

  Claire jumped to her feet and scampered aft to the ladies room. Once bitten … twice shy. She regained her seat just as we came in to land. I reached for the luggage. Yura grinned from ear to ear.

  “Not Tchersky yet. Zirianka. Stop for lunch.”

  Once again we trotted across the snow to a log café, leaving a bevy of robust ladies to refuel the plane. Over bowls of soup and glasses of cognac, I confronted Ivan and Yura.

  “Look,” I said, “a game’s a game. But just where in hell are we going, anyway?”

  Yura tilted his glass, wiped his lips and sighed.

  “Ah well, is too late for you to go back now, so I tell truth. Very many times you talk about Siberia for place of exile. So we make special exile just for you. Under Tsars most dangerous political prisoners sent to Tchersky. Nobody ever escape from there. Impossible! But you are very tough Canadian. We give you chance to try. Not necessary walk five thousand miles to Moscow from Tchersky – only you have to walk eight hundred miles east, then show passport to Yankees on Bering Strait.”

  I laughed, but I was intrigued. Was I going to catch a glimpse of the Siberia which is the only Siberia that exists for most North Americans? Would Tchersky prove to be the site of one of those dread “work camps” which, according to the writings of so many expatriate Russians and home-bred Russophobes, cover Siberia like a shroud of hopelessness? I decided not to ask but to possess my soul in patience. Meantime there was Zirianka to be examined.

  Built entirely of squared logs, it is a charming little town of about five thousand people, almost astride the arctic circle. It is a district administration centre but is also the trans-shipment port for river traffic on the Kolyma. Two thousand-ton self-propelled barges serve it from Green Cape, a seaport near the Arctic Ocean; and the freight goes on southward in smaller craft into the Kolyma Mountains to supply a string of placer and hard rock gold mines in an immense aureiferous region which stretches east almost as far as the Pacific Ocean. In winter the frozen river becomes a truck highway, and convoys haul tens of thousands of tons of freight along it. Trucks and ships returning north down the Kolyma fill up with coal from surface deposits near Zirianka.

  Zirianka is also an important agricultural centre. Its two state farms not only breed reindeer but also raise eating horses and beef and dairy cattle. I had noticed, as we came in to land across broad muskeg plains, little mounds in the many natural clearings. These were haystacks, harvested in summer and waiting to be brought in by horse- and reindeer-drawn sleds after the frost sufficiently hardened the muskegs.

  Claire was a little apprehensive as we wandered around amongst the neat log houses; however, Zirianka offered her no traumatic surprises. We could not know it then but the little town was biding its time. Later it would find a way to give her cause to remember it.

  When we departed from Zirianka I refrained from again asking where we were going, or how far it was. We flew straight north along the Kolyma valley with the mountains on our right and a plain of drowned taiga widening into the distance on our left.

  Two hours later the co-pilot came back and drew our attention to a brilliant white line on the horizon ahead.

  “The polar sea! … And there is Tchersky down below.”

  Beneath us was a haphazard sprawl of buildings. I searched for a stockaded enclosure but could not pick one out. Later, perhaps. The settlement was on a bald point of land jutting into the Kolyma. Beyond it the white and featureless tundra rolled north to the frozen ocean.

  We landed on the river ice and taxied toward the town through an assemblage of parked aircraft which included at least thirty fixed-winged planes and a dozen helicopters. Clearly Tchersky did not lack the means of modern transportation. Our plane stopped beside a crowd of fur-clad figures and we descended the steps into the heart of a mob of welcomers, all of them jovially anxious to pump our hands. It was the kind of reception which would have warmed the heart of the most blasé politician. It assuredly warmed ours, and that was good because the temperature was close to minus 40°.

  Our arrival was a real occasion. Claire and I were the first foreigners to visit Tchersky since the Revolution. Claire was the first foreign woman most Tcherskyites had ever seen. On top of that, we were Canadians, and as such were looked upon as being next-door neighbours, despite the fact that our homes were separated by the width of the Arctic Ocean.

  A gleaming-eyed Chukchee, Nikolai Tourot (who began life as a reindeer herder and is now Mayor of Tchersky and a delegate to the National Assembly in Moscow) greeted me with a gentle handshake; but the District Party Secretary, Victor Nazarov, a bouncing brute of a man, embraced me with such fervour I gasped for breath. He had his eye on Claire as well, but she was too quick for him and took shelter in the middle of a group of Russian, Evenk and Chukchee ladies.

  Yura rescued me from Victor’s grasp and introduced me to Simeon Kerilev, a tiny, sweet little Yukagir poet and novelist whose most recent book, Son Of An Eagle, had just been published.

  It was impossible to register all those who crowded around us. Their ardour was too overwhelming … but by far the most overwhelming was Victor Nazarov.

  Victor is the sort of man who has to be seen and heard to be believed. Born in 1930 of Russian peasant stock near Tobolsk in west Siberia, he went to the Aldan goldfields of Yakutia with his parents after his father had “some differences” with the Stalin dictatorship. Following his father’s death during the war, Victor helped support the family by becoming a driver-mechanic. This was a job that suited him and one he loved. He wrestled trucks over most of northern Siberia, and in his spare time became a champion weight lifter. In the time he could spare from that activity, he took correspondence courses until he had the credits needed to enter university at Sverdlovsk, from which he graduated with a prize degree in industrial transportation. He joined the Party in 1955 (bearing no grudges for what was past), ran the truck transport network during the building of Mirny, and in 1962 was dispatched to the mouth of the Kolyma to apply his energies to the construction of the new arctic town of Tchersky.

 
Moon-faced, tug-voiced, hairy as a mammoth, strong as a cave bear and utterly and absolutely indefatigable, Victor Nazarov took Claire and me into his ebullient heart with such rampant enthusiasm that he nearly killed us both. I remember him, and always will, as the most generous, ingenuous and forceful man I have ever met.

  Cutting our party out of the crowd of welcomers, he heaved us bodily into his Bobyk, a jeep-like little car (the nickname Bobyk means “little terrier”) and drove us into town over non-existent roads at fifty miles an hour. Not once did he stop bellowing in our ears. He had a lot to tell us and he was not the man to waste a moment. As the Bobyk skidded, leapt and crashed into and over obstacles, Victor’s massive left arm was flung out in a continuing gesture, pointing to half-built structures, piles of mud, holes in the ground, even to white stretches of virgin tundra, and identifying these as: “APARTMENT HOUSE FOR FIFTY FAMILIES GOES THERE.… THAT IS BEGINNING OF BIGGEST SCHOOL IN SIBERIA.… PALACE OF SPORT, WE ARE BUILDING HERE.… POWER STATION OVER THERE.…”

  When he had reduced all four of us, even Yura, to bruised and battered hulks, and deaf ones at that, he suddenly jammed on the brakes, sending poor Kola smashing into the window.

  “POOR CLAIRE! I FORGET MYSELF! MAYBE YOU ARE A LITTLE TIRED? I TAKE YOU TO HOTEL!”

  The hotel, of logs (“WE ARE BUILDING NEW ONE RIGHT AWAY – CONCRETE – ONE HUNDRED FIFTY ROOMS”), was simple, but we had a suite of two pleasant rooms which, it appeared, we were going to share with Victor. Having escorted us to our rooms he showed no inclination to depart but pounded over to the window, thrust out his big paw, and began waving at the distant landscape.

  “FARLEE! OVER THERE WE MAKE NEW AIRPORT – BIG ENOUGH FOR JET PLANES – AND CLAIRE! LOOK THERE! WE MAKE NEW NURSERY SCHOOL.…”

  Yura intervened. Somehow he manoeuvred Victor out the door – though not without a parting bellow.

  “NOW YOU HAVE GOOD REST! LATER WE MAKE PLANS!”

  The door swung shut and Claire fell on the nearest bed. I was a little shaky myself as I started to take off my boots. It seemed to me I could still hear Victor’s foghorn echoing inside my skull.

  It was not an echo! It was reality. The door burst open.

  “ULCERS ON MY SOUL! I FORGOT SO MUCH! YOU MUST HAVE FOOD! COME QUICK! COME QUICK!”

  I tried to tell Victor we were not hungry, just exhausted, but I might as well have been Canute trying to turn back the tide. He swept us out of the room, across the frozen range of muddy mountains which might someday be a road, and into a restaurant presided over by a beautiful young lady by the name of Lydia, whose husband, Anatoly (she quickly told me) was an interior decorator working in the town.

  Interior decorator? Here? Claire and I exchanged glances. But it was true enough and later we had a chance to meet Anatoly and to admire his work.

  Lydia had prepared a modest snack. Twelve of us (people kept appearing as if out of the woodwork) sat down to it. The appetizer was pickled reindeer tongue. Next came Kamchatka crab, chocolate éclairs, dumpling soup, fish soup, cream puffs, reindeer cutlets, smoked salmon, stewed Ukraine tomatoes, cherry juice, strawberry jam and tea. The food was not necessarily served in that order, but since there was one bottle of cognac, one of vodka, one of spirits and one of champagne at each person’s place, I can be excused if I have somewhat jumbled the sequence.

  Victor proved to be the tamadar of all the world. He leapt to his feet at least once every three minutes and every toast was bottoms up. It was at this first meal with him that Claire struck back. He insisted on learning a Canadian toast and so she perversely taught him to say “up bottoms.” He was delighted and, so he told me when I revisited him three years later, had no idea of its potential English meaning. However, during a visit to Moscow he was called on to help entertain a party of senior dignitaries from Great Britain at an official function. Beaming with affability and delight, he proposed that they should drink his Canadian toast, which he had unwittingly modified to:

  “Up your bottoms!”

  He told me this story somewhat ruefully, but without rancour.

  “MOSCOW SEND ME BACK TO TCHERSKY IN DISGRACE! BUT I FORGIVE DEAR CLAIRE! SHE HELPED ME GET OUT QUICK FROM THAT CURSED TOWN!”

  The last toast was drunk about 8 p.m. and we were almost literally carried back to our hotel. We were in no condition to resist when all twelve of our dinner companions crowded into our room and Victor sat down at the table, banged it so that it jumped clean off the floor, and announced we would now have a planning conference.

  “HOW LONG YOU STAY WITH US? A MONTH? TWO MONTHS?

  He seemed genuinely outraged when I timidly replied that we could not remain more than two weeks. He pounded the table until I was sure it would collapse and then he planned each of our days in the most minute detail – forgetting only to leave time for sleep.

  I could see that Claire, who had unwisely allowed herself to get hooked on the spirit, was not going to be with the party much longer; so, in an act of unselfish heroism which she has never properly appreciated, I agreed (actually there was no way I could have refused) to accompany Victor to the makeshift Palace of Sport while he did his nightly work-out.

  Kola had faded, but Yura was still going strong. Together with the mayor, the newspaper editor and half a dozen others, we watched the incredible Victor bounce his 270-pound bulk around while he played two fast games of volleyball, worked for half an hour with the barbells, wrestled a couple of the biggest truck drivers in Tchersky, and then announced:

  “I’M HUNGRY! LET’S GO AND HAVE A LITTLE SNACK!”

  We drank the snack at the headquarters of the Tchersky Press, a dilapidated log structure out of another age boasting a modern rotary press which had been flown in from Leningrad to print the daily Kolymskaya Pravda. We also did a group show on the radio station which was housed in the same building; although since it was then past midnight I doubt if anyone heard us except, perhaps, the polar bears on the arctic ice a few versts to the northward. I wonder what they made of my wobbly rendition of “The Squid Jigging Grounds.”

  At 2 a.m. we were back in the hotel, but not to sleep. Someone had decided our winter clothing was inadequate and half the town had been scoured to find proper clothing. Claire was pried out of bed and, eyes still tight shut, was wrapped in an enormous dog-skin coat, hatted with an Evenk reindeer bonnet, booted with embroidered felt boots which went up to her thighs (Victor insisted on fitting these with his own hands), and gloved in sealskin mittens. She claims she has no recollection of the fittings.

  During my absence at the Sports Palace the table in our room had miraculously sprouted several bottles of champagne together with baskets of fresh fruit and cream pastries. So we had another little lunch. At 3 a.m. Victor looked at his glittering Slava wristwatch and the voice of authority shivered the hotel.

  “TIME NOW FOR BED! GET GOOD SLEEP! TOMORROW WILL BE BUSY DAY!”

  Tchersky is at once one of the oldest and the newest of Siberian settlements. In 1644 the Cossack, Semyon Dezhnev, descended the Lena from Yakutsk, somehow navigated his way along the arctic coast to the mouth of the Kolyma, ascended it a few miles and built an ostrug, a tiny, crude wooden fort which came to be known as Nizhniye Kresty. Through the years and centuries it survived as a fur-trade station and one of the most remote and inaccessible outposts of the Russian empire. From it the Yukagir (then a strong and numerous people), the Evenk, and the Chukchee of the northeast coast were systematically bled for furs even as the Eskimo of North America were bled at a later time.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century the fur-bearers had all but disappeared – and so had most of the native people. Nizhniye Kresty remained alive, though barely so, as a place of exile for the most dangerous and desperate political prisoners in the hands of the Tsars.

  After the Revolution the ancient settlement almost vanished and human life in the district shrank to a handful of native Russian trappers and fishermen, a few hundred Yukagir reindeer herders, and a score of Chukchee families.<
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  Then, in 1960, Moscow waved her wand and Nizhniye Kresty was born anew.

  The justification for the resurrection was gold – unbelievable quantities of it that had been discovered along the upper reaches of the Kolyma and its tributaries; and to the eastward in the Anyuyskiy Mountains of adjacent Chukotka. The decision was taken to develop this region as a valuta centre and to begin building it into one of the new far northern complexes. There was no gold at Nizhniye Kresty but it was ideally placed to become another Lensk – a transportation and administrative centre for the region.

  In 1961, when the transformation was begun, there were thirty people living in ten ancient wooden houses on the river bank. In 1966, when I first visited it, there were two brand-new sister towns: Tchersky, on the old site, with a population of five thousand people and, four kilometers to the north, the sea and river port of Green Cape, with six thousand people. Tchersky had become the capital of the entire Kolymsky District, embracing an area the size of Denmark and the Netherlands put together, and it already boasted one of the most productive reindeer farms in the Soviet Union. The port city was receiving ocean-going ships of 15,000-tons displacement and the river had become the everyday highway, summer and winter, for a fleet of ships and trucks.

  All of this had been accomplished by the unbridled enthusiasm and the unremitting efforts of people like Victor Nazarov – people who were not motivated by the prospect of personal gain so much as by an idea and a belief.

  It was my good luck to live for a little while in the midst of Tchersky’s atmosphere of sustained excitement. And to see something of the adolescence of a new world abuilding on the shores of the polar ocean.

  Sixteen

  BY EXERCISING iron self-control, Victor managed to stay away from us until 6 a.m.; then the roar of his voice and the thunder of his feet as he pounded up the hotel stairs brought us unwillingly back to consciousness.

  “COME ON!” he boomed. “WE GO SEE REINDEER HERD!”