Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  The Maz (Minsk Auto Works) turned out to be a twenty-two-ton behemoth, and we had to climb a ladder to get into the cab. Victor was in his element. Embracing the steering wheel lovingly with both arms, he piloted the monster out of the yard and headed east.

  There was a chilling moment on the outskirts of the town when we passed a grim array of grey buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fences, at the corners of which stood high watchtowers. Yura’s joke about forced labour camps at Tchersky suddenly went very sour. Victor nodded his big head at the camp.

  “Ha!” he bellowed. “Very dangerous place! Storage for atomic materials going to Pevek. You want to wear lead pants if you go in there!”

  We drove eastward for about a hundred miles, well into Chukotka, and I saw nothing except an almost endless line of big trucks going both ways; a couple of tracked recovery vehicles; one arctic fox who seemed to think he had fallen into a foxy Hades and was scampering wildly to evade the mechanical monsters thundering down upon him; and a waste of tundra muskeg thinly dotted with dwarf spruce trees.

  The road was as it had been described, except that somebody had been remiss about filling in the holes with steaming mud – or with anything else. I would not recommend it for pleasure driving.

  As we bumped along, Victor talked about his true soul mates, the long-haul drivers.

  “In the old days (anything before last year was the ‘old days’ to Victor) we moved the trucks in convoys so if one broke down there would be others at hand to help. But that was slow and the drivers complained they were losing time. So we began letting them run on their own, and that’s the way they do it, even in big blizzards and at 70° below zero.

  “Because of the big tonnage we have to move, every truck runs twenty-four hours a day all winter, except for layoff time for maintenance. There are three drivers to a truck, but only two are with the vehicle; the other is off duty, resting. There are rest houses and repair stations every hundred miles and recovery vehicles patrol between them. As you see, almost every truck hauls a trailor. The average load is fifteen tons.

  “A truck is expected to last seven to eight years up here, despite the tough work and the climate. That’s because our maintenance is the best. We use twelve-ton Tatras from Czechoslovakia; sixteen-ton Urals, and these big Maz’s. We call them all ‘boats.’ The winter taiga and tundra is as rough on men and equipment as the Arctic Ocean, but our boats go through when the big ships can’t move.

  “Our lads work on incentives; they like to see who can haul the most and make the most trips. They’re real professionals. They get almost as much training as an airplane pilot, and make more money. The average up here is seven hundred rubles a month – more than the President in Moscow gets! We’ve got a tough trade union. If a driver works overtime he has to get that amount of time off later on, with full pay; and on top of that he gets two or three times his normal salary while doing the overtime.”

  Not all the trucks are on the Tchersky-Bilibino-Pevek run. Some of them drive six hundred miles south on the frozen Kolyma and then climb onto an all-weather highway running southeast across the mountains to Magadan, whose seaport is now kept open all year round by icebreakers. However, if they turn west on this same highway they come to Yakutsk, and from there can drive another seven hundred miles south to reach the Trans Siberian Railway where it skirts the Chinese border.

  The fabled isolation of Siberian towns in winter – even the most northerly of them – has become a myth; and prominent among the mythbreakers are the tough young men who drive their “boats” wherever need dictates across the frozen land.

  The truckers were relative latecomers in the mythbreaking business. In 1926 Soviet pilots, flying stick-and-string little aircraft, had already penetrated the arctic.

  I heard something of the story of those early days from a big, florid, red-nosed pilot who originally came from Kazakhstan and who had spent thirty-five years flying in the north. When I met him in 1966, Vladimir Sedlerevich was the Director of the Polar Aviation base at Tchersky.

  He and his companions first went into the north because of the driving ambitions of Otto Schmidt, who realized that ships alone could not master the ice of the North East Passage. Ships needed eyes aloft to find channels through the pack, and they needed meteorological data from remote outposts along the route – most of which could only be supplied and maintained by air. So the remarkable organization known as Polar Aviation came into being. By 1935 its fleet of over a hundred aircraft was not only servicing the Northern Sea Route but was flying on a more or less regular basis into almost every corner of Siberia.

  Schmidt, the dreamer and the doer, was not content. He had early realized that the Arctic Ocean was in fact a mediterranean sea, surrounded by polar lands which might one day be linked to each other in commerce and in friendship. However, in the 1930s almost nothing was known about the nature of that sea of ice or of conditions in the air above it.

  In 1936 Schmidt proposed that this gap in human knowledge be filled. He planned to establish a manned meteorological and oceanographic station on the drifting ice at the North Pole – a point where no man, with the possible exception of the American, Dr. Frederick Cook, had ever stood. Using this as a weather and communications relay base, Schmidt hoped to begin transpolar flights on the shortest route between Moscow and the U.S.A.

  On May 20, 1937, a converted four-engined bomber whose wheels had been replaced by enormous skis climbed laboriously into cloudy skies above Rudolph Island in the Franz Joseph Archipelago. Head winds reduced the ground speed to a crawl. Cloud cover forced the plane to climb until her people lost sight of the wilderness of ice below. After ten hours the navigator reported they were above their target.

  They went down through the cloud and broke out over a waste of crushed pack ice. There was no fuel to spare for a reconnaisance. The pilot picked what looked to be the best potential ice landing field and put the plane’s nose down. She touched. A drogue parachute spilled out from her tail and slowed her to a stop.

  During the next few days three more four-engined planes landed at the Pole. When the planes departed they left behind them a meteorological and oceanographic station staffed by four men who were destined to remain on the pack for nine months while drifting 1,300 miles across the polar basin, finally to be picked up by Soviet ice-breakers off the east coast of Greenland, not far north of Iceland.

  Barely two weeks after drift station North Pole One became operational, a big NO-25 aircraft lifted from Moscow airport. Sixty-three hours later the red-winged plane landed at Portland, Oregon, at the end of a 5,300-mile non-stop flight across the arctic mediterranean. Less than a month later, Mikhail Gromov brought the second NO-25 from Moscow to North America. Gromov flew non-stop to the Mexican border before circling back to land at San Jacinto, California.

  The success of these two flights went to the heads of the powers in Moscow. They ordered another flight for August 12; but instead of sticking with the trusty NO-25, they decreed that a new and relatively untried commercial aircraft, the N-209, should be used instead.

  At 1:40 p.m. of the 12th, Levanevsky, the pilot, reported being over North Pole One at an altitude of 20,000 feet and experiencing strong headwinds and icing. It was the last that was ever heard of the plane or of its crew.

  It was not Levanevsky’s death, but the approach of war, the war itself, and the ensuing years of chill hostility between East and West which forced the termination of Soviet efforts to establish a regular transpolar flight between Russia and North America.

  “Too bad we had to give it up,” Sedlerevich said regretfully. “But it didn’t put us out of work. There was plenty to do at home.”

  Polar Aviation now operates a fleet of over three thousand aircraft, ranging from single-engine AN-2’S (the standard “bush” plane) to the new trijet Yak-40 STOL (short-take-off-landing) passenger planes, and including nine types of helicopter. There is scheduled service to every community in the Siberian north which has more than one thous
and population, and frequent non-sched services to all the rest. Arctic airports are amongst the busiest – considering the size of the towns they serve – in the Soviet Union. Tchersky handles ten scheduled landings every day, including the daily “Arctic Lateral” flight each way from Moscow to Chukotka, along the rim of the Arctic Ocean. In 1969 Tchersky had a circulation of six thousand tons of cargo and 97,000 passengers.

  A special air fleet services the Polar Drift Stations on the arctic ice, of which there have been more than forty since North Pole One was established in 1937. The roster of services performed by other wings covers almost every need of the arctic communities: air ambulances, flying doctors, ice reconnaissance, trapper supply, exploration support, air-land-sea rescue, mail and general communications.

  “But our biggest single task,” said Sedlerevich “is mass passenger transport. People are much more willing to come and live in the north if they have fast, convenient, cheap and comfortable flights in and out whenever they have a mind to take a trip. We give them that. At any one time as many as a third of the people in the new northern towns and cities may be travelling south, east, and west, on holiday. Sometimes I think nobody in this country stays still long enough to drink a glass of tea.

  “We have mastered arctic flying so well now that the whole thing has become pretty routine. All the same there are times when our mastery is challenged. Last autumn, for instance, the north gave us something to remember.

  “Near the end of September the cartographic ship Inij was caught in the ice during a hurricane. She damaged her rudder and went out of control and finally blew ashore on a pile of rocks some five hundred miles from here, and a hundred miles off the coast.

  “It was a hell of a storm – winds of eighty miles an hour and snow so thick you could see nothing. All the lifeboats were smashed, and the crew of sixty seamen and scientists didn’t have much chance. Inij began to break up and two young chaps took the devil’s own risk and tried to reach a nearby islet in a rubber boat to get a lifeline to the land. They made it, but lost the line and found they were alone on the islet with a pair of angry polar bears.

  “We had word of what had happened immediately, and within an hour had our three biggest helicopters – MIL-4’s – heading for the wreck. It was a calculated risk. Normally we won’t operate more than sixty miles offshore, and then only in good weather; but this was no time for the rule book. The first helicopter reached the wreck in time for the radio operator to jump out and shoot the bears. The pilots reported back that they could operate from the islet if they had fuel delivered to them there. There was no real place for fixed-wing planes to land, but some of my boys loaded up their AN-2’s with extra fuel and flew off to see what could be done. The wind was on their side. It blew so hard that, by landing into it, they could put down on a patch of level rock only about a hundred metres long. In ordinary weather they couldn’t have landed or taken off in that distance, particularly loaded.

  “Now our helicopters had the fuel to fight their way out to the wreck, and between the three of them they made sixty lifts, bringing the people off the Inij one at a time to the little island. From there they were ferried to the mainland by the AN-2’s.

  “There were a lot of doubtful moments. The wind was so strong and the seas breaking so high that the lifelines from the helicopters would fly straight out although they had a weighted end on them. The lads solved that by tying their anchors to the ends of the lines.

  “One of my best pilots did that, and the wind gusted as he was lifting a man off, and the anchor caught in the ship’s rigging. So there he was, tethered to the ship; and he couldn’t cut the line because the man on the end of it would have been lost.

  “It was no time for long thoughts. He dropped a little to let the line sag, then gave the machine full power and lifted up. The fluke broke off the anchor and he was free – but he might just as easily have torn the guts right out of his craft.

  “Six of my lads got the Lenin Medal for heroism out of that three days’ work. And Tchersky gave them a special vote of applause – twenty cases of champagne being saved for New Year’s Day. Now they spend half their time listening to the marine radio, just hoping for another wreck to come their way!”

  Nineteen

  IT WAS FRUSTRATING to be so close to Chukotka and yet not be able to investigate the place. It had a particular interest for me, since not only does it lie immediately adjacent to the North American arctic, but its people are close neighbours and even relatives of the Eskimos amongst whom I once lived.

  If I could not visit the region in person, I was at least able to gain some knowledge of it from a number of Chukchee friends. Not least of these was Anna Dmitrievna Nutegryne, a very attractive thirty-eight-year-old Chukchee woman who has been Chairman of the Chukotka National District for several years, as well as being a praesidium member of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow. In 1969, Anna was in Leningrad taking a year’s leave of absence from her job in order to complete her studies for a degree in history. She was an old friend of Yura’s and we foregathered in his apartment where I heard a great deal about Chukotka, old and new.

  I was intrigued by the structure and nature of the Chukotka National District. National Districts are transitional arrangements intended to preserve small native groups, but they are in no sense reserves in the image of Indian reservations in North America. They were designed to prevent the dissolution of small native populations and their cultures while at the same time encouraging them to develop a modern social, economic, and political structure. In the Soviet Union the native peoples have no choice as to what that structure will be; however they do have the opportunity, and encouragement – accompanied by lavish material assistance – to build it by and for themselves.

  As the people of National Districts master the complexities of modern existence, they qualify for recognition as Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics, of which there are now twenty in the U.S.S.R. In theory, at least, the next step is to achieve complete equality with other states as a fully fledged Soviet Socialist Republic.

  The Chukotka National District occupies the whole northwest peninsula of continental Asia and comes under Magadan for external administrative purposes; but within its own borders it is to a very real degree self-governing. With a population of just under 80,000 people, over half of whom are non-natives (mostly miners and new townsfolk), it has its own capital at Anadyr and its own District Soviet of which Anna is the “President.” The District Soviet has direct control over most local activities and over most of the renewable natural resources, but has little to say, except in a consultant role, about the new urban-type European-dominated communities or about the development of mineral resources. Nevertheless, a reasonably high proportion of the profits from mineral development in Chukotka goes into the district treasury in the form of direct payments; while the Soviet government heavily subsidizes the entire gamut of district activities and enterprises.

  It is a good sign that the natives of Chukotka – roughly 20,000 Chukchee; two thousand Eskimos; two thousand Evenk, Yakut and Koryak; and about eight thousand “Old Russians,” including people of mixed blood – are by no means satisfied with their share of the income from Chukotka gold, mercury, and tin and are vocal in their demands for a bigger cut.

  The whole system of National Districts, of which there are now ten in Russia, inevitably breeds nationalism. Because it does so it is viewed by some autocrats with a hostile eye. The international battle between the “lumpers” who would do away with all small national entities in favour of “one world” agglomerations of people, and the “splitters” who believe mankind would be healthier and more likely to evolve in a viable direction if we preserved at least the best of the differences which distinguish neighbouring groups, still rages in Russia as it does almost everywhere in the modern world.

  Nationalism, born out of Lenin’s original concept of encouraging the preservation of significant cultural characteristics and racial unity within ethnic groups, has b
ecome and remains a potent factor in the Soviet Union. Distrusted by some, stubbornly defended by others, it is a fact of Soviet life. Anna Nutegryne sees it this way:

  “We Chukchee feel a great warmth and loyalty to the Soviet State. It has given us the right to remain Chukchee, while at the same time becoming full Soviet citizens. Our pride in our own race has not lessened our feelings of pride in the State. When we became part of the modern world, we were not forced to do so at the cost of losing ourselves. We were not submerged in the huge sea of Soviet peoples. No, we were helped to build a strong ship called Chukotka, and we sail on that ship in a fleet of friendly vessels, all heading in the same direction. Sometimes, of course, one of the bigger ships may take some of our wind, and then we have to struggle amicably for our rights. But we have the freedom to struggle, and we can win because we Chukchee are all together.”

  Doubtless Anna’s analogy is oversimplified, but it accurately reflects the attitude of most of the Small Peoples.

  Chukotka has had a peculiar history. Throughout modern times its Eskimo and Chukchee people (who speak a different tongue but are culturally very similar) had a much closer relationship to North America than to European Russia. In Tsarist times they were thought of as the only unconquered people in the entire country. They paid tribute to the Tsar only on a voluntary basis as “gifts to the poor white chief.” From about 1880 onward they came into close contact with white traders from Alaska and the northwestern states of America, and the seeds of capitalism were sown in a society which was originally more truly communistic than the one devised by Marx and Lenin. During this period the Chukchee even produced a few “kings,” local entrepreneurs who allied themselves with the foreigners, engrossed the once communally held reindeer herds to their own use, and controlled trade between their people and the Americans. The last of these was a man called Armavargan, who thought of himself as brother to the Tsar and fully his equal.