Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  Two possibilities suggested themselves to me. One was the city of Norilsk near the mouth of the Yenisei River, on the same latitude as Tchersky, two hundred miles north of the arctic circle.

  Norilsk came into being as a result of the discovery of vast concentrations of ores near the base of the Taimyr Peninsula by a young Leningrad geologist, Nikolai Nikolaevich Luberovski. The son of a well-to-do family, Luberovski was bitten by the explorer’s virus in his early youth and had already spent two years in the far north when the Revolution broke out. The change in régimes did not much concern him. In 1920 he discovered a fabulously rich nickel and base-metal lode near Norilsk, built a log cabin there, and spent the next thirteen years of his life working toward the development of the region.

  This was his happy time. He spent the succeeding fourteen years in prison camps as a victim of one of Stalin’s purges. Khrushchev released him and the state gave him many honours and made what amends it could, but when I visited him and his family in Leningrad in 1969 his wasted face testified all too clearly to the hardships he had suffered.

  Nonetheless the Father of Norilsk had lost nothing of his almost breathless enthusiasm for the north. He described to me how Norilsk grew from a population of three people in 1921 – himself, his wife, and an Evenk assistant – to a city of close to 300,000 people by 1969, surrounded by a complex of new communities with a combined population approaching three quarters of a million.

  By far the largest arctic community in the world, Norilsk is where many of the techniques of northern development were first applied. It stands as a living monument to what man can accomplish in the arctic wilderness, if he is so inclined.

  Norilsk interested me greatly, but I knew it had already been visited and reported on by foreigners. Furthermore, it was really too big a place for my taste. There was another northern city which interested me just as much – Magadan, called by its residents Little Leningrad, on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, 1,400 miles to the northwest of the great Pacific seaport of Vladivostok.

  Wherever I travelled in the Soviet Union, I seemed to hear talk of Magadan. At a party in a Moscow hotel, a number of ebullient men and women on leave from Magadan talked about their city in a way that made it sound like the New Jerusalem. Yuri Rytkheu had lived and worked there in his younger days as a newspaper man, and he extolled the virtues of the place interminably. On the other hand, some Russians shook their heads at mention of the name, and changed the subject. Others talked about Magadan in cautious phrases that carried an undertone of fear.

  During my 1966 journey I asked to be allowed to visit Magadan … and ran into a wall of fog. The authorities would not say “No!” but neither would they say “Yes!” My request remained in limbo until Claire and I were back in Moscow, ready to fly home to Canada. Then, when it was impossible for us to change our course, permission to visit the place was finally granted.

  In 1969 I made Magadan one of my main objectives. While in Moscow and Leningrad I used whatever influence I could muster, but could get no firm decision. Increasingly frustrated, I asked a diplomat acquaintance for a straight explanation. Was the place closed because of its military significance?

  “Oh, no. It isn’t that. And don’t feel you are being slighted. No foreigners are permitted to visit Magadan.”

  “Why not?”

  Reluctantly he told me. Magadan was once the centre of one of the most infamous forced labour operations undertaken during the Stalin régime.

  “Of course all that was finished long ago,” my informant hastened to add. “All the same, we are still sensitive about it. It was a black page in our history and there are those who are afraid visits by foreigners will revive memories of the past.”

  “Are there any labour camps there now?” I asked bluntly.

  “Certainly not! There haven’t been any for almost twenty years.”

  “Then why can’t I visit Magadan?”

  He spread his hands and smiled a bit sheepishly.

  “Maybe you can … maybe not. Who knows? Keep asking. You may succeed. In Russia, all is surprises!”

  I kept asking. Yura asked for me and so did many other people. There was no answer until two days before we were due to leave Tchersky on our return to Yakutsk. Yura arrived in my room before breakfast one morning, waving a sheet of flimsy.

  “Big news, Farley! Now you have chance to taste best beer in Soviet Union. And I show so many pretty girls you stay in Magadan for good.”

  Somebody … somewhere … had finally said “Yes.”

  As John, Yura, and I prepared to leave Tchersky, Anatoly brought word that Victor Nazarov was very sick. A heart specialist was in attendance on him and he had been forbidden any visitors.

  Four years earlier Victor had been practising with the barbells in preparation for the Yakutian weight lifting championships – which he usually won. He was making a heavy lift when the steel rod between the weights slipped from his hands and came crashing down across his chest. Several ribs were broken and his chest was caved in, damaging his heart. It was an injury which might well have been fatal to most men. It kept Victor in hospital for three months, and when he was discharged he was ordered to go to a Black Sea spa for at least a year to recuperate.

  He refused. He was “resting” in Tchersky when I first met him a year after his accident. However four years of nearly total disregard for the injury had finally caught up with him.

  “He is furious he can’t see you off,” Anatoly told me. “The doctors said he could not even see you at his house. He told them to go to the devil. He insists you come and say goodbye to him.”

  Defying the doctors, and his family, Victor got out of bed to meet me. His face was death-touched and I knew without being told that neither his bull body nor his indomitable will could support him much longer. If he too was aware of this, he refused to acknowledge it. Sometimes gasping for breath, and sometimes unconsciously pressing his great hand against his chest, he sat for an hour with me, keeping my glass full of cognac and talking of his city and his dream. Behind his back I caught glimpses of the heart doctor, a woman whose face seemed almost as white as Victor’s. Her anxiety was so great that I finally forced Victor to let me go. He hated to do it. As we stood up, he caught me in his arms again; but this time it was like being hugged by an old man.

  “Farley. You come back to Tchersky! You will come back and see what we have done in your second absence. You will be proud of us. Our work has just begun. It is only preparation for the creation of a world better than any we have ever had. When I go, I will leave something good behind! But I am not dead yet … a long way from it! These imbecile doctors insist they are going to send me south. Why do they waste their breath? I’ll be here when you come back. Bring Claire next time. I’ll beat you if you don’t.”

  We kissed each other on both cheeks. I left the room but I turned at the head of the stairs and caught a final glimpse of a man whose like I may not see again. He was crouched forward in a chair, great head lowered almost to his knees, apparently oblivious to the efforts of his doctor and his wife to move him back to bed.

  Our flight took us seven hundred miles southeast from Tchersky to Magadan, and the entire distance was flown over a massive highland drained by the Kolyma and its many tributaries.

  We transected the region called Golden Kolyma, which may be the richest gold-bearing area on earth. There is hardly a sandbar or a gravel bench in any of its innumerable mountain valleys which is not filled with placer gold – nuggets and dust. And, as if this were not enough, the area is now yielding gold in abundance from dozens of hard-rock mines. No official figures about production are available, but an estimate given to me in Magadan suggests that annual production from the Kolyma region is now over a thousand tons of gold a year. Whatever the truth may be, the gargantuan effort being put into placer and hard-rock gold mining in this area is obviously producing handsome returns.

  Just why the Soviet Union should be so afflicted by the gold bug seemed somethi
ng of a mystery to me until it was explained by Dr. Nikolai Shilo, Director of the Northeast Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in Magadan. Dr. Shilo and his charming wife have travelled over much of the world and have the sophistication of world citizens. They served me a superb dinner in their big and ornately decorated flat, and we ate with gold-plated cutlery.* It seemed appropriate, since Dr. Shilo is the ranking expert on gold mining in the Soviet Union.

  “Gold has many domestic and practical uses as a mineral, but of course that isn’t why we have amassed such a hoard of the stuff – probably more than the Americans have in their Fort Knox. As you may know, after the Revolution the capitalist countries, having failed to crush us by force, tried to do so by economic methods. The idea was to isolate us so completely we would never be able to build a successful modern society. We were to be refused access to everything we needed in order to survive, let alone to build. Fortunately for us, capitalists can never refuse to make a profit. We found we could buy what we had to have, under the bedclothes as they say, but only for gold. Nobody would give us credit, and we had little gold because most of it had been shipped out of the country by the Tsarist government, either to pay war debts or to keep it from the hands of the people.

  “So we became a little gold crazy. We had to have it. Nowadays it is not important in the same way, but it remains important to ensure our credit. Everyone trusts a rich man, nobody trusts a poor man. We are now very rich and the whole world knows it. Furthermore, as long as the capitalist countries artificially maintain the high price of gold, we do very well by selling it on the world market.

  “Internally we have little need of it except in small amounts for industrial or ornamental use. Our currency is not backed by gold as yours is. Externally it has become a powerful weapon with which we can defend ourselves.

  “We would have been in very serious trouble during the Great Patriotic War had we not had lots of Kolyma gold. Do you know you are not the first foreign visitor to Magadan? The first was Mr. Averell Harriman from the United States. He arrived here in a warship on a special mission in 1943 to assure himself and the American government that we had gold enough to pay for the weapons and materials we needed to defeat the German fascists.

  “I know in your countries it is said these materials were given free to us Russians since we were fighting your war for you. That is simply not true. We had to pay, in gold, for much of what we received, and the United States did not trust us to pay until one of her own high officials saw we actually had the gold.

  “It was an interesting visit. Harriman saw the gold in the ground, and in our vaults, and was satisfied. Before he left he looked around Magadan Bay and he told us, ‘Nobody in the world could ever succeed in building a real city in such a god-forsaken place. Why do you bother trying?’

  “He was thinking in capitalist terms: the way to treat a rich resource in some remote region is to go in with mining camps, dig it out of the ground, and then go away. This is exactly what was done in the Yukon gold rush. And what is your Klondike today? Be honest now, because I have visited it and seen it for myself. It is nothing! A tiny dead town called Dawson and nothing else but ruined river valleys with hardly a human being in the whole region.

  “We think in different terms. Resources should be used as a base on which to build new human communities, not as a means of enriching old communities in faraway places. It would be nice if Harriman could visit us again. I wonder what he would think about this ‘godforsaken place’ if he could see it now.”

  The Kolyma gold province, which includes much of the Magadan region, the western parts of Chukotka and an adjacent strip of Yakutia to the west of the main Kolyma valley, has twelve cities of between ten and twenty-five thousand people. The newest one, Bilibino (on the same latitude as Tchersky), which was founded in 1961, already has sixteen thousand. Magadan itself has 122,000. The population of the gold province as a whole is close to half-a-million (380,000 in the Magadan District alone) and as secondary resources such as tin and mercury mining, together with industry continue their rapid development, the population is expected to approach a million by 1980. It is certainly a far cry from Canada’s Yukon Territory or from the interior regions of Alaska, where the last gold dredges now lie abandoned, and all but a minute fraction of the once vast deposits of placer gold have been exhausted for the benefit of London, New York, Johannesburg, and other financial capitals of the western world.

  As we drew close to Magadan we ran into bad weather and the mountains vanished under black clouds. For a time it appeared we might have to fly on to the Kamchatka Peninsula. The prospect of seeing that mysterious land of live volcanoes, mighty mountains, and the strange Koryak people who may have been ancestral to the Eskimo, excited me.

  Yura put the damper on my enthusiasm.

  “If land at Kamchatka have no permissions. So they lock you and John up tight until can get rid of you. No caviar and vodka. Only black bread and water!”

  It wouldn’t have been that bad, but I remembered the story told me by an Intourist interpreter in Moscow of what happened to a planeload of American tourists flying from Japan to Vladivostok when their plane was forced by engine trouble to land at a military airport near the new Soviet naval base of Nakhadkya. The plane was at once wheeled into a hangar and there it and all of its passengers remained incarcerated behind closed and guarded doors for three days while repairs were being made. Only the interpreters were allowed out of the building. Those inside were forbidden even to smoke because of the fire hazard, and some of them became hysterical, having convinced themselves they had been hijacked and were being held for ransom.

  When their plane was repaired and they were delivered to Vladivostok, only two of their number had the fortitude to continue with their original plan of taking the Trans Siberian train to Moscow; the rest beat a hasty retreat to Tokyo on the first outbound flight. The interpreter who told me this story thought it was very funny. I imagine the Americans did not.

  Our pilot decided that Magadan weather was acceptable, and we broke through low clouds into a wide, sparsely wooded valley ringed with snow-dusted mountains. A large airport lay below us, but there was no city anywhere in sight.

  We were met by a reception committee of stylishly dressed gentlemen who approached us, under the eyes of television cameramen and press photographers, almost as tentatively as they might have approached a visiting delegation from outer space. Our arrival was clearly a landmark in Magadan history. Our hosts seemed distinctly uneasy as we descended the ramp. They shied nervously away from John deVisser, who was wearing a bright blue, highly ornamented knee-length parka with wolfskin trim, and a knitted blue and white French Canadian toque. They looked as if they were not quite sure whether or not he might open his red-bearded face and snap at them. With obvious relief they saw Yura, whom they knew. That imperturbable Chukchee gentleman took charge and we were all formally introduced, then escorted to a press conference in the airport building where I helped to ease the tension a little by giving a radio interview in which I confessed that the only things I really knew about Magadan were that it was reputed to have the best beer and the most gorgeous women in all Russia.

  The city was forty miles away. We drove to it in a convoy of Volgas along a paved road which is the first lap of an all-weather highway leading into the interior through the Kolyma mountains and terminating at Yakutsk. I was accompanied by the Director of Culture for the Magadan District – shy, slight, youngish Nikolai Andreivich Ponomarenko, who understood English fairly well but was hesitant to speak it. Through an interpreter he told me all Magadan was waiting for us, and that my books had been sold out in the local stores. It was the kind of remark calculated to warm an author’s heart.

  Our first view of Magadan was stunning. The road took us seaward down a broad valley with great, bleak peaks looming on both sides of us, then suddenly spilled over the lip of a pass to reveal the city almost filling a mountain-ringed amphitheatre below us.

&nb
sp; I don’t quite know what I had been expecting – perhaps something like Yakutsk, which is a city of comparable size – but Magadan was unlike any northern city I had ever seen. The highway swooped down to become a broad tree-lined boulevard running between rows of handsome white apartment blocks and office buildings. Some of the architecture may have been a bit ornate, but the impression was of a clean, modern, and handsome city that had been designed, planned, and executed by people of imagination and taste. As in Leningrad, there were no towering skyscrapers and no disfiguring industrial or commercial edifices. The city almost filled its bowl, and new buildings marched neatly up the slopes on all except the seaward side, where lay the harbour and Magadan Bay.

  We were taken to the Central Hotel and given a luxury suite boasting television, a refrigerator full of beer, a cabinet full of cutlery and dishes, and a bathroom containing the most extraordinary tub. It was a product of one of Khrushchev’s early attempts to rationalize consumer goods production so there would be more for all. The thing was about four feet long and built step-fashion in two levels, one of them eight inches above the other. A contortionist or a five-year-old might have been able to take a bath in it. The sight of John trying to manoeuvre his bulk into its inhuman confines was a spectacle to rouse pity in the hardest heart.

  While John agonized in the tub, I went to the window and looked out over the city, watching the lights come on. It was difficult to believe that in 1930 there had been nothing in this valley except scrub taiga and a few wild reindeer.