Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  The place of greatest interest to me was the Magadan Agricultural College, and I spent several hours there among six hundred students of twenty nationalities, most of them Small Peoples of the north. This is a residential college, and the students come to it from all over northeastern Siberia to take four-year courses in reindeer husbandry, fur farming, cattle raising, farm management and, suprisingly, poultry breeding, a new arctic venture which is exclusively in the hands of women. After graduation the students return to the collectives and state farms from which they came, equipped to apply the most modern methods and technology to the age-old pursuits of their ancestors.

  I have seldom met such ebullient youngsters, or seen a better-looking lot. They followed me about in mobs. My right hand grew cramped from signing autographs and my voice grew hoarse from trying to answer questions about the Canadian north. Their principal, Olga Terenteva, was a buxom, dark-skinned and intense woman with a bubbling laugh and limitless enthusiasm which seemed to be shared by her students.

  “Do you know the entire cost of training each of the students and of feeding and paying them for four years is recovered within three years once they return to their farms, by increases in production?” Olga told me. “You have no idea how much happiness it is to work with young people like these. They are wild to learn so they can raise the status of their own people and improve conditions of their lives. They seem to have the dedication missionaries were once said to have. They are so very much alive, so strong in their youth, so confident in what they can do. It is impossible not to love them.”

  I left the College festooned like a Cockney Button King. Scores of students had pinned their lapel badges all over my jacket. This giving of lapel badges (they represent the localities the donors come from, the organizations people belong to, or simply great events) is endemic amongst the young. The badges are highly valued and to give one’s badge is to give one’s wholehearted friendship.

  The general habit of gift-giving is a mixed blessing in the Soviet Union. One soon learns not to admire anything which is in any degree portable, or it may suddenly be yours. Once, in a Tchersky nursery school, Claire admired a Russian teddy bear – “Mischa” – and immediately a child of four or five years solemnly shoved it into her arms. When she tried to return it, the nursery school director stopped her.

  “No, no! You must keep it. If you give it back you will break the child’s heart.”

  Mischa accompanied us all the way to Moscow where, thank heavens, it was admired by another child to whom Claire was able to give it without feeling any sense of guilt. Stuffed bears, a balalaika, innumerable books, the famous frozen fish, carved bowls, ivory tusks, and items, as they say, too numerous to mention, all poured upon us until we learned wisdom. Our greatest difficulty came when we were viewing artists’ works. To admire was to receive. Not to admire was to crush the artist’s soul!

  I very much wanted to see a Soviet fishing village. Having spent many years in Newfoundland where I had watched the death of hundreds of vigorous fishing communities as a result of governmental conclusions that they were “uneconomic” in the modern age, and the consequent decision to uproot and transport the populations to so-called “industrial growth centres” (where there was no industry and no growth), I was curious to see how the Soviets had dealt with the same problem.

  Nikolai Ponomarenko took me to Sugar Loaf, a village fishing operation on the Soviet new style. Sugar Loaf lies on a bleak, gale-whipped shore not far from Ola, and it does not even have a harbour. For centuries its people fished “from the beach,” launching their oared boats each dawn and hauling them high above tide level when they returned ashore at dusk. In 1948 the Magadan area fishery was rationalized into a series of six combines which, together, formed the Magadan Fisheries Trust. Of the fifty-eight fishing villages (many of them still very primitive) which existed at that time, seven were abandoned by the decision of their inhabitants, who moved to nearby villages. Fifty-one were retained as potentially viable communities of the future. Sugar Loaf, despite its lack of a harbour, was one. Instead of engaging in a dozen peripheral fishing activities, as it had done in the past, it was given the task of concentrating on the herring fishery. A large, modern plant was constructed to process herring.

  I toured the place with its manager, a hard-bitten, craggy-faced Old Russian who had spent forty years in the business and had lived through the transition from a primitive, subsistence fishery to a highly efficient and lucrative modern enterprise.

  “We did it in stages. At first, after we built the herring pickling and preserving factory, the fishermen continued to use small boats. Gradually we introduced new and better methods. We built a fleet of inshore seiners of wood – not expensive boats – but they doubled production. Sugar Loaf’s population was growing and the production increase absorbed the labour growth; but to go on doing that we had to increase production. We followed a master plan which was to gradually phase out the inshore fishery in favour of midwater work. In the late 1950s we introduced the first of a fleet of all-purpose combined trawler-seiners, made of steel, and serially produced in large numbers.

  “These were two-hundred tonners – you can see a couple out there now at the unloading dock. They can stay at sea a maximum of five months, following the herring on their migrations, and they are maintained at sea by special service ships. They tranship their catch at sea to three-thousand-ton refrigerator ships that are constantly shuttling between the fishing fleet and the shore factories. We could, you know, have put the new big 20,000-ton factory ships out there, but that would have smashed the lives of the shore-based people. There was no sense in that.

  “How has it worked out? Here we now employ 120 factory workers (and we are the smallest of the many factories — there are three in our herring combine alone). We produce four thousand tons of prepared herring a year. The whole herring combine produces 36,000 tons. The trust production is 190,000 tons of prepared fish. Our herring combine employs 615 fishermen, full time, year round. They are rotated to the working ships aboard the refrigerator vessels, so they spend two months at sea and one ashore. When there are no herring they fish for other species for the other combines. Ordinary fishermen make an average of five hundred rubles a month. Officers, seven hundred to eight hundred. Plant workers, 350 to four hundred.

  “We have no difficulty manning our fleet; in fact we have big waiting lists. All fishermen must have a certificate from the Fishery College at Magadan, which gives free instruction and also provides full sea-going pay while the student is at college.”

  I asked him how the changes had affected the old fishing villages.

  “You can see for yourself. Ola had only a few hundred people before the trust was formed. Now it is a real town. It is the same with all the small fishing ports. They are growing very fast in size and in the quality of life. Specialization and rational use of technology are the answers. The villages and towns will continue to grow. The sea must be asked to help feed more and more of mankind. It is a farm, and we must farm it; and the farmers must be well rewarded for their work.”

  “Isn’t the sea being over-farmed already?” I asked. “In North America it is claimed that Soviet fleets are sweeping the seas clean of fish – destroying the breeding stock. What about that?”

  He gave me a hard look, then relaxed as he realized he was being baited.

  “Listen. You told me about the herring fishery in Canada. Tens of thousands of tons of good fish ground up for fertilizer or for animal feed! What kind of use of the sea do you call that? It is foolish waste! Every one of the herring we catch goes to feed human bellies. It is you who think the sea is inexhaustible! You talk about cropping it, but what do you really do? You take all you can get, wherever you can get it. I think you are just angry because we have become better fishermen than you.

  “We worry very much about conservation. We don’t want to find the seas empty and our fleets and all our people unemployed, and the population going hungry. We aren’t aft
er profit. We are working to feed people; not for now only, but for an eternity. Do you think we would be such idiots as to destroy the fish stock?

  “What is needed is international controls. We want them, badly. Do you? I think not. I think you talk a lot about them but don’t really want them. I think you had better change your minds pretty fast, or there will be a disaster in the sea – a disaster for mankind.”

  The manager of Sugar Loaf is not a man at the top, not a policymaker. Nevertheless, I think his attitude reflects Soviet concern about world fisheries. We could at least go halfway toward them and find out if they mean what they say, or if it is all bluff.

  Meantime I think about Newfoundland, where already more than two hundred fishing villages have been abandoned and their people dispersed all over mainland Canada to scrabble for what jobs they can find in the industrial cities. If I were a fisherman, I think I would prefer a home in Sugar Loaf to the shores of Newfoundland from which men are being forced to depart, after more than three hundred years of human occupancy.

  The best laid plans of the “Magadan Escort Service” did not always work out. In Russia, all is indeed surprises! One morning as we were due to depart for a tour of a transport company and the harbour, a gentle knock brought me to the door. In the hall stood a dark, wiry young man of indeterminate race. He handed me an envelope which contained a letter from him to me, written in the most endearing English:

  My dear Friend,

  Thanks a lot for your frankness of thought, feelings and spontaneity of your books, all of them I am reading.

  I was born and grew up on the tundra which is close and intelligible to me. I have half of Yukagir blood. I know the wolves and the caribous language; charm and pain of snow deserts; dumbly attractive northern lights. I couldn’t come to you for too many people greedy of the visual sensation, and officials all around you. I heard your voice and laughter, and vision of tundra came to eyes. Officials talking to you more as writing foreigner than as artist making his books in the darkness of dreamless nights … I write about Chukotka. My novels now like young, timid growth in icy soil of imperfection, but I hope will be known soon for real northern people.… Such a pity there is not time to make acquaintance with you.

  Yours,

  Edvard Gunchenko

  There was no resisting that letter. I looked up when I had finished it and met Edvard’s eyes, black and warm and hopeful.

  “John!” I yelled into the room. “I’m going out with a friend. Tell Nikolai I’ll be back later. You go on the tour. Have fun!”

  Edvard took me to his tiny flat, where his young and pregnant wife was overwhelmed by my unexpected arrival. While she flitted about making food and tea, Edvard’s five-year-old daughter carefully touched my beard.

  “She knows you are tundra man,” Edvard said happily. “Excuse me, but I must make share this minute.” He dashed out of the apartment to return a few moments later accompanied by another young man, Anatoly Lebeder. We sat and drank tea, and ate dried caribou meat, pickled whale blubber, and homemade red (salmon) caviar, while the two young men talked themselves into hoarseness.

  Both were writers; both were of the new school so condescendingly referred to in Moscow as the “nature kids,” and they were as honest, as direct, as delightful, and as admirable a pair of young people as one would care to meet. Anatoly was from Vladivostok. He abandoned a good job there as a harbour engineer and came north, as a result of reading one small book which was Edvard’s first published work. Edvard was nominally a geologist with the Northeast Research Institute, but he and his wife and child spent most of their days on the tundra of Chukotka, living lives as natural as those of the ancient Yukagir who were Edvard’s maternal ancestors. His father was of Cossack descent, from Markovo – a trapper all his life and one who had never killed a wolf because, “Wolf is man’s brother-life; my father will not kill wolfs because not able to make murder.”

  The driving force behind the lives of both these young men was the desire to clarify man’s true affinity with other living things; to rediscover the natural well-springs of human existence. They were passionately sure their pursuits of these objectives would lead to a better hope for mankind, to a new direction.

  “Most important truth of all is hardest to see because man of today will not be brave enough to look. Man, wolf, caribou, walrus, snowbird … all are one. Each day man moving farther away from truth into bowels of iron world. Spurning natural world with hard boots and smashing truth, and hopes for life. We try to understand true way, Anatoly and me. We living only for that truth, and telling of it for all men!”

  Political considerations seemed almost irrelevant to their deep quest. They were not anti-communist, however. On the contrary, they seemed to believe that the discovery and acceptance of the truth they sought would enrich and revitalize the dreams of Marx and Lenin.

  I was struck by the resemblance of their thoughts to the teachings of Konrad Lorenz, and I asked if they had read any of his works. They had not. Later I learned that Lorenz is not published in the Soviet Union. There, as in most other lands, established authority rejects his suggestion that man can only understand himself by a frank recognition of his own animality and by recognition of just how aberrant human behaviour has become. Old crystallized minds shudder at the implications. If we are indeed becoming aliens on our own planet, divorcing ourselves from the continuum of natural life, this is a fact that they are incapable of facing.

  “Lenin would have understood us. That mind would have seen the dangers for a mankind sick because not able to follow goodness in natural conditions!”

  It was said with assurance but with a certain wistfulness. It might have been true; but even if it were, there is no Lenin now.

  My morning with these two was abruptly shattered. An obnoxious German-born journalist, who had been obsequiously toadying to John and me since our arrival in Magadan, opened the door and walked into the apartment without knocking. He was furious with Edvard.

  “They are searching all Magadan for Mowat,” he shouted. “What right do you have to occupy him! You will be in trouble for this!”

  He spoke in rapid Russian but at my request Anatoly quietly translated. Later, when I had been restored to the fold of the guided tour, I explained to Nikolai Ponomarenko that the visit had been my own idea, and I apologized for upsetting his arrangements. He smiled, a little sadly.

  “Those are very good young men. Very talented, too. I would rather have been there with you three, than here, looking at a thousand motor trucks.”

  I became very fond of Nikolai. His shyness took some days to wear off, but when it did he talked freely about himself and his work. He, too, was a dedicated man. His chosen task lay in the direction of making sure that every person in the district, no matter how remote or how humble, should have access to the food provided by books, films, music, and everything which is called culture. To my delight I found that his deepest personal commitment was to nurturing and strengthening the cultural manifestations of the Small Peoples. That he had had some success in this was demonstrated one evening when we attended a three-hour-long performance at the Magadan State Theatre … a performance given by the Chukchee-Eskimo Ensemble of the Chukotka National District.

  Nikolai explained that the ensemble, consisting of twenty Eskimo and Chukchee men and women, most of them in their twenties, had only been in existence for three months and this was their first appearance in a major theatre.

  I anticipated an amateurish and embarrassing performance; instead of which I sat enthralled through a program of dancing, singing, musical comedy, and miming which was superlatively conceived, produced, and performed. It was fully professional theatre: vigorous, colourful, and never lagging. And every single act was an authentic adaptation from traditional Eskimo or Chukchee sources.

  The capacity audience was predominantly European, and Magadanians pride themselves on their theatrical sophistication. When the curtain fell the audience rose as one with an ovation that
lasted a full five minutes. Nikolai Ponomarenko, who was sitting beside me, had tears in his eyes.

  “Now they will go on to Moscow and to an All-Union tour! The whole country will see the art of these people and will applaud it. And the Chukchee and Eskimo will be very proud of their ancient heritage and of themselves.”

  Twenty-Three

  OUR FINAL days in the Magadan Region were spent high in the mountains, a hundred miles from the sea. We drove inland on a hard-topped road that looped and slithered along the walls of desolate valleys whose beds had been ravaged by gold dredges during the first great rush into the Golden Mountains. All that remained to mark those times were endless miles of tailings, looking like the corrugated castings of gargantuan worms.

  We climbed up past the snow line and the temperature plunged to bitter depths. The sense of being in an alien world was suddenly and bizarrely ruptured by a young writer who was travelling with us. Pointing to a frozen pond beside the road he announced its name: Jack London Lake!

  “The possessed were not all Russians,” he explained. “The stench of gold drifted around the world like a fever fog, and men reacted to it with the lust of dogs scenting a bitch in heat. They followed that stench to Ola from as far as Chile and Brazil. Many came from Alaska and it is to one of those, perhaps, that we owe the name.”

  At Black Lake Pass we turned off the highway which threads its way westward through the entire Kolyma range until it comes to Yakutsk. A narrow track along a hogs-back ridge took us northward into an apparently impenetrable massif. Suddenly our destination – Talaya – lay before us. A modern town sprawled at the base of a great cirque cut in a wall of rock and, high above the town, a palace as rococo and elaborate as some of the pre-Revolutionary palaces of European Russia reared its curved, white bastions. But this striking edifice was, in fact, a spa built in 1950, a product of the Communist State.