Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Occasionally, on the barren hills, we saw remnants of what looked like fences and corrals to direct reindeer at roundup time. But these were all greyed and often broken, leaving one to assume that they had not been used in a long time. We saw no reindeer or any recent evidence of reindeer either, on the road or off. And where reindeer footprints had prevailed for millennia before the march of Soviet progress, there remained only scars on the landscape where military vehicles on frozen ground had left a scatter of muddy ruts on tundra etched by acid rain and crisped by the unrelenting light of the midnight sun.

  The invitation to visit Murmansk came through inquiries I had made to the Canadian Embassy in Moscow about my book project. Through correspondence it became clear that one of the Canadian government’s priorities, given climate change, was the Arctic. Ambassador John Sloan and I had also figured out that both of our fathers had served in Allied ships on the Murmansk Run. This official junket to Murmansk was created to support Russian-Canadian business projects, but it was also an opportunity to mark the cooperation between our two countries, particularly the sacrifices of Canadian, British, and Russian sailors in Arctic waters during the Second World War. The two-day junket would culminate with a roundtable conference called “International Cooperation in the Arctic” aboard the legendary Russian icebreaker Lenin—the world’s first nuclear-powered surface ship—now moored in Murmansk harbour and transformed into a floating museum and conference facility.

  Having come by land to Murmansk, although conscious of the region’s checkered history as a home for the now mostly decrepit nuclear submarine fleet, we did not appreciate until we got to the city the extent to which it was a maritime place and a bustling port. Whatever we heard, read, or saw, it became clear that to understand the history and significance of Murmansk, one must understand the geopolitics of war and revolution and the importance of an ice-free port in an Arctic nation, all set in the crumbling concrete boxes of Communism.

  In the First World War, the Russians needed an alternative way to move supplies in and out of the western reaches of their nation, one that didn’t involve waters directly connected to those of Germany, so they built a railway from St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk to the north tidewater on Kola Bay. During the Russian Revolution, Murmansk was a port of strategic importance for White Army forces. Similarly in the Second World War, Murmansk was Russia’s link to the Western world. And then, during the Cold War, Murmansk and sheltered harbours farther down its river estuary became home to the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet.

  This history translated into a very curious set of stops on a Murmansk city tour with the Canadian delegation. Rolling up to the distinctively Russian Alyosha monument—a concrete model of a Second World War sentry in helmet and greatcoat, 35.5 metres tall, with a commanding view over the whole municipality and the harbour—provided a chance to think about Russians as allies in that war. But near the famous Russian Orthodox church, named for St. Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, was a smaller, much newer, and less imposing monument fashioned from the conning tower of the ill-fated Russian nuclear-powered submarine K-141 Kursk, the largest attack submarine ever built—a story about Russians as adversaries during the Cold War.

  Moving on, the delegation’s bus pulled up at a nondescript cemetery on a wooded hillside in the city. Here, with Canadian military attachés standing shoulder to shoulder with officers of the Russian navy, Ambassador Sloan made a touching graveside speech to the delegation about the Canadian whose name, George Auger, was carved into the plain grey marble monument. No doubt he thought of his father, as I did of mine, who survived naval service on the Murmansk Run.

  The British merchant ship Induna had left New York in early March 1942 with a cargo of aviation gasoline, barbed wire, and other war materials. It sailed in convoy PQ-13 to Reykjavik, Iceland. Between rough seas, storms, and prowling U-boats on the way to the coast of Norway, the convoy separated and took some losses.

  The Induna eventually formed up a new convoy with six straggler ships. They sailed through the Barents Sea well north and east of Murmansk, to try to avoid detection. One of these other merchant ships was bombed and incapacitated by German aircraft flying out of occupied northern Norway. Because of evasive manoeuvres, one of the Induna’s sister ships ran out of fuel. The Induna took her under tow and they both eventually got stuck in ice before another storm broke the tow cable and left both ships isolated and on their own in a hostile sea. Vulnerable and far from home in Arctic ice, the Induna was hunted and eventually sunk by German submarine U-376, the ambassador told the graveside assembly.

  A Canadian merchant seaman, George Auger, was a fireman and trimmer aboard the Induna. He was badly burned trying to save the ship after it had been struck by one, then another German torpedo. Auger made it into a life raft and watched the Induna sink bow first into the ice-choked ocean. Then, in a cruel irony, as the men tried to shelter themselves from minus-twenty-degree winter conditions on the open sea, Auger got frostbite, adding insult to the fire damage to his skin. For four days they waited, and survived, in an ice-encrusted life raft. They were finally scooped up by a Russian armoured trawler and transported to hospital in Murmansk. But, having survived all that, George Auger died on April 2, 1942. Many a moist eye watched as Ambassador Sloan laid a dozen red carnations at the foot of the plain merchant seaman’s grave marker.

  Later that day, at a reception for three Russian veterans of the Murmansk Run, Ambassador Sloan asked if I would join him in honouring these men with bouquets of flowers on behalf of the Government of Canada. Shaking hands with these three old sailors in their Russian Legion blazers festooned with medals and decorations of war, I looked into their rheumy eyes and thought of my dad, who would have been about their age had he still been alive, pondering how, even after all these years, Arctic allegiances were still shifting and how conflict is never very far away.

  Images of George Auger and the Induna persisted as we drove the following day down the curving roads, past a sea of makeshift hovels, to the harbour. The Lenin, tied proud with a fresh coat of paint to the wharf bollards with thick new braided rope, was only about a dozen metres longer than the Induna, but even after travelling 560,400 nautical miles through frozen seas—its ice-hardened steel skin being declared too worn for further service—it fairly bristled by contrast. Its bridge stood five or six decks higher than the Induna’s, its weight was more than three times that of the little merchant ship, and its nuclear-powered steam generators and electric motors could generate a thousand times more horsepower.

  We were met by naval officers and escorted smartly up a narrow companionway and into a room that made it clear the Arctic we now occupied was a different world again. The last retrofit of this pit bull of an icebreaker apparently had involved the removal of an upper deck and the creation of a cathedral ceiling and a modern all-purpose meeting space. Posters with the brightly coloured logos of Murmanshelf, a Russian association of suppliers for the oil and gas industry, the Murmansk Region Ministry of Economic Development, and the Embassy of Canada in Moscow stood on strategically placed easels before a theatrically lit giant screen and conference room that looked more like a meeting venue you might find at Disney World than a facility aboard a Russian ship.

  The conference opened with pleasantries from the first deputy governor of the Murmansk Region, the chairman of the Murmansk Regional Duma (parliament), and Ambassador Sloan, who talked about Canada and Russia as northern nations cooperating within the framework of the United Nations, the G8 and G20, NATO, and, of course, the Arctic Council, of which both countries were permanent members. Sloan mentioned that both countries were working through the Arctic Council to protect the environment and to create conditions for sustainable development as the North became increasingly important to the world for shipping, resources, and energy production.

  Several speakers detailed different aspects of plans to develop the massive Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea and talked about ways for Russia and Canada to colla
borate on that, if and when the economics of gas turned sufficiently to make this development feasible. Likewise, pointing to the Lenin itself as an exemplar of superior Russian icebreaking technology going back to the late 1950s, an official from the Murmansk Shipping Company talked about the Northern Sea Route and the implementation of the Arctic Bridge project linking Murmansk with the port of Churchill, Manitoba.

  Nathan Hunt, president of the Moscow chapter of the Canada Eurasia Russia Business Association (CERBA), detailed a number of success stories between the two nations. It became quite clear that since the end of the Cold War, Canada and Russia had established strong bilateral trade in everything from oil extraction tools to firefighting equipment, language technology, banking, schooling, and computer technology, and consulting on just about every conceivable area from agri-tech to integrated efficiencies in the oil and gas service industry. But the biggest emerging Canadian interest, the conference delegates learned, was Fedorova Tundra, a major platinum deposit on the Kola Peninsula.

  Exploration permits had allowed the Canadian resource giant Barrick Gold and its partners to demonstrate that the mine was a workable venture. Now they needed extraction permits and other permissions to get the mine operating to scale, and this was where the delicate give-and-take across the Lenin’s decks became key to the successful outcome of the gathering. Sergey Lobov, director of Fedorova Resources, had been part of the delegation as we toured around Murmansk the day before. When he took his turn at the podium, it was clear that he was speaking to those in the audience who might have political influence on producing the operating permits for the platinum mine.

  The roundtable finished up with concluding remarks from Ambassador Sloan. Standing before a slide with the colourful logos of fifteen Canadian corporations, he highlighted more success stories of Canada-Russia collaboration, particularly in the North, and returned to Barrick’s investment in Fedorova Tundra. “Governments point the way,” he said, “and business does the work. But at some point, the government needs to get out of the way so that corporations can get down to the specifics of business. That is where we leave this gathering, knowing the goodwill that joins our two nations.”

  As the ambassador spoke, I did a quick scan of his audience. The only women in the room were in the translation booths at the back. That seemed a bit odd, but maybe not in Russia. Sami people were also absent in body and in spirit. Although there were plenty of maps shown of the Kola Peninsula, not one of them registered in any way that the area was once and, in parts, was still the grazing lands, pastures, and fishing grounds of the Russian Sami. It also seemed odd that as speakers talked about the future of business and development in the Arctic in northwestern Russia, there was not a whisper about climate change beyond the fact that the opportunities for shipping in the Northeast and Northwest Passages were improving.

  A background paper by researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences explained the situation this way:

  It should be noted that only a small section of the population of the region has thus far demonstrated an interest in the problem of potential climate change. To a large extent this is undoubtedly due to the fact that information on climate change in Russia remains both limited and contradictory. It is mainly provided by the mass media (which frequently adopts an ironic or apocalyptic approach to covering the theme) often focusing on large-scale cataclysms (typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis etc). These phenomena have not of course affected the Russian North. As such it is likely because of this that the majority of the area’s population does not seem overly concerned about potential climate change. According to our estimations only about 5% of the population are interested in, or worried about, this problem.

  The subtext of all the Russian contributions at the roundtable was that strategic interests had created Murmansk and now, since the fall of the Soviet Union, one of the biggest problems for growing the businesses of tomorrow in this corner of the Russian Arctic was people, or the relative lack thereof. At the height of the Cold War, supporting an active fishing fleet and an even more active base of operations for nuclear icebreakers and submarines, Murmansk had been a city of more than five hundred thousand people, the biggest in the circumpolar world. But now, since perestroika, that number had been nearly halved, with people, particularly the young, leaving for jobs elsewhere on a daily basis.

  What was left on Kola Bay was the crumbling and often radioactive infrastructure of a fallen and nearly destitute superpower. Not a word at the roundtable about that. Nothing about the aging Kola nuclear power station, which had caused the remaining youth of Murmansk to reach out to Ingrid Skjoldvaer and Norwegian Nature and Youth to find a way to bring this potential disaster-in-waiting to public consciousness. Nothing about the municipality of Sør-Varanger, just over the border in Finnmark, where officials were worried enough about the nuclear power plant, the nuclear submarine bases, the nuclear fuel and waste storage sites, and other potential radiation sources—aware that it would take a nuclear cloud a scant four hours to envelop them after a disaster on the Kola Peninsula—that they had issued iodine pills to every household prophylactically, anticipating some kind of disaster sooner or later.

  Nor was there any mention of the Lenin itself as a poster vessel for the deadly problems of nuclear power in a fragile Arctic environment. Twice, in 1965 and 1967, the ship’s nuclear propulsion systems failed, resulting in the death of sailors aboard ship as well as permanent damage to reactor cores, which had to be removed from the ship, encased in furfural-based solidifying matter, and eventually dumped in the ocean on the eastern coast of the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago.

  The last event in the Murmansk junket was a Canada Day social, to which were invited all the people the ambassador and his delegation had already met, in addition to an extra guest list that had been compiled to fill the room and add a festive feel to the celebration. Having been involved in a project with a couple of Kola Sami organizations about ten years before through the offices of the Arctic Institute of North America, I had been trying to contact a number of people who had come to Canada as part of that project. But I had more or less failed to make that reconnection, having names but no addresses from a time when email was less prevalent than it is now.

  So when Gail and I were asked if there was anyone we’d like to invite to the Canada Day social, I passed on that short list of names to the ambassador’s roundtable crew. To my great delight, through the embassy’s business network, they had been able to connect with Nina Afanasyeva and a number of women from the Kola Sami community. So for us, the reception began with hugs and warm hellos from a bevy of handsome women in traditional Sami dress.

  The ballroom of the Poliarnie Zori Hotel was festooned with Canadian flags and bunting, and the buffet menu was supposed to be of distinctly Canadian food (although I have no idea what sausages, cabbage salad, and warmed-over tomato pasta have to do with Canada … maybe the colour red?). Ambassador Sloan invited some of the dignitaries present to say a few words, and he himself spoke about the importance of the meetings of the last two days and about how the future for our two countries as northern nations was bright. With that, a group of Russian musicians sang a song, followed by an enthusiastic expatriate rendering of “O Canada” in honour of July 1.

  Gail and I were standing with the Sami delegation during the national anthem and were surprised as it wound down to see Nathan Hunt of CERBA turn to the women and say, in Russian, how wonderful it was that the Russian song had been sung, but he wondered why the Sami ladies weren’t singing a song of theirs as well.

  “We haven’t been asked,” they said.

  “Well, you’re being asked now,” said Nathan.

  By this time, however, the ambassador had concluded the formal part of the evening program. Nathan did his best to pull people’s attention back from the buffet and the bar to listen as the Sami ladies began their performance, but the focus was lost. The lingering image from the Canada Day reception was of a half dozen Sami women singing their h
earts out in the function room of the Poliarnie Zori Hotel with hardly anyone listening.

  6: SEMJON’S OBSHCHINA

  The twenty-one-year-old Sami reindeer herder Semjon Bolshunov had a face that could sell almost anything. He was sitting on a backless kitchen chair in a ramshackle trailer in a sandy clearing in his ancestral grazing grounds on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, just over the Finnish border. His eyes danced with radiance and conviction as he told me about his Sami aunts, who helped him to overcome a Russian father who “from the beginning tried to kill” the Sami identity he had inherited from his mother. His sun-burnished smile and animated delivery lit up the shack. But it was not a completely happy story he related.

  In Soviet times, although the Sami were forbidden from wearing their national dress or marking their traditional ceremonies throughout the year, reindeer herding was done under state sponsorship and control and, all things considered, it worked. With the collapse of Communism in 1991 came the return of possibilities for Sami dress and language, but state support for herding vanished. The herders were left to fend for themselves economically. And this, with so many other pressures to be Russian, had a devastating effect on Sami throughout the Kola Peninsula. “Many of my cousins were ashamed to say they were Sami,” he said. “But me? I wear Sami clothes everywhere, not just to festivals. I wear Sami shoes in the city, and when people ask why I am dressed so strange, I proudly answer that I am Sami.”

  My path to Semjon’s obshchina—his forty-three-thousand-hectare ancestral homeland—began in the ballroom of the Poliarnie Zori Hotel in Murmansk on Canada Day. After they sang their songs, the newly elected chair of the Russian Sami parliament, Valentina Sovkina, and a host of other leaders in the Sami community (all women) hugged us both and said that it would be their pleasure to welcome us back at any time to see and do whatever our hearts desired in Russian Sápmi. I immediately made plans to return, but after a month away on this Scandinavian junket, Gail had a full slate of things to do at home and wouldn’t be able to join me for a second adventure in the Russian northwest.