Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  So six weeks later, I headed back alone to the Kola Peninsula. And just to make things interesting, the transport gods had arranged a little character-building exercise. The flight from Frankfurt to Moscow came in late, and the luggage queue gobbled up what few spare minutes there were to catch the night’s last flight from Moscow to Murmansk. So I was left with my hello/goodbye/thanks/where’s-the-bathroom/could-I-have-a-beer Russian to find out where one might go next. Several changes of airport levels, three ticket wickets, and a lot of hand-waving and watch-pointing later, it was nearly midnight and I had in my hand a voucher from my new friends at Aeroflot for a night’s accommodation and a meal at an airport hotel.

  Despite its surly desk clerk, burned-out light bulbs, and chipped ceramic tiles, the hotel was quite inviting, on the whole. The meal, however, was another matter. Ready for a cold beer and something spicy from what looked like some kind of Mexicanthemed bistro off the lobby, I presented the smiling hostess with my voucher, expecting to be seated without delay, given that the place was nearly deserted. She took one look at the voucher, grabbed my arm, and perp-walked me to a nasty little room that smelled of animal grease and exhaust with bare walls and bad light. Repast, gulag style: a glass of warm tap water, a small bowl of tired greens, a piece of black bread, and a plate of soggy pasta dabbed with watery tomato soup made up my evening meal.

  Suddenly my vibrating cellphone brought news of a warm welcome above the Arctic Circle. “Don’t worry, James,” said my Sami host, Anna Prakhova, on the phone from Murmansk, “we will adjust your schedule accordingly. What was going to be a busy few days will be a very busy few days.”

  Another call brought even more good news. Again, thanks to connections and friendships made through the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, a one-time Russian visa had been transformed into a one-year multiple-entry visa, which would make things much simpler. If there is a good thing about Moscow as a central hub for all traffic in and out of what used to be the Soviet Union, it’s that once you have cleared passport and immigration control on arrival at one of the three Moscow airports, all flights from there on, regardless of destination within Russia, are much less regulated and much less security focused.

  It was a sovereign summery August day as the morning flight to Murmansk settled into its final approach. There was the Lenin, bristling at the wharf, the various military cemeteries and monuments around town, the Russian nuclear submarine pens on the horizon up the Kola River estuary, and, of course the winding road leading back to Norway.

  Anna had told me on the phone that Valentina and the other Sami leaders would be joining us from time to time during the visit. She was very pleased to tell me that her employer, Frecom, a Moscow-based environmental consulting company, had given her leave to host the Canadian writer on behalf of the Sami of the Kola Peninsula on company time. “I hope you slept well as a guest of Aeroflot last night, James, because that will be the last time you’ll be doing that for a while.”

  Time quickly blurred into a stream of faces and places, but with a very different constellation of actors than those who had animated the official visit with Ambassador Sloan and the Canadian delegation. The Kola is Sami country—this point was made crystal clear—even though the two thousand Russian Sami are almost all now off the land and living in communities. We met Sami in various walks of life in museums and public offices through the city. Anna connected them all back to their roots: Sea Sami, who traditionally fished the rivers and the coastal waters of the Barents Sea; or Reindeer Sami, who, before the Bolshevik Revolution and seventy years of Soviet collectivization, traditionally moved their herds toward the sea in summer and back up onto higher ground inland in the winter.

  But Anna also took time in the schedule for a visit to the offices of the Murmansk Shipping Company, which had historically, until very recently, controlled the entire Russian nuclear icebreaker fleet. It also ran a diverse flotilla of ice-hardened cargo ships that for nearly a century had plied the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk on the Atlantic side across the top of Russia to Vladivostok and the Pacific.

  Down the street from the Murmansk Shipping Company, in the Murmansk Museum of Regional Studies, we met a woman in a white tracksuit, a lawyer from Ukraine called Olga Sergeieva, who had just returned from the North Pole in a Murmansk Shipping Company Arktika-class behemoth, NS 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory), the largest nuclear-powered icebreaker in the world, so far. Four days up, four days back, with a full two seconds right at the geographic North Pole. She showed me a photo on her camera of the ship’s GPS readout indicating their position as exactly 90°N. The cost of this adventure? “Twentytwo thousand U.S. dollars, and you get to keep the fancy parka. It was the dream of a lifetime,” she said with a sunburned smile.

  The next morning, we picked up Valentina and some of the other women from the Canada Day ceremony and drove about an hour south and east from Murmansk to Lovozero (known as “Love Lake”), where many of them had grown up. The town looked tired and rundown. Concrete buildings were crumbling. Not too many takers for the North Pole tourist trip here, I thought.

  We went to the Sami National Cultural Centre, which appeared to be one of the newest and best kept buildings in town. Under a domed ceiling depicting the drum symbols of shamans long passed, Valentina convened a meeting of elders and others from town for a roundtable discussion with the visitor from Canada. With Anna energetically interpreting, Valentina and the others listened to my stories of people elsewhere on the Arctic Circle, of joys and struggles of the Inuit, of commercial fishing families in Iceland, and of the Sami I’d met in Scandinavia.

  Slowly, the elders responded. They spoke of reindeer herding as it once was, of days when everyone spoke Sami, of change, cultural change, climate change, of how things were different now than they had been even a couple of years ago. They spoke of times when life was simpler and families were more connected to one another and to the land. But as the sun circled into the northwest and the shadows in the room lengthened, there was a sadness that started to overwhelm the meeting. Valentina spoke with quiet intensity, looking across the room into the eyes of her elders, of “pain in [her] heart” about the future of the Russian Sami. “We have talked about how things are warmer now, how winters aren’t as harsh, of how summers are warmer, but that is not what is worrying me the most,” she said.

  “Climate change is happening. We notice it from year to year. But climate change is slow. Cultural change is something we see every single day. We are losing our language. We are burying our young people who take their own lives. Alcohol is a sickness too many of us struggle with. We are losing our way of life. First we were moved off the land, out of our kova [tents], out of our wooden houses on the ground, and into these concrete doghouses that rise high above the ground. Now we have quotas for fish and our reindeer are in pens.

  “I feel pain in my heart,” said the Sami leader, her blue eyes welling with tears. Turning to me, through Anna, she said, “Thank you. You have raised with us some difficult issues that we must discuss among ourselves. Our voices must be heard. We must use the resources we have, like our new parliament, to make our voices heard.”

  When the public event was over, we had tea with the elders. Then Anna and Valentina and I walked on litter-strewn streets to Valentina’s office in the Sami college in Lovozero—her role as chair of the Sami parliament is unpaid—and we talked about just how difficult it had been for the Sami in Russia to have their voice heard by the powers that be. She told me of going to New York and speaking to the Tenth Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She said she told them of governments saying one thing and doing another. Right from the reforms of Czar Alexander II in the nineteenth century, which established an early form of self-governance for Kola Peninsula Sami, to now, she explained, there had been official talk of rights, but these had always been trumped (or ignored) by just about every other type of political initiative.

  Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union saw the ov
ernight disappearance of many of the strictures on Sami life. Following the example of their kin in Scandinavia, Russian Sami started organizing and making requests of the government of the new Russian Federation that they be given leave to create their own parliament.

  First the government just said no. The Russian constitution did not provide for establishing ethnic parliaments; after all, they were told, there were some forty different ethnic groups across Russia, and what a mess it would be if everyone set up their own system of governance. Then they were told, as described in a speech by the governor of the Murmansk Region at the time, Dmitry Dmitrienko, that “historically, there was practically no indigenous population present in the Murmansk Region” and that “all the people have in one way or another emerged from without.”

  Cut off from their kin in the part of Sápmi outside Russia throughout the Soviet period, and facing resistance from governments at every turn, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Sami took things into their own hands, Valentina proudly explained. Supported by human rights organizations around the world, they persisted with the argument that establishing a Sami parliament would be a way not only to establish effective dialogue with the government but also to realize their rights as indigenous people to preserve and develop their language, national culture, traditions, and customs. This was still not possible, they were told.

  And yet, through sheer persistence, the Sami were given permission to convene in 2008 the First Congress of the Sami People of the Murmansk Region, at which a decision was taken to move ahead with the creation of a Sami parliament anyway. Two years later, at the Second Sami Congress, convened in Murmansk on December 12, 2010, the Russian Sami parliament was created. One of the smallest indigenous groups in the Russian Federation had, however symbolically, taken matters into its own hands. Against all odds, the vote was pushed through by the Sami matriarch Nina Afanasjeva, and Valentina was elected chair.

  After a full day in Lovozero, we had much to think about. On the way back to Murmansk, driving into the setting summer sun, we approached a tall pine tree on the side of the road that the driver asked me to have a good look at. At first, it looked like a very handsome, even iconic tree that might have been painted into celebrity by the Group of Seven. “The Lenin Tree,” said Anna, pointing into the sunset.

  It took a minute for me to understand what she was saying. It was like looking at a Rorschach blot or an Escher drawing, but when my brain finally saw in negative space what they were seeing, my chuckle of recognition brought howls of laughter from the others in the van: in silhouette, the tree against the evening sky perfectly etched Vladimir Lenin’s familiar bald head, with his straight Russian nose and goatee.

  “Welcome to the last monument to Communism,” Anna said, “or so we hope.”

  Anna and Valentina had arranged for me to give a presentation about my work at the Murmansk Museum of Regional Studies the next day. It was a chance for the Sami to offer some programming for anyone who would like to hear from a guest they had brought to town; but, more importantly, it was also an opportunity for the guest—that would be me—to learn more about what the Sami were doing to change their decaying cultural and political fortunes, and about their growing public advocacy. There, in one of Murmansk’s main museums, the advocacy took the form, in temporary space, of a new exhibit about the Sami. There were photos of elders and youth in non-traditional roles and jobs—working in schools and universities, in industry, on offshore oil rigs, and still as reindeer herders, remembering and reinforcing connections to the land and to the Sami culture reaching back into time.

  The featured community member in the role of reindeer herder in the exhibit was the fresh-faced strapping twenty-one-year-old Semjon Bolshunov, who, said the interpretive panels, was from the village of Loparskaya. He was one of the leaders in the new Sami approach to herding. Thanks to Anna and the ladies, I would meet him at the end of an amazing road trip by the light of the midnight sun. Semjon was a cook by trade but took his turn, working with others on his ancestral community near the Finish border, at building a reindeer herd to keep the Sami traditions alive.

  After the curator’s tour of the exhibit was done and my talk had been delivered in the theatre of the museum, Anna explained to my delight that if I was amenable, we could head out when her husband finished work to visit Semjon on his obshchina. “It is a long drive, but we are going down there anyway. We have to pick up another herder who is in a community in the other direction and take him out to switch with Semjon. You would be welcome to come along. It will allow you to get an idea of what modern-day reindeer herding is like, James.”

  This indelible nighttime adventure began at about six o’clock in the fruit section of the grocery store near Anna’s home. We bought a big sheaf of bruised bananas, “for the reindeer,” Anna said, to my amazement. I took a couple of photos inside the store to mark the occasion. There was an insistent tap on my shoulder and something loud and officious being said, for my benefit. It took a second to realize what the fellow was saying. I quickly deleted my pictures. Why? Who knows. Habit? Bananas for reindeer? Who knew?

  We headed back to the car. Anna had invited Olga, the lawyer from Ukraine, to come along, so we swung by her hotel for pickup. There were four of us in a late-model Lada: Anna and her husband, Yuri, a naval electrician, in the front and the North Pole lawyer and me in the back, the bag of bananas between us.

  The original premise for making the trip was Sami looking after Sami. Alexi, one of the team charged with the responsibility of looking after this particular herd, had somehow gotten himself back to his village of Loparskaya, on the Kola River forty kilometres southeast of Murmansk, to see a doctor about his diabetes.

  So before we could travel southwest from Murmansk to get to the obshchina where the reindeer were, we had to go southeast first, to Loparskaya. It was a nasty, rundown little community with hungry-looking stray dogs, grubby children playing in puddles on the side of the road, and tattered aboveground steam pipes from an earlier era. We pulled up outside a three-storey concrete box with cracked windows and mismatched curtains. Anna phoned up to let Alexi know we had arrived, and there was a long pause. At length, she spoke to her husband, who listened gravely, then nodded. And to me, she said, “Alexi is not ready yet. You and Olga will walk with Yuri.”

  As it turned out, the walk was a ploy to kill time, because Anna had learned on the phone from Alexi’s wife that the herder, out on medical leave, had been self-medicating with vodka all day. She was trying to rouse him but not having much luck.

  By the time our walk along the narrow, clean Kola River was done, Anna and Alexi’s wife had him semi-conscious on the front steps of the building with a dark plastic bag of his personal effects collapsed on the concrete beside him. Yuri pulled the car up close to the building. Anna grasped him under one arm and his wife took the other; with his preschool children looking on, they poured him into the front seat of the Lada. All that stopped him from falling out of the car so that they might get the door shut properly was the seatbelt, which they reefed up tight as his drunken head lolled back against the seat.

  With Alexi, the main reason for our journey, fast asleep in the passenger seat, the two women and me jammed ourselves into the back. We made our way back toward Murmansk and then swung west on Highway P11, the “Lotta Road” in local parlance, heading toward the Finnish border. It was only 140 kilometres to the road marker where we would pull off the main highway, but the road was curvy and bumpy and the going was slow. With the detour to Loparskaya, we didn’t actually arrive at Semjon’s reindeer camp until midnight.

  By then, we were bathed in Arctic twilight, and frost was starting to crystallize on spruce fronds and on the rich beds of moss and lichen on the ground. Having driven down a narrow cart track for several hundred metres off the main road, we came to what looked at worst like a junkyard and at best like an abandoned gypsy camp. Tied dogs barked from indeterminate locations as we stepped out of the car and headed towa
rd a rectangular cabin on a truck chassis, a house trailer of sorts, with a set of rickety steps leading up to a door on the back. After the rumble of the car for nearly six hours, a delicious quiet surrounded us.

  In a wee-hours calm that felt almost conspiratorial, broken only by the dogs barking, Anna was first up the stairs. Before she could reach for the handle, the door opened and out came the young man from the pictures at the museum, fully clothed but looking like he’d just gotten out of bed.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” he said, with the magnanimity and welcome of a consummate host. “You will see that we set up a table and bench inside a picnic tent over there for you, because at this time of year the mosquitoes are bad.” As we started walking toward this four-by-four-metre netting enclosure that looked like something out of The African Queen, Semjon paused, looked around, and asked, “Where’s Alexi?”

  “He’s in the car,” said Anna, darkly.

  “Oh,” Semjon replied, knowingly.

  Over tea and crackers in the tent that progressed to beer inside the trailer after Alexi surfaced, with Anna interpreting and often (I think) correcting what he had to say, Semjon explained what was happening. Two things were evident from the outset: first, that although it was only through an aunt on his mother’s side that he had learned anything at all about the actual mechanics of reindeer husbandry, this was something that Sami had done for generations—he seemed to know that more in his bones than in his brain; and second, anything he knew of Sami and reindeer had happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union.