Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  As we travelled over frozen gravel and broken pavement, Shadrin—Slava—shyly explained in halting English that he had just been elected to his third five-year term as chief. Between calls on his mobile phone as we rumbled and bumped our way through potholes between snowbanks, he said, “They call me about everything. I wish I could solve all of their problems but I can’t.”

  After a brief nap at my hotel, I staggered downstairs to begin exploring Yakutia. I found Slava in the lobby, on his phone, and beside him a diminutive Sakha man in khaki-coloured overcoat and grey woollen toque. This was the inimitable, indefatigable Ruslan.

  “Hello. Hello, James. Slava has asked me to translate for you while you are here in the Sakha Republic. He and I have known each other for a long time. I am not cheap but I am very good. I give good value, very good value. I have been teaching English for a long time. In fact, Slava and I met in his home village, Nelemnoye, just north of here, near the Polar Circle. Actually … actually, it was very funny. I was a military translator first. But I went there to teach English in the school in Nelemnoye, and the kids asked me, ‘Why are you teaching us English?’ They did not seem to understand why I was there. They said, ‘Do the reindeer need to speak to us in English?’ Ask Slava, he will tell you. James. James, I am at your service.”

  At the table in Igor Makarov’s restaurant, Ruslan turned and said, “Horsemeat is very good for absorbing radiation. Very good. We have sent horsemeat to Japan since the nuclear power stations were damaged by the tsunami.” I didn’t have the heart or the time at that point to ask how he came to know this, but given Russia’s spotty history with nuclear power, including using thermonuclear bombs to assist with the creation of some of the big diamond mines in Yakutia, I had no reason to think that Ruslan was having me on.

  As the meal continued, Igor explained that the Yakut collective spirit that had resisted conquest by the Cossacks was the same vigorous resistance that had kept the Bolsheviks at bay, culturally speaking. And it was this collective feistiness that saw the creation of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. “There are Yakut primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools,” he said proudly. “There are Yakut writers, poets, artists, and academics. Yakut politicians. Yakut businessmen, like me. We like to think we govern ourselves, which has always been a bit of delusion.”

  “We live in a refrigerator,” Ruslan quipped. “Things keep well at fifty below.”

  Slava in his quiet and determined way had planned a weeklong agenda for my first visit to Yakutia that left my head spinning. With Slava as the tall and stolid straight man and quixotic Ruslan for editorial comment and one-liners, it was like going to the circus with Abbott and Costello.

  As a courtesy Slava arranged a meeting right at the start of my visit with Afanasiy V. Migalkin, chief of the Department of People’s Affairs and Federative Relations of the Sakha Republic. Migalkin seemed neither interested in nor engaged with anything Slava or I had to say, choosing instead to stick close to received government truths that indigenous peoples had thrived during the Soviet period, all of which was dutifully translated by Ruslan.

  Afterwards, we had barely stepped onto the street before Ruslan let loose. “Here in Russia, we say, ‘There is no truth in legs,’ meaning that you are more likely to be given the straight goods by a person who is sitting down. But in your country I believe what you just heard is called bullshit.”

  We moved from there to Dom Severa, the Northern House, where elders met to discuss important matters. “It used to be,” said one elder, “that in this permafrost area, even in summer you had to build a fire to dig a grave deep enough to bury a loved one. Now that is not the case. In town, back in the 1960s, they used to have to build buildings on piles driven four metres into the permafrost to ensure that they would be stable. Now they have to put the piles twice that far, eight metres, into the ground to make sure a house won’t topple.”

  Elsewhere in town, in a square near my hotel, I had seen a great bronze statue of Comrade Lenin on a massive marble base slowly sinking into the melting permafrost. Instead of standing straight-backed, pointing the way to the future, he was leaning dangerously to the right, his place on the square eroded by free-market currents or climate change—take your pick. “The whole city is about to collapse,” quipped Ruslan. I told him about the “last monument to Communism” on the road from Murmansk to Lovozero, which left him speechless, if only momentarily.

  Like conversations elsewhere, this parley in Dom Severa began with observations about climate change and moved before long into deeper and more troubling matters. “Changes to landscape bring changes to our souls,” said one of the elders. “When lands are destroyed, our souls are destroyed too,” added another. “And we don’t have much say in any of what is going on the land.”

  “You are from Canada,” said an elder who sat directly across the table and who, until this point, had said very little. “What is happening in your country? Is it the same as what is happening here?”

  Prompted by Slava, I launched into a sketch of Canadian indigenous land claims in general, including the story of the creation of Nunavut, explaining how, much as in Russia, Aboriginal and treaty rights are enshrined in a constitution as well as in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I mentioned that both our governments had issues with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People; Canada had voted against it initially but eventually endorsed it, and Russia abstained.

  The main difference between our two countries was that treaties such as the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement are predicated on fee-simple land ownership, meaning that many indigenous peoples in the Canadian North get to participate fully in development decisions, with all the costs and revenues that those decisions may generate. “It’s not perfect but it is very different from here,” I explained.

  “How did they do that?” the man asked.

  “Through resistance, persistence, and negotiation … and patience,” I replied. “But what is written in law and what happens on the ground are often very different and, in that sense, my country in many respects is no different than yours when it comes to many of the issues that are of greatest concern to you today.”

  “What troubles us most is the disappearance of language,” said Slava, to a full table of nodding heads. He continued, “The Sakha language is strong but the number of speakers is dropping. In the four spheres where language is used—official language, work language, home and family, and communication outside the jurisdiction—the dominant language, Russian, gets stronger every day. For the Evenks, the Evens, the Dolgans, the Chukchi, and my people, the Yukaghirs, there are fewer and fewer speakers every day.”

  From across the table, another voice added, “A loss of one language is a loss to all mankind. Indigenous languages are far more precise. The soul of a people depends on language.”

  At that point Ruslan, as was his way, sat forward, dropped his elbows onto the table, and spoke. I was not really sure if he was translating or speaking on his own behalf, but he said, “James. James, if you lose your language you have only your body left. Without language you are no longer human.”

  Still pursuing the theme of the invisibility of ordinary people, we travelled by car to the agricultural village of Oktyomtsy, population 2,787, fifty kilometres upriver from town. Yakutsk Radio serenaded us with the Beatles singing “All My Loving” as we headed south. There we met Marta Alexandra Uvarov, a gracious seventy-one-year-old who lived in a modest seven-by-ten-metre log home, built by her deceased husband. Attached to this was a garden plot, a tenth of a hectare, that has faithfully produced a hundred forty-kilo sacks of potatoes annually that she has sold to supplement her pension or bartered for meat and milk with her neighbours.

  “I was a midwife for thirty-five years,” she explained, “working for a time in the north of Yakutia, not far from Nelemnoye, Slava’s hometown. But we came back and settled here in 1985. Now my husband is gone. I must live on a pension of eleven thousand rubles [C$
350], which would be okay except that my monthly bill for gas and water is seven thousand rubles [C$225], so I must grow potatoes to make ends meet. And, since the flood, I have lost all my seed potatoes. I am now in the process of trying to start again but it is difficult.”

  The mention of a flood took me by surprise. I had expected that the story would have some kind of connection to climate change or a tale of unexpected extreme weather events that might be tied to changing global weather patterns. Indeed, this was a phenomenon throughout the world, including the North, that seemed to be occurring with increasing frequency. But as we toured the village after our meal, admiring the wandering cows and the sturdy little Siberian horses that had survived the flood, and as we sat down for another pot of herbal tea, the story Marta had to tell about the flood was more a cautionary tale about government and speeded-up resource development in the Russian North, and who participates in decision making—or not.

  In the spring of 2010, Marta’s husband was in hospital and she had to spend a lot of time running back and forth to Yakutsk to be with him. Her son, Alexander (Sasha), looked after a couple of cows they had and made sure that the house stayed warm. But that year had been a year of very little snow. It had been cold but there was not much precipitation on the ground. The broad Lena River was as low as it had been in some years when it froze in October, and many came to the conclusion that the river likely froze right to the bottom that winter.

  So when spring came and the sun started to melt the snows on southern slopes, and rivulets of water turned into streams that found their way to mighty Eh-Beh—the Mother River—there was no place for the water to go, because the main channel was blocked with ice. Sasha was at the farm and got a message through to his mother to say that he was taking what he could onto the roof but that no one knew if the water would rise. Gas and electricity supplies to the village were cut off. And that was the last they heard until a few days later.

  The water peaked at four in the morning on May 20. Sasha did his best to protect their belongings, but the water rose over the root cellar, ruining the next year’s seed crop for the best potatoes in the republic. Horses and cattle drowned. Before the water started to recede, a few days later, Oktyomtsy was devastated and Marta’s husband had died in hospital. By the time she was able to get back to the farm, the seed stock was mouldy and covered with silt in the root cellar, and the house her husband had built, the place that had shaped her life and her children’s character, was a total shambles.

  “People said this was the first flood our village had experienced in a hundred years,” Marta said, with tears in her eyes. “Other times when the river would freeze solid or an ice dam would form at the confluence of the Olyokma River and the Lena, the government would use bombs to blast the ice and let the water through. This time, though, there was no bombing because of the gas pipeline that runs in the bottom of the river between here and Yakutsk.”

  “So this flood had really nothing to do with an early spring, or a freak weather event that might have been related to a changing climate?” I asked.

  “No. They would not blast the ice for fear of damaging the pipeline.”

  “So they damaged the lives of the people of Oktyomtsy instead?” I continued.

  “Da. Da, da, da.”

  Proposed in 2001 to move Russian crude oil 4,857 kilometres from Tayshet in Irkutsk to Skovorodino and on to the terminal in Vladivostok, the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline included a leg constructed between Oktyomtsy and Yakutsk in March and April of 2009. The original plan called for a tunnel below the riverbed, but the modified plan, which was ultimately approved, set the 1.22-metre-wide pipe in a trench on the bottom of the river. It was particularly sturdy pipestock that was used in this section of the corridor and it was built to withstand anything the river might throw at it, but it was not designed to withstand conventional Russian techniques for blasting ice dams to keep villages like Oktyomtsy from being flooded.

  “The government compensated people for their cows,” Marta said. “But they have said that we should all move or we will not get one more ruble of help. I don’t want to move. This house is a monument to my departed husband. He built it with his own hands. We raised our children here. When we came here, the soil could grow only grass. I have worked that soil with my hands, year by year, and have made this little farm very productive. I am proud of what has been accomplished here. I will not move.”

  “Can’t you go to the government to say that that is not good enough? Can’t you complain?” I asked.

  Marta visibly deflated and her eyes lost their spark. “This topic is closed for public discussion. We don’t speak to the government in this country like you do in your country. Now they are talking about a bridge near here. I am worried that this will create another whole series of problems for us,” she sighed.

  “So we do what we can. I do my yoga. And I am president of the Grannies’ Club in this village. Our motto is ‘Help yourself.’ Please, have more tea.”

  It is only looking back on that first winter experience in Yakutia, which was followed by a second visit the following summer for another series of adventures in the Siberian Arctic, that I can see a very carefully constructed curriculum created by the kindness, generosity, and genius of Slava Shadrin, professor and Yukaghir chief.

  As happened in Murmansk and Moscow, Salekhard and Khanty-Mansiysk, my itinerary included visits to a number of museums where aspects and artifacts of indigenous life would be arranged in some kind of linear narrative that invariably began with geology and dinosaurs, volcanoes and woolly mammoths, and worked its way through dioramas of noble savages living off the land and reindeer pulling sleds then and now, to the silvered extravagances of czars and kings, the triumphs of the revolutions, the sacrifices of the patriotic wars, and eventually the contradictory successes of Soviet supremacy. But Slava did his best to set all that in a real human context, in its many dimensions. A case in point was a pair of visits with two people who routinely left the realms of conventional time and space.

  First, Ruslan and I were invited to visit with Aiza P. Reshetnikova, the director of the Yakutia People’s Music and Folklore Museum. Aiza, Slava told us, had been a concert pianist in her younger days but now devoted her life to gathering, protecting, and preserving folklore of all the various peoples throughout the region. I wasn’t really sure what the visit to Aiza’s museum might add to other folklore learnings. Slava obviously knew otherwise.

  Aiza welcomed us into a conventional museum setting, lined with outfits and artifacts, printed wall panels, and various TV screens that flickered in the subdued overhead lighting of the building. But rather than set us loose to pick a path through the various stops and exhibits, she pulled up three plain wooden chairs and told a story about the creation of the world.

  In the beginning there was darkness, she told us. “This is the Yakutian folk tale that I have suggested should be told at the opening of the opening of Sochi Olympics in 2014.” The Olympics were opened with a spectacular show that included a host of uniquely Russian stories but, alas, Aiza did not get her wish.

  In the beginning there was a big ballgame in this area. People played and played in the darkness until their ball disintegrated. At that point, Raven—”I’ve met Raven at every stop on my Arctic journey so far,” I just had to tell her—flew high into the upper world and brought back two balls, which he returned to the middle earth in his big beak. From one appeared the sun and from the other appeared the moon.

  Joining all this together was a sacred tree, whose branches reached up into the heavens and whose roots plumbed the depths of the underworld. Raven then created two special characters in the middle earth to help humans to navigate this complex cosmological environment, Aiza explained. The algyschyt, or blessing maker, connected to the upper world, and the shaman or black shaman (an Evenk term) to the underworld.

  Aiza led us to a huge diagram on the wall that showed the great tree and the concentric layers of both worlds, u
pper and lower, converging in mirror images as orange and yellow corn kernels or magnetic force fields joining in the middle of the image. The only animate figure on the entire image was a raven that appeared to be on its way from the second layer of the underworld toward middle earth.

  “Shamans were very important connectors in all the cultures of Yakutia. But after the Revolution, they were given a choice by the Stalinists,” she said “They could break and burn their drums or be shot. Many of them died by their own choosing, given that option.”

  Just as I was getting ready to accept that what the director was describing was something long gone, long past, she explained that with the founding of the Russian Federation and the collapse of Communism, shamanism has come back across northern Asia. Some consider it the official religion of the Sakha Republic. “There was a shamans’ conference here in Yakutsk back in the early 1990s,” she said, with a smile. “It is a spiritual tradition that lives on.”

  “What is the connection between the shaman and the raven?” I had to ask. “Are they one and the same?”