by James Raffan
Six flights up, I arrived at a battered steel door. Number 26. I inserted the key and turned it four times, each turn producing a percussive click in the tumblers of the lock. Lo and behold, the door swung open, revealing another more conventional wooden door inside, which was open. And beyond, to my great relief, was not some Russian thug with a gun but a very nice, perfectly normal-looking three-bedroom apartment with a large kitchen, dining room, and sitting room. It had a washer, a dryer, full cooking appliances, and a large-screen TV.
I assumed I was all alone in the apartment until I heard the toilet flush. Instead of an armed intruder, a compact American contract geologist from Centennial, Colorado, called Brad Margeson, emerged in clean jeans and plaid shirt. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “Take any room you like. I’m heading back to the States in the morning.”
Margeson explained that since gold was first found in the Kolyma region back around 1912, geologists like him—although exclusively Russian rockhounds until the collapse of the Soviet Union—had been prospecting and sampling the rich and ancient rocks of the Russian Far East. As they worked their way north from the first gold finds close to Magadan, the gold- and silver-rich quartz vein system that became the Kupol mine was discovered in the mid-1990s just above the Arctic Circle in the remote region of Chukotka.
Since the mine opened in 2008, it had produced something like two million ounces of gold and twenty million ounces of silver, which, even in this remote location, was still a very profitable undertaking, he told me. “I’ve been working with a team on opening two other deposits, called Dvoinoye and Vodorazdelnaya, that are located about a hundred kilometres north of Kupol. The plan is to truck high-grade ore from these mines to Kupol for processing, which will both add to Kupol’s results and extend the life of the whole project.”
After a great tall glass of Russian rum, cola, and real ice, I crawled into the clean sheets and had a chuckle at the key on the bedside table before passing out with visions of another day in Russian airspace, another trip over the Arctic Circle starting first thing in the morning.
Woken by either barking dogs or ravens mimicking barking dogs, or both, I was up and showered and well ready by the time, as promised, another driver in a van turned up at Karl Marx Street. Chattier than the last guy, he talked about working for Kinross and all the jobs it had brought to what was otherwise a pretty desperate place. We drove around town picking up four or five other people heading to Kupol before turning north on M56 for Sokol Airport and the charter flight to the mine.
The plane was a vintage Russian AN-26-100, the so-called tactical version of the AN-24, which included a retractable ramp at the rear of the plane for loading cargo and small vehicles and, presumably, for offloading the same by parachute over hostile terrain when the spirit moved.
After three-plus hours in the air, we touched down onto the gravel airstrip at the mine. “Welcome to Kupol,” said a sign, followed by a set of rules about things you could and couldn’t do, things you could and couldn’t bring in and out of the mine, where you could and couldn’t go on the site, and why management reserved the right to examine, X-ray, and hand-search your goods and your person in microscopic detail to ensure each visitor’s “safety and comfort” while at the mine site. Basically, surrender your passport while here; no booze or drugs in; no gold or silver out, anywhere in your system.
As my carry-on case included audio and video recording equipment, cameras, a GPS unit, and other electronic gizmos, I braced myself for a full going over when it came my turn to pass through arrival security. Mercifully my host, Lyudmila Ukhtomskaya, was there on the other side with Alexander Petrovich Romanov, the deputy site manager, who stepped forward and waved me through. In no time at all we were en route to the mine facility itself, which stood fortress-like on top of a distant rocky tundra ridge.
Every aspect of this impeccably run mine—from food, accommodation, and recreation facilities for the workers to the mine itself, with both aboveground and underground ore extraction processes; from the mill and refinery that crushed, cooked, and concentrated high-grade ore into twenty-kilo doré (gold-silver amalgam) bricks to the oilers, mechanics, machinists, road workers, security, translators, and administrators who each did their part in the 24/7 operation of the mine—demonstrated that if you can build a mine here, you can build a mine anywhere.
Pool tables, megatonne off-road dump trucks, computers, metallurgical reagents, workboots, and bandages—everything here had been shipped by sea to Pevek on the Russian Arctic coast and then driven, dragged, or hauled over a 360-kilometre winter road. Though it was hard to imagine from the inside, this small town with beds and comfortable living facilities for over six hundred people was actually a creative assemblage of trailers from Alberta that were shipped to Pevek, rolled up the winter road, and put together like dominoes on a crushed-gravel pad to make the man camp. And, presumably, anything left would all be moved the other way when the life of the mine was done.
But in all the stories of early road building and gold mining in the Kolyma region, conspicuous by their absence in any of the historical books or reportage were the indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands long before 1912, when the first Russian prospectors turned up. As it did elsewhere across the Russian North, Russification involved rounding them up into collective farms, breaking the shamans’ drums, and indoctrinating all and sundry, regardless of creed, culture, or language, into working for the good of the Russian whole. Mines, since their inception here and elsewhere throughout Scandinavia and Siberia, are something that the reindeer have just had to walk around.
Although there were no conditions on the licences governing the operation of the Kupol mine regarding relations with nearby indigenous communities or about hiring or training local indigenous people at the mine, I was intrigued to hear about Kinross’s relatively bold statements of corporate responsibility, which, company documents profess, guide all activities at Kinross projects all over the world, including in the Russian Arctic.
Four of the ten guiding principles for corporate responsibility were directed toward fair and ethical treatment of people for whom the locations of Kinross mines were home:
3. We promote an ongoing dialogue and engagement with stakeholders in the communities where we operate, maintained in a spirit of transparency and good faith.
6. We conduct all of our activities in accordance with accepted standards in the protection and promotion of human rights. We respect the cultural and historical perspectives and rights of those affected by our operations, in particular indigenous peoples.
8. We seek to maximize employment, business and economic opportunities for local communities from our existing operations and new projects.
9. We provide lasting benefits to the communities where we work by supporting sustainable initiatives to develop their social, economic and institutional fabric. We recognize that every community is unique, and we work with our community partners to ensure that our support matches their priorities.
With the help of the corporate responsibility manager, Evgeniya (Jenya) Saevich, I was able to explore the application of these principles with various office personnel at the mine. But the conversation I was most anticipating was a chance to sit with four Chukotkan employees at Kupol.
We met down in the Solstice Café—a place with fancy coffee machines and a fully equipped musical stage where the Kupol house band performed—in the orderly confines of the modular man camp. Pavel Ermakov was a blaster who had learned his trade in the open-pit part of the operation. Vladimir Korange, Vladislav Itegin, and Nikolay Rol’tykvy were labourers working their way into the system thanks to Kinross training and affirmative action programs. Pavel was from Ilirney, a rural settlement of about 150 people between Kupol and Bilibino, a nuclear-powered gold-mining town and administrative centre set up in the 1960s. Vladimir was from Keperveem, another reindeer-herding community in the region. The other two didn’t say where they were from and clearly were present for the conv
ersation because they’d been told that this was something that would make the boss happy.
They had all grown up in a reindeer-herding culture in the context of Soviet collective farms. Those were good times, relatively speaking. Reindeer were far more plentiful then than they are now—Pavel said that when he was young in the late 1970s and 1980s, there were eight herds, each with its own brigade of families that moved with it over the tundra lands around Ilirney. “Now,” he sighed, “there are two.” The fall of the Soviet Union summarily withdrew government support and cooperation for reindeer herding and dumped the herders and their families onto the open market to fend for themselves. “Reindeer herding is part of your soul,” Pavel said, “but not so good for finance. I had to look for work.”
Part of Kinross’s process in setting up Kupol, compelled primarily by its own Corporate Responsibility Code, involved travelling to Ilirney and Bilibino and Keperveem and other communities around the mine site to speak with the people and to tell them personally about what was happening at the proposed project. Company representatives spoke of the steps that would be taken to ensure minimal impact on lands and waters. They reassured community members about commitments made to themselves and to the Russian government about doing their level best to hire and train local people whenever possible.
For many, like Pavel and Vladimir, it was an opportunity they felt they should explore because the future of reindeer herding was so bleak. Chukotkan women as well, though fewer in number, applied for positions with Sodexo, a multinational food and facility management company that operates the man camp, or with the mine itself.
When the conversation was over, I asked Jenya if Kinross was close to reaching its targets for hiring indigenous people from the area. “We don’t really have targets, as such,” she replied. “It’s more of an attitude and an ongoing commitment to communicating with the communities. In many cases, the people, like Pavel, who apply for jobs with the mine and who do well, working their way up the ladder to positions of increased responsibility and increased pay, bring money back to their families in the community but at the expense of their connection with the land and the herding way of life. I have heard more than once from indigenous community leaders, ‘Don’t take our best herders from the community because they never come back.’”
On a tour of the mill, proud employees explained how eighttonne scoops of ore dumped around the clock into the hopper at one end were reduced to a “pour” of near-pure silver and gold at the other. Just as it was funny when a worker in a Canadian radar station on Baffin Island explained in the dying days of the Cold War that the only place left in the world to source tubes for Canada’s antiquated tracking equipment was behind the Iron Curtain, I laughed when I saw these US$300,000 bricks of Russian doré being carefully stowed in individual weathertight U.S. Army 2.56-millimetre M2A1 ammunition cans for transport to southern markets.
I listened to songs in the music room by a Russian-born Canadian from Calgary. I had conversations with people from all over the world in the cafeteria, many of whom had worked in mines on almost every continent. They spoke of airports, bars, and bistros in major cities and out-of-the-way locales as if they knew them like the backs of their hands, because they did.
Over surprisingly drinkable coffee, an Aussie called Jason Lever, the continuous improvement risk manager, told me of his “commute” to Kupol from Guatemala, where he owned a terrace bar and bistro called Lava, in La Antigua, Sacatepéquez. During subsequent cafeteria meals, I learned more about Jason’s Ducati 250 motorcycle and his love life than was probably necessary, but it was just table chat in a dry camp with very little else to do besides work, sleep, and carry on—four weeks in, four weeks out. “I’ve come to the point now,” he proclaimed, “that next time I feel like getting married, I’m going to do what Rod Stewart did. I’m just going to find a woman I hate and buy her a house.”
Outside the man camp and beyond the mill, with the requisite training and safety briefings at each step, I went with willing guides and translators deep underground to meet the people working there. I visited the open-pit part of the operation, which they were in the process of closing down, and saw the polymer-lined cofferdam where the cyanide extraction fluids, now neutralized with chlorine, were being collected in a substantial tailings pond.
On a drive out to the airport, I saw skids of shrink-wrapped ammunition cases being quietly loaded on a backhaul flight to Magadan—a plane full of doré bricks. Hijack that and you’ve got riches to fund a revolution! Past the airport, I chatted with workers running off-road dump trucks and massive bulldozers to build the hundred-kilometre all-weather road to the sister Dvoinoye mine, which Kinross was in the process of opening. Ore from there would be trucked back to the Kupol mill, thereby increasing the efficiencies of this Kinross Arctic operation.
This road building, the guys told me, was coming to a halt until freeze-up because they’d run out of heavy-duty envirocloth to lay on the tundra under the road. Still, they were busy making perfect the grades on the road they had built, and there was my friend the raven supervising from a perch on the edge of the dozer blade.
Back in Magadan, with the Get Smart theme again running in the back of my head, I turned the big brass key four times and found a new set of roommates at 54 Karl Marx. With them for company in the evenings, I spent a couple more days in Magadan, continuing my conversations with company personnel at the Kinross office.
Jenya Saevich introduced me to Alexander Kazantsev, site services supervisor for Kinross at its ocean port on the Northern Sea Route at Pevek. He took me back to the very early days of the mine and showed me photos of himself taking a six-wheeled amphibious all-terrain vehicle, much like Oleg’s Trekol on the Ob River near Khanty-Mansiysk, out over the tundra to find the remaining nomads and their reindeer still roaming on the lands between Kupol and the coast.
Their first encounter had been in April of 2004. Kazantsev showed me pictures of his team sharing meals with a herding family in the smoky confines of their yaranga made of bent saplings covered with dried reindeer skins. “We see these families occasionally now during the winter months when we are hauling freight to the mine,” he said, “but now that the connection is established, the herding families tend to drive their animals toward the mine in late July or early August each year. At that time, they can join us for a meal or two and also get supplies of tools or other things they might need.”
Jenya interjected to tell me about another way Kinross has made the benefits of the mine more tangible for the herders and the people they support in neighbouring communities. “We have established the Kupol Social Development Foundation, which is devoted to supporting worthwhile projects in maintaining traditional lifestyles as well as aboriginal health care, education, and entrepreneurship. This was started in October 2009, when the company put $1 million into a foundation fund to support a US$250,000 annual operating budget for grants to local people and local projects.”
Jenya led me down the hall to meet Ludmila Danilova, a Chuvan woman who was the executive director of the foundation. She explained how the staff go about deciding which projects and whose communities win support from Kupol’s charitable support arm. “There are eight members on the tender committee,” she told me, “whose job it is to decide on which projects to support. One of the early successes was a film called The Book of Tundra—”
“Oh,” I blurted out, “by Aleksei Vakhrushev.”
“Have you seen the film?” Ludmila asked.
I hadn’t, but I told her that I’d met Aleksei in Moscow and we’d spoken in the RAIPON office.
She continued, “To date we have supported more than two dozen projects, from getting bone carving going in one area, to helping to provide fur clothing and dental care for herders in the Bilibino district. We have helped to create a health centre in Anadyr to promote exercise and wellness and to reduce the incidence of diabetes and obesity. A grant went to a group who have created a mini-farm to provide fresh eggs to the
community. And we are working with a group to see about getting our core boxes—wooden boxes for miles of drill core—made locally. In another location we are helping to promote cultural identity as an ecotourism development driver. We try to send funds to where they are most needed, and we do our best to ensure that projects are aligned and not in competition or conflict with social programs and initiatives by local or regional agencies. We give out about seven million rubles [C$225,000] a year.”
That afternoon, I left the Kinross office in Magadan and walked back to 54 Karl Marx thinking of well-intentioned people doing the right thing, of a mining operation above the Arctic Circle where everything is being done properly. Still I couldn’t get out of my head the image of Pavel, the Chukchi blaster who talked longingly about attachment to the land. He was getting on with wrangling a future for himself and his family in the wage economy of resource extraction. I wanted to believe that this was a good thing, that this was a possible future for people like Pavel. But I was haunted by his comment about reindeer herding being part of his soul. There was something sad about that, but maybe there are also things a traveller could not or did not see.
Kinross must have been one of the biggest employers in Magadan and in Chukotka, if not the biggest. It employed 1,600 people in all, infusing 1.3 billion rubles (C$41 million) in wages and benefits into the local economy. It purchased over 4 billion rubles’ worth of goods and services each year, working with two hundred local enterprises and entrepreneurs as business partners. The mine trained people, students particularly, and supported local communities through its foundation. Still I couldn’t shake the notion that the power balances here, as elsewhere in the circumpolar North, were askew. Kinross was taking its corporate responsibility very seriously, far more seriously than the Russian companies that had been popping up in the mining sector since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Access to resources was increasing thanks to climate change, but without effective laws and regulation, or self-regulation in Kinross’s case, that included the people who lived where these extractions were taking place, there remained a potent sense that the decay and eventual collapse of these languages, these cultures, these land-based ways of life was a necessary consequence of progress.