by James Raffan
That night, I went to a banya, which involved amazingly hospitable Kinross men flaying themselves with fresh birch branches in a subterranean spa—some aspects of what happened in Siberia should probably stay in Siberia. I had a delightful meal and many toasts “to neighbours across the pole” with Jenya and some of her colleagues from her team at the Green Crocodile Restaurant on Pushkin Street in Magadan. Then I accepted an offer from Roman Karabets, the more talkative Kinross driver, to take me on a tour around town.
We went first to the Mask of Sorrow, which I’d seen on arrival. Inside the concrete head, the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny had created a life-size tiny cell to represent the place where many people perished. The tears falling down the face from the eye, which is actually a barred window, were faces, faces inside tears. In the back of the sculpture, the part you couldn’t see from the road, were two human figures in bronze. There was a headless man on a cross high up. Lower down was a grieving woman on her knees. Someone had placed red carnations in the crook of her arm. The effect of the work silenced us until long after we were back in the car.
On the way back to Karl Marx Street at the end of the tour, we passed the five golden turrets, which Roman explained were part of a new cathedral, the Church of the Trinity. We passed an army of workers slaving at midnight to finish installing marble steps and terraces of precast paving stones. “Why are they building a new cathedral when it appears there is another smaller one at the other end of the main street?” I asked.
“We had a governor here called Valentin Tsvetkov who thought he was the czar. He collected graft from all of the local businesses, who had no choice but to pay. And he used public funds to pay for private ventures with all sorts of underworld connections. He got rich by taking advantage of his position and his greed. He started building this church back in 2002 and then got assassinated in Moscow later that year. People have been trying to get the thing built since then. Apparently the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has never been to Magadan, is coming here tomorrow to open this place. I call it a monument to God and corruption,” Roman scoffed.
The next morning, before boarding my flight to Anadyr, I went with Jenya to the plaza outside the new cathedral where the consecration service was in full swing. Security was very tight and the square was crowded, but we managed to get close to a screen where the proceedings inside were being broadcast. The ornate artworks on the walls and ceilings of the sanctuary were like nothing I’d witnessed in any other church, in Russia or elsewhere, with the possible exception of the Sistine Chapel.
After we’d stood for a time watching the screen, Jenya suggested I go inside. “When was the last time you got to attend the opening of a Russian Orthodox cathedral? When was the last time you got to see the great Kirill, patriarch of the church? Go—I’ll be in my office across the road. Just come there when you are ready, and I’ll take you back to your apartment to get your things.”
Eventually I realized that there was a semi-organized line in what was more or less a sea of people milling in the plaza, and I waited my turn in that to go through security. An old woman in a big woollen greatcoat down to her ankles took exception to the young army officer who embarked on a pat-down. She cuffed him with her purse and spat something derogatory in his general direction before he backed off and held up his hands in submission, moving on to the next person in line.
There were men and women streaming across the newly finished pavers. The men looked up at the shiny gold turrets and the women drew kerchiefs out of their handbags and covered their heads as they made their way up the broad white marble staircase. I thought of Eduard, the three-fingered accordion player in Seliyarovo, and how excited he was when they were once again able to erect a cross on the top of the church in that town, the church that had become a store and a meeting hall during the seven dark decades.
Inside, as the blending of human voices chanting and singing echoed and reverberated off depictions of saints and the stations of the cross, I watched a parade of stone-faced mostly old men in glittering liturgical splendour, led by Patriarch Kirill himself, with their candles, incense, and incantations, move through a sea of men in plain clothes and women with their heads covered and eyes averted.
I thought about who plays, who watches, who wins, who loses. I wondered where was the healer, the shaman of this golden temple? Was it the patriarch? Was it the gold? I stood there thinking of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
Outside, a raven dropped from a nearby tree into the crowd and snagged a chocolate bar wrapper with some chocolate still in it that someone had dropped on the ground. A boy, maybe six or seven years old, pulled away from his grandmother’s hand and lunged toward the bird, missing by a mile, but stumbling and dirtying the knees of his Sunday-best pants.
14: SNOW WIND
My last stop in Russia was Anadyr, capital of Chukotka, located just across the Bering Strait from Alaska in the farthest east of Russia’s nine time zones. Grigori Tynankergav, a Chukchi geologist, member of the Chukotka Duma, and chair of the Chukotka Council of Elders, seemed very comfortable as he traced his finger along a map and talked about his first job. Although he had no experience with the development of tin and tungsten mines in the 1930s, which was when mining began in the Russian Far East, he was very much a part of the early development of placer mining, which had led underground to the creation of Kupol, Russia’s second-richest gold mine. Sifting through kilometres of river aggregate and alluvial sand for gold—the exact same process that had brought miners north to the Yukon and Alaska in the great gold rushes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—had had its effect on the pastures of reindeer that had been herded since time immemorial by his people.
“My first assignment as a government geologist,” he said, “was to travel along the coast of Chukotka to speak with the reindeer herders who migrated there in the summer. As a person familiar with herding as well as with geology and gold mining, my job was to explain to them what was being planned and when the gold mining would start. I can say that the population understood what gold mining was. They knew from the stories of the Kolyma gold mines to the south, in the days of the gulag, that when placer gold is being mined, entire valleys are removed from Native use. They knew that after the mining process is done, at this latitude vegetation does not reappear in those places for fifty years.”
Grigori wore a natty grey sports jacket, blue V-necked vest, and tie. His strong hands still touched places on the map as if doing so brought back the sensations of actually being there at times during his forty-year career. Speaking Russian that was being translated into English by an Eskimo interpreter, he said, “Of course the population agreed with the need to develop the gold resources. From one side they were very critical. A lot of them knew about the Kolyma mines, but when I spoke with them about the country’s need for resources, they understood. While on the one hand they knew that some of their ranges would be given over to placer gold mining, they also knew that there were other valleys they could move toward and that government money and collectivization projects could help raise the quality of their living conditions. Nobody asked their opinion about any development project.”
We were talking in Grigori’s spartan beige parliamentarian’s office in the State Duma building. Although there were aspects of this story that seemed lost in translation or that didn’t add up, there was truth in his eyes that was compelling. He had put his name forward in the recent election because he wanted to contribute to making his homeland a better place to live for all, including his people, in what remained of those collective farms and villages; a few remained on the land with the remnants of the 540,000 reindee
r that had once flowed like blood through the Chukotkan landscape. What had driven him to that level of public service was a debacle that should never be repeated, in the Arctic or elsewhere.
After the Second World War, Chukotka’s strategic importance resulted in large inflows of military personnel and resources to support the international bristling of the Cold War, this being the closest part of the Soviet Union to North America. As well, the regime offered large-scale incentives for Russians to come and help develop the riches and resources in this back corner of the Arctic. At the height of the immigration explosion in Chukotka, in the late 1980s, the nearly static and well-distributed indigenous population of 20,000 to 25,000 was buried to the point of invisibility in a total population of 160,000 immigrants, mainly Russians.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it a massive out-migration of military and mine workers, who were suddenly out of work. “At the same time,” said Grigori Tynankergav, as he offered more tea in the Duma’s chipped china cups, “the reindeer population dropped catastrophically, to less than eighty thousand animals. And with far fewer animals, a lot of Native people became unemployed. They moved to town to look for work. But there was no work. And there was no support. Whole villages were deserted. In many places the reindeer just disappeared. For nine or ten years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, times were very hard for the tundra populations of all kinds. They were hard for coastal people too, but for tundra people it was hard times, very hard times. Abramovich changed all that, at least partly for the better.”
Grigori recounted in capsule form the almost unbelievable story of how vulnerable the Russian North was politically. The player who “changed all that” was thirty-four-year-old Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch and eventual owner of the Chelsea Football Club, a plum team in the English Premier League.
In 1992, Governor Aleksandr Nazarov was elected to fix the post-collapse economic, cultural, and social mess. He closed the region to outsiders and attempted to kick-start the resource industry. People who had been enticed to the ends of the earth with high wages and subsidized costs of living were leaving in droves. Thinking it might compel indigenous people back into the Soviet-style wage economy, Nazarov reduced any remaining agricultural subsidies. By the late 1990s, problems of daily power outages, staple shortages, and corruption were replaced in the aboriginal sector by widespread starvation and disease.
And that, said the parliamentarian, was when Abramovich appeared. Having risen like a rocket after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from selling plastic ducks on the black market to co-ownership of Sibneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, for reasons that no one really wants to talk about—some say he was just a good, public-minded businessman and others said he was avoiding prison—Abramovich banished himself (some say with a nudge from the Kremlin) to Siberia by being elected to the Russian national parliament as the representative for the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
With proven massive resources, both in the ground and offshore, and lots of unproven potential to make money, Chukotka seemed a natural place for a business operative like Abramovich to migrate to continue building his empire. But in the fall of 2000, he surprised many people by running against Aleksandr Nazarov for governor. Amid allegations of corruption, Nazarov eventually withdrew from the race, and in December of that year, with 90 percent of the vote, Abramovich became governor of the most resource-rich, socially impoverished, dysfunctional state in the Russian Federation.
For better or worse, Abramovich and his team transformed Chukotka. He established a charity called the Pole of Hope, through which he directed personal funds to better the lives of Chukotkans living on the land, including the reindeer herders. He travelled to North America to talk up investment in the Chukotkan mining sector. In Alaska and in Canada’s Northwest Territories, he sought out advice on everything from health care to housing to improve the life and lot of post-Soviet Chukotkans—as if American and Canadian northerners had something in these areas to be proud of.
A Polish reporter, Zygmunt Dzieciolowski, wrote about a typical visit of Abramovich’s to an Eskimo village on the north coast: “Many of the Chukchi resembled tramps, dressed in worn-out clothes. Some were obviously drunk. The school stank of walrus meat. The meeting was over quickly.” But in the next scene, apparently the young governor did what he had done all over Chukotka. “He walked to his helicopter, rapidly dictated instructions to his assistants. First, there was to be a new school, then a power station and a clinic, and new houses for everybody. When they reached the helicopter, [Abramovich] asked his bodyguard for a bottle of vodka. It was not for drinking. It was to disinfect his hands.”
As his first five-year term as governor was coming to an end in 2005, Abramovich announced that he would not be seeking re-election. Some thought that perhaps he had decided his sentence was done, that his mysterious debt to society had been paid. Unfortunately for him, he had done such a stellar job by all accounts—particularly those circulating in the halls of the Kremlin—that, by the powers vested in his office, President Vladimir Putin scrapped the law under which gubernatorial elections were conducted and appointed Abramovich to a second term. By 2008, when President Dmitri Medvedev accepted his letter of resignation, it was estimated that Abramovich had somehow managed to flow something in the order of US$2.5 billion into the crumbling social and economic infrastructure of Chukotka, half of which was rumoured to have come from his personal bank accounts.
My fixer in Abramovich’s world was Elena Bologova, a representative of the Chukotka Mining and Geological Company, who had helped to stickhandle my “CP”—my Chukotka Permit, which is required for anyone from the outside to enter this final Far Eastern segment of Siberia. Because my visa stated my business as “cultural research,” CMGC could not sponsor my visit, so it was Elena who took my letter of introduction from RAIPON in Moscow to the leadership of the local branch of the Association of Native and Smaller Peoples of Chukotka. Without their enthusiastic support for a Canadian traveller, this last Russian stop would never have happened.
It was Elena who had introduced me to Grigori; then she took me to the offices of Deputy Governor Leonid Gorenshteyn, who had signed my CP. It was Elena, who spoke impeccable English, who had arranged for the services of Ivanna, a lovely Eskimo interpreter who she felt would better reflect the nuances of answers to questions I might have. It was Elena who arranged nearly a week of meetings, activities, and outings around Anadyr that took me inside the troubled history of the area but also inside the curious and brightly coloured hope that had been painted on everything by Abramovich and his people while they were in charge from 2000 to 2008.
After our conversation in the Duma and the executive offices, Elena and I climbed the stairs to the meeting room of the CMGC’s offices, where we sat down with the leadership of the indigenous groups in the Anadyr area. At the table were Anna Otke, a professor of ecology and vice-president of RAIPON in Chukotka; Petr Klimov, manager of social affairs, deputy general director for the CMGC and a newly elected member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow; Larissa Abryutina, a social worker and educator in Anadyr; André Alexandravich Klimko, a RAIPON board member and newly retired chief of police from Kanchalan village; and another RAIPON board member, Valentina Sobolkoya.
They talked about what it is like to shift from an indigenous population of 20,000 in a general population of 160,000—one eighth of the whole—to an indigenous population of 20,000 within 50,000—two-fifths of the whole, as a result of Russian emigration from the Far East. “The inequities and injustices become much more apparent,” said Valentina.
She went on, “Because the overwhelming majority spoke Russian, we spoke Russian. We had to learn Russian in school. Native languages are being lost. And now, when we might work at bringing them back into everyday life, the young people are not interested or able to join in. Even in the villages, language decay is happening.
“And although we are now nearly half of the populatio
n, Grigori Tynankergav is the only elected member in the Duma from the Native community out of thirty seats. We have problems with unemployment. When people moved to town after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were no jobs, even if we did have the right education. That was a sad experience, when the collective farms were closed, because we entered the market without any knowledge of the rules. We were not educated as owners. So while young people might be educated now to be owners and learn about business, after they come to school in town they don’t want to return to village life.”
Anna spoke up. “Another difficult aspect of reindeer herding is that there are very few women. If there are no women in the yaranga, there is no sense in keeping the herd. And without women on the land, there is no one to teach the girls how to sew and prepare skins. Reindeer herders are freezing on the tundra because there are no fur garments to keep them warm.” As the others were nodding in agreement with that, I thought back to the Kupol foundation and its project to produce fur garments for the reindeer industry. Hearing this helped put that project in context.
Someone else added their voice: “There is no European clothing that will replace fur. Fur doesn’t allow the frost to penetrate and doesn’t let the heat escape. There is nothing better than fur. The same is true with all of the attempts to replace our skin-covered yarangas. All of them have failed. All of those structures have been lost on the tundra. All of those good ideas from the engineers and the government turned out not to be good at all.”