by Frazier
The real story, the one the papers were most excited about, had to do with oil and natural gas. To my mental map of Siberia with its rivers, swamps, taiga forests, and expanses of essentially nothing, I began to add the Siberian oil and gas fields appearing in the news now all the time. There were the two huge fields offshore of Sakhalin Island, called Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II, and the Kovytka natural gas field near the Chinese border, which the Chinese hoped the Russians would attach to them by a pipeline (much of which China offered to pay for), and the rich Khanty-Mansiysk oil and gas fields along the middle reaches of the Ob River, and the Verkhnechonsk oil fields near Irkutsk, and the tough-to-drill-in Yamal Peninsula fields in the Siberian Arctic, and the Vankor field, in the Far East, the largest Russian oil-field development since the end of the Soviet Union.
Lukoil, a Russian oil company flush with cash, bought Getty Oil, and began to turn Getty gas stations in the United States into Lukoil stations. Oil-policy analysts thought this was a good idea, because Russian energy clearly was going to be an important future source of American supply, and if a Russian company had stations here Russia would be less likely, for coercive or other reasons, to turn off the tap. President Vladimir Putin himself showed up to inaugurate a new Lukoil station at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Vagit Y. Alekperov, the president of Lukoil, and the New York senator Charles Schumer were there, too. Putin held a cup of coffee and a Krispy Kreme donut in his hands.
Soon afterward, all the gas stations on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, which runs a mile from my house, turned into Lukoil stations. The first three letters of Lukoil’s name come from three fields the company has in western Siberia—the Langepaz, Urengoi, and Kogalym petroleum fields. Now when I want a whiff of distant Siberia, I need no longer travel into the city and breathe the scent of the sable furs at Saks Fifth Avenue. I just go to the nearest Lukoil and fill ’er up.
That particular Lukoil, by the way, offers no restrooms for customers. Large signs on the highway inform motorists of the fact. I found this innovation worrying. What other Russian bathroom customs might Lukoil be importing?
When Saudi Arabia reduced its oil production in 2005 and 2006, Russia became the largest oil-producing country in the world. Russia’s known petroleum reserves of 79 billion barrels were well behind Saudi Arabia’s 264 billion, but Russia also had the largest amount of territory whose energy resources remained unexplored. Most of those places were in the Russian Arctic and Siberia. Experts estimated that at least 80 billion barrels of Russian oil were yet to be found.
The maneuverings that Putin and his loyalists went through to take advantage of Russia’s strong position in the global energy market were complicated, and tiring to think about. Basically, they renationalized the oil and natural gas industries. Oligarchs who had previously dominated the business were forced to submit to the new order. Those who didn’t left the country or, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one-time head of Yukos Oil, ended up in a Siberian jail. Gazprom, the giant Russian natural gas company, of which the government owns more than half, grew to be the third-largest company (behind ExxonMobil and General Electric) in the world.
Key to the strategy of Putin & Co. was their focus on delivery. Primarily this meant pipelines, the traditional pinch point of the oil industry. If you wanted to move oil or natural gas out of the country, the Russian government was going to say how you did it and how much you paid. The United States, which now wanted to do business with Russia, seemed to forget that twenty-some years previously, during the Reagan administration, American sanctions had tried to block the completion of a Russian natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. Reagan had feared the political power the Soviets might gain by it. The pipeline, and others, got built anyway. Gazprom became the chief supplier of Western Europe’s natural gas. German homes were receiving 40 percent of the gas they heated and cooked with from Russia (that is, mostly from Siberia). All of the natural gas burned in Finland and the Baltic countries had the same source. In 2004, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic bought three-fourths or more of their natural gas from Russia; Austria and Turkey imported almost as much. France and Italy were at 25 percent and 27. (All these numbers are unlikely to be much different today.)
Consumers across Europe came to the uncomfortable realization that Russia, the chronically semifailing state, had now acquired the position of mean landlord in Europe’s basement. Now it could turn off the heat at will, depending on its mood. Marshall I. Goldman, an expert on Russian energy issues, has written that because of its control of the supply of natural gas “Russia is in a stronger position relative to Western Europe than it has ever been in its history.” To quiet people’s fears, Russian oil executives and high government officials swore that they would always stick to business agreements completely uninfluenced by political considerations of any kind. Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin appointee to Gazprom’s board, reformed top management at the company. In 2006, its deputy CEO promised, “For us, contracts are like a Holy Bible.”
Medvedev, of course, later moved from Gazprom to take over (sort of) from Putin as Russia’s president. Although the following fact has little to do with anything, I think it worthwhile to note that The New York Times has reported that President Medvedev’s favorite band is Deep Purple.
When oil prices were up, Russian money flowed. For the first time almost ever, you saw groups of ordinary Russian tourists on the streets of New York. Russia paid off multibillion-dollar debts ahead of schedule and piled up a $300 billion hard-currency reserve. Putin considered using oil revenues to finish old Soviet-era projects, like the Boguchansk hydroelectric dam in eastern Siberia, or the few unbuilt parts of the Baikal–Amur Magistral. Russian collectors bought twenty-some of my friend Alex Melamid’s paintings for a bundle. In rural America, fur trappers found themselves with unexpected windfalls, as the Russians, always big fur consumers, bought more and more furs. Roman Abramovich, the wealthy entrepreneur and one-time governor of Chukotka, sold his oil and gas company, Sibneft, to Gazprom for $13 billion, thereby becoming Russia’s richest man. Then he moved to England and, upon arrival, became the richest man in England.
Oil prices went down again and the exuberance slowed; clearly, though, they would have to rebound. India needed oil, China was headed for U.S. levels of consumption. In Russia and outside it, Putin got a big amount of credit for Russia’s newly established energy strength. Among his countrymen his approval rating was high. He had been lucky to have in place the network of pipelines that the Soviets built in the Brezhnev era, and even luckier in the unpredictable rise of the price of oil.
His focus on Siberia and its wealth seemed more than accidental, though. Soviet leaders like Brezhnev used to visit Siberia only slightly more often than did the tsars. Putin, on the other hand, showed up there all the time. He skied in the Altai, he attended the opening of the new Chita–Khabarovsk highway (a road replacing the undrivable section where Sergei and Volodya and I had traveled by vagon), he went down to the bottom of Lake Baikal in a minisubmarine. He laid a wreath on the grave of Victor Astafiev, the twentieth-century Siberian author, in Krasnoyarsk. When the European Union wanted to meet to discuss energy issues, he invited them to the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk, or to Omsk. Putin made a trip to Yakutsk in January to talk about mineral extraction and reported that it wasn’t very cold there yet—“It was minus 45 degrees in the morning and now it has become ‘warmer’ to minus 42 Celsius,” he joked.
Russia had been in bad shape when Putin first took office in 1999. A currency crisis had occurred the year before, the country had defaulted on debts in the billions, millions of people lost their savings, the banking system became insolvent, foreign investors fled, etc. In those years every news headline about the plight of the country seemed to be Russia on the Brink? Financially, at least, Putin’s actions and the price of oil had improved Russia’s prospects a lot. From a wider-angled view of history, the country’s turnaround recalled other times (the Time of Troubles, th
e Great Patriotic War) when Russia’s fortunes had been saved by the resources of Siberia.
Once tapped and flowing, these resources seemed endlessly rich, even profligate. The Chernogoreft and Priobskoye and Yuganskneftegaz fields in western Siberia, the Samotlor and Berezovskoe fields, the Talakan field in Yakutia . . . Drillers of oil wells outside the gas-pipeline network had no use for the gas their wells might happen to extract, and so it was vented through pipes and burned at the well sites. This practice is known in the business as flaring. Enough gas to supply whole American cities was being flared every year. In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 426 billion cubic feet of methane were escaping annually from wells in Siberia (Gazprom countered it was only half that). Siberia, formerly an almost-all-dark swath of the nighttime planet in satellite images, now blazed with gas flares across the wilderness—“like cities on fire,” according to one report.
This trip I would be by myself—without the company of friends, a tour group, or guides. My own command of Russian would have to do. Luda Stiler, a travel agent at Margo Travel in Manhattan, handled visa and reservations, as she has done for me many times. Luda is a kind and friendly woman, born in Leningrad and uninterested in going back. She regards my desire to travel in Russia as a mystery. I had decided to go to Novosibirsk because I’d seen not much of it in 2001, and it’s relatively easy to get to. In Novosibirsk I would stay in the Hotel Sibir, because of the name. Aeroflot offered the cheapest fares, New York–Moscow–Novosibirsk. To travel twenty-two time zones, there and back, cost $1,183.10.
I had not flown Aeroflot since the nineties. Now the complete absence of smoking, in accordance with revised policies, made a real change in the airline’s tone. Russians not smoking! I wanted to congratulate and console them. I was touched. Everything about the Boeing 767 we flew in was better than what I remembered of their former planes. Now they had real seats, not lawn chairs. Nothing about the interior looked beat-up or shabby. The passengers, almost all Russians, boarded with the happy boisterousness of people going home after a long time away. Many of them had been shopping. Amid all the Russian conversation, some of it deep voiced and sonorous, some of it shrill, they set about stowing their shopping bags in the overhead bins. Many of the bags were from Macy’s, whose design, for the 2009 holiday season, featured a single large red star on a white background. The Russians laughed and talked about one thing and another, stowing their red-star bags.
Some years ago, a British public relations firm did an overhaul of Aeroflot’s image. Thus the plummy-voiced British recording that gave the English translation of the Russian announcements. Thus the Scottish plaid of the blankets that were passed out, and the stitched floral pattern on the pillows, and the less hostile attitude of the in-flight personnel. The stewardess who served our aisle had refined her instinctive contempt for the passengers into something transcendent and soulful. She looked a lot like Babe Ruth, only with a slightly bigger hairdo, and she mugged like Chaplin as she indicated approval, disapproval, commiseration, and various other responses to each passenger she served. Sometimes she turned her face upward, saintlike, and rolled her eyes and sighed.
I felt I was already back in Russia just being on the plane: the way everybody ordered tea after dinner, and saved their dessert to have with it; the men going to sleep with the plaid blankets wrapped around their heads; the lustiness of their snores; the unmistakable hint of Russia-smell in the cabin’s recycled air . . . Not all the in-flight announcements were translated by the plummy-voiced recording or by the pilot and crew. One of the untranslated announcements informed passengers that this Boeing 767 airplane was named in honor of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin.
No other country but Russia would name a commercial airliner after a writer. Just knowing I was flying on the Ivan Bunin gave me a small thrill. I recalled what had happened to Varlam Shalamov for saying, back in 1943, that Ivan Bunin was “a classic Russian writer.” On the airport runways after we landed, I saw Aeroflot planes named after Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Ivan Krasheninnikov (an explorer of Kamchatka who wrote a book about it). The plane I flew home in was the Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Naming planes after Russian writers may have been the British PR firm’s idea. If it was, it had the intended effect on me.
My layover in Moscow was ten and a half hours. In the waiting room at the Sheremetyevo 1 terminal, I sat and watched, and sat and did nothing. For a while a teenage girl next to me was reading a book of short stories by Somerset Maugham. In English. Then she put it away and began to read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (ditto). I hadn’t wanted to bother her, but finally I asked, in Russian, what grade she was in. She said she was in the tenth. Here is something that would happen seldom or never in American air travel: in millions of air miles, you would be unlikely to sit next to an American tenth grader reading, in any language, the stories of Somerset Maugham. I told the girl that. She seemed puzzled. “But it is very interesting for me,” she said.
From time to time airport security guards walked by with German shepherds trained to sniff for illegal substances. Scent-trained dogs in America walk more or less normally when they’re working, but these dogs tracked their noses back and forth in the air and kept their bodies close to the floor, like snakes with legs. Flights departed for Samara, St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Volgograd. The girl reading Maugham left, after saying a polite “Goodbye” in English. A middle-aged woman replaced her. When she got up after boarding was announced for the flight to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, I asked if she lived there. She said yes. I said, “That’s very far,” and she replied, “It’s nothing! A nine-hour flight!” At one of the gates the microphone didn’t work and the gate attendants were making the boarding announcements without it. A flight was leaving for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. It was strange, and moving, to hear the final summons for a place more than four thousand miles away called out by an unaided human voice.
Finally the flight for Novosibirsk began to board. It took off at about ten thirty at night. The plane was a brand-new Airbus 321, and its interior design featured Aeroflot’s updated color scheme of orange and blue, exactly like the colors of the New York Mets baseball team. I dozed off, then woke after a couple of hours. From my window seat I could see nothing but blackness below—probably clouds. Then I started seeing occasional small knots of silvery-blue lights here and there, the lights of towns. Then suddenly big reddish-orange lights appeared, dotting the land’s darkness in random profusion, often in clusters of twos and threes. I couldn’t figure out what they were. Then I realized they had to be oil well flares burning off natural gas—those new irruptions of light into the Siberian wilderness that I’d read about. I don’t know what oil field they were part of. I imagined how the taiga or swamp around them looked, weirdly illuminated in their flames. After a while they were fewer; then, none. For an hour before Novosibirsk the ground was mostly dark again.
I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those. The temperature was −8°F. A layer of new snow covered everything, ready to stay. Around the airport, vehicles and workmen and the drainage grates in the runways all emitted steam. Along the top of the newly refurbished airport building (oil money, probably) ran a streak of midnight-blue neon that highlighted the blue-black of the sky. In the company of Anatoly, the bright-eyed, long-nosed, pixie-haired taxi driver who had claimed me, I came out the airport doors and into the parking lot, where other taxi drivers were standing around smoking cigarettes next to their idling cars. The hoarfrost in which each car was covered resembled a fur of white iron filings. My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of secondhand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.
Anatoly did not have enough left on his parking-fee card to get through the exit gate, so he had to back out, go to a lonesome kiosk in the lot, and buy a new one. While I waited in the backseat he bounded out of the car, bounded back in. E
verything he said he delivered in the exclamatory rhythms of taxi drivers. “No problem! I’ll just get a new card! Please wait a moment! Do you think this is cold? To us this is completely normal! In Novosibirsk we are used to this! Where are you from?” and so on. The theatricality of it made his Russian easy to understand.
As we proceeded to the city, mercury lights along the highway held the darkness at arm’s length, just barely. On the long bridge over the vast, dark Ob River, it pushed closer on either side. An icy mist on the river’s far bank fogged and further dimmed the scene, and on the city streets, our headlights showed the few pedestrians only from the knees down. Tall fir trees along the Hotel Sibir’s entryway had been covered in holiday lights of the same locally popular midnight blue, to which the mist had added its pointillism. Bounding from the car, Anatoly carried my bag into the intimately lit lobby and saw that I got checked in. I had a comfortable room on the twelfth floor, with a view of the train yard and the Ob River.
During my first days in Novosibirsk I was in darkness most of the time. Daylight itself usually was tamped down under clouds and falling snow, but I was awake for only a few hours of it, my internal clock having been turned around by all the time zones I’d crossed. Unable to sleep, I put on my full cold-weather outfit and walked the city in the early hours. A bank display on Ulitsa Lenina showed the temperature to be −18° (Celsius) at 5:18 a.m.; a light wind coming down the packed-snow sidewalk reinforced the cold. Nobody was about, for good reason. In the clear sky, a thumbnail-paring of a moon sat just above the horizon. To see the Big Dipper I had to crane my neck far back. At a few degrees lower than directly overhead, the North Star hovered like the point of a pushpin.