The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  I thought, as I ate my tinned mushrooms and mopped up the egg yolks with the one triangle of bread I had been allowed, that this was probably the worst café in the world.

  After lunch, I walked through the cold to the museum where Yevgeniya Ivanovna greeted me with the friendly condescension that Queen Victoria would have used on a loyal native. I would, she said, have to register my presence with the local authorities. She would, she said, accompany me. She donned her fur coat, and a thick fur hat with a dangly thing on the side, and we set off.

  We took a car through town. The scrubby trees looked sparse without their leaves, and the sun was just peeking through a gap between two apartment blocks. Footprints scarred the snowfields, and thickly dressed adults – men distinguishable from women because they were thinner and taller – hurried past, keen to get out of the cold. I saw no children.

  The registration office was opposite a three-storey log cabin housing a Sekond Khend – one of the shops that have sprung up in provincial towns to sell old clothes imported from Europe – and overshadowed by the two chimneys of the town’s heating plant. They were pouring steam into the sky in two thick white columns.

  Yevgeniya Ivanovna swept in magnificently, her fur coat brushing both sides of the door frame, enquiring who we needed to talk to, and demanding to know why the organization was no longer called the Passport Table as of old, but instead the Federal Migration Service. She had, she told everyone, spent an age looking for it in the phone book. We would, we were told, have to wait. Vladimir was not currently available and only he was permitted to deal with foreigners. Yevgeniya Ivanovna was having none of that, and pushed into his office. He was dapper in jeans and a white linen jacket and working on some papers. He ordered her out into the corridor, back among the common people. She did not take kindly to it at all.

  As head of the museum, she was a significant authority in town and not accustomed to waiting in line. While I sat patiently on the folding seats alongside two other supplicants, she swept up and down the corridor, muttering insults to Vladimir and the world in general. She opened the door to his office, then slammed it behind her on seeing he was still engaged in paperwork, smouldering while she did so like a volcano in a fur coat.

  After two or three more slams, Vladimir’s colleague – a curvaceous woman with a lot of flesh poorly concealed by a tight dress – emerged to remonstrate. ‘You have changed your name but kept your old ways,’ replied Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and the curvaceous woman vanished back behind the door.

  We waited another ten minutes before being ushered into Vladimir’s presence. He had taken off the linen jacket. This costume change was presumably for my benefit since he now wore a brick-red nylon waistcoat bearing the English words Migration Control. I wondered what possible cause there could be for English-speaking migration control in Inta. What English-speaker would move here? Still, I handed over my passport and we went through the absurd bureaucratic rigmarole of registration.

  This involved a series of pointless questions about my employment, my parents and my marital status, all apparently predicated on the assumption that I was moving to Inta for ever rather than staying here for less than a week. Vladimir copied down my details wrongly, however, putting my middle name before Oliver on his form. He therefore called me James throughout, much to the amusement of Yevgeniya Ivanovna, who giggled. The giggle was infectious, all the more so when we understood the gist of a conversation between the curvaceous woman and a mumbling old man on the other side of the desk.

  The old man had apparently lost his passport, and she wanted to know why.

  ‘It was stolen, on the train,’ he replied, and she forced him to complete a long and tedious form before getting a replacement. He laboriously wrote out his name, then put a dash in the box intended for his place of birth.

  ‘Why have you done that?’

  Shrug.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Sosnogorsk.’

  ‘Where’s Sosnogorsk?’

  Shrug.

  ‘It’s in the Komi Republic, write that. No, not like that. Komi. How do you spell Komi? Four letters. Komi. You need to do it again. If you waste another form I’ll make you pay for it.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he protested.

  ‘Nothing? You think that wasting the resources of the Federal Migration Service is nothing?’

  The curvaceous woman handed the old man a form, and turned back to her computer. He picked up the pen and immediately put a dash in the box for his place of birth. Yevgeniya Ivanovna, who had turned pink with the struggle of not laughing, had to leave the room at this point, while I took a few deep breaths and faced Vladimir once more. Eventually, he gave me back my passport, along with a slip of paper showing I was legally allowed to be in Inta.

  ‘James,’ he said solemnly. ‘One last thing, if you want to eat out tonight it is better to eat at home because some of our less cultured citizens may take exception to your presence on the territory of the Komi Republic.’

  I could hear Yevgeniya Ivanovna snort with laughter on the far side of the door and, not trusting myself to speak, I nodded my thanks and walked out of the door. The curvaceous woman was about to notice that the old man had spoiled another form, and I would not have survived that.

  I was not, as it happened, planning to risk an encounter with Inta’s less cultured citizens since Nikolai Andreyevich had arranged for me to meet another old gulag survivor. The long night had fallen on the town as I walked back to the Ukrainian cultural centre where we had arranged to meet. By the time I got there, I was shaking with cold. My thighs felt like they belonged to someone else. One pair of long underpants was not enough.

  Semyon Boretsky lived a short walk away with his wife Yulia. Considering the misery that fate had heaped on them both, they looked astonishingly jovial, and teased each other in the way only an old couple can.

  Boretsky was born in capitalist Poland in 1922. Poland won independence from Russia after World War One and managed to gain large tracts of territory that Moscow coveted. Stalin never forgot them and, in 1939, under a pact he reached with Germany, Moscow took them back. Stalin and Hitler extinguished Poland between them, and Boretsky’s country of residence abruptly changed from Poland to the Soviet Union, without him having moved house.

  It was only after World War Two was over that the Soviet security services really got to sort out the new territories they had inherited. The former bits of Poland had a population with none of the habits of obedience learned in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Anti-Soviet guerrillas operated in western Ukraine for years after the war ended, and the civilian population suffered as a result. Thousands of young men were arrested, and sentenced to entirely arbitrary terms in the camps, and among them was Boretsky. He described standing in the prison while their terms in the gulag were announced.

  ‘They just walked along saying twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five. That was twenty-five years, you understand, but I only got ten,’ he said. I asked him why he got less.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said with a broad smile, as if a decade in the camps was a small thing. ‘They needed young people in the north back then, and they didn’t want us to be in Ukraine, so they sent everyone. There were not enough convicted people to fill six wagons so they filled them up with people who were still just under investigation as well.’

  On arrival in Inta, ‘buyers’ came to pick the labourers they needed from among the new arrivals. There was no pretence that they had come as anything other than slaves. He was named V-195 and sent off to make bricks.

  ‘This number was on my breast, and then in larger type on my back. It was on my hat and my knee as well so I could find my clothes after washing,’ he said.

  If you worked well, he said, you got 600 grams of bread. There were fifteen of them in his shift and they had to make 20,000 bricks. That was the minimum required from their eight-hour day, which normally lasted ten or twelve hours. If they failed to make that target, they got le
ss food: at first 400 grams, and then 200 grams. Workers weakened on the reduced diet, and could not work harder, and lost ground fast. Then they died. It was an efficient way to make sure only worthwhile prisoners survived. Fortunately for Boretsky, he was young and tough.

  They got soup made of grain, or turnips, or potatoes, with a smear of oil on the surface. Sometimes there was a scrap of reindeer, or a bit of salted fish. In summer, it was good, he said, but in winter it would be frozen before they received it from the kitchen.

  And it was so cold. ‘You wore two pairs of quilted trousers and the wind went through like you were wearing a tracksuit. If you worked well,’ he said, with the pride of someone who clearly did, ‘then every day counted as double until you were freed.’

  This was a system instituted in the early 1950s to try to encourage more work from the prisoners. If they worked hard they not only got fed, but their days could count double, thus bringing the end of their sentence nearer. He had a few months chopped off as a result, but he still was in the camp even longer than Father Dmitry was.

  ‘I left the camp in 1957, and found work. I could not go home for another five years. I had lost my rights, they called it. I had to report to the police twice a month, on the 5th and the 20th.’

  He did finally go home in 1962, but did not get on with it. He had been away in the Arctic for a decade and a half, and he found his old friends’ jokes about polar bears annoying. He did not have the right to live there anyway, so he came back to the north and worked until getting his pension: 30,000 roubles a month now between the two of them, and they were grateful for it.

  ‘People leave here to go to Usinsk or Vorkuta,’ said Yulia, his wife. ‘It is hard to live if you are not working. A lot of people with a good education do not work. I am glad we are on our pensions now, but even so medicine is expensive. We have three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.’

  Boretsky was rehabilitated, and had his conviction quashed in the 1980s. He won compensation, but did not remember how much, 8,000 or 9,000 roubles, he said. That was when you could get a car for 6,000 roubles so it was not as bad as it sounds, though then again it still does not sound like much.

  The brick factory is closed now. There is no demand for bricks, since no houses are being built, and the clay for the bricks came from the mine, which is closed too, so even if there was demand, the factory could not operate.

  ‘People say they will find gold round here,’ Boretsky said, with a hopeful shrug. ‘Then there would be work.’

  Nikolai Andreyevich and I walked back through the bitter cold of the evening, our feet squeaking on the snow. He had designed this whole part of the town, he said, in the 1970s when he was working as an architect. It was one of his best ever jobs.

  ‘There was supposed to be another school there and an enclosed stadium where that park is.’ The park that he gestured at was just a blank expanse of snow, with bare saplings sticking through the crust, and beaten paths crossing it in a huge X. ‘The bosses here are idiots. They only think about their own pockets. I built a model of how this region would look and everything.’

  He clearly mourned the vision he had had for Inta’s future, back in the 1970s when coal was rumbling out of the ground and the whole monstrous inertia of the Soviet Union was keeping the town alive. That was Inta’s high point, when people like him flocked here to earn the hardship wages that would set them up as aristocrats in the workers’ state. In 1970, fewer than one in a hundred of Komi’s population died every year. Now, the figure is twice that. For villagers, the figure now is triple what it was forty years ago. Over the same time period, the birth rate has fallen by more than 50 per cent.

  Before catching the train north, I needed to buy a ticket to Moscow, since one would not be for sale in Abez itself. That meant a half-hour queue in the ticket office on the ground floor of one of the rotting concrete-slab apartment blocks that dominate Inta’s second-largest square. The office had a map of the old Soviet railway network on the wall behind the cashiers, and while I stood in line I traced the route I had taken to get here. North-east out of Moscow, the rails threaded the old gulag towns, until they sank under the weight of their own illogicality somewhere to the east of Vorkuta, just shy of the Arctic Ocean.

  Stalin’s government had dreamed of building a spur parallel to Russia’s north coast, through the Urals, over the River Ob and on to a port on the River Yenisei. That would have connected the coal fields both to the Arctic Ocean and, via the rivers, to Siberia’s biggest cities. Thousands of prisoners died on the project, but the tundra was too unstable and the supply routes were too stretched. It was too much even for the 1940s. If it could not be done in the last years of Stalin’s life, it probably cannot be done at all.

  Turning away from the map, I realized that the man directly behind me was a priest, and I struck up a conversation. Father Mikhail was twenty-nine – it seemed strange to call a man younger than me ‘father’, but that is what he called himself – and from Pechora, one of those gulag towns threaded by the railway. He had a narrow, suspicious face but was happy to talk when he learned I was researching the life of a fellow priest, even though he had never heard of Father Dmitry.

  His chapel, which we visited when I had my ticket to Moscow and he had his to Syktyvkar, was in the Southern District, the only part of Inta with a still-functioning coal mine, and thus the only district that might have a medium-term economic future. Named in honour of St Nikolai the miracle-worker, his chapel shares a saint with one of the churches where Father Dmitry preached his sermons in Moscow. That struck me as a happy coincidence, and we wandered around inside.

  Father Mikhail described the difficulties of building this chapel, Inta’s first, in minute detail, recounting every tiny triumph as a victory of the faith. A mine had closed and given him its garage, he said with a smile, as if the closure of the mine and the hundreds of subsequent job losses had been unalloyed good news. A demolished garage provided the bricks for the chapel’s walls. A well-wisher had provided the red corrugated roofing slabs. Another had given cement.

  ‘It is good that God did not give it all to us at once because we would not have noticed such a gift. It came hard and we all prayed and at every step we were joyful. When we finished the roof, we all shouted hooray. When we put in the door, we all shouted hooray,’ he said, as we stood in the roughly finished interior.

  ‘People think they have difficulties, but remember that when God went into the desert for forty days and was offered bread he refused it. It is like that. People think they want money and they bow down before it, but God said that man cannot live by bread alone. Now people say there is an economic crisis, but it is actually a call from God, telling us to throw away external things. The future of this town is in a return to faith, to trust in miracles.’

  To demonstrate his point, Father Mikhail reached into the little booth where the faithful could buy candles and religious trinkets and, after a few seconds of studied concentration, selected a small icon of St Nikolai. Printed on 5mm board inside a gold rim, the icon showed Nikolai flanked on either side by tiny floating figures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It was a gift, he said, for me to remember our conversation by. Perhaps it would help me come to the faith, he added. He held it out to me, waited for me to take it and, when I did, folded his hands together in front of his groin.

  He kept my gaze with a slight smile of sweet forgiveness without speaking for a few seconds. He held my eyes in fact, until I understood what he wanted. Of course: I should make a donation in exchange for the gift. It had taken me a little while to realize, and I was embarrassed by my own obtuseness. I reached into my pocket in a fret, dug out my wallet from under the layers of jumper and coat and pulled out a banknote. I noticed too late it was for 5,000 roubles, Russia’s largest denomination and almost half the cash I had with me. That is about £100. Indeed, it is more than a week’s wages for the miners who live round here. I could hardly put it back in my pocket though and fish out a smaller one,
so I handed it over. He maintained his sweet look.

  A taxi driver called Sasha drove me to pick up my bag and to catch my train. I had an hour to kill so, with grisly relish, he gave me a guided tour of the ruins of his town.

  ‘See there,’ he said, gesturing to some snow-covered humps. ‘There were houses there, but they’re gone. And there, on that flat patch, there was a school. That’s gone too. This town is dying.’

  He said he wanted to move away, to give his six-year-old daughter the chance of a better future, but was struggling to find work anywhere else. A large thermometer on the main square announced that the temperature was minus 37. With delight, Sasha told me that Abez would be even colder.

  At the train station, a single wagon waited for passengers, un-attached to any engine. A man was smashing at repugnant icicles hanging from the hole that channels toilet waste out on to the rails, while boiling water gushed past him. A woman stuck her head out of the door, holding an empty kettle, and asked if it was defrosted yet.

  ‘Fuck no,’ the man said without emotion.

  The carriage windows were filthy, and I could see only the vaguest outlines of the station buildings from inside. After twenty minutes or so, a few jolts suggested an engine had coupled on to our carriage. Another ten minutes, and the carriage moved off, complaining. My fellow passengers were mostly railway workers, even more heavily clothed than me in their thick, stiff, dark-blue jackets. I huddled over. With my gloved hands in my pockets, and my chin sunk into my chest, I could cherish a core of warmth that felt delicious and drowsy.

  The fuzzy silhouette through the windows was now the jagged fringe of fir trees, and then the approximation of a weak sunset far off to the south. I persuaded the guard to open the door so I could photograph it, and the cold draught of the evening ripped through my coat and attacked the core of warmth I had so carefully built up. The sun finally slipped beneath the tundra to the south-west. It was 2.36 in the afternoon, and the long night was ahead.