Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “In some places, so I have heard, compulsion was used. There was none used here in Yakutia. It would not have worked with our people. They were slow to change and they did so only when they saw with their own eyes the advantages they would get. They watched the co-op experiments with as much suspicion as a peasant watching a fortune teller at a fair. But once they were persuaded, there was no stopping them. They made quick progress despite a lot of stupid mistakes resulting from enthusiastic ignorance and a chronic shortage of technical advisors and good agricultural equipment. We still don’t have enough technicians or equipment, but only give us time.…”

  Moisie introduced us to his cousin, Peter Petrovitch Efrimov, who, at the age of twenty-nine was the manager of a newly formed pig collective at Modusty in an area of virgin taiga sixty miles to the eastward. This collective included Peter’s mother and father, both in their sixties, and seven other families. Although the farm was only a year old it already had two hundred pigs.

  After graduating from secondary school Peter joined the army (most native Siberian people are not subject to the draft but are encouraged to volunteer), emerging as an artillery sergeant after three years service. He then enrolled at the Lvov Finance Institute in the Ukraine, where he studied farm administration for four years, graduating with a Candidate’s Degree (equivalent to a bachelor’s degree). When he came home in 1965 he married, took over a small farm of his own, was elected chairman of his village co-op, begat two little boys and was then elected Deputy Chairman of the whole Namcy district.

  He is the most enthusiastic pig man I have ever met. Getting him to talk about anything else was nearly impossible. If Peter has his way, the day will come when the entire taiga will echo to the squeal of countless porkers. They are a peculiar breed of beasts, “designed” for the far north by research teams in Yakutsk and Novosibirsk, and they can apparently endure any degree of cold and thrive upon it.

  Another enthusiast was Ilya Tamarovo, a very dark, whipcord-lean little man in charge of fur breeding and forest trapping. He was particularly pleased to meet Canadians because as he put it, “You gave us the most valuable animal in all the taiga – the ondatra. I hope you like Siberia as well as he did!”

  Ondatra is the muskrat. Fifty pairs imported from Canada were released in Siberia in 1935 and they bred and spread at such a phenomenal rate that they are now found almost everywhere from the Pacific Coast to the Ural Mountains. A raw pelt is worth two rubles and muskrat now provides the largest single source of income for taiga trappers who, incidentally, have the highest average income of any group of people in the Siberian north, with the exception of truck drivers. Fur prices are supported and there is none of the wild fluctuation that wreaks such hardships on Canadian trappers.

  Ilya was happy about the high income his trappers made but not so happy about what they did with it.

  “They have more rubles than they know what to do with. Some of them decide to spend it buying a car, but what use is a car in the taiga even if you don’t mind waiting till the other three hundred people ahead of you in the quota line-up get theirs? A lot of the lads are spending their money on travel. They go off to the Black Sea and lie around on the beaches with the pretty office girls from Moscow; and when they come back they are too weak to carry a squirrel carcass! Never mind; maybe that’s better than trying to turn all their spare rubles into white dynamite.”

  Ilya was determined to take us into the deep taiga to visit a colony of our one-time fellow Canadians, but the temperature had dropped into the minus 30s and though the transplanted muskrats may have adapted to such weather, we had not. We opted for lunch in the town restaurant instead. Here we ate boiled horse brisket garnished with raw onions, cabbage soup and Yakut cookies. These cookies are made from a mixture of thick cream, sugar and chopped cranberries. The batter is dropped on a pan, but instead of being baked it is hustled outside and allowed to freeze solid.

  After lunch we drove another forty miles northward to the Red Banner Collective Farm, where we were taken in charge by a blooming lass named Galia who, to our surprise, spoke French – and better French than either Claire or I, though we are citizens of a so-called bilingual country. We asked her where she had learned the language (Paris? Moscow? Irkutsk, at least?) and she replied that she had studied it in secondary school at Namcy. Why on earth had she bothered? Well, French has a nice sound, rather like the Yakut tongue, and you never can tell when a third language may come in handy.

  Red Banner is a beef and dairy farm – on the same latitude as, but in a much more ferocious climate than, southern Greenland. It has about 6,000 cattle and produces 320 tons of meat and 1,450 tons of milk and cream each year. Galia took us to visit one of her barns. It was a strange structure, very low, dome-roofed, with walls built of two-foot lengths of logs laid up in woodpile fashion and cemented together with a mixture of clay and manure. I assumed this was an ancient Yakut design. On the contrary, it was the result of recent experimentation into the problems of housing cattle in the far north.

  “The research stations tried all sorts of new methods and new materials for barn construction,” Vladimir explained. “None proved as efficient as this for the Yakut climate. The insulation is so good that the body heat of the cows keeps the barn comfortably warm even for human workers during temperatures of sixty below zero; and it is quick and cheap to build, using almost any kind of local wood. The weather is not cold now, of course; but come inside and see how warm it is in there.”

  Not cold? Claire looked at me and mumbled through blue lips, “He has to be kidding!”

  There were 240 milk cows in this barn, in two rows of spacious stalls. Due to a shortage of straw, no litter was used, but the hardpacked clay floor was kept in immaculate condition by the milkmaids, each of whom had twelve cows under her care. The air was kept clean and sweet smelling by rows of variable ventilators set into the low roof.

  Galia, whose major task was the scientific selection of the best breeding stock, explained that the rather shaggy beasts we were seeing originated from a type called Kholmogor, which were first bred at the orders of Peter The Great for use in the Archangel region of European Russia.

  “Since 1925, Soviet science has worked to improve Kholmogor cattle even more. Now they are nearly as hardy as reindeer, and much better producers of milk and meat than the Yakut cattle used to be. Those being raised for beef can live out of doors all winter, but these darlings stay in the barns almost nine months of the year.”

  I wondered about the economics of keeping milch cattle under such conditions. Vladimir assured me it could be, and was, done at a profit. Perhaps so in this case, but it can hardly be true in all cases, particularly in regions to the north of the arctic circle such as Tiksi, where cattle are kept at 73° North Latitude! The answer seems to be that the U.S.S.R. has made it a matter of basic policy for the development of remote regions that they should, as far as possible, be self-reliant in terms of food production. Kola admitted that the profit motive was not the essential factor.

  “Much of our far northern agriculture has to be subsidized, at least in its initial stages. But what is the alternative? If large populations are to live and work in the far north they must have fresh foods, and the best of foods, and if such foods cannot be produced locally they have to be imported from great distances at very high costs. It is better to spend the money to produce them locally so that food production adds a segment to the economic base of the developing region, and at the same time enables the native peoples to share in the developing economy more or less on their own terms.”

  We intended to head back to Yakutsk that evening, but the Red Banner Farm workers thought otherwise. We argued. Well, they said, the least you can do is stop long enough to have a glass of tea with us before you go.

  We agreed to this much, but the moment we were ushered into the long log cafeteria, we saw that our fate was sealed. The farm workers were awaiting us along both sides of an immensely long table which was laden to the point of
collapse with bottles and with food.

  Kola’s eyes rolled and he groaned dismally. “Yakut hospitality! Farley, I can’t survive any more. I am only a weak Moscow man. Please tell my wife I died bravely in the cause.…”

  Ten

  ALTHOUGH the “taiga” culture continues to be the preferred way of life for most Yakut and Evenk, they are not restricted to it. Many of them (Moisie thought the figure might be as high as 80,000) have chosen to move from taiga to town and from agriculture to industry. This transition has not brought about a break in their cultural continuity. Most of the urban Yakut are concentrated in Yakutsk, where they retain an absolute majority, set the city’s cultural tone, control the local soviet (town council) and in general maintain the Yakut “fact.” They do not contribute many working people to the new mining and industrial towns and cities which, for the most part, are peopled by young European immigrants conditioned by, and products of, a technological society. The Yakut and Evenk seem happy to let these new people dig the mines, build the power stations, and generally do the work involved in the gargantuan natural resource development which has made Yakutia a major element in the economy of the Soviet Union.

  The urban-oriented Yakut have deliberately chosen to involve themselves in consumer industries, most of which have direct links with, and in truth grew out of, traditional skills and occupations. As Simeon Danielov put it:

  “Our people are growing gently into the twentieth century. They are adapting to it without much strain in the same way all living things can adapt to change when it does not come upon them too abruptly or with too much violence.”

  I asked Simeon if this approach was the result of the farsighted vision of Soviet policymakers.

  “They may think so. No, it is something we Yakut worked out ourselves. You must realize our mode of thought is not your mode. Europeans often ignore this truth. We have survived for a long time in a world where survival was very difficult and we learned how to do it. When the blizzard lashes the taiga only a fool tries to face it and struggle with its power. But only a fool abandons himself to it and lets it blow him where it will. The wise man leans against it and lets it push him, slowly, slowly, so he can pick his path and find his way to safety. This is what we are doing.”

  In Moscow I repeated this little story (suppressing its source) to a particularly energetic official of the powerful Council for the Productive Forces for the Development of the North. He literally snorted with impatience.

  “That’s nonsense! There is too much nonsense like it talked in the Soviet Union. It is only another peasant proverb to excuse inaction. Anyway, it doesn’t apply. For instance you’ve been to Yakutia and seen for yourself! Those people are amongst the most progressive of all the Small Peoples of the north. They don’t tolerate such backward notions!”

  I did not disillusion him.

  The industries in which the people of Yakutsk are involved include a clothing plant; a woodworking and furniture factory; a dairy product factory; shipbuilding; a textile plant; a big and effective (as opposed to the token type) handicraft industry that not only supplies products to all of the U.S.S.R. but also sells abroad; and the Yakutsk Leather Treating and Processing Combine. In 1969 Nikolai Yakutsky took John de Visser and me to visit the leather plant.

  The combine was conceived in 1929 when the city was facing a desperate shortage of winter boots. However, there was no shortage of cow hides and horse hides or of homemade felt, and there were a number of old Yakut men living in town who were skilled at bootmaking. The town soviet hired a dozen of them and set up a factory consisting of a decrepit log shed fitted with crude work benches and heated by a broken iron stove. Within the year the old men had trained a work force of sixty young people, and although everything was done by hand (including stitching) the plant had become a going concern. The work appealed to the Yakut and the place grew rapidly, if in a somewhat haphazard manner which is still reflected in the mélange of wooden buildings and spanking new concrete structures which today house the republic’s largest manufacturing enterprise. In 1969 it employed seven hundred workers and produced 200,000 pairs of boots and shoes.

  On the day of our visit the director, a Yakut, was away in Moscow at a conference so we were received by a pale, craggy-faced, intense and very nervous Russian, Dmitri Maslov, who was the combine’s chief technician. He was exceedingly embarrassed at finding himself cast in the role of guide and mentor to a pair of foreigners.

  Our tour of the plant turned into a happy ramble as we discovered that most of the employees were young and pretty girls. They were not the least bit shy. I suspect our visit may have had a bad effect on the day’s production figures, but no one seemed to mind. The workrooms had a pleasantly casual air about them. The girls had filled the place with potted plants and despite the fact that most operations were being done on complex modern machines, the aura was much more like that of a home industry than a modern factory. It certainly seemed free of the tense, impersonal, pressurized atmosphere which both we and the Russians tend to equate with maximum efficiency.

  “When I first came here from Leningrad,” Dmitri told us, “I was upset because I did not think we were getting the best out of the people or the machines. Everything seemed too relaxed. I did some studies on three or four processes, thinking I would gather figures to demonstrate this to the director. It was a surprise for me to discover that, unit for unit, production and quality were higher than in the modern plants in Leningrad. People here, even if they appear easy-going, are the best workers one could want because they really seem to like what they are doing.”

  I chatted with a number of men, women and girls in various departments. Most were Yakut, with a sprinkling of Evenk, Buryat, and native-born Russians. These latter, incidentally, appeared to be at least as fervent Yakut patriots as the Yakut themselves.

  By the time John had fired off all his film, Dmitri had relaxed. We went back to his office where he unstoppered a bottle, and himself, and told me far more about the shoe business than I really wanted to know; but although his facts and figures may be less than scintillating, they are revealing of what is happening to the Yakut as they “lean against the wind.”

  The one-time shoemaking shed is now a fully integrated operation, receiving raw hides from the collectives and state farms and turning out fully finished leather products. It employs sixty-eight “upper level” technicians, of whom exactly half are natives. The remainder, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, are employed on four-year contracts, and it is a major part of their task to train native people to take over their jobs.

  Although winter boots are the primary product, a team of Yakut women was engaged in designing fashion shoes and their work had already been exhibited and well received in Brussels and in Paris. Specialty boots of reindeer hide (with the fur on) were being made to ancient Yakut patterns and exported to high-fashion markets in western Europe. In 1969 the demand greatly exceeded production and by the end of 1971 the combine hopes to be exporting 50,000 pairs of reindeer boots a year. By that time total annual production is expected to reach 600,000 pairs of boots and shoes, 50,000 leather jackets and 200,000 pairs of gloves. Employment should have topped the thousand mark.

  In many cases all the working members of a family were employed in the plant. Girls of eighteen and nineteen worked by day on a reduced shift and went to technical school in the evenings. After graduation a number of them will go on to university. The management considers it part of its duty to help its employees better themselves, even if it means losing them.

  The plant works on an incentive basis. Basic wages for women average two hundred rubles a month, but there are a whole series of bonuses for “over fulfilment of the norms” which can almost double that amount.

  Maslov: “In the new economic climate of the U.S.S.R., we must be interested in profit; and so we must provide the workers with greater and greater incentives.”

  Ordinary workers get an annual holiday of thirty-six working days which, with the i
nclusion of weekends (they work a five-day, forty-hour week) and other holidays, gives them fifty to fifty-two consecutive days off. Skilled workers, and those in hard jobs, get forty-two working days off. Every third year, established workers (those who have been on the job four years or more) get free holiday transportation to any place in the Soviet Union, and their trade union pays one-third of their other holiday costs. After fifteen years in the plant, women can retire at fifty and men at fifty-five, on full pension. The pension base is 120 rubles a month, scaling upward depending on length of employment.

  Dmitri Maslov is a good example of the European Russians who are voluntarily becoming Siberians. He was born in middle Russia and at seventeen went to work in a Leningrad shoe factory; but he studied in the evenings and in 1964 graduated as a full-fledged engineer.

  He chose to go to Siberia because: “The job sounded exciting … in Leningrad factories there were no innovations; the problems were mostly solved. So when this factory offered me a contract, I jumped at it. The life is good out here. The people are the finest in the world. My wife, Ludmilla, and I have not been sorry we came. All that nonsense about the terrible hardship and isolation in Siberia was old woman’s talk. There is some hardship, but isn’t that what a man needs if he is going to bring out the best in himself? My two boys were born here in Yakutsk and they will be Yakut.”

  His wife, also an engineer, works in a furniture factory. The family has its own house and a half-acre garden where Dmitri grows ornamental trees and tomatoes. He is an ardent cook, an amateur artist and, being a good tenor, sings in the factory choral group. In summer he enjoys mushroom hunting in the taiga and boating holidays on the Lena. On his first “three year holiday,” he and Ludmilla went back to Leningrad and to the Black Sea … then, with the holiday only half spent, they returned to Yakutsk.