Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  Here, paraphrased and much condensed, is how it was explained to me by the Director of the Institute of Northern Planning.

  “We had four basic considerations before us when we worked out our policy. First: we had no intention of just exploiting the north for the benefit of the southern part of the country. Second: whatever we did had to ensure it would bring people into the north on a permanent basis. Third: development had to pay its own way, and had to recover the very heavy cost of the initial planning and surveys, which amounted to over six billion rubles. Fourth: everything we did had to be predicated on conservation of resources so the future would be assured, not only for the new northern communities, but for the whole of the Soviet Union. We could not afford to be profligate with what we had, as the United States and other capitalist countries have been.

  “The first step in implementing these criteria is to examine the surveys and the inventories with special reference to resources of particularly high value such as gold, diamonds, uranium, and particularly rich concentrations of less valuable minerals. Such resources we call valuta. We then conduct exhaustive further surveys in the regions around each valuta to assess the potential of all secondary resources. When a valuta shows it could be a focus for the development of other resources – and most of them do – we are ready to go to work in earnest.

  “We spend money as freely as needed to begin an intense exploitation of the valuta. In the case of Mirny it was diamonds; in the case of Kolyma, gold; in the case of Norilsk, a concentrated base metal deposit. As soon as production begins, the profits are used to transform the original temporary mining town into a planned community designed in all essentials to care for a much bigger population than is required to work the valuta alone. The town is built for permanence and has all the facilities needed by a modern city, together with excellent communications with the rest of the country. In addition the valuta pays for the installation of a power base with a capacity far in excess of current requirements. In as little as five to ten years we create the essentials for a human habitation centre which has all the amenities one could want; and this very heavy capital investment is provided directly from the profits of the valuta.

  “The new community now begins development of its secondary resources which could not, on their own, have paid for the initial installation of the new community. At the same time local industry is beginning to develop. It is a principle with us that raw materials should be processed as fully as possible at their point of origin. This means construction of smelters, refineries, reduction plants in the new centre, and these provide a base upon which heavy industry can later grow, while at the same time much reducing the costs of transporting the resource material to other regions.

  “As local processing of the several resources expands, the new centre finds itself in a position to begin manufacturing. At this stage it is approaching maturity as an integrated economic unit with many diverse activities, drawing on many sources of raw materials, and capable of supporting a large human community in perpetuity and in modern style.

  “If the original valuta resource should now become exhausted, it will not fatally affect the life of the community. If the valuta continues to be productive, the state continues to benefit from it and the money can be used to finance the beginnings of yet other new communities.”

  The Director ended his explanations with a little homily.

  “I believe you know better than I that your country, Canada, has an even bigger proportion of northern lands than the Soviet Union. So why, may I ask, are you ignoring it as a place for men to work and live and build new cities? Why do you treat it as a distant colony to be exploited but not to be occupied? Well, perhaps you will someday see it differently – if you have not already lost it to your big southern neighbour.

  “We think of the north as a land to be lived in. We do not go north just to fill our pockets. We are making it a part of our whole nation – and the north is making a new kind of men and women out of us.”

  There is not always unanimity of opinion amongst the hydraheaded organs of state in the U.S.S.R. In the summer of 1958 a battle developed in Moscow over the most suitable type of electric power source for the valuta centre of Mirny. The hard-nosed industrial economists, who were only interested in diamonds, plumped for a coal-fired plant which would be fuelled from nearby surface deposits and which would be quick and cheap to build, and economical to operate. However, representatives from the Northern Planning group insisted on an hydro-electric plant. Gavriel Bijanov, who was summoned away from a dam-building job in central Siberia to support the view of the Northern Planners, explained the situation to me.

  “There were a number of reasons for wanting hydro-electric generation. The obvious one, and the one we used as our main argument, was that we not only needed a great deal of power for the development of the Mirny complex in its secondary stages, but we also intended to supply the gold fields at Bodaibo, five hundred kilometres to the south; the diamond pipe at Udachnaya; and a new pipe at Aikhal, five hundred kilometres to the north. In order to do this we would need at least 1,500,000 kilowatts and it would have been impracticable to build a thermal station to produce that much power at Mirny, where everything had to be brought in by boats and winter roads.

  “While this was true enough, we had still other reasons, ones which were not so likely to meet the approval of the economists. We had been thinking for years that something must be done to stop the severe air pollution caused by thermal plants, so whenever we could we tried to substitute hydro power. Also we had long dreamed about building cities in which everything would be done by electric power – not only lighting and cooking, but all heating as well. This would mean little pollution of the air; power would come entirely from a renewable source; and much more of the non-renewable supplies of oil and coal could be reserved for gradual consumption in coal and petro-chemical industries. Why go on burning the stuff when it can be converted into hundreds of useful products? So, you see, we needed lots of power for the Mirny development if we were to make the town fully electrified, and we wanted the nearby coal deposits saved as the basis for an extraction and manufacturing industry.

  “Another reason for refusing a thermal plant was we wanted a chance to design and build a hydro-electric plant under the most adverse conditions of northern climate and inaccessibility – a plant which would be the prototype for many more to be built across the whole of the arctic to solve the very serious problems of power supply in the far north. Such a plant had never been built anywhere before. Mirny was our chance to do it, because we knew this first one was going to cost a fortune, and only something as valuable as diamonds could pay for it.”

  The northern planners won their case and Gavriel was given the job of directing the project. It was hardly an enviable prospect. He was faced with the task of having to dam a major river in a region subjected to eight months of winter and temperatures that plunged as low as 80° below. Because of the inaccessibility of the site, he knew he would have to forget about concrete and steel, and build the dam of local materials. Furthermore, everything he did would be subjected to the iron control of permafrost.

  The first workers arrived on the site by helicopter in the fall of 1960 – twelve men and one horse! They threw up log cabins banked to the eaves with mud and moss against the terrible Vilyui frost. As fast as the huts were built they were occupied by new arrivals. During that first bitter winter a trail paved with compacted snow was blazed through the taiga to Mirny. During the ensuing five years this was the only ground link with the outer world, and it was only usable in winter. In summer all transport had to be by air.

  Because of the incredibly difficult transportation problems, and the distances involved, major items had to be ordered from European Russia at least eighteen months in advance of the time they would be needed. Nothing that was not absolutely essential could be brought in from outside. The new town of Chernychevsky grew in the manner of a classic pioneer community, its homes and buildi
ngs constructed of logs cut in the nearby forests and chinked with mud and moss. They were heated with wood, too, and in many cases were roofed with moss and mud that gave so little protection against rain that in summer everyone moved out to live in tents, despite black flies and mosquitos in plague proportions.

  The unique nature of the Vilyui River itself posed special problems. In December it carries a dribbling 1.4 to 3 cubic metres of water per second; but by June the flow has leapt to 13,000 cubic metres a second. The fact that the future power drain would be at its greatest during the winter, when there was the least flow of water in the Vilyui system, necessitated the creation of a tremendous reservoir and a much higher and bigger dam than would have been needed to produce the same amount of power in the south. Also, because of the consequent enormous pressure in the penstocks, special propellor-type turbines had to be designed as a substitute for the normal radial-action type.

  So complex were the preliminary problems that work on the main structure – the dam and the west bank powerhouse – did not begin until 1963. By then the initially high cost estimates had tripled and Mirny, inadequately supplied with electricity from diesel generators and a “portable” coal-fired plant, was screaming blue murder. It looked for a while as if the whole Chernychevsky project might be abandoned in favour of a big coal-fired station. The great experiment was barely saved when Gavriel risked his neck by guaranteeing he would deliver power within four years.

  As the work force began blasting a power canal and turbine hall out of the frozen granite (making use of the debris to begin pushing rock wings for the dam out from the canyon walls), a new difficulty appeared. The frozen bedrock which had seemed sturdy enough to support almost any weight, was found to be underlain by a cracked strata full of ice lenses which could easily be deformed by the great weight of the dam and so lead to its collapse.

  The solution to this was to vastly increase the breadth of the dam at its base and so spread the load over a much greater area – a solution which meant trebling the amount of rock fill that had to be blasted and trucked to the site.

  The solving of each problem seemed only to lead to new and worse difficulties. As the riverbed was blasted, in mid-winter, to form a foundation trench, it was discovered that even the upper layers of bedrock were cracked. Although they were cemented together by permafrost, there was the likelihood that the weight of the dam would temporarily generate enough pressure to melt the ice and so again threaten the entire structure. The solution this time was to design a tunnel which would run along the basement rock through the full length of the dam and from which workers could inject cement grout under very high pressure into the fissures as the ice melted. It was estimated that this local melting process would continue for at least six years until permafrost had seeped back through the underlying rock and reasserted its sovereignty.

  The bulk of the dam was to be of stone, but the inner core was to be a water-impervious mixture of clay, sand and fine gravel. The core was designed to contain the water of the reservoir while the thick layers of rock around it would act as ballast to keep the core in place and to insulate it from summer heat and from the warmth of the water in the reservoir. The real strength of the dam was to be provided by the Vilyui winter, which would freeze the core into one monolithic block.

  Material for the core was found five miles from the site but, of course, it was solidly frozen. The clays and sands had to be thawed, thin layer by thin layer, under the summer suns, then scraped into great, flat-topped mounds for storage. In order to keep these mounds from freezing when winter came, electric heating rods were inserted into them in a rectangular pattern and connected to a series of diesel generators.

  The core material had to be hauled to the dam site and placed in position during the coldest months of the year – the colder the better, from Gavriel’s point of view.

  “We did not like to place core material unless the temperature was at least 30° below zero. We had to be sure it would freeze absolutely solidly. The rods in the storage mounds raised the temperature of the material just high enough so it could be loaded on trucks, driven at top speed to the dam, dumped, spread and compacted before it turned to icy stone. At temperatures of 60° below, we had trouble with it. It insisted on freezing too fast. We fixed that by building big mobile flame throwers and also by saturating it with very high concentrations of salt water.”

  “At 60° below you surely must have had trouble with your workers too,” I said. “Did you use flame throwers and brine on them as well?”

  Gavriel laughed. “No, they had something better. They called it Spirit Vilyui and I am not sure how it was made. They tell about one fellow who dropped a two-litre bottle of it on the frozen ground outside his house one cold winter night. The next morning there was a mudhole there a metre in diameter and, when they tried to find how deep it was, they couldn’t get a probe long enough to reach the bottom.

  “We had the toughest and best-humoured crowd of people in the Soviet Union. Most were just youngsters. They came from all over. There was an Azerbaijanian from Baku who had never even seen snow before. He had a wonderful voice and you could hear him singing all over the dam site. He would sing curses upon the ice and snow so they sounded as beautiful as love songs – but the words were the worst I’ve ever heard. At least once a week he’d roar that he was going home on the next plane. But, you know, he is still here. Even the women – and there were a lot of them – mostly held out. The wives did not have to work, but most of them did and a lot worked right on the dam alongside the men. I really don’t know what kept people here, unless it was some special kind of Russian stubbornness. Perhaps, though, they shared our feelings. Here was a job most people in the south said couldn’t be done; but it had to be done if the north was going to develop the way we felt it should.”

  By mid-winter of 1965-66, the builders were ready to close the gap in the centre of the dam. It was one of the worst winters on record in central Siberia, and working conditions were appalling. Nevertheless, the task was completed a few weeks before the spring break-up unleashed the terrific Vilyui floods. The films taken at the time show thousands of people standing silent on the edge of the canyon watching the waters rise behind the dam. There are no scenes of cheering or flag waving, no bands, no rockets in the air. I asked one of the engineers why there was so little apparent excitement.

  “It is difficult to explain. Instead of feeling like cheering, most of us felt closer to tears. It was not a feeling of victory so much as a feeling we had lost something – the thing we had done together, so many thousands of us; the life we had led together in this isolated little world buried in the taiga … it was coming to an end. Perhaps we would find it again in some other place, building some other dam, but here in Chernychevsky, the great times when we felt like giants and lived so closely with one another, and relied so much upon one another that we were all brothers and sisters, that time was running out.”

  There was another moment of a different kind in June, 1967, when the great steel gate of the inlet lock rolled up and the Vilyui roared into the penstock and fell two hundred feet down into the frozen rock to begin spinning a turbine. There was a band that day, and red banners flying, and people in holiday dress, and a delegation of stolid, black-suited gentlemen from the Olympian heights in Moscow who looked, nodded their heads, congratulated the dam builders, and flew off back to their own peculiar world.

  Chernychevsky was on the line.

  The story does not end there, however. Now a second powerhouse is being built on the opposite side of the river. When both are operating at full capacity they will generate 1,600,000 kilowatts of power. Already electricity is turning Mirny, Chernychevsky and Lensk into electrified cities which will soon be devoid of chimneys, growing cleanly in clean air. It is powering the first of the manufacturing plants; a factory for producing exploded stone fibre for insulation; one producing prefabricated cement apartment units; another to process waste timber into fibreboard. The pylons marc
h north now to Aikhal and to Udachnaya, and east to the new gas fields on the lower Vilyui where they will supply electricity for a gas-chemical industry.

  The dream of the northern planners – of men like Gavriel – is also becoming a reality elsewhere. During 1970 a dam and power station on the Chernychevsky model will be begun on the lower Kolyma River and two, or possibly three more will be started in Chukotka. All will be built far to the north of the arctic circle.

  The town of Chernychevsky will not wither away and die when the power plants are completed. Already its log buildings are being replaced by masonry apartments. It has begun to serve in a new role as a transportation and road building centre from which an all-weather highway is beginning to crawl north through the hundreds of miles of taiga to Aikhal. Before that job is completed Chernychevsky will have undergone its third metamorphosis, changing into a manufacturing town with a number of low labour-intensive, high power-intensive industries to support it in the future.