Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  In 1955 the Lensk-Mirny-Chernychevsky region had a population of under four hundred people. In 1969 there were over 60,000 in the three sister cities, plus another 1,600 on the new state and collective farms. The overall population will not increase much above 150,000 which is the planned total for this particular complex.

  But, far to the north, new cities are already being built – cities which will owe much to the pioneer dam builders of Chernychevsky.

  Thirteen

  ONE MORNING Ivan Danielov and I were walking beside the banks of the Lena near Yakutsk. Scattered across its gleaming surface were dozens of river boats, and as I watched them I began feeling homesick. Ships and seamen are a major part of my life and I am most at home when I can look out to a limitless horizon of open ocean. In Yakutia I was beginning to feel land-locked.

  Ivan listened sympathetically as I explained my feelings.

  “But Farley, you are mistaken about Yakutia. In the north we have 2,000 miles of ocean front. And connecting to the ocean we have an inland sea reaching into almost every corner of our country. It is narrow, but with its major arms is more than 8,000 miles in length. You are looking at it now – Elueneh – mother Lena. She is our inland sea.”

  “A river is a river is a river,” I replied. “The trouble with all you poets is you get carried away by your own imagery.”

  “And the trouble with you is you can’t see beyond your beard.” Ivan said with a smile. “Tomorrow we’ll open your eyes for you.”

  He was as good as his word. Next morning, in company with several friends, we drove out of town in brittle, crystalline weather under a low, cold sun which was proclaiming the near approach of winter.

  We passed through a guarded gate on the river plain and abruptly found ourselves in what appeared to be a major seaport. Ahead of us a forest of gantry cranes swung their jibs against the sky. Lift trucks and straddle trucks crowded the road we were following, heaving and hoisting mountains of freight that partially obscured the view of nearly two miles of docks lined with ships. The illusion of having been miraculously transported to a busy ocean terminal was so strong I thought I could smell the salt tang of sea air. Perhaps I really could, for the whole of the terminal area (about twenty-five square kilometres) sits on a plain heavily impregnated with brine oozing up from deposits left by a primordial sea.

  I had only a confused glimpse of the place before we stopped at the Yakutsk port authority offices, where we were greeted by a big blonde Viking with a chin like a dredge bucket who wore the uniform of a captain in the Soviet merchant marine.

  At forty-four, Victor Rukavishnikov had the weathered look of a man who had spent a lifetime on the water. Born of Old Russian immigrant stock in a small Yakutian village, he had spent twenty-four years on the Lena, as deckhand, mate, pilot and finally skipper. At forty he “swallowed the anchor” to become Chief of Port for Yakutsk harbour.

  He had, however, avoided becoming a bureaucrat. When I started to sit down at the conference table in his office, prepared for the usual briefing, he stopped me.

  “What’s the use of talking in here? Let’s go out on the docks. But, wait a minute. What time is it? After ten o’clock. Ah hah, we’ll have a quick one before we go.”

  When we were properly fortified, Victor led us at a lope through the complexities of the docks and terminal. Hundred-ton mobile cranes grumbled and whistled overhead, emptying the bellies of a score of big, awkward-looking vessels whose like I had never seen before. Women checkers kept an eye aloft as the cargo swung inshore. They were too busy to more than glance at us.

  “Summer is over.” Victor yelled in my ear. “Soon comes the ice. Our shipping season is only about 170 days, and in that time the Lena river fleet has to handle nearly five million tons of freight. No time to stand around and think about your love life!”

  The noise and confusion did not make for easy conversation. I managed to yell something back about how impressed I was by the magnitude of the place.

  “Yakutsk port is nothing. Only in the third rank of Soviet harbours. You should see Osetrovo on the Upper Lena. It is in the first class … one of the biggest ports in the Soviet Union.”

  Victor’s modesty was commendable but, I think, illfounded. Yakutsk port is at least equal in size, modernity and apparent efficiency to any medium-sized seaport on the coast of North America. The thing is that it is not on a coast. It lies seven hundred air miles and about 1,500 river miles from salt water. As for Osetrovo – it lies another thousand miles upstream from Yakutsk, in the very heart of Siberia and less than two hundred miles from Lake Baikal. Osetrovo is now Yakutia’s main connection with the Trans Siberian Railway, and in 1969 its harbour handled more than three million tons of freight, much of it “containerized,” bound north down the broad waters of the Lena.

  Victor yanked me to safety as a straddle truck waddled up carrying a loaded container about the size of a freight car between its wide-spread legs.

  “Have you had enough of this? Ivan Nikolaievich says you are homesick for the sea. How about a little voyage?”

  Somewhat dazedly I nodded assent. We fled from the pandemonium of the docks and drove down river to the passenger port. Here it was mercifully peaceful. Although the Yakutsk fleet of big diesel vessels carries up to half-a-million passengers a year, most of the ships were laid-up for the winter. Alongside the main pier rested a most peculiar looking vessel. Built of gleaming aluminum and shaped like a flattened cigar, she seemed to be a combination of an airplane and a submarine.

  “Byelorusskia hydrofoil,” Victor said proudly. “You have good luck. The river air observer reports no skim ice today – although it’s overdue – so we’ll take you travelling in our ‘water bird.’ ”

  Dubiously I climbed aboard this most unseaworthy-looking contraption. Her passenger accommodation, which ran the full length of the hull, was more like the fuselage of an airliner than a boat’s cabin – chrome trim, reclining seats, aircraft-type windows – all that was missing were the seat belts and the No Smoking signs.

  We were settling ourselves in the deep-padded seats when Victor remembered something.

  “Ulcers on my soul! No vodka! Ivan! Kola! Leonid! Come with me!”

  A few minutes later all four returned aboard laden with the spoils of a raid on a nearby canteen, and the boat’s skipper, a short, taciturn Buryat named Vladimir Stepanov, ordered his two Yakut crewmen to cast off. A nine hundred-horsepower aviation diesel snarled into life and we swung heavily and clumsily out on the glass-calm river. Then abruptly we were flying! Climbing up on her foils until only they and the propellor were still in the water, the vessel flashed down river at sixty knots and I, who am used to travelling on my own Newfoundland schooner at six knots, began to wish I had stayed home in bed.

  Sensing my unease, Nikolai Yakutsky came to my rescue. Corks snapped and bottles began to circulate. There were only six of us in a cabin designed to hold thirty, so there was ample room to have a breakfast party, complete with cold sausages, caviar, canned crab and other oddments seized from the canteen.

  Ten miles downstream we approached a new river settlement. Our hydrofoil slowed and sagged sloppily into the water as Victor told me about the town of Zhataj.

  “This is the base for the Middle Lena fleet. Here we have ten thousand people living. They work at vessel maintenance and new ship construction. There was nothing at all here fifteen years ago. Up until then all our steel vessels were built in Russia and brought out along the Northern Sea Route. Russian marine architects said we could not build our own boats here. We said we could. What is more, we said we could design them too, and do a better job than they.

  “We started small, designing and building one of the first self-propelled steel barges to be used in Siberia. It was a success. It had to be, because we knew this river. We went on to bigger things. Eventually we got permission to do it all ourselves. What really convinced Moscow was when we designed and built a 1,000-ton self-powered barge that only drew one metre,
forty centimetres of water when it was fully loaded.

  “Now we have eighteen types of river craft in serial production and we supply them to all Siberian river fleets. The only ships we do not build are heavy-duty tugs, hydrofoils and passenger boats. We leave those to the Russians, just to keep them happy!

  “We are proud of what we have done on our Lena. Forty years ago the whole river fleet consisted of thirty little wooden steamboats and a couple of hundred wooden barges. Fifteen years ago there was still not a single self-propelled barge, and very few steel boats of any kind. Nowadays just four of our 3,000-ton self-propelled barges can carry as much as the whole Lena fleet of the 1930s – and we have scores of those big fellows.

  “Mother Lena has always been the front street of Yakutia. They used to say in the west we would never be anything but a wilderness because we had no railroads, and nobody could afford to build them through the taiga and the mountains. Well, we don’t need them. Almost all our country lies along the ‘coast’ of the Lena and its tributaries, and there is hardly a stream of hers we cannot turn into a highway. On the rougher ones we use air-pillow boats that skim along a few feet above the surface of the rapids. If there is never a railroad built into our land, it won’t matter in the least.”

  Victor stopped to wet his whistle and a middle-aged Yakut journalist took up the theme.

  “It isn’t only in summer that the Lena works for us. Once the ice thickens, her surface becomes a highway for truck transport. Convoys drive all the way from Osetrovo to Mirny and Yakutsk, and trucks from here go even farther down the lower river.”

  “Trucks!” Victor interrupted contemptuously. “If the idiots who make up the supply orders for the year knew what they were doing, the trucks could stay at home and sleep all winter. We can carry all the freight Yakutia will ever need. That’s our job, friend!”

  I distracted him.

  “How many vessels are there on the river, Victor?”

  He gave me a calculating look and then his red face split in an immense grin.

  “Military secret! Not for the ears of capitalist spies! To tell the truth, I really don’t know. The fleets on all big Siberian rivers are pooled, and each river can draw on the pool according to its needs. If there is a lot of work to do on the Yenisei, then we send vessels there to help out. Other times, they send ships to us. Tankers, refrigerator ships and all the bigger self-propelled barges are dual purpose, designed for coastwise passages as well as river work. Because of their shallow draft they can hug the arctic coast and find open water when the bigger ships can’t move because of ice offshore.”

  We turned away from Zhataj with its dry-docks, marine railways and shipyards, and the boat reared up on her foils again. This time we flew upstream, passing Yakutsk which was wreathed in a purple haze of wood-smoke from the chimneys of its older sections.

  It was a superb autumnal day. The river rolled as smooth as oil and seemed to be as wide as the horizon, although in fact it is only twelve miles broad at Yakutsk (it is thirty miles wide near its mouth). The banks were low, with occasional great buttes rising from the dark water. The current was swift but the channel was well buoyed, taking us between willow-covered islands, clear of the ever-shifting sandbars. Despite the lateness of the season there was an amazing amount of shipping, ranging from six-thousand-horsepower tugs (built in Poland) pushing or towing long strings of barges, to a two-thousand-ton tanker so deeply laden that her decks appeared to be awash. Here and there we whipped past dredges still busily at work deepening the channel. Occasionally we passed small craft carrying river fishermen and hunters bound upstream to look for geese and ducks.

  I went forward to visit the skipper and found him perched in an aircraft-type cockpit, plexiglass enclosed, in front of a formidable panel of instruments. He offered to let me take command, but I know my limitations. I can sail a boat adequately but I would be bound to make a mess of flying one!

  After an hour’s run the banks began to rise until we were whistling past high, forested cliffs. A low mountain appeared ahead and Nikolai Yakutsky pointed to it.

  “Tatar Haia. The sacred mountain of the Yakut people. In the middle of it lies the valley of Tuey Nada where the Yakut nation was born. Very long ago a chief named Elai, son of a great leader in middle-Asia, led his people north and east until they reached the banks of the Lena under Tatar Haia. Elai carried with him the maxims of our people engraved on a stone tablet. When he saw the flowing waters of the river he flung the tablet in and gave the order to his followers to drop their saddle blankets. The Yakut had found the land they sought.”

  Nikolai also told me that in 1787 an American traveller came downstream to this place in an open boat from the vicinity of Irkutsk, then went on to Yakutsk where he spent the winter. This man’s name was Ledyard. When I returned home I dug out the account of his journey and found this description of the Yakut people:

  The Yakut is a man of nature, not of art. He is a lover of peace. No lawyers [are needed] here, perplexing the rights of property.… Never, I believe, did the Yakut speak ill of the Deity or envy his fellow creatures. He is contented to be what he is. Hospitable and human, he is uniformly cheerful and tranquil, laconic in thought, word and action. Those that live with the Russians in their villages are above mediocrity as to riches, but discover the same indifference to accumulating more that a North Amercian Indian does.

  The Yakut have not changed all that much since Ledyard’s day.

  Nikolai also talked about a United States Naval expedition which sailed through Bering Strait in 1879 in a quixotic attempt to reach the North Pole. The expedition ship, Jeanette, under Lieutenant DeLong, was caught in the polar pack and spent two years drifting aimlessly in the ice until she was finally crushed not far north of the New Siberian Islands. In September, 1881, word reached General Tschernaiyev, the Governor of Yakutsk, that Evenk reindeer herders had found eleven white men, all close to death, at the mouth of the Lena. These were the sole survivors of the Jeanette. Nurtured by Evenk and Yakut people, the eleven were brought to Yakutsk and finally restored to their homes. Strangely enough, the tragedy of the Jeanette is well remembered in Yakutia but is all but forgotten in the United States.

  Apart from river traffic, the world we were flying past seemed as wild and uninhabited as it must have been in Ledyard’s time. It came as a considerable shock when we rounded a great bluff and saw a complex of modern resort hotels clinging to the slopes of a wooded valley. Called Tabaga, these hotels belong to the Railway Workers Trade Union and in summer house about 1,800 people from all over the U.S.S.R. who prefer to spend their vacations in the far north rather than on the shores of the Black Sea!

  “Tourism is important here,” Ivan explained. “All-Union river tours sail throughout the summer from Osetrovo on big cruise ships. They even go northward past Yakutsk. Next year they will go to the mouth of the Lena and to Tiksi, where, if they wish, the passengers can transfer to ocean-going ships of the Northern Sea Route fleet and sail west to Archangel and Murmansk, or east and south to Vladivostock. The authorities think it important for people from European Russia to have a chance to see for themselves what the northlands are like.”

  A little more than a hundred kilometres south of Yakutsk we came to the town of Pokrovskoe, founded by immigrant Russians two hundred and forty years ago. Through almost all that time it remained unchanging; a cluster of log houses strung along the high bank of the river and known to the outer world only by the fearsome stories told by the few exiles who escaped from it during Tsarist times. Now, although it is still a town of wooden houses, it will soon be a city of concrete apartment blocks. A huge factory is being built here to take advantage of a limestone deposit and of a newly constructed cement plant. The factory will manufacture prefabricated building panels, concrete blocks and similar materials for shipment all over Yakutia on the waters of the Lena.

  We went ashore on the beach, climbed the bluff and wandered through the old town’s meandering, tree-lined streets. Vict
or and Nikolai headed for the liquor store to replenish our supplies. I followed Ivan to the co-op store to see a friend of his, and I was startled to find a sporting goods department which offered, amongst other items, fencing foils and masks. Whatever the shortages in Moscow, there appeared to be no dearth of consumer goods in Pokrovskoe.

  Nor was there any shortage of reading matter. The bookstore, in an old log building, had a stock of books, prints and paintings which would have been impressive in any Canadian city – but the population of Pokrovskoe was just under three thousand people. Ivan found copies of his newest book here and happily bought one and inscribed it for me on the spot.

  For my dear sailor friend who on this day made the acquaintance of Mother Elueneh and took his first voyage on the inland sea of the Yakut Republic.

  One of the great joys of Yakutsk, as opposed to almost every other place I visited in the Soviet Union, was that although the people were immensely proud of their city, and anxious to have me see it all, they never forced the pace. There were no conducted tours; no tightly scheduled attempts to cram me so full of information it would come running out my ears. Things just seemed to happen in Yakutsk, and they were always the right things, at the right time.

  My visit to the Yakut State University was a case in point. I had decided not to bother going there, assuming it would provide me with nothing more than additional masses of statistics. But one cold morning in October as I was walking down the main street I became aware that a slight, beautiful Yakut girl who seemed to be no more than seventeen, was dogging my footsteps. I slowed, turned and smiled. She drew alongside and very shyly asked in English what time it was. I told her, but she made no move to go on her way. Then she said:

  “Tovarish Moyet, please. We students at the University wish you to visit us. Will you come? Many have read your books, and we have heard about your travels in our country. We admire you so much. If it would not be too much trouble …?”