Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  Reindeer raising is the state farm’s primary concern, and employs 127 families in two Reindeer Departments, each of which has a base herd of 18,000 deer. Roughly a thousand tons of meat is produced each year, returning (with sales of hides and other side products) a gross income of about one million rubles; for a profit of nearly 300,000 rubles, which is invested in new equipment, training programs, improved breeding stock, and in the reconstruction of the three towns.

  Wages of apprentice herders begin at 210 rubles a month, increasing by ten rubles each year to a base rate of 250, plus all the usual, and some unusual, side benefits, including virtually free housing and a supply of meat, fish, and reindeer hides sufficient to meet the needs of an average-size family. Teams which overfulfill their annual quotas are paid extra in cash, or the members may take their bonus in reindeer, which they run with the farm herds and may sell at any time at market prices.

  This is no empty gesture. In 1969 Innokenty Khodyan’s team was running 163 privately owned deer with the farm herd. When I returned to visit Innokenty that year, I was presented with three reindeer of my very own – earned for me by the overfulfilment of my mates on the Second Team of which I was an honorary member. Since I could see no way of bringing the deer home with me, I authorized the slaughter of one to provide a special feast for my teammates and myself. The other two reindeer may, hopefully, breed enough offspring to make me rich some day – in Kolyma, if nowhere else.

  In 1968 the fur farm had a number of female white foxes, but the experts concluded it was too expensive to hold them over winter as breeding stock. Instead they now live-trap several hundred wild pups in early summer on the tundra and hold them only until the pelts are prime in autumn. Not only was the year-round feeding of white fox breeding stock expensive but, as Victor pointed out, it was stupid to feed good reindeer meat to foxes when it could be used for human beings.

  Wild-fur trapping employs about ninety families and is the particular province of the Evenk, who are natural-born hunters. Each trapper gets a guaranteed income of two hundred rubles a month all year round but in addition makes a percentage on all the fur he catches. Serafina Robik cleared several thousand rubles over and above his salary in 1966, and most of the other trappers did proportionately well. Since fur prices are supported, and since scientific cropping methods are employed to prevent a depletion of the natural stock, trappers are amongst the best-paid people in the north, and hunting is second only to reindeer breeding as a farm moneymaker.

  Fishing is also increasingly important at Kolyma, and one November day Victor took me down the river almost to the arctic coast to see the operation of a fishing station for myself.

  We set off in relatively mild weather – it was a mere 10° below – but with the threat of a blizzard implicit in the dark and brooding sky. Victor, Kola, Yura, and I went in one Bobyk while Victor’s Yakutian-born wife, Gallina, followed in another, accompanying a young Evenk girl who was going home from school in Tchersky to visit her parents’ village. We were convoyed, until we outran it, by a big tracked vehicle called a snow-tank. Its job was to pick us up if we got in trouble, a not unlikely possibility since we had to travel on the river ice which was treacherous due to overflows from springs along the banks that had not yet frozen.

  Victor happily reverted to his original profession and drove our Bobyk himself, manhandling the tough little machine with great skill. We soon left the main Kolyma channel and headed northwest into a complex of estuary channels winding through the bald-headed tundra. The only visible vegetation was the occasional clump of willows on the bank, from which flocks of ptarmigan rocketed away at our approach. The Bobyks flew along wide open, which was the only way to keep them moving. Every now and again we would hit a soft patch, and slush and water would erupt around us as we skidded, slewed, and roared through it.

  The wild drive continued for two hours and brought us to a low, snow-dusted ridge on which stood a gaunt looking cluster of shacks. This desolate-looking place was the fishing camp.

  We were greeted by the manager, a Russian who had spent decades in the arctic. He was taciturn and withdrawn until we got him going on the subject of his fishery. At this season the camp was operated by only four men (it employs forty or more at peak times), fishing two dozen nets set underneath the ice for a herring-like fish. One of the squat, log shacks contained two diesel-electric generators. Another was a living cabin much like any such cabin in the Canadian north, except for electric lights and a powerful radio transceiver. The third shack, however, was an eye-opener. It stood above the shaft of a quick-freeze “mine” and was connected to the river shore by a narrow-gauge railway.

  This natural underground freezing plant had been blasted out of perpetually frozen black muck which seemed to have the hardness and texture of basalt. It was still another example of the Russian genius for making permafrost serve man. The main shaft, which we descended down icy ladders, was sixty feet deep, and drift tunnels wound out from it on all sides. The walls were covered with immense frost butterflies – flat, multicoloured crystals as big as playing cards. A touch brought thousands of them fluttering down with a delicate tinkling sound.

  The mine had sufficient capacity to freeze and store three hundred tons of fish. It was originally built as an experiment and was now considered obsolete. A new one of greater size and better design was under construction at the Evenk village site three miles away. Equipped with an efficient air-lock and modern conveyor equipment, it will have the capacity to freeze and store up to one thousand tons of fish.

  In winter the frozen fish are trucked along the river ice and distributed all through the Kolyma region and into adjacent parts of Chukotka. In summer whatever has not been used locally is loaded on refrigerator ships bound for Murmansk and finds it way into the Moscow and Leningrad markets.

  During 1966 this was one of five such stations in the district. By 1969 the Fishing Department had added a modern processing and canning factory and was producing a grand total of 1,700-1,800 tons of seven different species of fish each year. The fishermen told me they made about two hundred rubles a month, excluding bonuses, and were supplied with all gear, including clothing.

  When we emerged, well chilled, from the mine shaft, Gallina was busy preparing a great pot of ukha, a species of fishermen’s soup which is a national addiction throughout most of the Soviet Union. Almost any kind of fish can be used to make ukha and everyone has his or her own special recipe. Gallina’s version called for four kinds of fish and was delicious. We crowded around make-shift tables and gorged ourselves. And, of course, Victor had not come empty handed. Out of his Bobyk came another clinking gunny sack.

  My compliments to Gallina on her cookery and to the fishermen on the quality of their products were sincere, but perhaps a little overdone. In any event, the manager, all smiles now, decided to reciprocate. Two of his men were despatched to the “mine” and returned therefrom carrying an enormous frozen fish between them. It was a chir – the king of all arctic fishes – and it was mine – all sixty pounds of it!

  This was, the fishermen told me, a little token of mutual regard. When I got back to Canada, they said, Claire would be able to make real Russian ukha for me. Nothing was said about how I was going to transport this monster home.

  That damned fish haunted me for nearly two weeks. It was considered a marvel by all who saw it, and it received royal treatment. Hotels were happy to hold it in their refrigerators and even Aeroflot recognized its regal qualities. On the flight from Yakutsk to Irkutsk, it was given a seat all to itself.

  In Irkutsk we finally parted company. I hope my fishermen friends will forgive me, but we were approaching warmer climates and my chir was in danger of becoming a monumental embarrassment. So I gave it to a writer friend and breathed a sigh of relief.

  The next morning my friend appeared at the airport to say farewell to us … bearing a return gift consisting of a forty-pound haunch of bear meat, unfrozen, and dripping gore through its inadequate wrappi
ngs.

  I eventually disposed of this to Yura, but only after extracting a solemn promise from him that he would let well enough alone and not reciprocate. It was a promise no Russian could have kept. However, the two-kilo can (about four pounds) of black caviar he shoved into my hands as I climbed aboard the plane for Canada was not to be spurned. Fortunately the Canadian Customs inspector in Montreal accepted my explanation that the can contained biological specimens – fish eggs, to be exact – and was therefore entitled to entry duty free.

  After demolishing the ukha we took the snow-tank, which had made a belated appearance, and drove downstream to help haul the nets. Victor eyed me calculatingly and asked if I would like to try driving the tank. I nodded. Treating me like a somewhat retarded ten-year-old, he gave me the most meticulous instructions. For my part, I refrained from telling him I had often driven tracked vehicles during the war. When he turned me loose I put the machine through its paces with deliberate bravado.

  Victor looked a trifle grim when I finally dismounted; but, never mind, he had another arrow in his quiver. He produced an automatic pistol, set a can on the ice, and worked it over, scoring several hits. Then he passed the gun around. Everyone tried a shot and to Victor’s unconcealed delight nobody hit the can. Finally it was my turn. I demurred, saying I knew little about guns. This only made Victor the more insistent. I finally took the thing, carefully fired twice, hit the can twice, and modestly handed the gun back.

  There were shouts of derisive laughter from the others at Victor’s expense. He looked at me for a moment with something of the expression of a man whose pet dog has just demonstrated an unsuspected ability to read a newspaper. Then he broke into a broad smile and gave me one of his bear hugs. That evened up the score. My ribs were sore for days afterwards.

  Although it was only 3 p.m. it was already growing dark. Blowing snow indicated that the threatened blizzard was about to materialize. We were in a hurry to be gone, but Victor had one more card to play. How would I like to try driving the Bobyk for a mile or two? He would be glad to show me how to do it.

  I grinned to myself. Not only had I driven a Jeep all through the war, but I had owned and driven several of the little monsters for fifteen years after the war.

  After enduring another painstaking period of instruction, I took control, starting off cautiously with a deliberate clashing of gears. Then we hit a soft spot and Victor yelled at me to stop and let him take over. Instead, I jammed down the accelerator and away we went, ploughing through axle-deep slush until we hit hard ice again.

  For once Victor was speechless. He said hardly a word as I drove the rest of the way home. I managed not to get stuck, although our companion Bobyk in the hands of a professional driver got so badly mired it had to wait for the snow tank to pull it out.

  This was my moment of greatest triumph. When we pulled up outside the hotel Victor grabbed me, kissed me on both cheeks and gave me his beloved Bobyk for the duration of my stay.

  In 1966 it was difficult to get a coherent idea of the shape of Tchersky. The townsite was such an incredible scene of what looked to be utter chaos that it made little sense to me. Nor could I understand how construction on such a scale could be carried out in this arctic ice-box, until one day I met the director of the town construction company.

  Alexei Terentievich Babkov was a big, lean man with a deeply carved face and flowing moustaches. A Latvian from Riga, he was Victor’s antithesis, cool and controlled in thought and action. Yet he was also Victor’s brother, for his dynamism was apparent in everything he said and did. Like so many other Siberians he was vastly impatient with bureaucracy. Here in Tchersky he had made himself almost completely free of the whims of officials far away in the west. What was built in Tchersky was his business, and he brooked little outside interference.

  What he was building was a town to house 10,000 people, one with all the amenities of a modern southern city, a place where people would live in style and comfort, and to which they could feel they belonged.

  “The psychology of what we do is vitally important,” Babkov told me. “You may wonder why we put up so many concrete and masonry structures. Well, apart from certain construction advantages, we do so because they look and are solid and permanent. They are not cheap. Here in Tchersky we could build prefabs or stick to wooden buildings and save many rubles; but masonry buildings are essential because of the way they affect the people who live in them. During our first years here we had nothing but log houses. They were comfortable enough and offered plenty of living space but people from the south were unhappy with them. When we completed our first 165-unit, five-storey masonry apartment block we found the percentage of residents who abandoned the north after only a year or two up here dropped like a rock. I’m convinced a transient-type settlement will attract transients, and it will breed them too. People must have solid foundations for their lives just as buildings must.”

  In 1966 Babkov’s company had finished only one of the five-storey structures but was hard at work on another. He took me to see it. The temperature was 27° below zero, yet a horde of men and women, red-faced and bundled up in quilted clothing, swarmed over the site as actively as, or perhaps more actively than, if they had been in the Banana Belt instead of on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

  “Construction goes on all winter even at temperatures as low as 50° below. The only thing that really stops us is a very low temperature combined with very strong wind. Otherwise we work twenty-four hours a day, with the help of floodlights. If we limited ourselves to the summer season, and to normal working hours, we would never get the job completed.

  “The height of our buildings is limited by the wind factor. Because of the strength of the arctic gales, it doesn’t pay to go above five storeys. Foundations are a bit of a problem. The best way is to sink precast concrete piers into the frozen soil by means of steam jets which melt a passage for them. They soon become locked into the eternal frost and then we raise our buildings on them, leaving a free air space between the ground and the bottom of the structure which prevents thawing of the soil. However, here in Tchersky there is much bedrock, so we foot the piers on that whenever possible; but there is often difficulty with ice lenses in the rock and then we must use frozen surface ‘pads.’

  “Pads are tedious to construct but can be used on any kind of ground – even on muskegs. They are composed of alternate layers of wet sand and gravel, compacted and allowed to freeze until they form a pad as much as ten feet thick. Over this we add a layer of dry sand as an insulator, and on top pour a layer of reinforced concrete. The building goes up from there, separated from the top of the pad by short concrete ‘feet’ to allow for free air circulation and to prevent heat flow downward. Such a pad is as permanent as the eternal frost of which it becomes a part, and will support a building of almost any height and weight.”

  I asked him how he solved the problems of using mortar in the fierce winter temperatures.

  “Our mortar is a special mix containing silicates and salts. It is mixed hot, and kept hot until used. However, at low temperatures it still freezes as soon as it is laid, and, of course, it can’t set until it thaws again. In earlier days, spring thawing would sometimes happen unequally. Lower tiers of bricks might thaw first; the mortar would then squeeze out and the whole structure could crack or even tumble down. Now we control the thawing. Brick buildings are built with walls about two feet thick. Before spring comes the interiors are sealed, and the inside walls then stay frozen and support the strucure until the outer walls have thawed and the mortar has set. Then we open up the interior so the inner walls too can thaw and set in turn.”

  “What about materials,” I asked. “Where do they come from?”

  “When we first started here everything had to be imported by ship, even concrete, gravel and stone. However, wood could be had up the Kolyma so we began with temporary wooden buildings. Meanwhile we surveyed the region and found usable deposits of sand, gravel and crushable rock. We even loc
ated a deposit of brick clay two hundred miles upriver. Now we are moving into a self-sufficient phase where the only thing we have to import is cement. We will soon have our own brick factory. We already have our own pre-fab concrete plant to turn out building panels and piers. The days of log structures are behind us, although we still use wood for emergency jobs. Our geologists have also found a limestone deposit away up the Kolyma, and during the next five year plan we will build a cement factory, and then we will have all our basic materials reasonably close at hand.”

  As we bounced around the townsite, I asked Alexei what he planned to do about building roads which would endure the Tchersky frosts.

  “For use in the town we have invented a mixture of cement and soil with an insulating pad beneath that ought to give us good hardtop streets. We see no utility in trying to build all-weather highways through this country, any more than there would be any sense in building railroads. Both would be terribly expensive and they just aren’t needed. By making proper use of water routes and by supplementing these with our specialty – the frozen winter roads nature paves for us – we can move any amount of freight. People, we move by air.”

  “About people. How do you manage to get and hold construction workers?”

  “This is the least of my problems. First off, we pay the highest construction wages in the Union. Then, we see to it our people get the best food, yes, and drink too – better than Moscow, I can tell you. We use a system of wage incentives and special bonuses that increase with the length of time a man or woman stays on the job and in the north. After two or three years here, some workers feel they just can’t afford to go back south! This is only part of it. We rely a lot on the way Russians feel about tough jobs. Most of them, particularly the youngsters, seem to want a challenge even more than they want money. We give them challenge! And anyone who works up here gets involved in the total project. Bricklayers, for example, have a say in how we work and in developing techniques.