Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “After a good taste of it, many of the young people determine to stay for the rest of their lives in the north, and they get first preference on the living space they themselves are constructing. It all works out to a feeling of personal commitment to a task once thought impossible – the satisfaction of solving problems and of breaking new ground for mankind. It helps that we know we are not working here to make a profit for someone else to put in his pocket. We know we are working for ourselves and for our fellows, and this makes a big difference to a man’s attitudes.”

  When I returned to Tchersky three years later, it was to find the chaos of the place somewhat reduced, but the atmosphere of frenetic activity still persisted. There were some incredible changes – notably rows of huge apartment blocks which had sprung out of the tundra, a fancy shopping centre under one roof, and the fact that the population had increased by a third. Also of note – Victor Nazarov had given up his precious Bobyk and was savaging a brand new Volga sedan on streets which had not improved one whit since I had risked my kidneys on them during my first visit. Alexei Babkov was still in town, still as intense as ever. Having admired the things he had achieved during my absence, I could not forebear from needling him a little.

  “What happened to those hard-top roads?”

  “Well, not everything works out. But we’ve got a new idea for frost-resistant paving under study right now. It’s urgent. Nazarov’s new Volga just isn’t going to survive unless we come to its rescue pretty quick.”

  Eighteen

  IN 1960, Zelyonny Mis (Green Cape), four kilometres north of Tchersky, was nothing but a tongue of tundra bearing a wisp of stunted trees which gave it its name. Occasional Evenk fishing parties hauled their boats out on its muddy beach. Under a mossy pile of stones high on the riverbank lay the bones of unknown men who perhaps were ancestors of the Yukagir people.

  On a day in early October of 1969 I stood near the ancient burial mound looking down over the Kolyma. Below me seven deep-sea freighters lay nose to stern along a half-mile of concrete dock. Towering gantry cranes wheeled and curtsied, while lift trucks scurried about amidst piles of freight. An almost unbroken line of trucks emerged from the sprawling cluster of warehouses behind me, slithered down to the docks, loaded, and climbed back up again.

  One of the big ships let go her lines, swung ponderously into midstream and dropped anchor. She rode light in dark waters skimmed with shimmering cat ice. With her cargo all unloaded she was awaiting orders to depart downstream to the Arctic Ocean and then make her way westward along nearly three thousand miles of arctic coast, through the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, past Cape Chelyuskin into the Kara Sea, through the mill race of Vorota Strait into the Barents Sea, and finally into the White Sea and to her home port of Murmansk.

  Her siren sounded a lugubrious blast, and it was echoed by one of the ships remaining at the docks. The Pioneer, a beautiful vessel of 10,000-tons with the bows of an ice-breaker, was also ready to depart. Her course lay east, past Wrangel Island into the Chukchee Sea, around Cape Deznev, through the Bering Strait, then south to join her sister ships of the Far Eastern Steamship Trust at Vladivostok … 3,700 sea miles distant.

  In less than a decade Green Cape had been transformed from a prehistoric wilderness into a new port city, standing almost at the midway mark along one of the world’s most unusual shipping lanes, stretching for nearly six thousand miles through the domain of arctic ice.

  As far back as the sixteenth century the dream of finding a North East Passage from Europe around Asia to the Pacific, or a Northwest passage around the Americas, was drawing men and ships to their deaths in the polar pack. Yet it was not until 1879 that a successful North East Passage was accomplished, by the Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld after a two-year voyage in the little steamer Vega. Between 1913 and 1915 a Russian naval officer, Vilikitsky, repeated the feat and during the same decade the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, in his tiny Gjoa, made the first voyage through the North West Passage. Up to this point in time the dual histories of man’s attempts to overmaster the northern ice in the two passages had been roughly parallel; now they diverged sharply. Apart from exploratory voyages through it by the Canadian Mounted Police vessel, St. Roch, and the Canadian ice-breaker, Labrador, interest in the North West Passage faded into almost total obscurity which did not lighten until 1969, when the American super-tanker Manhatten, escorted and assisted by the Canadian icebreaker John A. MacDonald, butted her way through the channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to become the first commercial vessel to navigate the North West Passage.

  Things had happened differently in the ice-clad eastern waters. In 1932 the Soviet ship Sibirikov made the voyage from Murmansk to Bering Strait and on to Vladivostok in a single season. A year later the Chelyuskin, a cargo-passenger vessel, tried to emulate the feat and got within sight of Bering Strait before she and her 128 passengers (including six women and two children) became jammed in the pack. Throughout most of that winter Chelyuskin drifted in the polar basin. In February 1934, the ice closed in and crushed her and she sank, leaving her people to camp on the shifting floes for sixty days until they were rescued by ski-equipped aircraft of Polar Aviation.

  The Chelyuskin voyage appeared to have been a disaster; but the man who led that expedition, big, burly, black-bearded Otto Yulievitch Schmidt, knew otherwise. For fifteen years before Chelyuskin sailed, Otto Schmidt had been obsessed by the need to establish commercial navigation in the Russian arctic. As a scientifically trained explorer, he understood how to use science in the proper service of mankind, and he also knew how to make and use propaganda in the same service. Having convinced the authorities that his northern vision was a reasonable one, he recruited a volunteer army to open the ice-fast gates of the northern waters.

  By 1932, Schmidt’s “Polar Army,” equipped with three antiquated icebreakers (of which the best was the Yermak, built in 1899) and supported by a score of polar research stations and by ice-reconnaissance pilots of Polar Aviation, had opened two-thirds of the North East Passage route to regular commercial shipping. Then came the Chelyuskin disaster. The very next year, however, Schmidt took a convoy of four merchant freighters eastward from Murmansk, successfully rounded Chukotka and delivered the cargo to Vladivostok. The North East Passage, renamed the Northern Sea Route, was open for business.

  In 1936 Otto Schmidt visited London where he described to a group of journalists something of the vision with which he had lived through most of his adult life.

  “People believe the arctic is a wasteland, incapable of development, useless to man, a frozen desert. They are utterly wrong! Anything can be accomplished in the arctic by men with dreams and with conviction.

  “Our geographical position demands that we look north. Our largest rivers flow into that ice-bound sea. We are going to take products up and down those rivers. They will be the side streets, and the Arctic Ocean will be the trunk highway. We will transfer goods at the river mouths to and from ocean-going ships and establish trade communications between Europe and America across the top of the world.

  “We have lined our northern coast with radio stations to assist arctic navigation and aviation. At all difficult places we will have ice-breakers stationed. We have already opened the North East Passage for three months of the year. During three hundred years prior to 1930 no more than nine little boats managed to round Cape Chelyuskin – the northernmost tip of Asia – and only three made it all the way east to the Pacific. In the summer of 1935 eleven of our cargo boats passed Chelyuskin simultaneously and four of them entered Bering Strait.

  “We fully subscribe to the phrase coined by the North American explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson: ‘The Friendly Arctic.’ We don’t just give it lip service; we are really making friends with the polar world – we are bringing it to life, and life to it.”

  A part of the realization of Schmidt’s dream lay before me as I looked out over Green Cape harbour. In 1936 the Soviet arctic merchant fleet carried 270,000
tons of freight on the Northern Sea Route, and that was a spectacular achievement. During the three-and-a-half months of its operation in 1969, Green Cape, the smallest and newest of the twenty-odd Soviet arctic seaports, alone handled 750,000 tons. In 1936, eleven steamers made the full run through the North East Passage. In 1969 there were more than seven hundred commercial voyages along Otto Schmidt’s “trunk highway.”

  In the North West Passage during 1969 … there was one transit; and even that was made only as an experiment by a ship whose cargo tanks were filled with ballast.

  By midnight of October 6, a blizzard had begun to blow over the anchorage, the docks and storage yards at Green Cape. It was difficult for men to move against the wall of driven snow, and the cold was terrible. I felt neither cold nor wind, for I was standing on the glass-enclosed bridge of Pioneer. From that point of vantage I could see the glare of dozens of floodlights diffusing through the storm, and catch glimpses of the great gantries still at work. The last few cases of cargo were coming out of the ships’ holds, and somewhere in that scene Victor Nazarov was sweating out the minutes. Word had been received from central headquarters of the Northern Sea Route that the polar pack was rapidly setting in against the coast and all vessels must clear port at once if they were to escape to open water before winter sealed the passage shut.

  I was aboard Pioneer at her Master’s invitation – an invitation which had included the offer to take me along as supercargo on the vessel’s homeward voyage to Vladivostok. To my regret I could not accept this portion of his offer, but I was glad to take advantage of the luxury of a hot shower and of dinner aboard ship.

  Captain Evgeny Kirov and his officers were all young men with an aura of confidence and professionalism about them. They were intensely proud of their ship, and of the Soviet merchant marine, but they were not boastful. The days are evidently gone when Soviet seamen nurtured an aggressive inferiority complex vis-à-vis the American or British merchant fleets.

  I toured the ship – and she was a marvel of modern technology, married to seaworthy qualities. Built in East Germany to Soviet designs, her hull was especially strengthened for ice navigation and her 3,600-horsepower diesels gave her power enough to break through pack ice five feet thick. She was completely air conditioned, including the engine room where the duty engineer sat in a soundproofed “office” and regulated the entire mechanical life of the ship from one set of panels and controls. Like all newer Soviet vessels she was also equipped with an elaborate filtration system designed to prevent oil pollution of the oceans through which she sailed.

  Captain Kirov told me that Pioneer was one of about a hundred vessels which had been built during the previous ten years for service in the arctic, but which were equally useful in more temperate waters. He explained the command system of the Northern Sea Route, whereby a shore-based Commodore controls each of several segments of the passage, directing icebreakers and aircraft to points where they are needed, and guiding the merchant ships along the easiest courses. Pioneer was equipped with facsimile receivers which hourly produced detailed ice charts and weather maps.

  I am no stranger to merchant ships, and I can honestly say I have never been aboard a better equipped vessel, nor one with more comfortable accommodations for her people. Nor have I met seamen who were more dedicated to their profession than the crowd aboard Pioneer.

  When I got up the next morning and looked out the window of the apartment where I was staying, the Kolyma rolled grey and empty under a thickening shell of ice. The ships had vanished, and for eight months to come Otto Schmidt’s highway would be closed to traffic.

  If the plans of his successors are realized, it will not always be so. The nuclear powered icebreaker Lenin, built in 1958 but still by far the most powerful ship of her kind afloat, has recently demonstrated that the North Sea Route can be kept open for six months of the year. She will soon be joined by two bigger sisters, and under those powerful wings ships like Pioneer will be able to stay in continuous arctic service twice as long as at present. Nor will Soviet vessels be alone on the arctic run. In 1970 the entire passage was opened to foreign ships, and a number of Japanese freighters sailed through it to European waters, cutting the usual passage time via the southern route almost in half.

  After a few days in Tchersky, Kola, Claire, and I were beginning to suffer from a surfeit of hospitality. Every day was fiesta, and every meal a banquet. In an effort to ease the pressures on my liver I tried refusing drinks under the pretence of being ashamed to consume so much of the local supplies, which were irreplaceable until the ships returned next summer. Victor neatly blocked that avenue of escape. He drove me to the warehouse district of Green Cape, stopped in front of a building about a city block long, unlocked the door with an ordinary house key, switched on the lights and invited me inside.

  It was an alcoholic’s Cave of Ali Baba. As far as the eye could reach the place was stacked to the ceiling with cases of vodka, cognac, champagne, wine, and spirit.

  “You see, Farley? No need to worry. Enough here for every thirsty man in Kolyma and Chukotka and plenty left over for Canadian guests.”

  It is worth noting that this vast lode of liquid gold was unguarded, except for a lock which any amateur could have picked. After this I no longer doubted what I had been told about the law-abiding qualities of Russians.

  Later I met the man responsible for distributing all those bottles, along with several hundred thousands of tons of other supplies, over the vast region served from Green Cape.

  Leonid Shevelyov, the hawk-faced Ukrainian director of the Tchersky Transport Company, had spent thirty years in the arctic – not all of that time on a voluntary basis. He was rather more of a Ukrainian nationalist than was advisable during the Stalin era, and in 1947 he was arrested in Kiev for “unsound political beliefs” and given a tour in a forced labour camp at the gold fields near Magadan. When he was released he decided it would be wiser to become a Siberian nationalist and to stay where he was for a while. He studied engineering by correspondence, got his diploma, and became so deeply involved in the complexities of establishing a truck-transport system in the arctic that he never did go back across the Urals; nor does he ever plan to.

  “I can’t say the forced labour did me a lot of good, but coming to Siberia was the best thing that ever happened to me. This is the country for a fellow who likes problems. Out here you get the chance to solve them in your own way, without some desk-banger thumping you on the head whenever you turn your back.”

  Leonid had been in Tchersky for five years and had set up one of the most efficient transport operations in the Soviet arctic. His company had 250 heavy-duty trucks, almost as many trailers, and a crew of nearly a thousand drivers and mechanics. Acting in concert with a sister company based in Chukotka, the primary job was to transport up to 330,000 tons of freight a year eastward from Green Cape some seven hundred kilometres to the rapidly developing gold fields near Bilibino, and beyond that to an atomic-powered electric generating station which was being constructed near Pevek.

  This was strictly a cross-country operation. There were no frozen rivers running east and west to provide natural winter roads, and there could be no permanent roads across the intervening taiga and mountains because there were no materials locally available with which to build them. The only natural materials in good supply were snow and permafrost, so both were put to work.

  “In late September we send small parties of technicians out to camp along routes we have already surveyed. Their job is to measure the penetration of the new winter frost into the thawed upper layers of the soil and muskeg. As soon as they report six inches of new frost we put our road-building machines to work.

  “We designed and built these machines ourselves. Each consists of an enormous flat-bottomed steel platform twenty feet wide with a V plough in front. The platform is loaded with ballast – as much as twenty tons of concrete-filled barrels – and the whole rig is hitched behind four or five of our biggest crawler tra
ctors. They move along the route and the plough breaks through the frozen crust and turns it aside, leaving a flat, compacted surface twenty feet wide. This is allowed to freeze until the surface frost joins with the underlying eternal frost. And there’s your road. It’s good from November through to April. Graders with shearing blades keep it planed smooth. We stop using it before the first spring thaws so it doesn’t get rutted by the trucks. The following autumn we wait for it to freeze again, grade it, and away we go. If holes develop we fill them with steam-heated mud, level it, and let it freeze. It is the cheapest pavement in the world and nearly as good as asphalt or concrete – better in this climate because it doesn’t buckle or crack.”

  “But surely,” I said, “you can’t use that sytem in all circumstances. What about crossing through mountain valleys or places where there is no appreciable surface thaw?”

  “In that case we have a different technique. We use bulldozers to heap up a ridge of snow, then we level the ridge and compact and smooth it with the road-builder. There is enough pressure generated to weld the snow crystals together so we get a kind of opaque, granular ice. It will carry reasonably heavy traffic. If the surface does get bad, we just add more snow, and pressure-harden it into a new surface.”

  It sounded a little bit like science fiction to me and perhaps my skepticism was apparent. At any rate Victor Nazarov decided I needed proof.

  “Leonid! Give me one of your Maz trucks! Farley! Come with me! We’re going to Chukotka!”

  I was delighted. Chukotka is one of the regions in the Soviet Union which really is off limits to foreigners because it stretches to within a few miles of Alaska, and both sides in the Cold War face each other across the Bering Strait with the maximum array of technological horrors.