Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  Magadan lies at about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, but has to endure a much more rigorous climate. Until the beginning of the 1930s the entire region was a virtually unexplored subarctic wilderness, inhabited by Evenk reindeer herders concentrated near the coast, some Yakut in the mountainous interior, and by a few thousand Old Russians, most of them living in little fishing villages on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk.

  These Old Russians were mostly descendants of a Cossack wave which reached the region in the early eighteenth century. However, as early as 1649 one small group of these incredibly intrepid pioneers, probably impelled to it by a healthy fear of falling into the hands of the Imperial authorities, established a tiny community in the heart of an almost impenetrable mountain massif six hundred miles northwest of Magadan. There they lived in almost complete isolation until well into the twentieth century. Markovo, as their village was called, still exists. Its older people still speak archaic Russian and cling to the Cossack customs of their ancestors. However, Markovo has now become the centre of a big collective farm for reindeer and fur breeding.

  For Markovo, as for the entire region, the touchstone for change was gold. Gold was first discovered (or at least first became known) in the region in the middle 1920s, when a few of the wandering prospectors known as “the possessed” began panning small amounts of dust in some of the river valleys. They sold their gold, or traded it, to foreign vessels, mostly Japanese, which occasionally visited the fishing village of Ola just north of Magadan. When word of what was happening reached Moscow, which was then desperate for gold, an attempt was made to control or stop the trade, but without notable success. In 1929 a young Leningrad geologist (many of the most famous Russian geologists seem to have come from Leningrad) named Yuri Bilibin, was sent to Ola to see what was going on. Bilibin was nearly murdered by the possessed, who looked on him as an interloper, which, of course, he was. However, he managed to send a three-man party into the interior, and at a place called Susaman on the Nurv River these men found Eldorado. Gold in the river sands assayed as high as two hundred grams per cubic yard. Nearby was a quartz reef, ten miles long, whose gold content was twice as high as that of any reef previously discovered in the U.S.S.R.

  The rush was on, but it was now rigidly controlled. The possessed were driven out and the entire region became the concession of a newly formed trust known as Dalstroy. This name was to bring terror to many Russians. Given an absolutely free hand to produce the vitally needed gold, Dalstroy operated in a completely ruthless manner. When it needed labour – and it needed masses of labour – it took over many of the prisoners who, for one reason or another, had been sentenced to terms in corrective labour camps all over the Soviet Union. Trainloads of these unfortunates rolled eastward in a manner reminiscent of the great flow of exiles into Siberia in Tsarist days.

  In the beautiful natural bowl behind Magadan Bay a wooden town began to rise. Many of its buildings were prison barracks. From these barracks the prisoners were dispatched into the interior to work the placer beds that were being discovered by the scores. Dalstroy was not a notably efficient organization. Food often failed to reach the distant camps; winter clothing failed to arrive. Disease swept the barracks. Death took a heavy price for the gold that was being gathered.

  Nobody in Siberia could give me an estimate of how many people died. “It is impossible to know,” a friend told me. “Probably Moscow itself never knew. What is certain is that thousands escaped the camps and blended into the Old Russian populations in the interior. And when the camps were closed and the inmates offered the chance to return home, a very large number decided to stay on in Siberia where opportunities were good … and authority not so strong. I know this is so. I was one of those who chose to stay.”

  In 1940 the population of Magadan was only nine thousand and it was a squalid wooden mining town. After the war ended and even before Stalin’s grip was broken by death, the place had already begun to change. It had been realized that the productivity of prison labour was so low, and the costs so high, that it did not pay to use it. By 1950 the barracks were no longer occupied. Within a few years they had been torn down and now, where they once stood, white and gleaming apartment blocks march up the hill slopes of a different city. The new Magadan does not like to remember the dark days of its past. Those days are past, and the citizens believe they will never return again.

  Many of the older people in Magadan today went there as prisoners. These men, and women, have a singular quality about them, they have a greater hunger for freedom and a stronger desire to build a new world even than do the young immigrants who now far outnumber them. Perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn between them and the original English settlers of Australia who, too, were mostly prisoners, “criminals” according to the mores of their times. In both cases injustice and adversity produced a people of singular resilience – and intractibility. The Australian character was deeply influenced by its prisoner-pioneers and the same is true of Magadan. This new city so far from Moscow, facing east toward a bright and trackless ocean rather than west into the dark tunnel of human history, has the feel of a community which is becoming an independent entity, a city state in the making. By this I do not suggest that it is rebellious or that it wishes to separate itself from the main body of the Soviet Union. It simply feels itself to be different, and I suspect the differences which develop in Magadan will one day make themselves felt all the way west across the Ural Mountains into European Russia.

  * This is not so remarkable as it may seem to some readers. Before leaving Moscow I purchased a set of gold-plated cutlery at one of the larger stores. Luxury items of this nature were available to any Russians with the money and the inclination to purchase them.

  Twenty-Two

  THE DECISION to receive us in Magadan must have resulted in some hectic conferences about what to do with us when we arrived; meetings during which the communist instinct for organizing was given full rein.

  The entire city had been alerted to our arrival by television, radio, and the press; and apparently every institution, with the possible exception of the local office of the KGB, had demanded a visit from us. For two days our convoy of cars shot up and down the broad avenues of the city with the frenetic impetuosity of a Mack Sennett comedy film. Zip – we would drive a block at fifty miles an hour, pile out, race into a school, library, Palace of Culture, Institute for Northern Science, newspaper office or … you name it … shake a score of hands, stare dazedly into masses of smiling faces, tour the building, listen to enthusiastic expositions of what was going on, dash out again, pile into the cars, and roar a few hundred yards to the next encounter.

  Information rained upon us in a torrent and my absorptive faculties soon became saturated. Before noon of the first day I was longing to return to the easy-going pace of Yakutsk. By mid-afternoon I was in a state of mild shock. During one of the few moments of relative peace (as we shot from the School of Music to the Palace of Sport, which were blessedly separated by at least seven blocks) I broke down and begged Nikolai Ponomarenko for mercy. He smiled sympathetically.

  “It was the same when Yuri Gagarin came here. He said it was worse for him, a thousand times, than going into space. I am really sorry, but that is the way Magadanians are. If we miss one single place, the people there will never forgive us – particularly they won’t forgive me. And you can’t believe how difficult our people get when they have a grievance.” He sighed so feelingly that I decided, for his sake, to endure.

  Being a kindly man, I do not intend to subject my readers to the Magadan Ordeal by attempting to detail all I saw and heard. Suffice it to say that Magadan is, despite the triple threats of perma-frost, seismic disturbances, and hurricane gales, as pleasant a city as any I have visited. It offers its people the best of everything in both the material and cultural realms. It lacks many of the major disadvantages of modern cities in that it is beautifully sited, spacious, relatively quiet, and free of obvious pollution. All in al
l I think it would be a good city in which to live – for anyone who likes cities and who can tolerate living amongst a people whose energy quotient has to be as close as makes no difference to the maximum reading. As with most Soviet northern cities, it is a young people’s community. The lone statistic which I shall record is that the average age in Magadan (excluding people under eighteen years of age) is twenty-nine.

  We took many of our meals at a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. Rather pretentiously furnished in chrome and plastic modern, it was big and spacious and it provided almost instant service! I know of no other restaurant in the Soviet Union which can make this claim. Furthermore the food was good. There was only one drawback. The place boasted a jukebox, a multicoloured monster almost identical to its North American sisters. Made in Poland, it even had an English language name emblazoned on its glittering belly – High-fie. However, it was not the menace it appeared. The volume control was always turned down low, and when its muted noises (mostly Russian pop songs, but some French ones, too) bothered a diner, he simply pulled out the power plug. Magadanians brook no nonsense from machines.

  We were having lunch here one day with a mixed crowd of writers, journalists, and odd sods when someone casually mentioned that the Soviet Union had simultaneously lofted three manned space ships. Now I am not a wild aficionado of the space age, but I was curious and wanted details. To my surprise nobody else at the table seemed the least bit interested. Nobody proposed toasts to “our brave boys in space.” My requests for more information were either ignored or given casual answers. Finally I turned to a sandy-moustached young man who was, I think, a professor at the local university, and asked him to explain this strange lack of interest in his country’s most recent space spectacular.

  “Don’t you care what’s happening up there? Or is something wrong with the flight that you don’t want to talk about?”

  He smiled affably and in a somewhat pedantic manner explained.

  “We don’t think such things are very important. It is more important for us to develop an earthly technology for the betterment of man and the preservation of the terrestrial environment. It is also bad economics and bad science to go space voyaging at the present time. In another twenty years, if we have straightened out our problems here on earth, technology will be so much farther advanced it will be safer and far cheaper to start playing extra-terrestrial games. I consider space flights a distraction from pressing problems here on earth. I doubt if any nation can afford such distractions at this time.”

  Sour grapes because of America’s space progress? Perhaps, but during my travels in the Soviet Union I never encountered anything approaching the near hysterical infatuation with space flights which characterizes North America. Doubtless it did exist when Gagarin made his first trip into space, but it seems to have cooled to negligible levels since then.

  The restaurant was the scene of many intriguing conversations. One day I sat beside a middle-aged journalist for a Moscow wire service. He had travelled widely in western countries and was devastatingly outspoken about his profession.

  “Foreign correspondents from capitalist and from socialist countries have one thing in common. Their main job is to look for what is bad in the other fellow’s country and report on that. If they can’t find what they need, they manufacture it out of idle gossip or even out of the air. We do it. You do it. The whole thing is a farce. It is also a tragedy. Why can’t we look for the good in each other’s countries and write about that? It would be nice to bring the truth into print sometimes in the service of easing hatred and enmity. The trouble is it would serve to bring people closer together rather than driving them farther apart and this would not be tolerable to those who find more advantage in fostering hatred than friendship.”

  “Many of our western correspondents in Russia say they can’t get at the truth.” I protested. “They are restricted in travel, and few Russians, except officials, malcontents, or paid sources, will associate with them. How can they do better than they do?”

  He laughed.

  “You think that is unique here? You should try being a Soviet correspondent in the U.S.A.! It is all part of the same pattern, and this kind of mutual harrassment of reporters exactly serves the purposes of those who send them out. Please do not pretend to be naïve. You know as well as I do that we correspondents, no matter what country we come from, are propaganda mongers because this is what our employers expect from us. Never mind. Fill up! Here’s a toast to freedom of the press – wherever it is that she is hiding herself.”

  Throughout my travels I had been amazed – and sometimes unnerved – by the frankness with which Russians talked about subjects which I had supposed were taboo, if not downright dangerous. However, nowhere did I encounter such outspokenness as in Magadan. The Magadanians said things one might have hoped to have heard whispered in private, but they said them in loud voices in public places. It would appear either that we westerners have been badly misinformed about the amount of freedom of speech permitted in the Soviet Union, or else the Magadan branch of the KGB needs a good shake-up. The truth seems to be that the people of Russia in general, and of Siberia in particular, simply aren’t privy to the conclusions of some western journalists that after a brief liberalization under Khruschev, the lid is being forced back down again.

  I discussed this matter with several English- and French-speaking men and women at a party one night, and their responses to the suggestion that the Stalin dictatorship was returning were illuminating. A middle-aged lady physician expressed her feelings in this wise:

  “Our reaction against Stalin after his death was understandable, but it was too drastic. Nobody is all devil, and Stalin wasn’t either. It really wasn’t fair to write him out of history as if he had never existed. Also, it wasn’t possible. He was ruthless and a paranoid, but do you know any great leaders who aren’t a little of both? He was also longsighted. He knew that the capitalist powers would some day try again to destroy our society by force. That thought clouded his mind and preoccupied him for twenty years. He was determined they would not succeed, and in his determination he did some horrible things. But in the end, you know, he was right in his monomania. If it had not been for him, fascist Germany might very well have smashed us … while you others in the West wept with one eye and winked with the other.”

  “What you call the rehabilitation of Stalin isn’t what you think it is,” interjected a journalist. “The fact that we can now evaluate him and give him what measure of due he deserves, along with the blame, means we feel safe from a return of that kind of terror. Nobody will ever forgive him for some of the things he did; and if anyone tries that sort of thing on us again, it will be the worse for him. Russian people are not going to give up their new freedom so easily.”

  A novelist made this point. “We’ve got our teeth into freedom now. Maybe we are pushing along too fast, with too much eagerness. It is true there are still Stalinists about and they try to slap us down, with some success. But it is we who are gaining ground in the long run and they who are losing it.”

  A girl political science student had the last word.

  “You know, we are fairly well informed about what is happening in the capitalist world. We know a lot about events in the United States, and we think it is better to live in a country, and in a society, which has endured severe personal and political oppression, but is shifting away from that sort of thing, than to live in a country which had a very great deal of freedom but is now shifting toward a repressive, cabal-governed society. Perhaps you would be wiser to examine what is happening in your own countries rather than spend so much time condemning what once happened in ours. We will see which of us, in the future, can claim to have the most freedom.”

  The dual nature of the new world of the Soviet north was again evident here. Magadan itself was essentially a European town, mostly populated by immigrants from the far west. There were native people in the city holding executive and administrative jobs, but th
ere were very few in any of Magadan’s industries – the shipyards, factories, foundries, construction plants or the transport companies whose thousands of trucks travel as far afield as the mouth of the Yana River on the Arctic Ocean, fifteen days hard driving to the northwest of Magadan. Nor were there many native people employed in the gold mines. Most of them live and work on the 107 collective and state farms where they engage in fur breeding, trapping, reindeer raising, cattle farming, and sea-mammal hunting. The big cities belong to the whites; the smaller towns are divided between white and native peoples; and the countryside (apart from the mining enterprises) belongs almost exclusively to the natives.

  One windy day, with snow flurries obscuring the bald old mountains, we borrowed some Bobyks and drove thirty miles northeast to the venerable town of Ola; once home of the possessed and, centuries before that, site of one of the earliest lodgements by Russians on the shores of the Pacific.

  It was a hair-raising trip over icy roads that climbed through mountain saddles where the wind from off the ocean was gusting at hurricane force. A dark, cliff-girt sea lay before us. We turned north along it, skirting a savage and fearsome coast whose roaring surf sent spume geysering over strange conical rocks to salt-smear the windshields of our cars.

  The rough, sub-alpine slopes inland from us glowed an unearthly shade of green. Nikolai explained that this was a special forage grass developed for arctic climates which could endure when ordinary grass turned brown and died. It was used to feed the tough breed of northern cattle. Harvested after the first heavy frost, it remained green even after it was cut, making bizarre emerald haystacks on snow-covered fields.

  Ola, with about four thousand inhabitants, had come a long way from the days of the possessed. Neat streets of single-family homes surrounded by gardens were interspersed with new apartment blocks. The people were a meld of Old Russian settlers and Evenk. The Evenk did most of the farming and the Russians most of the fishing.