Sibir (18 page)

The one-time shoemaking shed is now a fully integrated operation, receiving raw hides from the collectives and state farms and turning out fully finished leather products. It employs sixty-eight “upper level” technicians, of whom exactly half are natives. The remainder, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, are employed on four-year contracts, and it is a major part of their task to train native people to take over their jobs.

Although winter boots are the primary product, a team of Yakut women was engaged in designing fashion shoes and their work had already been exhibited and well received in Brussels and in Paris. Specialty boots of reindeer hide (with the fur on) were being made to ancient Yakut patterns and exported to high-fashion markets in western Europe. In 1969 the demand greatly exceeded production and by the end of 1971 the combine hopes to be exporting 50,000 pairs of reindeer boots a year. By that time total annual production is expected to reach 600,000 pairs of boots and shoes, 50,000 leather
jackets and 200,000 pairs of gloves. Employment should have topped the thousand mark.

In many cases all the working members of a family were employed in the plant. Girls of eighteen and nineteen worked by day on a reduced shift and went to technical school in the evenings. After graduation a number of them will go on to university. The management considers it part of its duty to help its employees better themselves, even if it means losing them.

The plant works on an incentive basis. Basic wages for women average two hundred rubles a month, but there are a whole series of bonuses for “over fulfilment of the norms” which can almost double that amount.

Maslov: “In the new economic climate of the
U.S.S.R.
, we must be interested in profit; and so we must provide the workers with greater and greater incentives.”

Ordinary workers get an annual holiday of thirty-six
working
days which, with the inclusion of weekends (they work a five-day, forty-hour week) and other holidays, gives them fifty to fifty-two
consecutive
days off. Skilled workers, and those in hard jobs, get forty-two working days off. Every third year, established workers (those who have been on the job four years or more) get free holiday transportation to any place in the Soviet Union, and their trade union pays one-third of their other holiday costs. After fifteen years in the plant, women can retire at fifty and men at fifty-five, on full pension. The pension base is 120 rubles a month, scaling upward depending on length of employment.

Dmitri Maslov is a good example of the European Russians who are voluntarily becoming Siberians. He was born in middle Russia and at seventeen went to work in a Leningrad shoe factory; but he studied in the evenings and in 1964 graduated as a full-fledged engineer.

He chose to go to Siberia because: “The job sounded exciting … in Leningrad factories there were no innovations; the problems were mostly solved. So when this factory offered me a contract, I jumped at it. The life is
good out here. The people are the finest in the world. My wife, Ludmilla, and I have not been sorry we came. All that nonsense about the terrible hardship and isolation in Siberia was old woman’s talk. There
is
some hardship, but isn’t that what a man needs if he is going to bring out the best in himself? My two boys were born here in Yakutsk and they will be Yakut.”

His wife, also an engineer, works in a furniture factory. The family has its own house and a half-acre garden where Dmitri grows ornamental trees and tomatoes. He is an ardent cook, an amateur artist and, being a good tenor, sings in the factory choral group. In summer he enjoys mushroom hunting in the taiga and boating holidays on the Lena. On his first “three year holiday,” he and Ludmilla went back to Leningrad and to the Black Sea … then, with the holiday only half spent, they returned to Yakutsk.

“We simply got sick of it. Too many people. Too much confusion. Too many regulations. Not enough time to stop and talk and smile a bit. Who knows if we’ll ever go west again? Our Yakut friends say the taiga has claimed us, and they may well be right.”

There is an apparent paradox in the Yakut approach to modern society. Although most of the ordinary workers show little desire to become cogs in a technological machine, their intellectuals display a phenomenal ability in all fields of knowledge, including the most esoteric realms of science. They go after higher education with a single mindedness and concentrated effort which appears peculiarly at odds with their devotion to their Yakut heritage and their desire to retain their national singularity.

The explanation for this purposeful pursuit of knowledge turned out to be both obvious and simple. It came to me from a rather remarkable source – a Yakut Communist Party member holding a high post in the state hierarchy.

“Knowledge is power. This is a truism but it is something which must never be forgotten by a Small People. As
a Small People we have the choice of turning our whole destiny over to a stronger people – letting them direct us where to go – or we can try and keep the leadership ourselves. If we are going to do this we must have as much knowledge as they do and, since we are weaker in numbers, we must be even more effective in using it.

“The willing horse may lead a good life – but the driver leads a better one! What is even more important is that the horse cannot choose the path he wishes to follow. Although we are happy to share our sleigh with our good friends and brothers from other places in the Soviet Union, and though we all hope to arrive some day at the same haven, we intend to keep a hold upon the reins.”

As far back as 1921 Lenin proclaimed the policy of preserving national entities within the Soviet Union and of helping them make the most of their own cultural resources for the ultimate enrichment of the entire state.

Lenin’s vision has not always been in favour with subsequent arbiters of Soviet policy. There have been powerful men who espoused the melting-pot principle with such vigour that a good many “nationalistic” leaders of Small Peoples (and some not so small) simply vanished from the scene. It is impossible to know exactly how Lenin’s principles of self-determination for minority peoples are now viewed in the Kremlin but, hopefully, the proponents of the melting pot seem to be losing ground. If so, it is probably because so many of the Small Peoples have demonstrated that Lenin was right and that the Soviet Union as a whole has been the gainer from the tremendous efforts the Small Peoples have made in their insistent and largely successful struggle to survive as spiritual, cultural and ethnic entities.

“Without the existence of a vigorous native population led by their own knowledgeable elite, the Soviet development of the Far North and the Near North would not have been possible or, at least, would not have been practicable on anything like the present scale.”

This flat statement was made to me by a director of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad, himself one of the most knowledgeable men in the Soviet Union on things relating to the north.

“In their search for ways to maintain their identities while moving out of the past, the so-called Small Peoples needed a thorough understanding of all aspects of modern life. We could have made it difficult for them to obtain this but we did not choose to do so. Instead we went to great lengths to make higher educational facilities available to them and they, in their turn, went to great lengths to take advantage of them. The result is that there now exists a very large cadre of native people, inured to the north, almost instinctively understanding it as we never can, and equipped and trained to use the most sophisticated instruments and information of modern science. It is these people, as much as any, who are solving the essential problems of how we can grow and prosper in the polar regions of this planet. They are helping their own people to prosper in the changing world; but they are helping the rest of us even more.”

I did not have to take his word for this. I saw it demonstrated in many places; but perhaps most spectacularly in the Yakutsk Eternal Frost Institute.

Eternal frost equals permafrost in our less romantic terminology, but by any name it is the most important single factor bearing on the development of arctic and sub-arctic lands. One fifth of the earth’s land surface, three-quarters of Siberia, and the
whole
of Yakutia sits on a crust of ice, frozen bog, soil, gravel, and rock – a crust with a maximum frost depth of 1,500 metres in northwest Yakutia and an average depth under the whole of the republic of 320 metres.

It is hard to conceive of the ferocious climatic conditions which froze the earth to such a depth – froze it so thoroughly that it still remains at a constant temperature of minus 04° C, despite the efforts of the planet’s hot interior and of the sun to melt it. The sun does have some
effect, but a minimal and transient one. Near the southern limits of permafrost the surface may thaw each summer to a depth of several feet and, in the far north, to a depth of a few inches. In winter, however, it all freezes into one solid block again.

The effects of this underlying shield of frost are tremendously far-reaching. For one thing there is no drainage through it and so all precipitation must escape by running off the surface or, if it cannot do that, it remains to form gigantic morasses like those which characterize the West Siberian Plain. The presence of permafrost is responsible for the size and flow of the great Siberian rivers and, in northern Canada, is largely responsible for the astronomical numbers of lakes and ponds which in some regions cover more than two-thirds of the tundra surface. Paradoxically, it is also largely responsible for the existence of the immense northern forests, since it acts to conserve the rather scanty precipitation. Without permafrost as a basement sealant, much of the northern interior of America and Asia would probably be desert. These are only a few of the ways permafrost affects the polar world. It affects human activity in that world just as strongly.

Much of the upper level of the permafrost structure underlying Siberia is a mixture of soils, gravels, shattered rock and other unstable materials cemented by frozen water into something approaching the consistency and strength of bedrock. However, strong as it is, this cement must melt if its temperature rises above freezing point. When this happens, an area that appears to be as stable as a granite plain turns into a jelly-like bog which, in summer, absorbs more water and then, on refreezing in the winter, expands and bursts upward like a miniature mountain range being born.

Anything
which disturbs the delicate temperature balance protecting permafrost can bring about a horrendous change. A tracked vehicle grinding over summer tundra and breaking through the thin insulating layer of
moss and lichen can create vast, heaving ditches which will endure for centuries. Casual damage to the forest floor during timbering operations can cause a fatal thaw which leaves the shallow-rooted trees with no hold on anything but quaking bog, and finally sends them toppling into chaos. And structures built by man can, through the slight temperature rise created by their own weight, or by heat radiated from them, create a local swamp into which the buildings sink, totter and collapse. The same thing can happen to roads, or in fact to anything man tries to build upon the frozen ground.

Sitting in the office of the Director of the Eternal Frost Institute, I listened to senior research scientist, Marina Kuzminichna Gavrilova, talk about this curious world in which she, and her ancestors through countless generations, had been born.

“The idea of a rock-solid frozen arctic is terribly misleading,” said this middle-aged Yakut matron. “Everything on the surface of the land is delicately balanced on the edge of potential disruption. We people of the north have always understood this, but since we never attempted to change the surface it had no great effect upon our lives. Now all is different. There is hardly one single thing modern man wants to do, or hopes to do, in the far north that is not influenced by the eternal frost, or which cannot influence it. Man has had to learn to come to terms with it, to understand it. At first he tried to fight it, and every time he failed. The engineers who tried to build one of the first power dams on Siberia’s eternal frost were sure their hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete would withstand any stress of nature. An earthquake would probably not have hurt their dam, but its weight melted the frost in the frozen rocks on which it stood. The rocks crumbled and the dam split open.

“People finally realized that here was an antagonist which would not be conquered so easily. Studies were begun, but I can say it was not until some of the people who were born on eternal frost began to join the studies
that the attitudes really changed. Instead of trying to conquer the frost, our scientists began to learn how to make friends with it. We are still doing that, and it is a successful effort.”

The Director, Pavel Melnikov, who is a Russian although he has lived in Siberia for more than thirty years, took up the story.

“Marina Kuzminichna is correct. Eternal frost used to be considered the worst enemy to those developing the north. Now it has become our biggest ally. Instead of trying to destroy it, we protect it. Instead of trying to push it aside, we use it. Whenever planners or constructors come to Siberia to begin work on a new project we tell them: ‘Be nice to the Eternal Frost Queen. Keep her well covered under nice thick blankets and she will let you do anything you wish. But if you strip off her clothes, you had better watch out!’ ”

This was a somewhat risqué simile in the Soviet Union, where prudery in conversation is something of a fetish. I got the point. I was to see the “be nice” principle demonstrated scores of times before I left Siberia.

Meantime I toured the Institute and I was as fascinated by the people I met as by the work they were doing.

At the age of forty, Marina Gavrilova, born on a reindeer farm near Oimyakon, commands some thirty scientists and two of the most important laboratories in the Institute – Geophysics and Heat Dynamics.

At the age of nineteen, she resolved to spend her working life studying the eternal frost. After graduating from the Yakut State University (in one of the first classes), she went to Moscow and then to Leningrad for advanced studies. Her doctorate thesis on arctic climate won her a Gold Medal and was published in scientific periodicals abroad. In 1958 she returned to Yakutsk and got down to work, but as a married woman with a family to raise. Her husband, Vasily Gosikov (it is common for married people to keep their own last names), who is the Director of the
Yakutsk Music Theatre, told me something about the marriage: