Sibir (19 page)

“A very good woman, Marina. But when we were going to get married some of my friends did a bit of joking about it. Better to marry an iceberg, one of them said. All the same, it works out very well. She has so much of cold in that underground laboratory of hers, she really appreciates a warm-blooded chap when she gets home at night.”

Marina’s staff was about a third European and two-thirds native. All held degrees of Bachelor or Master value. If there was any racial tension, it did not show, and the respect and regard which the European staff members demonstrated toward Marina could hardly have been contrived.

There are fourteen major labs in the Institute. Eight are headed by Siberian natives and three of these by Yakut women! There is a lab devoted to permafrost and ground transportation; one to airfields; one to deep mining in permafrost; several to theoretical research; one to agriculture on permafrost, and so on.

Another Yakut lady, Lilia Everstova, who holds her doctorate in advanced mathematics, showed me the computer lab, which is her domain. Her staff was assembling a monstrous digital computer to support two other digitals and an analog computer which, she told us, were so overworked they were getting tired. I could understand that, if the way she worked her human staff was an indication of the way she drove her electronic slaves. Her second-in-command, a lean young Evenk named Leonid Lee (also holder of a mathematics doctorate) told me he pitied the new computer. “Lilia will give it a nervous breakdown in six weeks, poor thing!”

Since I have small affinity for laboratories, no matter how sparkling and complex they may be (and these were both), and none at all for computers, I was glad when Marina took me into her holy of holies – a lab built thirty
metres underground in the permafrost itself. This was a fascinating maze of tunnels entered through heavily insulated doors, in which a variety of experiments under natural conditions were in progress. It was an eerie place, ice-cold of course, with feathery ice crystals clustering like hibernating butterflies on the frozen sand of which the roof and walls were composed. Marina proudly showed me a Carbon-14 apparatus for dating permafrost samples which she and her staff had designed and built themselves; and she lingered long over a working model of a method of piping natural gas through unlined tunnels drilled deep below the surface.

“You see,” she explained, “in eternal frost there is no need for shoring or supports for a tunnel. And, since the material is homogeneous, gas can be pumped through it without danger of its leaking out. The biggest problem was how to keep the gas at a temperature below minus 04°, and this we solved by compressing the gas and so lowering its temperature. We will soon build our first experimental transmission line here in Yakutsk and some day gas from the big new fields at Vilyuisk (three hundred miles northwest of Yakutsk) will flow over, or rather under, much of Siberia in eternal frost tunnels bored by mechanical moles.”

Impressive. But I was more intrigued by one of Marina’s personal projects. She wants to build an Eternal Frost Museum in which will be preserved samples of plants, fruits, animals, and other perishables, for the edification of our descendants in some distant future.

“Think how exciting it would be! Nature did the same thing with the mammoths that have been found preserved in eternal frost here in Yakutia. We could have all sorts of things – not stuffed, but
real
. Of course we should have to have some people, too – after they had died naturally, of course. Would you like to represent the people of your country? We would make a very special niche in the Hall Of Northern People, and you could wear that lovely Scottish skirt I’ve heard about.”

“Why not?” I replied, suppressing a shiver at this macabre suggestion. “I’ll put it in my will.”

On several occasions I had long talks with Director Pavel Melnikov, a loquacious man whose enthusiasm for eternal frost has grown stronger with the years. He is also a very forthright man.

“I do not understand you Canadians and Americans. Almost your whole north is eternal frost country, yet you made no real attempt to study it until the 1950s when it became a military problem at the time you were building your Distant Early Warning Line. From what your scientists have told me, it is still largely a military problem for you, and only a few of your best men are studying it.

“We, on the other hand, have been actively studying the problem of how eternal frost affects economic and human development of the north for the past forty years. I myself have done nothing else for thirty-four years. This Institute employs 320 people, of whom seventy-five are scientists with high degrees, and 130 are engineers and technicians; and we will have twice as many people in three or four more years. We are building branches all over the Soviet north. There is one in Chernychevsky devoted to the construction of power dams using eternal frost in place of concrete; there is one in west Siberia for studying problems concerning the production and handling of oil and gas. We are building others in Irkutsk and Magadan.

“We think it extraordinarily stupid that you people and we should be duplicating the same work. The problems are essentially the same in your country as in ours. The efforts you have put into solving those problems are fractional compared with ours, so you would hardly be the losers in a reciprocal exchange of information and a sharing of research work. We have tried to bring this about. I have twice visited Canada and have shared all possible information with your scientists, but have received little in return. We invited your Minister for the North, Mr. Chrétien, to send two or three Canadian
scientists here to spend a year studying our methods. He has not done so. Last year we held an International Symposium here and invited eight Americans from the small
U.S.A.
Permafrost Lab. It was agreed it would be a reciprocal visit. Well, the Americans came and saw all we had to show them, but we are still waiting to be invited to visit their country.

“Overall total planning is the only way to
develop
the north as opposed to simple
exploitation
of its resources. And even in exploitation, which is the North American approach, everything you do has to take eternal frost into account. There is a terrible danger that if we interfere with it without sufficient knowledge, we will bring calamities to the northern regions. With all our efforts we don’t begin to have enough knowledge yet. You people have far less. It is not a matter of politics or competing economies; it is a matter of simple common sense that we should work together to ensure the preservation of a great part of the earth for the use of future generations.

“In earlier times man used to learn by experience what he could and could not do with his environment. I don’t believe he learned very much by that method. Now it has become dangerous to his survival to follow such absurd procedures. We think this is a criminal way to act!”

T
HIRTY-SEVEN
years after Yermak broke through the Ural wall, a band of Cossacks rowed rough-built boats along the wide Yenisei to the mouth of an unknown tributary flowing westward out of an immense mountain plateau. This region was inhabited by a forest dwelling people whom the Cossacks called Tungus, but who called themselves Evenk. The land of the Evenk was full of fine sable, which drew the Cossacks up the new river (Tunguska they named it), over rapids, around roaring falls, deep into mountain valleys and finally to the height of land. A small party crossed the height of land, built new boats, launched them on a mountain brook then descended it towards the east. They had discovered the headwaters of the Vilyui River, which was to lead them to its mother stream, the Lena, and so open the whole of northeastern Siberia to Cossack depradations.

In the autumn of the year 1618 or 1619, these Russian voyageurs were stopped by ice and forced to winter on the Vilyui bank near the mouth of a small stream called Malaya Bortuobuya. They somehow survived the winter and when the ice went out launched their boats on the spring flood and were flung down the foaming Vilyui to emerge upon the placid Lena.

With the founding of Yakutsk a few years later, the difficult Tunguska-Vilyui route was abandoned. For two hundred years the Vilyui wilderness was forgotten except
by the Evenk whose home it was. As the centuries passed the Evenk shrank to a scattered remnant and the Vilyui region became a void of white rivers, dark forests and looming hills into which only a handful of placer gold seekers ever penetrated.

This was how it was on a June day in 1955 when Yuri Kabardon, a young geologist, set up a portable radio transmitter near the site of the long-vanished Cossack winter camp at Malaya Bortuobuya, and tapped out a message:

The “pipe” was a tube of grey-blue rock a mile in diameter extending down toward the earth’s molten magma core. The tobacco was diamond-laden kimberlite.

Fourteen years after Kabardon sent his message, I stood beside a table in the city of Mirny (Peace) near the site of Kabardon’s discovery camp and watched two young women sifting through a pile of glittering jewels which, although worth several million dollars, represented only a minute part of the riches that lay at the end of one of the longest and most frustrating treasure hunts in human history.

Soon after their arrival on the Lena some of the Cossack intruders heard of certain strange Fire Stones prized by the Yakut for their miraculous powers. Alas, most of the stones proved to be embedded only in Yakut legend, although a few real examples apparently fell into Russian hands. At any rate, something gave birth to rumours which grew and spread until they reached St. Petersburg. In 1736, M. W. Lomonosov, an erudite intellectual of scientific bent whose dictum, “The power of Russia will grow as Siberia grows!” is now one of the guiding principles of the Soviet Union, flatly stated that diamonds existed in
Sibir
, and predicted they would be found in quantity if men would seek them with proper diligence.

Men sought for them all right, but for a long time only
a few small gems, of no great value, were discovered.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of merchants from Irkutsk and Yakutsk organized a major and continuing search in the Lena valley and along its tributaries. Lured on year after year by the discovery of occasional scattered gems in gravel bars these men spent fortunes without any real success.

After the Revolution, success, though still elusive, became increasingly desirable because of a “gentleman’s agreement” amongst the non-communist countries which was intended to prevent the new Soviet states from buying diamonds from the international diamond cartel. Since industrial diamonds were vital if the
U.S.S.R.
was to transform herself into a modern nation, or even if she was to survive at all, the search for a source of domestic diamonds began anew … and failed again.

The Soviet Union was forced to buy what stones she could get on the world’s black market at fantastically inflated prices.

In the middle 1930s Vladimir Sobolev, a young graduate of the Leningrad Mining Institute who had meticulously studied everything available concerning the structure and character of South African diamond-bearing zones, went to Siberia and spent several years exploring the taiga-covered hills and the deep river valleys of the wild country lying between the Lena and the Yenisei. Early in 1941 he presented a report to Gosplan – the Soviet master-planning organization in Moscow.

“The Central Siberian geological platform,” wrote Sobolev, “is to all intents and purposes identical with the South African diamond-bearing region. Here, if anywhere, we will find diamonds. I particularly direct attention to the valley of the Vilyui River and recommend that detailed prospecting be started there at once.”

Unfortunately Hitler invaded Russia shortly thereafter, and Sobolev’s report was buried under the debris of war.

During the next few years it hardly mattered. The
western nations relaxed their restrictions and sold industrial diamonds to the hard-pressed Russians, who had now become their allies. When the war ended and the West reverted to its tactics of denying the Soviets whatever might be of help to them, diamonds were high on the new prohibited list.

Once again the age-old search was renewed. Someone recalled that Sobolev had specifically suggested trying the Vilyui basin. On August 12, 1949, Gregory Finstein, a young Jewish geologist, panned six diamonds on the Vilyui sand bars, and before the season ended the largest collection of gems ever taken from Siberia had been assembled.

It was still a pitiful handful, and there was still no sign of a pipe; but because the shortage of industrial diamonds was now gravely hampering industrial development, the search for the source of the Fire Stones was intensified.

It was an infuriating and frustrating business. Scattered stones continued to be found, but their source remained hidden. As one of the diamond seekers of that time described it, “The whole country was blanketed by taiga and muskeg. If any pipes existed, they gave no indication of their presence beneath the forest floor. The chances of selecting just the right spot in all that wilderness were astronomically small unless we happened on a pipe cut open by a stream or a river and exposed to view. That’s what we were looking for. It seemed a hopeless search. The few diamonds we found offered no really useful clues, because diamonds are practically indestructible and are dispersed by river action, glaciers, or other natural forces over huge areas. What we needed was a tracer of some sort; a pointer to tell us when a pipe was near at hand.”

Now it happens that almost everyone in the
U.S.S.R.
is a science-fiction fan. A pair of young Leningrad geologists, Natalia Sarsadskikh and Larissa Popugaeva, were no exceptions. One day in 1952 Natalia was thumbing
through a tattered sci-fi magazine published in 1944, when she came across a story called “The Diamond Pipe,” in which the author described the imaginary discovery of Siberia’s first diamond mine. In order to flesh out his account he wrote a paragraph describing certain reddish crystals called pyropes. He referred to them as the “poor cousins” of diamonds because, although the two gems are often found in association, pyropes are practically worthless.