Authors: Farley Mowat
“Decentralization and dispersion were taking place as early as the 1930s but many people then thought only the central and southern portions of the Soviet Union could be treated in this way. It took much hard work to convince everyone that the northern regions could absorb and support modern habitation centres on a large scale. Now we have reached the point where we have devised a northern technology capable of creating living conditions almost anywhere in the north which are as good as those
in, let us say, Moscow, and in many ways are even better.
“Those of us who fought for the development of the north had additional reasons to inspire us. There was the question of the future of the Small Peoples. We never did believe it was permissible to leave them to decay in ignorance and apathy in regions which were to lie outside our new society; nor did we think it wise or right to take them out of their northern world and transplant them into our southern way of life. Lenin insisted, and we agreed with him, that it would be much better to take the modern world to them.
“The wisdom of this is surely clear from the fact that, instead of being a burden on the State, the Small Peoples are now full partners with the rest of us in developing the New Life in the north.”
A young woman in charge of social planning for the north added this comment:
“Human beings must have challenge! That is understood by any thinking person; and we know the best challenge is the one which is the most natural. If men do not have such challenge they find it in unnatural ways – perhaps in a fierce competition for power or money; perhaps in internal struggles that tear a society apart; perhaps in external struggles that become bloody wars. We know all this, you see; and so we have deliberately offered to our people – particularly the young – the challenge of the north, which is a challenge of nature. They have responded with enthusiasm. It is not good to give people security of body alone … we must also make a valid and good purpose for life. Those who go north find such a purpose.”
It was early recognized that northern development on a big scale required careful planning, but until the end of the Stalin era the planning was rather haphazard and sometimes bungled. Stalin was a Georgian and apparently never had the feel of the north. Under Khruschev things were different. Tremendous efforts and vast sums of money went into planning and into research to back
the plans. At the same time tens of thousands of scientists flooded out over Siberia to conduct the most intensive surveys and to compile the most complete inventory of resources ever undertaken by any nation. This resulted in the discovery of nearly every important raw material required by modern technology and, to the perturbation of some Western powers, it assured the Soviet Union of internal self-sufficiency in raw resources, if it proved possible for them to develop these resources on an economically realistic basis. And that was the rub. No country, communist or capitalist, can remain healthy if the things it purchases with its labour or its money are worth less than what it cost to get them. However, the Russians found sound economic methods for developing their northern resources while at the same time turning an almost empty wilderness into a suitable habitat for modern man.
Here, paraphrased and much condensed, is how it was explained to me by the Director of the Institute of Northern Planning.
“We had four basic considerations before us when we worked out our policy. First: we had no intention of just exploiting the north for the benefit of the southern part of the country. Second: whatever we did had to ensure it would bring people into the north on a permanent basis. Third: development had to pay its own way, and had to recover the very heavy cost of the initial planning and surveys, which amounted to over six billion rubles. Fourth: everything we did had to be predicated on conservation of resources so the future would be assured, not only for the new northern communities, but for the whole of the Soviet Union. We could not afford to be profligate with what we had, as the United States and other capitalist countries have been.
“The first step in implementing these criteria is to examine the surveys and the inventories with special reference to resources of particularly high value such as gold, diamonds, uranium, and particularly rich concentrations of less valuable minerals. Such resources we call
valuta
. We then conduct exhaustive further surveys in the regions around each valuta to assess the potential of all secondary resources. When a valuta shows it could be a focus for the development of other resources – and most of them do – we are ready to go to work in earnest.
“We spend money as freely as needed to begin an intense exploitation of the valuta. In the case of Mirny it was diamonds; in the case of Kolyma, gold; in the case of Norilsk, a concentrated base metal deposit. As soon as production begins, the profits are used to transform the original temporary mining town into a planned community designed in all essentials to care for a much bigger population than is required to work the valuta alone. The town is built for permanence and has all the facilities needed by a modern city, together with excellent communications with the rest of the country. In addition the valuta pays for the installation of a power base with a capacity far in excess of current requirements. In as little as five to ten years we create the essentials for a human habitation centre which has all the amenities one could want; and this very heavy capital investment is provided directly from the profits of the valuta.
“The new community now begins development of its secondary resources which could not, on their own, have paid for the initial installation of the new community. At the same time local industry is beginning to develop. It is a principle with us that raw materials should be processed as fully as possible at their point of origin. This means construction of smelters, refineries, reduction plants in the new centre, and these provide a base upon which heavy industry can later grow, while at the same time much reducing the costs of transporting the resource material to other regions.
“As local processing of the several resources expands, the new centre finds itself in a position to begin manufacturing. At this stage it is approaching maturity as an integrated economic unit with many diverse activities, drawing on many sources of raw materials, and capable
of supporting a large human community in perpetuity and in modern style.
“If the original valuta resource should now become exhausted, it will not fatally affect the life of the community. If the valuta continues to be productive, the state continues to benefit from it and the money can be used to finance the beginnings of yet other new communities.”
The Director ended his explanations with a little homily.
“I believe you know better than I that your country, Canada, has an even bigger proportion of northern lands than the Soviet Union. So why, may I ask, are you ignoring it as a place for men to work and live and build new cities? Why do you treat it as a distant colony to be exploited but not to be occupied? Well, perhaps you will someday see it differently – if you have not already lost it to your big southern neighbour.
“
We
think of the north as a land to be lived in.
We
do not go north just to fill our pockets. We are making it a part of our whole nation – and the north is making a new kind of men and women out of us.”
There is not always unanimity of opinion amongst the hydraheaded organs of state in the
U.S.S.R.
In the summer of 1958 a battle developed in Moscow over the most suitable type of electric power source for the valuta centre of Mirny. The hard-nosed industrial economists, who were only interested in diamonds, plumped for a coal-fired plant which would be fuelled from nearby surface deposits and which would be quick and cheap to build, and economical to operate. However, representatives from the Northern Planning group insisted on an hydro-electric plant. Gavriel Bijanov, who was summoned away from a dam-building job in central Siberia to support the view of the Northern Planners, explained the situation to me.
“There were a number of reasons for wanting hydro-electric generation. The obvious one, and the one we used as our main argument, was that we not only needed a great deal of power for the development of the Mirny
complex in its secondary stages, but we also intended to supply the gold fields at Bodaibo, five hundred kilometres to the south; the diamond pipe at Udachnaya; and a new pipe at Aikhal, five hundred kilometres to the north. In order to do this we would need at least 1,500,000 kilowatts and it would have been impracticable to build a thermal station to produce that much power at Mirny, where everything had to be brought in by boats and winter roads.
“While this was true enough, we had still other reasons, ones which were not so likely to meet the approval of the economists. We had been thinking for years that something must be done to stop the severe air pollution caused by thermal plants, so whenever we could we tried to substitute hydro power. Also we had long dreamed about building cities in which everything would be done by electric power – not only lighting and cooking, but all heating as well. This would mean little pollution of the air; power would come entirely from a renewable source; and much more of the non-renewable supplies of oil and coal could be reserved for gradual consumption in coal and petro-chemical industries. Why go on burning the stuff when it can be converted into hundreds of useful products? So, you see, we needed lots of power for the Mirny development if we were to make the town fully electrified, and we wanted the nearby coal deposits saved as the basis for an extraction and manufacturing industry.
“Another reason for refusing a thermal plant was we wanted a chance to design and build a hydro-electric plant under the most adverse conditions of northern climate and inaccessibility – a plant which would be the prototype for many more to be built across the whole of the arctic to solve the very serious problems of power supply in the far north. Such a plant had never been built anywhere before. Mirny was our chance to do it, because we knew this first one was going to cost a fortune, and only something as valuable as diamonds could pay for it.”
The northern planners won their case and Gavriel was given the job of directing the project. It was hardly an enviable prospect. He was faced with the task of having to dam a major river in a region subjected to eight months of winter and temperatures that plunged as low as 80° below. Because of the inaccessibility of the site, he knew he would have to forget about concrete and steel, and build the dam of local materials. Furthermore, everything he did would be subjected to the iron control of permafrost.
The first workers arrived on the site by helicopter in the fall of 1960 – twelve men and one horse! They threw up log cabins banked to the eaves with mud and moss against the terrible Vilyui frost. As fast as the huts were built they were occupied by new arrivals. During that first bitter winter a trail paved with compacted snow was blazed through the taiga to Mirny. During the ensuing five years this was the only ground link with the outer world, and it was only usable in winter. In summer all transport had to be by air.
Because of the incredibly difficult transportation problems, and the distances involved, major items had to be ordered from European Russia at least eighteen months in advance of the time they would be needed. Nothing that was not absolutely essential could be brought in from outside. The new town of Chernychevsky grew in the manner of a classic pioneer community, its homes and buildings constructed of logs cut in the nearby forests and chinked with mud and moss. They were heated with wood, too, and in many cases were roofed with moss and mud that gave so little protection against rain that in summer everyone moved out to live in tents, despite black flies and mosquitos in plague proportions.
The unique nature of the Vilyui River itself posed special problems. In December it carries a dribbling 1.4 to 3 cubic metres of water per second; but by June the flow has leapt to 13,000 cubic metres a second. The fact that the future power drain would be at its greatest during
the winter, when there was the least flow of water in the Vilyui system, necessitated the creation of a tremendous reservoir and a much higher and bigger dam than would have been needed to produce the same amount of power in the south. Also, because of the consequent enormous pressure in the penstocks, special propellor-type turbines had to be designed as a substitute for the normal radial-action type.
So complex were the preliminary problems that work on the main structure – the dam and the west bank powerhouse – did not begin until 1963. By then the initially high cost estimates had tripled and Mirny, inadequately supplied with electricity from diesel generators and a “portable” coal-fired plant, was screaming blue murder. It looked for a while as if the whole Chernychevsky project might be abandoned in favour of a big coal-fired station. The great experiment was barely saved when Gavriel risked his neck by guaranteeing he would deliver power within four years.
As the work force began blasting a power canal and turbine hall out of the frozen granite (making use of the debris to begin pushing rock wings for the dam out from the canyon walls), a new difficulty appeared. The frozen bedrock which had seemed sturdy enough to support almost any weight, was found to be underlain by a cracked strata full of ice lenses which could easily be deformed by the great weight of the dam and so lead to its collapse.
The solution to this was to vastly increase the breadth of the dam at its base and so spread the load over a much greater area – a solution which meant
trebling
the amount of rock fill that had to be blasted and trucked to the site.
The solving of each problem seemed only to lead to new and worse difficulties. As the riverbed was blasted, in mid-winter, to form a foundation trench, it was discovered that even the upper layers of bedrock were cracked. Although they were cemented together by permafrost, there was the likelihood that the weight of the
dam would temporarily generate enough pressure to melt the ice and so again threaten the entire structure. The solution this time was to design a tunnel which would run along the basement rock through the full length of the dam and from which workers could inject cement grout under very high pressure into the fissures as the ice melted. It was estimated that this local melting process would continue for at least six years until permafrost had seeped back through the underlying rock and reasserted its sovereignty.