Sibir (23 page)

The bulk of the dam was to be of stone, but the inner core was to be a water-impervious mixture of clay, sand and fine gravel. The core was designed to contain the water of the reservoir while the thick layers of rock around it would act as ballast to keep the core in place and to insulate it from summer heat and from the warmth of the water in the reservoir. The real strength of the dam was to be provided by the Vilyui winter, which would freeze the core into one monolithic block.

Material for the core was found five miles from the site but, of course, it was solidly frozen. The clays and sands had to be thawed, thin layer by thin layer, under the summer suns, then scraped into great, flat-topped mounds for storage. In order to keep these mounds from freezing when winter came, electric heating rods were inserted into them in a rectangular pattern and connected to a series of diesel generators.

The core material had to be hauled to the dam site and placed in position during the coldest months of the year – the colder the better, from Gavriel’s point of view.

“We did not like to place core material unless the temperature was at least 30° below zero. We had to be sure it would freeze absolutely solidly. The rods in the storage mounds raised the temperature of the material just high enough so it could be loaded on trucks, driven at top speed to the dam, dumped, spread and compacted before it turned to icy stone. At temperatures of 60° below, we had trouble with it. It insisted on freezing too
fast. We fixed that by building big mobile flame throwers and also by saturating it with very high concentrations of salt water.”

“At 60° below you surely must have had trouble with your workers too,” I said. “Did you use flame throwers and brine on them as well?”

Gavriel laughed. “No, they had something better. They called it Spirit Vilyui and I am not sure how it was made. They tell about one fellow who dropped a two-litre bottle of it on the frozen ground outside his house one cold winter night. The next morning there was a mudhole there a metre in diameter and, when they tried to find how deep it was, they couldn’t get a probe long enough to reach the bottom.

“We had the toughest and best-humoured crowd of people in the Soviet Union. Most were just youngsters. They came from all over. There was an Azerbaijanian from Baku who had never even seen snow before. He had a wonderful voice and you could hear him singing all over the dam site. He would sing curses upon the ice and snow so they sounded as beautiful as love songs – but the words were the worst I’ve ever heard. At least once a week he’d roar that he was going home on the next plane. But, you know, he is still here. Even the women – and there were a lot of them – mostly held out. The wives did not have to work, but most of them did and a lot worked right on the dam alongside the men. I really don’t know what kept people here, unless it was some special kind of Russian stubbornness. Perhaps, though, they shared our feelings. Here was a job most people in the south said couldn’t be done; but it had to be done if the north was going to develop the way we felt it should.”

By mid-winter of 1965-66, the builders were ready to close the gap in the centre of the dam. It was one of the worst winters on record in central Siberia, and working conditions were appalling. Nevertheless, the task was completed a few weeks before the spring break-up unleashed the terrific Vilyui floods. The films taken at
the time show thousands of people standing silent on the edge of the canyon watching the waters rise behind the dam. There are no scenes of cheering or flag waving, no bands, no rockets in the air. I asked one of the engineers why there was so little apparent excitement.

“It is difficult to explain. Instead of feeling like cheering, most of us felt closer to tears. It was not a feeling of victory so much as a feeling we had lost something – the thing we had done together, so many thousands of us; the life we had led together in this isolated little world buried in the taiga … it was coming to an end. Perhaps we would find it again in some other place, building some other dam, but here in Chernychevsky, the great times when we felt like giants and lived so closely with one another, and relied so much upon one another that we were all brothers and sisters, that time was running out.”

There was another moment of a different kind in June, 1967, when the great steel gate of the inlet lock rolled up and the Vilyui roared into the penstock and fell two hundred feet down into the frozen rock to begin spinning a turbine. There
was
a band that day, and red banners flying, and people in holiday dress, and a delegation of stolid, black-suited gentlemen from the Olympian heights in Moscow who looked, nodded their heads, congratulated the dam builders, and flew off back to their own peculiar world.

Chernychevsky was on the line.

The story does not end there, however. Now a second powerhouse is being built on the opposite side of the river. When both are operating at full capacity they will generate 1,600,000 kilowatts of power. Already electricity is turning Mirny, Chernychevsky and Lensk into electrified cities which will soon be devoid of chimneys, growing cleanly in clean air. It is powering the first of the manufacturing plants; a factory for producing exploded stone fibre for insulation; one producing prefabricated cement apartment units; another to process waste timber into fibreboard. The pylons march north now to Aikhal
and to Udachnaya, and east to the new gas fields on the lower Vilyui where they will supply electricity for a gas-chemical industry.

The dream of the northern planners – of men like Gavriel – is also becoming a reality elsewhere. During 1970 a dam and power station on the Chernychevsky model will be begun on the lower Kolyma River and two, or possibly three more will be started in Chukotka. All will be built far to the north of the arctic circle.

The town of Chernychevsky will not wither away and die when the power plants are completed. Already its log buildings are being replaced by masonry apartments. It has begun to serve in a new role as a transportation and road building centre from which an all-weather highway is beginning to crawl north through the hundreds of miles of taiga to Aikhal. Before that job is completed Chernychevsky will have undergone its third metamorphosis, changing into a manufacturing town with a number of low labour-intensive, high power-intensive industries to support it in the future.

In 1955 the Lensk-Mirny-Chernychevsky region had a population of under four hundred people. In 1969 there were over 60,000 in the three sister cities, plus another 1,600 on the new state and collective farms. The overall population will not increase much above 150,000 which is the planned total for this particular complex.

But, far to the north, new cities are already being built – cities which will owe much to the pioneer dam builders of Chernychevsky.

O
NE MORNING
Ivan Danielov and I were walking beside the banks of the Lena near Yakutsk. Scattered across its gleaming surface were dozens of river boats, and as I watched them I began feeling homesick. Ships and seamen are a major part of my life and I am most at home when I can look out to a limitless horizon of open ocean. In Yakutia I was beginning to feel land-locked.

Ivan listened sympathetically as I explained my feelings.

“But Farley, you are mistaken about Yakutia. In the north we have 2,000 miles of ocean front. And connecting to the ocean we have an inland sea reaching into almost every corner of our country. It is narrow, but with its major arms is more than 8,000 miles in length. You are looking at it now –
Elueneh
– mother Lena. She is our inland sea.”

“A river is a river is a river,” I replied. “The trouble with all you poets is you get carried away by your own imagery.”

“And the trouble with you is you can’t see beyond your beard.” Ivan said with a smile. “Tomorrow we’ll open your eyes for you.”

He was as good as his word. Next morning, in company with several friends, we drove out of town in brittle, crystalline weather under a low, cold sun which was proclaiming the near approach of winter.

We passed through a guarded gate on the river plain and abruptly found ourselves in what appeared to be a major seaport. Ahead of us a forest of gantry cranes swung their jibs against the sky. Lift trucks and straddle trucks crowded the road we were following, heaving and hoisting mountains of freight that partially obscured the view of nearly two miles of docks lined with ships. The illusion of having been miraculously transported to a busy ocean terminal was so strong I thought I could smell the salt tang of sea air. Perhaps I really could, for the whole of the terminal area (about twenty-five square kilometres) sits on a plain heavily impregnated with brine oozing up from deposits left by a primordial sea.

I had only a confused glimpse of the place before we stopped at the Yakutsk port authority offices, where we were greeted by a big blonde Viking with a chin like a dredge bucket who wore the uniform of a captain in the Soviet merchant marine.

At forty-four, Victor Rukavishnikov had the weathered look of a man who had spent a lifetime on the water. Born of Old Russian immigrant stock in a small Yakutian village, he had spent twenty-four years on the Lena, as deckhand, mate, pilot and finally skipper. At forty he “swallowed the anchor” to become Chief of Port for Yakutsk harbour.

He had, however, avoided becoming a bureaucrat. When I started to sit down at the conference table in his office, prepared for the usual briefing, he stopped me.

“What’s the use of talking in here? Let’s go out on the docks. But, wait a minute. What time is it? After ten o’clock. Ah hah, we’ll have a quick one before we go.”

When we were properly fortified, Victor led us at a lope through the complexities of the docks and terminal. Hundred-ton mobile cranes grumbled and whistled overhead, emptying the bellies of a score of big, awkward-looking vessels whose like I had never seen before. Women checkers kept an eye aloft as the cargo swung inshore. They were too busy to more than glance at us.

“Summer is over.” Victor yelled in my ear. “Soon comes the ice. Our shipping season is only about 170 days, and in that time the Lena river fleet has to handle nearly five million tons of freight. No time to stand around and think about your love life!”

The noise and confusion did not make for easy conversation. I managed to yell something back about how impressed I was by the magnitude of the place.

“Yakutsk port is nothing. Only in the third rank of Soviet harbours. You should see Osetrovo on the Upper Lena. It is in the first class … one of the biggest ports in the Soviet Union.”

Victor’s modesty was commendable but, I think, illfounded. Yakutsk port is at least equal in size, modernity and apparent efficiency to any medium-sized seaport on the coast of North America. The thing is that it is not
on
a coast. It lies seven hundred air miles and about 1,500 river miles from salt water. As for Osetrovo –
it
lies another thousand miles upstream from Yakutsk, in the very heart of Siberia and less than two hundred miles from Lake Baikal. Osetrovo is now Yakutia’s main connection with the Trans Siberian Railway, and in 1969 its harbour handled more than three million tons of freight, much of it “containerized,” bound north down the broad waters of the Lena.

Victor yanked me to safety as a straddle truck waddled up carrying a loaded container about the size of a freight car between its wide-spread legs.

“Have you had enough of this? Ivan Nikolaievich says you are homesick for the sea. How about a little voyage?”

Somewhat dazedly I nodded assent. We fled from the pandemonium of the docks and drove down river to the passenger port. Here it was mercifully peaceful. Although the Yakutsk fleet of big diesel vessels carries up to half-a-million passengers a year, most of the ships were laid-up for the winter. Alongside the main pier rested a most peculiar looking vessel. Built of gleaming
aluminum and shaped like a flattened cigar, she seemed to be a combination of an airplane and a submarine.

“Byelorusskia hydrofoil,” Victor said proudly. “You have good luck. The river air observer reports no skim ice today – although it’s overdue – so we’ll take you travelling in our ‘water bird.’ ”

Dubiously I climbed aboard this most unseaworthy-looking contraption. Her passenger accommodation, which ran the full length of the hull, was more like the fuselage of an airliner than a boat’s cabin – chrome trim, reclining seats, aircraft-type windows – all that was missing were the seat belts and the No Smoking signs.

We were settling ourselves in the deep-padded seats when Victor remembered something.

“Ulcers on my soul! No vodka! Ivan! Kola! Leonid! Come with me!”

A few minutes later all four returned aboard laden with the spoils of a raid on a nearby canteen, and the boat’s skipper, a short, taciturn Buryat named Vladimir Stepanov, ordered his two Yakut crewmen to cast off. A nine hundred-horsepower aviation diesel snarled into life and we swung heavily and clumsily out on the glass-calm river. Then abruptly we were flying! Climbing up on her foils until only they and the propellor were still in the water, the vessel flashed down river at sixty knots and I, who am used to travelling on my own Newfoundland schooner at six knots, began to wish I had stayed home in bed.

Sensing my unease, Nikolai Yakutsky came to my rescue. Corks snapped and bottles began to circulate. There were only six of us in a cabin designed to hold thirty, so there was ample room to have a breakfast party, complete with cold sausages, caviar, canned crab and other oddments seized from the canteen.

Ten miles downstream we approached a new river settlement. Our hydrofoil slowed and sagged sloppily into the water as Victor told me about the town of Zhataj.

“This is the base for the Middle Lena fleet. Here we have ten thousand people living. They work at vessel maintenance and new ship construction. There was nothing at all here fifteen years ago. Up until then all our steel vessels were built in Russia and brought out along the Northern Sea Route. Russian marine architects said we could not build our own boats here. We said we could. What is more, we said we could design them too, and do a better job than they.