Sibir (32 page)

The next morning my friend appeared at the airport to say farewell to us … bearing a return gift consisting of a forty-pound haunch of bear meat, unfrozen, and dripping gore through its inadequate wrappings.

I eventually disposed of this to Yura, but only after extracting a solemn promise from him that he would let well enough alone and not reciprocate. It was a promise no Russian could have kept. However, the two-kilo can (about four pounds) of black caviar he shoved into my hands as I climbed aboard the plane for Canada was not to be spurned. Fortunately the Canadian Customs inspector in Montreal accepted my explanation that the can
contained biological specimens – fish eggs, to be exact – and was therefore entitled to entry duty free.

After demolishing the ukha we took the snow-tank, which had made a belated appearance, and drove downstream to help haul the nets. Victor eyed me calculatingly and asked if I would like to try driving the tank. I nodded. Treating me like a somewhat retarded ten-year-old, he gave me the most meticulous instructions. For my part, I refrained from telling him I had often driven tracked vehicles during the war. When he turned me loose I put the machine through its paces with deliberate bravado.

Victor looked a trifle grim when I finally dismounted; but, never mind, he had another arrow in his quiver. He produced an automatic pistol, set a can on the ice, and worked it over, scoring several hits. Then he passed the gun around. Everyone tried a shot and to Victor’s unconcealed delight nobody hit the can. Finally it was my turn. I demurred, saying I knew little about guns. This only made Victor the more insistent. I finally took the thing, carefully fired twice, hit the can twice, and modestly handed the gun back.

There were shouts of derisive laughter from the others at Victor’s expense. He looked at me for a moment with something of the expression of a man whose pet dog has just demonstrated an unsuspected ability to read a newspaper. Then he broke into a broad smile and gave me one of his bear hugs.
That
evened up the score. My ribs were sore for days afterwards.

Although it was only 3 p.m. it was already growing dark. Blowing snow indicated that the threatened blizzard was about to materialize. We were in a hurry to be gone, but Victor had one more card to play. How would I like to try driving the Bobyk for a mile or two? He would be glad to show me how to do it.

I grinned to myself. Not only had I driven a Jeep all through the war, but I had owned and driven several of the little monsters for fifteen years after the war.

After enduring another painstaking period of instruction, I took control, starting off cautiously with a deliberate clashing of gears. Then we hit a soft spot and Victor yelled at me to stop and let him take over. Instead, I jammed down the accelerator and away we went, ploughing through axle-deep slush until we hit hard ice again.

For once Victor was speechless. He said hardly a word as I drove the rest of the way home. I managed not to get stuck, although our companion Bobyk in the hands of a professional driver got so badly mired it had to wait for the snow tank to pull it out.

This was my moment of greatest triumph. When we pulled up outside the hotel Victor grabbed me, kissed me on both cheeks and
gave
me his beloved Bobyk for the duration of my stay.

In 1966 it was difficult to get a coherent idea of the shape of Tchersky. The townsite was such an incredible scene of what looked to be utter chaos that it made little sense to me. Nor could I understand how construction on such a scale could be carried out in this arctic ice-box, until one day I met the director of the town construction company.

Alexei Terentievich Babkov was a big, lean man with a deeply carved face and flowing moustaches. A Latvian from Riga, he was Victor’s antithesis, cool and controlled in thought and action. Yet he was also Victor’s brother, for his dynamism was apparent in everything he said and did. Like so many other Siberians he was vastly impatient with bureaucracy. Here in Tchersky he had made himself almost completely free of the whims of officials far away in the west. What was built in Tchersky was
his
business, and he brooked little outside interference.

What he was building was a town to house 10,000 people, one with all the amenities of a modern southern city, a place where people would live in style and comfort, and to which they could feel they belonged.

“The psychology of what we do is vitally important,”
Babkov told me. “You may wonder why we put up so many concrete and masonry structures. Well, apart from certain construction advantages, we do so because they look and are solid and permanent. They are not cheap. Here in Tchersky we could build prefabs or stick to wooden buildings and save many rubles; but masonry buildings are essential because of the way they affect the people who live in them. During our first years here we had nothing but log houses. They were comfortable enough and offered plenty of living space but people from the south were unhappy with them. When we completed our first 165-unit, five-storey masonry apartment block we found the percentage of residents who abandoned the north after only a year or two up here dropped like a rock. I’m convinced a transient-type settlement will attract transients, and it will breed them too. People must have solid foundations for their lives just as buildings must.”

In 1966 Babkov’s company had finished only one of the five-storey structures but was hard at work on another. He took me to see it. The temperature was 27° below zero, yet a horde of men and women, red-faced and bundled up in quilted clothing, swarmed over the site as actively as, or perhaps more actively than, if they had been in the Banana Belt instead of on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

“Construction goes on all winter even at temperatures as low as 50° below. The only thing that really stops us is a very low temperature combined with very strong wind. Otherwise we work twenty-four hours a day, with the help of floodlights. If we limited ourselves to the summer season, and to normal working hours, we would never get the job completed.

“The height of our buildings is limited by the wind factor. Because of the strength of the arctic gales, it doesn’t pay to go above five storeys. Foundations are a bit of a problem. The best way is to sink precast concrete piers into the frozen soil by means of steam jets which melt a
passage for them. They soon become locked into the eternal frost and then we raise our buildings on them, leaving a free air space between the ground and the bottom of the structure which prevents thawing of the soil. However, here in Tchersky there is much bedrock, so we foot the piers on that whenever possible; but there is often difficulty with ice lenses in the rock and then we must use frozen surface ‘pads.’

“Pads are tedious to construct but can be used on any kind of ground – even on muskegs. They are composed of alternate layers of wet sand and gravel, compacted and allowed to freeze until they form a pad as much as ten feet thick. Over this we add a layer of dry sand as an insulator, and on top pour a layer of reinforced concrete. The building goes up from there, separated from the top of the pad by short concrete ‘feet’ to allow for free air circulation and to prevent heat flow downward. Such a pad is as permanent as the eternal frost of which it becomes a part, and will support a building of almost any height and weight.”

I asked him how he solved the problems of using mortar in the fierce winter temperatures.

“Our mortar is a special mix containing silicates and salts. It is mixed hot, and kept hot until used. However, at low temperatures it still freezes as soon as it is laid, and, of course, it can’t set until it thaws again. In earlier days, spring thawing would sometimes happen unequally. Lower tiers of bricks might thaw first; the mortar would then squeeze out and the whole structure could crack or even tumble down. Now we control the thawing. Brick buildings are built with walls about two feet thick. Before spring comes the interiors are sealed, and the inside walls then stay frozen and support the strucure until the outer walls have thawed and the mortar has set. Then we open up the interior so the inner walls too can thaw and set in turn.”

“What about materials,” I asked. “Where do they come from?”

“When we first started here everything had to be imported by ship, even concrete, gravel and stone. However, wood could be had up the Kolyma so we began with temporary wooden buildings. Meanwhile we surveyed the region and found usable deposits of sand, gravel and crushable rock. We even located a deposit of brick clay two hundred miles upriver. Now we are moving into a self-sufficient phase where the only thing we have to import is cement. We will soon have our own brick factory. We already have our own pre-fab concrete plant to turn out building panels and piers. The days of log structures are behind us, although we still use wood for emergency jobs. Our geologists have also found a limestone deposit away up the Kolyma, and during the next five year plan we will build a cement factory, and then we will have all our basic materials reasonably close at hand.”

As we bounced around the townsite, I asked Alexei what he planned to do about building roads which would endure the Tchersky frosts.

“For use in the town we have invented a mixture of cement and soil with an insulating pad beneath that ought to give us good hardtop streets. We see no utility in trying to build all-weather highways through this country, any more than there would be any sense in building railroads. Both would be terribly expensive and they just aren’t needed. By making proper use of water routes and by supplementing these with our specialty – the frozen winter roads nature paves for us – we can move any amount of freight. People, we move by air.”

“About people. How do you manage to get and hold construction workers?”

“This is the least of my problems. First off, we pay the highest construction wages in the Union. Then, we see to it our people get the best food, yes, and drink too – better than Moscow, I can tell you. We use a system of wage incentives and special bonuses that increase with the length of time a man or woman stays on the job and in the north. After two or three years here, some workers
feel they just can’t afford to go back south! This is only part of it. We rely a lot on the way Russians feel about tough jobs. Most of them, particularly the youngsters, seem to want a challenge even more than they want money. We give them challenge! And anyone who works up here gets involved in the total project. Bricklayers, for example, have a say in how we work and in developing techniques.

“After a good taste of it, many of the young people determine to stay for the rest of their lives in the north, and they get first preference on the living space they themselves are constructing. It all works out to a feeling of personal commitment to a task once thought impossible – the satisfaction of solving problems and of breaking new ground for mankind. It helps that we know we are not working here to make a profit for someone else to put in his pocket. We know we are working for ourselves and for our fellows, and this makes a big difference to a man’s attitudes.”

When I returned to Tchersky three years later, it was to find the chaos of the place somewhat reduced, but the atmosphere of frenetic activity still persisted. There were some incredible changes – notably rows of huge apartment blocks which had sprung out of the tundra, a fancy shopping centre under one roof, and the fact that the population had increased by a third. Also of note – Victor Nazarov had given up his precious Bobyk and was savaging a brand new Volga sedan on streets which had not improved one whit since I had risked my kidneys on them during my first visit. Alexei Babkov was still in town, still as intense as ever. Having admired the things he had achieved during my absence, I could not forebear from needling him a little.

“What happened to those hard-top roads?”

“Well, not
everything
works out. But we’ve got a new idea for frost-resistant paving under study right now. It’s urgent. Nazarov’s new Volga just isn’t going to survive unless we come to its rescue pretty quick.”

I
N
1960, Zelyonny Mis (Green Cape), four kilometres north of Tchersky, was nothing but a tongue of tundra bearing a wisp of stunted trees which gave it its name. Occasional Evenk fishing parties hauled their boats out on its muddy beach. Under a mossy pile of stones high on the riverbank lay the bones of unknown men who perhaps were ancestors of the Yukagir people.

On a day in early October of 1969 I stood near the ancient burial mound looking down over the Kolyma. Below me seven deep-sea freighters lay nose to stern along a half-mile of concrete dock. Towering gantry cranes wheeled and curtsied, while lift trucks scurried about amidst piles of freight. An almost unbroken line of trucks emerged from the sprawling cluster of warehouses behind me, slithered down to the docks, loaded, and climbed back up again.

One of the big ships let go her lines, swung ponderously into midstream and dropped anchor. She rode light in dark waters skimmed with shimmering cat ice. With her cargo all unloaded she was awaiting orders to depart downstream to the Arctic Ocean and then make her way westward along nearly three thousand miles of arctic coast, through the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, past Cape Chelyuskin into the Kara Sea, through the mill race of Vorota Strait into the Barents Sea, and finally into the White Sea and to her home port of Murmansk.

Her siren sounded a lugubrious blast, and it was echoed by one of the ships remaining at the docks. The
Pioneer
, a beautiful vessel of 10,000-tons with the bows of an ice-breaker, was also ready to depart. Her course lay east, past Wrangel Island into the Chukchee Sea, around Cape Deznev, through the Bering Strait, then south to join her sister ships of the Far Eastern Steamship Trust at Vladivostok … 3,700 sea miles distant.

In less than a decade Green Cape had been transformed from a prehistoric wilderness into a new port city, standing almost at the midway mark along one of the world’s most unusual shipping lanes, stretching for nearly six thousand miles through the domain of arctic ice.