Sibir (6 page)

Now things have moved a step farther. A planned process for easing the pressures inside the big cities is taking place through the decentralization of industry. It consists of shifting heavy, noisy industries (and those which produce noxious by-products) right away from the parent cities, which then become infinitely more habitable. Those who work in the dispossessed industries follow them to greener pastures –
literally
greener pastures. All new industries, as well as the old ones which are being relocated, are established in satellite towns separated one from the other, and from the metropoli, by many miles of agricultural lands or forest belts. Furthermore each new satellite town has a planned upper limit to
its
population. When that limit is reached the satellite must begin budding-off to spawn new and more distant satellites.

“We believe in the dispersion principle as opposed to the concentration principle,” Yakob said vehemently. “Just see what we are doing here in Irkutsk.…”

He outlined the master plan which now guides the destiny of the Irkutsk district. The original city is to be maintained, improved, and to a degree modernized (a phrase which made Mark wince) as the cultural, administrative, communications and education centre for the entire Irkutsk province, an area of about the size of France. It is to be the centre of concentric rings of satellite industrial centres, which will be separated from each other by wide stretches of taiga given over to reindeer and cattle raising and other agricultural pursuits. Irkutsk and the satellites will be linked to each other by rapid transit systems – air-bus shuttles, road-bus service (both of these are already functioning) and high-speed electric trains, probably of the monorail variety.

Three satellite cities already exist. Two of them are brand new and one, based on an old coal mining centre, has been completely rebuilt. This is Cheremkhovo, ninety
miles away to the northwest. Much closer are Shelekhov and Angarsk, neither of which existed prior to 1956. Shelekhov now has fifty thousand people living in a model town two miles distant from the aluminum smelting plant which is its
raison d’ětre
. It can absorb another fifty thousand people in secondary manufacturing before it reaches its planned upper limit. Angarsk is the “power city” based on the Angara hydro electric power station; it will develop as a “power intensive” manufacturing city until it is about the size of Shelekhov.

Because they are carefully planned, and don’t just grow like Topsy, the satellites are far more spacious and comfortable places in which to live than are the old-fashioned industrial cities. There is no problem persuading people to move to the satellites since, in so doing, they obtain better housing, better living and working conditions, and yet do not lose touch with the mother city and its amenities.

When I suggested that perhaps this decentralization program might have a military purpose in this atomic age, Yakob scoffed.

“We do all this because it makes better living conditions for human beings. It is expensive. It uses up time and materials and energy that could be spent increasing productivity in existing plants. But it is worth it. We are making sure the next generation won’t have to live in swarming dunghills. Perhaps you have to be Russian to understand this; perhaps you have to have a history of hundreds of years when people were crowded into real pig-pen slums. But if you have read Dostoievsky, you will know why it is we want to be free forever from that sort of threat.”

N
EARLY
thirty million years ago a cataclysmic event took place in the middle of Asia. The continent split latitudinally into two parts, and the northern and southern halves ground against one another like two titanic pans of ice. Along the line of pressure the earth’s crust broke and crumbled and the debris piled up to form the highest and most extensive mountain regions on earth.

Eventually the pressure eased. The two vast land masses resolidified as one but, before doing so, they rebounded slightly opening a fissure thirty to forty miles in width, more than a thousand miles long, and as much as three miles deep. Because the earth’s crust was exceptionally thick in this region, the gaping wound did not fill from the bottom with molten magma. Instead it began to fill with run-off water from the surrounding mountains. So immense was its capacity that it took many thousands of years before it filled to the rim and the overflow began to run out of its western end to form the river Angara.

This was the beginning of Lake Baikal. The passage of aeons has made great changes in this, the earth’s most ancient lake. Erosion of the mountains which enclose it and the accumulation of the dead husks of astronomical numbers of aquatic animals has gradually filled the fissure with sediment, reducing Baikal’s length to about four hundred miles. Still it remains the deepest of all lakes, well over a mile deep in places. It contains about a
fifth of all the free fresh water in the world (almost as much as the basins of all five of the Great Lakes of North America). Although much reduced from their original Olympian heights, the surrounding mountains still tower high above this ancient inland sea. Earthquakes still shake the region but, by comparison, they are only tiny residual shivers of the convulsion which gave birth to the Baikal fissure.

The lake’s fantastically clear waters shelter a community of living things that have evolved in their own way through millions of years. More than a thousand species of plants and animals living in Baikal are found nowhere else. Hidden in the mountain heart of Asia, Baikal successfully protected and nurtured a unique community of life through an immense span of time.

And then came man. At first he did no harm. Evenk hunters were the last in the aboriginal line to occupy its shores. They and the Buryats to the south believed the lake was sacred. They peopled it with spirits and for the most part stayed off its treacherous waters, which can roar in oceanic fury under the lash of sudden, blasting winds of hurricane velocity.

About 1634 marauding Cossack bands became the first westerners to see the lake. In its surrounding forests they found great numbers of a singularly beautiful member of the weasel family, the Barguzin sable.

Lust for sable pelts had been directly responsible for the first breaching of the Ural wall when, in 1581, Russia’s most powerful merchant family, the Strogonovs, sent a rag-tail army of Cossack mercenaries through the Perm Gates in search of sable – a search which led to the conquest of a new world.

Captained by a free-booter named Yermak, the Cossacks first destroyed the small Mohammedan Khanate of Kutchum, just east of the Urals, which was the only human society in Siberia capable of more than token resistance to the invaders from the west. Impelled by the same rapaciousness which motivated the Spanish conquistadors
in South and Central America, and the Dutch, French and English in North America, small bands of Cossacks then swept eastward across Siberia, each band striving to outpace all others and be first into the territory of some undiscovered tribe which could be brutalized into paying tribute in “soft gold” – furs – but, above all, in sable furs. What the beaver was to the Mountain Men – those ill-famed buccaneers of the American west – sable was to the Cossacks. In just under fifty years they crossed the whole of Siberia and reached the Pacific.

The Cossacks, and those who followed, were one with their European compatriots who were then busily swarming into Africa, the Americas and the Pacific in search of loot. They were men who had abrogated one of the basic principles of life: that each living thing shall only take from the world around it what it actually requires to secure its own survival. The new kind of man – a mutant if ever there was one – took everything he could grasp, and then reached out for more. When the soft gold of the Barguzin sable and of the other land fur-bearers around Baikal had been almost exhausted, the invaders turned to the lake itself.

Several million years ago one small group of mammals had given up the hard-won terrestrial way of life and returned to the salt seas from which all life originated. The sea was kind to these backsliders and they ultimately diversified into the many members of the seal family. Most of them chose to live in the open oceans where the greatest numbers of their kind still remain.

However, some hundreds of thousands of years ago, a few of the early seals entered the arctic estuary of one of the great Siberian rivers, the Yenisei, and worked their way south into the very heart of the Asian land mass to Baikal.

Here they found themselves in an inland sea where conditions were not so different from those in the greater sea – two thousand miles away to the north. The water was fresh instead of salt, but that was not material. Fish were
abundant. Because of its great depth and the presence of convection currents of oceanic character, the ice formed late in the winter and there were always areas near the river mouths where it remained thin enough so that air-breathing mammals could keep holes open. In other areas of Baikal the mountain winds built up heavy blankets of snow atop the ice wherein the female seals could build snug caves in which to bear their pups.

When natural man arrived upon the scene he killed occasional seals, but his predations were so minor that they made no impression on a herd which, it is estimated, must have numbered several hundred thousand individuals.

When the European conquerors turned their attention away from the forests where life was growing silent, and looked upon the Sacred Lake, they must have been incredulous at the amount of life it contained. Here was a killing ground worthy of their mettle. But that world of water was so vast (some sixteen thousand cubic
miles
of water) that the rape took some time to complete. By the early years of the twentieth century there had been solid victories. The giant Baikal sturgeon was virtually extinct. The apparently inexhaustable schools of fine-flavoured whitefish called
omul
were fading fast. A number of other fishes were becoming scarce. And the seals were almost gone; no more than four or five thousand of them still survived.

The battle to destroy the living world of Baikal was being won. Fishermen and seal hunters were receiving indirect assistance in their work of destruction from landsmen. In the mountain valleys drained by Baikal’s three hundred and sixty inflowing streams and rivers, the forests where the sables were hardly more than a memory were themselves being razed. Siberian cedars, high towering patriarchs, many of them more than a thousand years old, all but disappeared. Larch, and the lesser species, took their turn. The logs were floated down the once crystal rivers, gradually coating the stream beds with thick layers of bark until many of the lake fishes that
used the rivers as nurseries could no longer find suitable spawning grounds. Tannic acid and other decomposition products from sunken logs and bark began contaminating the waters of the lake itself.

Then, in 1962, the economic planners in Moscow decided to build a gigantic cellulose and wood-chemical combine on the south shore of Lake Baikal. Even by Soviet standards the plans were grandiose. There were to be five plants with their associated towns in the combine. Secure in the conviction that the true Good is to be found in more production, the planners turned their blueprints over to the builders and in 1963 work on the first two plants began.

At this juncture something truly remarkable occurred. In the Soviet Union, that closed society where, so we are told, the voice of the individual is never heard, there arose a thunder of protests from individuals in every part of the land. The editors of the monolithic All-Union papers,
Pravda
and
Izvestia
, having proudly announced the birth of the gigantic new production complex at Baikal, found themselves inundated by letters of outrage. As the two plants neared completion the intensity of the storm strengthened.

An elderly, much respected Moscow writer described to me what followed:

“The word Baikal became a rally cry even to people who knew very little about it except its name. They were acute enough to see that finally the high priests of progress-through-production had to be brought to their senses. The threat to Baikal made people understand that unless this was done the new world we were building would be no better than a ruined wasteland fit for machines, but not for human beings. Hundreds and thousands of professional writers, poets, artists and scientists took it on themselves to make Baikal the symbolic warning. They were joined by masses of workers and by revered members of the Academy of Science, and even by some state officials. Every magazine and
newspaper heard the voice of what was a true mass movement of the people.

“For a while the authorities who had designed the cellulose combine tried to drown out the protests. There were long articles lashing out at reactionary sentimentalists who tried to stop the glorious march of our revolution. There were some threats, and some of the more prominent of Baikal’s defenders were told they would get into trouble if they did not keep quiet. They refused to be quiet. The fuss kept getting worse. The plants were completed and began operations. They began pouring their poisons into the Sacred Sea. Within three months there were reports of fish dying in Baikal and even of people getting sick from eating fish caught in the Angara. The fight of the people to save the lake became more furious and then, quite suddenly, the authorities gave in. The plants were closed.”

I visited Baikal several times and on one occasion sat in a little cafe on the shore of the lake, watching its waters rage in the grip of a roaring October storm. Boris Arimov, an Irkutsk poet who spent seven years fighting for Baikal, sat with me and told me more of the story.

“When they closed the plants we suspected it was only for long enough to let things cool down. So, we did not let things cool down. We kept the fire going and gave it more fuel. Now we demanded that fishing be banned until the stocks returned to normal. No more slaughter of the seals, we said. We said that all lumbering must be stopped on the Baikal watersheds. We demanded that this treasure – one of the world’s great treasures – be cleansed until it was again as beautiful as it had been before men began to desecrate it. All over the Soviet Union the friends of Baikal fought on.