Thursday, December 3, 1998

• A sense of betrayal
• Vanishing Huskies

The plight of Nezhdaninskoye, Russia, built beside one of the world's richest gold deposits, is perhaps the most severe and absurd of all.
      In its heyday in the 1980s, the village boasted the school, a kindergarten, a library, a music institute with a brass band and adult choir, a 34-bed hospital, a post office, a gym, lots of food and 2,500 eager settlers.
      Nezhdaninskoye's state-owned mining company, which supported the village and ran the mine, found itself spending $140 more to extract each ounce of gold than it earned from the sale. Those losses bled the company for years until the mine's closure last March. The company is now bankrupt.
      In the spring, the village was formally "liquidated," and no supplies were budgeted for it beyond Sept. 15. But the money promised to help its 968 inhabitants move out by then never came, leaving them betrayed, trapped and unprepared for nine months of bitter cold.
      After balking for years, the Yakutian regional government in May ordered the village closed. It promised to pay back wages and a relocation subsidy during the summer. But the payments were delayed when the regional authorities, in July, demanded that Yeltsin's government foot the bill.

As the air turned cool, they began to suspect a life-threatening betrayal. Ruslan Shipkov, Yakutia's deputy prime minister, flew here Aug. 20 and was confronted by a mob of angry women.
      "We were shouting 'Give us our money!' " said Lyubov Budko. "Women and children were crying. We climbed into his helicopter and made him sign a paper that we'd be paid by Sept. 15."
      But the deadline passed, and the promise proved empty.
      In late November, Shipkov was still haggling with Moscow over who will pay for the evacuation.
      "Last I heard, the entire Soviet Union created the gold-mining industry, and the Russian Federation is its legal successor," he said in an interview. "The Russian authorities shouldn't be trying to shift this burden on us."
      Sounding impervious to the villagers' hardships, he added: "It's extremely difficult to keep delivering coal to a place that's not producing anything, where 900 people are just living for free."

Svetlana Khasanova awoke on an icy morning to find the door of her cabin jammed closed from the outside. Her bewilderment turned to shock after she crawled out a window and saw the open shed. Someone had locked her in while stealing her three Siberian huskies.
      Soon after, Butuz, the shaggy mutt who was 6-year-old neighbor Sergei Krivoruchko's loyal playmate, ventured outside and never came back. Ludmila Rzhevskaya, a nurse, noticed a steady dwindling of the canine pack that romps near the hospital, and children began finding dog skeletons in the woods.
      Then a few people admitted what everyone else suspected: The vanishing dogs are helping to sustain this hungry, shivering village in eastern Siberia--one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth--through what is surely its harshest winter and may well be its last.
      "It is Russian tradition to believe that life will give you a chance, but my bitter experience tells me otherwise," said Andrei Perevedentsev, who moved from Ukraine's Chernobyl zone after the 1986 explosion at the nuclear plant there. "The danger here is more immediate. We could starve or freeze to death."