Thursday, December 3, 1998
The Making of Siberia
"What kind of fool decided to build a village out here, 300 kilometers
[186 miles] from the nearest town?" asked Nadezhda Borovkova.
The answer: Nikita S. Khrushchev's Soviet planners.
Their aim here was to "civilize" the wild North while mining the Verkhoyansk Mountains--2,165 feet above sea level, 4,566 miles from Moscow and just 280 miles below the Arctic Circle, the same latitude as southern Iceland. The nearest airfield is seven hours by jeep on a road that legions of Josef Stalin's prisoners died building.
"There were so many volunteers, people had to live in railroad cars while waiting for housing," recalled Tatiana Filippova, who arrived in 1980 to teach at the music institute.
The improbable scene she described was repeated across the top of Russia as Stalin's gulag work gangs gave way to pampered pioneers lured north by salaries as much as eight times higher than corresponding Moscow wages. Defying all odds and economic sense, cities sprang up on the permafrost to serve the Soviet mining, oil and nuclear power industries.
"Our government told us we were creating a special breed of people who
could live and work in the cold--something the capitalists had not yet
achieved," said Mikhail Bruk, a mining executive in Yakutsk, the regional
capital.
The settlers were young, adventurous and from all over. Valery Budko
came here from Kyrgyzstan--then Soviet Kirghizia--at 21, with dreams of
making a quick killing in the mines and retiring to warmer latitudes.
After five years, Budko met and married Lyubov Bezrukavaya, who had
come with her parents from Ukraine and worked at the power plant. Their
daughter was born here in 1990. The couple figured they needed to work
four more years to buy a comfortable home on what Northerners call "the
mainland"--non-Arctic European Russia.
But by then, the "mainland" had sobering new ideas.
World markets began dictating prices. President Boris N. Yeltsin's
advisors worked out the cost of the northern campaign and announced in
1992 that they couldn't afford it. They drafted vague plans to evacuate
the region's "nonessential" population and develop its resources more
slowly, sending workers in shifts without their families.