The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (34 page)

been away in the Arctic for a decade

and a half, and he found his old

friends’ jokes about polar bears

annoying. He did not have the right

to live there anyway, so he came

back to the north and worked until

getting his pension: 30,000 roubles a

month now between the two of

them, and they were grateful for it.

‘People leave here to go to

Usinsk or Vorkuta,’ said Yulia, his

wife. ‘It is hard to live if you are not

working. A lot of people with a

good education do not work. I am

glad we are on our pensions now,

but even so medicine is expensive.

We have three grandchildren, and

two great-grandchildren.’

Boretsky was rehabilitated, and

had his conviction quashed in the

1980s. He won compensation, but

did not remember how much, 8,000

or 9,000 roubles, he said. That was

when you could get a car for 6,000

roubles so it was not as bad as it

sounds, though then again it still

does not sound like much.

The brick factory is closed now.

There is no demand for bricks, since

no houses are being built, and the

clay for the bricks came from the

mine, which is closed too, so even if

there was demand, the factory could

not operate.

‘People say they will find gold

round here,’ Boretsky said, with a

hopeful shrug. ‘Then there would be

work.’

Nikolai Andreyevich

and

I

walked back through the bitter cold

of the evening, our feet squeaking

on the snow. He had designed this

whole part of the town, he said, in

the 1970s when he was working as

an architect. It was one of his best

ever jobs.

‘There was supposed to be

another school there and an enclosed

stadium where that park is.’ The

park that he gestured at was just a

blank expanse of snow, with bare

saplings sticking through the crust,

and beaten paths crossing it in a

huge X. ‘The bosses here are idiots.

They only think about their own

pockets. I built a model of how this

region would look and everything.’

He clearly mourned the vision he

had had for Inta’s future, back in the

1970s when coal was rumbling out

of the ground and the whole

monstrous inertia of the Soviet

Union was keeping the town alive.

That was Inta’s high point, when

people like him flocked here to earn

the hardship wages that would set

them up as aristocrats in the

workers’ state. In 1970, fewer than

one in a hundred of Komi’s

population died every year. Now,

the figure is twice that. For villagers,

the figure now is triple what it was

forty years ago. Over the same time

period, the birth rate has fallen by

more than 50 per cent.

Before catching the train north, I

needed to buy a ticket to Moscow,

since one would not be for sale in

Abez itself. That meant a half-hour

queue in the ticket office on the

ground floor of one of the rotting

concrete-slab apartment blocks that

dominate

Inta’s

second-largest

square. The office had a map of the

old Soviet railway network on the

wall behind the cashiers, and while I

stood in line I traced the route I had

taken to get here. North-east out of

Moscow, the rails threaded the old

gulag towns, until they sank under

the weight of their own illogicality

somewhere to the east of Vorkuta,

just shy of the Arctic Ocean.

Stalin’s

government

had

dreamed of building a spur parallel

to Russia’s north coast, through the

Urals, over the River Ob and on to a

port on the River Yenisei. That

would have connected the coal fields

both to the Arctic Ocean and, via the

rivers, to Siberia’s biggest cities.

Thousands of prisoners died on the

project, but the tundra was too

unstable and the supply routes were

too stretched. It was too much even

for the 1940s. If it could not be done

in the last years of Stalin’s life, it

probably cannot be done at all.

Turning away from the map, I

realized that the man directly behind

me was a priest, and I struck up a

conversation. Father Mikhail was

twenty-nine – it seemed strange to

call a man younger than me ‘father’,

but that is what he called himself –

and from Pechora, one of those

gulag towns threaded by the railway.

He had a narrow, suspicious face but

was happy to talk when he learned I

was researching the life of a fellow

priest, even though he had never

heard of Father Dmitry.

His chapel, which we visited

when I had my ticket to Moscow and

he had his to Syktyvkar, was in the

Southern District, the only part of

Inta with a still-functioning coal

mine, and thus the only district that

might

have

a

medium-term

economic future. Named in honour

of St Nikolai the miracle-worker, his

chapel shares a saint with one of the

churches

where

Father

Dmitry

preached his sermons in Moscow.

That struck me as a happy

coincidence, and we wandered

around inside.

Father Mikhail described the

difficulties of building this chapel,

Inta’s

first,

in

minute

detail,

recounting every tiny triumph as a

victory of the faith. A mine had

closed and given him its garage, he

said with a smile, as if the closure of

the mine and the hundreds of

subsequent job losses had been

unalloyed good news. A demolished

garage provided the bricks for the

chapel’s walls. A well-wisher had

provided the red corrugated roofing

slabs. Another had given cement.

‘It is good that God did not give

it all to us at once because we would

not have noticed such a gift. It came

hard and we all prayed and at every

step we were joyful. When we

finished the roof, we all shouted

hooray. When we put in the door,

we all shouted hooray,’ he said, as

we stood in the roughly finished

interior.

‘People

think

they

have

difficulties, but remember that when

God went into the desert for forty

days and was offered bread he

refused it. It is like that. People think

they want money and they bow

down before it, but God said that

man cannot live by bread alone.

Now people say there is an

economic crisis, but it is actually a

call from God, telling us to throw

away external things. The future of

this town is in a return to faith, to

trust in miracles.’

To demonstrate his point, Father

Mikhail reached into the little booth

where the faithful could buy candles

and religious trinkets and, after a few

seconds of studied concentration,

selected a small icon of St Nikolai.

Printed on 5mm board inside a gold

rim, the icon showed Nikolai flanked

on either side by tiny floating figures

of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It was

a gift, he said, for me to remember

our conversation by. Perhaps it

would help me come to the faith, he

added. He held it out to me, waited

for me to take it and, when I did,

folded his hands together in front of

his groin.

He kept my gaze with a slight

smile of sweet forgiveness without

speaking for a few seconds. He held

my eyes in fact, until I understood

what he wanted. Of course: I should

make a donation in exchange for the

gift. It had taken me a little while to

realize, and I was embarrassed by

my own obtuseness. I reached into

my pocket in a fret, dug out my

wallet from under the layers of

jumper and coat and pulled out a

banknote. I noticed too late it was

for 5,000 roubles, Russia’s largest

denomination and almost half the

cash I had with me. That is about

£100. Indeed, it is more than a

week’s wages for the miners who

live round here. I could hardly put it

back in my pocket though and fish

out a smaller one, so I handed it

over. He maintained his sweet look.

A taxi driver called Sasha drove

me to pick up my bag and to catch

my train. I had an hour to kill so,

with grisly relish, he gave me a

guided tour of the ruins of his town.

‘See there,’ he said, gesturing to

some snow-covered humps. ‘There

were houses there, but they’re gone.

And there, on that flat patch, there

was a school. That’s gone too. This

town is dying.’

He said he wanted to move

away, to give his six-year-old

daughter the chance of a better

future, but was struggling to find

work anywhere else. A large

thermometer on the main square

announced that the temperature was

minus 37. With delight, Sasha told

me that Abez would be even colder.

At the train station, a single

wagon waited for passengers, un-

attached to any engine. A man was

smashing

at

repugnant

icicles

hanging from the hole that channels

toilet waste out on to the rails, while

boiling water gushed past him. A

woman stuck her head out of the

door, holding an empty kettle, and

asked if it was defrosted yet.

‘Fuck no,’ the man said without

emotion.

The carriage windows were

filthy, and I could see only the

vaguest outlines of the station

buildings from inside. After twenty

minutes or so, a few jolts suggested

an engine had coupled on to our

carriage. Another ten minutes, and

the carriage moved off, complaining.

My fellow passengers were mostly

railway workers, even more heavily

clothed than me in their thick, stiff,

dark-blue jackets. I huddled over.

With my gloved hands in my

pockets, and my chin sunk into my

chest, I could cherish a core of

warmth that felt delicious and

drowsy.

The fuzzy silhouette through the

windows was now the jagged fringe

of

fir

trees,

and

then

the

approximation of a weak sunset far

off to the south. I persuaded the

guard to open the door so I could

photograph it, and the cold draught

of the evening ripped through my

coat and attacked the core of warmth

I had so carefully built up. The sun

finally slipped beneath the tundra to

the south-west. It was 2.36 in the

afternoon, and the long night was

ahead.

A perfect crescent moon shone

over Abez, close enough to touch

but a million miles away. It was

paired like in a Muslim flag with a

single bright star, which swam in a

pure

black

sky. A

herd

of

snowmobiles had gathered at the

station to welcome the two dozen

passengers that alighted into the

moonlight. Among them, his beard

dusted with ice, and his eyes smiling

behind his thick glasses, was

Alexander Merzlikin, my guide of

the summer.

He had a trailer behind his

snowmobile, which he ushered me

on to, sitting me on a reindeer skin

and insisting that I wrap a fur-lined

blanket around my legs. He asked if

I was warm in my red down-filled

jacket. I told him about my

mountaineer friend and the Andes.

This coat, I said, was the best Britain

had to offer. He looked sceptical and

muttered

something

about

me

needing to borrow a real coat. And

we set off.

The single headlight cut into the

dark, illuminating the cloud of