The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (36 page)

under the bridge, and Alexander

pointed out the sticks that mark

where fishermen have set their nets

under the ice. He himself preferred a

site 15 kilometres upstream, he said.

It might be further away but the fish

were better, and there was less

competition. Fortunately, the cold

winter water preserved any fish he

caught, he said, and he only had to

check the nets every three or four

days.

I wiggled my toes. My feet were

cold and stiff, and my camera was

beginning to misbehave as well. The

little screen that tells me the aperture

and shutter speed, as well as all the

various focus points and ISO

information, was fading out. I turned

it on and off again, but it did not

return to life. I tucked it inside my

coat in the hope that the warmth

would revive it, but to no effect.

While we watched, a passenger

train of nine carriages passed over

the bridge. It was the first train I had

heard since being here.

‘They used to pass every fifteen

minutes, but that was before,’ said

Alexander. ‘Now, you’re lucky if

you get one an hour.’

We turned back for home and

into the wind. The air hit me in the

face like sandpaper. I had not

realized that previously my back had

been against the wind, and my face

had been protected. I tugged my hat

down as far as possible, and pulled

my scarf up over my face. Just my

eyes were exposed now, but the cold

cut at my eyebrow ridge. It was

sharp and inescapable. We were

driving into both sun and wind, and

it was weird to feel such cold and no

heat at all from the sunlight.

By the time we were back inside,

my face was extremely sore. I

checked the thermometer on the way

in; it was indeed just minus 27.

Father Dmitry had experienced

temperatures colder by 20 degrees or

more, for longer, with a fraction of

the clothing and far less food. Still, I

was not prepared to stay out any

longer no matter how much I wanted

to know what he had lived through.

In the days of Mochulsky, the

gulag boss, Abez was the centre of

this part of the camp system. From

here, the security chiefs co-ordinated

construction at dozens of small

camps up and down the railway,

communicating

by

a

primitive

telephone

and

setting

nearly

impossible targets.

Mochulsky was told to build an

embankment for a bridge over the

River Pechora. ‘If you pull this off,

you will get an award; if you don’t,

we will shoot you,’ his supervisor

told

him

bluntly.

With

such

management techniques, it is hardly

surprising that the bosses worked

their labourers to death.

Alexander, however, came here

much later. He was born in 1953 in

the town of Uzlovaya, in the Tula

region, which is just south of

Moscow and is now close to being

ground

zero

in

Russia’s

demographic catastrophe.

‘I left my homeland thirty years

ago,’ he said. ‘I went back five years

ago and it was like nothing had

changed, nothing had improved: the

same holes in the road, the same

destruction; no one does anything to

make it better. Our rulers say the

correct words about democracy,

about the market, about creating the

right conditions but nothing gets

done. We are the richest country in

the world by natural resources, but

look at us. This snowmobile we

went out on this morning costs the

same as a car – 160,000 roubles –

but people were using machines just

like this fifty years ago, there is

nothing

new

here.

All

the

technology you see is Western now,

nothing gets made in Russia any

more.’

For a hunter, of course, a badly

made snowmobile or a poor-quality

outboard motor can be lethal. Get

stranded in the tundra without

transport and you die, summer or

winter. He had a brochure for

snowmobiles from Germany and

Japan, which he had picked up on a

recent visit to town. We pored over

it together, gazing at the shiny

smooth bellies of these gorgeous

machines. He lamented the shoddy

quality of what he could afford.

‘This is the problem of Russia

itself,’ Natasha said.

She was an Abez girl, born and

brought up here. Her mother had

worked as a teacher in a village on

the far side of the river and, during

the thaw, would walk across the

river on the moving ice. It was that

kind of self-reliance and edge that

Alexander had fallen in love with

when he first came north.

‘This

was

like

a

zoo,

mushrooms, berries, everything,’ he

said. ‘You could see the Urals on a

clear day and I went out in the boat,

sometimes for fish, but normally just

for an adventure.’ His trips had

made

him

an

expert

in

the

geography of the gulag. ‘It is not

like what is said in the books. They

say there was a camp here or a camp

there, but it is not like that. There

were camps everywhere. Last year I

went up the River Lemva for 200

kilometres. There is a swamp there

where the prisoners cut the trees and

sent them down the river. There was

prisoner labour everywhere and it

was used for everything.’

After he has set his nets, he said,

there is not much to do, so he

explores the tundra a little, looks at

what is around him.

‘In this place on the Lemva

there’s only marsh, but we looked

about and found the camp. Time

hides everything but the first years I

lived here I often saw barbed wire in

the tundra, which must have been

guarding something.’

Now we – or rather I – were

warmed up, we saddled up the

snowmobile again. I wanted to see

again the memorial cemetery that we

had visited in the summer, and to

photograph the village. My camera

had revived in the warmth, and this

time I took the spare battery too.

With a battery keeping warm in my

pocket, to replace the one in the

camera as soon as it died of cold, I

hoped I could keep it on life support

long enough to get the shots I

wanted.

As we set off down the hill once

more,

Alexander’s

two

dogs

tentatively followed us. They were

thick-furred mongrels, shaggy as

wolves, and were clearly not sure if

they could accompany us on our

trip. When Alexander did not stop

them,

however,

they

gained

confidence and trotted up alongside

the trailer. When we roared out on to

the ice, they gambolled and danced

like dolphins round a ship. They

leaped and bounded with joy,

sometimes running their noses along

in the snow to cool down. They

were mother and son, and the male –

still puppyish though full grown –

shoulder-barged his mother again

and again, urging her to play.

Sometimes, he would crash through

the crust on the snow and come

bouncing

up

again,

grinning

foolishly. Their tongues lolled, and

they were the image of joy.

In reading books on the gulag, I

always imagined the guard dogs as

grim, oppressive beasts, but perhaps

they were like these two, and their

play would have been a comfort in

the surroundings. It is hard to

imagine how grins like these, or a

nudge on the hand like the one I felt

as we slowed to drive back up into

the village, would not have cheered

even the most downhearted of men.

We headed off to the right, through

the ruined farm buildings, to the

cemetery. The path was impassable,

however. No snowmobile had gone

up there this winter, and without a

compacted track to follow we ran the

risk of crashing through the crust

ourselves, and facing a struggle to

extricate the heavy machine.

Frustrated in that plan, therefore,

I turned to look at the village graves,

hoping to see headstones with the

names of gulag bosses and their

families. The cemetery was too

recent for that, however, so I idly

scanned the names that were there.

These graves were far more recent

than I had imagined, most if not all

of them post-Soviet. But there

seemed an impossible number for

such a small village. It was then that

it dawned on me, as I looked from

name to name, that here was the

death of Russia, in hard dates, in

front of my eyes. These graves were

not of pensioners, but of young men

and young women, dying before

their prime. What chance did a

village have to support itself, or to

reproduce itself, if its new adults die

before they can achieve anything?

And if the villages are dying, then

the country is too.

This

was

the

alcoholic

apocalypse that Father Dmitry saw

starting in the 1960s, and fought

against with his sermons. I wrote

down the birth and death dates in a

column in my notebook: 1988–93,

1990–2007,

1983–2007,

1962–

1994,

1972–1992,

1986–2008,

1985–2005, 1975–2001. I saw a

man born in 1949 who had lived to

1997, and smiled briefly. At least

here was someone who had lived a

full life, I thought, until I worked out

that he had died aged forty-eight.

His life was cut short by any

standards I was used to, but it looked

age-long compared to his young

neighbours:

1971–2006,

1986–

2006, 1970–2004, 1980–2005. That

is not all the graves. Some I could

not reach through the snow, and on

others the drifts obscured the dates

and names of the people buried

beneath, but it was enough to show

why Abez has shrunk like a slug

sprinkled with salt.

Right by the path was the grave

of Veniamin Arteyev, born May

1980, died October 2007. His little

sister Zoya was next to him. She had

been born three years after him, but

died six months earlier, on 20 April

2007. And between them was their

mother. Her birth date was obscured

by snow, but she died on 7

September 2003. I looked at

Alexander for an explanation of this

family tragedy.

‘Their father sold moonshine. He

wanted to be rich, and look what

happened. The two kids died in the

same year,’ he said with a grimace.

And a little further along was

Andrei Kulikov, born March 1983;

died, two months after his twentieth

birthday, in May 2003.

‘He was my pupil, he died of this

too,’ said Alexander, flicking his

jaw-line in the Russian sign for

getting drunk. ‘He shot himself in

the end. They are all kids of twenty,

twenty-four, twenty-five, they all

died of this,’ he said, with another

flick.

‘It’s like a plague,’ I said, at last.

‘Ah no, it’s worse,’ he replied.

A grey stone grave for a young

man, 29 August 1981 to 28 October

2006, dredged up another memory

for Alexander: ‘That one died on his

snowmobile falling through the ice.

They didn’t find his body for a

year.’

There is apparently a disco

sometimes in Old Abez, the little

village the other side of the river

where Natasha’s mother used to

teach. Drunk and exuberant, the lads

race each other back over the frozen