Travels in Siberia (61 page)

Another difference between Yakutsk and present-day Elwood: in downtown Yakutsk I saw signs for a Gap clothing store, a Benetton, a Baskin-Robbins, and Wrangler Jeans. In Elwood, many of the stores are empty, mainly because the town’s citizens now tend to go to the malls of Indianapolis or Muncie or Kokomo to shop. None of those familiar commercial logos may be found on signs in downtown Elwood, Indiana.

While in Yakutsk, you can (or could) visit the Museum of Music and Folklore of the Peoples of Yakutia, which is hidden behind a fence on Kirov Street; you can study the exhibits about Yakut authors in the Yakut Literature Museum, whose collections are partly housed in a giant cement yurt; or admire the traditional log construction of the old Orthodox church on Petra Alekseeva Street; or check out the regional museum, which has a skeleton of a whale; or look through the furs and hand-carved objects for sale in various shops; or attend a performance at the Government Ballet and Opera Center; or stroll the campus of Yakutsk University; or schedule a tour of the subterranean laboratories of Yakutsk’s Permafrost Institute, where many important discoveries have been made.

Sergei and I skipped all that, however—too cold. Instead, the first day after we got to Yakutsk we mostly stayed in and watched TV in the hotel room while recuperating from our recent long time on the road. Sergei was a fan of the American sitcom
Mad About You
, and we happened to catch the episode in which Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser accidentally lock themselves in their bathroom. Overdubbed in Russian, the comical dialogue sounded better. The Russian TV news had a long feature about the red-tailed hawk known as Pale Male who with his mate had built a nest on a ledge of a Fifth Avenue apartment building in New York. Also, there was chaotic-looking coverage of an antigovernment uprising currently going on in Kyrghyzstan.

On other days he and I hung out with Dr. Sergei V. Shibaev, director of the Siberian Geophysical Survey at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in downtown Yakutsk. Sergei Shibaev was a dark-haired, young-looking guy with a high forehead and a quick, untrammeled laugh. Sergei had known him from university. We met him at the Academy of Sciences headquarters, a large and undistinguished government building with an
entryway smelling strongly of heating oil, and sat in his office with him and some of his colleagues.

Nowadays many geologists do their work on computers and seldom venture into the field. Geology, formerly an outdoor profession, has become not necessarily that anymore. In my own limited encounters with geologists, I have found that they have differing opinions about which kind of geology, outdoor or indoor, is superior. From the look and atmosphere of the Academy of Sciences geology offices, I understood that Sergei Shibaev and his colleagues were the outdoor kind. Maps of Yakutia covered the office walls, rock samples and geological gear lay here and there on the desks, and one long wall of the central office was covered with a detailed multicolor map of the geology of the Russian Federation from Baltic to Bering Strait. Most of the geologists in Sergei Shibaev’s department, he said, spend some or all of the warmer months in the taiga.

Maybe because of this focus on the actual land out there, Sergei Shibaev took a proprietary interest in the question of where in Yakutia Sergei and I might go next. The two Sergeis put their heads together, consulted maps, made calls, and (of course) looked up information online. I could not contribute much to this, so I fell into conversation with a geologist named Anatoly Firsovich Petrov. He was a white-haired, balding fellow, seventy-one years old, whose sturdy-looking build and general appearance brought to mind Nikita Khrushchev. He wore a blue suit jacket, a dark tie, gray trousers, and a light gray sweater-vest, and on his lapel he had two small round pins bearing emblems of his profession. From his somewhat oratorical style of speaking I gathered that he was the memoirist and philosopher of the department. After a while I asked how he had come here and what his work in Yakutia had been. He said he’d be happy to tell me. We went down the hall to his own office, where we could talk more easily, and he began:

“I am a specialist in plate tectonics, so I am interested in the structure of the earth’s crust—in how the earth develops, and why the seas are where they are, and what influences what, and where earthquakes come from. You understand that everything depends on the interactions of the plates. Here is our map [indicating a map on the wall]. You see in this map of Yakutia that we have tectonic plates coming together, so we have many earthquakes, here in the region north of Baikal especially. These are the lines where the earth’s crust breaks.

“I learned geology at Saratov State University, in that city, which is on the Volga River. My special diploma work was about a small river, the Markha, which is in Yakutia and which runs into the Vilyui River. I was here first in 1954 to study the geology of this river, and after finishing my diploma I became attached to all this open space in Yakutia. I am a nature fan, my soul strives not to destroy but to create. To protect nature. I do not say this to flaunt it, I say it sincerely.

“My father was completely illiterate, and although it is necessary to say that we blame Soviet authority from time to time, and that there were a lot of bad things, like gulags, on the other hand neither my father nor my mother ever had a chance to finish even a single grade of school. They were poor, and there were three of us children in our family, and all three, my sister and brother and I, all of us received a higher education at federal expense. There were many like us in the Soviet Union. Please, don’t take it as my approval of Soviet authority. But really,
‘Uchit’sya, uchit’sya, uchit’sya’
[Study, study, and study], as Lenin told all young Communists—this really existed! Yes, in a way I was like Lomonosov, another poor boy who studied and who became a scientist.

“I arrived here in Yakutia to live in 1958. I was twenty-four years old. Here in Yakutia I liked, first of all, the purity of the country. Second, in Yakutia there were then comparatively few people who had studied at university, and most of the geology of Yakutia was unknown. Therefore I understood I had an opportunity here for interesting work. A new place, new people, and three hundred million square kilometers in Yakutia. Well, one can only dream about such work. At first the aim was as follows: to search for diamonds. We used various indicators as are found in South Africa, where so many diamonds are on the Kimberley plateau, and we looked for similar geologic structures. Basically we were searching for kimberlites.

“I don’t exaggerate when I say I really loved the geologists who came here and who I worked with. I loved the tribe of geologists here—quite seriously, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. Mutual assistance, one should save a friend even at the expense of your own life. Sharing even the last piece of bread. I lived in Yakutsk but I worked in Yakutia everywhere. In summers we geologists went in groups for four months, maybe five or six months, living in tents in the taiga, in totally different places. Well, you can imagine, during half a year with the same people, you live and work like brothers and sisters.

“Well, it was very complex work. I was engaged in everything, maybe it is not necessary to tell you about all of it, but I was involved in every sort of thing—both oil and gas prospecting, iron ores, gold and diamonds and whatever. In the taiga we transported all our cargo on reindeer. We put twenty kilograms on a deer, there were sixty deer in a team, and a deer driver. Sometimes deer would fall. Very difficult work.

“Geology is not a profession, as we say, but a way of life. That attracted me, and I stayed. We were constantly studying the geological configuration of Yakutia, and as a result we made some unique discoveries. Not all the deposits we found were in this category, but some were absolutely unique. Udokan copper, for example, located in the Chita area on the border with Yakutia—this is one of the largest deposits of this copper in the world. Also of course there were very rare stones that we found. The best example is charoite. Three of us discovered charoite together—two Irkutsk geologists and I. I was the chief of the geological party that conducted the geological shooting of the formation where we found the charoite. Some eroded deposits in this formation looked unusual to us, so we hit them with a hammer—a geologist is always with a hammer—and we gathered samples of stones that we then brought back to Yakutsk, and our colleague, Vera Parfentyevna Rogova, named this stone ‘charoite.’ Since then it has been determined that charoite is a previously unknown stone. Also, no other deposits of charoite have been found anywhere in the world. Well, it is a very beautiful stone, it has been made into beautiful vases, some rich people even make basins for baths out of it.

“You ask what is my most favorite place in Yakutia, and I would not say that I have a most favorite, but there is a very beautiful river, the Chara. Charoite is named after it. The word means ‘a charm,’ or in plural,
chary
, it is sorcery, witchcraft. The rocks along this clear and pure Chara River are crumpled in folds, various and multicolored, green, blue, red, all capriciously bent. I have gone on vacation on a Danube River cruise, and people admire that river, of course. But the rocks there are gray. On the Chara there is such a combination of rocks! Do not think every cook praises only his own broth. I agree that the Danube is a good river, but the rocks on our Chara are more beautiful, in my opinion.

“I spoke earlier about Yakutsk as a clean place, and I can repeat: I have read much on ecology from meetings and international conferences, and I know there are problems of great importance for the whole
globe. Let’s take oxygen, this is most important, its consumption still increases, but natural places that produce oxygen become always fewer and fewer. Yakutia is notable for huge areas occupied by woods. This is true of all Siberia, in fact. Approximately 85 to 88 percent of the Siberian woods is still intact. In Yakutia we have a strong movement for leaving Yakutia as an ecological oasis. Leave it untouched—woods, moss, tundra (which makes oxygen, too). That is first. Second, there are a lot of rivers here, with excellent pure water. There is certainly pollution, as in the places where steamships go along the Lena River. But all other rivers in Yakutia are extremely pure, with reserves of water for all mankind. There is also a deficiency of freshwater today on the planet, as is known. We in Yakutia have freshwater here. By preserving woods here we preserve these rivers. If we cut the woods down, the rivers will dry up, speaking simply. We are convinced that the main riches of Yakutia and Siberia in general are woods and pure water.

“Certainly, you know, there are minerals here about which I have already spoken, and maybe it is also necessary for mankind to extract them. I myself discovered deposits, I feel we cannot do without them, without them there will be no money, and people need somewhere to work. But how to organize this extraction? We have a proverb:
I volki sytie i ovtsy tselye
[The wolves are fed and yet the sheep are whole]. We will try to do both, extraction and preservation, but we believe our main task is the preservation of riches for generations to come.

“I assure you, I give my word to anybody, that 90 percent of our taiga territory today is absolutely pure. That is, there is no infection, no illness, no pollution. I can sincerely tell you, I worrylessly take a mug, or a cup, or a glass, and I come up to any puddle, and I scoop and drink, and I am not afraid. All of us who journey in the taiga do this, and not a single time was anybody poisoned. I actually put bread right on the ground. I put sausage on moss. All of us agree—as soon as we leave the city we can put anything on the grass. Do not think that we are savages. No. We understand that in other places there is infection and pollution. But here in our taiga I am sure I won’t be poisoned. In this sense Yakutia is good for tourists who want to look at nature and not be afraid. We have plenty of such completely clean places here.”

Somewhere along the academy’s dim corridors were two museums, one devoted to the geology of Yakutia and the other to its paleontology. Both opened to visitors only by invitation. Sergei Shibaev said we should see them and he made a call, and an elderly female curator with an assistant appeared. The geology museum resembled a cross between a museum and a packed-full storeroom, with exhibits and wooden storage cases crowding one another along narrow aisles. Anatoly Petrov, who accompanied us, proudly produced a box of samples of charoite, which is a gaudy purplish stone, exactly in keeping with the country’s overall color scheme. Studying a photo display on the wall, I tried to make visual sense of the big black-and-white panoramas of Yakutia’s Mirny diamond mine, which appeared as a giant, tiered, conical hole in the earth with tiny trucks spiraling down into it. The curators passed around glass-topped wooden boxes divided into compartments, each of which contained a Yakutia diamond. The diamonds came in many sizes, from lima bean to regular aspirin pill size, and their tints ranged from clear to pewter to champagne. They rattled richly in their boxes when shaken.