Sibir (24 page)

“We started small, designing and building one of the first self-propelled steel barges to be used in Siberia. It was a success. It had to be, because we
knew
this river. We went on to bigger things. Eventually we got permission to do it all ourselves. What really convinced Moscow was when we designed and built a 1,000-ton self-powered barge that only drew one metre, forty centimetres of water when it was fully loaded.

“Now we have eighteen types of river craft in serial production and we supply them to all Siberian river fleets. The only ships we do not build are heavy-duty tugs, hydrofoils and passenger boats. We leave those to the Russians, just to keep them happy!

“We are proud of what we have done on our Lena. Forty years ago the whole river fleet consisted of thirty little wooden steamboats and a couple of hundred wooden barges. Fifteen years ago there was still not a single self-propelled barge, and very few steel boats of any kind. Nowadays just four of our 3,000-ton self-propelled barges can carry as much as the whole Lena fleet of the 1930s – and we have scores of those big fellows.

“Mother Lena has always been the front street of Yakutia. They used to say in the west we would never be anything but a wilderness because we had no railroads, and nobody could afford to build them through the taiga and the mountains. Well, we don’t need them. Almost all our country lies along the ‘coast’ of the Lena and its tributaries, and there is hardly a stream of hers we cannot
turn into a highway. On the rougher ones we use air-pillow boats that skim along a few feet above the surface of the rapids. If there is never a railroad built into our land, it won’t matter in the least.”

Victor stopped to wet his whistle and a middle-aged Yakut journalist took up the theme.

“It isn’t only in summer that the Lena works for us. Once the ice thickens, her surface becomes a highway for truck transport. Convoys drive all the way from Osetrovo to Mirny and Yakutsk, and trucks from here go even farther down the lower river.”

“Trucks!” Victor interrupted contemptuously. “If the idiots who make up the supply orders for the year knew what they were doing, the trucks could stay at home and sleep all winter.
We
can carry all the freight Yakutia will ever need. That’s
our
job, friend!”

I distracted him.

“How many vessels are there on the river, Victor?”

He gave me a calculating look and then his red face split in an immense grin.

“Military secret! Not for the ears of capitalist spies! To tell the truth, I really don’t know. The fleets on all big Siberian rivers are pooled, and each river can draw on the pool according to its needs. If there is a lot of work to do on the Yenisei, then we send vessels there to help out. Other times, they send ships to us. Tankers, refrigerator ships and all the bigger self-propelled barges are dual purpose, designed for coastwise passages as well as river work. Because of their shallow draft they can hug the arctic coast and find open water when the bigger ships can’t move because of ice offshore.”

We turned away from Zhataj with its dry-docks, marine railways and shipyards, and the boat reared up on her foils again. This time we flew upstream, passing Yakutsk which was wreathed in a purple haze of wood-smoke from the chimneys of its older sections.

It was a superb autumnal day. The river rolled as smooth as oil and seemed to be as wide as the horizon,
although in fact it is only twelve miles broad at Yakutsk (it is thirty miles wide near its mouth). The banks were low, with occasional great buttes rising from the dark water. The current was swift but the channel was well buoyed, taking us between willow-covered islands, clear of the ever-shifting sandbars. Despite the lateness of the season there was an amazing amount of shipping, ranging from six-thousand-horsepower tugs (built in Poland) pushing or towing long strings of barges, to a two-thousand-ton tanker so deeply laden that her decks appeared to be awash. Here and there we whipped past dredges still busily at work deepening the channel. Occasionally we passed small craft carrying river fishermen and hunters bound upstream to look for geese and ducks.

I went forward to visit the skipper and found him perched in an aircraft-type cockpit, plexiglass enclosed, in front of a formidable panel of instruments. He offered to let me take command, but I know my limitations. I can sail a boat adequately but I would be bound to make a mess of flying one!

After an hour’s run the banks began to rise until we were whistling past high, forested cliffs. A low mountain appeared ahead and Nikolai Yakutsky pointed to it.

“Tatar Haia. The sacred mountain of the Yakut people. In the middle of it lies the valley of Tuey Nada where the Yakut nation was born. Very long ago a chief named Elai, son of a great leader in middle-Asia, led his people north and east until they reached the banks of the Lena under Tatar Haia. Elai carried with him the maxims of our people engraved on a stone tablet. When he saw the flowing waters of the river he flung the tablet in and gave the order to his followers to drop their saddle blankets. The Yakut had found the land they sought.”

Nikolai also told me that in 1787 an American traveller came downstream to this place in an open boat from the vicinity of Irkutsk, then went on to Yakutsk where he spent the winter. This man’s name was Ledyard. When I
returned home I dug out the account of his journey and found this description of the Yakut people:

The Yakut have not changed all that much since Ledyard’s day.

Nikolai also talked about a United States Naval expedition which sailed through Bering Strait in 1879 in a quixotic attempt to reach the North Pole. The expedition ship,
Jeanette
, under Lieutenant DeLong, was caught in the polar pack and spent two years drifting aimlessly in the ice until she was finally crushed not far north of the New Siberian Islands. In September, 1881, word reached General Tschernaiyev, the Governor of Yakutsk, that Evenk reindeer herders had found eleven white men, all close to death, at the mouth of the Lena. These were the sole survivors of the
Jeanette.
Nurtured by Evenk and Yakut people, the eleven were brought to Yakutsk and finally restored to their homes. Strangely enough, the tragedy of the
Jeanette
is well remembered in Yakutia but is all but forgotten in the United States.

Apart from river traffic, the world we were flying past seemed as wild and uninhabited as it must have been in Ledyard’s time. It came as a considerable shock when we rounded a great bluff and saw a complex of modern resort hotels clinging to the slopes of a wooded valley. Called Tabaga, these hotels belong to the Railway Workers Trade Union and in summer house about 1,800 people from all over the
U.S.S.R.
who prefer to spend
their vacations in the far north rather than on the shores of the Black Sea!

“Tourism is important here,” Ivan explained. “All-Union river tours sail throughout the summer from Osetrovo on big cruise ships. They even go northward past Yakutsk. Next year they will go to the mouth of the Lena and to Tiksi, where, if they wish, the passengers can transfer to ocean-going ships of the Northern Sea Route fleet and sail west to Archangel and Murmansk, or east and south to Vladivostock. The authorities think it important for people from European Russia to have a chance to see for themselves what the northlands are like.”

A little more than a hundred kilometres south of Yakutsk we came to the town of Pokrovskoe, founded by immigrant Russians two hundred and forty years ago. Through almost all that time it remained unchanging; a cluster of log houses strung along the high bank of the river and known to the outer world only by the fearsome stories told by the few exiles who escaped from it during Tsarist times. Now, although it is still a town of wooden houses, it will soon be a city of concrete apartment blocks. A huge factory is being built here to take advantage of a limestone deposit and of a newly constructed cement plant. The factory will manufacture prefabricated building panels, concrete blocks and similar materials for shipment all over Yakutia on the waters of the Lena.

We went ashore on the beach, climbed the bluff and wandered through the old town’s meandering, tree-lined streets. Victor and Nikolai headed for the liquor store to replenish our supplies. I followed Ivan to the co-op store to see a friend of his, and I was startled to find a sporting goods department which offered, amongst other items, fencing foils and masks. Whatever the shortages in Moscow, there appeared to be no dearth of consumer goods in Pokrovskoe.

Nor was there any shortage of reading matter. The bookstore, in an old log building, had a stock of books,
prints and paintings which would have been impressive in any Canadian city – but the population of Pokrovskoe was just under three thousand people. Ivan found copies of his newest book here and happily bought one and inscribed it for me on the spot.

One of the great joys of Yakutsk, as opposed to almost every other place I visited in the Soviet Union, was that although the people were immensely proud of their city, and anxious to have me see it all, they never forced the pace. There were no conducted tours; no tightly scheduled attempts to cram me so full of information it would come running out my ears. Things just seemed to happen in Yakutsk, and they were always the right things, at the right time.

My visit to the Yakut State University was a case in point. I had decided not to bother going there, assuming it would provide me with nothing more than additional masses of statistics. But one cold morning in October as I was walking down the main street I became aware that a slight, beautiful Yakut girl who seemed to be no more than seventeen, was dogging my footsteps. I slowed, turned and smiled. She drew alongside and very shyly asked in English what time it was. I told her, but she made no move to go on her way. Then she said:

“Tovarish Moyet, please. We students at the University wish you to visit us. Will you come? Many have read your books, and we have heard about your travels in our country. We admire you so much. If it would not be too much trouble …?”

Moisie Efrimov was waiting for me at the hotel. He asked what I would like to do that afternoon – if anything. He did not seem at all surprised when I replied that I simply
had
to visit the university.

Yakutsk is a students’ town. One out of every three of
its inhabitants is enrolled in one of the innumerable schools, institutes or colleges, either for day or for night classes; and the university is the students’ citadel. Although it was founded only in 1956, it has already become the heart of the city. Physical construction cannot keep up with its growth and, apart from its massive three-storey central building (which is itself still uncompleted), classrooms for the 4,300 regular students are scattered all over the place in any structure which can house them.

“What do the buildings matter?” a second-year Evenk student asked me. “The important things to us are the best books, equipment and instructors; and we have those. We would come here for those things alone even if we had to sleep in tents all winter.”

I wandered around the main building with a group of students. The science labs were filled with esoteric equipment, all brand new and much of it made in Czechoslovakia and Rumania. The library occupied the largest single portion of the building, and it bulged at the seams with nearly half-a-million volumes. The professors and instructors of the sixteen departments (there are seven faculties, including medicine) held surprisingly high qualifications. One of the department heads (all of whom are Yakut) explained:

“When it was announced we were going to start the university, we were buried under applications from teachers all over the Soviet Union. Even when we explained that living conditions would not be so good at first, and we had not too much money, it made no difference. So we took the best and today our standing shows us near the top in the Soviet Union. However, that is not all due to the volunteers. Sixty per cent of our teachers are Yakut.”

It is really a students’ university. All regular students (there are an additional three thousand night students and students taking correspondence courses) are on
scholarships. Most of them live in residences which they run themselves by means of elected councils. Those who live out receive extra grants to cover the higher cost of board and room. All textbooks are free. The Central Students’ Council, the Student Trade Union and the Komsomol Committee all have representation, with full voting rights, on the Governing Board, where they exercise a strong influence on policy. The Prorector, Ivan Mikhailovich Bruhanov, a Yakutian-born Russian, was a little rueful about that.

“We have been reading about student power in American universities and the complaints of their boards about students trying to take a hand in too many things. Here the students already have a hand in everything! Sometimes I don’t know who is running this univeristy, they or we. Do you know every student group has an elected monitor who can challenge any of his Dean’s decisions and bring it to the Governing Board? Not only that, but a Dean cannot even take disciplinary action against a student without permission of the monitor. It was not the same when I was a student. But, never mind, it isn’t so bad. They are a headstrong lot, and they make mistakes, but they are loyal to the university and as determined to make it a good place as any of the staff.”

Later I talked privately to three students, two Yakut and one Russian. I asked whether they really felt they had much freedom to determine how the university was run. A twenty-year-old Yakut girl, studying history and languages, answered.