Sibir (34 page)

“In that case we have a different technique. We use bulldozers to heap up a ridge of snow, then we level the ridge and compact and smooth it with the road-builder. There is enough pressure generated to weld the snow crystals together so we get a kind of opaque, granular ice. It will carry reasonably heavy traffic. If the surface does get bad, we just add more snow, and pressure-harden it into a new surface.”

It sounded a little bit like science fiction to me and perhaps my skepticism was apparent. At any rate Victor Nazarov decided I needed proof.

“Leonid! Give me one of your Maz trucks! Farley! Come with me! We’re going to Chukotka!”

I was delighted. Chukotka is one of the regions in the
Soviet Union which really
is
off limits to foreigners because it stretches to within a few miles of Alaska, and both sides in the Cold War face each other across the Bering Strait with the maximum array of technological horrors.

The Maz (Minsk Auto Works) turned out to be a twenty-two-ton behemoth, and we had to climb a ladder to get into the cab. Victor was in his element. Embracing the steering wheel lovingly with both arms, he piloted the monster out of the yard and headed east.

There was a chilling moment on the outskirts of the town when we passed a grim array of grey buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fences, at the corners of which stood high watchtowers. Yura’s joke about forced labour camps at Tchersky suddenly went very sour. Victor nodded his big head at the camp.

“Ha!” he bellowed. “Very dangerous place! Storage for atomic materials going to Pevek. You want to wear lead pants if you go in there!”

We drove eastward for about a hundred miles, well into Chukotka, and I saw nothing except an almost endless line of big trucks going both ways; a couple of tracked recovery vehicles; one arctic fox who seemed to think he had fallen into a foxy Hades and was scampering wildly to evade the mechanical monsters thundering down upon him; and a waste of tundra muskeg thinly dotted with dwarf spruce trees.

The road was as it had been described, except that somebody had been remiss about filling in the holes with steaming mud – or with anything else. I would
not
recommend it for pleasure driving.

As we bumped along, Victor talked about his true soul mates, the long-haul drivers.

“In the old days (anything before last year was the ‘old days’ to Victor) we moved the trucks in convoys so if one broke down there would be others at hand to help. But that was slow and the drivers complained they were losing time. So we began letting them run on their own, and
that’s the way they do it, even in big blizzards and at 70° below zero.

“Because of the big tonnage we have to move, every truck runs twenty-four hours a day all winter, except for layoff time for maintenance. There are three drivers to a truck, but only two are with the vehicle; the other is off duty, resting. There are rest houses and repair stations every hundred miles and recovery vehicles patrol between them. As you see, almost every truck hauls a trailor. The average load is fifteen tons.

“A truck is expected to last seven to eight years up here, despite the tough work and the climate. That’s because our maintenance is the best. We use twelve-ton Tatras from Czechoslovakia; sixteen-ton Urals, and these big Maz’s. We call them all ‘boats.’ The winter taiga and tundra is as rough on men and equipment as the Arctic Ocean, but our boats go through when the big ships can’t move.

“Our lads work on incentives; they like to see who can haul the most and make the most trips. They’re real professionals. They get almost as much training as an airplane pilot, and make more money. The average up here is seven hundred rubles a month – more than the President in Moscow gets! We’ve got a tough trade union. If a driver works overtime he has to get that amount of time off later on, with full pay; and on top of that he gets two or three times his normal salary while doing the overtime.”

Not all the trucks are on the Tchersky-Bilibino-Pevek run. Some of them drive six hundred miles south on the frozen Kolyma and then climb onto an all-weather highway running southeast across the mountains to Magadan, whose seaport is now kept open all year round by icebreakers. However, if they turn west on this same highway they come to Yakutsk, and from there can drive another seven hundred miles south to reach the Trans Siberian Railway where it skirts the Chinese border.

The fabled isolation of Siberian towns in winter – even
the most northerly of them – has become a myth; and prominent among the mythbreakers are the tough young men who drive their “boats” wherever need dictates across the frozen land.

The truckers were relative latecomers in the mythbreaking business. In 1926 Soviet pilots, flying stick-and-string little aircraft, had already penetrated the arctic.

I heard something of the story of those early days from a big, florid, red-nosed pilot who originally came from Kazakhstan and who had spent thirty-five years flying in the north. When I met him in 1966, Vladimir Sedlerevich was the Director of the Polar Aviation base at Tchersky.

He and his companions first went into the north because of the driving ambitions of Otto Schmidt, who realized that ships alone could not master the ice of the North East Passage. Ships needed eyes aloft to find channels through the pack, and they needed meteorological data from remote outposts along the route – most of which could only be supplied and maintained by air. So the remarkable organization known as Polar Aviation came into being. By 1935 its fleet of over a hundred aircraft was not only servicing the Northern Sea Route but was flying on a more or less regular basis into almost every corner of Siberia.

Schmidt, the dreamer and the doer, was not content. He had early realized that the Arctic Ocean was in fact a mediterranean sea, surrounded by polar lands which might one day be linked to each other in commerce and in friendship. However, in the 1930s almost nothing was known about the nature of that sea of ice or of conditions in the air above it.

In 1936 Schmidt proposed that this gap in human knowledge be filled. He planned to establish a manned meteorological and oceanographic station on the drifting ice at the North Pole – a point where no man, with the possible exception of the American, Dr. Frederick Cook,
had ever stood. Using this as a weather and communications relay base, Schmidt hoped to begin transpolar flights on the shortest route between Moscow and the
U.S.A.

On May 20, 1937, a converted four-engined bomber whose wheels had been replaced by enormous skis climbed laboriously into cloudy skies above Rudolph Island in the Franz Joseph Archipelago. Head winds reduced the ground speed to a crawl. Cloud cover forced the plane to climb until her people lost sight of the wilderness of ice below. After ten hours the navigator reported they were above their target.

They went down through the cloud and broke out over a waste of crushed pack ice. There was no fuel to spare for a reconnaisance. The pilot picked what looked to be the best potential ice landing field and put the plane’s nose down. She touched. A drogue parachute spilled out from her tail and slowed her to a stop.

During the next few days three more four-engined planes landed at the Pole. When the planes departed they left behind them a meteorological and oceanographic station staffed by four men who were destined to remain on the pack for nine months while drifting 1,300 miles across the polar basin, finally to be picked up by Soviet ice-breakers off the east coast of Greenland, not far north of Iceland.

Barely two weeks after drift station North Pole One became operational, a big
NO
-25 aircraft lifted from Moscow airport. Sixty-three hours later the red-winged plane landed at Portland, Oregon, at the end of a 5,300-mile non-stop flight across the arctic mediterranean. Less than a month later, Mikhail Gromov brought the second
NO
-25 from Moscow to North America. Gromov flew non-stop to the Mexican border before circling back to land at San Jacinto, California.

The success of these two flights went to the heads of the powers in Moscow. They ordered another flight for August 12; but instead of sticking with the trusty
NO
-25,
they decreed that a new and relatively untried commercial aircraft, the
N
-209, should be used instead.

At 1:40 p.m. of the 12th, Levanevsky, the pilot, reported being over North Pole One at an altitude of 20,000 feet and experiencing strong headwinds and icing. It was the last that was ever heard of the plane or of its crew.

It was not Levanevsky’s death, but the approach of war, the war itself, and the ensuing years of chill hostility between East and West which forced the termination of Soviet efforts to establish a regular transpolar flight between Russia and North America.

“Too bad we had to give it up,” Sedlerevich said regretfully. “But it didn’t put us out of work. There was plenty to do at home.”

Polar Aviation now operates a fleet of over three thousand aircraft, ranging from single-engine
AN
-2’
S
(the standard “bush” plane) to the new trijet Yak-40
STOL
(short-take-off-landing) passenger planes, and including nine types of helicopter. There is scheduled service to every community in the Siberian north which has more than one thousand population, and frequent non-sched services to all the rest. Arctic airports are amongst the busiest – considering the size of the towns they serve – in the Soviet Union. Tchersky handles ten scheduled landings every day, including the daily “Arctic Lateral” flight each way from Moscow to Chukotka, along the rim of the Arctic Ocean. In 1969 Tchersky had a circulation of six thousand tons of cargo and 97,000 passengers.

A special air fleet services the Polar Drift Stations on the arctic ice, of which there have been more than forty since North Pole One was established in 1937. The roster of services performed by other wings covers almost every need of the arctic communities: air ambulances, flying doctors, ice reconnaissance, trapper supply, exploration support, air-land-sea rescue, mail and general communications.

“But our biggest single task,” said Sedlerevich “is
mass passenger transport. People are much more willing to come and live in the north if they have fast, convenient, cheap and comfortable flights in and out whenever they have a mind to take a trip. We give them that. At any one time as many as a third of the people in the new northern towns and cities may be travelling south, east, and west, on holiday. Sometimes I think nobody in this country stays still long enough to drink a glass of tea.

“We have mastered arctic flying so well now that the whole thing has become pretty routine. All the same there are times when our mastery is challenged. Last autumn, for instance, the north gave us something to remember.

“Near the end of September the cartographic ship
Inij
was caught in the ice during a hurricane. She damaged her rudder and went out of control and finally blew ashore on a pile of rocks some five hundred miles from here, and a hundred miles off the coast.

“It was a hell of a storm – winds of eighty miles an hour and snow so thick you could see nothing. All the lifeboats were smashed, and the crew of sixty seamen and scientists didn’t have much chance.
Inij
began to break up and two young chaps took the devil’s own risk and tried to reach a nearby islet in a rubber boat to get a lifeline to the land. They made it, but lost the line and found they were alone on the islet with a pair of angry polar bears.

“We had word of what had happened immediately, and within an hour had our three biggest helicopters –
MIL
-4’s – heading for the wreck. It was a calculated risk. Normally we won’t operate more than sixty miles offshore, and then only in good weather; but this was no time for the rule book. The first helicopter reached the wreck in time for the radio operator to jump out and shoot the bears. The pilots reported back that they could operate from the islet if they had fuel delivered to them there. There was no real place for fixed-wing planes to land, but some of my boys loaded up their
AN
-2’s with extra fuel and flew off to see what could be
done. The wind was on their side. It blew so hard that, by landing into it, they could put down on a patch of level rock only about a hundred metres long. In ordinary weather they couldn’t have landed or taken off in that distance, particularly loaded.

“Now our helicopters had the fuel to fight their way out to the wreck, and between the three of them they made sixty lifts, bringing the people off the
Inij
one at a time to the little island. From there they were ferried to the mainland by the
AN
-2’s.

“There were a lot of doubtful moments. The wind was so strong and the seas breaking so high that the lifelines from the helicopters would fly straight out although they had a weighted end on them. The lads solved that by tying their anchors to the ends of the lines.

“One of my best pilots did that, and the wind gusted as he was lifting a man off, and the anchor caught in the ship’s rigging. So there he was, tethered to the ship; and he couldn’t cut the line because the man on the end of it would have been lost.

“It was no time for long thoughts. He dropped a little to let the line sag, then gave the machine full power and lifted up. The fluke broke off the anchor and he was free – but he might just as easily have torn the guts right out of his craft.

“Six of my lads got the Lenin Medal for heroism out of that three days’ work. And Tchersky gave them a special vote of applause – twenty cases of champagne being saved for New Year’s Day. Now they spend half their time listening to the marine radio, just hoping for another wreck to come their way!”

I
T WAS FRUSTRATING
to be so close to Chukotka and yet not be able to investigate the place. It had a particular interest for me, since not only does it lie immediately adjacent to the North American arctic, but its people are close neighbours and even relatives of the Eskimos amongst whom I once lived.