Sibir (40 page)

He smiled affably and in a somewhat pedantic manner explained.

“We don’t think such things are very important. It is more important for us to develop an earthly technology for the betterment of man and the preservation of the terrestrial environment. It is also bad economics and bad science to go space voyaging at the present time. In another twenty years, if we have straightened out our problems here on earth, technology will be so much farther advanced it will be safer and far cheaper to start playing extra-terrestrial games. I consider space flights a distraction from pressing problems here on earth. I doubt if any nation can afford such distractions at this time.”

Sour grapes because of America’s space progress? Perhaps, but during my travels in the Soviet Union I never encountered anything approaching the near hysterical infatuation with space flights which
characterizes North America. Doubtless it did exist when Gagarin made his first trip into space, but it seems to have cooled to negligible levels since then.

The restaurant was the scene of many intriguing conversations. One day I sat beside a middle-aged journalist for a Moscow wire service. He had travelled widely in western countries and was devastatingly outspoken about his profession.

“Foreign correspondents from capitalist and from socialist countries have one thing in common. Their main job is to look for what is bad in the other fellow’s country and report on that. If they can’t find what they need, they manufacture it out of idle gossip or even out of the air. We do it. You do it. The whole thing is a farce. It is also a tragedy. Why can’t we look for the good in each other’s countries and write about that? It would be nice to bring the truth into print sometimes in the service of easing hatred and enmity. The trouble is it would serve to bring people closer together rather than driving them farther apart and this would not be tolerable to those who find more advantage in fostering hatred than friendship.”

“Many of our western correspondents in Russia say they can’t get at the truth.” I protested. “They are restricted in travel, and few Russians, except officials, malcontents, or paid sources, will associate with them. How can they do better than they do?”

He laughed.

“You think that is unique here? You should try being a Soviet correspondent in the
U.S.A.
! It is all part of the same pattern, and this kind of mutual harrassment of reporters exactly serves the purposes of those who send them out. Please do not pretend to be naïve. You know as well as I do that we correspondents, no matter what country we come from, are propaganda mongers because this is what our employers expect from us. Never mind. Fill up! Here’s a toast to freedom of the press – wherever it is that she is hiding herself.”

Throughout my travels I had been amazed – and
sometimes unnerved – by the frankness with which Russians talked about subjects which I had supposed were taboo, if not downright dangerous. However, nowhere did I encounter such outspokenness as in Magadan. The Magadanians said things one might have hoped to have heard whispered in private, but they said them in loud voices in public places. It would appear either that we westerners have been badly misinformed about the amount of freedom of speech permitted in the Soviet Union, or else the Magadan branch of the
KGB
needs a good shake-up. The truth seems to be that the people of Russia in general, and of Siberia in particular, simply aren’t privy to the conclusions of some western journalists that after a brief liberalization under Khruschev, the lid is being forced back down again.

I discussed this matter with several English- and French-speaking men and women at a party one night, and their responses to the suggestion that the Stalin dictatorship was returning were illuminating. A middle-aged lady physician expressed her feelings in this wise:

“Our reaction against Stalin after his death was understandable, but it was too drastic. Nobody is all devil, and Stalin wasn’t either. It really wasn’t fair to write him out of history as if he had never existed. Also, it wasn’t possible. He was ruthless and a paranoid, but do you know any great leaders who aren’t a little of both? He was also longsighted. He knew that the capitalist powers would some day try again to destroy our society by force. That thought clouded his mind and preoccupied him for twenty years. He was determined they would not succeed, and in his determination he did some horrible things. But in the end, you know, he was right in his monomania. If it had not been for him, fascist Germany might very well have smashed us … while you others in the West wept with one eye and winked with the other.”

“What you call the rehabilitation of Stalin isn’t what you think it is,” interjected a journalist. “The fact that
we can now evaluate him and give him what measure of due he deserves, along with the blame, means we feel safe from a return of that kind of terror. Nobody will ever forgive him for some of the things he did; and if anyone tries that sort of thing on us again, it will be the worse for him. Russian people are not going to give up their new freedom so easily.”

A novelist made this point. “We’ve got our teeth into freedom now. Maybe we are pushing along too fast, with too much eagerness. It is true there are still Stalinists about and they try to slap us down, with some success. But it is we who are gaining ground in the long run and they who are losing it.”

A girl political science student had the last word.

“You know, we are fairly well informed about what is happening in the capitalist world. We know a lot about events in the United States, and we think it is better to live in a country, and in a society, which has endured severe personal and political oppression, but is shifting away from that sort of thing, than to live in a country which had a very great deal of freedom but is now shifting toward a repressive, cabal-governed society. Perhaps you would be wiser to examine what is happening in your own countries rather than spend so much time condemning what once happened in ours. We will see which of us, in the future, can claim to have the most freedom.”

The dual nature of the new world of the Soviet north was again evident here. Magadan itself was essentially a European town, mostly populated by immigrants from the far west. There were native people in the city holding executive and administrative jobs, but there were very few in any of Magadan’s industries – the shipyards, factories, foundries, construction plants or the transport companies whose thousands of trucks travel as far afield as the mouth of the Yana River on the Arctic Ocean, fifteen days hard driving to the northwest of Magadan. Nor
were there many native people employed in the gold mines. Most of them live and work on the 107 collective and state farms where they engage in fur breeding, trapping, reindeer raising, cattle farming, and sea-mammal hunting. The big cities belong to the whites; the smaller towns are divided between white and native peoples; and the countryside (apart from the mining enterprises) belongs almost exclusively to the natives.

One windy day, with snow flurries obscuring the bald old mountains, we borrowed some Bobyks and drove thirty miles northeast to the venerable town of Ola; once home of the possessed and, centuries before that, site of one of the earliest lodgements by Russians on the shores of the Pacific.

It was a hair-raising trip over icy roads that climbed through mountain saddles where the wind from off the ocean was gusting at hurricane force. A dark, cliff-girt sea lay before us. We turned north along it, skirting a savage and fearsome coast whose roaring surf sent spume geysering over strange conical rocks to salt-smear the windshields of our cars.

The rough, sub-alpine slopes inland from us glowed an unearthly shade of green. Nikolai explained that this was a special forage grass developed for arctic climates which could endure when ordinary grass turned brown and died. It was used to feed the tough breed of northern cattle. Harvested after the first heavy frost, it remained green even after it was cut, making bizarre emerald haystacks on snow-covered fields.

Ola, with about four thousand inhabitants, had come a long way from the days of the possessed. Neat streets of single-family homes surrounded by gardens were interspersed with new apartment blocks. The people were a meld of Old Russian settlers and Evenk. The Evenk did most of the farming and the Russians most of the fishing.

The place of greatest interest to me was the Magadan Agricultural College, and I spent several hours there among six hundred students of twenty nationalities, most
of them Small Peoples of the north. This is a residential college, and the students come to it from all over northeastern Siberia to take four-year courses in reindeer husbandry, fur farming, cattle raising, farm management and, suprisingly, poultry breeding, a new arctic venture which is exclusively in the hands of women. After graduation the students return to the collectives and state farms from which they came, equipped to apply the most modern methods and technology to the age-old pursuits of their ancestors.

I have seldom met such ebullient youngsters, or seen a better-looking lot. They followed me about in mobs. My right hand grew cramped from signing autographs and my voice grew hoarse from trying to answer questions about the Canadian north. Their principal, Olga Terenteva, was a buxom, dark-skinned and intense woman with a bubbling laugh and limitless enthusiasm which seemed to be shared by her students.

“Do you know the entire cost of training each of the students and of feeding and paying them for four years is recovered within three years once they return to their farms, by increases in production?” Olga told me. “You have no idea how much happiness it is to work with young people like these. They are wild to learn so they can raise the status of their own people and improve conditions of their lives. They seem to have the dedication missionaries were once said to have. They are so very much alive, so strong in their youth, so confident in what they can do. It is impossible not to love them.”

I left the College festooned like a Cockney Button King. Scores of students had pinned their lapel badges all over my jacket. This giving of lapel badges (they represent the localities the donors come from, the organizations people belong to, or simply great events) is endemic amongst the young. The badges are highly valued and to give one’s badge is to give one’s wholehearted friendship.

The general habit of gift-giving is a mixed blessing in the Soviet Union. One soon learns not to admire anything
which is in any degree portable, or it may suddenly be yours. Once, in a Tchersky nursery school, Claire admired a Russian teddy bear – “Mischa” – and immediately a child of four or five years solemnly shoved it into her arms. When she tried to return it, the nursery school director stopped her.

“No, no! You must keep it. If you give it back you will break the child’s heart.”

Mischa accompanied us all the way to Moscow where, thank heavens, it was admired by another child to whom Claire was able to give it without feeling any sense of guilt. Stuffed bears, a balalaika, innumerable books, the famous frozen fish, carved bowls, ivory tusks, and items, as they say, too numerous to mention, all poured upon us until we learned wisdom. Our greatest difficulty came when we were viewing artists’ works. To admire was to receive. Not to admire was to crush the artist’s soul!

I very much wanted to see a Soviet fishing village. Having spent many years in Newfoundland where I had watched the death of hundreds of vigorous fishing communities as a result of governmental conclusions that they were “uneconomic” in the modern age, and the consequent decision to uproot and transport the populations to so-called “industrial growth centres” (where there was no industry and no growth), I was curious to see how the Soviets had dealt with the same problem.

Nikolai Ponomarenko took me to Sugar Loaf, a village fishing operation on the Soviet new style. Sugar Loaf lies on a bleak, gale-whipped shore not far from Ola, and it does not even have a harbour. For centuries its people fished “from the beach,” launching their oared boats each dawn and hauling them high above tide level when they returned ashore at dusk. In 1948 the Magadan area fishery was rationalized into a series of six combines which, together, formed the Magadan Fisheries Trust. Of the fifty-eight fishing villages (many of them still very primitive) which existed at that time, seven were abandoned by the decision of their inhabitants, who moved to
nearby villages. Fifty-one were retained as potentially viable communities of the future. Sugar Loaf, despite its lack of a harbour, was one. Instead of engaging in a dozen peripheral fishing activities, as it had done in the past, it was given the task of concentrating on the herring fishery. A large, modern plant was constructed to process herring.

I toured the place with its manager, a hard-bitten, craggy-faced Old Russian who had spent forty years in the business and had lived through the transition from a primitive, subsistence fishery to a highly efficient and lucrative modern enterprise.

“We did it in stages. At first, after we built the herring pickling and preserving factory, the fishermen continued to use small boats. Gradually we introduced new and better methods. We built a fleet of inshore seiners of wood – not expensive boats – but they doubled production. Sugar Loaf’s population was growing and the production increase absorbed the labour growth; but to go on doing that we had to increase production. We followed a master plan which was to gradually phase out the inshore fishery in favour of midwater work. In the late 1950s we introduced the first of a fleet of all-purpose combined trawler-seiners, made of steel, and serially produced in large numbers.

“These were two-hundred tonners – you can see a couple out there now at the unloading dock. They can stay at sea a maximum of five months, following the herring on their migrations, and they are maintained at sea by special service ships. They tranship their catch at sea to three-thousand-ton refrigerator ships that are constantly shuttling between the fishing fleet and the shore factories. We could, you know, have put the new big 20,000-ton factory ships out there, but that would have smashed the lives of the shore-based people. There was no sense in that.