Sixty Degrees North (17 page)

On the shortest night of the year, I sat on Ninilchik beach, looking west. At midsummer, at every point on the parallel, the sun is above the horizon for just less than nineteen hours. And though it sets, it does so at such a shallow angle
that the light never entirely fades. At worst, in poor weather, these nights could be called gloomy; but if the sky is clear it will remain light enough outside to read a book (or to play golf, as Shetland tourist literature is fond of pointing out). It is a strange kind of light, this midnight glow. At home it is called the ‘simmer dim': a washed out blush, where colours fade and edges soften. Day melts seamlessly into day, and a connection is made.

At nine p.m., the sun was still high and a sword of light lay across Cook Inlet, resting its point upon the peak of Mount Redoubt. The mountains were paling into silhouettes then, with snow barely distinguishable from rock. They seemed to sit up, as though suspended just above the horizon, held aloft by a thin white line. Feather streaks of yellow cloud were ribboned through the blue sky. Just offshore, boats were still fishing, and through my binoculars I could see an otter floating on his back. A bald eagle was tormenting a raft of ducks, each one diving in panic as the raptor flew low above them, over and over. On the beach, four quad bikes hurtled noisily about, while a pair of eagles sat still at the wave-edge, attended by a squad of restless gulls.

By ten o'clock the sun was just over Mount Redoubt. The few clouds were backlit, glowing at their edges. A group of people further down the beach had built a campfire, and like me were waiting it out for midnight. I settled back and closed my eyes, with the wind against my face. I thought about where I was, where I'd been and where I was going. At that moment, I was halfway through my journey; I was halfway home.

By 11.30, the sun had slipped behind the mountains, and thick cloud was gathering over the land. The last dregs of the day washed over Cook Inlet, leaving only the sweet aftertaste of light. As midnight came, I picked up my bag and walked back towards the truck, leaving the night and the beach behind.

SIBERIA

exiled land

On a map of the world, there are few names that carry such a heavy burden as Siberia. Those four short syllables have come to signify more than just a place. They cast a shadow, and conjure a host of ugly images: of impenetrable forests and lawless towns, of poverty and alcoholism, of intense cold and intense cruelty. This is a region that lives in the mind, in daydream and in nightmare; it is more imagined than seen. And those imaginings, like a cloud of mirrors, reflect, disguise and distract from the land itself. This is a place almost lost behind its own myth.

To say anything at all about Siberia it is necessary to begin with size, for the enormity of the region is central to its story. Covering more than five million square miles – close to ten per cent of the world's landmass – Siberia has a population of less than forty million. It stretches from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and from the Mongolian steppes in the south to the frozen Arctic in the north. This is an area larger than the United States of America and Western Europe put together.

When I was twenty-one I went to Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia. I had found that wonderful name – Kamchatka – and a description in a travel brochure, and made up my mind to go. It was somewhere that nobody I knew had ever been before. It sounded exotic, and seemed, on the map at least, like a very long way away. Travelling there, from Shetland to London, from London to Moscow, from Moscow to Petropavlosk, it seemed even farther. That last
part of the journey, between Russia's capital and its most remote region, left me struggling to comprehend the vastness of the country. The flight lasted nine hours and crossed eight time zones. The country passed beneath us, hour after hour, emerging from the clouds now and then but revealing nothing. Land, water, space, nothing. What lay below seemed almost blank, in the way that a desert or an ocean does. From that height, that distance, it felt empty.

Kamchatka, like many parts of Russia, was effectively closed to outsiders during the Cold War, even to most of the country's own citizens. There was, and still is, a nuclear submarine base on the peninsula, close to Petropavlosk, the region's capital, which was founded in 1740 by Vitus Bering, and named after his two ships,
St Peter
and
St Paul
. Kamchatka was also a base for international surveillance, being, as it is, one of the closest points to the west coast of America, and on hillsides amid the trees that past was still in evidence. But in the decade or so that had passed between the end of the Soviet Union and my own visit, doors had begun to open to the outside. Individual travellers were still discouraged, but organised visits were possible, so I joined a small-group tour company – half a dozen strangers in a strange land – and went east.

We spent just two weeks on the peninsula, but in that time I fell desperately in love. Together with my fellow travellers, I clambered into the stinking maw of Mutnovsky volcano and camped for two days beneath it, as the tail end of a typhoon stranded us inside our battered tents. I bathed in hot pools that sprang like blessings from the earth. I stood beside the Kamchatka River as Steller's sea eagles cruised overhead and a young brown bear patrolled the opposite bank. Dumbstruck, I looked out over land so vast and so beautiful that I could hardly believe it was allowed to exist. I left Russia infatuated. Something in that extraordinary place grabbed me by the heart and refused to let go.

For most of my life I have felt myself somewhat distanced from love – within sight, but just out of reach. It is a feeling that mirrors the sense of separation that was with me from my youth. And though it may partly be of my own creation – an avoidance of that which it would hurt to lose – it is difficult to be sure. These knots in which we tangle ourselves are not tied consciously or by design, we simply wake one day and find ourselves bound. But because of this distance, those moments in which love, or something like love, have taken hold in me have been memorable and important. And this was one.

The sixtieth parallel runs through the north of the Kamchatka peninsula, then across the Sea of Okhotsk to the ‘mainland', passing close to the city of Magadan. That city, as much as any place in Siberia, has come to signify the horror for which, in the twentieth century, the region became known. For Magadan was the port and administrative centre of the Dalstroy organisation, which ran the gulags of the Russian northeast. These were the camps known collectively and infamously as Kolyma. The gulag system of forced labour camps, which reached its zenith under the watchful eye of Joseph Stalin, has come to be considered one of the most appalling acts of barbarism of the twentieth century. Many millions were incarcerated in these camps, and many millions died. The scale of what happened is almost as unimaginable as the scale of Siberia itself.

But the region's history as a place of exile and imprisonment did not begin with Stalin or Lenin, it goes back much further. Indeed, almost as soon as Russia started to explore the lands east of the Ural Mountains in the seventeenth century, Siberia's value as a dumping-ground for undesirables was recognised. In a twisted reflection of America's westward development, the movement of explorers, trappers and
traders in Russia was accompanied by another movement: of people forced into exile. It is an extraordinary fact that, while the first European Russian did not reach the Pacific coast until 1639, by the end of that century ten per cent of Siberia's population was already made up of convicts.

In the United States, the West became a symbol of hope and progress for the nation; in Russia, the East was always a darker and more ambiguous vision. It offered wealth, in the form of furs and later gold, but it always remained a place apart, far from the heart of the country. While America expanded to fill its natural boundaries, Russian power and wealth remained where it had always been, on the other side of the Urals. Siberia was conquered but never fully absorbed into the nation. Such was the extent to which the region was viewed as distant and distinct, indeed, that when the Decembrist revolutionaries were sent into exile in 1826 for plotting to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I, one of their number, Nikolay Basargin, wrote that he no longer considered himself to be ‘an inhabitant of this world'.

Those who were sent to Siberia were being punished for a wide range of crimes. From genuine revolutionary activities such as those of the Decembrists, to apparently harmless ones like snuff-taking and fortune-telling: all could result in relocation. And the precise form of that punishment also varied considerably. For some, exile meant little more than a forced change of address, but many others were sent to labour camps, the precursors of the gulags. These camps, like the gulags, had a dual purpose. They not only removed unwanted elements from society and placed them where they could cause no further trouble, they also provided a large, cheap workforce for the exploitation of Siberia's natural resources. These were not concentration camps in quite the same sense as those operated by the Nazis. Their purpose was to make money, and convicts essentially took the role of slaves. Death was not the intended outcome for
prisoners. At least not at first. It was simply an occupational hazard.

While the tsars certainly made use of forced labour prior to the revolution, the scale and brutality of the system that developed through the early decades of the twentieth century was entirely unprecedented. In 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power, around 30,000 people were imprisoned in camps across Siberia. But by 1953, the year that Stalin died and the network began to be dismantled, there were close to 2.5 million prisoners in the gulags. This was a system of exile and slavery that riddled the country like a pox, and was fed in large part by one man's paranoia and thirst for vengeance.

Among the thousands of camps spread throughout the USSR, those in Kolyma gained a reputation as the worst. The region was, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's words, ‘the pole of cold and cruelty'. The isolation, the extreme temperatures, the difficult, dangerous work and the consequent high death rates became legendary. Prisoners were underfed and kept in unsanitary conditions, cramped together in freezing barracks that crawled with lice and other insects. In the years after 1937, when Dalstroy's first boss – considered too lenient by Stalin – was removed and executed, Kolyma was a hell from which death was the most likely escape.

To prisoners, Kolyma was known as ‘the Planet'. Like Basargin a century earlier, those transported to Magadan felt themselves to be travelling towards another world entirely, and the sheer difficulty of reaching the place only underlined this feeling. To get there, convicts had to travel across the country by train, in overcrowded, filthy cattle trucks, with neither enough food nor water. In summer many died en route of thirst and disease; in winter they froze. The trip by train took a month or more to reach the Pacific coast from Moscow, and once there prisoners were kept in holding camps until being taken by ship to Magadan.