The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (13 page)

I had not reserved a room, but

that was fine. The price was 1,800

roubles – about £36. That seemed

steep, but it was manageable. I

handed over my passport. That was

when she realized I was a foreigner,

and I needed to pay a ‘coefficient’ of

three. She consulted her calculator.

‘That means 5,400 roubles,’ she

said with finality.

Many Soviet institutions once

had a double price scale, with

foreigners made to pay vastly higher

prices than locals, but it is now

supposed to be illegal. I told her so. I

told her I would not pay over £100

for a hotel in Moscow, even if it had

a spa, pool and sauna, and refused to

pay her charge. She rang her

administrator, who came down and

tried to ring the manager. He was not

there, so she rang the former

manager, who expressed surprise

that he was being consulted on a

business he had nothing to do with,

and rang off. She then, inexplicably,

rang the Federal Migration Service,

who also could not help. I would

still, they told me, have to pay the

5,400 roubles. I refused.

At this point, and seemingly

randomly, the administrator offered

me a revised coefficient of 1.2,

which allowed them to save face and

me to save money. We had a deal.

It was only when I was sat on the

chair in my bedroom, which had a

single bed, a chair and a kettle and

was on the ground floor facing a

yard, that I realized that – in half an

hour of haggling – neither of the

women had expressed any interest at

all in my visit to Inta. This was a

small town, in a wilderness, an

overnight train journey from the

nearest airport, with no tourist

amenities or business opportunities.

And yet, they were acting as if

foreigners swanned in and out all the

time. This was a blow, since hotel

receptionists tend to be a key source

of help in a new town. On my way

out, I tried to engage the heavily

made-up woman in conversation.

The few miners left, she said, earn

20,000 roubles a month sometimes

but normally around 14,000.

The town’s coal is no longer in

demand, and the shafts are largely

worked out. The population peaked

above 60,000 in 1989. Now only

half that many people are registered

as living in Inta, and many of those

really work somewhere else. The

trend is repeated in Komi as a whole.

At the end of the Soviet period, one

and a quarter million people lived in

this region. Now there are 950,000 –

a population decline of 25 per cent

in twenty years.

I hoped the receptionist might

ask about me about what I was

doing in her crumbling town. But

she showed no more interest in me

than she had the first time round.

My fallback plan was Inta

Museum, which would I hoped be

full of information on the gulag.

After all, the town had no other

history, and the exhibits would have

to include something. Here too my

foreign nationality cost me extra,

though I got my money’s worth,

since they had no 50-rouble tickets.

The woman behind the cash desk

had to tear out separately five 10-

rouble tickets along the edge of her

ruler. Another woman was ready to

take my coat but I was not wearing

one. It was far too hot for anyone to

be wearing anything more than a

shirt, and I was the only visitor, so

she was presumably not having a

very busy day.

The museum’s first room was

devoted to the Soviet Union’s

Victory in World War Two, under

the slogan ‘The victory was forged

in the gulag too’. There was a photo

of the order signed on 22 July 1941

which had kept all prisoners locked

up for the duration. That order kept

Father Dmitry’s father in the camps

for an extra five years on top of his

four-year sentence. The exhibit did

not mention the two million gulag

prisoners who had died forging the

victory.

The room devoted to coal had a

roundabout way of showing the

drop

in

the

workforce.

Coal

production

had

dropped

from

9,099,000 tonnes in 1989 to 4,851

tonnes in 2001. During that period

each worker had become almost

twice as efficient. I did not need to

do the sums to realize the heart had

been ripped out of the town.

An old woman walked the

museum with me. She turned on the

lights in each room; sat down to

check I examined all the exhibits;

turned off the lights after me. I

trudged round, then asked if the

director was in her office and

whether I might speak to her. She

was not. And no one else would

have anything to tell me, apparently.

The director’s secretary gave off

the air of someone who received so

many requests for access that she

would rather corral all the visitors

into one group before allowing them

past. I would have to come back. It

was to be another two days before I

finally made it into the director’s

presence.

The day stretched before me, so I

set out to explore. Every building

looked tired. The one bit of fresh

paint I saw – bright orange used to

smarten up an arch leading into an

otherwise ordinary courtyard – had

been

defaced

with

the

single

scrawled word ‘cock’, and a crude

sketch of male genitalia. Walking on,

I headed for two factory chimneys

that dominated the town. Built of

dark brick, one bore the date 1952

and a red star. Father Dmitry must

have seen this being built. Perhaps

he had helped build it. The factory –

a power station – was not working,

and I briefly wondered if the only

thing more depressing than a

belching factory chimney was a non-

belching factory chimney, before

ordering myself to cheer up.

A

minibus

slowed

down

enticingly so I climbed on board and

rode to the end of the line on a

whim. Here the apartment blocks

w e r e invisible, and the Great Inta

River surged past, muscles flexing

beneath its khaki surface. This had

once been a region of wooden

houses and gardens on the bluff

above the river. They were rotten

and collapsed now, the gardens

choked with stagnant grass. The

entrance gates to the Kapital coal

mine gaped, and the mine’s lift

tower stood a hundred metres away.

Thickly lagged pipes rose up over

the gates into a square-sided arch.

The pipes were lifted high to allow

trucks to pass safely underneath, but

no trucks had come this way for

years.

At the end of a long track was a

cemetery, filled with Lithuanian

names

and

birch

trees.

The

mosquitoes poured out of the damp

grass, covering my arms and

clustering at my ankles. They were

stupid and easy to kill, not like the

streetwise ones in Moscow that

know how to hide on dark patches

so you cannot spot them against the

background. But here they swarmed

in such numbers that I could not

keep up with them and I was bitten a

dozen times in a minute. A path led

through the wood, between the

graves, to a monument of a woman

in Lithuanian national dress bearing

a ball in her left hand. On the back,

in several languages, it said, ‘To

those who did not return’.

Although the gulag is generally

imagined to have been unbearably

cold, for many prisoners it was the

blood-sucking parasites during the

summers that caused the most

torment. The writer Oleg Volkov, on

lying down to sleep on his first night

on Solovki, was appalled to see

bedbugs dropping on to him from

the ceiling. There were so many he

could not sleep, and went outside.

There the clouds of mosquitoes were

equally intolerable.

Guards used the mosquitoes as a

punishment, stripping off recalcitrant

prisoners and tying them to posts in

the forest. Their whole bodies would

swell up. As I fled the graveyard I

had a glimpse of that torment. The

mosquitoes might not blot out the

sun but, given the chance, they could

swell your face enough to turn you

blind.

For half an hour I waited for the

bus to return. Then I got tired of

beating off the mosquitoes and

walked.

There did not seem to be much

else to do, so I retreated to the

Barakuda bar and took out the thick

bundle of papers that is
Two Years in

Abez
, a memoir by A. A. Vaneyev, a

former inmate of a camp a few

dozen kilometres to the north of

here, and an account of life inside. I

had been carrying a few books

around with me, including Father

Dmitry’s

various

volumes

of

memoirs and a couple of books on

the gulag. Vaneyev’s manuscript

was the only one I had yet to read,

so I ordered a beer and settled in.

The book is mainly a description

of the writer’s relations with Lev

Karsavin, a religious philosopher

who fled St Petersburg after the

1917 revolution. After wanderings

in Europe, he found a new home in

Lithuania which, between the two

world wars, was an independent

state. He learned Lithuanian and

became an inspiration to a generation

of Orthodox writers.

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler carved

up Europe between them, and Stalin

got Lithuania – as well as eastern

Poland, Estonia, Latvia and various

other places that took his fancy –

while Hitler got western Poland and

a free hand with France. This

inglorious episode is one that

modern Russia prefers to forget. The

two dictators fell out a couple of

years later, and their armies would

chew Lithuania to pieces between

them over the course of World War

Two. Eventually, however, Stalin

came out on top and thousands of

patriotic Lithuanians ended up here:

many of them, like Karsavin, for

ever.

One of the strangest quirks of the

gulag was that, although it took no

interest in keeping prisoners alive

when they were healthy, it provided

hospitals to nurse them back to

health

when

they

were

sick.

Karsavin, born in 1882 and thus an

old man when he was arrested in

1949, never left the hospital.

The memoir’s main theme is how

life

continued

in

the

camp.

Professors of all subjects and priests

of all religions were happy to discuss

their disciplines with each other and

anyone else who was interested. The

camp was surrounded by barbed

wire, bitterly cold in the winter and

plagued by mosquitoes in summer,

but it was a strange kind of haven

from the horrors Stalin unleashed on

the Soviet Union in his last paranoid

years.

‘When they brought us here,’

Vaneyev

wrote,

‘all

of

these

circumstances created a terrible

impression. With time, however,

they became somehow familiar and

did not stop us living. And life went

on in its own way, not so much

independent of the circumstances,

but finding its own unexpected way

within them.’

The strange side-effect of the

influx of educated people from all

over Russia and Eastern Europe was

that the camps had a freedom absent