From: "Slate Magazine"
<SlateMagazine_025940@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tues., August 21, 2001
foreigners: Saving Russia's Armpit
By Anne Applebaum
As one might have expected, the 10th anniversary of the Communist coup
against Mikhail Gorbachev?whose defeat led directly to the breakup of the
Soviet Union?is being marked, in the West, by a mixed bag of intelligent
comments, where-are-they-now articles, and the odd spot of dramatic TV
footage. Rather than joining this onslaught of theoretical journalism, I
suggest, instead, that it might be worth sparing a moment for Vorkuta,
where I recently happened to be. Vorkuta is a city built beside a coal
mine, north of the Arctic Circle, in barely habitable, treeless tundra.
Vorkuta is also the Soviet Union in miniature. Objectively speaking, it's
an awful place, but people lived in it, people got used to it?and now they
don't want it to change.
Untypically, on the day I arrived in Vorkuta, the temperature was climbing
into the 70s. The week before, I was told, it had been near freezing?and
not long after I left, it dropped again. There are years when the Arctic
summer lasts two weeks, and years when it lasts six weeks. In that short
period of time, the city's 200,000 inhabitants are to be found strolling
the streets of their city, basking in its perpetual daylight: This is the
reward they get for living the other half of the year in perpetual darkness.
True, they can't stroll very far: Vorkuta is built upon permafrost, which
in summer turns into a virtually impassable, mosquito-infested swamp. Nor
can they drive anywhere, since Vorkuta and its famous coal mines are not
accessible by car: One gets there by train (very crowded) or by plane
(very expensive). Nor even, one would imagine, ought the inhabitants of
the city to get much pleasure out of contemplating its architecture ?click
here http://go.msn.com/newsletter3817/51368.asp for pictures ?let alone
its history. Vorkuta's first 23 settlers arrived in 1931, via the
waterways that run from the Arctic Sea, bringing their wooden picks and
shovels with them. This being Stalin's Soviet Union, these 23 original
settlers, were, of course, prisoners, and their leaders were, of course,
secret policemen. Over the subsequent two and a half decades, a million
more prisoners passed through the city's coal fields, one of the two or
three most notorious hubs of the gulag, the vast labor camp system that
once stretched from the Soviet-Finnish border to the Pacific Ocean.
And yet ?"Kak vam nravitsa nasha Vorkuta?" I was constantly asked while I
was there: "How do you like our Vorkuta?" It is hard to imagine the
contemporary inhabitants of Auschwitz asking visitors to share their civic
pride, but those who live in Vorkuta do expect praise for their sprawling
city. For Vorkuta was not shut down when Stalin died. On the contrary,
throughout the 1960s and '70s, the Soviet authorities built shops and
swimming pools and schools, the better to attract inhabitants. They
flattered and feted the city's highly paid miners, telling them they were
Soviet heroes of labor. As a result, the city's inhabitants believed
themselves to be patriots, willingly enduring the harsh Arctic conditions
in order that the Motherland might have coal. That the price of heating
shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of the year is astronomical,
that the coal from the mines was worth less than the cost of maintaining
the buildings and the street, none of that was ever taken into consideration.
Alas, the truth is that Vorkuta, is?and always was?utterly unnecessary.
The miners could have been flown in and out on two-week shifts, as they
are in Canada or Alaska, spending half their time with their families in
the south. Why build kindergartens and university lecture halls in the
tundra? Why build a puppet theater? Once constructed, however, such
institutions aren't so easy to dismantle, particularly given the rhetoric
that was lavished upon them. In the company of the daughter of former
prisoners, I walked around the ruins of the city's geological institute?a
once-solid structure, complete with a columned, Stalinist portico, a red
star on its pediment?and listened to her rail against the
"thief-democrats" and "greedy bureaucrats" who had, rather sensibly,
decided to shut the institute down. If your whole life has been associated
with a place, even a place widely famed for atrocity and stupidity, it is
hard to admit that it ought to be shut down.
Although they don't quite come out and say it, the bureaucrats in the
regional capital, Syktyvkar, know this perfectly well. "Vorkuta will
always exist," one of them told me: "Forever!" He banged his fist, a touch
over-dramatically, on the table. Then he proceeded, more rationally, to
agree that it might have been wiser to adopt a different system of
exploiting the coal. He also explained that the Russian government is in
fact trying to persuade people, especially pensioners and couples with
young children, to leave the city, the better to reduce its size and the
expense of maintaining it. There is, he told me, a pattern. First, those
willing to move are offered flats in more southerly parts of the country.
Then, they are helped to move.
But then?they come back. In fact, he said, the majority come back. Whether
unable to find jobs, unable to make friends, or unable to tear themselves
away from a place that was once so widely praised and celebrated?they come
back. In Vorkuta, a young woman with two small children?a classic
candidate for resettlement, and herself the granddaughter of
prisoners?told me with wide eyes how much she loves her city. "I have been
other places, but nowhere else is as good as our Vorkuta." She showed me
the ordinary violets she cultivates in summer?inside, in plastic
pots?because nothing but weedy wildflowers grow in the courtyard of her
falling-down block of flats during the short Arctic summer.
Of all the obstacles confronting those economists and politicians who
would sincerely like to reform Russia, none is more formidable than this:
the power of habit. Vorkuta, like the Soviet Union, ought never to have
been built in the first place. It required slave labor to construct and an
enormous propaganda machine to maintain. From a purely economic and
practical point of view, it ought to be dismantled. But it will take more
than 10 years?more than a generation?to accustom its inhabitants to
something else.