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Saving Russia's Armpit

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

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 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.

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Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Nate provides a link to some photos of Vorkuta here: as he says, it looks rather nice. Calling somewhere the armpit of Russia naturally led to contemplation of other locations which might be the armpit of somewhere else: "both Dakotas, Utica, New York, and several other small-to-medium sized cities" according to Rich Mahady; Flint, Michigan says Craig Calcaterra. In a post called "The death of entire worlds", Otto writes elegaicially about an arctic town in Norway. And Thomas D. links Vorkuta with Social Security in one easy step here.]


Please, Ms. Applebaum, there must be something besides the violets that brought the woman back, especially since she could grow indoor violets anywhere. Does she have family in the town? Does she have a job? Does she have good friends? Does she have a relatively large flat? Access to decent services? Does she like dark winters?

You did ask her about such things didn't you? Please tell us the whole story, or I may have to go there myself to find out!

--Lewsir

(To reply, click here.)


 Many people assume that "rationality" or some such is the touchstone and wherewithal of Human Civilization. Not so. A certainly day-to-day mechanical ingenuity plays an important part, but the talent that has got us where we are today is the ability to absorb culture in a seemingly indelible way and pass it on to our children. In a way, it's hopeful to see that it can be applied to making a home in the place where one is, besides the other thing of perpetuating feuds with some people who wear funny hats.

--Marshall

(To reply, click here.)


 Except for its coasts, Australia is the same barely-livable place Applebaum describes... Desolate. Harsh. Populated by prisoners led by jailers. Indeed, South African townships, French penal colonies, U.S. Native-American reservations could be similarly described, and condemned. But Applebaum's credentials are anti-communist. She'd rather rail against the premature aspirations of a failed utopia, than expose the premeditated exploitation of societies that never aspired to a favorable quarterly stock report.

Ten years ago, A. Whitney Brown was scarily and (I'm certain) unintentionally insightful when he exclaimed "Who would have thought the fatal flaw of communism was that there's no money in it?" Maybe a decade from now Applebaum can write a more favorable review once Alcoa reports its first net profit from Vorkuta.

--William Hoffman

(To reply, click here.)


 It doesn't appear that Applebaum's town will be much mourned. But eventually, if it is allowed to, it will die in peace and it won't be the first badly positioned town that has gone that way. It's a shame that they can't all go out with a bang, like Pompeii.

--Martin

(To reply, click here.)

 (8/22)



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