Meanwhile, the South Siberian Railway, begun during the war, was completed between the southern Urals and the Kuzbas; extensions of the Trans-Siberian were forged in the 1960s to Magnitogorsk in the west and to Tayshet; and the line was electrified as far as Novosibirsk. Another line was pushed across the northern Urals to the mouth of the Ob. Yakutsk (until recently without a regular highway to the outside world) is now linked to the Trans-Siberian by all-weather roads, which also connect the mines of the Kolyma and Indigirka valleys to the port of Magadan.
The development of the Northeast Passage as a route for commercial shipping likewise edged closer to reality. In 1932, the Soviet icebreaker Sibiryakov had made its way from Murmansk through Bering Strait to Vladivostok in a single season; and in the following year, the Chelyuskin proved the navigability of the route for steamships. Subsequently, the Soviet Union built six nuclear and several dozen conventional icebreakers, 150 other ice-capable ships, and commissioned “universal dry-load carriers” from Finland. Nevertheless, even with a long string of intermediate pons along the Arctic coast – Salekhard, Dudinka, Tiksi, Providenniya, and so on – and the help of the largest fleet of icebreakers and Arctic reconnaissance aircraft in the world, the 7,000-mile-long route can only be used for three to four months of the year.
Although Stalin had more or less exhausted the surface gravel deposits and placer mines in the northeast, the deep lodes of ore beneath had scarcely been touched. Subsequently, large deposits of natural gas were discovered under the permafrost of the Yamal Peninsula and the adjoining Kara Sea. Novy Urengoy, a company town near the Arctic Circle, grew up to accommodate tens of thousands of workers transplanted to the area, as millions of tons of equipment were flown in for constructing docks, houses, roads, power stations, and drilling pads. Meanwhile, Nizhnevartovsk and Surgut, situated in the midst of the frozen marshland, had been transformed by the oil boom of the mid-sixties from sleepy villages into cities as large as Anchorage, Alaska. Derricks sprang up on the tundra, drill after drill bored down through the geological ice, and power and pipelines crisscrossed the barren terrain. Omsk, far to the south, became the center of the oil-refining industry, and a sizable chemical and synthetic textile manufacturing business arose at Barnaul.
Some twenty-three hydroelectric plants have also proliferated on the Yenisey; the district of Irkutsk is heavily studded with aluminum, chemical, wood pulp, and other plants; and in the Transbaikal, Ulan Ude (the capital of Buryatia) has the largest locomotive and rolling stock manufacturing and repair works in Siberia. Other factories produce such items as airplanes, rivercraft, electric motors, truck cranes, and steel and iron castings. The region also boasts prodigious supplies of bauxite (all-important for the aluminum industry), and the Barguzin River is flanked with lodes of gold. Around Chita, miners still carve up the earth for silver and iron, but throughout the Transbaikal there are also flourishing fields of grain, herds of cattle, and great flocks of sheep and goats. Off the Pacific Coast, the fisheries of the northern Kurile Islands and Kamchatka are abundant – with salmon, herring, lobster, cod, and king crab – and an American-Japanese consortium has undertaken to develop the large oil and natural gas fields off Sakhalin’s northeastern shores.
More than half of Sakhalin is covered with forest, which large factories turn to paper and cellulose. At Norilsk, the northernmost industrial city in the world, the Mining and Metallurgical Combine refines copper, nickel, cobalt, silane, platinum, and other strategic metals with up-to-date equipment – furnaces, converters, and electrolytic baths – and produces its own steel, cement, and ferroconcrete panels and brick. In tandem with its growth, Soviet planners attempted to give Norilsk a new civilized veneer. Traces of its Satanic origins were superficially erased, and buildings in neoclassical style went up on concrete pilings that did not preclude amenities (like hot and cold running water, central heating, etc.) found in few Arctic settlements in the world. In addition to its fifty large metallurgical, chemical, and food-processing plants, Norilsk has also taken on a pompous scientific air with several industrial and research institutes, such as the Norilsk Research Institute of the Agriculture of the Extreme North, the Laboratory of Polar Medicine, and the Polar Aerospace Physics Proving Ground for the Academy of Sciences. Perhaps another learned institute may one day be erected in memory of all the knowledge that was lost.
Sable is still the world’s most valuable fur, and the international fur trade continues to depend heavily on Siberian pelts. By and large, these are the bounty of a corps of licensed, professional hunters who turn in their catch at regional collection depots, which process several hundred thousand skins a year. The sable population has been carefully regulated with the help of the Barguzin Sable Reserve, but ermine and mink are also valued, together with muskrat, bred from some fifty pairs imported from Canada in 1935. A number of silver fox farms were also started in Yakutia in 1936 as part of a broader program for the experimental breeding of fur-bearing animals in captivity. Altogether, the Siberian fur industry is said to be worth about $62 million a year.
More grandly, Siberia’s gold and diamond deposits rival those of South Africa; its natural gas fields surpass those of the United States; the Samotlor oil field compares to any on the Arabian Peninsula; the fishing grounds of Sakhalin match those of Newfoundland; and the timber reserves exceed those of Brazil. Siberia is also endowed with the world’s greatest reserves of coal, iron ore, manganese, lead, nickel, cobalt, tungsten, molybdenum, bauxite, antimony, sulfur, apatite, and asbestos. Rare metals like platinum and wolfram – in fact, every element in the periodic table of Mendeleyev – are also amply contained in the inexhaustibly rich soil.
The material promise of Siberia, indeed, was prefigured by the exiled Archpriest Avvakum in the fall of 1661. Having come to the rocky shores of Lake Baikal, he rigged up a sail with a woman’s old smock, and crossed its stormy waters in an open boat. On its farther side, he beheld “such high mountains as I had never seen before. And their summits are crowned with halls and turrets, pillars and gates, and walls and courts, all made by the hand of God.” In the midst of this palatial splendor, he was amazed by the natural bounty of the land – by the great bulbs of wild onion and garlic that grew upon mountain slopes, by the green valleys, sweet-smelling flowers, Baikal’s abundance of fish, and “wild fowl in great number: geese and swans floating on the lake like snow… And all this had been created by Christ for man, that he should find pleasure in it and praise his Redeemer.”780
The population of Siberia is about 26 million (not including parts of Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk oblasts that lie east of the Urals) according to official figures released in 2002 (18.3 percent of the population of Russia as a whole). Natives make up about 3 percent of the total, and about 60 percent overall live in cities or towns (Siberia has 29 cities with a population of 100,000 or more). Although it is supposed that Siberia may one day support a population of 250 million or more, that day is very far off. Certain areas have grown enormously, of course, especially in Western Siberia; and Novosibirsk, not so long ago a dusty railroad junction town, is today larger than Paris or Berlin. Once known especially for the production of machine tools, hydraulic presses, hydroelectric turbines, and gigantic pumps, its special stature today is closely tied to Akademgorodok (or “Science City”) 18 miles south on the Ob, where in 1958 a forest of birches and pines was transformed into a university research center with thirty branch institutes. Chekhov’s prediction in 1890 that “a full, brave and intelligent people” would one day illuminate the shores of the Yenisey has certainly come true at Krasnoyarsk, despite all of Russia’s travails.