Yet until quite recently at least, Siberia suffered a proportionate population decline, as more people began to leave Siberia than arrived (the Russian government estimates that over the past 20 years the population of Siberia declined by about 2 million persons). Many were attracted by the relatively better living conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, and in response the government used higher wages, housing privileges, longer vacations, better pensions, cost-of-living allowances, and other material incentives to give the harsher localities allure. This strategy made a difference, but eventually yielded diminishing returns, since the costs outstripped the gains. Although Soviet planners had once envisaged weather-controlled, enclosed towns dotting the tundra, and railroads on steel pylons sunk into the permafrost extending along the entire length of the Arctic coast, the retrograde idea took hold that Siberia should simply be exploited as a powerhouse and source of raw materials. Energy-intensive industries like aluminum smelting or those concerned with the primary processing of raw materials, such as lumber, were located in Eastern Siberia; those concerned with manufacturing and consumer goods in Western Siberia, where the manpower and markets lay.
Much of Siberia’s once and future building, of course, must take place on permafrost, and strategies for coping with its anomalies have chiefly been devised at the Eternal Frost Institute in Yakutsk, the world’s most important center for permafrost research. It was at Yakutsk that the extent of the phenomenon was first clearly glimpsed, when in the mid-1800s a merchant tried to drill a well, and with enormous effort over ten years bored without result to a depth of 380 feet. Today, this pioneering shaft enjoys the status of a national monument. Although permafrost has incidental advantages – for example, cellars and caverns hewn out of it can serve without any lining as natural deep-freeze storage vaults for foods – in general it adds enormously to the costs of building because of problems due to soil creep, rock slides, frost heave, earth flows, talus cones, thermokarst (when surface melt turns to mire), and other changes resulting from the alternate thawing and refreezing of the ground. Roads laid across permafrost require thick layers of gravel and other materials as insulation, and structures of any size have to be erected, as it were, on stilts. A building will gradually thaw the topsoil beneath it, by even the slight temperature rise created by its own weight, and, settling unevenly, will totter and lean. Throughout Siberia there are clusters of old houses that thus resemble “dismasted ships rolling and tumbling about in a high sea, some with their sterns high up out of the water, others buried with their bows in the waves.”781 Iron pylons were first tried as building supports, but they themselves conducted heat into the ground so that, to enable the air to cool the iron, it became necessary to raise the buildings about six feet into the air. Today, the preferred method uses reinforced concrete piles jack-hammered to a depth of 30 feet.
Siberia today has about 25,000 schools with 5.5 million students (a decline of about 2 percent and 10 percent since 1990, respectively), thousands of theaters, theater groups, opera and ballet companies, hundreds of newspapers in several languages, and so on. But despite the many colossal projects for Siberian development, on the whole housing, food, medical facilities, day care, and other social needs have been ignored. As one Siberian writer recently complained, Siberia was like “a barge moored to Russia that brings in its wealth of goods and then is pushed away from the shore.”782 Its products were taken out of the region at low wholesale prices, while consumer goods from the European sectors were delivered at a mark-up. Until the Union’s dissolution, Siberia’s resources accounted for about half of all Soviet hard cash receipts, which is one explanation as to why the state wrung the territory for all the profit it could get.
Many of the gigantic undertakings were also carried forward without the slightest regard for their impact on the environment. In the Kuzbas, lung cancer rates, respiratory infections, eye diseases, and other ailments are very high due to the sulfur dioxide and other industrial wastes in the water and air, and the great aluminum smelter and pulp mill adjacent to the Bratsk Dam has so befouled the air of that city that cars and trucks often have to use their headlights at midday. Around Nizhnevartovsk and Lake Samotlor, oil spills have tainted many rivers and streams; heavy metals and other industrial waste, pesticides and human sewage contaminate the Ob down to its mouth at Salekhard. To the north, Norilsk “on windless days,” wrote a recent visitor, “smells like hellfire,”783 and at Magnitogorsk, John Scott’s miracle city of steel, the open-hearth smelting system (unchanged since the war) produces every year 865,000 tons of air pollutants, including extremely toxic levels of benzine and sulfur compounds. Lung cancer rates have doubled in the past decade, and the majority of children have chronic bronchial diseases.
The flooding of river valleys for gigantic hydroelectric dams, the construction of BAM, oil and gas exploitation, and so on have also altered the geography and distribution of many native peoples. The cost to the Samoyeds on the Yamal Peninsula has been especially keen, since half of their reindeer pastures have been appropriated and the delicately sustained existence of the peninsula itself – “an iceberg with a green skin”784 – threatened by the reckless haste with which drilling has been done. Not content with city-sized combinats or artificial seas, in the mid-1960s Soviet planners also came up with “the project of the century,” as they called it, to reverse the course of Siberia’s rivers by building a gigantic earthen dam hundreds of miles long along the Arctic coast. All of Central Siberia was to be flooded to form a huge inland sea, and the waters then directed southward through new river channels, blasted through the mountains, to irrigate arid land. Environmentalists, already galvanized by the transformation of the Aral Sea in Central Asia into a desert by a kindred project, rallied to thwart this catastrophic scheme.
Another idea involved the building of a huge hydroelectric power plant and dam on the Katun River (the source of the mighty Ob), which rises in the perennial snows and glaciers of the Altai. Beginning in 1983, construction gangs built a wide highway to the proposed site to bring in heavy equipment, and enormous gashes were cut through masses of bedrock in the gorge. A concrete plant and a prefabricated housing factory immediately went up, but by luck the excavations also uncovered some two thousand burial mounds, with cave drawings dating back to Neolithic times. This caused a delay in the project and led to a closer look at its wisdom, with the realization that the very survival of the agriculturally rich Katun Valley was at stake.
The Cold War also visited Siberia with a vengeance. Novaya Zemlya and Semipalatinsk were used as test sites for thermonuclear blasts in the 1950s, and the Kyshtym Industrial Complex on the shore of Lake Irtyash, 50 miles northwest of Chelyabinsk, became the home of the Soviet atomic bomb. The first plutonium plant was built there in a crash program (with the help of prison labor). Workers were exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, and subsequent negligence led to melt-downs, cracking in the reactor core, and the reckless dumping of toxic wastes into nearby rivers and lakes. One of the lakes accumulated curies to an amount two and a half times that released by the Chernobyl catastrophe, and eventually, traces of radioactive material showed up in the Arctic Ocean nearly 1,000 miles away. In 1957, an accidental nuclear explosion on the southern shore of Lake Irtyash required the evacuation of thousands of people and sent “a plume of toxic isotopes” over the countryside.785 Today, the Kyshtym Complex also operates a reprocessing plant for separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel, and (possibly) for assembling nuclear warheads. There are nine known military reactors distributed throughout Siberia, not counting a number of civilian plants; in recent years the only Cold War monument to be dismantled on its territory was the notorious radar station complex near Krasnoyarsk, which, as Eduard Shevardnadze noted with chagrin, was “equal in size to the Egyptian pyramids.”786