None suffered more than the Chukchi, of whom eleven thousand or so remain. Their homeland was used as a proving ground for nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties, and almost all have very high accumulations of radioactive elements, such as lead and cesium, in their bone tissue. As a result, one in five have high blood pressure, and practically the whole population suffers from tuberculosis or chronic lung disease. The lung cancer rate is two to three times above the Soviet average, and the incidence of stomach and liver cancer has doubled in the last twenty years. The death rate from cancer of the esophagus is the highest in the world. Moreover, new forms of malignant tumors – affecting connective tissue and the thyroid glands – have recently appeared. All this has produced a death rate of 70 to 100 per 1,000, and an average life expectancy of only about 45 years.
A number of large nature preserves have rescued part of Siberia from blight. The first (650,000 acres in extent) was established under Tsar Nicholas II in 1916 in the Barguzin Valley, originally to protect the sable but now extended to all wildlife and flora within its perimeters. Under the Soviets, a preserve was also created on Wrangel Island, where walrus, fox, polar bear, and snow geese can find a refuge; a huge Central Siberian Preserve encompasses some 2.5 million acres of taiga; the Zeya National Forest in the Amur Region includes an enormous bird sanctuary; and other preserves protect large parts of the Altai, the Kurile island of Kunashir, and the Taimyr Peninsula. An international park now flanks Bering Strait. Some of these preserves only superficially resemble national wildlife refuges as we know them in the West, since (except in a few instances) they prohibit public access, and aim at the protection of an overall environment – including its soil and mineral resources – from every possible infringement. This is wonderful for the ecosystem of a natural habitat, and gratifying to the scientific study of specialists, but perhaps something of a loss for the general public, who cannot share in the enjoyment of such a pristine wilderness even under restricted conditions.
Yet in crossing the length and breadth of Siberia, it is the vast emptiness of the inhabited land that remains astonishing, the hundreds of miles of nothing but taiga and plain. In between the towns are rickety old wooden village farmhouses, dusty unpaved streets, and solitary harvesters (portraits in Russian Gothic) standing bewildered in their fields with simple scythes. Old peasant huts consisting of one large room are still warmed by great enamel-covered brick ovens, which double as sleeping platforms; indoor plumbing in many settlements is lacking, and in winter, excrement often accumulates in the outhouses in frozen mounds. People shop for a handful of necessities at local general stores, grow what they can in their little garden plots, and in winter get their milk in frozen blocks and chop their meat like wood with an ax in the yard. Whenever the Trans-Siberian stops at a station, local residents rush to negotiate supplements to their usual fare from the dining car. On the platforms, Russian, Tatar, or Buryat peasants cheerlessly wait behind their little improvised markets and bazaars, where they offer sheep’s milk cheese, pickled cucumbers, eggs, roasted chickens, and flat maize cakes for sale. In the hinterland, Yakuts, scornful of more modern housing, prefer hexagonal, yurtlike cabins, with a central chimney hole in the roof: Tungus, who long ago gave up their nomadic ways to live in houses, still spend much of their time in tents in their yards.
Although Tyumen, Siberia’s first fortress town, is now an industrial center of about 350,000, Tobolsk to the north has lost all its former glory (although its ancient citadel remains) and the vast frozen wilderness beyond it is home to a population thinly scattered along the tributaries of the Ob. Remote Yakutsk, inhabited by 125,000, has a thriving university, movie theaters, and a satellite disk, but Wrangel Island, surrounded by drifting icefields between the East Siberian and Chukchi seas, has only one small settlement clinging to a coastal hill. Anadyr (founded as Novo-Mariinsk in 1889 and renamed in 1920) has a population of 16,000, but the tiny Eskimo settlement of Uelkal is three days away by dogsled, and at Egvekinot, another Eskimo village (pop. 1,300) on Krestovaya Bay, planes land on packed snow rather than concrete runways.
In many Arctic and sub-Arctic settlements, the windows in the houses, buses, and cars are double or triple thick, and the entrances to buildings have a chamber between two doors that, somewhat like an airlock, mediates between the bitter cold without and the heat within. Mere body heat envelops everyone in little clouds of steam, which rise and accumulate into a blanket of fog above the town. Despite the most concerted efforts, agriculture has been unable to make much headway against the climate; but in some cases experimental farms equipped with hothouses have succeeded in forcing the upper level of the permafrost down six or eight feet, enabling fruits as well as vegetables to grow. The Taimyr Peninsula (an area as large as California) also has its own meat and dairy farms, but the region of Magadan has to import more than 60 percent of its food. “Man,” one traveler wrote recently,
is an interloper here, alien. From the air, the occasional roads, pipelines, and railroad tracks he has managed to construct are only the slightest scratches across the great expanse of snow. In the mornings I’ve seen men drink cognac for breakfast to wash down piles of kasha and plates of horse meat. The oilmen in Surgut board the bus out of town before there is a hint of dawn in the black Siberian sky. Bundled in rough, padded coats, they leave like fishermen setting out from a snug harbor into a sea of wind and wilderness.787
Travel across Siberia is still often spoken of as a voyage, out of tribute to its oceanic vastness, and although all-weather roads and river highways link various industrial centers to each other and to the Trans-Siberian, the network remains relatively scant. All the roads radiating out of Yakutsk are unpaved, and Norilsk can be reached during the winter only by air. Moreover, aside from the Trans-Siberian Railway and (in the east) BAM, the length of Siberia is traversed today as it was a century ago by only one unpaved transcontinental highway, “in summer, a dusty, potholed strip reminiscent of stagecoach days in the American West.”788 The American West is readily evoked by the Soviet Far East, which remains an untamed territory with “raw new towns,”789 in one description, “as rough as Dodge City in its early days.” Its relatively few major cities, like Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk, are surrounded by wilderness, and across the mile-wide Amur at Khabarovsk, the headquarters of Russian military forces in the Far East, can be seen the distant Manchurian hills.
Andrei Amalrik, a dissident playwright exiled to Siberia in 1965 for having “systematically avoided socially useful work” (as an artist, he supported himself by odd jobs), encountered first hand the relatively primitive character of Siberian country life. His first stop was Krivosheino, 100 miles south of Tomsk on the Ob, a dusty, muddy village of mostly one-story wooden houses with wooden sidewalks and two major streets. Subsequently, he was transferred to an even smaller village, Guryevka, five miles away, largely made up of ruined houses with thatched roofs located along the side of a ravine. The houses had whitewashed walls and ceilings, small windows that could not be opened, large vaulted stoves, and two rooms: in one of them (the kitchen), fodder was also prepared for the livestock, and newborn calves and pigs were kept throughout winter instead of in the barn. Each house had a vegetable garden, berries were gathered in the woods, and two old men in the village kept bees; but for the most part, the villagers lived on sugar, bread, butter, and eggs. Electricity had been brought to the village three years earlier, but was reliably supplied only at milking time to run the machines. As a result, although a number of houses had radio sets, they frequently didn’t work.