In mineral resources, Sakha is the richest administrative territory in Russia and ranks fourth globally in diamond production. Nevertheless, Yakutsk and its port were chaotic and shabby. The actual port building resembled an oversized, blue-and-white cement shoebox sitting atop matchbox pillars. A dock on the river served larger boats, but most craft had to make do with rickety piers and even gangplanks. This, in the wealthiest region of Russia. Where was all the money going?
The Lena, at 2,779 miles in length, is the third longest river in Russia and the eleventh in the world. It is the only major river flowing entirely through zones of permafrost; almost half of Sakha lies within the Arctic Circle. Unique among bodies of water, the Lena freezes from the bottom up. It originates as a narrow rocky stream in the mountains just west of Lake Baikal and courses northward to emerge into the Arctic Ocean’s Laptev Sea. At Yakutsk’s latitude, the Lena’s bed is some seven miles wide but strewn with a multitude of sandy islands overgrown with saw grass, so called for its serrated blades that can reach six or seven feet in height. Tributaries flow into the Lena from numerous tiny lakes—Yakuts say they are as many as stars in the sky—nestled away in the surrounding taiga.
Cossack explorers first reached this part of Siberia in the early 1600s. They took the name Lena from local appellations—Elyuene or Lenna, meaning “big river,” in the Manchu Tungus language. The Lena’s majestic expanses so impressed Vladimir Ulyanov, who did a stint of exile near its banks, that he adopted a version of it for his pseudonym, Lenin.
Georgy piloted his craft out onto the magnificent Lena, which resembles the region through which it flows—undeveloped and little exploited, despite its riches. We inhaled fresh air—there are no factories anywhere near. We watched the reedy islands slide by as we sailed south, against the current, our bow splitting the glassy turquoise panes of water spreading from shore to sandy shore.
Georgy, sounding bitter, commented on how strange Sakha and its chief river were.
“There are so many minerals out here. The Yakuts have a folk tale: when God was distributing riches around the world, he got so cold in Yakutia that he dropped all the minerals—a whole periodic table of elements of them. But they aren’t exploited as they should be.” He then pointed toward the banks and changed subjects. “Look at the grass on the islands. It only grows here and is so invasive that if you come back in five years, these islands will have been overtaken by the grass. Of course, in other places this growth would be managed. Here people leave the river alone.”
The Lena’s most famous natural wonder is the Lenskie Stolby (Lena Pillars), some 160 miles south of Yakutsk. There the river cuts through uplands, forming a channel of steep yellow-and-brown limestone and slate walls that, in places, reach more than a thousand feet in altitude. The pillars rival the Grand Canyon, although few outside Russia have heard of this Sakha marvel.
We would not make it that far, but Georgy often did.
“I make a lot of money taking people to the pillars,” he said. “For a group of eight I charge as much as a hundred thousand rubles a day [about $1,700]. All the Russian officials and diamond businessmen who come to Yakutsk want to visit them. The pillars, the beauty of the scenery, the vodka, the shashlyk (kebab)—they have a good time out here with me.”
We peacefully glided up the Lena, which now was growing astoundingly asymmetric: the eastern shore was flat, the western steep, high, and rocky. And the farther we got from Yakutsk the more stunning it was, erasing our memories of the messy port and docks.
Over the course of the next few hours, Georgy regaled us with his story, which was typical for this part of Russia—the difficulty of keeping a small business going and a desire to move out west, to the better lands with more opportunity. He had grown tired of Yakutsk and its ethnic tensions; he was thinking of moving to Novosibirsk or Krasnoyarsk and starting up a similar boat service on one of the rivers passing through them, the Ob or the Yenisei.
Part of the reason Georgy was thinking of leaving had to do with what happened to the port following the Soviet collapse of 1991. Here, as along so many river towns across Russia, in the Yeltsin era the government privatized the port, dividing it up between a number of owners. Owners tried to squeeze out as much profit as they could from their sections, bribing local authorities as necessary and creating, as a result, a generalized chaos that suited no one. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Russian railroads languished in similar disarray, owned by multiple proprietors. When Putin became president, he made it his priority to put crucial pieces of Russia’s infrastructure under full Kremlin control. And although he managed to reorganize the railroads, the exploitation of natural resources, and even the postal service, which he restructured, the waterways are still waiting their turn.
“Imagine,” Georgy complained, “despite its size, the Lena has no bridge across it. A bridge was in the works, but with the Crimea annexation the state shifted funding to Crimea, to the bridge that is being constructed there” across the Kerch Strait.
We nodded sympathetically—this Crimea diversion, we had seen, had happened in many other places across Russia. Reporting on the news of its opening in May 2018, one Italian newspaper quipped that Putin “built his career on bridges”[44]—in Ulyanovsk, Vladivostok, and elsewhere. It is also worth noting that the Crimea bridge construction dream dates back to the last czar. Stalin also made an attempt to build it in 1945, but it was quickly destroyed by ice. Putin then succeeded where the previous greats had failed, which must be a tremendous point of pride for the current Kremlin leader.
Answering our question about his own future, Georgy insisted that all ethnic Russians, like he is, would leave Yakutsk soon enough—a lack of opportunity and rising ethnic chauvinism were to blame. His sister had already moved to Krasnoyarsk—“a nice town, less to compete with than in Novosibirsk. They need entrepreneurs more there, so I am getting ready.”
Judging by his almond-shaped eyes, Georgy probably had Yakut blood, even though he spoke passionately of his Russianness, with a whiff of disdain toward the indigenes.
“The Yakuts don’t even know how old they are,” Georgy said. A giant banner on top of the port building announced Yakutsk’s 380th anniversary. Yet on Lenin Square it is listed as 385, and 384 elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Yakutsk is indeed old. Once a settlement in the taiga, it existed long before the Cossacks, led by the Ataman (chieftain) Pyotr Beketov, who reached it in 1632. The Sakha had fled north from the rampaging armies of Genghis Khan and finally settled here, where the freezing winters and summer swarms of mosquitos and midges would dissuade intruders. The Sakha herded reindeer and cattle, hunted, fished, and even bred horses—diminutive, robust ungulates capable of surviving on limited fodder during fierce winters. The coldest winters on earth—temperatures at times hit −94 Fahrenheit—preclude much in the way of agriculture. Not surprisingly, in recent decades scientists have found more remains of woolly mammoths—three entire specimens—in the republic than anywhere else. Proud of these discoveries, Yakutsk hosts a mammoth museum—the only one in the world—though its unique exhibits, as we would see, could use better upkeep.
5
Micol Flammini, “Quel ponte sullo stretto tra la Crimea e la Russia che fa tremare Kiev: Oggi viene inaugurato il Krymski most, il ponte sullo stretto di Kerch che collegherà la Crimea alla regione di Krasnodar” [The bridge over the Strait between Crimea and Russia that makes Kiev shudder: Today is inaugurated the Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, which connects Crimea to the Krasnodar region, is inaugurated today],