The indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, unforgiving as it was, whereas colonizers brought their own habits and rules. In the seventeenth century, the newly arrived Russians were brutal in establishing themselves here, killing Sakha by the thousands, according to numerous sources, when the natives rebelled against taxation or relocation.[45] The Russians trapped for furs but also prospected for gold and diamonds, resources not previously exploited in the region. Unfortunately, they also introduced alcohol. As is the case with Native Americans, the indigenes lacked the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol efficiently, which left them prey to alcoholism. Alcoholism is a plague now as it was then, with a frightening death toll, more than three times higher than in the rest of the country.[46] During the week, we noticed an unusually high number of intoxicated young Sakha begging for money on the streets but saw few Russians out and about. Russians joked to us that they work while the Sakha drink. On weekends, though, the ethnicities mix and tipple together. The climate here, at least in winter, surely drives many to drink.
Walking around Yakutsk, we couldn’t shake the feeling that even after almost four hundred years since the Cossack arrival, the Russian world is still colliding with the indigenous one. It was hard to call Yakutsk Russian at all. Russian towns, as a rule, have a certain logic—there is a Lenin Square, a Lenin Street, and central avenues and streets, usually well maintained, radiate from there before falling into disarray further afield. Here, from Lenin Square—the only one in good shape—radiate streets as dusty and rough as gravel roads.
Just stepping off Lenin Avenue to a side street, we encountered a huge pile of dung—from the times of the woolly mammoth, perhaps. It was a few yards before we got to the Treasury of Sakha, an ultramodern structure of slate-gray glass and steel. Inside we would gaze upon the pride of the republic, the national treasures of Sakha: gold, precious stones, diamonds, and figurines carved from bone depicting hunters, animals, and scenes from traditional family life. Wouldn’t someone think to clean the street in front of the building housing such a stunning collection? To be fair, though, even if Yakutsk were to spend a fortune paving and maintaining its roadways, it might not do much to make the city more livable. During the all-too-brief summer, temperatures reach 104 Fahrenheit, and, we discovered, midges and gnats swirled around our faces all day long and even after sunset. No surprise, really, given that the terrain surrounding Yakutsk is bog. Locals say, “Repellant doesn’t help, but a paste of reindeer fat and gasoline does.” But who wants to walk around town smelling like a car!
The Siberian chain of cafés, Traveler’s Coffee, often provided us with some consolation, though we spent thirty minutes waiting for a cappuccino. We took greater pleasure in the flower market covering the giant Ordzhonikidze Square. Even stands selling simple petunias drew scores of buyers—Russians, Yakuts, Evens, and others—from all walks of life. In Sakha, where it is cold nine months a year, petunias must seem as fancy as orchids. One Sakha woman confirmed that any flowers are better than none: “With this climate we have here—the pole of cold—we do like flowers.”
Yet just a couple of blocks from Lenin Square, in the wooden quarter of town called the Old City, we came upon tall, yellow-orange-scarlet-pink Siberian lilies (the Lilium dauricum, scientifically speaking) peeping through patches of overgrown grass. Elsewhere such flowers would be considered precious and rare, but here they grow unattended, unnoticed. The Old City itself seemed more rundown than antique—a few dilapidated Russian huts, a handful of “traditional” restaurants, and incongruously standing amid them, the boutique Mascotte; a beauty salon called, puzzlingly, Lime.Fink; and the log-cabin Museum House of Maksim Ammosov, one of the founders of the Yakut Soviet Autonomous Republic and one of its first leaders. Nearby stood the nineteenth-century Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In front of it lay another pile of dung. No one was rushing to clean it up.
We did find a stately and well-kept street in Yakutsk—Dzerzhinsky Street, named in honor of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Iron Felix, as he was known for short, was the founder and first leader of the dreaded Soviet Cheka, or secret police, a precursor to the KGB and other Soviet security organs. Putin’s own KGB past may have contributed to Dzerzhinsky’s standing in Yakutsk. Still, if the notorious Dzerzhinsky is no longer considered the villain he was before Putin, few cities rush to memorialize him with statues and street names. In Yakutsk, Dzerzhinsky’s bust rests in a little birch park on Dzerzhinsky Street next to the imposing, sleek, cream-and-chocolate Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sakha Republic, which looks more like a five-star hotel than a Sakha version of the FBI. Next to it stands the less pompous but still impressively sleek police headquarters. Such is the current Russian trend—public infrastructure for simple citizens might be deteriorating, yet the karatelnye organy (punitive organs) are doing just fine.
This is no accident: the city has even tried to rehabilitate Stalin, in a way. Plans were made to install a Stalin bust in the Veterans Park further down the street, but Yury Zabolev, then mayor of Yakutsk, supported by the journalist and media entrepreneur Leonid Levin, pushed to sway public opinion against the idea. Surprisingly, they won out. Off the dusty Chernyshevsky Street, though, in a private yard belonging to the Diamonds of Anabara company, a Stalin bust was nevertheless erected. Beneath his stern gaze, veterans, pensioners, and communists now gather to remember the Soviet’s grandeur during his decades in power.
We wondered, why would the Sakha still esteem Dzerzhinsky and Stalin? After all, their republic for centuries suffered under the Russian yoke. Only since 1991, with the emergence of a movement for self-determination, have they begun to reevaluate their history. In fact, Sakha was originally determined to achieve independence. Its first post-Soviet leader, Mikhail Nikolaev, negotiated with Yeltsin and won the right to be called president and quasiindependence from Moscow. Not that Yeltsin meant it, really—two Chechen separatist wars followed his declaration. The Sakha would not revolt against Moscow, though. Eventually, the independence movement waned. The Kremlin no doubt rejoiced, since the republic paid so much in taxes to the federal government. Yet the movement had a salutary effect on Sakha’s finances: revenues from at least some of its resources—fur, gold, diamonds, copper, and other precious and semiprecious metals—would go to the development of the republic. In previous years, only limited funds went to local projects, leaving the Sakha to mostly drink and waste away in poverty.
Enjoying, for the first time, revenues from their minerals, the Sakha have turned away from the phony internationalism that was such a strong part of Soviet communism and begun to reevaluate their own heritage. Glorifying Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, we thought, should have had nothing to do with that. So what was going on?
To seek answers, we arranged to meet Leonid Levin, one of the opponents of the Stalin bust, and editor and publisher of the Vecherny Yakutsk (Evening Yakutsk) newspaper, in his office, a wooden two-story bungalow on the outskirts of town. (It happened to stand adjacent to the London Hotel, another bungalow whose only connection to the British capital was a painting of Big Ben on the front wall.) Upbeat and charismatic, Levin, to our surprise, blamed the local government for the glorification of Stalin, but he absolved Putin.
“Putin is not a Stalinist,” said Levin. “He just uses elements of Stalinism as tools to unify the country.”
6
See Kesserwan Arteau, “Interview with Daryana Maximova: Native Yakutian and Researcher,”
7
“Alkogolizm V Yakutii V Tri Raza Vyshe Chem Po Strane” [Alcoholism in Yakutia Is Three Times Higher Than in the Rest of the Country],