Not only did the Russians explore the High North, they exploited it, which also means investing in it. Twenty percent of Russia’s landmass, the Arctic Circle, accounts for something like 20 percent of the country’s GDP and exports. None of the other five Arctic Ocean powers have any cities of notable size in the Arctic Circle. Nome, Alaska, the United States’ largest Arctic city, usually has a population of just under 4,000. Russia, on the other hand, has eight of the ten largest cities in the Arctic Circle, Norway having the other two. Murmansk, the largest, had a population of 500,000 in Soviet times, though it has fallen almost by half in the years since.
The last city founded by the tsars, in 1916, Murmansk was a principal target of the 1918 U.S. invasion to keep Russia war materiel from falling into German hands. American soldiers are buried there. During World War II the “Murmansk run” became legendary as British, Canadian, and American ships kept an embattled Soviet Union supplied with food. German U-boats torpedoed eighty-five merchant ships and sixteen Royal Navy warships. Churchill called this “the worst journey in the world.”[314]
For Russians the Arctic is associated with the heroic and the hellish—sometimes the two have even been combined. Daring rescues of explorers and scientists trapped by ice provided patriotic fodder for Soviet newspapers and newsreels. In 1937, due to exceptionally severe conditions, twenty-six Soviet ships were forced to winter at sea, frozen in place. This might have been good luck in disguise because 1937 was the very apex of Stalin’s Terror, and it was safer to be trapped in Arctic ice than home in your bed.
The Arctic was not only an arena of heroic exploits but a scene of ecological crimes. There were 138 nuclear tests—land-based, underground, underwater—in the Arctic between 1955 and 1990. Fourteen nuclear reactors were simply dumped into Arctic waters along with nineteen vessels containing radioactive waste. The K-27 nuclear submarine was scuttled in 1981 in thirty meters of water whereas international convention requires three thousand. In some places, like Andreeva Bay, nuclear waste leakages from a site containing thirty-two tons have rendered the waters “completely devoid of life.”[315]
But that may not be the gravest danger: “A Russian Academy of Sciences study indicates decades’ worth of nuclear reactor and radioactive waste dumping in the Kara Sea by the Russian Navy—as well as fallout from Soviet-era nuclear tests—could cause heightened levels of radioactive contamination when major Arctic oil drilling projects ramp up…. Studies show that when the drill bit hits the ocean floor, there is a danger of disinterring a vast portion of the Soviet Union’s irresponsible nuclear legacy … which threatens to contaminate at least a quarter of the world’s Arctic coastlines.”[316]
But drilling presents other dangers—as well as some intriguing possibilities—apart from the release of radioactive wastes. Russian scientists, attempting to foresee and forestall some of the effects of climate change and drilling, have been working on the melting permafrost and have recently discovered more than twenty previously unknown and possibly dangerous viruses. One of them, termed a “giant” virus because, at a length of 0.6 microns, it can be seen under a normal optical microscope, is known as Mollivirus sibericum and has been frozen in ice for thirty thousand years.
Not all the viruses are potentially harmful. In fact, one of them, officially known as Bacillus F and more informally as “the elixir of life,” shows mind-boggling promise. First, scientists noticed that Bacillus F “didn’t show signs of aging,” said Dr. Anatoly Brushkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University. “My colleagues and I cultivated the bacteria and started studying them more closely…. We started injecting mice with a solution containing Bacillus F and their lifespan increased by up to 30 percent.” As the lab head, Vladimir Repin, put it: “Imagine an old mouse living the last of its average 600 days. We injected it with the solution, and suddenly it started behaving like it was much younger. All the vital signs returned to normal.” Another of the lab’s scientists said, “Experiments have already resulted in mice restoring their fertility and beginning to reproduce again.”[317]
The true treasures of the North may not be the obvious ones of gas, oil, and gold.
In private, members of an ethnic group will often say things about themselves that they would not tolerate being said publicly, especially by someone not a member of their group. By themselves Russians will often remark on their carelessness, their bent for the slapdash. This, however, is usually viewed with more affection then disdain, seen as a result of the maximalist Russian spirit, which cannot be bothered with mere fussy detail.
In an article entitled “Carelessness as a Russian National Trait,” Michael Bohm, a former editor of The Moscow Times, lists eight horrific examples, including the crash of a Proton rocket in July 2012 because the velocity sensor was installed with the plus and minus poles reversed. The rocket carried three satellites worth $75 million, and they were not insured. Within Russia planes crash much more frequently than they do in other advanced nations, though Aeroflot’s international flights are world-class and its safety rating is higher than American Airlines’. The sinking of the Kursk nuclear attack submarine in August 2000, Putin’s first crisis, was caused by leaving on board cruise missiles that should have been removed to shore during training exercises and by proceeding with the testing of torpedoes that were leaking acid. One of those torpedoes exploded on board, causing a cruise missile to explode. This, and a long list of similar incidents, caused Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to declare sloppiness “a national threat.”[318]
Nothing is more portable than culture, and the Russians have brought theirs with them to the Arctic. In Soviet times that meant the dumping of radioactive wastes directly into the sea regardless of the depth. In post-Soviet times that mind-set has taken different forms. The sinking of the Kolskaya oil rig in December 2011 is a perfect example.
Everything was done wrong and everything went wrong. The captain had called his wife to say that their “mission is suicidal…. It was prohibited to transport oil rigs in those waters between December 1 and February 29.”[319] In mid-December, tugged by an icebreaker, the rig was traveling from the waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East and was carrying sixty-seven people, which was fourteen more than its crew; both Russian and international regulations stipulate that only skeleton crews be on board when rigs are being towed—sixty of the sixty-seven should have been on the icebreaker. Instead, the rig was packed like an “inter-island ferry in Indonesia.” The captain, who had attempted to resign but not been permitted to, was among the fifty-three casualties when the rig capsized and sank in heavy seas on December 18, 2011, in the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water temperature was 33 degrees, meaning any survivors had only thirty minutes before freezing to death.
In a Voice of America article, “Russia Moves into Arctic Oil Frontier with a Lax Safety Culture?” longtime Russia watcher James Brooke says the sinking of the Kolskaya rig “involved the kind of stunning incompetence that most nations would rule criminal.”
Brooke adds: “Some men, in what can only be described as superhuman feats of strength, donned wetsuits and managed to swim far enough in the freezing water to avoid getting pulled down in the deadly whirlpool created by the massive, multi-ton structure as it sank 1,000 meters to the ocean floor.”
316
“Arctic Oil Drilling Threatens International Radioactive Contamination from Old Soviet Nuclear Dump Sites,” Bellona, www.bellona.org/articles, February 3, 2009.
317
Arama Ter-Ghazaryan, “Ancient Bacteria Might Help Us Live to 140,”
318
Michael Bohm, “Carelessness as a Russian National Trait,”
319
James Brooke, “Russia Moves into Arctic Oil Frontier with a Lax Safety Culture?” VOA (Voice of America), December 22, 2011.