Travels in Siberia (69 page)

And I mean, these people can really
dance
. No two ways about it. I remember at the New York City Ballet years ago I saw a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, the great Russian-born choreographer, in which six or eight women did a delicate and controlled number for the first movement of a piece, and a similar dance for the second, and then before the third and last movement, which had a much faster tempo, the women went offstage and loosened their hair from the tight coifs it had been in, and when they came out for the final movement their hair was flying everywhere, and those girls—by that time they were girls, not women—danced to shake the paint off the walls.

Well, in this ballet,
Manon
, the whole corps danced like that. In the crowd scene they let go like kids at a rock concert, while staying technically accurate and hitting their marks (as near as I could tell) the whole time. The Mariinsky audience was with the dancers every second. Perhaps some of the tourists were a bit abstracted, but the Russians themselves—the old-lady balletomanes on the parterre; and the middle-aged folks in the boxes; and the rich, gaudy young couples; and the little girls with bouquets of flowers—none of them could take their eyes away. At intermission I was on a staircase and I happened to look down at the crowd milling in the second-floor lobby, and I noticed six or eight little girls here and there trying out ballet steps for one another and for small
knots of grown-ups looking on. During the last act when the stage lights were bright and spilling out into the audience, I observed the audience’s faces and they all were pointed intently at the stage, each with the devout, rapt, out-of-body expression of somebody watching the enactment of a deeply remembered dream.

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibers of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

The next morning or the one after, I flew back to New York. A rough pat down by security in Helsinki, clouds over the North Atlantic, clear skies over Canada revealing forests chewed up by harvesting for the paper mills; then the coast of Maine, the high-rise apartment buildings of the Bronx, the cranes and stacks and cargo containers of New York Harbor, the row houses before JFK Airport; then home.

I went back. When the subject of Siberia came up, people always asked me if I had plans to go back, and for a long time I didn’t know if I would. At what point can you say you have traveled in Siberia enough? I had done most of what I wanted to do there. But I kept wondering and thinking about this question, and I decided that if I was thinking about it so much, probably I should go. “You should do it, if only just to breathe the air,” my friend Katya said. For some reason her advice sealed it. In the fall of 2009, I started making plans for my fifth (and shortest) Siberian journey.

Meanwhile, like Governor Pestel, I had been observing Siberia from afar. Think about a name like Siberia long enough and your eye begins to pick it out at a glance among columns of newsprint even when you’re not trying. Siberia is one-twelfth of the land on earth, and I came to suspect that it appears in one-twelfth of all news stories, also. Its use as an expression of failure or ineptitude is growing. Expressions like “pop-music Siberia,” “career-counseling Siberia,” “dental-care Siberia,” “footwear Siberia,” etc., all indicating complete out-of-it-ness in those various areas or categories, are a big percentage of what the eye pulls up. And the name has become almost obligatory in restaurant reviews: reviewers now routinely note, along with the quality of the service and the price range of the meals, the location of the restaurant’s Siberia.

The real story, the one the papers were most excited about, had to do with oil and natural gas. To my mental map of Siberia with its rivers,
swamps, taiga forests, and expanses of essentially nothing, I began to add the Siberian oil and gas fields appearing in the news now all the time. There were the two huge fields offshore of Sakhalin Island, called Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II, and the Kovytka natural gas field near the Chinese border, which the Chinese hoped the Russians would attach to them by a pipeline (much of which China offered to pay for), and the rich Khanty-Mansiysk oil and gas fields along the middle reaches of the Ob River, and the Verkhnechonsk oil fields near Irkutsk, and the tough-to-drill-in Yamal Peninsula fields in the Siberian Arctic, and the Vankor field, in the Far East, the largest Russian oil-field development since the end of the Soviet Union.

Lukoil, a Russian oil company flush with cash, bought Getty Oil, and began to turn Getty gas stations in the United States into Lukoil stations. Oil-policy analysts thought this was a good idea, because Russian energy clearly was going to be an important future source of American supply, and if a Russian company had stations here Russia would be less likely, for coercive or other reasons, to turn off the tap. President Vladimir Putin himself showed up to inaugurate a new Lukoil station at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Vagit Y. Alekperov, the president of Lukoil, and the New York senator Charles Schumer were there, too. Putin held a cup of coffee and a Krispy Kreme donut in his hands.

Soon afterward, all the gas stations on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, which runs a mile from my house, turned into Lukoil stations. The first three letters of Lukoil’s name come from three fields the company has in western Siberia—the Langepaz, Urengoi, and Kogalym petroleum fields. Now when I want a whiff of distant Siberia, I need no longer travel into the city and breathe the scent of the sable furs at Saks Fifth Avenue. I just go to the nearest Lukoil and fill ’er up.

That particular Lukoil, by the way, offers no restrooms for customers. Large signs on the highway inform motorists of the fact. I found this innovation worrying. What other Russian bathroom customs might Lukoil be importing?

When Saudi Arabia reduced its oil production in 2005 and 2006, Russia became the largest oil-producing country in the world. Russia’s known petroleum reserves of 79 billion barrels were well behind Saudi Arabia’s 264 billion, but Russia also had the largest amount of territory whose energy resources remained unexplored. Most of those places were in the Russian Arctic and Siberia. Experts estimated that at least 80 billion barrels of Russian oil were yet to be found.

The maneuverings that Putin and his loyalists went through to take advantage of Russia’s strong position in the global energy market were complicated, and tiring to think about. Basically, they renationalized the oil and natural gas industries. Oligarchs who had previously dominated the business were forced to submit to the new order. Those who didn’t left the country or, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one-time head of Yukos Oil, ended up in a Siberian jail. Gazprom, the giant Russian natural gas company, of which the government owns more than half, grew to be the third-largest company (behind ExxonMobil and General Electric) in the world.

Key to the strategy of Putin & Co. was their focus on delivery. Primarily this meant pipelines, the traditional pinch point of the oil industry. If you wanted to move oil or natural gas out of the country, the Russian government was going to say how you did it and how much you paid. The United States, which now wanted to do business with Russia, seemed to forget that twenty-some years previously, during the Reagan administration, American sanctions had tried to block the completion of a Russian natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. Reagan had feared the political power the Soviets might gain by it. The pipeline, and others, got built anyway. Gazprom became the chief supplier of Western Europe’s natural gas. German homes were receiving 40 percent of the gas they heated and cooked with from Russia (that is, mostly from Siberia). All of the natural gas burned in Finland and the Baltic countries had the same source. In 2004, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic bought three-fourths or more of their natural gas from Russia; Austria and Turkey imported almost as much. France and Italy were at 25 percent and 27. (All these numbers are unlikely to be much different today.)

Consumers across Europe came to the uncomfortable realization that Russia, the chronically semifailing state, had now acquired the position of mean landlord in Europe’s basement. Now it could turn off the heat at will, depending on its mood. Marshall I. Goldman, an expert on Russian energy issues, has written that because of its control of the supply of natural gas “Russia is in a stronger position relative to Western Europe than it has ever been in its history.” To quiet people’s fears, Russian oil executives and high government officials swore that they would always stick to business agreements completely uninfluenced by political considerations of any kind. Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin appointee to
Gazprom’s board, reformed top management at the company. In 2006, its deputy CEO promised, “For us, contracts are like a Holy Bible.”

Medvedev, of course, later moved from Gazprom to take over (sort of) from Putin as Russia’s president. Although the following fact has little to do with anything, I think it worthwhile to note that
The New York Times
has reported that President Medvedev’s favorite band is Deep Purple.

When oil prices were up, Russian money flowed. For the first time almost ever, you saw groups of ordinary Russian tourists on the streets of New York. Russia paid off multibillion-dollar debts ahead of schedule and piled up a $300 billion hard-currency reserve. Putin considered using oil revenues to finish old Soviet-era projects, like the Boguchansk hydroelectric dam in eastern Siberia, or the few unbuilt parts of the Baikal–Amur Magistral. Russian collectors bought twenty-some of my friend Alex Melamid’s paintings for a bundle. In rural America, fur trappers found themselves with unexpected windfalls, as the Russians, always big fur consumers, bought more and more furs. Roman Abramovich, the wealthy entrepreneur and one-time governor of Chukotka, sold his oil and gas company, Sibneft, to Gazprom for $13 billion, thereby becoming Russia’s richest man. Then he moved to England and, upon arrival, became the richest man in England.

Oil prices went down again and the exuberance slowed; clearly, though, they would have to rebound. India needed oil, China was headed for U.S. levels of consumption. In Russia and outside it, Putin got a big amount of credit for Russia’s newly established energy strength. Among his countrymen his approval rating was high. He had been lucky to have in place the network of pipelines that the Soviets built in the Brezhnev era, and even luckier in the unpredictable rise of the price of oil.

His focus on Siberia and its wealth seemed more than accidental, though. Soviet leaders like Brezhnev used to visit Siberia only slightly more often than did the tsars. Putin, on the other hand, showed up there all the time. He skied in the Altai, he attended the opening of the new Chita–Khabarovsk highway (a road replacing the undrivable section where Sergei and Volodya and I had traveled by
vagon
), he went down to the bottom of Lake Baikal in a minisubmarine. He laid a wreath on the grave of Victor Astafiev, the twentieth-century Siberian author, in Krasnoyarsk. When the European Union wanted to meet to discuss energy
issues, he invited them to the oil town of Khanty-Mansiysk, or to Omsk. Putin made a trip to Yakutsk in January to talk about mineral extraction and reported that it wasn’t very cold there yet—“It was minus 45 degrees in the morning and now it has become ‘warmer’ to minus 42 Celsius,” he joked.

Russia had been in bad shape when Putin first took office in 1999. A currency crisis had occurred the year before, the country had defaulted on debts in the billions, millions of people lost their savings, the banking system became insolvent, foreign investors fled, etc. In those years every news headline about the plight of the country seemed to be Russia on the Brink? Financially, at least, Putin’s actions and the price of oil had improved Russia’s prospects a lot. From a wider-angled view of history, the country’s turnaround recalled other times (the Time of Troubles, the Great Patriotic War) when Russia’s fortunes had been saved by the resources of Siberia.

Once tapped and flowing, these resources seemed endlessly rich, even profligate. The Chernogoreft and Priobskoye and Yuganskneftegaz fields in western Siberia, the Samotlor and Berezovskoe fields, the Talakan field in Yakutia . . . Drillers of oil wells outside the gas-pipeline network had no use for the gas their wells might happen to extract, and so it was vented through pipes and burned at the well sites. This practice is known in the business as flaring. Enough gas to supply whole American cities was being flared every year. In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 426 billion cubic feet of methane were escaping annually from wells in Siberia (Gazprom countered it was only half that). Siberia, formerly an almost-all-dark swath of the nighttime planet in satellite images, now blazed with gas flares across the wilderness—“like cities on fire,” according to one report.