Travels in Siberia (71 page)

When I used to watch satellites going by, I had never considered that one of them might run into something. They seemed to have a pretty clear field. And my notion that occasionally I might be watching an Iridium was mistaken; every satellite I saw was going east–west, while the Iridium orbits are circumpolar. The system divides its sixty-six satellites among eleven orbits that enclose the globe like the bars of a spherical birdcage. Because the earth spins under them, the orbital paths relative to it turn like candy striping. The collision did not interrupt Iridium’s service. Other Iridium satellites were able to take over for the one that had been destroyed, and a spare satellite (the system also orbits eight spares) was maneuvered into its place within two weeks.

Navy Captain Paul “Mack” Insch, now retired, was chief of staff of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space of the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) when the collision occurred. This command tracks objects in space for civilian purposes as well as for the military. Some months after the incident I gave Captain Insch a call. He told me that when Iridium lost contact with the satellite, the company informed
Captain Insch’s department, which used radar sensors to search the area where the satellite was supposed to be. “We got what we call a multiple head count,” Insch said—many pieces, indicating that a collision had occurred. The number of the destroyed satellite was Iridium 33. Following 33’s path backward, Captain Insch’s group found that a Russian Cosmos, number 2251, would have come close to 33 at the time of the collision. Looking at 2251’s orbital path, they found another debris field. Some of the satellites’ debris had been knocked into higher orbits, some into lower. In time the debris fields in their orbital paths spread out to encircle the world; they will remain up there for many decades, at least.

After the collision, people wondered what the risk might be to the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits at 350 miles up, and to the Space Station, at 220 miles. “I don’t believe there is a statistically huge increase in risk to either of them from this event,” Captain Insch told me. “Human grasp of these spaces is inadequate—the magnitude of volume we’re talking about. But you also can expect one result of this kind of impact to be a lot of pieces that are utterly invisible to our radar or optical sensors. I wonder about those pieces we can’t see. Whenever the astronauts take space walks I always think what guts they have. One little paint fleck to the visor, at those velocities, and you’re dead.”

Maybe the meeting of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 will turn out to be just a footnote, nothing anybody need worry about. Or maybe it was the first of more to come, with multiplying fragments hitting other orbiting objects in a chain reaction that turns certain orbit levels into dangerous and useless junk zones. If so, the fact that Russia and the United States, the space race’s Cold War competitors, should be the first participants in this futuristic smashup, and that it should begin in the sky over Siberia, somehow stands to reason.

Things to do in Novosibirsk:

You can visit the Novosibirsk Regional Museum, a redbrick building with white trim near Lenin Square. When I was there, the museum was having an exhibit of mummies, or maybe I should say “mummies,” because the mummies weren’t real but replicas—or, more properly, “replicas,” inasmuch as the originals of what the replicas represented may never have existed to begin with. It was scary, though! Along with human
mummies, there were cat mummies, dog mummies, crocodile mummies. There was a mummy of an Italian bishop, in front of a perhaps real picture of a cathedral filled with monks who had had themselves mummified in emulation of him. The tour of the exhibit concluded inside a pyramid made of plywood in which dwarfish mummy-skeleton guys held torches next to a mummy of a pharaoh. Kids thronged all over. Out front the sign advertising the exhibit was in Cyrillic, of course, but with letters that wavered and dripped blood—the universal mummy typeface.

Up the street a few blocks, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum occupies an immense classical-style building from Soviet times. This museum has the usual large number of good paintings by Russian painters you’ve never heard of. Nicholas Roerich, the painter and guru/mystic who lived for a while in Novosibirsk, gave two dozen or so of his idealized mountain landscapes to the museum. In one of them, a sharp-eyed Genghis Khan sitting on his pony on a high ledge looks off to the left, as if there’s something in that direction he can’t wait to despoil. One of the museum’s more recent paintings (not by Roerich) had a baffling title: “
Stakan Fanti
.” The first word means “glass,” but my pocket dictionary did not list the second. I looked more closely at the painting. The liquid in the glass was orange. “
Fanti
,” therefore, must be the genitive singular of Fanta, the orange soft drink: “Glass of Fanta.”

For a moviegoer, the Pobeda (Victory) theater, on Ulitsa Lenina, is both familiar and not. The ornate and columned building, formerly a Soviet movie palace, has been turned into an ordinary multiplex, but with the old high ceilings and triumphalist moldings mostly unchanged. One afternoon there I saw the just-released
Tsar
, about Ivan the Terrible. I found it almost unwatchably horrifying, though not inaccurate about Ivan’s life. People in the movie are tortured in various ways, enemies of Ivan are eaten by his bear, monks are burned alive in their churches. The plot concerns Ivan’s attempts to coerce Philip, the Orthodox metropolitan, into blessing Ivan’s wicked schemes. When a monk who has refused to implicate Philip in a crime is beheaded, the executioner holds the head in front of Philip’s face, and Philip takes the head by its cheeks and kisses it on the lips. Just another escapist costume drama, in other words.

If you like Cold War relics, the Museum of Siberian Communications, on the second floor of a brownstone by the Novosibirsk post office, is the place to go. This museum is sponsored by a Siberian telecom company.
You have to ring a buzzer to get in. The humorous blond woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.

In front of a display about old-time satellites and their orbits—concentric circles of colored lights, blinking in sequence around a globe—I asked the guide if she had heard about the American satellite and the Russian satellite that collided over Siberia. She said she certainly had. The crash was in the newspapers and on television and on the radio for days, she said. People weren’t too sure exactly where it had happened, but they thought it must have been someplace just above them. She said old ladies in Novosibirsk were afraid that pieces of the satellites would fall on them.

When my friend Alex Melamid was a member of the Soviet Artists’ union, back in the early seventies, he was sent from Moscow to work on some murals in Novosibirsk. The work required that he stay in the city for several months. At the time, as it happened, the region was suffering from a shortage of matches, so Alex had brought a supply of matches with him. He recalls that whenever he stopped to light a cigarette on the street, passersby would immediately hurry over to him holding out unlit cigarettes of their own.

Today Novosibirsk has its own giant shopping mall, with matches and more—in the event that you have come to Novosibirsk to shop, you’ll be fine. I had found the claim hard to believe when I read it in
The New York Times
, but there it was: “Siberia, where Russians waited in long lines to buy food with ration cards not long ago, is the improbable epicenter of one of the biggest mall booms in history.” The story cited “trickle-down petroleum money” as the cause and mentioned the new mall in Novosibirsk.

One morning I set out to find this mall. I had heard it was on the city’s outskirts, so I went down into the Lenin Square metro, boarded a subway train, and rode to the last stop. The weather was as cold as usual but
the station was heated to stuffiness. A drowsy warmth filled the subway car, too—until the train emerged onto the bridge over the Ob River, supposedly the longest subway-train bridge in the world. I noticed the passengers all rebuttoning and adjusting scarves. After a few minutes, the car’s temperature dropped to the subzero cold outside, and everybody was breathing steam. In another few minutes, the train went back underground and the car became warm again.

I got out at the end of the line and wandered a shabby square where pieces of broken produce crates strewed the gutters and sidewalks. Maybe a farmers’ market gathers here. Vans and buses idled in long lines at the curbs, and on the sides of some of the buses I noticed ads for the Mega-Ikea. That’s the Novosibirsk mall’s name. Mega is a developer of malls in many Russian cities, and Ikea is—do I need to say what Ikea is? A behemoth, world-devouring home furnishings store? I asked a guy in the square how to get to the Mega-Ikea, and he told me what buses went there. He was wearing a jacket with the Dannon Yogurt label on it in Russian, so I figured he’d know.

When I asked the bus driver to tell me when we reached the Mega-Ikea, he only shrugged. I soon understood why. The Mega-Ikea mall dominates its blank surroundings like a beached aircraft carrier, impossible to miss. Its huge parking lot lacks cars and thus presents the approaching mallgoer with a flat Siberian snowfield across which footpaths serpentine. I debarked with almost all the other passengers and took the footpath originating at this bus stop. Up ahead, I could see, the path would converge with others from other bus stops, aiming for what had to be the colossus’s entryway.

Of the mall itself, little need be said. Any reader can supply his or her own generic experiences of malls and be not too far off. Perhaps the Novosibirsk Mega-Ikea is bigger than most malls—with its hallways as wide as airplane runways, etc.—and its customers correspondingly smaller-seeming and more scattered. Perhaps the Mega-Ikea’s background Muzak is more bizarre—unthreatening American country songs, in a style that might be called shopping country. Considering that this is a mall in the Siberian taiga, I found “On the Banks of the Ohio” (sung in English) a confusing tune. The only part of the mall I really liked was right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold. Mixed with that air, a strong scent of Russian diesel blasted a muscular alternative to the retail atmosphere.

Certain of the mall’s architectural elements had not been thought through. At the end of one airplane-runway hall, a floor-to-ceiling window opened a vista on the countryside. Malls in America do not have windows. For a mall to be a true mall this law must be observed. Here, a large sofa upholstered in blue denim sat in front of the window with its back to it, but the gesture was too late, the damage done. Inescapably the eye was drawn outward, where it met a small, drab village of wooden dachas, snow-covered roofs against dark-brown walls, and beyond, the taiga tree line’s front rank, winter-cold and gray to the horizon.

On the Novosibirsk metro, the station closest to the Mega-Ikea mall is Ploshchad Karla Marksa, Karl Marx Square.

Another day, I took a bus to Akademgorodok, where I’d stayed on my 2001 trip with Sergei and Volodya. This time I went there to meet Ivan Logoshenko, a friend of Rob Carey’s, my brother-in-law. Rob got to know Ivan some years ago when both were doing experiments with the alternating gradient synchrotron, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island. Rob had told me that Ivan, called Vanya, is a prince of a guy, and he is. He holds the rank of “leading scientist” at Novosibirsk State University, where he heads his own
katedra
, or department, in the field of computers and physics. Vanya grew up on Sakhalin Island, in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, but he speaks American English not much differently than Rob and I do.

Akademgorodok must have been designed to look its best in winter. I remembered it as being green and somewhat weedy, with apartment buildings and tall fir trees rising from the undergrowth. That was in August. Now, a thick snow mantle subdued the “science city,” rendered it into a sharply focused two-tone photograph, made it look reasoned and disciplined. At a T intersection where a street met an avenue, the bus stopped and began to idle. The driver leaned back and lit another cigarette, blue lassos of smoke snaking around his rearview mirror, while all the twenty-somethings piled out. I figured this must be the center of town. The snow here had a packed-down, much-trodden patina and people were hurrying past, pushing kids in strollerlike conveyances that had sled runners instead of wheels. A group of boys, all of them about nine or ten years old, horsed around while waiting for their mothers to pick them up.

I called Vanya and told him where I was and he said he would be there in five minutes. The boys continued to play all around me, oblivious, like fish around a scuba diver. One kid climbed partway up a nearby fir and began to shake snow down on his companions. This got a laugh. Then a boy who was hopping here and there doing karate kicks happened to kick an aluminum light pole. Atop the light pole was a shade like a broad, flat hat, carrying a tall accumulation of snow. The kick sent some snow down on another kid’s head. Great hilarity. All the kids then began karate kicking the light pole, which responded with satisfying dull
bongs
and cascade after cascade of snow. Meanwhile, several mothers pulled up in their cars and were chatting with one another, occasionally interrupting themselves to tell the boys to quit kicking the light pole. The boys only kicked more, and finally one of the boys, with high exuberance, began singing “Jingle Bells,” in English, in time to his kicks. Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, “Jingle Bells,”
bong, bong, bong
, great laughter. He knew the words and sang them perfectly, without accent.