Travels in Siberia (72 page)

Vanya arrived in his Toyota with its steering wheel on the right-hand side, and he drove me around the town. This was a totally pleasant afternoon. Knowing that so many great brains were on the premises, in the apartment buildings and institutes and cottages distributed throughout the snowy landscape, gave the place a certain romance. Playing off that, the restaurant where we went for lunch had been designed around a science theme. Its decor featured elaborate scientific formulas in Russian handwriting on the zinc walls, and abstruse charts and graphs on the floors, and combinations of actual brass-and-steel gears set into the paneling above the booths. The check, when it came, was in an old Russian textbook of differential equations.

As Vanya and I sat and talked, I felt normal. I had never felt just that—normal—in Russia before. I had been making trips to Russia and working on this book since 1993. In those sixteen years I had been to Siberia five times, to western Russia five or six more. Never in all those travels had I felt merely normal. At the beginning, when the Soviet Union had recently disappeared, everything was giddy, in flux. A person you met might be your new best friend or a complicated criminal. The rubles in your pocket might be devalued overnight. Though the Soviets themselves were gone, the Soviet relics had not been hauled away, and
Cold War mirror images were everywhere. Back then the whole country was, to me, toxic as well as wonderfully new. I was both dazzled and on my guard constantly.

Now things had sorted themselves out, more or less. Once again Russia was not a democracy. People seemed to have accepted that. Absorbent of other cultures, as always, the country had taken in global capitalism and made its own version of it, in some ways a grotesque. English could now be found throughout the country, and Cyrillic signs, when sounded out, often were English, too. I noticed this restaurant offered a special
—phonetically, “biznes lunch.” I had seen similar signs around Novosibirsk. Vanya said the “biznes lunch” had become common some years ago. Like the Hotel Sibir and the Aeroflot planes and this restaurant, parts of Russia were now almost indistinguishable from their equivalents in America. I couldn’t even find old Soviet postcards anymore. Those funny, drab, literal-minded cards of former times had been replaced with high-production glossies you might buy at Disney World or anywhere.

What to make of this remade, hybridized country? From what you heard and read, Russia was a bigger disaster now than it had been under communism. Russians today were dying faster than they were being born. The population, descending at a rate of 4 percent annually since 1993, was down to 142 million. At this rate it would go below 100 million in eight years. And yet, as mentioned, Russia had become the leading energy-exporting nation in the world. But that was bad for the country, too, given its unhealthy dependence on this single, unrenewable source of income. Russian men now were living, on average, only fifty-nine years—a life expectancy worse than in 165 other countries, and just above Gambia’s. The World Health Organization noted that Russians were consuming twice as much alcohol as the amount considered dangerous for health. Three and a half times as many people were dying in car wrecks in Russia (twenty-one per hundred thousand) as were dying in car wrecks in Germany (six per hundred thousand). Three times as many Russians as Americans or Europeans were dying of heart disease.

And yet, in 2009, Russia passed De Beers as the world’s leading producer of diamonds. And yet, Russia now supplied Boeing and Airbus with over half the titanium used to build their airplanes. And yet, Norilsk Nickel, in the far north, was producing a fifth of the world’s nickel. And
yet, Norilsk’s smelters also were producing more sulfur dioxide than the entire nation of France. And yet, United Energy Systems, Russia’s electrical monopoly, was putting almost as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as was the entire nation of Great Britain. And yet, a Russian billionaire who made a lot of money from Norilsk Nickel had just bought the New Jersey Nets basketball team. And yet, a Russian oil billionaire had just brought some very large bells back to the Russian monastery from which they had been removed years ago, and had compensated the bells’ owner, a Harvard dormitory house, by providing duplicate bells, at great expense. And yet, a Russian aluminum billionaire had merged his aluminum company with two others to create the largest aluminum company in the world, explaining that he could make aluminum more cheaply because of the vast hydropower resources of Siberia; in fact, most of the money and resources currently enriching the billionaires, and Russia, had their origins in Siberia. And yet—

And yet Russia was a mess. Once again it was killing its writers; although, in keeping with the previous century’s tilt toward nonfiction, reporters had become the victims now, while poets and fiction writers seemed to be exempt. Investigations of the Soviet past had been clamped down upon. The archives of the KGB, open during the Yeltsin years, were unofficially reclosed. Researchers seeking access to them met bureaucratic delays and other obstacles impossible to go around. In St. Petersburg, masked men of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office forced their way into the offices of Memorial, a research and information center devoted to studying the Stalinist repressions. The government men confiscated hard drives and CDs containing Memorial’s entire files. These included databases of victims, letters, photographs, memoirs, and documents relating to the Terror and the gulag. Prosecutors said they were investigating Memorial’s connection to a newspaper article that incited racial hatred—a claim with no foundation, Memorial’s supporters replied.

Each year the long-dead Joseph Stalin continued ascending in the estimation of his countrymen. Putin himself sometimes made favorable comments about him, even referring to him once or twice familiarly as “Iosif Vissarionovich.” In 2008 a Russian television station conducted a poll to find out which Russians were considered by their countrymen to be the greatest of all time. Millions voted in the poll, and Stalin came in third.
Alexander Nevsky, the thirteenth-century prince who later became a saint, was first, and Pyotr Stolypin, the prime minister who worked for reforms under Nicholas II and died by assassination in 1911, was second. Among the top twelve, the others were Pushkin (#4), Peter the Great (#5), Lenin (#6), Dostoyevsky (#7), A. V. Suvorov (famous general; #8), Mendeleev (the only Siberian on the list; #9), Ivan the Terrible (#10), Catherine the Great (#11), and Alexander II (#12). In light of how hated Alexander had been in life, and how hard his enemies had worked to kill him, his appearance in the top twelve was something of a surprise.

Snow was falling when Vanya and I emerged from the science-themed restaurant, and the snow on Vanya’s car had to be removed with a snow scraper, while big snowflakes continued snowing down snowily. A heavy snowstorm, in other words, in this already snow-covered place. Vanya offered to drive me back to my hotel; as I said, he’s a prince of a guy. I hesitated to accept his offer, knowing he would be driving forty miles in the snow. But accept I did.

Cars were going slowly on the road between Akademgorodok and Novosibirsk as Vanya told me about the first time he left Russia, back in the early nineties. He had won a prize of three months’ study in Switzerland for being first in physics in his graduating class at Novosibirsk State. The difference between Zurich and anyplace in Russia at that time was enormous. On the crowded and snowy highway, traffic slowed more, then stopped. Vanya said this is the only road from Akademgorodok to the city and it gets busier all the time. I remembered locals telling me, back in 2001, that Akademgorodok was losing population; now, Vanya said, Akademgorodok had become fashionable, rents were rising, new apartment buildings were going up. Old-time residents had begun to worry about conserving the town’s character, its forests and open spaces. Rich apartment buyers from Novosibirsk were moving in. Maybe in the future the scientists for whom the place was designed would no longer be able to afford it.

In a Siberian snowstorm, we were having a conversation about real estate—for me, another feature of normality. I continued to feel normal for a while after Vanya dropped me off at my hotel. Snow fell all night and for the next few days. The snow was pleasant to look at from my room,
though hazardous to walk on as it piled lightly on the already slippery sidewalks. On every surface it settled in and soon became a Styrofoam-like substance that squeaked underfoot. After another solitary hike or two around the city, my feeling of normalness faded out, and I fell into a jumpy state again. I decided I kind of preferred it, overall.

The regional museum, where the mummy exhibit was, had a gift shop I remembered as a place in which I might find some presents to bring home. There was a whole shelf of refrigerator magnets. When I went back and looked at them again, I saw that the magnet facings with engravings of mammoths were made not of wood, but of mammoth ivory, and I bought a half dozen, happy to participate in the mammoth-ivory trade. Since an international ban on buying and selling elephant ivory was enacted in 1989, mammoth ivory from Siberia has taken over as a legal substitute. Japan and China are the chief importers; in those countries people often use ivory seals on documents in place of signatures. In the West, a pound of mammoth ivory can go for $800. Russia’s mammoth-ivory exports increased from two tons in 1989 to forty tons in 2007. Mammoth ivory fifteen thousand or more years old, a part of Siberian commerce for centuries, became a sought-after product of the taiga again.

Some people hunt mammoth ivory professionally. It also provides an income source for oil-field workers and reindeer herders who trade in it as a sideline. Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths—or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today.

Sergei Prigarin, the mathematician whom I’d met on my trip in 2001, was not at home in Akademgorodok this time. By e-mail he informed me that he and his wife were staying in Munich while he worked on a meteorological project involving stochastic simulations of clouds. Sergei said his daughter, Sveta, was living in Akademgorodok, spoke fluent English, and would be glad to meet with me. Sveta had been only sixteen when we came through here in 2001. She and her friend Maria had gone with us to the outdoor museum with the restored wooden church. The truth was, I did not really remember them. Vaguely I recalled that they were cheerful and friendly kids and I’d talked some English to them.

On this trip, Sveta and I were in touch first by e-mail, and then arranged by cell phone how we would meet. I took a van to Akademgorodok
and kept a window scraped clear of frost so I could see out. As the van came into the town limits, we passed a sign by the roadside:
MOGUCHESTVO ROSSII PRIRASTAT’ BUDET SIBIR’IO!
Many Russians know this saying, which was made by Mikhail Lomonosov, the first Russian genius in science, in the eighteenth century. It is the most succinct expression of the eastward-looking, pro-Siberia point of view, and the biggest sign in Akademgorodok, as well. It means, “The Power of Russia Will Grow from Siberia!”

Again I got off with everybody else, but the van had taken a different route than the bus did when I came to visit Vanya. I could not see any landmarks in the surrounding forest. I went with a flow of pedestrians along a snow path until it ended in front of what might have been a student union or a dorm. By my sketchy description over the phone, Sveta figured out where I was. In twenty minutes she showed up—a tall, slim young woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. She recognized me before I recognized her.

I had wanted to check some facts about the wooden church we’d visited in 2001. On the Internet she had found a three-page history of the church in Russian, and she brought it with her on a memory stick. She took me to a nearby minimall and got the history printed out at a copy shop, and then over coffee she translated the text for me. She also had a good recall of the visit and of Galina’s, the guide’s, speech, and filled in blanks in my notes. While I had been so distracted by my own concerns that I almost didn’t notice her, she had been remembering everything.

Sveta had finished high school, attended Novosibirsk State, and graduated in 2008 with a degree in psychology. So far she had been unable to find a job and was taking classes in origami. She told me about growing up in Novosibirsk, and about a dacha the family has nearby, and she described the many mosquitoes around there. One summer, she said, a local pharmacy was offering $100 a pound for dried mosquitoes. Apparently they have some pharmaceutical qualities. Inspired by the big price, Sveta and her friends tried to catch and collect a pound of mosquitoes, but quit in despair after finding out how many it took to equal just a gram.

When I left, Sveta gave me an origami globe of pink and orange paper flowers she had made, and a cardboard candy box to carry it in. At JFK Airport, on my way home, a young woman police officer with a beagle trained to sniff for illegal substances walked by as I was standing near the luggage carousel. The candy box was in a plastic bag on the floor
beside my briefcase. As the beagle trotted past, it suddenly stopped short and “indicated” at the plastic bag, scratching and whining and straining toward it. The officer asked me what was in the bag. I took out the origami globe and showed it to her. She smiled and said, “Wow!” and then she and the dog walked on.