HE KNOWS that I came here because there is a miners’ strike. His mine has resumed work already, but the others are still striking. If I wish, we can go to the mine. We plunge into a sea of darkness, into snow, into a freezing gale. We hold each other so that the wind doesn’t knock us off our feet or throw us in opposite directions.
In Vorkuta, for the first time, I experience cold not as a piercing, penetrating chill, but as sharp physical pain. My head feels like it is splitting from the cold. My legs and arms hurt so much I cannot touch them.
Every now and then human shadows loom in the dense and gusting blizzard, blurry silhouettes, huddled shapes bent in half.
“That’s the second shift,” Genady Nikolayevich, breathless, shouts in my ear. “The second shift is going home.”
We are passing people who for months do not see the light of day. They walk to the mines in darkness; then, down below, in the underground, it is also dark, and when they return from work, they are surrounded by gloom. They are like the crew of a submarine — with only their watches, as well as their increasing fatigue, hunger, and drowsiness, to tell them about the passage of time.
The Komsomolskaya mine — ice-covered walls, ice-covered constructions, scanty lighting, a black, wet ooze beneath one’s feet. Women distributing the carts, working some sort of levers, beams, supports. “Do you want to talk to them?” asks Genady Nikolayevich. But talk about what? Such cold, such gloom, such sadness. And the women — busy, heavy, tired, maybe something is worrying them, maybe something is hurting them? Let me show them some respect, let me offer them some relief if only by not asking anything of them, no additional effort, even one so insignificant as would be required to answer some routine question.
WE GO BACK to the house, to the room of Mikhail Mikhailovich, where he and another young miner, Yevgeny Alekseyevich, are already waiting for me. They will take me to the Vargashovska mine, where the strike continues and where a meeting is going to be held, but we still have a lot of time. Mikhail, slender, tall, dark haired, continually in motion, continually agitated, is furious that his mine (the one that I have just visited) called off the strike. The reason: the director promised that the food would be better. “This nation will never amount to anything,” says the disheartened Mikhail. “Only one thing is important to these people—pazrat’ [eat]. Pazrat’!” He works himself up into a fury and cries “Pazrat’! Pazrat’! Pazrat’!” so suggestively that one feels oneself beginning to salivate. “Hunger, that is what moves us, that is our only concern.”
He clearly wants me to understand that he, Mikhail, is different, is cut from finer cloth. With pride he pulls out from a dresser drawer the thing he considers most precious — a beautiful, ornate 1900 edition of the Sergei Bible. He watches me to see if I have the capacity to be astonished and enraptured. Then he opens the enormous book at random and begins to read: “And gather yourself some wheat, barley, buckwheat beans, lentil, millet, and vetch, and put them in one dish and make yourself bread …”
He stops, startled and angry. Even the Bible talks about how to pazrat’!
“What else do you read?” I ask him later. He is reading Vauvenargues. He shows me a 1988 Leningrad edition in a green cloth cover. “There are many interesting things here,” he says of the collection of aphorisms of the eighteenth-century French thinker. “ ‘Slavery so degrades people that they even fall in love with it.’ How true that is!” He nods his head. “But in another place the Frenchman says the following: ‘We do not gain much through cunning.’ With this one cannot agree. Here you can attain everything through cunning.”
Neighbors start to arrive; it becomes crowded in Mikhail Mikhailovich’s room. Yevgeny Alekseyevich turns on the color television set on top of the dresser. The large, cherry-colored box growls as fiercely as if at any moment it were going to bristle. “Dynamo versus Spartak,” Yevgeny Alekseyevich explains to me in low tones, for the others have already long known this.
I stare at the screen. There is no distinct image on it, only thousands of multicolored sparks flitting nervously across the convex glass surface. The set is broken, but if such an appliance breaks in Komsomolski Posiolek, there is no way to fix it.
I have never seen anything like it. A dozen or so people are staring intently at the screen, on which every now and then sparks explode, as they do in a fire when someone throws in some dry juniper. The spots, lines, grains of light, dance, flash, and pulsate like an ethereal and mobile Fata Morgana. What a richness of light forms this is, what an indefatigable and crazy pantomime. All these flashes seem mad and illogical, but I am wrong. A perfect order governs these wanderings of colorful particles, their ceaseless motion and rapid changes of direction. The left side of the screen suddenly starts to sparkle in red; redness vibrates there, undulates, rages, and suddenly a cry resounds in the room: “Goool! Dynamo scored!” “How do you know they’ve scored?” I ask Yevgeny Alekseyevich, irritated, especially since the sound on the set also isn’t working. “What do you mean, how?” he replies, astonished. “Dynamo has red shirts!” After a time, at the other end of the screen there appears a great concentration of blue (Spartak’s color), and the room (which is clearly rooting for the Dynamo team) groans: “They tied!” During the break the sparks calm down, and even became motionless, spread out uniformly across the whole surface of the screen, only to spring up again in new pirouettes and gambols. But it has grown late — and we have to go to the meeting.
GLIMMERING AGAINST the white, icy darkness are the lights of Vargashovska — the northernmost mine of the Vorkutaugol Company. One hundred and eighty kilometers from here is the Kara Sea (which is part of the Arctic Ocean).
I passed through the guardhouse dressed in a shabby quilted jacket and hid my face in a huge reindeer-skin hat with earmuffs. After that nobody asked me for a pass or identification card, and someone even courteously indicated where the meeting room was. It was the standard hall with a plaster Lenin, with banners proclaiming the victory of communism, and at the front a table covered with a red cloth.
The hall could seat about three hundred people. It was full. An atmosphere of curiosity, but also of a certain anxiety: experience has taught these people that provoking the authorities is no laughing matter. On the other hand, they’ve announced in Moscow that there is new thinking, so perhaps something will change.
From the start of the meeting — confusion, bedlam, disorder. Who is to chair the meeting? Who has the right to turn the floor over to others? Who has the right to decide that the first one to speak will be the tall one and that only later may the short one take his turn; or that the one from the back of the hall will be first, and only later this woman from the left side, who after all has been demanding to speak for a long time now? And in general — what is the goal of our meeting? We have assembled — now what? We have announced a strike — now what?
One is immediately struck by the lack of leadership. Every now and then someone tries to direct the gathering. “Kozlov! Let Kozlov preside!” Kozlov gathers his thoughts, squirms, hems and haws. He cannot decide who should speak first — this one, who is asking when they will install the windowpanes in warehouse number 5, or that one, who is shouting across the length of the hall, demanding to know when all of Lenin’s volumes will be published. “Pietrov!” they call, dissatisfied with Kozlov. “Give us Pietrov!” But Pietrov also hems and haws. Pietrov also sweats; he too doesn’t know what to do with the aggressive assembly.