Lenin and Stalin saw nothing in the north but savagery and empty space in which ‘cultured states’ could quickly be established. The Northern Region, a vast area stretching from Novgorod to the White Sea, was Molotov’s first bureaucratic responsibility after the new Soviet state moved the seat of government from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. It was in this position of responsibility for production, factories and nationalisation that he was able to see how much the reality of ‘expropriating the expropriators’ differed from Marx’s idea on the page. During the first Five-Year Plan, for the anniversary of the Revolution, an obelisk of the north was erected in a square behind Archangel’s waterfront, declaring in granite that the will of the proletariat, and its power and vigour, would ‘transform this dark and backward region into a new industrialised north’. The power that industrialised the north combined the energy of genuine ideological and patriotic love with the power of the state over its slaves. The obelisk had taken the place of another vision of light in darkness, a statue of Mikhailo Lomonosov, the intellectual luminary from the north who transformed the culture of eighteenth-century Russia. The Lomonosov statue is famous in Archangel as a monument with no fixed place. Inspired by his own ode, ‘Evening Thoughts on the Greatness of God at the Happening of the Great Northern Lights’, the bronze luminary has an expression of awe on his upturned face. Lyre in hand, dressed in Roman sandals and a toga, he stands on the northern half of a globe; on it is the word ‘Kholmogor’, the humble place where Lomonosov was born, son of a northern fisherman, in a village which is almost washed away each spring. If Archangel could be compared to a person, it would be Lomonosov, Dmitri Likhachev said: a poor boy raised in the rich soil of his native culture, educated first by the Church and then in Germany, in the centres of the European Enlightenment. Lomonosov, who was sure that the Russian future lay in the exploration of Siberia and the Arctic, educated himself to endure the cold too, not by wearing a toga in winter, but by sleeping with his windows open through the coldest nights.
A group of runners in thin tracksuits and woollen hats came out every evening, running past the Arcades and the Palace of Culture, where the Trinity Cathedral stood before it was disassembled during the first Five-Year Plan and its materials recycled by Severoles, the northern forestry company. A loudspeaker is still rigged up on the Palace of Culture to broadcast into the street. The subbotniks of spring, days when people come out voluntarily to clean the city, happen at the same time as the ice-flow. Within a few hours, every concrete litter bin along the embankment had been repainted lilac, and the black and yellow beach umbrellas on the dark sand of the beach were restored to apiary brightness. Mothers walked their babies, moving slowly, stopping often to watch the ice. From the open windows of an old wooden mansion, School of Music and Performing Arts No. 42, came the sound of three pianos and a cello and the voice of a teacher, counting time. Seagulls called. Down below the embankment, in the broken hulls of abandoned rowing boats, there was still clean white ice, and driftwood so warped by the sea that it looked like dirty cloth. In the frozen puddles, the melt was grimed, oily substances blending in the ice, creating rainbow slicks. Every colour, whatever its source or substance, seemed precious in the pallor of this place. Parts of the promenade had slipped unchecked into the Dvina, forming little pools dammed with broken concrete where cigarette ends, fish cans and beer bottles swayed in the lacy foam. Outside the Hotel Pur-Navolok, the pennants of the oil company Rosneft and the diamond mining company Alrosa flapped in the wind beside the Russian tricolor.
Of the grand and melancholy neoclassical buildings that faced the Dvina, my favourite was the derelict Girls’ Gymnasium, founded in 1811 for the centenary of Lomonosov. What a sign of enlightenment, this magnificent white neoclassical building, straddling the street corner with such proud symmetry, in which young girls were educated on the classical German model. Its windows were dark now, many of their panes broken. Graffitied in English on a wall were the words ‘Know Your Rights!’ If I were the mayor of this city, I thought, at this precarious moment of opportunity when financiers in Moscow say that Russia is ‘afloat on a sea of liquidity’, I would ask Alrosa or Rosneft to fund the restoration of the school. But Archangel’s popular mayor was in prison, having been arrested on corruption charges soon after announcing his plan to run for the presidency against Putin’s appointed heir.
This waterfront with its once wooden embankments was built to greet foreign ships, to display their comings and goings as the very pride of the city, water showing itself to town and town to water, in the manner of a seventeenth-century engraving of Antwerp, Dresden or London. The Arcades, built when Archangel was Russia’s only seaport as the architectural centrepiece of the city, now stand alone on the headland. Though most of the vast original structure of the Arcades has been demolished or crumbled into ruins, a small inner section has recently been exquisitely restored to house part of the regional museum. In it is a ‘Lomonosov room’, displaying the school workbooks of Archangel’s greatest son, and an ingenious splinter lamp by which he studied at night. For the second half of the seventeenth century, before Archangel yielded its place to St Petersburg as a cosmopolitan ‘window on Europe’, the brick Arcades showed the foreign merchants who came to deal in linen and fur the power and solidity of the Russian state, and its love for trade.
It was here, in 1553, that Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor of the Mystery Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands ‘discovered Russia’ as they journeyed on their ship the Edward Bonaventure in search of the north-east passage to India and Cathay. With all the recording passion of nations in their prime, Willoughby and Chancellor logged each day and night of their voyage, noting lands, elements and tides, the moon’s course, the arrangement of the stars and the height of the sun. Their log-book was the first of its kind. The English seafarers weighed anchor opposite the fifteenth-century monastery of St Nicholas (where the nuclear-submarine works at Severodvinsk, formerly Molotovsk, now lie), naming the White Sea ‘St Nicholas Bay’ on their maps. Chancellor went south to Moscow and met the Ivan ‘the Terrible’, who quickly became an Anglomane and gave exclusive trading privileges to Chancellor’s company, the Muscovy Company. Willoughby continued his voyage, reaching the long narrow island of Novaya Zemlya just above the Russian mainland before dying with his crew as they wintered in Lapland.
The effect of Archangel on the imagination is almost clinical. It is a place for stowaways and adventurers, locals say, for people who long for freshness, to see the way the sea bleaches rock and wood, to imagine making voyages of their own to the summit of the planet. At this latitude, the North Pole itself exerts a powerful gravitational pull. When Mamontov built the railway, his protégés, the painters Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, came north to paint the landscape and the people. But the dreams of their contemporary, the painter Alexander Borisov, were of venturing further north, of going ‘up’ from Archangel. We were the only visitors in the city’s small, lovingly tended Borisov Museum, an old timber house where fishing nets and plastic seagulls have been hung on the ceilings, and a tape plays the calls of Arctic birds. The son of a peasant from the North Dvina, Borisov took a rocking chair, a bearskin and a chestful of brushes, canvas and paint, and went to live in a hut on Novaya Zemlya. (My painter companion was enraptured by the story of this adventure for art’s sake.) His boat, the Mechta (‘Dream’), was a copy of the Fram, the ship the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had built for his journey to the Pole, with an egg-shaped hull that levitates evasively in the moving ice so as not to be crushed. The Moscow journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky found himself staring at Borisov’s vast polar landscape Kingdom of Death for over an hour. Gilyarovsky, great connoisseur of human character, was amazed by Borisov’s daredevil toughness for the sake of art, his ability to keep a paintbrush in his grip at forty degrees below zero. Once, after watching his dogs die in the freezing sea, Borisov spent nine days and nights on a broken iceberg, spreading his body weight so as to keep the ice intact. In 1907, in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, he exhibited his sublime images of ice and snow in all their infinite coloration, of wrecked boats, lurid Arctic skies and the huts of the Samoyeds on Novaya Zemlya. Before the Revolution, Borisov was involved in a plan to build a railway linking northern Europe with Siberia, along which the station buildings would be designed by well-known artists.