As I looked at their blotched black-and-white faces, I thought of Shalamov’s ‘Lend-Lease’, in which, near some Arctic mine hidden in the folds of a mountain, in the landscape that can hide and reveal so much, an American bulldozer appears (bringing a new word into the Russian language) with the tractors and Studebakers and spam ‘from beyond the ocean …’ Planes and tanks and machines were of infinitely more importance to the state than people, Shalamov writes. While the camp authorites fought over the food, the convicts were so hungry they ate the machine grease from the bulldozer, convincing themselves it was American butter: ‘foreign joy that tasted like a young stone’. (The taste of young stone? Is there comfort to the senses in thinking in geological time?) And this particular ‘symbol of victory, friendship and something else’ had a blade like a mirror, which was used efficiently, driven by a common criminal (‘a parricide, to be precise’) named Grinya Lebedev, who was proud to fulfil his duty to the state, to scrape the bodies of Gulag prisoners into a mass grave: a ‘stone pit filled with the undecaying corpses of 1938 … sliding down the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma’, thousands of bodies, which the unforgetting permafrost resisted ‘with all its strength’, bodies frozen and preserved, ‘curled fingers, rotten toes, turned to stumps by frostbite, eyes still burning with the gleam of hunger’.
On our last day, we drove out of Archangel, past rotting log houses on muddy streets with wooden pavements, to Malye Korely, an outdoor museum of wooden architecture, and walked in the sunshine among churches with fish-scaled tent roofs and carved log houses brought here for preservation from all over the Russian north. A bride and groom in a horse and carriage were driven several times around the circular road through the forest as bells rang from one of the old churchtowers. The bride’s veil blew back in the wind, she laughed, her wedding party cheered and held out plastic cups of champagne, and the chimes sounded mad with nuptial glee.
Our train was to leave around midnight, so we went to eat baked fish and blini at the Solovetsky Hostel and wander on the waterfront again. A small group of young clubbers was waiting for the USSR to open, boys in their mid-teens with mulish laughs, smoking and drinking Baltika beer, leaning on the busts of Otto Shmidt and the pre-revolutionary seafarer Georgy Sedov. In 1936, Shmidt’s words reached as far as Trotsky in exile. ‘“The better part of our youth”, the well-known polar explorer Shmidt said recently, “are eager to work where difficulties await them,”’ Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936. ‘This is undoubtedly true,’ he continued. ‘But in all spheres the post-revolutionary generation is still under guardianship. They are told from above what to do, and how to do it.’
The busts of Shmidt and Sedov made a poignant ensemble. The ship in which Shmidt sailed from Archangel to Franz Josef Land on his first great navigation to declare the island a forepost of the USSR was named the Georgy Sedov. On one of his Arctic navigations, Shmidt had hoped to bring Sedov’s remains back to Archangel. The son of an Azov fisherman, educated at a naval school in Rostov-on-Don, Sedov had tried to reach the North Pole overland with three dogsleds. Having miscalculated the distance by a factor of ten, he died on the sea ice. His Travels to Kolyma and Novaya Zemlya were published after his death in the year of the Revolution. In the Soviet era, Sedov’s tragedy was used to illustrate the cruelty and chaos of capitalism. When he had tried to finance a voyage in search of a northern sea-route to the east, the Archangel merchants had double-crossed him (selling him a ship sabotaged for insurance fraud), and the state treasury had refused him funds. ‘All the Russian people have to give is a little money’, Sedov pleaded, ‘and I will give my life.’ The collectivist society would not have betrayed such dreams of discovery and conquest. Shmidt could not find Sedov’s body; his burial place had been washed away.
The old system may have failed Sedov, but what did it really mean for a polar explorer and scientist like Shmidt to live so ‘close to the Kremlin’, so close to Stalin and Molotov? In old age, when Molotov used to like to draw floorplans of Stalin’s dachas, he reminisced about the maps lining the walls of the corridor of his dacha at Kuntsevo. ‘He liked wall maps,’ Molotov said. ‘Here was Asia. Here was Europe. We spent a lot of time there … he was interested in how to make use of the Arctic Ocean, the Siberian rivers, the treasures of Siberia …’
I had looked into Shmidt in the Lenin Library before coming to the north, and as the descriptions of his navigations led out into thrilling uncharted vistas of white space, they simultaneously seemed to lead into a dark tunnel. One of his books was an address of 1937 on Soviet plans for the Arctic, which talked of the conquest of the northern sea-route, the need for heavy industry in the far north, the necessity of gaining access to the mouths of the northern rivers, the new industrial centres at Kolyma and Norilsk, the ship-building feats at Murmansk and the success of the mines at Barentsburg on Spitsbergen. Yet, he said, there is no need to resettle millions in the north. It is harsh. Just enough to do the work. And they must be fed properly, the people in the north, with the freshest food, or they will not be able to work. Vegetables, he said, have a huge psychological significance. Anyone who has worked in the north knows the joy that every single leaf can give. We must have collective farms, hothouses near Norilsk. What was he really saying? In another of his books from the late 1930s I recognised an ex libris plate that I had seen before, in one of Vyshinsky’s works on Soviet jurisprudence. From the library of the ‘bibliopsychologist’ Nikolai Rubakin (who must have bequeathed his books to the Lenin Library), the plate showed a gothic arch at the end of a book-lined room, a book on a lectern and a human figure with arms outstretched to the sun, and said, Long Live the Book, the most powerful weapon in the struggle for truth and justice! The struggle for truth and justice … 1937 … the far north … What did the brilliant and courageous Shmidt know about the ways in which the unconquered Arctic was to be turned into a source of raw materials for the USSR?
I read the transcript of a 1938 radio show for children, set to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, about Shmidt’s heroic explorations, and leafed through a two-volume book, published in the same year, on the doomed voyage, four years earlier, of the Chelyuskin, on which Shmidt had set out from Murmansk to navigate the northern sea-route in a single summer. Data accumulates, page upon page: the number of fur trousers and undergarments each crew member took on board, the co-ordinates of every moment of the seven-month drift in the sea ice, every cloud that passes, every temperature change, and the endless motion of the ice in the Kara Sea that eventually crushed the ship and sunk it in the space of two hours in February 1934. The Arctic was an arena for politics. The Chelyuskin story signified the great humanity of collectivism. Every head was counted, even the dogs were saved – they were ‘Soviet’ dogs – and only one man died as the 101 survivors unloaded the ship. Shmidt’s ice camp, in which the survivors lived until their heroic rescue by Soviet pilots, was a model of Soviet society: co-operative, optimistic, built on common labour, organised to perfection under a benign leader, who even stenogrammed a daily paper and lectured the shipwrecked on the poetry of Heinrich Heine and dialectical materialism.