Shmidt called revolutionary Marxism a ‘living fire’ which burned inside him. He wanted to fill in ‘white spots’ in science, to do away with the mysteries. He devoted the last years of his life to cosmogony, developing his own theory of the origins of the universe out of solar dust. He tried to reconcile Marxism with the theoretical challenges of quantum physics: the theory of relativity and the discovery of the ‘inner freedom’ of the electron. Matter can no longer be seen to act against the backdrop of space and time, he explained, for the ‘new physics’ reveals that time and space are interdependent, that time is altered by what it flows through, that time can alter the characteristics of space. How should a Marxist counter the ‘pure idealists’ who say that time and space exist only in our observation of them, and that there are as many worlds as there are observers? There was no experiment that would prove the truth of Marxist dialectical materialism, he concluded, unless it was the success of the workers’ paradise that the Communist Party was trying to create on earth.
When the recording mania of nations falls apart in wreckage and doubt, another search begins: the search for the places where the bodies lie buried, for a record of their names. After the fall of the USSR, in the heady years of Yeltsin’s presidency, questions about the voyage of the Chelyuskin floated up from the undertows and conspiracy theories appeared in national newspapers and television shows. What had been the real purpose of the hastily prepared, ill-equipped expedition? Why were there women and children aboard? Why had Stalin refused all offers of help from abroad? Why was it never said that the Chelyuskin had been built in Copenhagen? Why had the two attempts to find and raise the wreck found no trace of the ship? Had a second ship sailed in convoy with the Chelyuskin? In 2004, after another attempt to find the Chelyuskin, the head of the Russian Submarine Museum, Alexei Mikhailov, concluded that the recorded data about the whereabouts of the ship were false. The conspiracy stories suggested that the Chelyuskin had been bound for Chukotka to prospect for minerals, accompanied by a slave ship, the Pijma, loaded with Gulag prisoners: kulaks, former NEP men, ‘saboteurs’, ‘learned double-dealers’, priests and Jewish radio-enthusiasts (foreign spies by definition), under guard by members of the NKVD following orders from the Lubyanka. In 2006, divers from an expedition led by Mikhailov, and partially sponsored by Roman Abramovich, billionaire governor of Chukotka, finally discovered the wreck of the Chelyuskin fifty metres deep, raising a few fragments of the ship, and the memory of the Soviet Union’s ‘happiest year’.
I returned from Archangel to Moscow to banners across Vozdvizhenka commemorating Shmidt’s drifting polar research station: ‘1937–2007 – the North Pole!’ Not long afterwards, the Russian government announced to an astonished world that it had dropped a flag on to the seabed under the Pole and declared it Russian territory, on account of a ridge on the seabed – the Lomonosov Ridge – that is said to connect the mainland with the Pole. If the polar sea ice does retreat, the colossal untapped stores of oil, gas and minerals below present the prospect of riches unimaginable for the Kremlin. There were incidental rumours about a more cryptic geopolitics floating among journalists at Moscow dinner parties, claiming that President Putin had asked to have a piece of the polar seabed brought back for him, as one of the entrances to the underground kingdom of Shambhala in the hollow earth is believed to lie beneath the Pole.
TWELVE
Murmansk and Barentsburg
Draw the blanket of ocean
Over the frozen face.
He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish,
Staring through the green freezing sea-glass
At the Northern Lights.
CHARLES CAUSLEY, ‘Convoy’
There was a time in the history of the Arktika Hotel when a drunken Russian could be taken outside and shot for assailing the honour of the British. Back then in 1942, not long before the hotel was blitzed to rubble by the Luftwaffe, its dining room was filled with Soviet naval officers and voyage-worn Allied servicemen come ashore from the convoy ships. The summary execution, one evening, of the Russian sailor who had jeered at the loyal toast to King George VI must have seemed to the subordinates of Generalissimo Stalin no more than an appropriate token of respect, bound to please their new comrades-in-arms. But for my companion and me, nearly sixty years later, the only recourse was a quick retreat from the Arktika’s otherwise empty dining room as the larger of the two men at the next table, registering that the slurred proposition he had advanced had been met with an impregnable wall of ice, bent forward, and with the slow deliberation of the deeply drunk, spewed a lump of chewed fish on to the white linen cloth, laid down his head and fell asleep.
I suppose two white nights and a day spent reading memoirs of the convoys on the train from Moscow (which was also called the Arktika) had disposed me to think and dream about the war, to find in even a sordid encounter in a run-down hotel some hidden reminiscence of the years when the city showed the outside world its most sinister and heroic front. And after all, I had been drawn to the Kola Peninsula by the black-and-white wartime picture, an image of austere gallantry, labelled ‘Murmansk 1942’ in copperplate hand, words charged with the excitement of far distance, that I found that hot afternoon at the bottom of an old box, its cardboard sides weakened and bloated by decades’ worth of governing body minutes and university bulletins, in the college rooms of Sands.
In the tundra of the Kola lurks the world’s greatest concentration of military and naval forces, and in its waters, battleships and ballistic nuclear submarines capable of sending missiles across the North Pole to annihilate large areas of the United States. Murmansk is a city built and rebuilt in a spirit of battle, a community whose memory and imagination were formed when enemies were real and present: over the Norwegian border – just a few minutes’ flight for a Heinkel 111 – or slinking invisibly along the Barents seabed, loaded with torpedoes. Sculpted bodies of young men killed in uniform, images of the Russian soldier crucified and resurrected, are the icons of this city. One block down Lenin Avenue from the Arktika is a dynamic bronze of Anatoly Bredov, seconds before his sacrificial death, pulling the pin from the grenade that will blow him to pieces along with the German troops who surround him. And massive on a hill above the city stands ‘Alyosha’, an unknown soldier in moulded concrete. Looming in and out of view in the sea mist, he stands guard, pantoscopically gazing down at the rusting fishing and cargo ports, at the red-and-black nuclear-powered ice-breakers in their graving dock, and the passenger ferries plying back and forth to the closed town of Abram-Mys on the other side of the inlet.
Places disperse in images that come to form their identity. I had first seen concrete ‘Alyosha’ from another angle, in a monochrome photograph taken from a hill above Murmansk by the great Tass war photographer Evgeny Khaldei. I visited the retrospective exhibition of his work in the House of Photography on Moscow’s Nikitsky Boulevard soon after we moved into Romanov. Khaldei’s genius was to find composition in scenes of fear and destruction. He caught the tension in the faces of a group of people on a Moscow street listening to Molotov announcing the Nazi invasion through a loudspeaker – ‘a perfidy unparalleled in the history of civilised nations’ – just as he caught the fear in the turn of a reindeer’s head. His most famous image is the Red Army soldier planting the Soviet flag on the Reichstag, planting his own straining form among the stone statues still standing on the fire-blackened roof, as the rubble of Berlin smoked in the background. (It is said that Khaldei had to doctor the picture before it was published, as the Soviet soldier was wearing several watches.) Taken together, Khaldei’s pictures record, and are part of, the process by which Soviet consciousness was formed out of the epic of the nation’s near-destruction and astonishing victory. Khaldei began his photographic record of the war in Murmansk in the June weeks after the German invasion, experiencing his first aerial bombardment on the rail journey from Moscow. At the exhibition I bought an album entitled From Murmansk to Berlin, and on my way home stopped in at Intertour Luxe, the travel agency in the basement of our building, to ask for the times of trains to Murmansk, a city whose mere name had stirred me so powerfully in Cambridge.