Khaldei’s Murmansk photographs are images of terrible beauty. His lens absorbed the strange mineral gleam of the Kola in the shimmering reflections of seven caped and helmeted soldiers trudging past a pool of still water on the rocky shore. Light catches the dark skin of the Jewish submariner-poet Israel Firsanovich, and his brow and cheekbones in burnished profile like the medals on his chest and the gold band around his tobacco-pipe, a portrait in the open air, the iridescent air of the Arctic circle. A close-up, taken from a gundeck, stills a plume of exploding water, as the Soviet star strains against the force of the blast on a flag in the foreground, and the snow-webbed hills of Kola behind, under a layer of low clouds as black as the sea, in which the bombers hid. The Kola hills, formed two or three billion years ago, are some of the oldest on the planet, but the scars of war became part of their geological composition. War discomposes nature as it destroys cities. On Fisherman’s Peninsula, the granite outcrop that juts into the Barents just above the Norwegian border, Khaldei caught the moment when a reindeer, its antlers in perfect silhouette beside the last branches of a scorched tree, turned its head towards the five German planes in the sky behind, alert and frozen in confusion, against a backdrop of shattering rocks, deciding which way to run. There was nowhere on Fisherman’s Peninsula for the troops to dig in, Khaldei remembered. He photographs a group of soldiers clambering up a lichened rock face, absolutely exposed to the menacing clarity of the sky. As his fellow war reporter, the Stalinist poet Konstantin Simonov, wrote in one of his patriotic Murmansk war lyrics, ‘the fighters, pressed against the ice and the rock breast, / Spend the night in the crags of Musta-Tunturi’.
And there, in Khaldei’s collection, was Murmansk in 1942, where Sands had come ashore from his ship bearing Lend-Lease materiel just as the Nazis decided to obliterate the city with their incendiary and high-explosive bombs. Built of wood, half the houses in Murmansk burned immediately to ash, leaving nothing but their slim brick chimneys, forming a smoking landscape of solemn vertical structures. An old woman carrying a wooden suitcase on her back made fierce eye contact with the lens as she crossed the scene of ruin. She put down the wooden suitcase, Khaldei recalled, and said, ‘Why are you taking pictures of my grief and our misfortune, little son?’
Even in the years between 1916, when Romanov-on-the-Murman was founded at British request as a military supply port, and 1941, when the city, long since renamed Murmansk, became one of the most crucial fronts of the war, the Kola Peninsula had little sense of peace. ‘We always felt we were at the front in this city of endless day and endless night, of strange snowstorms and startling colours,’ remembered the poet Lev Oshanin, who travelled north from Moscow during the first Five-Year Plan to join in the construction of a chemical-mining plant at Apatity in the Khibin mountains. His Stalinist hymn, ‘Comrade Apatit’, is addressed to that ‘stone of fertility’, an ore used to produce phosphorous fertilisers. Apatit takes its name from the Greek word apate, meaning ‘deceit’; it is a fool’s gold. Oshanin’s poem imagines the creation of a new world, built and settled ‘in our own way’ on the ‘naked earth’ of the Russian north, setting the energy of socialist man against the inertia of nature. In place of the rawhide tents of the hunter-gatherer native tribes, the Sami and the Pomors, the Young Pioneers will build ‘palaces’ of stone. Exulting in the power of the ammonal explosions that ‘tear at the rock’ and ‘destroy the terrible peace of the Khibin mountains’, they will take the virgin Kola by storm,
ploughing up the breast of the earth,
Carrying the name of Kirov,
Like blood in our hearts …
Like the vengeful anti-Nazi war poetry that Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg composed a decade later, Oshanin’s verse is instinct with the slogans of state propaganda and the hot blood of mass rape.
Landscapes rarely express the moral experiences that have shaped them as starkly as the gouged mountains and poisoned tundra of the Kola. Occasionally, we passed an old woman at work on a vegetable plot, or a group of blond children in grubby clothes, leaning over a fence to watch the train pass. We stopped at Apatity, and women on the platform offered dried fish hung on wire coathangers. Freight cars lay in the sidings, loaded with rocks. Seagulls walked the telegraph wires. We sat all that June evening in the restaurant car; the train was, by now, a relaxed society, overwarm and smelling of tinned meat, axle grease and socks. After we had eaten, my companion moved the vase of plastic chrysanthemums to the edge of the table and took out her sketchbook, seeking form in the dissolving landscape of sky, water and trees, while I stared out of the window at the telegraph wires reeling away into the swamps. At around midnight we reached Belomorsk at the mouth of the White Sea and the sun rolled slowly across the horizon from west to east.
The Murmansk line ‘was born in the smoke and fire of world war’, the reporter Zinaida Richter wrote in her NEP-era travelogue, Beyond the Arctic Circle. Its first passengers were troops, its first freight, heavy weapons and explosives. It was built at great speed by Chinese migrant workers from Vladivostok, workers from Archangel and prisoners of war. Already in 1925, it was said of the Murmansk line (as is said of St Petersburg and Stalin’s White Sea Canal) that there were bodies in its foundations, prisoners and workers, that the edifice is also a tomb. Richter thought it looked unfinished compared to the other railway lines, quite unlike them. The railway buildings looked as flimsy as dachas, and there was no electricity on the platforms. The stations in the tundra were lit with kerosene lamps that made them look mysterious. After the Leningrad station, all the passengers were business people, NEP men: industrialists, traders, co-operative men, inspectors, merchants, factory owners. She wondered what the railway workers made of the restaurant car of the train as it passed, with its white linen, flowers, bottles and stacks of pies, coming shining out of the snowy tundra and disappearing again, the train as a herald, a carrier of distant civilisation into the wild. She tried to compare the sky colours of the Arctic with daybreak over the Kremlin, but quickly turned away in contempt from all the ‘iris, mother-of-pearl and such-like literary requisite’. The biggest new population along the way was in a town named after the recently deceased ‘Comrade Dzerzhinsky’, she noted with pride. Now the railway line clings to the route of the White Sea Canal, another triumph of Stalin’s will, celebrated by Soviet writers, led by Gorky, in hyperbolic propaganda, built by Gulag slave labourers so that a submarine assembled in Leningrad could, without leaving Russia, travel by water to join the Northern Fleet.