Richter’s travel writing, which took her in every direction across Soviet territory, is like Kushner’s report on his journey south: part of the work of making Soviet space come together, of telling people in Moscow how people in the far reaches live and think. Richter talks proudly about the colonisation of the region, as yet in its early days, which is transforming the tundra, still the home of Lopars and Samoyeds, with their witch doctors and shamans, into a Klondike. Murmansk is a young town, she says, it ‘arose only ten years ago because of war’. She describes its little tin houses, known as ‘food boxes’, left over from the years of the occupation, and the new bright-green premises of the Fishing Trust. The main pastime in Murmansk used to be drinking at home, Richter says, but now that restaurants have opened under NEP people drink in public. (In the north, people have always drunk to oblivion, she notes.) The people she talks to in Murmansk all hope that the railway will mean that outsiders no longer look at them through a telescope. The locals do not wear fur because the Gulf Stream makes the winters mild. The ‘Romanov half-fur’ which Richter bought for her visit to Murmansk might just as well have stayed in the Leather Trust on Tverskaya Street. She meets Professor Kluge, a ‘hero of labour’, who runs the Murmansk Biological Station, and he goes round all year in a sea raincoat over a leather vest. (Professor Herman Kluge, an expert on bryozoans, ran the Biological Station, turning it into a prestigious research centre, until his arrest in 1933, when the Biological Station was broken up by the secret police. At the time when the physiologist Ivan Pavlov was petitioning Molotov for the release of intellectuals arrested in the aftermath of the Kirov murder, Professor Kluge was suddenly released from prison and exiled from Leningrad. He made his way up to the island of Novaya Zemlya, where he lived for eighteen months, close to the bryozoans, remote from the purges.)
*
Two months after my rail journey to Murmansk, in the company of a press pack, parents of seven of the submariners already dead inside the Kursk would take this same route towards the Arctic to be closer to their sons. The news photos of those men and women and the fragments of their speech reported in the papers are mixed now with my own incidental memories. The Kursk, a ballistic nuclear submarine the length of two Boeing 747s, designed to elude detection in the complex acoustic theatre of the Arctic seas, dived uncontrolled to the seabed during war games in August 2000, after two massive internal explosions. Its 118-man crew perished. For many days it was believed that a few might have remained alive in the aft of the submarine. It was on the Kola Peninsula that President Putin first turned his rage on a critical press, which was seeking the reasons for the disaster and the truth behind the official dithering, cover-up and possibly fatal delay in accepting offers of foreign assistance. These particular unnecessary deaths, widely seen as the nemesis of a superpower, seem also to constitute an exemplary tragedy for this remote city, a place at once dignified and seedy, whose public expressions are tugged between, on one side, xenophobic paranoia, pride in a violent past and the numerical manias of propaganda-tuned patriotism and, on the other, openness, ecological humility and genuine civic hope.
Regional museums in provincial Russian cities are not arranged for occasional foreign visitors so much as for the pallid teenagers who are always shuffling in sullen groups one hall ahead of you. These account for the 120,000 visitors who, as the guide will relate, annually come to observe its 140,000 exhibits. The Murmansk version of this model follows a standard teleology from mollusc to Marxist man. In the twilight of the first room, branches of soft coral and hairy sea-worms glow in jars of formaldehyde around a contoured plaster model of the bed of the Barents Sea. The other halls on the ground floor display specimens of the six hundred mushroom genera and 540 varieties of moss that grow among the 2,700 million-year-old granite boulders of the Kola.
Past glass-eyed Arctic foxes, gulls and storm-petrels perched on plaster cliffs, visitors are led upstairs through rooms decorated with replicas of Sami wigwams, bearskin overalls and woven willow cradles, into the sudden drama of the Revolution Room with its red banners, guns and scenes of surging proletarians. Then a wide corridor leads on to the Great Patriotic War, evoked by antiaircraft guns, framed billets-doux, stilled black-and-white footage and the demob papers, signed by Stalin and Marshal Zhukov, of one Ivan Ivanovich Shumilov, one of the millions of ‘Ivans’, who fought his way from Murmansk to the Reichstag. The only snag in the thread of this narrative of natural selection, human progress and patriotic sacrifice occurs in the space between these last two rooms: a tiny typed list on yellow paper, like an old train timetable, of the locations of Kola’s twenty-three Gulags: Kandalaksha, Khibin, Apatity, Kirovsk …
The Naval Museum of the Northern Fleet is less generic, more dashing and elegiac than the Regional Museum, and there is more to buy: such as an anthology of local ‘artistic-marinistics’ – quatrains about flotillas of ice-breakers ‘cutting the hard breast of the sea like brontosauri of the stone age’. For five dollars, we had pressed on us from under the counter a photo of a vast metal slug called the Kursk, lying in berth against a backdrop of snow-seamed grey hills, and the now famous snapshot of a stern Putin in the astrakhan shapka of the Fleet. And, for as many roubles, I picked up a special issue of a ‘scientific and practical’ local magazine called Learning and Business on the Murman, filled with factory-to-seabed biographies of Second World War submariners lost in action, and heroic captains such as the Dagestani Magomet Gadzhiev, or Israel Firsanovich, the Jewish submariner-poet with the pipe and the beautiful profile, who, before his sub was hit by British friendly fire in 1944, wrote that
There is no higher happiness than the struggle with enemies,
No fighters braver than submariners,
And no firmer soil beneath our feet
Than the deck of a submarine.
Now, it seemed, the only enemy in the sights of the Museum of the Northern Fleet lurked three thousand miles to the south, in a landlocked mountain republic. The final cabinet in the museum displayed a torn fragment of unrecognisable script which, the curator informed us, was a terrorists’ scorecard, seized in Chechnya, of Russian soldiers mutilated and killed in captivity; an anticipation, I guess, of one of the many Russian rumours about the role of ‘enemies’ in the sinking of the Kursk, that it was the two Dagestanis on board who sabotaged the submarine. But allies past and present also had a place here. There was no hint, in the pictures of them sitting smoking on the granite hills of the Kola with their Soviet counterparts, of just how squalid and strange the British servicemen found Murmansk when they finally arrived with their shipments of materiel. And now again, as plankton seethed through the bodies of its sons, Murmansk waited for technology from abroad that would raise them into the air and bring them home.
*
There was no night in Murmansk, so after we had eaten in a louche restaurant in the ferry port overlooking a passenger boat called the Anna Akhmatova, we walked back through the town under white cloud, following the line of the waterfront. We wandered into the docks, past the Fish Kombinat, unremarked by the guard in his metal booth. Once part of the commissariat of Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, the fisheries buildings in Murmansk were now in a state of utter dilapidation, most of their plaster come away from the brick walls, patched with corrugated tin, grass growing through holes in the concrete, windows broken.