I looked past the rusted fishing trawlers at the keen black prows of the nuclear-powered ice-breakers, and imagined voyaging north across the Barents Sea.
My daughter went down to the ship ahead of me, running down the wooden steps, calling, afraid that before the set hour the icebreaker would weigh anchor and leave us stranded, seventy-eight degrees north, in this improbable settlement on the Gronfjorden. We passed a landing where four men leaned on the railings, smoking and looking out to sea. I lost her when I stopped halfway down to the quay; the man with the postcards looked so sorry to see us pass. His seven views of what Russians call Spitsbergen, printed in sallow colour in Moscow in 1976, were priced at one krone each. One showed miners ‘relaxing in the new Palace of Culture’: weightlifting, performing Cossack dances. In another, ‘Barentsburg keeps building’, a brick hostel was going up, high against a white hill. A close-up showed chives growing under glass: ‘fresh greens all year round for the miners’ stolovaya’.
There was a sunset over the Barents Sea: ‘across it lies the way to Spitsbergen’, and a view of a ship loading in blue polar night. I felt in my pocket, found a single krone, and chose a picture of reindeer grazing on moss and purple saxifrage under a bare mountain. The miner took my coin and asked where we came from. When I told him Moscow but really England, he laughed sadly, gathered up all his cards and handed them to me as a gift. Well, perhaps cash has little meaning, I told myself in my embarrassment, in the strange world of Barentsburg.
In the world outside, dealers in rare coins pay good money for the illegal kopecks of the state mining trust, Arktikugol. There are even forgeries of the trust’s currency issue of 1946, which marked the USSR’s return to the coal seams after the German occupiers left. (In November 1944, as soon as the Red Army had driven the Nazis out of a small part of Norway, Molotov had laid full claim to Spitsbergen, stubbornly refusing to concede until well after the end of the war.) Recently, when Norway, whose laws have governed the terra nullius of Svalbard since 1920, called for the withdrawal of the trust’s 1998 illegal coins, the collectors’ market was flooded with Arktikugol money. The trust’s postage stamps of 1995 feature ink drawings of lounging walruses and polar bears roaming the pack ice, sights I had brought my ten-year-old daughter this far north to see. It is not the Russians, however, but the Norwegians, who portray wilderness and its creatures as the true worth of this archipelago. Touch little, take nothing, leave no trace, the Governor tells visitors. In Barentsburg, the mining settlement purchased by the USSR in 1932 from a Dutch coal company, the Arctic desert is still valued in the rhetorical currency of the Five-Year Plan. ‘Men wage a struggle against nature’, Stalin said, ‘and exploit nature for the production of material values.’
‘The miner’s labour powers space rockets,’ declares a violently-coloured agit-prop placard on the face of the Pomor Museum. ‘Rock Miner! With your well-toiled hand, you give heat and light to everyone!’ A miner stands in the foreground, white light exploding from one raised hand. With the other, he points to a backdrop of pipelines, power stations and pylons. According to Marina, who showed us around Barentsburg and told its stories with mercurial emotion, the display of hero-workers displayed in the town centre is a Soviet tradition recently revived to motivate the flagging miners. But they no longer carry the Stalinist title udarniki (shock-workers, from the verb udarit’, to strike a blow or to attack). The faces on this screen are gentle and tired; no fire in their eyes.
In After the Future, the cultural critic Mikhail Epstein explores the ‘frenzied erotics of labour’ that drove Soviet civilisation from its beginnings to its desolate end. ‘We will go into the earth in thousands,’ the proletarian poet Alexei Gastev promised in Poetry of the Worker’s Blow, 1918:
we will not come back … we will perish and bury ourselves in the insatiable rush and the labouring blow … the earth will be transformed … when she can bear no more and rends her steel armour, in an ecstasy of labour’s outburst, she will birth new beings whose name will no longer be man.
(Gastev was arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist activity’ in 1938, and shot in 1939.)
To Epstein, Soviet ‘labour-lust’ is promiscuous, oblivion-seeking, ‘indifferent to its object so long as you can get into it, work it over, and lose yourself in it’. When the miner in Boris Gorbatov’s novel Donbass got down on his knees before a wall of coal and switched on his hammer, ‘a familiar tremor of joy rolled over his hands … the body of coal lay before him submissively as the miner was free to let himself go … the solid wall of untouched black forest moved excitingly close to him, enticing …’ Epstein sees the Russian landscape as the victim of violent rape: ‘its traces remain on the faces of our cities and villages … in the gullies and potholes on the body of our exhausted land’.
Marina came back in 2000. Productivity slumped when the women left after the catastrophe of 1996, so Arktikugol ordered their return. She did not want to dwell on the plane crash in which ten per cent of Barentsburg’s population, mainly miners’ wives and children, had died. It made her eyes fill. Or on the methane explosion a thousand feet down in the shaft the following year, which burned for four months. She wanted to show us little miracles of fertility and nurture: the fuchsias and parsley in the damp heat of the greenhouse; Yasha the bull, and Daybreak the sucking calf in the cowshed. Barentsburg’s first baby, ‘our baby’, had been delivered premature a few weeks ago by the dentist before its mother could get to the nearest Russian obstetricians in Murmansk, whose direction is signposted, but which is much further from here than the North Pole. As we approached the wooden chapel, newly built to commemorate Barentsburg’s recent dead, four miners walked slowly towards us in the afternoon sun, eyes on Marina’s brightness. After sixteen hours underground, they like to attract our attention, she shrugged; it’s life, what can you do?
Miners from Donbass in Ukraine compete to come to Barentsburg for the wages and conditions: $300 a month (when Arktikugol pays) and three meals a day in the stolovaya. They mark time in winters, which last eight months. Russia keeps these men working Svalbard’s unprofitable seam for territorial reasons. A treaty signed in Paris after the First World War gave sovereignty over the former no-man’s-land to Norway, and equal access to its economic and scientific assets to all thirty-nine signatories, many of whom had rushed on its mineral resources in the 1900s. The treaty forbids any military activity. But Russia, whose Bolshevik leaders’ concerns lay far from this barren terra nullius in 1920, has long considered its claim primordial.
Rival discovery stories vie in the naming of the place. The word Svalbard, ‘cold land’, remembers the Vikings, whose annals suggest that they sailed this far north in the tenth century, though Russian scholars, with their narrative of Russian primacy, think that the land the Norsemen saw was only Jan Mayen Island, half as far from Iceland. The western coast of the largest island, Spitsbergen (‘Sharp Mountains’) was first named and mapped in 1596 by the Dutch navigator Willem Barents, on an expedition funded by Amsterdam merchants hoping for a northern route to China. Throughout the seventeenth century, the sea-trading nations sent adventurers north to map the bays, name the glaciers and nunataks and battle the ice pack in their ‘shalops’, slaughtering Svalbard’s ‘great stores of whales’, ‘sea morces’ and polar bears. Sailors from England’s Muscovy Company lit fires under great copper vats on the seashore, and feasted on the eggs and flesh of barnacle geese while their hauls of blubber boiled down, then set their ships for London, loaded with oil and bone.