Rails to nowhere
I spent the last summer in Yermakovo, where the “Road of Death” was built. However, due to the elemental forces of permafrost and taiga, almost nothing of it remained. And it was the most indispensible task not to just continue one’s way on the Yenisey and pass by this place, which was as important to Russia as the school ob Beslan, the Kremlin or the Old Koptyakovo Road (near Yeakterinburg; translator’s note).
There is a painted, nameless cross with a nailed up frame to place a little ikon;
you will hardly find it between the high blades of grass behind all the boulders.
The ikon has disappeared. When trying to cleave through the grass, which, in
some places, is up to two meters in height, towards the destroyed buildings –
buildings, which are also all covered over by grass and brushwood -, you learn
something the hard way: you become acquainted with the whole extent of irreality
in this world. This is the place where many thousand people lived and died,
worked, hated and loved (Sergo Lominadse, who lived in Yermakovo first as a
prisoner and later did hard labour as a free man, called the settlement “Little
Paris”); now the grass has not been mowed or trampled down by any person for
more than half a century, and maybe this is way it looks so beautiful. There is
sky, which for half a century nobody has been looking at – without knowing, how
beautiful it is – but our Good Lord, for some reason or other, continues to show
his absurd,useless pictures to nonentity – the clouds he is painting and
unsheathing in all this emptiness.
The impression that all this appears to me in a dream, intensifies my ambition to go where I have to go. I continue my way through grass and myriads of biting midges. It seems to me as if I have been here some time before, as if the reminder of this place – is running in my blood.
Blisters are hanging down from under the roof of the barracks. A birchtree is outgrowing from the stove, protruding through a hole in the roof (in our regions stoves are being built to bear up for at least a whole century, they are everlasting, outlasting terrestrial globe and galaxy). Ice cristals of permafrost on a decomposed post, which is grown into the earth up to its top – perpetual ice, and a lizards is sitting there intrepidly looking at you. She does not intend to run away, she is not aware that human beings have just appeared behind the grass. A piece of rail between the blades of grass, a smashed little waggon, a a watchtower, a cistern; the ruins look like tomb stones.
Who are they meant for? A couple of photos have been archived. Before goung to
Yermakovo, we took the opportunity to look them over in the Museum of Igarka,
where they have two museum collections on the “Construction Project N° 503,
1947-1953”. The faces of the tormented prisoners looking at you from the photos,
cut trees with growth rings are memorized forever.
The larches in this area, the polar region, are simply oversized, they look like pushed away rails rearing up towards heaven. Wooden rails. Rails to nowhere, rails which lead straight to heaven.
Maybe, these trees have to look this way, because unburied prisoners are lying below. When the “Road of Death” was under construction, the war had just come to an end. And while being at war, the soldiers had good reason to believe that, at least 10 years later, someone would bury their remains in a reasonable way, in an adequate place. The prisoners, too, were hoping for a dignified burial. By the way, I have no idea, whether any of you has ever dealt with this kind of a question. The question about where and how we bury our grandfathers - it does not concern us. The cross on the embankment is standing there – silently, a cross for all – and that’s it.
Russia’s Asian peripheral regions (which are by far bigger than Russia itself) is going to become a territory of terrific constructions and investments amounting to thousands of millions of dollars, just as it happened in Soviet times. They do not just have the intention to revive Brezhnev’s projects, but also those planned by Stalin, who both counted on the exploitation of the GULAG prisoners and their slave labour. It seems as if these plans cannot even be influenced by any worldwide crises.
Nowadays, the attention of the public is time and again attracted by plans of erecting Stalin’s memorials (besides, in places where the air is fraught with the smell of the disgusting balanda, by which the prisoners of the GULAG were usually fed – in Krasnoyarsk, Kureyka ….); the pragmatic power has obvuíously gone about the realization of Stalin’s ideas – under the pledge of secrecy. Within the governmental authorities they have already ceased to discuss about whether or not it is really worthwhile to finish the railroad track between Salekhard and Igarka; they rather deliberate upon how to realize one of the biggest construction projects initiated by the dictator. In 2005 this project was given particular piority during a conference about principle issues of the social-economic development of the Federal Ural Region, and this year the Moscow State University of routes and traffic even organized an expedition with engineers. The scientific report including a rating of perspectives for the revival of the railroad line has been finished, the profesorship has already announced the necessity of building the main line, confirming that the yet existing sections are not in such a bad state as assumed. Soonafter, the Ministery of economic development began to talk about a definite term, indicating the date by when the construction of the railroad line from the Chanty-Mansinsk area to Igarka and further up to Norilsk should have started (by also consulting “Norilsk –Nickel” as corporate enterprise being interested in this project). This will be in 2020.
Our overzealous functionaries even proceeded a little further than Stalin, who just planned the elongation of the second Transsiberian railroad line throughout North-Asia upt to Yakutsk, and afterwards yet all the way up to Uelen, as well, including a ferry route through the Bering Sea to Alaska (later, however, he reconsidered his views and limited his idea to a mainline up to Chukhotka – with just a branch line to Kolyma and Kamchatka). Our bureaucrats are ready to realize these visions and yset go a step further. Since long, different variants of concepts to construct a parallel Transsib connection in the manner of a transcontinental mainline from the Atlantic up to the Pacific Ocean, are circulating within the machinery of the State Duma and the administration of the President. They intend to realize it on the 62nd parallel, and slightly more to the south, on the 60th. The railroad line ist to go up to Magadan, to Uelen (with a tunnel leading up to Alaska).
The mainlines Right Lena – Uelen and the North Siberian Line (from Ust-Ilimsk via Lesosibirsk to Belyi Yar in the direction of Nizhnevartovsk) belong to the “most important strategic issues with the development of railroad transoportation in Russia in the period up to 2030”.
The building of the North-Sib has already been decided, the Krasnoyarsk governor Aleksander Khloponin announced last year. According to his words the President has already commissioned the elaboration of a detailed plan concerning “one of the most important strategic projects”. And the Yakutian president Vyacheslav Styrov also repeatedly talked in public about perspectives of a railroad line up to Magadan and a later extention towards the Bering Sea.
There are contradictory opinions about the reason of repressions. The reasons are with us; we – that is executioners and victims, just like grain and millstones. And Stalin came up with such terrific building projects, in order to keep his people in the camps busy. Another point of view is that the primary necessity of slave workers and the term of imprisonment of the inmates were dictated by the economic, constructional and industrial departments by means of the law enforcement agencies. Who is going to become the fuel of the new old construction projects? Maybe the Tadzhiks, who are used to a warm climate?
Alexander Toshchev, branch manager of the unique Permafrost Museum in Igarka, says by referring to the opinion of scientists and permafrost researchers, that the railroad line from Salekhard to Igarka (some sections of which are in use) will never be completed. And he got this across to us adding: we are driving through a town of “dancing houses” – permafrost, in the true sense of the word, is chiselling out paving stones and posts, raising the buildings, pushing them from out of the ground.
The Northsib, as Khloponin noted, “is badly needed with regard to the development of promising perspectives (treasures of the soil) and big projects in Siberia and the Far East”. And there is another key phrase yet, quoted from some lecture recently held by the Krasnoyarsk governour: “We have to get straight that a considerable part of the east of our country urgently requires its primary industrial development”. and the same, in Khloponin’s opinion, is true for Siberia – “it needs to be industrialized”.
An irreconcilable point of view to consider Siberia a self-sufficient or needy, indigent territory. The only thing that is true is the fact that Russia will not succeed to catch up with the rest of the world in today’s postindustrial epoch by just pressing ahead with industrialization. Maybe, it is an affair of honour to be just an appendix of resources, a colony of the European Union or the countries of the Asian – Pacific region; however, we will find alternative concessions of the utilization of Siberia’s huge natural potential in our today’s worls, were even freshwater and pure air are subject to high prices. But they seem to be somewhere beyond the horizon of our present state power. At the best its representatives are able to pronounce words correctly, as they did on theoccasion of the recent Baikal Forum, but the projects, nonetheless, remain all the same – they embody the plans already concocted by Brezhnev and Stalin.
Which kind of loads do they intend to handle via this icy desert and – what for? If the raw materials are destined for developing nations, then these countries should actually take the responsibility to build the North-Sib, the Polyarka, the Transpolyarka, etc.
On the whole, public opinion is sympathetic about the idea of such entirely useless construction work in places of iciness with temperatures of up to minus 60 degrees, where you do not get to see the sun due to myriads of swarming midges in the summer. The projects concerning the building of the Polyarka and Transpolyarka were looked upon favourably by the press – they say that, finally, the “second birth of Siberia” is going to take place: the exploitation of immeasurable natural resources. People always tend to search for an apology, a justification of their (in comprehensible at the best) life. Those, who participate in budget assignment, are keen on looking for projects, they can later make money with. There are quite a number of motives for why Stalin’s heritage has become that popular again. Nonetheless, neither one of them nor all reasons as a whole, can give a plausible explanation of why the country until today has been unable to construct just one single bituminized road connecting Russia’s east to the west – a country, in which you will find just 34 public toilets per one million of towns (and they are all assembled in Krasnoyarsk), a country which launches into projects to no lesser extent phantastic, but by far more absurd and useless, than flights to Venus or Pluto.
As long as this state is still willing to grant money for such kind of projects, but pretends to have no money to erect a memorial in commemoration of the builders of the railroad line to nowhere, not even for an icon inside the frame of a nameless cross which someone rammed into the ground somewhere on the embankment of the Yenisey, we know we still have the same state. The price – latrine buckets of which there are a lot in the Yermakovo camps. These antiques will certainly not been taken away by tourists.
According to the words of Maria Mishechkina, director of the Permafrost Museum, just one memorial has been registered by the Center of Preservation of Cultural Monument in the Krasnoyarsk Region within the list covering the Igarka area – V.I. Lenin’s memorial.
Aleksei Tarasov
Correspondent of the “New Paper”
Igarka – Yermakovo – Krasnoyarsk
“New Paper”, 07.11.2008