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From Our Own Correspondent
BBC World Service FOOC
00:09:02
Prisoners of Norilsk - a city frozen in time "A history of Soviet failure written in a...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service. It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.
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This week, we're looking back through the archives and replaying some dispatches from years gone by. And there's no doubt about it, BBC correspondents do get to the most amazing places. Back in 1994, Kevin Connolly travelled deep inside the Arctic Circle to a city built by prisoners. He soon learned that after the fall of the Soviet empire, it became something of a prison to the people living there.
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If you ever want to find Norilsk on a map, not that there's any reason why you should trace a line with your finger across Russia from Europe towards the Pacific Ocean. Stop when you're halfway and look up towards the North Pole. In other words, start in the middle of nowhere and work outwards. Do not be deceived by the streams and rivers which appear to radiate prettily away from Norilsk. This is a landscape which makes you feel as though you're seeing it on a television set with the colour turned down. It rolls towards the horizon in dreary shades of grey and brown under a sky the colour of cigarette ash. And that's in the summer. This far north inside the Arctic Circle, winter lasts for 10 months of every year. It's dark even during the hour or so a day which is officially described as daytime. And it's so cold that the liquid on the surface of your eyes freezes between blinks. There are more snowplows than cars and there's more snow than they can cope with. In the middle of summer, there are 23 and a half hours of sunshine every day. The local council gives the handful of foreign visitors who make it this far into the Russian interior a souvenir packet of postcards which. Which includes a picture of a group of townspeople muffled up like polar explorers, struggling to pick up a pensioner who's blown over in a blizzard. She was lucky they saw her. Pedestrians generally walk backwards during storms to keep the stinging snow driven by arctic gales out of their eyes. Norilsk clings to life on the edge of the inhabitable world. A local official summed it up for me with a kind of tragic pride. Only Russians would have dared to create a town here, he said, or wanted to. Norilsk survives as a testament to the crazed logic of Stalinist economics. Built 500 miles inside the Arctic Circle to exploit the world's largest deposits of nickel, copper and uranium. Summer comes and goes as fleetingly as the beam from a lighthouse sweeping across the horizon, and the townspeople are experts at making the most of it. Because it was built in such a remote place, Norilsk comes to an abrupt halt. One moment you're walking along a street of apartment blocks, bus stops and telegraph poles. The next you're facing a polar wilderness which stretches for thousands of miles and betrays not a single sign of human habitation. Keep going a little beyond the last building, though, and there, stretched out before you, is the world's most godforsaken beach, a miserable scrap of land which you reach by crossing a disused railway track and climbing over a main sewage pipe the size of an underground railway tunnel. Ten years ago, before anyone noticed that the fabric of Soviet society was unraveling, summer would have been spent in the Black Sea resorts of Georgia, the Ukraine or southern Russia, where the hard living, free spending tourists from the Arctic were favored visitors. They reminisce now about how they used to begin sunbathing almost as soon as it got light in the morning, as though their bodies were like rechargeable batteries with which would allow them to take some of the warmth back inside them to their homes on the polar ice cap. But those holidays are a thing of the past now. They were holidays from the Soviet era, when everything was allocated by central government decree, from your subsidized seat on the crowded flight to Moscow to your numbered space on the beach. There was special treatment in this, as in all things, for the hero Soviet workers of the Arctic metal plants, who were paid twice as much as anyone else in the country and given three times as much annual leave. Young families used to volunteer to come to Norilsk, like pioneers of the Old west in America, to save enough money to buy a home in the south or an apartment in Moscow. The long years in the endless cold and darkness, they used to say, were worth is not worth it. Now, in a few months, inflation destroyed savings which took years to build up and which had been carefully set aside to buy what would pass in Russia in the old days for a life of luxury. A ticket via Moscow to the beaches of the south used to cost about a day's pay. Now it costs as much as most people earn in a year. The beach beside the river Yenisei might not be much of a beach, but it's the only beach that most of the people in Norilsk will ever see. Now. The road back to town was cracked and pitted and crumbling Partly because the temperature had climbed from minus 40 to 30 in a matter of weeks, but mostly because even here, in this most extreme of climates, the Russian government builds roads with the strength and durability of pie crust pastry. It wound through a dismal series of housing developments where the occasional flash of decorative gaiety, like a bright red painted hammer and sickle, somehow serves only to make the building seem even more despondent. Walking through the town was like walking through the opening sequence of one of those old black and white science fiction films where some supernatural force has made time stand still. It almost looks as though at some point in, say, 1975, every painter, cleaner, glazier and handyman in the country knocked off for lunch and never came back. Norils looks as though it was built by the kind of do it yourself enthusiast who never quite gets round to finishing anything. It's a history of Soviet failure, written in crumbling cement, a monument to a system that simply ran out of steam. It didn't run out of steam early enough to give Tatiana Nikolaevna and thousands like her a normal life. She came to Norilsk in the 1940s from the Ukraine, and like many of the people who built this town and made it work for so long, she came as a prisoner. She was a 16 year old schoolgirl in the nationalist west of The Ukraine in 1949, old before her years, like many teenagers in the Eastern Europe of those days. When she was arrested, her crime officially was slandering the Soviet state, a charge related to remarks made in the school playground about the Ukrainian language nursery rhyme she'd been taught at home. This teenaged enemy of the people was taken down to the local railway station at 3 o' clock one morning from the local KGB headquarters, having been sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. What she finds impossible to put into words is the relentless, grinding misery of it all. The years of eternal drabness, the endless cold, the loneliness and the isolation. It is a familiar and dismal story, the story of millions of prisoners forced into decades of hard labour, whose story is the black side of the official, heroic history of the Soviet conquest of remote Russian lands, including in the Far east and the Far North. Forty years later, though, Tatiana is still in Norilsk, a free woman now in the city to which she came as a slave. She chose to stay when she was released because she felt in her mid-20s that somehow she'd already grown old, with thinning hair, rotting teeth and calloused hands from years of captivity. Her parents in the Ukraine had died, and so she felt no urge to return. And anyway, the Soviet authorities, having released her and thousands of other prisoners like her, still had one final misery to inflict. They did not. When you were freed at last, pay your fare home and so you were stranded at the gates of your prison. She got a job in a local foundry that paid four times the average salary for Soviet workers and began to save, dreaming of the day when she would have enough money to pay for a flat in Moscow or St. Petersburg and dreaming of holidays in the sun. Now, after three years of inflation, reform and chaos, her life savings wouldn't even buy a return air ticket to Moscow. She dismissed with an embarrassed shrug the idea that her life story tells you anything about the Soviet system and the people whose lives it ruined and shortened. But she's wrong. As we sat over a final cup of tea with the midnight sun blazing away through the thin curtains of her small apartment, she even put it into words herself. I came here, she said, as a slave, and I chose to stay for the money. But now, now I know I can never afford to leave, not even for a short break. I feel as though I'm more of a prisoner than ever.
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Kevin Connolly, back in 1994 on how the city of Norilsk came to be washed up by the tides of history. Join us again tomorrow for more from our own correspondent.