Johnson's Russia List
#5070
3 February 2001
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#10
The Guardian (UK)
3 February 2001
A people skating on thin ice
Once it was a thriving fishing port, now it's a ghost town where only the
old, the young and the sick are left. John O'Mahony visits a city whose
harrowing decline reflects a country in crisis
By John O'Mahony
Just when it seems that the solitary, snow-bound highway might really lead
nowhere, the ghost town of Oktyabrskiy peers over the permafrost, its skyline
a grim, gap-toothed leer. As we approach, a hammer-and-sickle-encrusted sign
by the roadside announces what was once one of the busiest fishing ports in
the Russian far east, a model soviet enterprise bustling with life.
Stretching away behind, however, Oktyabrskiy's main Lenin Street now looks
little more than a sliver of wasteland, lined on both sides by abandoned
apartment blocks, their sunken windows staring blankly, their facades in the
advanced stages of decay. Dilapidated wooden cottages, stripped to timber
skeletons, clutter the moul dering side-streets. Everywhere, tatty scraps of
open ground appear to have been seeded with trash and twisted metal. And all
along the pier, the rotting shells of trawlers lie entombed in ice.
Only occasionally do the last sad remnants of Oktyabrskiy's population
stumble into this desolate scene, some of them sullen teenagers who pass
without expression, but the majority hunched and elderly, the human detritus
of an unprecedented decade of decline: "It's difficult to believe this place
was once crammed with people," says Lidia Ivanovna, the town's current
governor, and our guide through the ruins. "All we have left are the very
young, the very old and the sick - the people who couldn't leave. We're
trapped between the tundra on one side and the sea on the other. Oktyabrskiy
has been condemned to a gradual death."
Over the past 10 years, Russia has been haemorrhaging humanity at a rate
unprecedented for a modern, industrialised nation, except during times of
famine or war. At the fall of communism, the population stood at 148.3m, a
number that has been steadily sinking by between 300,000 a year, in 1993, and
almost 800,000 in 1999, the most dramatic 12-month slump to date, a net loss
of 0.5 % of Russia's total inhabitants. In an atmosphere of deep pessimism
about the country's future, the traditionally high birth rate has plummeted
to 1.3 children per woman, the lowest in Russia's history. At the same time,
the death rate has soared; average life expectancy for the Russian male is
now just 59, some 10-15 years less than in any western country, while women
can expect to live to 72, six to eight years less than their European
sisters. In yet another symptom of the Russian demographic malaise, this
male/female discrepancy is the largest in the world.
Other indicators are equally alarming: infant mortality is on the rise, 15.8
per 1,000 births in 1999 as against 6.9 in the US that year; Russia has
become one of the world's TB hot spots, and Aids is said to threaten an
epidemic of sub-Saharan proportions; meanwhile, migration is depleting the
human resources of the far-flung regions. As the scale of the situation was
becoming clear in 1998 and '99, the Russian Duma included genocide among the
charges in an impeachment drive against the then president Boris Yeltsin,
regarded as the architect of the debilitating reforms widely seen as the
catalyst for the population collapse. However, if the projections of Russia's
state statistics department, GosKomStat, are correct, the mammoth scale of
the demographic catastrophe has yet to unfold. By the year 2016, they predict
that Russia will lose another 8-10m, making the total loss for the
post-soviet period more than the combined victims of Stalin's purges.
Even in relatively thriving Moscow, which serves as a magnet for impoverished
migrants from all over the former Soviet Union, there is still foreboding
evidence of demographic subsidence: a precipitous 27% drop in the numbers of
pre- and primary school infants has forced the closure of scores of the
city's kindergartens and junior classes. Just a few hundred kilometres south
of the capital, there are already dwindling villages, each one home to a
meagre handful of pensioners.
However, it is at the exposed and vulnerable extremities of the vast Russian
territories that the atrophy of the population has been most acute. Perhaps
the most startling example is Chukotka, a massive chunk of the far east three
times the size of Britain, where the population has withered by a staggering
60%, from 180,000 in 1990 to just 65,000 today, a figure that is expected to
slump to just 20,000 within the next five years, making the region's
infrastructure unsustainable. Others include the Taimyr region in the far
north, which enjoys 10 months of arctic winter and two of "polar night",
which has bled more than 20% of its inhabitants and may now be in
considerable danger of being evacuated by central government, and Kamchatka,
an isolated peninsula, and the region where Oktyabrskiy is located.
The final approach into Kamchatka after a nine-hour Aeroflot flight affords a
view that might pass for an aerial vision of the edge of the earth. Its
capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, is surrounded by a crescent of gently
smouldering volcanoes, just a few of the 800 scattered throughout the
peninsula, including Asia's largest and most lethal, the Klyuchevskaya Sopka.
The ground beneath hides a mesh of grinding fault lines; we had barely
stepped from the plane when an earthquake struck, jolting the ground for a
few unnerving seconds.
Since the fall of communism, almost a quarter of the overall population has
seeped away. Unemployment in the grubby, low-lying capital is running at
about 30%; 40% of its people live below Russia's already low poverty line,
healthcare is nonexistent and fuel shortages have meant that until recently,
heating and electricity were routinely shut down for as much as 17 hours a
day.
However, as we venture outside Petropavlovsk in the company of a Red Cross
contingent, the situation worsens exponentially. Mountain-locked
microclimates send the temperatures crashing to -30F. For hours, we encounter
no other vehicles, just the occasional group of fishermen trudging through
the snow. And then, at the end of one of the world's bleakest stretches of
roadway, a desolate strip of asphalt separating the heaving lead-coloured
waters of the Okhotsk Sea on one side and a huge frozen lake on the other, we
finally encounter Oktyabrskiy.
Perhaps fittingly, governor Lidia Ivanovna begins not with the physical
wreckage of the town, but with a virtual tour of how it once was: "Right here
there used to be two rows of houses." She gestures towards sawn-off
foundations in a completely deserted district known as Basa II. "That was
once a small port, where supplies were delivered before the road was
built..."
The decay began, she explains, in the early 90s, with the liquidation of the
fish-processing plant and cannery; in the new, market-driven environment,
harsher even than the merciless natural climate the town had survived for
decades, no one could justify the ballooning costs of transporting canned
fish across the vastness of Russia. Since then almost 60% of the population
of 4,500 has evaporated, and the spirit of the town with them. A heavy-set
woman in her 50s who brooks little sentimentality, Lidia Ivanovna finds
herself continually fighting back tears: "People once lived well in
Oktyabrskiy," she says. "People once lived very well..."
By anyone's estimation, however, many of the remaining inhabitants of
Oktyabrskiy now endure an almost bestial existence. One filthy apartment we
visited, home of an alcoholic and his retarded son, was the most sordid
imaginable, strewn with vodka bottles, stinking mattresses and the guts of
ancient televisions. Across the stairwell, we find a woman of Koryak origin
in a dark and sooty living room with her two youngest children, a mischievous
boy and pretty moon-faced girl called Veronika, both suffering from
tuberculosis. Ironically, because of spells in the TB hospital in
Petropavlovsk receiving proper nutrition, they look infinitely healthier than
the three emaciated older boys.
Most of these pitiable human beings pray for escape - in any form - from
their grimy purgatory. In the first block we visit, pen sioner Maria
Riabchenko shows us round her two almost entirely bare, unheated rooms. Aged
72 and virtually blind, she has carefully stacked all of her possessions in
one corner, in preparation for a journey she was almost certainly never going
to make: "I want to get out of this prison," she hisses. "Many people have
already fled but the rest of us would also get out if we could. I have
everything packed. I'd have left long ago, except that I don't have any
money." With tears streaming, she adds, bitterly: "But I can wait. I'm very
patient..." In the next stairwell, we call on Valintin Igulayev, an amiable
old man who arrived in Oktyabrskiy in the 50s, brimming with idealism: "A
friend of mine said one day: 'Let's go to Kamchatka' and I immediately
answered, 'Why not?'. I was up for some romance and adventure." His elderly
wife, Lilia, has just been diagnosed with cancer of the colon; but with their
combined pensions totalling about $70 (£45) a month, she has no hope of
getting adequate treatment. Physically shaking and with tears welling up in
her eyes, she explains that her only option is to sit at home and wait for
the tumour to consume her: "The doctor says that I must pay 15,000 roubles
for the treatment, but I don't even have 40 roubles for fish in the
market..."
Oktyabrskiy's clean but impossibly spartan hospital, which is forced to rely
on the Red Cross for basic commodities such as soap and washing powder, has
almost given up trying to help the seriously ill. Instead, certain wards
serve as a rest home for the most chronically destitute.
In one upstairs room, Alexei, who has lost all coordination because of the
devastation wrought by alcohol on his nervous system and looks 25 years older
than his actual age of 48, shares a room with Vladimir, whose binge drinking
caused a cerebral haemorrhage that deprived him of the use of one arm and his
legs. "We don't hope to cure them," Oktyabrskiy's head doctor, Nikolai
Kuznetsov, tells me, "but if we let them out now, they wouldn't survive long.
The only option is to look after them here until we find a place for them in
the old people's home in Petropavovsk or until they die..."
Our final stop is Oktyabrskiy's modest, two-storey school, which has seen
numbers fall from 680 students 10 years ago to 240 today. This will sink
further as every one of the children intends to flee the ailing town
immediately on graduation: "Oktyabrskiy is just a long street with the sea on
both sides of it," says Oksana, a forthright 16-year-old who intends to move
to Petropavlovsk, "It's boring here. There are no sports facilities or
anything. I want to study psychology and there are no higher education
facilities. And I won't come back - there is no work and nothing to do."
Another 16-year-old, Spartak, hopes to move either to England or Greece: "Of
course I'll miss Oktyabrskiy. It's my home," he says. "But I have to survive
and, for that reason, I have to move. I know that without us, Oktyabrskiy
will die, but what can I do? Not a single one of my friends wants to stay..."
"Russia has been shunted back a century," says Sergei Kaleshnikov of the
statistics committee, GosKomStat. "A contemporary man who is 50 can,
according to statistics, live for another four to 10 years It's almost the
same as it was 100 years ago." As is obvious from the situation in
Oktyabrskiy, the primary causes of the demographic catastrophe are brutally
simple: poverty, bad diet, poor living conditions and, in more industrialised
parts of Russia, a polluted environment.
This has been fatally compounded by an almost total implosion of the
healthcare system, even in the more populous cities. The TB hospital in
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy relies entirely on a 50-year-old fleurography
machine, a hulking piece of apparatus that produces tiny imprints of lungs
the size of postage stamps. In St Petersburg and Moscow, very few hospitals
have the resources to perform what have become routine operations in the west
such as heart bypasses; the leading TB hospital in St Petersburg can only
afford to spend about 55p per day on its patients, much less than is required
to cure many of them. Contemporary Russia is also an ideal breeding ground
for infectious diseases such as TB which, incubated in the labyrinthine
prison system, are now raging through the population.
"We are now on the verge of an epidemic," says Tatyana Suprun, one of St
Petersburg's leading TB doctors. "It's a consequence of the way we live now
in Russia, often three generations in a tiny flat. If one person gets sick,
everyone does." Aids too is rumbling beneath the surface, due to a potent
combination of rising intravenous drug use, the post-soviet sexual revolution
and an almost total lack of safe-sex education.
However, the Russian populace is not only being corroded by disease, but also
by its own self-destructive social reflexes. Alcohol consumption in Russia is
the highest in the world, and deaths from alcohol poisoning far outstrips
those in any other country: about 50,000 cases in 1999 as opposed to just 350
in the US, mostly as a result of a national predilection for binge drinking
and the nature of the alcohol itself: "Since about 1990 there has been no
control of alcohol production," says Viktor Petrovich, head of Petropavlosk's
addiction clinic. "This has led to the availability of very low-grade
spirits. People also started to brew their own, low-quality home brews that
led to a lot of poisoning. In some cases, people even drank technical
spirits."
Finally, there is the issue of violent death: the Russian murder rate per
capita, which has doubled since 1990, is the highest in the world, three
times more than the US and four times more than France. And in the atmosphere
of social gloom, suicides are also rising, up by a third from their 1990
levels.
Russia and its long-suffering people have, throughout most of the country's
demographic history, had a complicated, almost intimate relationship with the
mechanics of death. As Catherine Merridale reported in her recent book on the
death culture of Russia, Night of Stone (Granta £25), crude death rates in
Russia in the 1870s were far higher than for any European country: 38 deaths
per 1,000 members of the population per year, compared to the corresponding
rate in France and England of just over 22 per 1,000.
If the situation continues to deteriorate today, Russia's accelerating
population decline could become the most important challenge to the country's
already unstable economic and political status in the world: "If this trend
does not change in 15 to 20 years," claims Valentin Pokrovsky, of the Russian
Academy of Medical Science, "for each working person, there will be one or
two people who cannot work. It will be very difficult for the country."
However, despite an insulating fatalism nurtured by Russians over centuries,
the ultimate toll is a very human and individual one.
The cemetery in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy is probably one of the most
beautiful spots in the city, a sweeping, steep, snow-covered hill framed by
the icy peaks of volcanoes. On one of the most picturesque slopes, a small
army of youthful gravediggers is opening the frozen earth with picks, working
simultaneously on three or four graves at once. All around, small picnic
tables are piled with food, sustenance for the dead on their journey, while
ravens, believed by Russians to be celestial pallbearers, circle hungrily
overhead. One funeral (pictured above) is already in progress, the deceased
an unemployed man of 44 who died suddenly from a heart attack, leaving behind
a wife and young daughter. "It was totally unexpected," said his brother, "He
was so young, still relatively healthy. Life killed him."
As soon as it ends, another gets underway, this time of a 21-year-old man who
had been kicked to death by a group of
soldiers: "He was just coming home and they beat him up. Five
or six of them just set upon him," says his father. "They beat
him up and took his clothes. He was just left there lying naked
in the snow; people just walked around him, nobody helped him.
They only found him in the morning lying there dead - he didn't
have a chance because of the cold."
Once the body has been laid in the ground, the entire
mountainside, as bleak and depleted a stretch of wilderness as
any we have encountered during our journey to Kamchatka's
depopulated margins, seems to fill up with the keening of his
mother as she is led away.
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