Russia:Old dreams unfrozen in the city of ghosts




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Russia :

Old dreams unfrozen in the city of ghosts

By Mark MacKinnon, the Globe

February 2, 2004

In Russia 's icebound north, MARK MacKINNON finds, Stalin's victims are still serving time

VORKUTA , RUSSIA - Her treasured black-and-white photographs testify that Lyubov Kalashnikova was a lithe 21-year-old student when she first arrived in Vorkuta aboard a prison train from Moscow .

At the height of wartime paranoia, the Young Communist was arrested as the Nazis approached the capital. It was 1942, and she was sentenced to 10 years in the gulag for allegedly betraying her country.

Sixty-two years later, Ms. Kalashnikova lies in her tiny bed and dreams of the world outside this icebound Arctic outpost. Impoverished and half-paralyzed, she still hopes to get back her old apartment in Moscow and reclaim the remaining years of her life.

"I wish I had never come to Vorkuta , this cursed place," the 83-year-old said, clutching angrily with her good right hand at the tattered blanket wrapped around her.

Although she was "rehabilitated" decades ago -- the charges against her were dismissed as false -- she was prevented first by law and then by her economic situation from leaving her urban prison.

"I've been in jail my whole life. Now, it is worse than when I was in the gulag," she said.

"Then, at least I was with other people. Now, I am alone and still in Vorkuta ."

Ms. Kalashnikova is among the hundreds of gulag survivors who never left this grey city where the snow melts for just two months of the year and winter temperatures often hit -50 C. They are Stalin's forgotten victims, still serving time for offending a dictator who died half a century ago.

Now, as the Russian government prepares a mass retreat from its overpopulated north, some are at last being offered the chance to return south.

Under a project sponsored by the World Bank, the beginning of a mass population transfer that could eventually involve hundreds of thousands of people, some of those trapped in Vorkuta and other dying Arctic settlements are being offered cash to move south and start over.

Yet even though the chance to leave finally looms, Ms. Kalashnikova wants more than what they're offering. She wants her old life back.

Moscow is not on the list of destinations available under the World Bank-sponsored program, and Ms. Kalashnikova has no interest in moving to an unfamiliar city just to start over again at her age and in her physical condition. "I am a Muscovite," she said. "I want to go back to my beloved Moscow , to see the Bolshoi Theatre again and visit the graves of my relatives before I die."

The government and the World Bank are running into this unexpected stumbling block repeatedly as their efforts pick up steam.

Of the 700-plus former gulag inmates still living in Vorkuta, many say that although they want to leave, they feel they're owed a little more than a fistful of money and a train ticket to an unfamiliar destination.

They don't want apartments in southern Siberia ; they want to go back to their homes in Ukraine , Tatarstan , Belarus and Germany . If they can't, they'd rather stay.

It's not just the gulag veterans who are resisting. Although Vorkuta deputy mayor Valeri Belyaev talks of the need to slice the city's population to something like 80,000 from its current 130,000, of whom about 40,000 are pensioners who strain the municipal budget, the World Bank program has seen few takers.

Only a quarter of the first 6,000 available places on the city's relocation list have been filled. Many other residents want a deal, most of them mining families who flocked here after coal was discovered under the tundra in the 1940s but now find themselves put out of work by the gradual closing of the mines.

While the Russian government's resettlement efforts have been under way for several years now, the $80-million ( U.S. ) pilot project sponsored by the World Bank is the most determined effort so far to start moving people south.

Vorkuta residents who fit the bill -- the disabled and the war veterans first, the pensioners next -- are being offered $2,000 to $4,000 each as start-up cash, as well as help finding an apartment in the south.

"It's too little money, but this is what's available," Mr. Belyaev said. "It's a free choice. Nobody is making anybody take this offer. Nobody is being forced to move from Vorkuta ."

The same experiment is being carried out with World Bank help in the areas of Norilsk and Magadan, two other regions synonymous with the gulag system through which an estimated 18 million people passed in 50 years.

According to some estimates, a proper program to shut down the antiquated mining towns and prison settlements that dot Russia 's Arctic would cost as much as $5-billion. There simply isn't that kind of money available in federal coffers.

Andrei Markov, project manager for the World Bank, says Russia 's north may be overpopulated by as many as 800,000 people, a relic of the period when settling the region seemed a laudable national goal. Vorkuta , he says, is a perfect example of the problem.

He calls it a "completely artificial" settlement that never should have been built. "With normal economic rationale, nobody would have ever built a city of 250,000 [ Vorkuta 's population at the height of the Soviet era] in the Arctic , on permafrost," he said.

Although there's coal in the region, he noted sardonically, the city's heating system is fired by oil that has to be brought in from hundreds of kilometres away.

Vorkuta now is little more than a city of ghosts, haunted by its terrible past. The tens of thousands who died here seem to linger accusingly in the empty apartment blocks at the end of every street, and in the graveyards that surround this city like an army laying siege.

Nonetheless, there's a sense of community among the survivors who remain here, one that springs from the shared experience of having lived through the horrors of the labour camps. They say they hate Vorkuta , but it's become their home.

"It's not quite a prison any more, but they can't imagine any other life," said Yevgenia Khaidarova, head of the local branch of Memorial, a human-rights group that represents gulag victims.

"Here, they are among their own. They've adopted this place."

Even if the government ever made the perfect relocation offer, some aren't sure they would take it.

Alexander Ilin has taken some pride in recent years in serving as an unwelcome reminder to those who would rather forget an ugly part of this country's past. He knows a better life -- certainly an easier retirement, in a more livable climate -- lies waiting for him in the south, but he feels uncomfortable with the idea of leaving.

Mr. Ilin moved here in 1946 as a teenager to be with his father, who was sentenced to hard labour as a "traitor" for surrendering to superior German troops.

He grew up behind the barbed wire of the Vorkutlag prison camp, his every move seen from above by the armed guards who manned the sinister watchtowers at each corner of the camp.

Now 71, he's afraid that Vorkuta , a part of history scarcely mentioned in the history books used in most Russian schools today, will die if he and others like him leave.

"There are seven man-made wonders in the world, seven beautiful things. Vorkuta is not a monument like the pyramids, but it is our history, our bitter history, and we can't leave it behind," he said.

"Rather than let this place die, we should make this place into a monument so that we never repeat these events in the future."