Free The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation by Oliver Bullough Page A

from
    Moscow,
    with
    smaller
    signs
    countingoffthetenthsofakilometre
    in between. I mused about how
    muchpaintitmusttaketokeepthem
    bright and shining, and what on
    earth they were for. The only
    reasonable
    explanation
    was
    to
    provide something of interest for
    passengers on the train to look at,
    but it seemed an incredible amount
    ofeffortforsucha minimal reward.
    After a kilometre or two, they lost
    theirappealalmostentirely.
    The town of Inta, where Father
    Dmitry served his sentence for
    writing poems, is 2,000 kilometres
    from Moscow. Getting there would
    take thirty-six sweltering hours. I
    scribbled a calculation, that is 55
    kilometres
    an
    hour;
    another
    calculation:34milesanhour.Ifthat
    was our average between Moscow
    andInta,itwasnowonderitfeltlike
    we were going slowly. You can
    drivemorequicklyinmanybuilt-up
    areas, and this was very far from
    beingabuilt-uparea.Therewereno
    houses of any kind. The trees were
    dense
    and
    monotonous:
    solid,
    pricklyanddark.
    Sometimes we would rattle
    through villages, clutches of log-
    built houses huddled close to the
    tracks. But fewer than half the
    houseshadanythingplantedoutside.
    Most were still secure against the
    weather,theirroofswerewhole,but
    no one lived there. If someone did,
    they would have filled every
    available
    hectare
    with
    potatoes
    against the winter. Outside the
    villages the fields were choked with
    weeds: no livestock, no crops. The
    onlyfarmanimalsIsawalldaywere
    adozengeeseinagarden.
    Oneofthemoststrikingstatistics
    about modern Russia is that, of the
    153,000 villages in the country in
    1989, some 20,000 have been
    abandoned. Another 35,000 have
    fewer
    than
    ten
    people.
    The
    population has fallen faster in cities,
    however,
    meaning
    that
    the
    proportion of Russians living in
    villages has actually gone up over
    that period. This is a practically
    unique example of a modern,
    developedcountrydeurbanizing.
    Theeconomyofthefarnorthhas
    all but vanished. It was based on
    subsidized coal mines and, now the
    subsidiesaregone,asaremostofthe
    factories that burned coal, so the
    mines have not been able to stay
    open. In Soviet times, workers
    received special high wages for
    workinginthenorth,butthoserates
    aregonetoo.Theknock-oneffectof
    the mine closures has touched
    everythingtheSovietscreatedinthe
    Arctic. Shops cannot stay open
    without people to buy their goods.
    Factories cannot stay open so far
    from their markets.The railway line
    I was travelling on was built to tie
    theArcticintotheRussianeconomy
    but, that whole day, the only two
    other trains I saw were passenger
    trains. There were no goods being
    shippedeithernorthorsouth.
    Somewhere to the north-west of
    me, in 1923, the O G P U security
    service, which would later be
    renamedtheNKVD,thentheKG
    B, then the FSB, opened its first
    labourprison.Thatfirstlinkinwhat
    became the chain of gulag camps
    wasontheSolovetskyIslandsinthe
    White Sea. It opened when Father
    Dmitry was just a year old. The
    island camp held several thousand
    menby1925.
    But
    feeding
    and
    guarding
    prisoners in such a remote location
    was expensive. The government in
    Moscow needed every rouble to
    build its new economy. The camps
    would have to pay their way. That
    meant that, over time, they were
    forced to evolve into profitable
    enterprises. They did this by a key
    innovation: feeding prisoners a
    quantityoffoodproportionatetothe
    amountofworktheydid.Thiskilled
    off weaklings early, meaning that
    non-productiveinmatesdidnothave
    tobecarriedbythosestrongenough
    to fell timber, make bricks, dig coal
    or do any of the other tasks left to
    prisoners in the fastnesses of the
    Sovietstate.
    It was economically successful,
    since it meant camps could be
    pushed into areas barely habitable
    and exploit their resources for the
    first
    time.
    Decades
    later,
    this
    expansion
    was
    chronicled
    by
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Red
    Armyofficerjailedformakingjokes
    about Stalin, who became the
    historian of the camp