Free Sibir by Farley Mowat Page A

truly came alive.
    The real reason for the explosion in Siberia is a compulsive desire on the part of many Russians to break out of the more and more rigidly mechanistic society which is dehumanizing the people of all “advanced” nations. It is an inchoate and instinctive urge to discover and to justify reality of self on the testing grounds of physical – which is to say, natural – adversity. Soviet people, and in particular the young, have become increasingly aware of the abnormal constraint the Brave New World is imposing on essential man. They are trying to find ways and means of again functioning as natural beings. In this way they are no different from young people in other technologically threatened societies – except that they have found an area of action where they can at least temporarily reject the concept that man is destined to be trapped within the confines of a machine-made and machine-dominated world. They have discovered the wilderness of Siberia, and they are flocking to it.
    It is a sad paradox that the result of their struggle to avoid being obliterated by the machine should so often end with the addition of yet another gigantic factory or power plant to sustain and further strengthen the juggernaut. This is apparent to some of them. Here are the words of a young dam builder who, at twenty-four, had already spent seven years in Siberia.
    “When we finished Bratsk they told us we had built the biggest power dam in the world. It was going to power enough industries to employ 400,000 people. We were supposed to be very proud of that, and some of the bright-eyed young Party people
were
proud of it. But you didn’t hear much talk about that amongst my crowd. When the last forms came off and the clean-up was completed, we could have got jobs with big pay in the new industries, but that was not for me. I came here to get away from being the slave of some machine. There’s a new power dam to be built up the Kolyma River, away into the arctic … a
really
tough proposition, that one. A lot of us are heading there. What’ll we do when that one’s built?” He took a long drink of beer. “Listen, with the electric maniacs we’ve got in Moscow, they’ll go right on giving us power dams to build until the world blows up!”
    Most of the freedom seekers are not so articulate, and not so clear about their motives. Some, like Luba, are filled with nostalgia for a freedom briefly tasted then lost again – and without a clear understanding of why that nostalgia should still haunt them. But there is a group of young (and not so young) artists, poets, novelists and others who think they understand what is happening to them. They are rather disparagingly referred to by the established literary elite as the “nature kids.”
    Here are excerpts from a letter I received from one of them while I was still in Siberia.
    We were all brought up to believe very much in the New Man who is the ultimate goal of Communism. Creating that Man was our sacred duty. He was to be the perfect human being. But as time passed some of us began to
wonder about the
kind
of New Man we were trying so hard to make. When they sent Gagarin into space he was supposed to be the prototype, yet when we thought hard about it we realized Gagarin didn’t matter much. He was along for the ride. It was the
machine
we sent into space that was the essence of the New Man!
    We began then to understand that the New Man was going to be truly a
creation
of man! It was a short way from there to realizing we were creating a monster, and in so doing we would become monsters ourselves, taking on the character of the machine
.…
    Man is not a machine; he is a living thing subject to natural laws, and if he is going to prosper he must abide by those laws. This is the way we must understand ourselves. This is the “New Man” we must recover
.
    We talk very much about our Russian soul. Do you know what that soul really is? It is the primitive in us. This