On the Run in Siberia

11. Screwed

169 11 screwed Iam sitting in Zyryanka’s small airport, waiting for the propeller airplane to Yakutsk. A whole year has passed since I returned to Siberia to carry out my field study of the Yukaghirs and revive the fur project. The trip is over; I have finally decided to go home to Denmark. I am neither happy nor sad at the prospect of going home, as I do not know what to expect. Is Helene still waiting for me? Since I last saw her in St. Petersburg, I have received only a few letters, all without much affection. Where am I to live in Cambridge when I am supposed to start writing my PhD thesis about the Yukaghirs’ spiritual beliefs? I do not know, and for that matter I am almost indifferent. I feel empty of thoughts and hopes, as if in a meditative state where only the present matters. I have waited for the airplane for a week, as Zyryanka has been wrapped in a thick fog brought on by the summer heat and the humid climate. Suddenly the fog lifts, and a departure announcement blares over the PA system. As often happens when traveling in Siberia , a long period of waiting is replaced by feverish activity. Quickly, quickly! Those who do not hurry will be left behind without mercy. With hectic motion and loud shouting, suitcases, boxes, and bags are thrown into the airplane’s little passenger cabin, and people scramble to sit on narrow benches alongside the mountain of luggage before the rotor blades whine and the plane launches into the air toward Yakutsk. We immediately lose sight of Zyryanka as white clouds surround the airplane. After twenty minutes pass, the skies clear, and I look Flying over the Kolyma Upland region of Siberia. 170 . screwed down on the Kolyma Upland’s high, sharp slopes and deep river valleys filled with old snow in the ravines. There must be places down there that no human has ever reached, and who knows, perhaps longextinct species of animals still roam there. The indigenous hunters speak of a gigantic bear—much bigger than an ordinary brown bear, with very short hind legs and a flat, oblong head—that has been seen on the outskirts of these mountains. Can it be one of the giants of the Ice Age, the long-extinct cave bear? . . . After a six-hour flight, we reach Yakutsk on the bank of the River Lena, which at 2,750 miles is the tenth longest river in the world. The Lena rises in southern Siberia, close to Lake Baikal. It flows northeast onto the Central Siberian Plateau near Yakutsk, where it reaches a width of up to twelve and a half miles. It forms a vast delta of tributaries , islands, lagoons, swamps, tracts of rushes, and floodplains. With a population of three hundred thousand, Yakutsk is not just the capital of Yakutia but the economic and cultural power center of northeastern Siberia since its founding in 1632. From Yakutsk the Cossacks embarked on their campaigns of conquest, and from Yakutsk the whole of northeastern Siberia’s collection of yasak was administered . Since the 1950s, the city has had everything that belongs in a modern urban area: a university, a hospital, government buildings , and hotels. Still, great changes have taken place between my visits in 1993 and 2000. Beautiful new apartment complexes, shopping malls, and casinos with mirror facades have shot up along the main streets in the center of the city. There is now an abundance of food and all sorts of luxuries to buy. The problem is that few people can afford to take part in the new consumer economy reserved for the rich. Ordinary wage earners can barely make ends meet by taking two or more jobs. The liberal reformers claim that this inequality is necessary: the money and the good things in life function as a carrot for those who work hard and take advantage of opportunities of the new system. But so far openness and democratization have mostly just brought about the legalization of criminality. Those who coldly and cynically screwed . 171 circumvent the law get rich, while those who keep their morals intact and work hard get screwed. In Russia, the market economy means above all extortion, exploitation, and fraud. Cheated Again The Yukaghirs’ obshchina director, Shadrin, is a tragic textbook case of this exploitation. I meet him at my...