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  • The Colors of Tiksi
  • Photographs by Evgenia Arbugaeva

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Playing at an abandoned station, known locally as the ″TV antenna.″

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When Evgenia Arbugaeva recounts her childhood in Tiksi, a port town in the Russian Arctic that touches the Laptev Sea, she speaks in fantastical terms—of an aurora borealis that hovered like “a big green breath frozen in the heavens”; of ice fishing with her father, the two of them dragging home a nelma that could barely fit inside the bathtub; of walks home from school during polar night, the Arctic’s season-long twilight, while celestial lights cast “bits of blue, yellow, and pink” across the tundra.

“As usually happens with memories,” she says, “they started to transform into very surreal images that I started to question—you know, whether it was even possible these kinds of things existed in the world. Is this town really like this, or was I just making it all up?”

When it thrived—if such can be said about a village in the Arctic Circle—Tiksi was home to 12,000 people, many of whom worked at the seaport, the handful of scientific-research stations, and military bases nearby. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, nearly all government infrastructure dissolved, and the bases, stations, and seaport shut down. Tiksi’s economy, as with most of Russia’s, collapsed. Stores ran out of provisions. An exodus began. Both of Arbugaeva’s parents were teachers. Her mother, Irina, taught literature, and her father, German, taught biology. He also kept a zoo of unlikely specimens for students—a small alligator, a swan, some snakes, spiders, and more. After the collapse, schools remained open but teachers went unpaid. The Arbugaevs knew their odds were better improvising in Yakutsk, where they had met and married, than if they stayed in Tiksi, so they boarded up the house and left, bringing eight-year-old Evgenia, her baby brother, and what reptiles they could carry with them.

Evgenia grieved for Tiksi, her imagination cut off from the spectacular landscape that fed it. And as she matured through the experiences of city life, her memories of that landscape seemed less reliable. Was the nelma that big? Was the borealis that green? Her parents assured her that it was all true, but a nagging sentimentalism stuck with her, something irresolvable and visceral, a feeling of “an absolute freedom, moments of pure happiness and wonder” that her parents’ assurance never quite satisfied. Being her father’s daughter, she decided to prove these memories empirically.


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An abandoned Soviet Army training facility just outside of town.

A small Arctic seaport that loses more than half its resources and population is doomed to [End Page 160] suffer. Tiksi’s scars of abandonment—of buildings, of stations, of leaning, rusted ships—attest to its long odds at the seventy-first parallel. Today its population hovers around 5,000 people; food and other staples arrive sporadically by helicopter; inflation is so high that eggs are sold one at a time. In October 2012, the Ministry of Defense closed Tiksi’s airport because of its damaged runway, severing the town’s last connection to mainland Russia. When boilers broke that winter, hundreds of residents went without heat for weeks, with outside temperatures reaching -56 degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, Prime Minister Dimitri [End Page 161] Medvedev intervened, and in the process berated the ministry for “putting the existence of a whole town at risk.”


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Tanya, in her summer dress, plays with one of her favorite stray dogs, June 2012.

Arbugaeva first returned to Tiksi in 2010. She was shocked, she says, by how decrepit the town had become. “The place was a nightmare. My heart was broken. I was walking alone on the streets crying.” With no choice but to make the best of it, she set about photographing through the wreckage, framing her childhood “through this layer of decay.”

Shooting along the shore, she happened upon a mother sitting by a bonfire with her daughter, a thirteen-year-old named Tanya, throwing stones into...

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