Arctic Siberia: Its Discovery and Development

Arctic Siberia: Its Discovery and DevelopmentAuthor(s): H. P. SmolkaSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 16, No. 46 (Jul., 1937), pp. 60-70Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4203318 .

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ARCTIC SIBERIA ITS DISCOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT

ARCTIC Siberia is one of those parts of the world which have been almost despaired of by civilised countries. Although very little has been known until recently of the land and its inhabitants-or rather because of that lack of knowledge itself-it has always been regarded as one of the less creditable parts of the globe, as one of the blind spots of the earth's surface. Men casting their glance over the whole world, in search, it may be, of colonies, trade-routes or exploitable land, have hardly given it a thought. Or, if they have allowed themselves to form any impression of it at all, it has been one of a vast desolate waste, unknown and not worth knowing. Its very situation on the northernmost fringe of a continent has prevented it from being anything more than a vague idea hovering on the fringe of men's minds.

Even in the expansive days of the i6th century, when merchants and mariners alike were straining their eyes for new lands to explore, Northern Siberia was considered, not as possessing any importance in itself, but as coastland to be passed on a possible route to " Cathay." As has happened with so many other countries, it was discovered in the search for something else. It was the English and the Dutch, their ambitions thwarted by the maritime powers of Spain and Portugal, who were the first to consider seriously this " north-east passage " along the Siberian coast. During the reign of Henry VIII, a Bristol merchant of the name of Robert Thorne drew up a long petition to the King, urging him to further the work. Not until Edward VI's time, however, was the passage actually attempted. Then an expedition of three ships was sent out by Sebastian Cabot's "Company of Merchant Adventurers." The expedition, sailing under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby, resulted in the arrival of Richard Chancellor at Archangel, and his welcome by Ivan the Terrible in Moscow. Its outcome was the trade agreement between the Muscovite Tsar and the sovereigns of England.

With the destruction of the Invincible Armada, there was less need for English merchants to seek a route to China on which their ships would remain unmolested by Spanish galleons. The next step towards the opening up of Arctic Siberia was taken by a Russian. Peter the Great conceived an interest in the actual extent of his dominions, and ordered its whole coast-line to be mapped. In this way, part of the country was explored from the interior.

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The project of a north-east passage came again to the fore during the period of imperialist expansion at the close of the last century. The greater part of the burden was borne by Englishmen and Scandinavians, the Russian Government itself not participating.

Captain Wiggins, an Englishman, visited the mouths of the two great rivers, the Obi and the Yenisey, which flow northward through Siberia into the Arctic Ocean. Wiggins was financed largely by a public subscription organised through the columns of The Times. The next explorer, Nordenskjl1d, was backed by Sibiryakov and the Swedish financier Baron Dickson. Nordenskjold brought off a considerable feat by sailing all along the Siberian coast in the course of one winter. This was in 1876.

In the first years of this century, a Norwegian company organised and managed by Mr. Jonas Lied, elaborated a plan for obtaining concessions of timber from the Russian Government and, after floating the timber down the Obi and the Yenisey, transporting it to Europe. In 19I3 Fridtjof Nansen made a journey on one of the company's steamers and in his book Siberia, the Land of the Future expressed his conviction that commercial navigation in the western half of the Arctic Ocean was quite feasible.

The Soviet Government, once in power, decided to organise the enterprise on a much larger scale than ever before. In place of lonely explorers braving the northern seas, with little "moral support " and even less financial assistance, there was formed, after earlier efforts on a smaller scale, two years ago an organisation called the "Central Administration of the Northern Sea Route." This organisation was given an exclusive charter to explore and develop not only the route itself, but also that part of the mainland lying above lat. 62. The territory thus covered is over thirty times the size of Great Britain. " The Central Administration of the Northern Sea Route " is the agency through which all the developments which I am to describe were effected, and today it has forty thousand men and women in its employ.

For some little time it has been common knowledge that the Soviets were working out a comprehensive scheme of development for Arctic Siberia. It was believed to include not only the organisation of a sea-route and an air-route, but the modernisation of the inhabitants' economic conditions as well. First-hand facts, however, were hard to come by.

The head of the "Central Administration," Professor Otto Schmidt (the leader of the flying expedition which quite recently made a successful landing near the North Pole, and commander of



THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

the "Chelyuskin" when it was marooned on an ice-floe off the Siberian coast in the winter of 1933-34) came to London early over a year ago to explain the achievements of his organisation. I was among those who heard him speak. He gave what seemed to me an astonishing, I might almost say fantastic, account of the extent to which modernisation of the Arctic had gone. I expressed doubts to him as to whether an unbiassed non-Communist, like myself, would see the same picture. The upshot was, that Schmidt invited me to pay a visit to Arctic Siberia myself, so that I might see the work being done there with my own eyes. After some little trouble, he succeeded in getting me permission to travel and take photographs in complete freedom. I made the journey last summer.

It is obvious, from what has been said, that Arctic Siberia had been visited by foreigners before; but I can safely claim to be the first non-Soviet traveller to have seen what the Russians are doing in its most outlying centres. My account of what I saw may be made easier to follow if I give a short description of the route I took.

From Moscow I travelled by train to Krasnoyarsk, in Eastern Siberia. From there I went by aeroplane, following the course of the Yenisey down to Port Igarka, a town lying right in the centre of the Arctic zone and only recently erected. I then took another aeroplane across the Taimir Peninsula (which juts out from the northern coast of Siberia) to Nordvik, returning east to Norilsk and Dudinka. The next part of my journey was undertaken in a British tramp steamer carrying timber to Dickson Island. Dickson Island is the central radio exchange and polar station in the Kara Sea, and from it I made a few expeditions on board an ice-breaker engaged in blasting a route for a fleet of cargo steamers through the Vilkitsky Straits. I returned on a Russian tank-steamer through the Kara Sea, the Matoshkin Straits of Novaya Zemlya, the Barents Sea, and so to Murmansk. From there I came down by rail on the " Polar Arrow " to Leningrad, flying home from Moscow to London in one day.

I made this journey, as I have said, in summer. When any attempt at navigating these northern seas is considered, there is one fact of unescapable importance to which all projects have to conform. It is this: for all but three months of the year the seas that wash Siberia's northern coast are frozen over. For nine months great waterways like the Obi and the Yenisey flow into an ice-bound Arctic Ocean.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Government has spent considerable sums of money in organising transport on these rivers, in building ports at

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their mouths, and in developing communications from these ports during the three months of the year in which navigation is un- hindered.

The chief aid to navigation is, of course, provided by powerful ice-breakers. The ice-breakers themselves are further assisted by other achievements of modem technical progress such as wireless stations and reconnoitring aeroplanes.

A chainwork of radio stations has been built along the whole length of the coast-line, as well as on islands in the Kara and East Siberian Seas. They number fifty-seven now; further inland are another two hundred. These stations report on weather conditions to the centre at Dickson Island four times a day; from there, incident- ally, they are relayed to Moscow and the principal European weather bureaux. The ice-breakers are provided with valuable information on the location and resisting-power of the ice-floes, on the strength and direction of the wind, and are thereby saved much time and trouble. The stations also make hydrographic, biological and geological observations.

When visiting some of these stations, I found the operators to be mainly young people. They tackle their task with immense courage and zeal; they look upon their work as a national mission. Among them I found some of the finest types of Russian youth, men and women possessing great faith in their work and ready to sacrifice for it their own comfort and welfare.

The other aid to navigation through these waters possesses also high importance of its own: it is aviation. Aircraft assists the ice- breakers in this way. Planes, taking off from the shore, reconnoitre a largish area around and ahead of each caravan of ships. During the flight, observers draw maps of the ice-formation and, upon their return, drop a small parachute, with the maps attached, on to the deck of the vessel. Routes for cutting through the ice are then mapped out on board.

The ice-breakers in use at present are mostly out-of-date. The largest, the " Yermak," was built in 1899 (at Newcastle). No ice- breaker is able to remain away from its fuelling-base for more than 25 days, and therefore has to return several times in one season.

The problem of how ships are to be provided with fuel to last them a considerable period, has only recently been brought in sight of solution.

It was not until 1932 that the North-East passage was negotiated in one summer. Then the ice-cutter " Sibiryakov," under Professor Schmidt, travelling from west to east, made the journey. Since then

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at least one ship has made the journey each year, until, in 1936, the trip was made by no less than fourteen vessels, some travelling west to east, others east to west.

This spring four new ice-breakers were to have been put into service. They were to be of I2,000 tons each, run on Io,ooo h.p. Diesel-engines, and have space for carrying two aeroplanes apiece. Their radius of action will be very much higher. These vessels will, then, be independent of the coastal bases throughout the summer season.

Siberia possesses some of the most valuable and extensive timber- forests in the world. It is only the inaccessibility of the country which has prevented its immense wealth from being utilised on a large scale. Russians today being very keen on statistics, perhaps I may be allowed to introduce a few figures in support of these statements: particularly as they do give some idea of the unsus- pected riches of the country. The natural annual growth of Siberia's forests is estimated at fifty million trees. That is to say, fifty million trees could be felled each year without reafforestation ever becoming necessary. Last summer five hundred thousand trees were sawn up for export at Port Igarka. More than fifty vessels were engaged in its transport, and nearly seventy thousand standards of Siberian wood were brought to Europe.

The timber is cut up in towns built for the purpose only recently by the Russians. Work in the mills and in the towns generally goes on all the year round. The two great drawbacks which most people ascribe to the Arctic, the intense cold and the polar night, hardly trouble the workers at all. As a matter of fact, the Arctic winter is not the coldest on the earth. The timber can be rafted downstream in summer, and only when the thermometer falls below -65 degrees C. is work in the mills interrupted. And that happens very rarely. The minimum temperature is usually -35 degrees C., a not unusual figure even in more "temperate" regions of Russia, such as Ukraine and Southern Siberia, where large industries have been established for many years. During the polar night the whole town is floodlit.

The sawmills are organised on extremely modern lines. Up-to- date machinery has been brought from Sweden; and operatives, before being sent out, are trained for their work at Archangel. The largest of the timber-exporting towns, the largest town in fact in the whole north of Siberia, is Port Igarka. It lies on the Yenisey at lat. 67' 27" N. At the time of my visit its population was 14,ooo, 2,000 of whom were children. It is built entirely of timber; and

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tlhe houses, either one or two storeys in height, reminded me strongly of Swiss and Tyrolean cottages.

The condition of the ground at Igarka presented some problems when the buildings were first set up. Owing to the fact that the summer is so short, and that in winter there is little snow, the ground there is never completely thawed. In July and August the top- soil may thaw to a depth of from five to eight feet, but for sixty feet under that, it is permanent ice and frozen earth. The rain that falls in summer cannot be absorbed into this frozen subsoil, and the surface of the tundra is turned into swamp and marsh.

Sometimes, when the first houses were built, one wall or another collapsed, or else the centre fell in and only a hollow shell was left. The reason for this was that the heat from the huge brick stoves that were used to warm the houses, thawed the ground in which the foundations were set. The difficulty is now met by building the floor of the rooms a few feet above the surface of the soil. This allows the air to circulate freely beneath, and so insulate the earth from the heat of the stoves.

The roads also are built of timber. They are really floating parquet-floors. Great logs are laid across the tundra, the spaces between them are filled in with sawdust and, over all, a floor of highly-polished beams is laid across. Along these roads run horse- carts, motor-cars, trucks and automatic timber-carriers.

A few years ago, when Russia first began exporting timber at lower prices than either Canada or Finland, much was written about " forced labour " in the timber camps. I cannot say what conditions were like at that time. When I was in Igarka, I found that of its I4,000 inhabitants, four thousand were exiled kulaks, that is to say, former well-to-do peasants who had resisted the collectivisation of their farms and had been exiled. They were paid normal wages and, outwardly, I could hardly distinguish them from the free workers. They lived as neighbours one with another; the kulaks' children went to school with those of free workers, and are now being absorbed rapidly into the new society. No guards are needed to keep the kulaks in the camp; for the nearest railway station is fifteen hundred miles up the river, to the north stretches the endless tundra, and to the south the dense Siberian forest. After a number of years, if they have worked well and shown an interest in their work, if they can on the whole prove themselves to be what the authorities call " dekulakized," their passports are restored and they come into their civil rights again.

Although Igarka lies four hundred miles up the Yenisey River, E

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it is not its position that makes navigation there difficult. The Yenisey is forty miles wide at its mouth, and at Igarka it is still five miles wide. Moreover, an arm of the river branches off beside it; and this is wide enough and deep enough to accommodate sea- going steamers up to the number of fifty. Igarka's difficulty is to construct a quay both large enough to allow so many ships to load at once, and strong enough to withstand the pressure of the ice in winter and the force of the floods in spring. Up till recently, the quays built have accommodated no more than six or eight ships at once; and each year theyhave been torn away bythe rush of water produced when the ice started moving. During this last winter, however, a much stronger quay has been constructed. Vessels have to be guided by pilots for the whole of the four hundred mile journey to the mouth; for descent of the river is made difficult by the exist- ence of numerous islands and shoals. Even today, pilots dare not attempt the journey during the few hours of darkness which con- stitute the night during autumn in the Polar region.

Besides timber, the other great potential product of Siberia consists of its deposits of metallic ores. Norilsk is already a considerable coal-mining centre, while nickel has also been found there. Nordvik is another rising mining-town.

The coal-mines of Norilsk are worked entirely by convicts. Just as I was leaving, two hundred women convicts arrived by barge; they were to work in the kitchens, in the houses and in the power-station. The convicts are paid wages, however, and live a normal life in the town. Still, no one can pretend their life is all roses. Norilsk lies further north than the northernmost tip of Alaska, and is situated in a very remote spot. Even in July and August, when the rivers are navigable, a journey of fifteen hundred miles from the mouth of the Yenisey is necessary in order to get to the mines. In winter, transport is possible only by reindeer-sledges and dog-teams. In an attempt to overcome these difficulties, a railway is being laid from Norilsk to Dudinka-a port on the Yenisey about seventy miles away, which is to serve as Norilsk's harbour. The greater part of the track was already laid when I visited it; and the engineers, with the usual Soviet optimism, assured me that the whole line would soon be ready.

The coal at Norilsk lies fairly near the surface, but a layer of ice has to be penetrated in order to reach it. Nickel, a metal in which Russia is not over-rich, is found here in abundance. The Norilsk coal will be invaluable for refuelling ships that follow the Northern Sea Route. Already a fuel-base is in course of erection on Dickson

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Island. At the present day, vessels have to ship enough coal at Murmansk to supply both their outward and their homeward voyages.

Nordvik is a younger settlement. The way this little township has been founded may serve as a guide to the Russians' general methods of work. Last summer, when it had been decided to begin mining there, five ships set out from Archangel. On board were six hundred workers and everything necessary for building a town; houses in parts, all ready to be set up the day after unload- ing, furniture, food, radio apparatus, mining equipment, hospital appliances, etc. The Russians called it a fleet of Noah's Arks.

Nordvik's wealth consists in its salt, its coal and its oil. The salt will be used for canning fish; at present salt has to be brought by devious routes from the Black Sea. By 1938 the Russians hope to mine I8o,ooo tons a year at Nordvik. The oil they intend to refine on the spot and use for replenishing steamers on the Northern Sea Route.

Great as the endeavours are, that are being made to develop navigation, the whole scheme of development for Northern Siberia really depends on aviation. For nine months of the year the seas are choked with ice; travel across the bogs and marshes of the tundra is restricted to reindeer and dogs. It is in the air that the future of Siberia must lie. And the Russians realise this to the full. Regular air-services are already working for the greater part of the year along the courses of the main rivers. There are no landing grounds, so only hydroplanes are used; and these fly only above the rivers and the sea, never above the land. As they are equipped with skis as well as floats, they can alight either on ice or on water. Blind flying is out of the question as long as the network of radio stations is not sufficiently dense. Whenever fog brews up, the pilot simply sits down on the river and waits for clear weather.

This summer it is hoped to start an air-service from Moscow to San Francisco along the Siberian coast. A chainwork of re-fuelling bases, meteorological bureaux and radio-stations once set along the route, there is nothing whatever to prevent it. Flying in the summer, the pilots will have the advantage of almost continuous daylight. I have, myself, flown for a total of about a hundred hours in Arctic Siberia, and have encountered no unbearable hardships. At the time of my visit, it is true, the aeroplanes were used for carrying either cargo or passengers as occasion demanded, so that they had no seats and one was obliged to sit huddled on the floor. The bases, though, were already very well equipped.

E 2

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The Russians believe the Arctic to be one of the most important highways of tomorrow's air-traffic. The recent establishment of a radio station and meteorological observation post on an ice-floe twelve miles from the North Pole, is only the first step in an ambitious plan to inaugurate air-lines between the great cities of the Northern Hemisphere, via the North Pole. The distances, that way, are obviously shorter than if one travels nearer the waist of the globe. The possibilities opened up by this project are incalculable.

Two other important subjects remain for treatment-the question of providing food for the thousands of Russians who are working in these regions, and the question of how the natives are to be treated.

The natives themselves are used to living on raw meat and frozen fish, but other food has to be provided for white men. Tinned food can always be imported, of course, but a dreaded disease in these latitudes is scurvy. This can best be prevented by a menu that includes plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. Extraordinary attempts have therefore been made to grow these greenstuffs in the Arctic. Radishes, cabbages and onions have been raised as high as the 68th parallel, but along the coast and on the islands plant- life consists of moss and lichens only. Hothouses have been constructed under the ice itself, and here fresh fruit and vegetables are grown. At Igarka tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, lettuce and potatoes have been successfully raised. Even at the Polar stations themselves, electrically-heated chambers are built below the surface of the ice, where cucumbers and salad-stuffs are grown.

Experiments with wheat, oats and barley are also being made, and on the Kola Peninsula, where the climate is affected by the Gulf Stream, they have proved particularly successful. On the State farm at Igarka wheat stood a foot high last September. On other experimental farms, which, however, I did not see, winter oats planted in spring are said to have germinated and ripened quicker than ordinary spring-sown oats. The yield was estimated to be 30 per cent. higher. A certain method of preparing the seeds called Jacovisa- tion may produce even better results in the future. The seeds, before being set in the soil, are saturated with water and, as soon as they have begun to germinate, are kept in a constant temperature of between five and thirty degrees Celsius. After a number of days they are then planted in the ordinary manner. By this method their whole life-cycle is strengthened and accelerated.

Three main problems confront the Russians who are trying to grow cereals in these regions. The first is to drive the grain-belt as

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near as possible to the Polar zone itself, in order that the cost of transporting grain from a distance may be saved. The second is to evolve plants suited to the peculiarities of the Arctic summer, that is to say, plants with short growing-seasons and immunity to occasional frosts. The third is to discover methods by which the crops can, when ripe and harvested, be kept fresh for a whole year, or even longer. The reason for this is obvious: most of the cereals are only ready for harvesting when the navigation season is drawing to a close. The crops, then, have to be kept in storage until the season starts again in the following summer. The dangers inherent in this, are that the plants may lose their vitamins, putrefy, or send out shoots over the winter. The methods used up to the present to prevent this, is to put the crops " under gas." Large frames are constructed in which the plants lie, asleep in carbon monoxide. Experiments are, however, being made on a new method, in which the plants will be stored in X-ray chambers.

Arctic agriculture, as a whole, suffers from the shortness of the warm season, midsummer frosts, and very poor soil. In return, it enjoys twenty-four hours sunlight during the two months of summer. This is of special benefit to greenstuffs and grasses. Grass, for instance, grows ten times as fast in the Arctic as it does in the South of England; and the cabbages raised there grow much larger leaves.

These experiments in growing foodstuffs are hardly what the business man would call a "paying proposition." But they are indispensable to the carrying through of the Soviets' other plans: to the development of mining, of lumbering, navigation and air- routes. Apart from the consideration of the inhabitants' and workers' healths, food-bases are also necessary to ensure provisions in the event of a breakdown on the transport routes. And, since this is so, any expenditure is justified; although, as a matter of fact, the workers on the State Farm at Igarka have calculated that even if the presen t ost of raising the produce were doubled, it would still be cheaper to grow it there than to bring it by aeroplane from the South of Russia.

In the course of the last fifty years or so, the number of natives has decreased rapidly.1 From the beginning the Soviets have meant well by the natives, but their first efforts were spoilt by over-haste and excessive zeal. Young natives brought to Leningrad to be educated there, languished and died in the air of the city. Now the teachers

1 Visiting this region in 1919, before any appreciable Communist influence, I learned that the native races had long been dying out.--B.P.

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themselves travel to the Arctic. There they help the natives, tend their reindeer (the chief form of wealth among them), show them the use of the motor-boat and the metal trap (to help them in their hunting and fishing), combat the influence of the shamans, and, if their parents permit, teach the children to read and write in alphabets specially invented. Education, instruction in modern hygiene and sanitation is already having its effect. The decline in population has been arrested, and it is hoped the numbers will soon increase. " Cultural centres " have been set up at the main trading- bases, where the natives call at regular intervals to sell furs and buy provisions. The sale of alcohol has been forbidden, and the natives are exempt from both taxation and military service.

The Russians meet with few difficulties when trying to induce the natives to accept the form of local government known as Soviets, if only for the reason that these are already similar to their own tribal councils. This fact fits in well with the main line of policy followed by the Russians in their treatment of the natives. For their final aim is to teach them to take care of themselves. Some of the children educated by " red missionaries" rise to be teachers, economists and technicians. There is a good reason behind this policy. The natives are well acclimatised to the tundra life, and are hardened against the vagaries of the weather. They are, in fact, the natural trustees of the country, and in the long run will provide a better personnel for the work being done there than any Europeans.

It is perhaps a little beside the point to question the value, or at least the " profit " of this immense endeavour to open up a half- forgotten country, to explore new sea- and air-routes, and to make plants grow where none have grown before. Vast amounts of money and energy have been expended. Last year Russia's " North Asia Company" had a budget of fIo,ooo,ooo (at par). There are however two considerations. The first is strategical. The Russians believe the North Siberian air-route will provide an invaluable means of transport and communication in the event of a possible war. Some trial flights have already been made, and the full effect of this project is difficult to realise. The second consideration is that, even if the scheme for developing Arctic Siberia does not " pay for itself," it will augment the wealth of Russia as a whole.

H. P. SMOLKA.

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Documents

Arctic Siberia: Its Discovery and Development