Just when it seems that the solitary, snow-bound highway might really
lead nowhere, the ghost town of Oktyabrskiy peers over the permafrost,
its skyline a grim, gap-toothed leer. As we approach, a hammer-and-sickle-encrusted
sign by the roadside announces what was once one of the busiest fishing
ports in the Russian far east, a model soviet enterprise bustling with
life.
Stretching away behind, however, Oktyabrskiy's main Lenin Street now
looks little more than a sliver of wasteland, lined on both sides by abandoned
apartment blocks, their sunken windows staring blankly, their facades in
the advanced stages of decay. Dilapidated wooden cottages, stripped to
timber skeletons, clutter the moul dering side-streets. Everywhere, tatty
scraps of open ground appear to have been seeded with trash and twisted
metal. And all along the pier, the rotting shells of trawlers lie entombed
in ice.
Only occasionally do the last sad remnants of Oktyabrskiy's population
stumble into this desolate scene, some of them sullen teenagers who pass
without expression, but the majority hunched and elderly, the human detritus
of an unprecedented decade of decline: "It's difficult to believe this
place was once crammed with people," says Lidia Ivanovna, the town's current
governor, and our guide through the ruins. "All we have left are the very
young, the very old and the sick - the people who couldn't leave. We're
trapped between the tundra on one side and the sea on the other. Oktyabrskiy
has been condemned to a gradual death."
Over the past 10 years, Russia has been haemorrhaging humanity at a
rate unprecedented for a modern, industrialised nation, except during times
of famine or war. At the fall of communism, the population stood at 148.3m,
a number that has been steadily sinking by between 300,000 a year, in 1993,
and almost 800,000 in 1999, the most dramatic 12-month slump to date, a
net loss of 0.5 % of Russia's total inhabitants. In an atmosphere of deep
pessimism about the country's future, the traditionally high birth rate
has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman, the lowest in Russia's history.
At the same time, the death rate has soared; average life expectancy for
the Russian male is now just 59, some 10-15 years less than in any western
country, while women can expect to live to 72, six to eight years less
than their European sisters. In yet another symptom of the Russian demographic
malaise, this male/female discrepancy is the largest in the world.
Other indicators are equally alarming: infant mortality is on the rise,
15.8 per 1,000 births in 1999 as against 6.9 in the US that year; Russia
has become one of the world's TB hot spots, and Aids is said to threaten
an epidemic of sub-Saharan proportions; meanwhile, migration is depleting
the human resources of the far-flung regions. As the scale of the situation
was becoming clear in 1998 and '99, the Russian Duma included genocide
among the charges in an impeachment drive against the then president Boris
Yeltsin, regarded as the architect of the debilitating reforms widely seen
as the catalyst for the population collapse. However, if the projections
of Russia's state statistics department, GosKomStat, are correct, the mammoth
scale of the demographic catastrophe has yet to unfold. By the year 2016,
they predict that Russia will lose another 8-10m, making the total loss
for the post-soviet period more than the combined victims of Stalin's purges.
Even in relatively thriving Moscow, which serves as a magnet for impoverished
migrants from all over the former Soviet Union, there is still foreboding
evidence of demographic subsidence: a precipitous 27% drop in the numbers
of pre- and primary school infants has forced the closure of scores of
the city's kindergartens and junior classes. Just a few hundred kilometres
south of the capital, there are already dwindling villages, each one home
to a meagre handful of pensioners.
However, it is at the exposed and vulnerable extremities of the vast
Russian territories that the atrophy of the population has been most acute.
Perhaps the most startling example is Chukotka, a massive chunk of the
far east three times the size of Britain, where the population has withered
by a staggering 60%, from 180,000 in 1990 to just 65,000 today, a figure
that is expected to slump to just 20,000 within the next five years, making
the region's infrastructure unsustainable. Others include the Taimyr region
in the far north, which enjoys 10 months of arctic winter and two of "polar
night", which has bled more than 20% of its inhabitants and may now be
in considerable danger of being evacuated by central government, and Kamchatka,
an isolated peninsula, and the region where Oktyabrskiy is located.
The final approach into Kamchatka after a nine-hour Aeroflot flight
affords a view that might pass for an aerial vision of the edge of the
earth. Its capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, is surrounded by a crescent
of gently smouldering volcanoes, just a few of the 800 scattered throughout
the peninsula, including Asia's largest and most lethal, the Klyuchevskaya
Sopka. The ground beneath hides a mesh of grinding fault lines; we had
barely stepped from the plane when an earthquake struck, jolting the ground
for a few unnerving seconds.
Since the fall of communism, almost a quarter of the overall population
has seeped away. Unemployment in the grubby, low-lying capital is running
at about 30%; 40% of its people live below Russia's already low poverty
line, healthcare is nonexistent and fuel shortages have meant that until
recently, heating and electricity were routinely shut down for as much
as 17 hours a day.
However, as we venture outside Petropavlovsk in the company of a Red
Cross contingent, the situation worsens exponentially. Mountain-locked
microclimates send the temperatures crashing to -30F. For hours, we encounter
no other vehicles, just the occasional group of fishermen trudging through
the snow. And then, at the end of one of the world's bleakest stretches
of roadway, a desolate strip of asphalt separating the heaving lead-coloured
waters of the Okhotsk Sea on one side and a huge frozen lake on the other,
we finally encounter Oktyabrskiy.
Perhaps fittingly, governor Lidia Ivanovna begins not with the physical
wreckage of the town, but with a virtual tour of how it once was: "Right
here there used to be two rows of houses." She gestures towards sawn-off
foundations in a completely deserted district known as Basa II. "That was
once a small port, where supplies were delivered before the road was built..."
The decay began, she explains, in the early 90s, with the liquidation
of the fish-processing plant and cannery; in the new, market-driven environment,
harsher even than the merciless natural climate the town had survived for
decades, no one could justify the ballooning costs of transporting canned
fish across the vastness of Russia. Since then almost 60% of the population
of 4,500 has evaporated, and the spirit of the town with them. A heavy-set
woman in her 50s who brooks little sentimentality, Lidia Ivanovna finds
herself continually fighting back tears: "People once lived well in Oktyabrskiy,"
she says. "People once lived very well..."
By anyone's estimation, however, many of the remaining inhabitants of
Oktyabrskiy now endure an almost bestial existence. One filthy apartment
we visited, home of an alcoholic and his retarded son, was the most sordid
imaginable, strewn with vodka bottles, stinking mattresses and the guts
of ancient televisions. Across the stairwell, we find a woman of Koryak
origin in a dark and sooty living room with her two youngest children,
a mischievous boy and pretty moon-faced girl called Veronika, both suffering
from tuberculosis. Ironically, because of spells in the TB hospital in
Petropavlovsk receiving proper nutrition, they look infinitely healthier
than the three emaciated older boys.
Most of these pitiable human beings pray for escape - in any form -
from their grimy purgatory. In the first block we visit, pen sioner Maria
Riabchenko shows us round her two almost entirely bare, unheated rooms.
Aged 72 and virtually blind, she has carefully stacked all of her possessions
in one corner, in preparation for a journey she was almost certainly never
going to make: "I want to get out of this prison," she hisses. "Many people
have already fled but the rest of us would also get out if we could. I
have everything packed. I'd have left long ago, except that I don't have
any money." With tears streaming, she adds, bitterly: "But I can wait.
I'm very patient..." In the next stairwell, we call on Valintin Igulayev,
an amiable old man who arrived in Oktyabrskiy in the 50s, brimming with
idealism: "A friend of mine said one day: 'Let's go to Kamchatka' and I
immediately answered, 'Why not?'. I was up for some romance and adventure."
His elderly wife, Lilia, has just been diagnosed with cancer of the colon;
but with their combined pensions totalling about $70 (?45) a month, she
has no hope of getting adequate treatment. Physically shaking and with
tears welling up in her eyes, she explains that her only option is to sit
at home and wait for the tumour to consume her: "The doctor says that I
must pay 15,000 roubles for the treatment, but I don't even have 40 roubles
for fish in the market..."
Oktyabrskiy's clean but impossibly spartan hospital, which is forced
to rely on the Red Cross for basic commodities such as soap and washing
powder, has almost given up trying to help the seriously ill. Instead,
certain wards serve as a rest home for the most chronically destitute.
In one upstairs room, Alexei, who has lost all coordination because
of the devastation wrought by alcohol on his nervous system and looks 25
years older than his actual age of 48, shares a room with Vladimir, whose
binge drinking caused a cerebral haemorrhage that deprived him of the use
of one arm and his legs. "We don't hope to cure them," Oktyabrskiy's head
doctor, Nikolai Kuznetsov, tells me, "but if we let them out now, they
wouldn't survive long. The only option is to look after them here until
we find a place for them in the old people's home in Petropavovsk or until
they die..."
Our final stop is Oktyabrskiy's modest, two-storey school, which has
seen numbers fall from 680 students 10 years ago to 240 today. This will
sink further as every one of the children intends to flee the ailing town
immediately on graduation: "Oktyabrskiy is just a long street with the
sea on both sides of it," says Oksana, a forthright 16-year-old who intends
to move to Petropavlovsk, "It's boring here. There are no sports facilities
or anything. I want to study psychology and there are no higher education
facilities. And I won't come back - there is no work and nothing to do."
Another 16-year-old, Spartak, hopes to move either to England or Greece:
"Of course I'll miss Oktyabrskiy. It's my home," he says. "But I have to
survive and, for that reason, I have to move. I know that without us, Oktyabrskiy
will die, but what can I do? Not a single one of my friends wants to stay..."
"Russia has been shunted back a century," says Sergei Kaleshnikov of
the statistics committee, GosKomStat. "A contemporary man who is 50 can,
according to statistics, live for another four to 10 years It's almost
the same as it was 100 years ago." As is obvious from the situation in
Oktyabrskiy, the primary causes of the demographic catastrophe are brutally
simple: poverty, bad diet, poor living conditions and, in more industrialised
parts of Russia, a polluted environment.
This has been fatally compounded by an almost total implosion of the
healthcare system, even in the more populous cities. The TB hospital in
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy relies entirely on a 50-year-old fleurography
machine, a hulking piece of apparatus that produces tiny imprints of lungs
the size of postage stamps. In St Petersburg and Moscow, very few hospitals
have the resources to perform what have become routine operations in the
west such as heart bypasses; the leading TB hospital in St Petersburg can
only afford to spend about 55p per day on its patients, much less than
is required to cure many of them. Contemporary Russia is also an ideal
breeding ground for infectious diseases such as TB which, incubated in
the labyrinthine prison system, are now raging through the population.
"We are now on the verge of an epidemic," says Tatyana Suprun, one of
St Petersburg's leading TB doctors. "It's a consequence of the way we live
now in Russia, often three generations in a tiny flat. If one person gets
sick, everyone does." Aids too is rumbling beneath the surface, due to
a potent combination of rising intravenous drug use, the post-soviet sexual
revolution and an almost total lack of safe-sex education.
However, the Russian populace is not only being corroded by disease,
but also by its own self-destructive social reflexes. Alcohol consumption
in Russia is the highest in the world, and deaths from alcohol poisoning
far outstrips those in any other country: about 50,000 cases in 1999 as
opposed to just 350 in the US, mostly as a result of a national predilection
for binge drinking and the nature of the alcohol itself: "Since about 1990
there has been no control of alcohol production," says Viktor Petrovich,
head of Petropavlosk's addiction clinic. "This has led to the availability
of very low-grade spirits. People also started to brew their own, low-quality
home brews that led to a lot of poisoning. In some cases, people even drank
technical spirits."
Finally, there is the issue of violent death: the Russian murder rate
per capita, which has doubled since 1990, is the highest in the world,
three times more than the US and four times more than France. And in the
atmosphere of social gloom, suicides are also rising, up by a third from
their 1990 levels.
Russia and its long-suffering people have, throughout most of the country's
demographic history, had a complicated, almost intimate relationship with
the mechanics of death. As Catherine Merridale reported in her recent book
on the death culture of Russia, Night of Stone (Granta ?25), crude death
rates in Russia in the 1870s were far higher than for any European country:
38 deaths per 1,000 members of the population per year, compared to the
corresponding rate in France and England of just over 22 per 1,000.
If the situation continues to deteriorate today, Russia's accelerating
population decline could become the most important challenge to the country's
already unstable economic and political status in the world: "If this trend
does not change in 15 to 20 years," claims Valentin Pokrovsky, of the Russian
Academy of Medical Science, "for each working person, there will be one
or two people who cannot work. It will be very difficult for the country."
However, despite an insulating fatalism nurtured by Russians over centuries,
the ultimate toll is a very human and individual one.
The cemetery in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy is probably one of the most
beautiful spots in the city, a sweeping, steep, snow-covered hill framed
by the icy peaks of volcanoes. On one of the most picturesque slopes, a
small army of youthful gravediggers is opening the frozen earth with picks,
working simultaneously on three or four graves at once. All around, small
picnic tables are piled with food, sustenance for the dead on their journey,
while ravens, believed by Russians to be celestial pallbearers, circle
hungrily overhead. One funeral (pictured above) is already in progress,
the deceased an unemployed man of 44 who died suddenly from a heart attack,
leaving behind a wife and young daughter. "It was totally unexpected,"
said his brother, "He was so young, still relatively healthy. Life killed
him."
As soon as it ends, another gets underway, this time of a 21-year-old
man who had been kicked to death by a group of soldiers: "He was just coming
home and they beat him up. Five or six of them just set upon him," says
his father. "They beat him up and took his clothes. He was just left there
lying naked in the snow; people just walked around him, nobody helped him.
They only found him in the morning lying there dead - he didn't have a
chance because of the cold."
Once the body has been laid in the ground, the entire mountainside,
as bleak and depleted a stretch of wilderness as any we have encountered
during our journey to Kamchatka's depopulated margins, seems to fill up
with the keening of his mother as she is led away.
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