If you live on ice, where does your water come from?
The answer is easy, right? The people of Yakutia – a Russian region so huge it would be the eighth largest country if it were an independent state – have been harvesting and drinking ice for centuries. Even in an era when the entire republic (the Sakha Republic is another name for Yakutia) is connected on WhatsApp and has a thriving movie industry, “ice water” is still popular, even in the main city of Yakutsk, home to nearly 300,000.
Every November Yakut villagers team up to harvest ice for residents’ drinking water. One family may send an able-bodied young man to help, another might have a truck, the third provides some money for gas… The team will then head out to a designated lake and set to work.
November is the opportune time: by then, the ice is definitely thick enough to work on, and even drive right up to the harvesting site in your car. But it is still of a manageable thickness: if the ice sheet gets thicker than 50 centimeters (20 inches), extraction becomes next to impossible.
The team clears the snow, etches rectangles onto the surface of the frozen lake, uses a special saw that looks like a cross between a sword and a harpoon to cut through the ice, and then pull blocks of it out of the freezing water. These blocks are then delivered to people’s backyards, where they sit in the open air or are placed into a cellar (ледник). Voila, your solid state, seasonal supply of drinking water is ready.
The fact that Yakutia is almost entirely covered by permafrost, or frozen ground, that varies in thickness across the northern latitudes (beneath Yakutsk it is about 300 meters) means that life works a bit differently here from elsewhere on the planet. All pipes freeze, so tap water is unavailable in rural areas during winter. Wells are difficult to dig, and you often can’t go deep enough to reach an underground source. As a result, water from melted ice is used for everything from drinking and cooking to other household needs, even though it is deficient in minerals. It also means that if surface water becomes polluted anywhere in Yakutia, locals can see and taste it immediately.
“I like ice water,” said Yakut villager Pelageya Semyonova after receiving a delivery of ice bricks from the village’s Council of Elders. “In the city, tap water smells like chlorine, and our summer tap sometimes smells like fuel oil.”
Even though there is now internet and gas in Semyonova’s village, water is still cut from the nearby lake, like it always has been.
In the summer, the tap water is drawn directly from the river, but not all summer. Right after the river ice breaks, the water gets too muddy, so people don’t start using tap water until well after the first thaw, and then stop when the river freezes. In Yakutia, that period is not long, so ice water is the go-to solution: ice bricks are hauled from the yard and put into a plastic barrel inside the home. People scoop the vital liquid out of these barrels for drinking and cooking through the winter holidays and into the spring and early summer.
Even in the capital city of Yakutsk some houses don’t have running water. Instead they get their supply from public water pumps (колонки). These pumps are connected to heated underground reservoirs that keep water in liquid form. Lately these dispensers have become so advanced that users can pay for their water with a special magnetic card distributed by the utilities company.
What about the question of hygiene? Absent running water, the solution is a traditional banya, whether in your own backyard one or at a public bathhouse, in some of which you can also wash your clothes.
Though Yakutia has a reputation of tremendous riches (it’s the world’s number one diamond producer), life on permafrost is far from easy.
– Maria Antonova
Yuri Gotye was a respected Moscow historian who began keeping a diary in 1917, appalled by the unfolding events. In 1922, fearing the diary would be discovered, he gave it for safekeeping to Stanford University professor Frank Golder, who was then visiting Moscow. Gotye was arrested in 1930 (in connection with the Academy of Sciences Affair) but was later released and allowed to resume his work. He died in Moscow in 1943, but his diary was not discovered until 1982, in the Hoover Institution Archives long after Golder’s death in 1929. This diary [Published as: Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e, Translated, edited and introduced by Terence Emmons (Princeton University Press, 1988)] entry is from January 1918.
In addition to the fact that you can do anything under the present regime for a bribe, Russian dishonorableness is apparently manifesting itself intensely in the triumphant boorocracy [khamokratiya]. We greeted the new year at Myortvy Pereulok, where we also spent the night. I have just returned home; on a fence, on the paper of a wall decree, I read the following inscription in a hand “of the people”:
No hour passes without a soviet, No day without a decree, But there is still no bread.
Что ни час то совет. Что ни день то декрет. А хлеба все нет.
Vox populi, vox Dei. But everything is going to ruin all the same, and all will be subjected to the ever more triumphant German: it is no accident that the Russian diplomats, Trotsky and co., “accepted the ultimatum” and continue in Brest to sell the rest of Russia wholesale and retail. And why shouldn’t they? After all, there is no nation in Russia, nor is there a people. Where is there a single man made by the revolution? Even those mediocrities of the old days have all disappeared. The SR Kerenskiada did not produce a single man; bolshevism even less so. More than ever before, the “God-carrying people” is a panurgic herd rushing to the sea. There is no salvation for those who have destroyed themselves. Yesterday the Wilkins told about the Georges’s journey from Vladivostok to Moscow: there was order only in Manchuria, which is being guarded by the Chinese. They were searched nine times inside Russia’s borders. In Perm the train’s passengers narrowly escaped being shot because some commissar who had requisitioned 2,800 rubles from the dining car wanted to shoot the passengers with the help of the militia and the red guard. Finally, their engine was stolen once by some soldiers for their “war” train. Where is the escape from this bedlam?
There is a lot of talk about corruption in Russia, and Russian prosecutors have been hard at work profiling the typical corruptionist (коррупционер).
According to a spokesman for the Prosecutor General, the average corrupt Russian is male, about 40, energetic, communicative, and does not drink.
“Usually these are educated people with a college degree. They have families and kids,” he said in an interview on the Prosecutor General’s Efir TV channel, and are motivated to engage in criminal corruption in order either to feed their ego or to take revenge on their boss.
In December Russia held a nationwide drive to pick names for its airports (i.e. to attach the name of someone famous to the facility). The project was intended as a democratic effort that allowed each city’s residents to pick a famous local son (or daughter) but, as often happens, the path of good intentions didn’t lead where it was supposed to.
In Omsk, fans of the band Grazhdanskaya Oborona campaigned online for weeks to get the name of cult rocker Yegor Letov, an Omsk native, approved as the airport’s moniker. Government officials rejected their pick.
In Kaliningrad, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (born there) was leading in the polls, but several public figures deemed such a choice to be unpatriotic, and he fell in the ranks, eventually losing to Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna.
Here are some of the winners:
Kornei Chukovsky, real name Nikolai Korneychukov (1882-1969), was a famous journalist, poet, critic, translator and literary expert. Primarily known today for his children’s stories and poems, he actually began his career as a journalist and philologist, before moving into criticism and children’s poems and stories. Heavily criticized during the 1930s (the attack was led by Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya), he turned his attention to translation, and introduced Russian readers to many English and American writers. In the postwar period, he attained mythic status and was able to combine official approval with support for notable dissidents. Below is an excerpt from a 1918 entry in his diary. [Diary, 1901-1969, Kornei Chukovsky; Michael Henry Heim, translator (Yale University Press, 2005)]
With Lunacharsky. I see him nearly every day. People ask why I don’t try and get something out of him. I answer I’d feel bad taking advantage of such a gentle child. He beams with complacency. There is nothing he likes more than to do somebody a favor. He pictures himself an omnipotent benevolent being dispensing bliss to all: Be so good, be so kind as to... He writes letters of recommendation for everybody, signing each, with a flourish, Lunacharsky. He dearly loves his signature. He can’t wait to pick up his pen to sign. He lives in a squalid little flat off a nauseating staircase in the Army and Navy House opposite the Muruzi House. There is a sheet of paper (high quality, English) on the door that says “I receive no one here. You may see me from such-and-such a time at the Commissariat of Education, etc.” But no one pays the slightest attention to it: he is constantly barraged by actors from the imperial theaters, former émigrés, men with harebrained schemes or out for easy money, well-meaning poets from the lower classes, officials, soldiers, and more – to the horror of his irascible servant, who rages each time the bell rings: “Can’t you read?” Then Totosha, his spoiled and handsome young son, runs in, shouting something in French – never Russian – or the ministerial unceremonious Madame Lunacharskaya. It is all so chaotic, good natured and naive that it seems a comedy act...
Lunacharsky is late for his appointments at the Commissariat of Education: he gets involved in a conversation with one person and makes others wait for hours. To show how liberal he is, he has a portrait of the Tsar hanging in his office. He calls in his visitors two by two, seating them on either side of himself, and while he talks to one of them the other can admire the Minister’s statesmanlike acumen. It is a naive and harmless bit of swagger. I asked him to write a letter to the Commissar of Post and Telegraph Offices, Proshian, and he willingly picked out a letter on his typewriter to the effect that I was such-and-such a person and he would be delighted if Proshian agreed to reopen Kosmos...
It’s not clear whether Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky had a hand in a wave of concert cancellations and the harassment of hip hop artists in Russia. The situation came to a head in November with the arrest of the popular singer Husky (Хаски). His concert in Krasnodar was swarmed by police who had turned off the electricity, leading him to perform outside the venue from the top of a car. He was promptly detained and accused of hooliganism.
The events led to a rare show of solidarity by Russian hip hop performers, who organized a concert in Moscow to support Husky.
“It’s not just the money [being collected at the concert],” according to rapper Oxxxymiron, “it’s for solidarity. I wanted to write a tweet, but understood that was not enough.”
Husky was born in Ulan Ude, but lives in Moscow. His rap music is distinguished by an almost “literary” approach and non-standard rhythms. He himself calls his songs “painful fairy tales.”
At right, an excerpt from his song, “Panelka,” which refers to the concrete panel buildings that house many Russians on the outskirts of major cities. A panelka is a high-rise apartment building constructed out of prefabricated concrete panels. In Russia, they are synonymous with inexpensive housing, with the mass housing projects of the 1970s and ‘90s, with the “sleeping districts,” where the less fortunate live, where gangs of kids roam about or hang out in local shops. The autobiographical song charts the course of the singer’s life growing up and not quite escaping his panelka past.
Song translation by: Nadya Grebennikova, Liv Bliss, Nora Favorov, and Maria Antonova.
Photo: Julia Sergina
The Russian social research agency Zoom Market (mazm.ru) asked over 2600 persons, aged 23 to 76, in 20 Russian cities if they or a family member smokes (or smoked). The result was this ranking of those 20 cities, from the “most smoking” to the least.
Bryansk Moscow Krasnodar Volgograd Ivanovo Chelyabinsk Rostov-on-Don Voronezh Perm Tambov Irkutsk Saratov St. Petersburg Yekaterinburg Samara Krasnoyarsk Nizhny Novgorod Novosibirsk Omsk Kazan
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
