The Enchantment of Kimzha

Most maps do not show Kimzha, a rural hamlet in northeast Arkhangelsk oblast, though it stands near the intersection of two rivers, the Mezen and the much smaller Kimzha. Its population varies between winter and summer: a couple of hundred in the winter, and a hundred or so more during the summer, when relatives visit. In this distinctive village, located near the Arctic Circle, people seem to exist in another time.

Kimzha lies buried under severe winter conditions for much of the year and my first experience of the place occurred in early March 2000. The summer prior, in 1999, I had seen a photograph of the Kimzha church, consecrated in the 1760s and dedicated to the Hodegetria Icon of Mary.* It showed five soaring towers and cupolas over a structure of massive larch logs. Friends in Arkhangelsk warned me of the difficulties: the place would be impossible to reach by land in the summer because of the lack of roads, but I was convinced I had to see it for myself.

Formerly, there was limited scheduled transportation by water from Arkhangelsk, but that had ceased with the collapse of state subsidies. Another possibility was to travel by small plane from Arkhangelsk to Mezen. But I wanted to experience the terrain between Arkhangelsk and the Mezen River, and for that I was told of another mode of travel: over a temporary winter road, a zimnik.

Fortunately, I had blat, an essential Russian concept that combines “pull” and “connections.” Since 1998, I had maintained close contacts with Pomor State University in Arkhangelsk, at that time the leading university in the White Sea territory (Pomorye). The first vice-rector of the university, Yury Kudryashov, was a native of Mezen; and while he had long since left the area, he had maintained contact with childhood friends, such as Peter Kondratyev, the director of a lumber factory in Kamenka. Kondratyev provided me with a driver from his company motor pool and a Land Rover, one of several that made weekly runs between Arkhangelsk – the power center – and the twin towns of Mezen and Kamenka. For the driver, this was a regular, if demanding, shuttle trip. For me it was something else entirely.

The sun was bright and the frost hard when we left Arkhangelsk in the early afternoon of March 7. The Land Rover sped over a paved road along the right bank of the Northern Dvina River until we approached the mouth of the Pinega River, some one hundred kilometers southeast of Arkhangelsk. At that point we turned east and moved along a reasonably smooth gravel road near the right bank of the river until we reached the town of Pinega. The gently rolling terrain had presented few challenges to the Rover. A tractor grader kept the surface even, and high snow banks provided insurance for the occasional skid.

Beyond Pinega, the way to Mezen forked sharply to the north from the main road, and we soon approached the deep taiga forest. The grades became much more primitive, and the track narrowed. This was the beginning of the zimnik. Despite the apparent remoteness of the area, the track to Mezen carries a small but steady stream of traffic – including twice-weekly service in small buses. And where there are drivers, there will be road stops. In the tiny village of Chizgora, we stopped at a log hut that offered the usual assortment of engine oil, beef jerky, soap, and ramen noodles. A stocky militia captain ate microwave-warmed pelmeni, and in the corner a small television projected a flickering black-and-white image of Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda. It would have been fun to watch the scene where John Cleese seduces Curtis with a recitation of elegant nineteenth-century Russian poetry, but we still had many kilometers to travel.

As we drove, the forest suddenly thinned, and the road improved into a straight causeway through what appeared to be a marsh. Although the hour was close to eleven, floodlights loomed in the distance. Excavators tore at rock-hard earth, and the roar of heavy dump trucks shattered what had been the unbroken silence of the forest. The driver explained that “they” had decided to build a year-round road from Arkhangelsk through forest and marsh to Mezen, via Kimzha. In the meantime, we plunged back into the forest, with nothing in front of the headlights but a snow track and endless rows of fir and pine trunks. Around midnight, the driver, nodding and exhausted, mumbled that we had finally arrived.

Cemetery hooded with crosses.

To arrive at Kimzha in the middle of a winter night produces an unsettling impression, all the more because the first thing one sees is not the village – which is located to the side of the road – but a group of large crosses, stark and ghostly in the sharp contrast of the headlights’ glare. This was a startling apparition, and eerily beautiful. But where was the village and my promised shelter? Despite the late hour, a workshop on the edge of Kimzha was brightly lit, part of a service area for the road builders. The directions we received there took us into the village, where we again lost ourselves in a maze of log walls. Stumbling through snowdrifts, I found the small log house where I was to spend the night. Before going inside, I looked upward and saw the aquamarine shimmer of the aurora borealis. It was the last clear sky I would see in the Mezen region on this trip. The next hour brought a new weather front of snow and wind that would last for the next three days. But in that brief moment I could clearly see the looming specter of the Kimzha church.

As for my accommodations, I had been told that the house was new – which also meant unfinished. But the small abode was warm and dry, and I had no trouble with the Spartan room, with a window looking out upon the village. The next morning my host, Georgy Fedorkov, and his brother (both retired on a pension from the lumber plant) provided a hearty breakfast of kasha, fresh milk, and simmering beef stew. The wind and snow continued unabated, and my attempts to call Mezen from a neighbor’s house failed; the telephones were out. Kondratyev had planned to bring me from Kimzha to Mezen, but I was stranded in the middle of a snowstorm.

Despite the stiff wind and treacherous snow drifts, I decided to photograph as much as I could, partly as a way to relieve the tension. The church, of course, was my primary objective. It was the sole surviving example of its type, apparently created by a group of carpenters active only in this part of the North. The brilliance of their design, perfectly proportioned, is still a source of amazement to me.

But for all of the monumental power of the church, what surprised me still more was the extent to which the village’s massive log houses, built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been preserved. This was not an open-air museum, with a few reconstructed log buildings. Yes, some of the houses had been abandoned or at least shuttered for the winter, while a few others had been modified with plank siding, but Kimzha remained a functioning, living environment.

How to explain this degree of preservation – of the buildings and of the community? Perhaps the very absence of roads, the “isolation factor,” protected the integrity of the environment. Yet that alone was not sufficient to explain the survival of Kimzha, when hundreds of other villages throughout the North had vanished. It occurred to me that the existence of the church, although closed until 1999, might have contributed to the village’s endurance. I decided to revisit Kimzha under more favorable conditions, during the summer, in order to explore further the sources of its strength.

The morning’s photography produced two rolls of film before driving snow threatened the workings of camera and lenses. By eleven, my primary concern centered on finding transportation to Mezen before the roads became completely snowed in. Fedorkov suggested that I turn to the road builders, whose shop I had seen the night before. Now I got a closer look. Even under clement conditions, it is extremely difficult to build a road straight through a northern swamp. I was told that the crews work throughout the year, day and night, on weekly rotations. At this rate, the road should be completed within another two years. In view of the budget difficulties in the Arkhangelsk region, it is unlikely that the project would have gotten this far without some form of subsidy or promise of a payback in natural resources.

A log windmill, no longer in use.

I looked into the equipment garage, saw a bulldozer under repair, and wondered what could ever bring this inert lump of metal back to motion. The blade was encrusted with a type of local clay that hardens to the consistency of rock, especially in the winter. While we discussed the possibility of my hitching a ride to Mezen with one of the road crews, I examined the bunkhouse and workroom, thick with cigarette smoke, as well as the canteen, where a fresh load of bread baked in a nearby village had just arrived. The hash hound, who appeared to be just out of the army, cooked up a crude but edible, calorie-laden fare of several dishes. I could only eat my way through two.

At noon we heard of a group of surveyors who were heading to Mezen in their “Uazik” (a Russian UAZ all-wheel drive) and were willing to take me along. As they packed their gear, a small car drove up with three passengers – Russian Baptist missionaries from St. Petersburg who had come to the Mezen region to spread the Good News and distribute copies of the New Testament.

A bit later I noticed one of the crew idly thumbing through a copy in the bunkhouse, where only a little while before a card game was in full swing with the usual incessant profanity. As for the villagers, one noted laconically: “They won’t get very far here.” While I pondered that judgment, a woman in a quilted jacket opened the long village stable, and out came several horses, some of whom rolled in the snow, while others ambled through the drifts, the rime of snow glistening on their dark coats.

After the winter visit, I could only think of returning to Kimzha with summer light. In late July 2000, again in Arkhangelsk, I purchased a plane ticket to Mezen and left from Vaskovo airport. The view from the air was spectacular during the hour-long trip. Looking at the taiga forests, bogs, and meandering rivers, I could scarcely imagine the terrain that I had covered with such difficulty a few months earlier.

Upon arrival in Mezen, I was escorted by the major who headed the local police, and, after due formalities, was driven in a brand-new Uazik to the village of Dorogorskoye, across the Mezen River from Kimzha. There I met the head of the local village council, Alexei Zhitov, who made it clear that he pretty much controlled what happened in Kimzha. Not an easy job, as it happens, and the silting of the Mezen River has made it much harder. As I later saw, simply getting a small barge of fuel oil over to the other side was a very difficult, even dangerous, operation – and without oil the village of Kimzha has no electricity. It came as no surprise to learn that Zhitov was suffering from a serious ulcer.

A local fisherman got me up and over the river to Kimzha in an aluminum boat with a sputtering outboard. Now I was here, but where was the sun? After leaving my gear in Fedorkov’s house, I moved through the village with two cameras. What a relief to walk without the constant impediment of snowdrifts, however picturesque. Now the land was swathed in green, and a stiff wind was pushing the cloud layers around. A group of children followed me, the visitor from another planet, with a patter of questions. Then the sun appeared. As I ran toward the center, with the village kids cheering in my wake, the church acquired that rich glow that only late northern light can impart.

The next days brought the same alternation of cloud and sun, and I had time to contemplate the ever-changing image of the church. I also met some of the people from the local parish. This dedicated group – predominantly women – had succeeded in 1999 in having the padlock removed from the church, which was then reconsecrated by an Orthodox priest.

Although there is no resident priest and no regular service, the church was opened by the women of the church committee at ten each morning. They have also created a small prayer table (the altar has not been re-created) with an icon of the savior. The door over the vestibule has a reproduction of one of the “tenderness” icons, with Mary and the Christ child. The church ladies were very concerned about the state of the building, and worried that Zhitov was unwilling to make basic repairs, particularly to the windows. Their appeals to various foundations had so far gone unheeded, although the church is a registered national landmark. A rather slipshod attempt at restoration in the 1980s has long been abandoned, and this, too, has disfigured the appearance.

Kimzha scenes.

As I asked about the parish, I learned more about the community. Although the former dairy kolkhoz, surrounded by rusting machinery for which there is no fuel, is a shadow of its Soviet size, a large part of the dairy herd has reappeared through individual ownership. I had ample opportunity to partake of the fresh milk, cottage cheese, and ryazhenka (similar to buttermilk) produced throughout the week by individuals who own one cow or a few. The villagers are also sustained by the forest and by the rhythm of its seasons – a time for berries, a time for mushrooms, a time for hunting and fishing. Late one afternoon, Elena Repitskaya and Antonina Mamontova, former kolkhoz workers, arranged a tasting session at which I sampled over a dozen types of jams and other concoctions from the various types of local berries. No Moscow restaurant could offer better.

It also came as a surprise to find that Kimzha has retained a number of residents in their thirties, with young children. These families tend to be large and are of modest means. Much of their income will eventually go to educating their children in a large town. But in the meantime these families – and others who come for the summer – are quietly proud of being a part of the village.

Like all complex environments, Kimzha does not submit to easy definition. During my visits, I came to realize that it was not some isolated pocket of the past. The villagers do not sit around singing authentic folk songs. Many of the residents are retirees from the lumber plant, and their children have moved to larger places. When they return for the summer, more urban elements appear in the culture of the village. Television is widespread. In other words, life here shares much with life anywhere in Russia. And yet, these surviving ancient villages are essential microcosms of Russian traditions, many of them now forgotten.

Fortunately, I had succeeded in photographing the Hodegetria Church before a decision was made, a few years later, to restore it. As is often the case in such remote locations, the project was clumsily managed from Arkhangelsk. As late as 2010 there were concerns that the components would rot before the task was completed.

Yet the roof has been replaced and the exterior of the church released from the shackles of years of scaffolding. One can only hope that, as a result, this unique, soaring wooden church will survive another century, when so many others have been lost. RL

* Or Virgin Hodegetria, is an iconographic depiction of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) holding the Child Jesus at her side while pointing to Him as the source of salvation for mankind.

To read and learn more about places like Kimzha, look for William Brumfield’s newest book, Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North, to be released by Duke University Press this summer.

Featuring nearly two hundred full color photographs of these beautiful centuries-old structures, the book is the most recent addition to Brumfield’s ongoing project to photographically document all aspects of Russian architecture.

bit.ly/brumfield

The artist Nikolai Shabunin (1866-1907) was born in the Mezen uyezd of the Arkhangelsk gubernia, where Kimzha is located. The son of a priest, he moved to the capital to study, and apprenticed under Ilya Repin, attaining the official title of artist in 1898. Shabunin would return to his home district each year, always bringing his beloved camera. Russian Life will have a full feature story on Shabunin in a future issue, but we wanted to share a few of his images here, as they were taken 100 years ago, and very near to Kimzha.