The Coldest Village on Earth

Is there no Russian winter in Russia anymore? After weeks of the mercury hovering around zero in a slushy, filthy Moscow, it was looking that way.

So, in preparation for the day when youngsters in the family line would sit on my knee and ask about my time in Russia (“What did you do in the cold, grandpa?”), I set course for the worst Siberia has to offer: Oymyakon, Yakutia. Oymyakon holds the title of the world’s coldest permanently inhabited settlement. In 1926, a ferocious –71.2o Celsius was registered there.

It is said that, in this log cabin village of some 1,000 souls, spit freezes into a pellet in mid-flight, breath crystallizes and audibly tinkles to the ground, plastic carrier bags stiffen and snap in two.

It sounded perfect.

After a six-hour flight to the republican capital of Yakutsk, I find the locals are baffled why anyone would spend their vacation time pursuing monster frosts in remote climes.

“Normal people don’t come here, only the scum of the earth,” said Seva, a 30-year-old heating engineer who said he fled the law in his homeland of Ukraine, for reasons he would not clarify.

Meanwhile, Yakutsk’s respectable –40o C already produces some bizarre phenomena: the earbuds of my CD player freeze stiff on the wire and bounce around in front of my face like a pair of deely-boppers. I hear reports of –60o C in Eastern Yakutia two days previous. This is starting to look promising.

Another two-hour flight leads to the Oymyakon district center, Ust-Nera, a rundown shanty town of crumbling apartment blocks, snaking outdoor heating pipes, frozen rubbish tips and shells of jeeps and buses that serve as sheds. The town’s only claim to fame appears to be a lavish visit in distant Soviet times by the son of the Iranian Shah. The heir apparent booked the town’s entire hotel (now dismally dilapidated) for his entourage during a hunting trip, hoping to bag one of the region’s prized spiral-horned mountain rams.

Today, Ust-Nera exists largely as a staging post for workers in the gold-mining industry and for offbeat travelers on their way to the Polyus Kholoda, or “Cold Pole,” as Oymyakon is proudly known.

Visitors to the Cold Pole in recent years have hailed from Germany, Britain, the Czech Republic and Japan, arriving by plane, car and even bicycle to confront the infamous temperatures.

“These are people who are prepared to rough it, they don’t need luxury hotels, but stay with families, go hunting, ride reindeer,” said Vitaly Kondakov, head of tourist development in the district.

Kondakov motions to a poster of a resplendent, silver-bearded figure on the wall: this is Chishaan, the Yakutian Santa Claus, who is now charged with the task of attracting more tourists to the Cold Pole for its annual festival in March. Beyond diamonds, gold, timber and oil, Yakutia has evidently cottoned on to the potential of another of its plentiful natural resources: the cold. All the festival needs now is a star guest from overseas, hence the hopeful invite sent this year by the republic to California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I arrange a $40 ride in one of the ubiquitous UAZ minivans to travel 400 kilometers to Tomtor, the next village to Oymyakon. It’s an uncomfortable eight-hour haul, lurching through the taiga forest and over frozen rivers in the knowledge that a truck hurtling the other way can bat you down the hillside to join the other wrecks.

The onset of a warm front is equally disturbing. The mercury infuriatingly rises to –30o C, which, if it holds, will be like diving at Sharm el-Sheikh and seeing no fish.

I spend the night in Tomtor, 40 kilometers from my goal, where I am introduced the next morning to the head of the Oymyakon village administration and given the red carpet treatment on the last leg of the journey. Like a few dozen foreign guests before me, I am accommodated in a private home for a very market-wise $25 a day, and the locals attentively take me under their wing in this most unlikely of tourist destinations.

Initially, I feel somewhat conspicuous – within a few hours everyone knows who I am and what I am doing here, such is the lightening speed of the local grapevine. But the Yakuts are now accustomed to the appearance of thermometer-fixated foreigners, and not just those in their prime.

“Here I successfully experienced an air temperature of minus 51 degrees,” 84-year-old Japanese tourist Ishiko Honzo wrote in a visitor’s book last February, while visiting with a group of octogenarians wishing to test their mettle.

“Minus 50 or 60 is unthinkable for most people and they come to see how it is possible to live in such conditions,” said Albina Vinokurova, director of studies at the village school.

Paradoxically, “Oymyakon” means “river that doesn’t freeze” in Evenk. A tiny tributary of the Indigirka river in the village never freezes, because warm springs bubble up underneath it.

Situated 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, Oymyakon’s latitude and continental climate combine with its valley location some 2000 meters above sea level to produce a pocket of intense cold, earning it the Cold Pole status. Winter temperatures usually plummet to the mid –60s, but not today. I glumly note that it is still only a paltry –38o. As the population happily goes about its daily business, remarking how “warm” it is, doubts start to arise: Where am I and what am I doing here?”

Perhaps a friend in Moscow was right when he declined an invitation to travel with me, saying, “Why would I go halfway round the world just to see people with frozen moustaches?”

Mercifully, the natural spirits revered by the pagan Yakuts apparently heeded my silent prayers. A day later, a searing –56o shroud drops on the village, and its foggy paths beckon.

If Oymyakon basks in unspoiled nature in summer, there is little to see in winter except for the monument to the lowest temperature, measured 78 years ago by Russian geographer Sergei Obruchev. But tramping around in multiple layers of clothing is an adrenalin-pumping exercise in itself. The temperature is a few degrees lacking for the full range of cold phenomena like freezing spit and breath, but exhaled gusts thicken with a gratifying roar, as if I am blowing in the embers of a fire. My cheeks start to burn and my eyebrows turn to small thickets of frost. I am without furs and ‘unty’ reindeer skin boots, so the cold penetrates to my bones in just a few minutes. Daytime forays are therefore kept short, not to mention the unavoidable ones at night. After Oymyakon, people riding bicycles over canyons or groping around in vats full of snakes no longer impress – the true “fear factor” is a trip to an unlit outhouse when it is –50o C.

This challenge met, I offer thanks to the vast night sky. The stars are vivid here as in few places on Earth. As an unexpected bonus, the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, spread out in a salad green display. The most spectacular lightshows coincide with the coldest spells. More northerly towns in Yakutia like Tiksi are blessed with a greater frequency of lightshows, so much so that a hotel was built there to cater to Japanese couples who seek out the lights, in the belief, said tourism chief Kondakov, that a child conceived beneath their tumbling columns will grow up to be a genius.   

Beyond the rigors of the cold, the local diet is also not for vegetarians or the faint-of-heart. A mid-morning snack of horsemeat and bread may be followed by a lunch of moose and macaroni, and a supper featuring cow entrail soup and rabbit. Fresh vegetables and fruit are luxuries that have to be brought in from the South.

Inbound transport has been limited since the suspension of regular flights to Tomtor from Yakutsk in the 1990s, due to rising costs. Special runs by twin-propped Antonov-24 planes service the Cold Pole festival, but otherwise travelers must come the round-a-bout route via Ust-Nera, or drive from Yakutsk, jolting 18 hours along 1000 kilometers of ice-clad taiga road and dizzying mountain passes.

A calendar highlight is the annual motor rally along the route from Yakutsk to Oymyakon, a chilly alternative to the Paris-Dakar race that is drawing an increasing number of competitors from overseas. Oymyakon and Tomtor will this year hold their fourth Festival of the Cold Pole, capping the road rally with a program of festivities that feature Chishaan, Santa Claus and Russia’s Grandfather Frost, if not Governor Schwarzenegger. And, of course, the frosts, which are slightly abated by March, but still formidable.

Last year’s harshest period brought –65o C. “We’ll never get –71o again, because of global warming,” said Valery Vinokurov, a weather monitor for the regional meteorological service.

Oymyakon’s icy supremacy is challenged by the Yakut town of Verkhoyansk, located 400 kilometers further north, inside the Arctic Circle. It has a well-documented winter low of –68o C, and some say Obruchev’s reading of –71o C was not properly witnessed. This year, Oymyakon hoped for an exceptionally bitter winter in the presence of a visiting team of German meteorologists. “We are counting on them,” Vinokurov laughed. “If they record –68o, then there will be no more discussion.”

Oymyakon is remote but not completely cut off from the fads and troubles of the materik, or mainland, as they say here, meaning Moscow and European Russia. In the chaotic general store, shotgun cartridges are piled in a box with bubble gum, and chunks of animal fat are sold alongside Ninja Turtle toys. A few kilometers outside the village, I think I’ve found a timeless snapshot of Yakutia, as I sip tea with two horse farmers in their cabin, which is lined with skins and has only a hurricane lamp for light. But, sensing an additional presence, I glance over my shoulder and see Frodo gazing down at me from a glossy Lord of the Rings poster.

Drugs and HIV are not established problems yet, but alcohol abuse is, said social worker Aksenia Sibtseva. The village’s three young men who did combat tours in Chechnya all started drinking heavily when they returned. One died in a fishing accident on the river last year, another hanged himself a few days before I arrived. The third is in a rapid downward spiral.

Generally, however, people here enjoy sturdy health and live to a ripe old age, even though the climactic fluctuations are hard on the body. The main natural cause of death is stroke caused by sudden pressure changes in winter, as the temperature soars and plummets. By contrast, the short summers in the valley are stifling, as temperatures rise to plus 35o C. Thus, the temperature span between the record high and low readings in this remote village is a staggering 109o.

But even in summer, Yakutia’s icy mantle is never far away. Dig down a meter and you hit the concrete that is permafrost. Many homes in the republic improvise an additional refrigerator in the form of a pit under the floor, ensuring that food products stay cool even in the baking heat.

In winter, the ground is rock solid to the surface, posing problems for funerals, for which fires are lit in the cemetery to defrost the soil deep enough to dig a grave. It’s a race against the clock, however, as, according to local beliefs, the dead must be buried within three days.

The effects of the cold on the human body intrigue the village doctor, Alexandra Yakovleva, who runs the village’s 10-bed hospital. “I have worked all over Yakutia,” she said, “and can say that people are very healthy here in Oymyakon, they live a long time. Evidently, there is some kind of link with the frosts. In Southern Yakutia, where it’s warmer, the children are more prone to sickness. But, for example, we don’t get flu epidemics here.”

There are practically no cases of cancer, Yakovleva said, and surprisingly few intestinal complaints, despite the fatty, meat-intensive diet. But the doctor does point to a worrying increase in alcoholism, which is blamed for many of the unruly incidents that occur in the village.

Apart from the occasional drunk and disorderly outbursts, though, crime is said to be generally limited to domestic fights and altercations between neighbors. There is no policeman here and most matters are sorted out by the local administration. More serious cases are referred to two Russian officers based in Tomtor, and to the prosecutor’s office in Ust-Nera if necessary, said deputy administration head Gavril Gotovtsev.

The crime situation was far worse in the 1990s, when, like rural communities all across Russia, Oymyakon foundered after the Soviet collapse. Most of its services were cut and the town reverted to a largely hunter-gatherer existence.

“It was a terrible period,” recalled teacher Vinokurova. “We received no wages, the shop was empty, there was lots of crime, theft, even murder. Now life is normalizing; young people are having more children; classes at the school are growing.”

Last year, the village finally got some real money from the republican budget and things are slowly on the mend. It is just in time, it would seem, as the local landscape and fauna show the strain.

“We can’t live on hunting like we used to, there are too many people and not enough animals,” said villager Mariana Tylgina. “Now the hunters have to go farther and farther.”

Funds and work may be appearing, but unemployment still rises and falls with the seasons. Some of the men get summer jobs at the region’s gold mine, located about 30 kilometers up the river Indigirka; others work as stokers at the coal-fired heating plant, or they might save for a second-hand UAZ van and earn a living driving goods and passengers to and from Yakutsk. The average monthly wage here is less than $150, but most families supplement their income and larder by keeping a few head of cattle. Creature comforts are limited, but everyone tells of projects to improve their homes and village life in general. The town has just completed a large new school, and now plans to resurrect the post office, which was shut down in the last decade.

People are also counting the days until the installation of a modern, outbound phone line and internet connection. The enthusiasm here contrasts starkly with other villages I’ve visited in Russia, where people wearily retreated into a bottle and wait for the community to die.

Perhaps there’s just too much to do to simply quit. The short summer is spent fishing and hunting moose, ram and bear, gathering firewood and making hay for the grueling months ahead. Winter means full combat with the elements, keeping the homes heated, repairing burst pipes, tending cattle in all temperatures and coaxing life from frozen vehicles for the supply runs to Yakutsk. In short, the year in Oymyakon is every bit as busy as in the Russian capital, 5,000 kilometers away.

“Life here is a constant bustle, like being on a wheel,” said Gotovtsev. “But we like this bustle, this life of ours.”

At the end-of-term sports competition for the region’s teachers, a microphone is thrust into my hand at the closing banquet. Before I leave this far corner of the country, apparently I am expected to share my impressions both orally and musically. I manage a rusty version of “You are my Sunshine,” and improvise a toast to cold climes and warm people.

Now, back in Moscow’s slush-drenched rat race, I can confirm that Real Russian Winter lives on in Oymyakon – all nine months of it.  RL