The Master of Olkhon

About halfway along the western shore of Lake Baikal is Olkhon Island – the fourth largest lake-bound island in the world. And on Olkhon Island is the village of Khorontsy.

Just beyond the village is a dusty field, parched by the sun. And at the edge of the field is a one-story wooden building. The building has a garden, and in the garden an 86-year-old man – Vladimir Innokentiyevich Prokopiyev – is fussing over his potatoes.

The field, in actuality, is not just a field, but Khuzhir Airfield (in the Buryat language, Khuzhir means “salty land”). And one half of the wooden building is actually the airport terminal, while the elderly Prokopiyev lives in the other half with his wife, Gerolda Mikhailovna.

Prokopiyev is in charge of the airfield, which has had no scheduled flights for 20 years. And as to the potatoes? Well, you simply cannot live without potatoes. No way, no how.

Our taxi driver told me a story: “The old man said that some barge set out from Severobaikalsk. It was carrying 500 prisoners. The weather turned bad and the ship crashed into the cape, which ripped open a big hole in the hull. The guards didn’t open the hatches, so they were the only ones who survived. The prisoners all drowned. This was in November. And for a long time after, the old man said, people were drifting around Baikal encased in ice.”

There are lots of stories like that here, not only about prisoners, but about settlers or fishermen. The locals call Baikal a sea, and they call the gulf between its western shore and the lake’s largest island the Little Sea. Actually, this is the body of water’s official designation, used on topographical and navigational maps.

The Buryat believe the spirits of Baikal reside on Olkhon, and it is important for people to stay on good terms with the spirits. The master of the island is Burkhan, and to burkhanit means to share with the spirits whatever is most valuable to you. In other words, vodka. So you need to sprinkle a few drops – for the spirits – on the ground in each direction: north, south, east and west. You can drink up the rest yourself. No one violates this custom – not locals, nor visitors.

Olkhon was never densely populated. At its peak in the middle of the last century, perhaps three thousand people lived here, along with the prisoners and those forcibly resettled here under Stalin.

The Gulag appeared on Olkhon in the 1930s, but it was not for political prisoners. The  colony at Peschanoye was filled with people who had been late for work, who maybe told a joke about Stalin or stole potatoes from a kolkhoz.

About the same time the camp barracks appeared, Baikal’s largest fish processing factory was built near the village of Khuzhir. Incidentally, if you stole from the factory, you would end up in the local camp: swiping one omul^* got you a year; a pair of omuls got you two years.

In the 1940s, captured Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Germans were shipped in to the camp. After the camp was closed, the exiles built a fishing village in Peschanoye, including a dock, a warehouse, and a canning line. Omul in aspic and grayling in its own brine were shipped to Irkutsk and then on to Moscow.

The 1990s saw the closure of the fish processing factory. The diesel substation that powered the island’s villages soon followed.

The fish have also left for other parts. The fishing village has been subsumed by sand. The camp’s barracks and barbed wire have disappeared and the wooden docks have rotted. Rusty fishing vessels litter the shore.

But the Khuzhir Airfield remains.

On Olkhon Island, which is surrounded on all sides by the pure waters of Baikal, there is no asphalt. None. There are dirt roads running through the steppes and hills, through the bright fir and deciduous forests. But the dirt roads are dusty, as it rarely rains on the island.

There is no asphalt, but there is an aged concrete apron with anchors where planes used to be tied down. Freshly painted timbers line the runway. In the winter, Vladimir Innokentiyevich hides them in his yard so that the locals don’t steal them for firewood. In the spring he repaints them and replaces them along the runway.

Blackened by time, the building is locked up on the uninhabited side. It contains a passenger waiting area, a radio control room, and equipment needed to maintain the airfield through the winter.

Tall poplar trees grow in the garden of the inhabited side of the building.

“We planted those when we first arrived. They’ve grown so tall,” Prokopiyev told us.

Vladimir and Gerolda came to the island forty years ago. Prokopiyev is 86 now, and over sixty of his years are tied to aviation.

When his mother died during the Great Patriotic War (WWII), Prokopiyev was 14, making him the oldest in his family, which included three younger brothers and a sister.

“I went to work on the kolkhoz. As a result, I only finished seventh grade when I was 17,” Prokopiyev explained. “An article in the newspaper about aviation caught my eye. In 1948 I graduated from the Arzamas School for Radio Operators...”

After seven years on a flight crew in Yakutia, Prokopiyev was sent to Irkutsk to master the Tu-104, the USSR’s first passenger jet.

“We were the first ones to be retrained,” he said. “Then we became instructors and trained the rest, starting in 1957. We kept at it until retirement.”

Back then, there were 36 small airfields around Irkutsk, Prokopiyev recalled. For a few years he inspected them, then decided to put down roots and move to Olkhon, where he was put in charge of Khuzhir.

“There were three or four flights a day back then,” he told us. “It was lots of work. Gera, how many passengers were there? Eight hundred a month?”

“Seven-fifty at times.”

Gerolda came to Olkhon with her husband and worked at the airport as a cashier and radio operator.

They both recalled how back then the locals traveled to the mainland only by plane. There were no buses, no regularly scheduled ferries.

Of the 36 small airfields that once dotted the Irkutsk region, they don’t know how many survived. It may well be that Khuzhir is the only one.

“The last scheduled flight here was 20 years ago,” Prokopiyev said. “Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, people stopped flying. Pensions are tiny here: 6000-7000 rubles. It’s too expensive to fly. They tried to start flights back up again, but never got more than five passengers per run.”

For a long time, Prokopiyev believed that the flights would resume. He maintained the passenger waiting room and radio station. He cleaned and painted it and kept the runways lined with timbers.

Today, maybe two or three small planes land on Olkhon each summer, delivering tourists. Prokopiyev is rather dubious about them. “They don’t observe Aeroflot rules,” he said. For years he waited for Aeroflot’s blue and white planes – now just a part of the company’s history – to resume regularly scheduled flights.

“I’m already so old that I doubt I’ll ever see that,” he laments.

A few years ago, he was director of the Khuzhir Airport. Now he is simply a guardian with a monthly salary of 6,000 rubles.

“They pay me for now, but I think they’ll shut it down soon,” he said. “What will I do then? I’ll stay here anyway. Where am I going to go? I’m already 86. Soon I’ll be heading back to where I came from.”

Just 1500 people still live on Olkhon. But in the summer the population increases considerably. According to various statistics, from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand people visit the island each summer. Exactly how many is unknown; no one counts. They are allowed to visit despite the fact that a large part of the island should be protected as part of the Pribaikal National Park.

The natural regulators of the tourist flow are the ferries. There are just two: the little Dorozhnik, which carries 8-9 cars for local islanders; and the larger Olkhonskie Vorota, which carries 18-20 visitor vehicles. In order to get to the island (or leave it), people have to wait in line for several hours, or perhaps even spend the night on the side of the road. You can show up around midnight, when the ferry stops running, sleep in your car, and stand a good chance of being on one of the first ferries, which start running at 6 a.m.

Last August, lines for the ferry disappeared. The forests around Baikal were burning and people were evacuated from the tourist centers and vacation resorts. Others left of their own accord, unable to handle the pungent smoke. Fires also burned on Olkhon. The first fire on the island was spotted (from the air) by an amateur pilot from Moscow, Anton Volkov.

“When I saw the smoke, I immediately radioed my wife to call 112. From there the information was sent to the island forestry service,” Volkov explained.

Nearly every day Anton flew to the island to help forestry workers and other volunteers extinguish the fires, daily posting photos and videos of the conflagrations on Facebook. They succeeded in putting out the fire.

Olkhon was lucky to have Anton. But he and his wife originally came here from Moscow by car, with his ultralight Sigma in tow, not to put out fires, but to fly. Anton knew that Olkhon had a small airfield with a dirt landing strip that for some reason had not been allowed to fall into decay.

Vladimir Innokentiyevich and Gerolda Mikhailovna feel that the best time of year on Olkon is the winter.

“What’s it like here in winter? Very peaceful,” Gerolda Mikhailovna said.

“Even better than in summer,” Vladimir Innokentiyevich added.

“We’ll chop firewood, heat up the stove,” Gerolda continued. “And there will be silence.”

Silence means there are no tourists. Winter comes early to Baikal, and the tourists head home. We were visiting in early August. The old couple said that they didn’t have long to wait for the silence. A month at most.  RL