Murmansk was lucky. It is the place where one of the most remarkable novels of the Soviet era – Georgi Vladimov’s Three Minutes’ Silence – begins and ends. Its forlorn hero, who lives a feckless life along the shores of Kola Bay, after returning from a job at sea to solitude on land, sits in a train station café pondering the love he believes he has lost forever.
The station buffet opens at six; I occasionally used to go there before going on morning watch. The barmaid came out looking sleepy, her hair tied up in a grey scarf, and squeezed two glasses of coffee out of the urn. The coffee was hardly warm – or so it seemed to me, having come in from the freezing cold – and I drank it without bread or anything else, simply in order to chase away the sleep and have a bit of a think. Because in the evening we’d be meeting at the Arctic and there, of course, we’d have plenty to drink and everything would again take its usual course. In the meantime, though, it would be a good idea to try and understand what we live for and why we go to sea. And about those Scotsmen – why did we go and save them, when we seemed unable to save ourselves?…. Was it so important, though, how I organized my future? Because Klavka wouldn’t be with me, and I didn’t want any other woman in my life – ever. And anyway, one thought wouldn’t give me any peace: why were we all such strangers to each other, why were we always each other’s enemies? No doubt this is to someone’s advantage; sad to say, we are all simply blind and we can’t see where it’s taking us. What disasters we need to bring us to our senses, for us to recognize our fellow-men as our brothers! But we are good people, that’s what we have to understand – I couldn’t bear to think we were worthless – yet we put up with pigs; like sheep, we obey people who are stupider than we are, and we torment each other for no reason… And so it will be – until we learn to think of our own neighbor. But not to think about how to stop him from getting one up on us, or how to outflank him: no, that way none of us will ever save ourselves. What’s more, life will never set itself to rights on its own. We, each of us, if only for three minutes a day, ought to shut up and listen out to hear if someone’s in trouble, because that means you’re in trouble too! – in the way that all Marconis at sea observe radio silence and listen out, in the way that we get concerned about some distant people on the other side of the Earth… Or is all that just useless day-dreaming? Yet it’s not much – just three minutes! And then, you see, you gradually turn into a human being… I was sitting by the window. Snowdrifts were piling up all over the station square, and there wasn’t a soul in it; the lamps were swinging back and forth on their wires, making black shadows leap across the snow. Then from out of a dark, dark street crawled a Volga taxi, with a checkerboard strip along its side. It circled around and stopped in the middle of the square: it could drive no further. A woman got out of the taxi – backwards for some reason – wearing a thick brown fur coat, a white headscarf and deerskin boots, and pulled out a suitcase after her. [Three Minutes’ Silence, by Georgy Vladimov, translated by Michael Glenny (Quartet Books, 1985) – the novel was originally published, in abridged, censored form, in Novy Mir in 1969. It is currently out of print.]
The station buffet opens at six; I occasionally used to go there before going on morning watch. The barmaid came out looking sleepy, her hair tied up in a grey scarf, and squeezed two glasses of coffee out of the urn. The coffee was hardly warm – or so it seemed to me, having come in from the freezing cold – and I drank it without bread or anything else, simply in order to chase away the sleep and have a bit of a think. Because in the evening we’d be meeting at the Arctic and there, of course, we’d have plenty to drink and everything would again take its usual course. In the meantime, though, it would be a good idea to try and understand what we live for and why we go to sea. And about those Scotsmen – why did we go and save them, when we seemed unable to save ourselves?….
Was it so important, though, how I organized my future? Because Klavka wouldn’t be with me, and I didn’t want any other woman in my life – ever. And anyway, one thought wouldn’t give me any peace: why were we all such strangers to each other, why were we always each other’s enemies? No doubt this is to someone’s advantage; sad to say, we are all simply blind and we can’t see where it’s taking us. What disasters we need to bring us to our senses, for us to recognize our fellow-men as our brothers! But we are good people, that’s what we have to understand – I couldn’t bear to think we were worthless – yet we put up with pigs; like sheep, we obey people who are stupider than we are, and we torment each other for no reason… And so it will be – until we learn to think of our own neighbor. But not to think about how to stop him from getting one up on us, or how to outflank him: no, that way none of us will ever save ourselves. What’s more, life will never set itself to rights on its own. We, each of us, if only for three minutes a day, ought to shut up and listen out to hear if someone’s in trouble, because that means you’re in trouble too! – in the way that all Marconis at sea observe radio silence and listen out, in the way that we get concerned about some distant people on the other side of the Earth… Or is all that just useless day-dreaming? Yet it’s not much – just three minutes! And then, you see, you gradually turn into a human being…
I was sitting by the window. Snowdrifts were piling up all over the station square, and there wasn’t a soul in it; the lamps were swinging back and forth on their wires, making black shadows leap across the snow. Then from out of a dark, dark street crawled a Volga taxi, with a checkerboard strip along its side. It circled around and stopped in the middle of the square: it could drive no further. A woman got out of the taxi – backwards for some reason – wearing a thick brown fur coat, a white headscarf and deerskin boots, and pulled out a suitcase after her. [Three Minutes’ Silence, by Georgy Vladimov, translated by Michael Glenny (Quartet Books, 1985) – the novel was originally published, in abridged, censored form, in Novy Mir in 1969. It is currently out of print.]
The dark, cold, cheerless city extends out around the protagonist and seems to envelop him. Although Murmansk is not explicitly named in the novel, what other city sits above the Arctic Circle on the 68th parallel? Or sees 50 days where the sun does not set, but experiences snow in July and an average summer temperature in the low 50s Fahrenheit? Murmansk is also a city that endures 42 days of polar night (when the sun never rises), a city that is washed by the Barents Sea and draws warmth from the Gulf Stream, and, despite being an ice-free port, does ice over during particularly cold winters.
This ice-free port was the reason that Murmansk was built in the first place, when, during the First World War, the Russian army needed to receive supplies from its allies. In 1915 a settlement was established that, later, on October 4, 1916, was made into a city, Romanov-on-Murman (renamed simply Murmansk after the fall of the Romanovs).
The source of the name Murmansk is a mystery. According to one account, apparently originating with Maxim Gorky, who was enamored of the region, the name has to do with the fact that local inhabitants called their Scandinavians neighbors Norsemen. Over time, according to local historians who picked up on his idea, the “n” turned into an “m” and the “o” into a “u.” This all sounds very charming, but it is a little unclear why the inhabitants of the northerly Kola Peninsula would call nearby Scandinavians “Norsemen,” i.e., “people from the North.” There was a logic to them being given this label when they appeared in France or Italy, but here the locals were every bit as “northern” as the Scandinavians.
Geography may not have been Gorky’s strong suit. But in 1930, when he wrote the newspaper article “At the Earth’s Edge,” he probably did not have historical sources on his mind. He needed to sing the praises of a land groaning under the weight of ever-newer camps, a land where zeks (prisoners) – drowning in swamps, dying of hunger, disease, and insect bites – were building railroads that nobody needed then and that have since been abandoned, and then erected the port facilities and chemical plants, to which still more zeks were brought to work. For Gorky, Murmansk was a symbol of the rebirth of the country and its people.
Near a little station two workers are breaking velvety, dull-green diorite into rubble. On another spot, by a bridge, a huge boulder has been blown up, its gray meat shining with hornblende is lined up in straight rows, looking like the lettering of church books or leaflets that used to be written by hand in the old days. This is “bible” or “writing” stone. A huge space is littered with boulders, and, at a distance from one another, narrow-ringed fir trees often stand among dead stones. These are the same high-priced “semi-precious” trees that the forester had been talking about to the “Murmans.” And beyond this half-dead field, on all sides all the way to the horizon, there is dense forest, its thick, lush coat forming a solid cover over this vast territory. Abundant rivers dash furiously over the stones; new settlers’ huts glimmer along their banks. The lumber mills’ smokestacks billow, logs are everywhere. The Khibiny Mountains rise up here: you can see the hills, the apatite deposits. In the Khibiny there is a famous experimental agricultural station. And Kondostroy’s concrete channel cuts through the earth here. The region is coming alive. Everything is coming alive in our country. It is only a shame that we know immeasurably and shamefully less than we should. But wherever you turn you see how the clever hand of man is bringing order to the earth and you believe that the time will come when man will have the right to say: “I created the earth with my wits and my hands.”
The initial idea was to turn Murmansk into a model “modern” city. As early as 1915 there were plans for an electric station (actually completed in 1917), and a water and sewer system – in a word, modern conveniences that many Russian cities did not yet enjoy. It was supposed to be a place human beings could live in comfort. Russia’s allies even contributed funds to build the city, which served the interests of the alliance.
Perhaps the idea was that northern cities deserved special consideration. For example, in 1915 a strategic railway line had to be built in a hurry – the military situation demanded it. However, when the residents of Novgorod announced that vibration from the trains might damage a famous twelfth century church, the Savior on Nereditsa (Спас на Нередице), the line was diverted slightly away from this historic structure. This same sort of care was supposed to be given to the building of Murmansk.
Alas…
When the revolution began, practically the only people in the city were construction workers and soldiers. From 1918 to 1920, Murmansk was controlled by Entente troops that had been stationed there to try to protect the alliance’s supplies; the city became a base for the ill-fated Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites. When the Civil War ended, the Soviets took over.
As a result, it was only in 1927 that the first brick building was constructed here, and the first street was not paved with asphalt until 1939. When World War II broke out, Murmansk still had only a handful of stone buildings. And for whom? The overseers of local labor camps? To make matters worse, it suffered horrible bombings during the war and had to be rebuilt during the Stalin and post-Stalin era. Not a very auspicious beginning.
But gradually the city came to life, museums and theaters appeared, and the giant boulders were painted to brighten things up. Now the 16-story Arctic Hotel towers over the city; its restaurant has for many years now been where sailors go for rest and relaxation when they are in port. When the captain in Three Minutes’ Silence is hesitant to come to the aid of a sinking ship he is told, “Nobody will sit down at the same table with you at the Arctic,” which convinces him that he has to do the right thing or face eternal shame.
In recent years, the population of Murmansk has fallen sharply. Young people are departing for places where there is more warmth, sun, and jobs. Cutbacks and reshuffling within the Russian military has taken its toll as well. Many of the institutions that are part of the Northern Fleet in Murmansk and nearby Severomorsk are being closed down, and people are moving to more southerly regions. On the other hand, the city has been declared a free economic zone. Perhaps this will help. Murmansk seems to be a city of shifting perspectives. At the end of the passage cited above, Vladimov’s protagonist suddenly realizes that the woman climbing out of the taxi is actually his beloved, the woman he had almost lost, and here, in the cold and grimy train station café, they decide to try a new life.
So, let’s say goodbye on the embankment, where I turned around for a last look at that whole panorama. Klavka was standing a little to one side, waiting for me, and looking down at the port too. We heard three farewell blasts on a hooter as a black trawler went astern out of her berth and into the middle of the harbor. She cut across the colored threads, and her three blasts were answered by the dockyard, the harbormaster and several large ships where night work was still going on.
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