Life in Isolation

The universal quarantining and self-isolating due to COVID-19 has put millions of people in something of a predicament. Every day is the same as the one before, and sometimes we can’t even get together with our closest family members. But for a few, being solitary is a way of life. And so we decided to touch base with people in remote corners of Russia who, because of their jobs or the unique features of their culture, socialize with only a narrow circle of people, yet somehow never feel lonely.

The Pomors

Data from 2019 show a little more than 4,500 people living in Umba, a town in Tersk District that lies over 220 miles south of Murmansk and is still the most densely populated place in the entire district. Here, on the Tersk coast of the Kola Peninsula, kelp (usually found in salads) is worked into the soil (along with local varieties of brown and red algae) to fertilize the potatoes, and virtually every family owns at least one fishing rod.

This is the land of the Pomors.

Time has changed the Umba lifeways. Whereas the shore was once home to dozens of tonyas (complexes where commercial fishermen lived and worked), now the local professional fishermen can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Some couldn’t handle the endless reports and audits; others stopped using their seine nets when Umba’s fish processing plant closed and there was nowhere to sell the catch. And it’s trickier than it used to be to get a commercial fishing permit, which requires dedicated fish-cleaning facilities that not everyone has.

So the fish processing plant is gone, and over time, the polar fox farm and the food plant followed. Work has become hard to find, and more and more young people are moving to Murmansk, Petrozavodsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major Russian cities after graduation. Some do return after a while, though, and that’s how things worked out for Dmitry Komarov. A lawyer by training, he worked for a time in a law firm but finally realized that he couldn’t live without the White Sea.

Now he and his father are busy preserving the history of the Russian North in an open-air museum named Tetrina, after the tonya that sits at its heart. Typical Pomor industries have been brought back to life here. There is even a salt works, where salt is evaporated out of water from the White Sea as it was 500 years ago, in the very same place and following instructions that are part of village lore. Other object lessons in how life used to be include a traditional ice cellar that can hold snow and ice unthawed all through the summer, and the sturdy Pomor fishing boats called karbas that are tarred here as they have been for generations.

Tetrina is 18 miles or so from Umba. The journey begins with nearly 14 miles on a paved road, after which the route cuts over a field and across the sea, on a road that’s accessible only twice a day, at low tide. Then it’s only three more miles, through a forest. Museum staff have installed signposts to help travelers along.

They try to limit the number of tourists, however, to give visitors a chance to get away from people and relish the sound of waves and the cries of seagulls. So guided tours mostly have to be booked in advance. September and October are the quietest times. It’s still quite warm then, the mosquitoes are gone, and the polar day is giving way to the northern lights. This is the off-season, as most tourists come in summer and winter. In early fall, with the shore and the sea almost deserted, Tetrina feels very far from the rest of the world.

“Do you fish for profit?” I have to ask.

“Unfortunately, our family isn’t doing any commercial fishing now,” Dmitry replied. You can tell how much that bothers him. “We’re putting together the paperwork for fishing permits, but just for ourselves. Some people might like to sit with a fishing rod, pulling in one cod at a time, but once you’ve unloaded a ton of swarming herring, along with several pounds of cod, from a seine net, fishing with a rod’s pretty dull. With seine nets, though, it’s best to have two people. I go to sea with my father, because my brother and sister aren’t interested. The serious fishermen take their whole families with them. You can go it alone, but then there’s a better chance of losing the catch. While you’re tugging on one side, the fish can go over to the other or even escape altogether. You do a better job, and faster, with two. By the way, we call most of our fish ‘salmon,’ whether they are or not.”

“Isn’t it lonely out there on the sea, just the two of you?”

“It’s work, and there’s no time for moping around at work. So much to do, and it’s all important. The only time for talking is when you’re rowing. And after you get back, you’re in for a different kind of work, beaching the boat properly and attending to the fish.”

Dmitry goes on to explain how the fisherman’s work is, apparently, never done. There’s a great deal of detail involved, and you have to be an adept observer of just about everything. Pomor fishermen often live not by the sun but by the moon, paying close attention to what happens on the sea during the night, and often they even take cues from the behavior of the seagulls.

Dmitry is certain that if there were more job openings here in the North it would end the talent drain from this area. When you’re accustomed to living in Pomorye, he tells me, no white night in St. Petersburg can beat the polar day here, and an apartment with a sea view pales in comparison, with the spray from cresting waves pounding against the window.

“Pomors can be made, not just born,” he says. “A Pomor is a person whose life is the sea. These shores will always accept someone who wants to take charge, will give him fish and resources and make sense of his life, but there’s no place here for a loafer. The North isn’t only beautiful landscapes, not only tasty fish and a great history. The North is a window of opportunity. It’s our chance to make good, to develop. But jobs are needed here. If the jobs were to come, so would the people. And then Pomorye would no longer be another word for loneliness.”

The Herders

Anna Terentyeva is a native Saami, having been born into one of the many small ethnic groups indigenous to the Arctic North. The Saami used to be gatherers and fishermen, but after the Komi arrived in the Kola Peninsula, in the late nineteenth century, everything changed. The Komi are reindeer herders, and taught those skills to the Saami. When collectivization came to the Peninsula, the individual reindeer herders were gathered into state-run enterprises and started working together.

Anna’s grandfather actually founded the kolkhoz in the village of Lovozero (which is about halfway between Umba and Murmansk, the regional capital), and she inherited her reindeer from her father. Then she married a herder, had children, and is now a “chumwife,” with two homes – one in Lovozero and the other out on the tundra, where she makes sure that the chum, her tundra home, is livable for her husband and children. This involves doing all the day-to-day household chores and cooking for everyone. [To read more about the life of a chumwife, see Yevgenia Volunkova’s article from our March/April 2019 issue.]

Anna and her family venture out onto the tundra in April and stay there until early June. Why then? Because that’s the crucial time when the reindeer cows are calving. There’s no going back to the village for those two months, except perhaps by helicopter, not least because Lovozero, the lake (ozero) for which the village is named, floods, and all the roads are underwater.

In summer, the herd migrates to the sea, where the reindeer lichen that they feed on is at its best and there is plenty of grass. For the kolkhoz workers, this is what passes for downtime. There is still work for Anna and the others to do on the kolkhoz, though.

In September, the reindeer are herded back together, and preparations for winter begin. The animals slated for slaughter are culled from the females that are pregnant or have given birth that year. And in winter, since the herders’ job description includes protecting the animals from both predators and bad weather, the men take turns going out to the herd every two weeks to make sure everything is as it should be.

Then in April it all starts over again.

Out on the tundra, the herders live mostly at a station that consists of two wooden buildings and a bath house. The reindeer don’t pasture there, though, but several miles away, so the men set up a tent-like structure called a kuvaksa near their animals and keep watch from there. When their time is up, they return to the station to chop firewood, work on the sleds, and do whatever else is needed while they wait their turn to go out again.

“How many people live at the station?” I ask.

“In my mother’s time, the herder brigades could have as many as 14 people, and they all had to be fed, their clothes had to be washed, or repaired, or whatever… Plus the place had to be kept up. There were plenty of chores. It was tough. Now the brigades are half what they were. Our station has eight adults – five herders and three all-terrain drivers. The next brigade over has only two people. But I’m not short on company. And we recently installed a satellite dish at the station, so we now have internet. We can stay in touch, long distance, with those we care about. People in big cities are more lonely than we are here, among our own kind. But it’s very hard when I’m away from the station for too long. It’s like something’s weighing on my chest. And then, every fall we can’t just take our oldest daughter – she’s in third grade right now – out of school. It’s simpler in spring, when the teacher gives her assignments, and we can do them out there, in the open air.”

“Do you get bored?”

“For that you’d need time, and I have so much to do. Besides. we bring four children to the tundra with us, and they keep me hopping. I grew up like this, constantly on the move, and when my parents asked where I wanted to go for the summer, the sea or the tundra, I always picked the tundra. It’s good here, so calm…”

For two months every year, in summer, her husband comes back to the village. But that’s not boring either, because there are repairs to do, things to build, and Anna can always use the extra help. The Terentyev family owns its own reindeer, more than 20 head, and they need to be cared for too.

Although Lovozero has a population of less than 3000, the village is not dying. There’s more than enough work to go around, both on the kolkhoz and elsewhere. Not far away there’s an ore mining and processing plant, a military base, and an industrial park. Lovozero is right in the middle of the Kola Peninsula too, so tourists abound.

Anna has a problem with the tourists however, as they have been known to scare and scatter the reindeer. Then the men have to round them back up, and that’s not the easiest task.

“Still, we’re always glad to meet new people,” she says.

The seasons here take some getting used to, Anna says that this year she came home in early June so sunburned that people laughed and asked if she’d been down to the sea instead of working at the station. The summers here are warm, around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. But the frosts begin in September, and then, thank goodness for the insulated coveralls that keep the cold out.

The greatest danger is the wild animals – foxes range pretty close to the station, and in a recent year, a bear ate 16 reindeer trained for riding, which was an enormous loss. Another time, Anna came in to find a stoat eating meat from a cooking pot. They stared each other down for a while, but the intruder didn’t beat a retreat until she reached for her camera. Getting a gun license is no simple matter, so the herders and their families are left to hope that the wildlife is more afraid of them (and their cameras) than they are of the wildlife.

For Anna, as for everyone in Lovozero, reindeer herding isn’t a job. It’s a way of life, and one that doesn’t suit everyone, no more than life in a big city is to everyone’s taste. “It’s a rare youngster who hires on with the kolkhoz these days,” she admits. “Some men can’t handle having two homes, and some women aren’t eager to have a husband and still be left alone.” But Anna said she believes she took in her love of herding with her mother’s milk, and she hopes that her children will follow the same path. “One thing I can say is that they yearn for the tundra just as much as I do, and having no one of their own age around doesn’t faze them at all.” And with that, Anna is content.

The Inspector

The Kronotsky Nature Reserve, on the eastern side of the Kamchatka Peninsula, is one of Russia’s oldest. It boasts several active and dormant volcanos, the tallest being Mt. Kronotsky, at a height of well over 11,000 feet; thermal lakes; the renowned Valley of the Geysers, which is interesting in and of itself; unique flora and fauna, including a large concentration of brown bears; and three miles of coastline.

Alexander Khachukayev, the current state inspector of specially protected natural sites, never expected to find himself in a place like this, after living such a “civilized” life in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He first came to Kamchatka to give a four-day yoga seminar, then never really left. Instead, he got to know Pyotr Shpilenok (Brother of Igor Shpilenok, who has photographed much for Russian Life, and who was married to the American author and activist Laura Williams, who passed away in 2018.), the then-inspector of the Kronotsky Reserve, who offered him a job.

There was a whole lot to learn: how to behave in the wild, how to handle a gun, how to stay safe when you cross paths with a brown bear. He had to study the history and layout of the reserve, and become familiar with its plants and animals. And, on the way, he also had to get a handle on housekeeping in the middle of nowhere, becoming an expert in siphoning fuel from a barrel, telling regular gasoline from diesel – and kerosene from both – in the dark, firing up a generator, chopping wood with an axe, and then splitting some of it for kindling, and doing laundry. And more things that no urbanite would ever have to figure out: judging the speed and direction of the wind, estimating the density of cloud cover, fording a river in water boots (city footwear simply won’t cut it out here), and navigating all kinds of terrain carrying a gun and toting a heavy backpack. And, perhaps best of all, washing up in a rushing river while a curious bear looks on.

Bears aren’t the only predators here, and there’s a simple art to not becoming their lunch, which begins by not acting aggressively and never leaving food out. A gun is a must, of course, but if you shoot, you must always shoot to kill. Alexander was terrified of the bears at first, but a year later, he was in love with them. They’re complicated creatures, he learned, each with a character of its own. He and his coworkers respect them and the rest of the wildlife and understand – or try to understand – just why they do what they do.

Aside from the bears, the wolverines, the elusive lynx, and the foxes and hares, which are more plentiful and far less skittish, Mother Nature has some harsher surprises here in Kronotsky. There are landslides, mudflows, scarps that can turn into a slip-and-slide at a moment’s notice, torrential rains, blizzards… and the list goes on. “Stay Alert” is the watchword.

“When you first arrive here, you don’t pay attention, and Fate gives you a kind of pass,” Alexander says. “But when you start studying weather phenomena, you gradually come to understand just how much of a threat an avalanche or a layer of siltstone can be. A novice might get away with underestimating the danger, but a seasoned professional is held to a much stricter standard.”

Every employee has a certain set of responsibilities, and they usually work in pairs. For example, Alexander and a partner take groups to the Valley of the Geysers during tourist season, which runs from April through November. The valley is small, but it’s also one of a kind. Its ecosystem is like a living organism and is always changing under the effect of volcanic and hydrothermal processes, and soil slippage. Hot springs disappear and new ones appear all the time.

The Valley can only be accessed by helicopter, and living here is a whole education in making do. Amenities that are basic to an apartment in town – warmth, light, and cooking facilities – become a daily struggle here. Some potable water is helicoptered in, but most is hauled in heavy jerry cans from a stream several hundred yards away from the residential quarters, while a pump provides water to wash the dishes. In winter they collect snow and melt it in fifty-gallon barrels. Heat comes from small iron stoves, electricity is supplied by a generator that has to be fired up twice a day on schedule, and the garbage goes out by helicopter.

At the lodgings built here and there in the reserve to accommodate employees, volunteers, and tourists, a simple trip to the lavatory in winter can be quite an adventure. You have to dress warmly, put on your skis, take a shovel, trek to the latrine across a thick layer of ice, and clear away enough snow to get inside… A succession of heavy snowfalls will usually block all the compound’s exits and entrances, making it the inspectors’ job to dig them out. “Trench warfare”? Yes, you could say that. And after the sun goes down, everyone walks around with a flashlight or a flare. This is a reserve, after all, and the best interference in the natural world is no interference whatsoever.

Alexander has all the company he could want during the tourist season, with as many as eight to ten groups going to the Valley of the Geysers in a single day, but in late fall the loneliness does set in. There’s plenty for an inspector to do then, of course, and he also reads a lot, rummaging through the little libraries that are scattered about the reserve, some severely battered by years of bad weather.

Still, Alexander is in no hurry to break up with his “blustery, damp, chilly beauty,” who will routinely produce the whole gamut of seasons in a matter of just fifteen to twenty minutes.

“After six months here, I flew back to the mainland and went into a café,” Alexander recalls. “I almost fell to my knees and kissed the floor, just because I could order a hot cappuccino. And the drink itself knocked my socks off. But I’m used to it now. Civilization doesn’t blow me away anymore. Besides, after a year I realized that observing untamed nature had helped bring me spiritual peace, and that Kamchatka had become my home.”