Kolpashevo is a city of 24,000 souls on the Ob River in Tomsk Oblast. Soviet era romantics moved there from all corners of the country to explore for oil and gas. It is a wild region governed by the taiga, roadlessness, and a severe climate. People came to work in the Tomsk Geophysical Trust, which disappeared after the country’s transformation in the 1990s. Those who remain in Kolpashevo today have essentially been left stranded in the middle of Siberia. The Trust’s headquarters building has become a frozen ruin.
“Either leave or die,” the locals say. And in this Kolpashevo is similar to 70 percent of Russian towns. People are leaving them behind, because they cannot find work and don’t see any future.
Last winter, a journalist and photographer from the Russian independent news website 7x7 traveled to Kolpashevo to see whether Soviet oil and gas exploration’s glorified past is a sturdy enough foundation for a town to build its future on.
Darkness. The half-empty Tomsk to Kolpashevo bus leaves the station just after seven a.m. The trip, if the schedule is to be believed, will take five hours. Almost all the passengers are men. One of them says that he had been “roaming around the North” and is now returning home. But Kolpashevo is also the North, boasting a less than hospitable climate – five and a half months of winter, with temperatures sometimes dropping as low as -50° C.
Along the road to Kolpashevo, looking out the bus windows, we see wooden huts and administrative buildings, all with the same siding and flag. Women shoveling snow. Chimneys smoking.
We approach the river. The bus stops. A sign inside the bus reads:
“The loading and unloading of vehicles onto and off the ferry will commence only after their passengers have disembarked.”
Ferries operate in the summer. When the Ob River freezes, people walk across the ice – a distance of just over a kilometer.
The passengers quickly exit. The bus drives parallel to the footpath. The wind howls. In the mezhsezonye[1] – when the ice is not yet thick enough, or after it’s melted – Kolpashevo is accessible only by helicopter.
In Kolpashevo, the river evokes hope, apprehension, and memory. Residents would much prefer to be driving over a bridge, yet no one believes one will ever be built. Meanwhile, the Ob has been washing away the town’s shoreline, subtracting several meters a year. The authorities have had to resettle people living along the river.
Before the 1917 revolution and during the Soviet era, Kolpashevo was a place of political exile. In 1979, when the Ob washed away its annual share of shoreline, human bones and mummified remains tumbled into the water. It turned out a mass grave for executed prisoners had been located here.
To this day, it is not clear who decided to use motorboat propellers to push the remains downstream. Whatever was left was weighted down with stones. The incident earned the spot the name Kolpashevsky Yar.[2]
Today the spot is covered with dry grass. Locals who don’t know any better dump their trash here.
We finish our ice crossing. Entering the town, we notice a banner: “Gold of Russia. Purchase, Exchange, Sale.” We climb back on the bus, which takes us to the local House of Culture.
I call a taxi – it’s the first time I have done this in four years.
A white Zhiguli arrives. Behind the wheel is a greying man wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Rosneft logo. His trunk is filled with a layer of dust, tools, chaos, and a canvas bag labeled “Mixed Feed.” We place our clean suitcases inside and plop down in the back seat.
The Kolpashevo District website describes the town’s descent from boomtown to questionable viability.
In these parts, the Khanti and Selkup peoples hunted, gathered, and fished. Then the Russians arrived, bringing with them a range of occupations involving horses: “The indigenous peoples fell under the heavy oppression of the feudal state, while at the same time the Russian people’s higher level of material culture led to the rapid assimilation and development of the territory.”
“There were no objective conditions,” the site continues, “for the emergence or development of industrial production in the district.”
In the mid-twentieth century, the town began to grow when it was transformed into a center for the exploration and production of oil and gas. This development, the site says, “was of a largely coercive nature, and therefore initially depended on state support.” Kolpashevo became a hub for geologists and geophysicists. In 1968, the Tomsk Geophysical Trust (TGT) was established.
A river port and airport were built to serve the town’s Trust. There was a serious construction enterprise and plans to build a railway, a bridge, and a modern road. But they remained just that – plans.
“The district is going through difficult times,” concludes the anonymous author of the website’s historical narrative. “A number of enterprises and institutions are being shut down. The economy of the Kolpashevo District, as a whole, is not commercial in nature and essentially requires subsidization.”
The only glimmer of hope the website’s text offers is that there is some potential for harvesting and processing wild plants, and for the construction of a federal highway.
The taxi delivers us to a brick building on Chapayev Lane. It is flanked by a dingy children’s playground, an abandoned television, a cemetery that has been overgrown by forest, and the main building of the Geophysical Trust.
“Oh, my poor darlings! Let me finish my smoke and we’ll go inside,” says Lena (not her real name). She is about 60 and has lived her whole life in Kolpashevo. She worked for several years at the Trust, and for several years in a military unit. Both have vanished from the city.
There is a long corridor through the middle of Lena’s apartment. Time stands still here. There are shelving units full of quality, hardbound books, porcelain figurines, Soviet crystal, and old photos.
“The town has no hope,” Lena says, “but you can at least rest here, breathe normal air, and drink water without chlorine.”
She shows us how to turn on the water and wash our clothes, where to find the bread. She explains that we can ignore the neighbors, and says that some of her photographs are in the basement.
After she is done fussing over us, Lena goes to see her mother. Lena’s father also worked in the Trust. She visits him in the snow-covered cemetery.
We walk along Luginets Street. Ivan Luginets was a geophysicist and a respected polar explorer who worked as a geologist in Kolpashevo. Aside from the street, the Luginetskoye Oil Field bears his name. It is in the basin of the Vasyugan River, the left tributary of the Ob.
The era of geophysics and the Trust can be seen everywhere in Kolpashevo: in street names, the 19 housing blocks built by the Trust, a kindergarten, the Trust building itself, the city center’s Geologist microdistrict, the abandoned airport.
After the fall of the USSR, the state stopped financing geology and geophysics. That which just a few decades before had been so necessary and important, today evokes only tears and shame among former Trust workers.
In the early aughts, retired geophysicists founded a veteran’s organization, “Veteran Geological Explorers” [Ветеран-геологоразведчик]. At first, they met in the Trust building. Then the heat was turned off there, so the veterans requested space in a building at the socio-industrial college.
By 2023, the Trust, once renowned across the Soviet Union, had been reduced to a single three-by-three-meter room. A Soviet chandelier painted with red roses hangs from the ceiling. The room contains just a pair of tables, chairs, a kettle, a computer, velvet banners, trophy cups and display stands.
We are met by Natalya Kukushkina, a tall, vigorous woman with curly hair and blue eyes.
“Thank God they gave us a room,” she says. “And that the city subsidizes our rent. For now, we are content, no one is trying to throw us out.”
Kukushkina moved to Kolpashevo with her family in 1979, after graduating from university. She had been given a job in the Trust’s computer center. Just three years before, the Trust had begun to process information digitally.
Her story is typical: after completing university, young specialists from across the Soviet Union – some single, some with families – were assigned to work in Kolpashevo. None of them had any friends in this new place, so all the Trust workers came together as one great big family. Kukushkina witnessed the city and Trust in their prime.
“And now,” she says. “Well, I helped conduct the Census of 2020, or rather 2021,” she told us. “Based on my census work, I realized that all the villagers live here now, that the villages are no more, they have all moved to Kolpashevo. And the youth are somehow different. They don’t have a ‘I am going after the fog’ mentality.[3] I had that, and I still have it to this day.”
Geophysicists would work weekends and evenings, and not everyone took an interest in the life of the town itself. As Kukushkina recalls it, each morning a “river of people” would flow into the Trust.
There are now 102 members of the veteran organization. They are all inscribed in a book: name, telephone number, address. Many of those listed are now marked: “Deceased.”
Natalya Kukushkina points to a display that sums up the veteran organization’s work: there are photos with messages of congratulation and of various meetings.
The veterans’ organization offers encouragement to those who are still among the living and preserves the Trust’s memory. Members each donate R150 per year to the fund, and the money is used for celebrations and for funeral wreaths.
A work plan for 2022 hangs on the wall:
After moving to the city in 1979, Kukushkina didn’t think she would last three years in Kolpashevo. But she never moved away – not after that first cold winter, not after she left her job in 2005, and not after her husband died in 2011. She did try to rent out her apartment and receive an exit settlement as a resident of the Far North. The housing authority was not able to confirm that she had lived sufficiently long in Kolpashevo to be eligible for such assistance.
She admits that Trust workers lived and worked without looking toward the future. They did not believe that there would come a time when neither the Trust nor the USSR would exist.
“My mother died in 1985,” she says. “When all the chaos began, when they talked of shares of some sort, when there was nothing in the stores, I thought, ‘It is so good that she didn’t live to see this.’ She believed in her times. When they declared that the USSR no longer existed, no one had prepared us for that… I could not believe it. On the radio they were saying that everything would be better: ‘We will now join the world community.’ In a word, we were a bit happy that there would no longer be an Iron Curtain. And then you can see how it turned out… If these are the consequences, then nothing good has come of this.”
Kukushkina and other veterans remember the 1990s as a time when they did not receive their pay for six months, when there was nothing to feed their children, when the Trust repeatedly changed hands. There was neither money for funerals, nor for sending children away to study. The new owners of the Trust told them, “It doesn’t matter what you do. The main thing is that you bring in a profit.” Gradually, the Trust was transformed into a “site for servicing field units,” and then it closed.
Today’s Kolpashevo, as Kukushkina put it, is a city where either you die or you leave.
Dark descends. We ask Natalya whom else we can speak with about the Trust. She pulls down a book full of names, dials a phone number, and persuades someone to meet us. But the next day no one comes.
Natalya Kukushkina’s conversations with Trust veterans (condensed):
“Hello, Natasha, I can’t make it, but I tell you what. Have them go see Maria Konstantinovna.”
“They already saw her.”
“Well, enough then. Give them our books. I’m not coming, I have nothing to say. You need those who worked, who dedicated their lives to it. I’m a nobody, that’s just not how you do things, Natasha.”
“Can you tell them the history of the Trust? You are our living history.”
“Living, yes, but what am I going to talk about? They haven’t even erected a monument here. The Trust was a city-building enterprise…”
“I have a huge, heartfelt request. You are one of the founders of the Tomsk Geophysical Trust. We need the memory of work in the Trust to be passed on to our youth. After our passing, so to speak. I want to invite you down to the Veterans’ Council. Don’t laugh!”
“Oh, no, Natasha. Thank you for the invitation! The Trust is no more. There is a book [on the Trust]. I’m already old.”
We leave the Veterans’ Council. It is snowing, and orange streetlamps light up the street and the nearby skating rink. The snow is streaked with skate lines. The clock near the House of Culture is broken. Among the illuminated movie posters is one for the new film about Cheburashka. The district administrative offices are decorated with garlands in the colors of the Russian flag and neighbored by a jumble of stores. Yet another shopping center will be built soon.
There are two cemeteries in Kolpashevo. One, where people have been interred since early in the twentieth century, is near Lena’s home. The other, more modern one is far from the city center.
Many famous geophysicists are buried in the older cemetery. When the Trust was still functioning, it, as was common back then, independently took care of burying workers and their family members. Today, part of the job of caring for graves has been taken over by the Veteran Council. “We have to look after at least three or four graves,” Natalya says.
The temperature has fallen to -36° Celsius. Lena leads us to the cemetery. The graves lie amid tall trees, and the wide footpath gradually narrows. The snow canopy presses down on the tombstones, and in some places trees have fallen onto the fences. It’s impossible to get to the graves; there is just too much snow.
Most often it is Alexander Petrovich Kuznetsov who oversees the burial of former Trust workers. He arrived here after finishing his studies in Novosibirsk and found work as an aerial topographer. Over 14 years he flew 3,000 hours. Then he injured his back while working and could no longer fly.
“Topographers were both pilots and observers,” he said. “But out there you have to load and unload your cargo yourself – if they loaded two tons of fuel barrels, you had to unload them yourself. And when I lifted one barrel, something snapped, and my spine buckled inward. There is no way to fix it. So my boss said ‘We can’t let you keep doing such work.’ I handed in my resignation, and he signed it.”
Kuznetsov moved over into the housing and communal services sector. But after the fall of the USSR, when, as he put it, “there was a perturbation at the cemetery,” he went and studied undertaking. Since 2004, Kuznetsov has worked alone, and to this day he finds burying his former colleagues to be very difficult work.
“I have buried 13,000 people in my life,” he said. “People ask me, ‘What do you have to worry about?’ And I say, ‘Well, wait a second, I’ve got a heart too.’ I buried my wife, then my mother and father right after that, and my daughter from my second marriage. So many loved ones. So now I bury people. And their families are grateful.”
A typical burial in Kolpashevo costs 30,000 rubles – about half of an average monthly salary in Russia.
“One of my friends buried his sister and came by to visit,” Kuznetsov said. “I have polished coffins that sell for 20,000 rubles, but in Tomsk he paid 40k. And I said, ‘Vasya, do you know that people here can’t even pay 10,000; they have to go door to door asking for contributions?’”
Aside from undertaking, Alexander installs memorial plaques on buildings. He wants to create two plaques in memory of geophysicists, one for the school and one for the college, and also to erect a stone monument to geophysicists, because “stone is almost eternal.”
Often people come looking for Kuznetsov because they have no idea where their relatives are buried.
“I know where they all are,” he says. “I’ve walked the entire cemetery, and know what grave is where.”
Since stopping work as a topographer, Kuznetsov has suffered from arthritis, osteoarthritis, and his legs swell up. Sometimes the pain is so bad that the tears flow involuntarily.
“In songs it’s all romantic [the life of geophysicists], but when you see what it’s like in real life…” Kuznetsov says. “Yes, to sit around the camp fire and sing songs… it’s… But when you can’t relieve yourself because of a swarm of [blood sucking] gnats. In the tent… Well, then dichlorvos appeared,[4] and we used it by the boxful. You put up your tent, spray the dichlorvos around inside, then light a little flame and – poof – the fumes burn off. Then you can sleep, more or less. You sleep, but the swarm is still buzzing. And it’s hot inside the sealed tent. And the bears are growling, keeping you from sleeping.”
In early 2023, Kuznetsov buried three former Trust workers. When asked what he feels when he drives past the Trust building, he answers simply, “Sad.”
That night in Lena’s apartment I make a mistake – I crack open a window. A tiny thread of cold air flows into the room. By morning I am completely frozen.
The next day, Lena organizes an excursion for us, showing us all the buildings that once belonged to the Trust.
“This is the geophysicists’ kindergarten,” she says. “We had a subbotnik [volunteer work on a Saturday], put things in order before handing it over, washing and scrubbing everything, getting rid of all the trash. It was so interesting. It was great.”
The kindergarten continues to function. But all the other buildings are abandoned. Lena shows us a building with broken windows and a flimsy door.
“This was the café. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner here. The food was excellent. There was a store on the second floor where they sold fabric, shoes, gold, shampoo.”
Lena recalls a time when there was a fountain across the street from the computing center. It being winter, the fountain and the walls of the building are covered with frost. Beneath it you can make out a sign reading “Geotech.”
The last owners of the Trust tried to sell off or donate the buildings. But the local administration has no use for them.
“Nothing is left, in general nothing is left,” Lena says. “Everything is ruined.” She urges us homeward to warm up.
We pop into the food store Maria-Ra – a Siberian chain. As we are standing at the cash register, an elderly man asks the salesgirl if they have Nesquik.
“For your kids? No, there isn’t any.”
“Will you be getting any?” he asks.
“I don’t know, maybe they’ll come to terms.”[5]
We visit School Number Five, which is between periods. We hear the shouts of children, and the smell of food reaches us from the cafeteria. A guard hides behind a plastic barrier, protected from rambunctious children.
Polina Demidovich, 21, works in the school. She has an advanced degree, beyond normal teacher training. She leads discussion groups on the media.
We climb to the second floor. Oil-painted walls, carved wooden doors, a portrait of the president. In a photograph, children – members of the Young Army Cadet movement – stretch out a Z in the colors of the Saint George ribbon. The school building is in disrepair. According to Polina, plaster falls from the ceilings.
She offers us sweetened tea from the cafeteria.
“After finishing up school,” Polina says “all my classmates were inspired by the fact that we would soon be going away, that we would do other things,” Polina. “The future seemed cool and interesting, while life in Kolpashevo was boring and plain. Because it’s as if we’re not doing anything, stuck in one place.”
After finishing school, she left for Tomsk to study to be a photographer. She describes the two years she spent there as aimless – she did not find herself. She returned home in order to do something. The death of Polina’s beloved grandmother became an impetus toward civic engagement – to try to drown out her pain of loss.
In 2022, Tatyana Bardakova, who works in the district administration, proposed that Polina and a few other young people design a tour around Kolpashevo, as a way to attract tourists. The plan was to include the Trust’s headquarters as part of the tour.
Young people held a series of subbotnik fix-up days. They cleaned and painted the Peace to the World! monument. Then they set up a space for cultural events – “The New Space” – on the Trust grounds. Some 150 people joined the group’s page on VKontakte [Russia’s answer to Facebook].
“At first,” Polina said, “if seemed like ‘Cool, we’re restoring something.’ Something that was probably going to be abandoned, destroyed in the end, since the town administration says they expect the Trust to meet the same fate as the military unit – for it to be picked apart, brick by brick. Everything these days is connected with patriotism: write a letter to a soldier, lay some flowers. The workplan is nothing but memorial services. Nothing else is happening, all we do is commemorate people, remember them, honor them, have a moment of silence. The children walk about in the ruins, whatever’s left.”
Each evening, she takes a trolleybus back to Torur, a suburb of Kolpashevo where her grandmother’s apartment is. The bus leaves from the “Vegetable Oil Factory” station – another enterprise that is no more.
While we wait for the bus, we ask about Kolpashevo and Togur.
“You come here and you see the stars. Against that backdrop, everything else is insignificant,” Polina says about Togur.
The bus arrives packed full of people, its windows covered with ice through which one can barely see the stops. A ticket costs 31 rubles – more than in Tomsk.
“We need to spend our Northern hardship pay somewhere,” she jokes.
We exit into the darkness at a cement bus stop, “Sovkhoz Office,” walk to a two-story building, and open a squeaky door. Potatoes are stored in boxes on the landing.
We enter a small, two-bedroom apartment. A knitted rug, Soviet wallpaper and curtains, dumbbells. The fact that a young woman lives here is betrayed by the presence of a Polaroid camera, a sunset lamp, candles, a fruit basket, and quotes stuck on the bed’s headboard.
“I hardly touch anything in the apartment.” Referring to her grandmother she says, “I feel that she is going to return and do everything, or tell me what to do.”
She gestures to the wall. “This is where Babushka’s daily calendar hung. She died on January 5, and I was here on the 4th and tore off the next sheet. It did not rip off cleanly, but it had always torn off cleanly for her. I kept the calendar there for a while. The nail’s still there. It gives me the chills when I see it.”
She is waiting for summer, when the neighbors – all her grandmother’s friends – come out into the garden below her window.
“And this thought is comforting somehow, liberating,” Polina says. “When you look out a second-floor window the horizon is a long ways away.”
Polina said she feels there is no work for young people in Kolpashevo. Her friends mainly lead hobby groups.
“There are many problems in Kolpashevo,” she says. “But I wish that the people who leave, as I one day will, leave with a feeling that Kolpashevo is not the pits, not simply a spot where people are born and die. That people can actually live here. But there is no infrastructure here to support life. There are no lively places for get-togethers, for meeting people, for exchanging experience, ideas. Veterans with veterans, children with children.”
Yulia Selyavko is an artist and one of the organizers of The New Space project. She meets us in the Youth and Child Center where she leads hobby clubs. Yulia is 33 and has lived her whole life in Kolpashevo. She trained as a lawyer at the local technical college and worked in the profession until she was laid off. Before coming to the youth center, she spent two years working as a janitor.
“I live in a dormitory that used to belong to the Trust,” Yulia says. “So they hired me to take care of the nearby buildings. I would go there, clear the snow from the steps.”
Yulia’s dormitory was built in the 1970s, and her parents once lived there. Her father was an electrician, the head of a brigade and then a field unit. Her mother drew maps in the field data analysis department. The dormitory is full of childhood memories for Yulia: kapustniki,[6] discos, shashlik[7] in the neighboring forest.
“We lived like one big family,” she recalls.
When Yulia was eight, her parents were paid their salaries in pears and coupons that could be redeemed for meals in the cafeteria.
“A large part of the work was transferred to Tomsk,” she says. “Almost nothing remained in Kolpashevo. Mama sometimes cried that there was nothing to eat. But she didn’t want to move anywhere else. She had planned to work her whole life here, and then all of a sudden they cut Kolpashevo loose.”
Two years later, her mother quit the Trust and now works in a store. Her father worked shifts as a geophysicist until he died.
Yulia did not plan to end up in the dormitory.
“My mother-in-law bought this apartment, which was small for my husband and me. All the normal workers left, selling their apartments for nothing. We of course have some neighbors – pensioners and families. It’s quiet in my part of the building, but on the second floor it’s all drug addicts and drunkards, and the police are there constantly.
It was never in Selyavko’s plans to leave Kolpashevo.
“It’s fine for me here,” she says. “Where am I going to go? Tomsk? It’s also a grey village, it smells awful there. And no matter when you go, they never turn the central heating on time. I like it in Novosibirsk. I have an aunt there. It’s a big city. If I were to move, realistically it would be to some kind of megapolis, where it’s always like a big anthill, like New York, so that there would be constant parties.”
Yulia explains that there are lots of stores in Kolpashevo but few customers, because people have so little money. Two years ago, she says, her paintings sold better, and she feels that tourism could bring revenue to the city.
“I want people to come visit us. We are trying to reach an agreement with the Soviet-era Metalist factory to bring excursions there, to do a bit of industrial tourism.”
She says that the museum and curators who oversee excursions in the city don’t understand how to attract tourists to the former Trust or military unit properties.
“They think showing the Lenin monument is the way to go. But if there are ruins, they don’t see the tourist potential,” Yulia says. “I love abandoned places – for me they’re the real deal; I climb all over them. I’ve subscribed to the [Instagram] group ‘Unknown Russia,’ and they lead excellent tours around Russia – there is never a shortage of abandoned places. And Kolpashevo should be on their list. It’s important. It’s our history. So what if the buildings are abandoned and not in use. What are you going to do?” Yulia sighs. “That’s the situation in our country: an enterprise closes, but the building is still there, and it’s cool. So it should be used.”
At the city administration building, we climb to the second floor in search of Andrey Chukov, the deputy mayor. He’s speaking on an iPhone. Suit, white shirt, wedding ring with inset stones.
“Where can young people in Kolpashevo find work?” I ask.
“We have six vacancies in the city administration,” Chukov says, cheerful and energetic. “A work placement specialist, someone to oversee athletics, and a construction engineer. In general, all you need is higher education and a desire to work [there are no higher education institutions in the town]. Young people have different ambitions today, different interests. The kids who are down to earth and want to work – they have work. They work in the mines, in the navy, aviation, police, Emergency Situations Ministry. But those who want a bohemian or genteel life, as bloggers, say – you are not going to attract them here.”
Chukov says that since 2018 the city “has been working to create a comfortable environment, to create places that young people want to go, so they can stay here and start families.”
“We’re interested in the Trust building,” I say. “It is owned by Tyumen. But the territory surrounding the building, is that owned by the city or somehow controlled by it?”
He answers that it is, most likely, city property. The deputy mayor opens up Google Maps and shows us the streets around the Trust. The photos were captured before The New Space existed. The grass is overgrown and there is general devastation.
“Has the city administration been offered the buildings?”
“No. Even if they offered them… There are the concepts of effectiveness and expedience. If we had a vision for them, what to put there, then maybe we would set a goal of taking them over. If you have seen this building, everything there is destroyed, looted, frozen. What is it good for? As to the young people that conceived of a space there, why there exactly? They told me ‘This is what we want.’”
“They consider it a piece of history…”
“Fine, and how would the activities and work they do there connect with the Trust?”
“They would be leading tours.”
“Oh, Lord. Sure, once or twice. The rest is more informal – some sort of hippie movement with music. Simply students sitting around on rugs or something. But not in any way connected to the enterprise. So be it, but let’s designate a space where young people can hang out and we’ll refurbish it. We say, ‘Kids, there’s garages here, a guarded area, communications, roads, residential buildings. You sing, and the grandmas and grampas don’t like it. So let’s make a place where no one else will be around.’ And they say ‘This is what we want.’ Well, if that’s what you want, sit there.”
“And how do you feel about this young people’s initiative?” I ask.
“I immediately asked, ‘What exactly is the message of your place?’ I have not been to their meetings, so I don’t understand what they have been talking about and what goals they have for their gatherings.”
Chukov notes that he was inducted into the Pioneers in the Trust building. A bit later we learn that his father taught at the vocational school where Trust workers were trained.
“We spoke with the Trust veterans. They say that the city maintains the graves of military veterans, but not for labor veterans who were Trust workers.”
“You know, if the state has obligations to certain categories of citizens, that is one thing. But there is no such obligation here. If that were the case, we’d have to maintain the graves of all citizens. There is a simple physical factor here. They have relatives – let them maintain them.”
Chukov turns an hourglass over and over in his hands, and no longer is speaking so energetically. He often drops his gaze.
“What do you think?” I ask. “What sort of tourist potential does the city have? Where would you take tourists?”
“To Cedar Park. This year we created the Lipatov Walkway.[8] The Lipatov Museum, the cultural history museum. Those sorts of places. And, to be honest, to take them elsewhere… Lord, go and walk, stroll, or swim in the lake. That’s it.”
The deputy mayor knows how many businesses in Kolpashevo offer sushi but has no idea why there is no monument near Kolpashevsky Yar. He also doesn’t know why young people are setting up a public space near the Trust buildings.
We are invited to a meeting dedicated to Nikolai Gogol being held at the Central Library. The library has been renovated and everywhere are the colors yellow, violet, and blue. There is also a book exchange shelf.
It turns out we have happened on a gathering of the Meetings (Встречи) Club. Its members analyze classical works from a Christian perspective. Aside from us, there were five elderly people at the event, and discussion of the works gradually moves over into debates about the fate of Russia.
“Gogol wanted to fix Russia. He could see that Russia was not spiritual.”
“But he believed that it was spiritual. They believe that God is on their side, and they are spiritual.”
“Taras Bulba’s monologue sounds very contemporary.”
“Gogol loved Russia so much, he so much wanted to fix it. It is so good that the first volume [of Dead Souls] was not burned. How hard it was for him to accept that Russia was irreparable, in short, he found himself in a dead end.”
“In general, people have to begin by fixing themselves before trying to fix Russia.”
“Become reborn!”
“Christ was literally all about this… Many people get confused. My sister was just that kind of believer, and someone said to her, ‘Save your own soul, that is all you need.’ But no, you can only save yourself if you are working to save other people. Almost no one understands this. It’s as they taught us in Soviet times: ‘Working and living your life, think about the whole country.’”
“I’m curious, who is fighting at the front? I don’t really understand. Is it outcasts and bums there? Who is defending Russia now? I don’t understand…”
“That’s the thing about Russia, that we have always found such people at difficult moments. And you just don’t get that.”
“I don’t think he’s right about that.”
“Aha! It is only in the difficult times that people have the right to do something. So any crisis or war is good for Russia. Because in difficult times we get not bosses like that [bad ones], but ones like we have now.”
“Well that I can agree with.”
“So, in difficult times people get the right to die?”
“No, and this includes ruling properly. For now, everything is good for us Russians. While things are good, we tend to let our guard down.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea. War is the mother of all. If there is no war, there are no people... War brings out the best in people.”
We leave the library. A prickly wind burns our faces and feet. I recall how, two days ago, a ten-year-old in a local café told his friends about his father, who had gone off to fight in Ukraine. The young kid said, “I will go too.”
Olga Titova is a senior researcher at the Kolpashevo Local History Museum, where she has worked since 1988. The museum has changed little since then. Some of the information under glass is 20 years old. In some spots, the papers under glass have tilted or slid out of place.
We approach an exhibit on the Trust. Titova recalls how Kolpashevo used to be: wooden sidewalks, well-groomed gardens, neatly stacked firewood. Today the district is subsidized, and you can’t count on the government to pay to keep the streets clean. The powers that be demolish old wooden homes, along with their history.
I ask Titova if she feels betrayed and forgotten, now that work for the good of the motherland has been replaced by the country’s collapse and destitution. She answers,
It was not only Trust workers who had this feeling, but the entire country. Have you read Orwell’s Animal Farm? I call it an awful fairy tale. It described our Soviet reality. Even if geophysicists or farm workers faced some difficulty, they did not ask for material support. A modest cookie or award was enough for them. There was a feeling of belonging. But then they took that feeling away and said, ‘Every man for himself.’ Our parents felt that they had been betrayed. They lived for something, for someone. Now it turns out that their ideals were worth nothing.
Tourists visit us and we start out by saying, “This is where a church once stood. This is where the home of an amazing peasant stood. Here was the vocational school where people learned how to read.” Do you understand?
During our conversation, I noticed an exhibit of works by local artist Taisia Lakhno. She graduated from Tomsk State University and then returned to Kolpashevo.
Lakhno is a short young woman with dark eyes. Her grandparents both worked for the Trust. Lakhno could not find work as an artist or graphic designer in Tomsk, so she started teaching children in Kolpashevo. Sometimes she dreams of running away.
“When I began studying, I thought, ‘If worse comes to worst, I can return to Kolpashevo and work here.’ It’s not that bad here. I go to Tomsk from time to time. My grandmother told me a lot about how the Trust workers were all essentially the same age, how there was a solidarity. Maybe this was her nostalgic memory of the USSR. But now I feel there is none of that. I don’t know why,” Lakhno says quietly.
After she returned home from her studies in Tomsk, Lakhno says she found it nice that “everything was more or less as it always had been” in Kolpashevo. But now she feels like the city has become stuck in its Soviet past.
Taisia was assigned to first grade – “it needs a good teacher.” Meanwhile, she is saving up so she can “move on and start life.”
Her first personal exhibit was a collage cycle, “Dreams,” which explored the motif of water. The artist spent her childhood alongside the river, in a home not far from Kolpashevsky Yar.
“The place seems to say a lot about the sort of regime people lived under,” Lakhno says. “On the surface, all is wonderful and healthy, but beneath is a massive graveyard.”
As a child, Taisia constantly had nightmares about the Yar, that their home would be washed away. The constantly collapsing riverbanks became a source of anxiety, and she thought that everything would one day come to an end.
“Most likely it will be washed away, and that is sad. Fifty years after the fact, some people can go to the house where they grew up and feel nostalgia. I know that when I come back, this house won’t be here anymore.”
Eight a.m. City bus station. I go outside to get a last look at Kolpashevo before we leave.
Snow. There is a crack in the wall of the House of Culture. A middle-aged man clears the square where a bus will be pulling up in just a few minutes. There are more passengers who want to leave Kolpashevo than those traveling here. Just like in almost every small city in Russia.
I remember my aunt Masha, who lives in Tomsk. How her good friend Gala would bring her a “48-Kopek” ice cream bar on the anniversary of the death of Masha’s husband. He loved ice cream and was a manager at the Trust. His grave is in the old Kolpashevo graveyard.
Aunties Masha and Gala worked together for decades in the Trust’s computing center. Aunt Masha has the phone number of the polyclinic stuck to the base of her desk lamp. She calls the people in photographs from her younger days “my sweethearts.” She rarely visits Kolpashevo, maybe once or twice a year. But I recall her words:
“I pass through… it’s like an ash heap, as if it had been through a war. It’s sunk into oblivion. Such industrial might people created here. It supported not just Kolpashevo, but all of Tomsk Oblast, the country… it’s been transformed… It would be better if they burned it to the ground. I get it, what happened to our country: you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. And we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But we survived the 1990s and have almost rebuilt the country. And no one needs the Trust. It’s like a sore spot in the country’s conscience, of no use to anyone anymore.”
We get off the bus. The river greets us. A string of lights stretches along the embankment. Shrouded figures pass under the lights and then disappear into the darkness.
[1] Literally the between-season time.
[2] A yar is a ravine, but the name echoes Babi Yar, the infamous World War II killing ground outside Kiev that was the site of horrific massacres and mass burials of between 100,000 and 150,000 victims of the Nazi occupation.
[3] From the song, “I Am Going,” by the bard Yuri Kukin, which he wrote while on a geology expedition. In it he celebrates his sense of exploration, and says he is chasing after his dreams, drawn by the smell of the taiga. It is an unofficial anthem of geology field workers in Russia.
[4] An insecticide; commonly used on pest-strips.
[5] Nestlé suspended the sale of Nesquik and other non-essential food items to Russia in connection with the war in Ukraine.
[6] Kapustniki are a sort of amateur theatrics variety show.
[7] Grilled kabobs.
[8] Named for Vil Lipatov (1927-1979), Soviet writer, playwright, and journalist. He lived in a suburb of Kolpashevo for several years.
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