Death and Life in a Company Town : As the deadly legacy of Russia’s polluting factories has become clear, a handful of activists wages the lonely battle to reclaim their poisoned communities.

IT IS EARLY MARCH ON THE SNOW-BOUND PLAINS OF RUSSIA’S BASHKORTOSTAN REPUBLIC, AND THE winter winds are still. A tall, bulky figure stands on the frozen riverbank of his native town, Sterlitamak, staring toward the dense gray smog gushing down from the sprawling industrial complex on the north side of town. The snow around his feet has turned gray under the mantle of noxious gases; the air is so strafed with chlorine and amorphous petrochemicals that it stings the nostrils.

For Albert Tukhvatullin, 39, an artist turned environmental activist, this week’s smog is only the latest in the litany of spills, explosions and daily emissions that have befouled this Soviet industrial outpost for more than a quarter century. And it emboldens his lonely crusade to cut the tons of pollutants, ranging from mercury to dioxins, that he blames for the cancer that is slowly claiming the life of his teen-age son Marat.

We drive northward, past apartment buildings erected like a row of dominoes during the industrial boom of the 1960s. Ahead looms the center of Sterlitamak’s economic power and pollution: the five chemical plants, which rise huge and soot-encrusted, belching dense powdery plumes and hurling orange flames from their smokestacks. It is as dark as dusk on this side of town, and some pedestrians cover their mouths as they pass the factory gates. Albert sardonically calls the stench a “socialist bouquet.”

During the zealous industrialization campaign that reached its zenith in the 1960s, Sterlitamak and other cities across the former Soviet Union were selected for their natural resources--Sterlitamak for its salt deposits and broad Belaya River. From far and wide, workers were exhorted to come and march down the “Wide Road for Great Chemistry.”

In Sterlitamak’s chemical complex, which employs about a tenth of the city’s 250,000 people, the campaign left a nightmarish maze of corroding rails and vast crumbling ducts patched with strips of paper and fraying cloth rags. Discarded hardware litters the factory lots, and huge frozen pools of toxic wastes lie waiting for the spring thaw. The flagship factory, Kaustik, was built in 1964 to produce chlorine and caustic soda. Kaustik’s officials say they annually ship 40,000 tons of dichloritane to Western Europe, bringing in much-needed foreign currency. The cost is high: In the factory’s most recent accident, in December, an explosion killed two people.

Grave as it is, Sterlitamak’s environmental destruction is not the worst in the former Soviet Union, where hundreds of cities and towns in areas as far apart as Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Siberia have endured decades of devastation from nuclear radiation, DDT and petrochemical wastes. According to government surveys, 50 million residents of 103 cities breathe pollutants 15 times worse than maximum allowable levels. No place in the former Soviet Union is really safe, since most plants built along its majestic rivers and lakes were never equipped with pollution controls.

“When I was a child, I took a washbasin and used to ride the current of the river toward that bridge,” says Albert, pointing to a horizontal form barely visible through the smog. “There were woodpeckers in these trees. Under Khrushchev, they tore down all the small houses and built these things,” he says with disgust, tipping his head toward the concrete nine-story building behind us.

When I first visited Kaustik at the close of 1991, I was taken on a tour by the factory’s gaunt deputy chief of technology, Yuri Dimitriev, and the local chairman of the official trade union, Anatoly Stariov. Workers dressed in baggy pants and jackets toiled in dim, filthy work sections, with sacks of powdered polyvinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, flopped in a corner. Overhead pipes burst with clots of thick white insulation fibers. As we passed through another room where men were rolling huge plastic sheets, the ill-designed ventilation fan blew hot, gagging vinyl fumes that sent me hurrying to the door for air.

In the years he spent at Kaustik, Albert says, wincing and shaking his head, “There was always dust in the air, spilled liquids and vapors. Thoe place was such a mess. Sometimes sacks would burst open, and all six workers in the area would be forced to swallow this dust.”

These are only minor insults compared to the massive, enduring environmental destruction left by factories such as Kaustik. Sitting in his imposing wood-paneled office, Dimitriev admitted that over the years, “We consumed about 40 tons of mercury a year for this process, and those 40 tons escaped with the final product.”

One of the largest concentrations of mercury ended up on the land next door, where the “May 1st” township was built for thousands of chemical workers and their families. Thanks to Sterlitamak’s chronic housing shortage, the companies have postponed a plan to evacuate their workers from those squalid dormitories.

Kaustik’s administration feels hamstrung by rising costs and declining production due to the breakdown of Soviet-era supply networks--a complaint echoed by managers interviewed in petrochemical plants in the regional capital of Ufa and at the Urals steelworks of Magnitogorsk. The official labor union, which historically served as the strong arm of Soviet management, endorses the administration. “As a father, I have felt concerned about my own three children,” says union leader Stariov. “But we never think about closing the factory. We have no right to leave such a big number of people without jobs.”

Most workers would agree. Apocalyptic predictions of mass unemployment and social unrest loom larger than environmentalists’ concerns. And even though Russia has stringent environmental protection laws, most industries opt to pay the nominal fines rather than invest in safer technology. It is no wonder that in 1989, studies by Soviet experts found three-quarters of the water in Russia not fit for drinking. Sixty-nine percent of the fish analyzed were dangerously contaminated with mercury-based pesticides, and 30% of food products were polluted by pesticides and other hazardous chemicals.

The toll on the population’s health is frightening. Infant mortality is more than triple the rate in the United States. Life expectancy has declined from its peak of 74.5 in 1965 to an average of 63.5 years for men--and far lower in severely polluted areas. According to an official at Sterlitamak’s hygiene department, life expectancy for men here is only 45 years.

As glasnost unlocked the first secrets of environmental devastation in these industrial centers, small groups of activists in various cities achieved significant local victories: vetoing ill-conceived dam projects, closing some factories and preventing new toxic production sites from opening. In the Soviet Union’s 1990 elections, a number of “greens” won local seats, including Sterlitamak’s own mayor, and a dozen other ecologists, including Albert, were elected to the city council. But the fledgling movement fragmented amid local infighting and recognition of the city’s dependency upon the industries.

For Albert, however, there was no turning back from his environmental crusade despite the financial and social hardship it has brought him. It is bad enough that the factories have ruined his city; they have also destroyed the health of his younger son.

“MY STRUGGLE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT BEGAN WHEN MY SON GOT SICK,” SAYS ALBERT, DRAWING A parallel with the experience of the late German environmental activist, Petra Kelly. “She said in her book that after her sister died, she started her struggle for the environment. Like her, I got interested in ecology, economics and politics, and I started collecting all this literature--regional, local and international.”

But underlying his activism was a lifelong concern for what the “Wide Road for Great Chemistry” had brought to Sterlitamak. “My father himself had written letters about the environment,” he says, “since he remembered seeing his city much cleaner than I did. He was opposed to the building of the huge chemical plants.” In 1969, Albert was 16, and the chemical complex was in high gear; a dozen other factories were opening up. Like his father, he started writing letters, first to local newspapers and to Leonid Brezhnev, then the Communist Party chief, to complain about being surrounded by “a wall of chemical gases.”

One day that year, two brawny men in white coats stepped out of an ambulance in front of his apartment building and escorted him not to a hospital but to the local headquarters of the KGB. “For six hours, they kept asking me what I knew about the Beatles, and the West in general, and to whom I was connected,” he recalls with a smile. “They were convinced that my letters had been written by some ‘organization.’ ” His interrogators were particularly irritated by Albert’s nonconformist dark glasses and shoulder-length hair. “I was the first hippie in Sterlitamak,” he says with a hint of self-mockery, pointing to his receded hairline.

Albert acknowledges that he was somewhat protected by the reputation of his father, a decorated World War II veteran and a respected city administrator. Albert’s interrogators let him go, but they marked his file with the medical diagnosis the Soviets often gave to rule breakers: “Slowly developing schizophrenia.”

When Albert left art school in 1970, he became an apprentice, designing advertisements for state food stores. But the pull of the factories was unavoidable. Three years later, he took a job at the Soda factory, which in addition to caustic soda manufactured asbestos products, such as corrugated roofing and “bandages” for insulating industrial pipes. It was in the section of Soda classified as “hazardous” that Albert met his future wife. While she was expecting Marat, she worked with barium chloride, a single gram of which is potentially lethal.

His wife, he says, “has problems with her liver, suffers from vomiting and a poor appetite.” And she is not alone. “Even if they don’t work in one of the chemical factories,” says Albert, “I don’t know a single family without some illness.”

Sterlitamak’s problems became horrific in 1973, when the industries promoted a novel solution for storing their toxic wastes: They would bury them in deep underground cavities blasted out by deadly nuclear explosions. Albert recalls hearing about the first local blast three days before it happened, but there was no evacuation. “We heard and felt the explosion 18 miles away. The ground trembled. It was something terrible.”

It was one of more than 100 nuclear explosions that have been carried out in the former Soviet Union for construction purposes. Activists believe at least seven have taken place in Bashkiria (now Bashkortostan), and the two explosions Albert remembers occurred within 20 miles of Sterlitamak, near the villages of Ilinovka and Nikolayevka. The first of the two cavities, named Kama 1 and 2, is being filled with toxic wastes piped down from the chemical plants in Sterlitamak, and the villagers are frantic about the dangers of radiation and lethal chemicals.

Over the next decade, Albert moved on to two other chemical giants, Kaustik and Synthetic Rubber, in the latter heading the department that churned out Socialist Realism banners still displayed in many workplaces. Working in any capacity at one of the plants was flirting with danger. Townspeople tell of the epic 1983 explosion at Synthetic Rubber that, they say, took the lives of 40 people. But it was the decision of the neighboring Kaustik factory in 1986 to begin building two new sections for producing the pesticides Karahol and Yela, which would increase the quantity of toxic waste, that galvanized Arthur to act. “All night long, I made posters saying ‘Down with Karahol and Yela’ ” he recalls, recounting how he took the first morning trolley to place his signs at the factory gates--something almost unthinkable at the time. “By 9 o’clock, I was at my job and was summoned to the plant’s Communist Party work committee. The Third Secretary began to lecture me with a party chairman’s voice.”

A number of workers from several factories agreed to sign a protest letter and call a rally, but they were diverted when the state-run trade union promised them more food and better working conditions. Still, the sections were never built, and Albert was buoyed by the victory. Soon afterward, however, Albert’s troubles intensified.

First, he says, fury seeping through his usual reserve, he was fired by Synthetic Rubber. Officials gave the reason as “budget cutbacks,” but he believes he was blacklisted for his activism. “When I’d phone enterprises to ask if they needed an artist, they’d say yes. But when they saw my identity papers, they’d say no.”

Then Albert’s marriage collapsed. It was late 1986, and Marat, then 9, had suddenly developed a kidney tumor, which proved malignant. Albert’s voice is barely audible when he speaks of Marat and his ex-wife. “When my son got sick, my wife left me. She left her job, married another man and moved to a village 120 miles away with our other son. It was such a mess.” After much agonizing, Albert and his ex-wife finally agreed that Marat should leave Sterlitamak and live with her. “My heart was broken into pieces,” he says, his face muscles tightening. “But I knew that in the village, there’s good air.”

Albert doesn’t talk freely about his own health, mentioning only a heart condition lingering from rheumatic fever. But his face looks puffed and pallid. His broad, widely spaced teeth are edged with black decay, and the small, wart-like growths on his tongue, cheek and upper lip appear to have become larger over the past year. “I’d better struggle for the health of others,” he says. “My own condition is irrelevant. Besides, if I started examining all these physical ailments I have, I’d find so many things.”

Instead, Albert throws himself into his environmental work, putting his artistic gift to use designing ecological posters and protest placards. With a core of 20 scientists, health professionals and journalists, he helped mobilize tiny but startling environmental protests in the late 1980s. It seemed as if the movement might have taken hold when thousands revolted in August, 1990, after a particularly acute smog blanketed the city, provoking a strike by angry trolley-bus drivers. Two days later, about 50,000 gathered for a visit by Boris N. Yeltsin, then the maverick challenger to Mikhail S. Gorbachev. This was the pinnacle of their local protest, and, as Albert recalls, “Yeltsin told us, ‘If we take power, believe me, in three years we’ll cure both the economy and ecological problem.’ ”

But the demise of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic crisis have relegated pollution control to a far lower priority. In Sterlitamak, the movement dwindled to a handful of activists forced to cope with feelings of isolation and captivity.

IN ALBERT’S SPARTAN APARTMENT, A FEW HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE RIVER, HE HAS NAILED A MAP OF the world to one wall, marked with circles denoting the major concentrations of radioactivity.

Piles of newspaper clips lie on his laminated table, and stacks of paperback books fill a corner of the room. A document-in-progress is in an ancient manual typewriter. On his bookshelf sits a small, hand-held dosimeter, less elaborate than a Geiger counter, which he ordered from Moscow. With it, he ventures out on his own to measure radiation levels in the city and surrounding villages.

Only a few miles beyond the city limits, the traces of urban life slip away among the birch groves and snowy plains. In a tiny village near Kama 2, time seems to have stopped a century ago. Outside the small village store, horses trot by hauling classic sleds. Inside the shop, a portly peasant woman in a coarse brown woolen shawl clicks away on a wooden abacus as a stream of customers clanks empty green wine bottles on the counter, exchanging them for full ones.

The villagers have known Albert for several years, and a group of women with weathered faces framed by shawls bursts into discussion about the underground blasts 20 years ago.

“They told us when there would be an explosion and everyone should leave his house,” begins one woman who had been living about four miles from the explosion site. “Some people were scared. But we were standing there, and I saw the land move in waves.” The others chime in with similar accounts, and she adds almost numbly, “When it was over we came back home.”

The clamor grows as at least 15 people crowd around Albert, who has shoved his bare hands back into the pockets of his bulky fake-fur coat. “Of course, it’s in our fields and the river,” an old farmer bellows. “Our animals are affected, and all our products. They even use this place to feed the cows from the collective farm.”

A slender woman in her early 30s angrily cuts in to condemn the chemical wastes pumped all the way from Sterlitamak. “The children here are terribly sick, and so many young people in their 20s are sick also, mainly with diseases of their joints,” she screams. “And when my son got red blotches on his skin, the medical specialist told me it was from intestinal worms!” The crowd yelps with indignation. “I don’t believe it. But we’re not competent to know.”

Albert calmly says, “But the authorities say they do analyses every year and examine everyone--”

“No!” the villagers retort in unison. “They never examine anyone!”

Night has fallen, and the storekeeper is sweeping off her bare wooden shelves. As we turn to leave, the villagers scramble behind us to the door, shouting, “Come back! Please come back.” Their shrill cries drift off in the freezing night. “We hope so much that you can help us. Nobody can help us!”

Over the past four years, the people of these fretful villages have rallied and petitioned the regional authorities to cancel a plan called Nature 1, which would resume the underground explosions for waste dumping. Last autumn, the issue was due for a vote by the regional legislature, and Albert spent weeks taking water samples and radiation counts with the dosimeter. Penniless, he hitched rides on local buses, discovering the drivers sympathetic to the environmental cause.

“I found the level of micro-roentgens in the village between 60 and 100, and at the cavity site itself, 160,” he says. “This was way above the background radiation level of 14 micro-roentgens set after the Chernobyl disaster. But the Sterlitamak officials refused to talk with me about it. They said they were too busy with economic problems.”

So Albert decided to picket city hall to cancel the planned blasts.

“There were only two of us,” Albert begins, “but gradually people gathered around, and we tried to explain the problem of radiation. A lot of people from the affected villages work in the factories here, and they started to sign our protest document. By the end of the morning, we had about 500 signatures.”

The city officials brushed them off, but positions were divided in the county-level legislature, and the plan was narrowly defeated. But Albert expects further confrontations, predicting that the industries will step up their considerable pressure on the legislature to approve Nature 1.

THE LEGACY OF STERLITAMAK’S ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAS GRADUALLY COME TO LIGHT IN THE city’s maternity hospitals, where newborns with collapsed lungs and pneumonia lie gasping in makeshift “oxygen tents”--plastic bags pulled over their heads and tied at the neck. They balloon as the oxygen is piped in by a tube poked through the bag and fastened with a rubber band.

The city’s chief pediatrician, Dr. Galina I. Moroz, makes the rounds amid the hiss of oxygen. A small, compact woman with a tuft of curly red hair, Moroz approaches the crib of a 6-day-old infant with fused fingers. “You see all the signs of some genetic disease?” she asks as she unwraps the tightly swaddled baby. “I spoke to the mother when she was pregnant, and though she didn’t work directly with hazardous substances, she worked in an institution that is right on the territory of all our factories.”

Over the past five years, Moroz has been distressed by the rise in birth defects, from 23.4 to 25.7 per 1,000. She is particularly alarmed by the dramatic increase in neurological disorders, which have outstripped gastrointestinal infections on the list of children’s illnesses. She says lung and kidney diseases have also doubled, and liver disease has risen 150%.

Moroz strides through the steamy corridors to consult with her senior colleague, Dr. Maria V. Bichenkova, who heads the department of obstetrics and gynecology. The stout, gray-haired physician erupts in ominous observations from her long career.

“We now have a generation whose mothers and grandmothers worked in chemical factories,” she declares, reaching for an oversized handwritten logbook. “From 1990 to 1992, cases of anemia in women rose four times, and we also saw a rise in kidney, coronary and endocrinological diseases. An unhealthy mother will never give birth to a healthy child.”

With a constellation of toxic elements in most industrial centers in the former Soviet Union, it is difficult to measure the role of each in causing pathology. But Dr. Bichenkova seems to have little doubt about the trends she has recorded in the heavy old register. “Only 16% of the births today are normal !” she exclaims. “And look at the last 17 years,” she says, slapping the yellowed pages. “In 1975, the percentage of babies born with some kind of illness was 7.2; now it’s 36!”

Infant mortality rates are harder to evaluate, because of routine underreporting of deaths, but Moroz estimates that Sterlitamak’s rate is the same as all Russia’s, 28 per 1,000 live births--spiking to 40 per 1,000 when high levels of wastes have been released into the air or water supply.

As a member of parliament in Bashkortostan, Moroz has pushed for a law prohibiting women from working in hazardous sections altogether. She praises one of Sterlitamak’s factory directors, who shifted his women employees into a new section that makes children’s toys. With new ultrasound equipment, Moroz hopes to monitor pregnant women more closely, and she has obtained budgetary support to open a treatment center for children born with illnesses.

But as the weary-looking pediatrician glances out her window at the latest wave of smog filtering through the trees, she admits that her individual efforts alleviate only a small part of the illness caused by the ecological disaster. A surer cure--stemming the pollution at its source--is as distant as a blue sky.

THE COZY APARTMENT OF ALBERT’S FRIENDS OLEG AND VERA KRUCHKOV IS A WELCOME OASIS. DRESSED in a cotton housedress, bulky beige stockings and slippers, Vera, 38, still radiates a childlike curiosity, ready with a comfortable smile and soothing laugh. The sound of water running in the tub comes from the end of the narrow hallway where her tall, broad-shouldered husband emerges from doing the family laundry. They guide us into their small, spotless kitchen for a snack of salami, cheese, bread and butter.

Oleg, 39, has blue eyes and a long angular face; he combs his sandy hair flat across his forehead. He has known Albert since grammar school. While he and Vera share Albert’s outrage over the factories’ pollution and health risks, they seem, like most of the populace, resigned to Sterlitamak’s predicament. Instead, they concentrate on their personal pursuits, as Oleg enthusiastically describes his part-time correspondence course in veterinary medicine at a regional agricultural school.

Oleg ended up as many people do in Sterlitamak, taking a job in a hazardous section of a chemical factory after finishing his compulsory military service on a nuclear submarine in the north.

“He had terrible rashes on his hands when he was doing the hazardous work for the first time,” recalls Vera, her face clouding. Her husband’s voice is very deep and raspy, and his hacking cough is so abrasive, I feel my own respiratory tract being lacerated as he clears his throat every 30 seconds. Despite his skin rashes and chronic bronchitis, Oleg put in nine years in factories to build up enough “hazardous credits” to qualify for early retirement.

“Then he might be able to do something with horses,” Vera breaks in, getting up to pour another round of tea. “It’s his passion,” she adds. “He rode as a kid but has no time now.”

“Just to have some horses, it’s good for my soul,” Oleg murmurs dreamily. “But,” he pauses, shifting his eyes up over the stove, “I don’t know. Life is unpredictable now.”

Never since World War II has the future been so uncertain for the hundreds of company towns where the all-powerful state factory bosses once provided the cradle-to-grave security of jobs, housing, kindergartens and hospitals. Roughly 700 miles east of Moscow, Sterlitamak still has the feel of a small town, despite its size. Few people have telephones or cars, and they get around by the public trolley system that snakes past all the factories and apartment complexes.

“All through life, people have been dependent on someone,” Vera continues, scowling with self-disdain. “We were trained to be obedient.”

Oleg tosses his head in protest. “How can it be avoided? If you stand up and challenge a boss, you have to be really strong. Look at what happened to Albert,” he says, abruptly turning toward his classmate. “He’s a living example.”

After clearing away the dishes, the two men leave on an errand, and a gust of icy night air fills the apartment with the odor of chlorine and rotten eggs. Vera pulls out a box of old snapshots from the 1970s. “The kids adore the beach,” Vera whispers nostalgically as she lingers over vacation at the Black Sea. “We used to go in August, when the air is worst here,” she says, “heavy, unbreathable. It’s also bad in March when there’s no wind.”

Like dozens of residents of several industrial cities interviewed for this article, Vera is distraught about the health of her children--two sons, aged 15 and 7--and did everything to provide them with at least a month of fresh air a year. “Yevgeny was born with bleeding bowels,” Vera says, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. “He was also sickly during most of his childhood, with allergic bronchitis, colds, skin rashes and stomach problems,” she says. “I’m afraid he couldn’t survive his military service.”

People in this region talk of their children’s afflictions--allergies, asthma, liver problems, even cancer--the way Americans might report their spring hay fever or sinus attacks. One pediatrician in Sterlitamak lost her 28-year-old son to lung cancer in 1991. An epidemiologist in the nearby industrial center of Ufa lost her teen-age son to bone cancer. Even an energetic 37-year-old man who gave me a lift in Ufa suddenly mentioned that his first baby was born in 1977 without a skull and died only three hours later. His wife had been working in a spray-paint factory during her pregnancy.

When I ask Vera if they have ever considered moving to another city, she says they could never afford it with the spiraling prices. They are doubly handicapped by Sterlitamak’s notorious environmental reputation, which discourages outsiders from swapping homes with them or offering anything but a pittance for their apartment.

Later on, Oleg echoes the fatalism often heard here. “Now I’m persuaded that in other places it’s not much better,” he says. “In some places there are ethnic conflicts, in others they find radiation, and so on. Practically all of Russia is polluted. What’s the use of changing your place?”

DESPITE THE ENTHUSIASTIC WORK OF ECOLOGISTS IN MANY CORNERS OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION, IT will be a long time before independent groups of environmental analysts or activists will emerge in many provincial cities. Experienced international advocacy groups such as Greenpeace have begun to set up offices in Moscow and Ukraine, and a number of grass-roots environmental groups coordinated by the Socio-Ecological Union have begun linking themselves to a potentially huge international electronic-mail network. But for this, activists need computers and modems. In many places like Sterlitamak, most ordinary people lack even telephones, and the existing phone lines with Moscow frequently break down. Meanwhile, the resources and technology for monitoring the air, water and health profiles in Sterlitamak are kept under local government control, shrouded in secrecy.

A local journalist who crusaded for ecology in Sterlitamak for several years recently claimed not to have any general statistics on emission levels or cleanup efforts, saying that they were “not in the realm of journalism,” and referred me back to the city authorities who had already declined to be interviewed. One prominent scientist, who had openly criticized the local industries in the late 1980s, avoided my repeated attempts to contact him. He later told Albert that he did not want to risk having trouble with the authorities by talking with a foreign journalist.

Albert’s blunt, dogged style has prompted local authorities and their allies to make pejorative references to his “unbalanced behavior” and “neurological problems.” One day in his cluttered apartment, he snapped at these allegations. “My memory’s been deteriorating. But it’s because of the gases. I know it. It’s typical of this city.”

He has not taken off his matted fur hat, and the gray light through the window glistens on the fibers of his synthetic coat. For more than a year, I have not seen Albert dressed in anything but a brown pullover and trousers, and now a hole has worn through the knee. Glancing at the volumes stacked on the floor, he says that he has sold a bookcase and a few books to make some money. “But now I practically live on thin air. Once or twice a month I have to work as a laborer, carrying trash at the railway station,” he says, his face blanching with shame. “It’s really filthy work.”

Over the past year, Marat’s suffering has weighed heavily on him. “His lungs are eaten up by the cancer now, and recently he’s really begun to feel the pain,” Albert says, spreading his own hands in circles on his chest. “He can’t do anything strenuous, and he basically lies in bed all the time.” His voice is flat, as if he has repeated these words in his mind dozens of times.

Every few weeks he makes the 24-hour journey by train, bus and foot to visit his sons near the Ugtazinka River.

He disappears into the next room and pulls out a small painting of children on a skating rink. “This is a scene I painted of the yard out there where my sons used to play,” he says, nodding toward the window. The picture has the dreamlike quality of a scene from Chagall, with bold streaks of twilight blue across the sky.

Albert’s deepening poverty and depression have caused his friends concern and even exasperation.

“I’m sorry, but if only I had the talent Albert has! I’m only an ordinary man,” Oleg blurts out one evening. “I work full-time, and I’m spending years doing a correspondence course. So I’ll get a certificate in veterinary studies. Big deal. But Albert’s a man with real talent. He studied at the art institute. He has hands made of gold. For him it takes almost no effort to paint a picture or to make a good-looking advertisement. He’s a gifted artist.” Oleg pauses, looking away, and adds, “He’s not just an average man like me.”

Vera shuffles around him in the snug kitchen preparing macaroni and chicken.

Oleg suddenly swings around.

“But,” he says, defiant, “I really admire Albert. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He’s really concerned about the health of everybody else here, and he never thinks about himself. He’s really dedicated to what he’s doing--while the rest of us here are just enduring our life in this socialist crematorium.”