It’s Downsizing, Russian Style, Near Arctic Circle

Some were idealists who came to carve a new socialist world from the frozen wilderness. Many were lured by the promise of wages three times what they could earn anywhere else. Others sought adventure on the new frontier.

Together, they tightened the Soviet grip on the icy Chukotka Peninsula across the Bering Strait from Alaska, using huge federal subsidies to build towns, factories and military bases on the edge of the tundra.

But today, the Russians are in retreat. With the Cold War lost and the economy in disarray, their dreams have turned to desperation, and their pioneer spirit has succumbed to the daily struggle for survival.

More than half the people of the Chukotka region have moved away in the past six years, and more are leaving daily. In town after town in Russia’s easternmost region, crumbling apartment blocks stand abandoned, windows broken. The potholed streets--empty of people--are lined with shipping containers packed with the household goods of Chukotka’s refugees.

“This is a land of containers. You can see them everywhere,” said Nina Mikhailovna, who moved to Provideniya as a teacher 33 years ago. “ ‘Leaving’ is not the proper word for it. They are fleeing for their lives.”

Relocation Efforts

Call it downsizing, Russian style. In an effort to reduce the population of a region larger than Texas, the Chukotka government has relocated thousands of retirees to other parts of Russia. Soaring prices, high unemployment and shrinking public services have convinced thousands more that it is time to go. From a Soviet-era peak of 220,000, Chukotka’s population has plunged to 87,000 and falling.

“What is the point of maintaining the infrastructure and keeping the people there together with their families and schools?” asked Chukotka Gov. Alexander Nazarov. “This is not the south. It’s not even Siberia. It’s the Arctic region.”

The departure of so many Russians from the peninsula has forced the native Chukchi and Eskimo people to begin relying on themselves after decades of dependence on the Soviet government. But robbed of their traditions by the Communist system, most are unprepared for the transition to a market economy.

Forced from their native villages into Soviet settlements in the 1950s, the indigenous people survived largely on government handouts. Collective farms took over their ancient herds of reindeer and their traditional hunts for whales, walruses and seals. Now, with subsidies gone, the reindeer population has collapsed under poor management, and many hunters cannot even afford ammunition.

“We got used to getting extended aid,” said Grigory Taiyumvat, 51, a Chukchi and onetime reindeer herder who now works as a night watchman. “We haven’t learned to think for ourselves yet.”

To restructure its economy, this region nine time zones from Moscow has begun to look to the Pacific Rim, even opening a trade office in Seattle.

Few Trade Prospects

But apart from its mineral resources, the region has little to offer as a trading partner. Chukotka’s best prospect lies in reorganizing the business of gold mining, improving efficiency and increasing the yield from its large deposits. As with so many industrial projects in Russia, however, it is hard to find investors who are willing to put up money and wait for long-term results.

Officials say they want to attract tourists, but there are few hotels, transportation services are primitive, and the government refuses to relax restrictions that keep visitors out. Further, Nazarov has blocked a 10-year-old plan to create a U.S.-Russian national park encompassing both sides of the Bering Strait for fear it would interfere with oil exploration.

Some officials pin their hopes on the idea of building a tunnel under the Bering Strait to Alaska, linking Europe, Asia and America with an intercontinental highway. But they acknowledge that few people would want to spend weeks driving from, say, Los Angeles to Paris by way of Siberia.

The remoteness of the Chukotka Peninsula and the high cost of transporting goods to and from the region present a formidable obstacle to its economic renewal.

The region’s 22 towns and villages are scattered over wide distances along the coast of the Bering and Arctic seas. Roads between towns are virtually nonexistent. Ports are frozen all winter, until icebreakers arrive in May. Docking facilities are few, and landing craft are often used to haul cars and cargo. Flying is the most reliable way to get around, but bad weather can leave travelers stranded for weeks at a time.

The cost of transportation drives prices sky high. Goods in shops often cost three to five times as much as they would in Moscow--itself ranked as the third most expensive city in the world.

People who were among the wealthiest in the Soviet Union now find themselves among Russia’s poorest. Although they received triple wages in Communist times, there was little to buy, and most saved for eventual return to “the mainland,” as they call the rest of Russia. Some socked away huge ruble fortunes, but the hyper-inflation of the early 1990s wiped out their savings; the princely sum of 60,000 rubles, officially valued at $100,000 a decade ago, is worth $10.27 today.

Now a good monthly salary is 2 million rubles--$342. Pensioners receive at most 500,000 rubles--about $85. But many workers have not been paid for months or even years. Chukotka’s pioneers, once rewarded with vacations to any place in the Soviet Union, now cannot afford to travel. In the short summer, most go to the tundra and pick mushrooms and berries to survive the winter.

Lavrenty Mikholai, a retired seaman in Provideniya, is on a list of retirees waiting for apartments in the south. He doesn’t know when his number will come up or, when it does, where he will head. His monthly pension, he calculates, is “enough for two visits to the store.”

“It was much better under communism,” he said. “Everyone had a job. We don’t know what is in store for us or for the city. Everyone is leaving. Everything is falling apart. Everything is being destroyed.”

Even in Soviet times, life was hard in Chukotka. There is little sunlight, and nutrition is notoriously poor. Life expectancy is 56 years for men and 61 for women, lower even than on the mainland. The region is plagued by alcoholism, especially among its indigenous people.

“Alcohol is a very big problem,” said Vyacheslav Salnikov, a physician in Lavrentiya who works in the boiler room of the town’s power plant. “Even people who used to be abstainers have started drinking. They have lost all hope.”

Decaying Cityscapes

The Chukotka coast is so far east, it is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Moscow. But its bleak, decaying towns look as if they belong in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Provideniya, established in 1937, calls itself the “Gateway to the Arctic.” In the past six years, its population has shrunk from 5,000 to 2,000, and today its buildings look like the worst of U.S. public housing.

Its most scenic spot is the cemetery, with its commanding view of the surrounding mountains. The graveyard is the only part of Provideniya that is growing these days, but, like the town, it is in an advanced state of decay.

Mikhailovna, the teacher who came here at age 20, has no apartment waiting for her on the mainland and no money to buy one. She and her husband had planned to live out their lives here, but now she sees only a last trip to the cemetery as their future. “We were proud we were living in the north,” she said. “People were proud they were on the frontier. I will stay here. I don’t have any other place to go.”

But some residents of the region see Chukotka’s population decline as an improvement. In Lavrentiya, deputy chief administrator Andrei Shchegolkov said the settlement, having shrunk from 6,000 to 2,000, is approaching the ideal population it can support.

“They haven’t gone a long way. We can always visit them,” said Shchegolkov, who looks like a young John Candy with gleaming gold teeth. “The decrease in the population has had a direct effect on the increase in the population of mushrooms.”

For hundreds of years, the peninsula’s Eskimos and Chukchis coexisted peacefully, the Eskimos living on the meat of sea mammals and the Chukchis raising reindeer and hunting.

At the onset of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union began building up its military presence and Russian volunteers arrived from the mainland, the government began relocating Eskimos and Chukchis from their villages into larger settlements. Many elderly people died when they could not adapt; children were taken from their parents and put in boarding schools where only Russian was spoken.

Grigory Taiyumvat, 51, is now an old man among the Chukchis. Born in a tent on the tundra, he recalls a time when his nomadic parents, following their herd of 6,000 reindeer, were considered wealthy. But he has seen most Chukchi culture disappear.

After the Soviet collapse, herds were privatized; Taiyumvat and six fellow workers were given 3,000 reindeer. But there was no gas to drive tractors across the tundra, and they were unable to keep the herd together, losing some head to wolves, others to illness or stampedes. Those they didn’t lose, they slaughtered to eat or sell. “We lost our capacity to walk long distances with the reindeer,” he said. “We got used to driving, and we couldn’t follow the reindeer.”

In six years, the region’s reindeer population has fallen from 500,000 to 150,000.

“During Soviet times, we were deprived of the roots of our lives,” said Ludmila I. Ainana, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. “It resulted in our gradually losing the language and the culture. We got used to decisions being made by somebody else.”

Now, instead of government aid, the Eskimos get help from relatives in Alaska. The town of Barrow across the Bering Strait donated five generators to the village of Novoye Chaplinoas well as binoculars, boat engines and arms--to revive the hunt for bowhead whales.

As the Russian migration from the region continues, many native people worry what it will mean for them. “It was good when the Russians first came here,” said Margarita Ruhltinli, 64, a Chukchi woman who lives in Lavrentiya on a $75 monthly pension. “They started opening up schools. They gave education to our children for free. Now everything has changed. We are not living at all. We are like beggars.”