Russians Do Not Go Gently Into Polar Night

A soft, primrose glow gathers on the horizon as the weak winter sun struggles to revive the slumbering arctic landscape.

From the blackness that fades to gray each day, skeletal shrubs take shape against their snowbound backdrop, slowly emerging, black on white, like images in a developing photograph.

Short days and freezing temperatures will persevere through April in this icy outpost that shares a latitude with the north coast of Alaska, but the worst of winter’s hardships are at least on the wane.

So why, the hardy settlers of this northern community wonder as they massage their aching temples, are these first days of freedom from the polar night’s unbroken darkness the most dispiriting season of the year?

“This is the worst time, even worse than the weeks of endless darkness,” sighed Antonina Selivanova, who lives in this remote territory that Soviet planners made a stage for the struggle of man against nature. “I feel depleted, like all my energy leaked out during that long night.”

Medical professionals have only recently put a name to the fatigue and depression afflicting many of the 1 million Russians who make their homes on the inhospitable Kola Peninsula--Polar Night Stress.

But the listlessness and dysfunction caused by the harsh northern elements are now a recognized menace to both mind and body, and another challenge to those trying to correct the Communist era’s reckless development drive into the hostile North.

Nature never meant for humans to live and prosper at this latitude, where winter temperatures plummet to minus-40 (both Fahrenheit and Celsius) and Arctic winds roar across the frozen terrain, grounding aircraft and blocking roads out of the city with freakish snowdrifts.

Nevertheless, Soviet planners deployed hundreds of thousands of workers to this region to build factories to process the Kola Peninsula’s abundant minerals, ports to house the Soviet submarine fleet and nuclear reactors to generate power for much of northern Russia.

That many of the settlers never got used to the dark, brutal winters, or to the unrelenting daylight of late spring, was a social side effect paid no heed in the development-obsessed Communist era.

“The polar night affects the body’s natural rhythms, especially for those who come here from more temperate climates in central Russia and have to undergo serious physical adaptation,” said Lev Sokol, a cardiologist with the Regional Diagnostic Center in nearby Murmansk. “For normal, healthy adults, it is only a question of time before their bodies adjust to the new conditions. But for those with other physical complaints, the stress can be quite severe.”

Sokol and other health care professionals contend that Polar Night Stress is distinctive from its North American cousin, Seasonal Affective Disorder, which produces similar symptoms among many Canadians and Alaskans.

‘Isolation Factor Is Very Influential’

The Russian anomalies result from the compounding stress of living in a country beset by general turmoil and in a region where bonuses that once compensated for hardships have been severely reduced.

“The isolation factor here is very influential,” Sokol said. “There are no pleasant signs of nature around us, and the extreme temperatures and the winds affect people as much as the dark.”

Women in their 40s and 50s are the most susceptible, say the medical experts, although no formal research has been conducted on the condition because of a lack of funding.

Selivanova, a 54-year-old warehouse worker who has lived on the Kola Peninsula for more than 20 years, said she feels as frozen as the landscape during the two months of total darkness and these lifeless weeks that drag with painful lassitude toward the vernal equinox.

“I know I should try to shake myself out of it,” said the widow of eight years who is overweight and suffers from heart disease and liver malfunction. “The doctors tell me to keep busy, but all I really want to do is sleep.”

Yelena Guryanova has lived in the Kola region for all but five of her 37 years but insists that experience is no shield against the polar night’s psychological onslaught.

She plans to return to more temperate Karelia, her home region on the Finnish border, when her husband retires from the military intelligence service that currently posts them here. She has left her teaching career, where the pay was miserly and slow in coming, to manage the Bronzary tanning salon at Murmansk’s Five Corners Square.

“Of course I would prefer more intellectual stimulation, but here the clientele is better off than the average person and more focused on having fun,” said Guryanova, who complains of headaches and depression at this time of year. “It’s a nice atmosphere here. Everyone comes and goes in a good mood.”

At 35 rubles (about $5.75) per 20-minute session, the solaria at Bronzary and at least half a dozen similar businesses in the Murmansk area are a luxury for average working people whose salaries are often as low as $200 a month. But with the 120% hardship supplements still applied to most government jobs in the extreme North--even if both pay and benefits are often delayed--the mood-boosting tanning salons are a booming business.

“At this time of year, the only way I can feel better is to try to look better,” said Svetlana Pluzhnikova, a 28-year-old executive secretary with lightened hair and a toned, bronzed body.

For pensioners and others struggling to put food on the table, however, cosmetic treatments are too costly and offer them no guarantee of feeling better about their grim surroundings.

The vast majority of residents on remote Kola Peninsula were drawn north by the development boom of the Communist era and the lucrative bonuses guaranteed to the pioneers. Until the inefficiencies of a command economy caught up with Soviet planners in the 1980s, laborers in the North’s energy and military-industrial complexes could count on annual vacation packages to balmy Black Sea resorts and special deliveries of foods that were hard to obtain even in southern Soviet cities.

But with the collapse of the old order, so too have the privileges of northern prospecting disappeared. About half of the Kola region’s workers are on the federal government payroll, and the pay packets are especially slow in making their way to the Arctic. With generally poor job prospects throughout the country, though, the disillusioned have little hope of escaping to warmer climes.

Alcohol Abuse Is Worse in the North

Sliding fortunes for middle-aged laborers have been contributing to a growth in alcohol abuse, which can have even more dire physical consequences for the drinker in the North, said Vladimir Demin, chief therapist at the Regional Substance Abuse Clinic.

“Alcohol abuse is more common here than in central latitudes of Russia, but what is worse is the risk of complications because of the harsh environment,” said the physician, noting rare brain diseases among his patients.

Demin attributes higher workplace accident rates here to debilitation from heavy drinking but laments the lack of scientific research to confirm medical professionals’ impressions.

“Alcohol and drug use usually appear against a background of generally poor adaptation to one’s surroundings,” Demin said. “They are responses to the stress caused by an existence in deprivation.”

But he draws a strong distinction between stress and distress, noting that it is common and natural to feel down during the long winter but that a healthy person should be able to adapt.

Although the dearth of public funding for science has prevented thorough examination of the extreme North’s influence on the mind and body, sociologist Valery Mararitsa said the negative consequences are obvious. Student test scores are lower in winter, life expectancy here continues to decline despite a slight upsurge elsewhere in Russia, and illness and accident rates are markedly higher at this time of year, he said.

On the plus side, he noted, Russia’s strengthening market economy offers northerners more choices for improving both mood and diet.

“In Soviet times, everyone lived at the same level. If there was any cabbage at all in the stores, everyone could afford it. Now, there are at least 10 kinds of cabbage and every other kind of produce, but not every family is in a position to buy all that it needs,” Mararitsa said. “Still, I think it’s better now. When I was growing up here, the only fruit in my vocabulary was apples.”

Antidepressants can ease the symptoms felt by many northerners at this time of year. But doctors note that combating the seasonal syndrome with medication can produce more negative results than positive, especially in patients with other physical disorders like heart disease or high-blood pressure.

Light therapy--exposure to artificial ultraviolet light when the sun does not provide it--can help keep the body’s natural rhythms in tune, but most health-care professionals advise physical activity and a vitamin-rich diet as the most effective treatments for the winter blahs.

“Light therapy can help, especially psychologically, but what is needed is training of the body,” Demin said. “Swimming or gymnastics or skiing are options throughout the year, so overcoming Polar Night Stress is mostly a matter of personal incentive.”

The measurably different attitudes toward winter among the young and those of middle age or older attest to the doctor’s theory.

“During the polar night, everyone wants to sleep all the time, like hibernating bears,” said 16-year-old Yevgenia Yegorova, an 11th-grader at School No. 2 in Murmansk. “But there are ways to escape these feelings of fatigue and unhappiness. I like to listen to music, walk around with friends or go skiing or skating. That’s more fun than feeling down all the time.”

Despite the teenager’s perky optimism, school doctor Rima Kalinina said as many as 80% of students exhibit effects of the polar night, from flagging energy and vision problems to a marked propensity to catch colds and flu.

“The sun is everything for us,” the pale, languid doctor observed. “I was born here and have lived here my whole life, but I have never gotten used to such winters.”

Schools on the Kola Peninsula shorten the study day by half an hour each winter, hoping the extra free time will allow youths to get a bit more sleep and be sharper despite the lulling darkness, said Larisa Putistina, vice principal of School No. 2.

In the Soviet era, elementary students were routinely exposed to quartz-light treatments, arrayed around illuminated poles each morning in their underpants and protective glasses. But education budget cuts and changing philosophies on how best to combat winter’s ravages have relegated the light sessions to prescription-only practice in public clinics.

“We were forced to stop the quartz-light treatments for lack of space, which is unfortunate,” said Putistina, whose high school was forced by federal funding cuts to take in elementary classes and convert to double sessions.

Newcomers Most Vulnerable to Stress

The Kola Peninsula’s battle against the elements promises to remain an annual affliction, but a Russian government effort to reduce the role of industry in the Far North could deter newcomers, who are the most prone to Polar Night Stress.

“There is an attitude in the country now that it makes no sense to carry on huge industrial activities in such an environment,” said Mikhail Demin, deputy head of the Murmansk city administration. “The population has been shrinking slightly each of the past three or four years, and we are expecting that trend to continue.”

In the meantime, he noted, attention has to be paid to the complaints and discomforts of Kola residents.

“There are big, common problems associated with the polar night that we are working on by building sports complexes and improving medical and dental services,” said the city official, who added that people in the North have more health and dental problems than elsewhere because of the widespread inclination to hunker down at home in the harsh-weather months rather than exercise and maintain a proper diet.

“But for many, coping with the cold and darkness comes down to very small things,” he said. “We get a lot of positive feedback from hosting our annual jazz festival in January, and even from those little lights we string in the trees.”

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Polar Night

Hundreds of thousands of workers deployed to Russia’s Kola Peninsula during the Soviet development rush are subjected to relentlessly dark winters, cruel temperatures and a susceptibility to the physical and psychological burdens of Polar Night Stress.