Stephan Orth - Behind Putin's Curtain - Friendships and Misadventures Inside Russia [aka Couchsurfing in Russia]

In the summer there was a false report in the British tabloid Daily Express claiming that British subjects could also apply for pieces of land there. Accompanying the article were spectacular pictures of mountains and bears that looked so inviting that of the fifty thousand participants in a reader’s poll, forty thousand could imagine moving to eastern Russia.

In actual fact the offer was initially only for people from Sakha and the neighboring regions, and a few months later it was extended to include other Russians. “We’re afraid that the Chinese will try to get a lot of land,” says Kirill. “Actually, that’s not the plan, but there’s so much corruption here.” He could imagine starting up a farmstead. Selling milk, meat, and cream. One of his uncles earns his living this way and he could learn a lot from him.

There’s no lack of space in the region. Sakha is almost as big as India, but has a population of less than half a million. The reason for this is not only the poor infrastructure but also the extremely harsh winters. Temperatures of minus forty or fifty degrees Fahrenheit are not unusual. It’s so cold that people keep their small children indoors in December and January, they can’t wear glasses outdoors because they freeze to the skin, and they leave car motors running all night to be able to use them the next day (unless they have heated garages and wrap up the batteries in warm blankets). All buildings in Sakha are on stilts because otherwise the heat from the houses would melt the permafrost, which is bad for the foundations. You can often take shortcuts by walking under a high-rise building.

A tunnel beneath a large road in a city; well worth using, as crossing a road during rush hour can be lethal. There are sometimes interesting opportunities for shopping as well: you can buy fake university diplomas, health certificates, and pirated DVDs. Nowadays these commodities can only be found in the outskirts of larger cities, as selling has been curbed in the central areas.

“It is winter here for nine months and summer for three,” says Kirill’s mother, Lyuba. We visit her in the somewhat rundown village of Oy, which translates to “ouch” and is full of wooden houses, some forty miles from the city. Car wrecks litter the side of the gravel road, and at the entrance to the village, the tanks of an abandoned dairy rust away. There is no sewage system; the expense of installing a facility that could withstand extreme frost would be too great. Instead every household has an outhouse in the garden. The surroundings consist of endless forests and barren, fallow land; new landowners can’t expect an easy life here. “But in return, we don’t suffer from natural catastrophes—no earthquakes,” says Lyuba, a cheerful retired nurse who has short, brownish-red-dyed hair and wears a flowery patterned top.

She doesn’t care who governs in Moscow; the capital is six time zones away. Then she tots up the reasons she is content with her life out here: “I get a pension of 20,000 rubles a month”—around US$320—“and my husband and mother do too. Gas in winter costs 12,000 rubles a month, plus we pay for electricity, but there are few other expenses. We grow almost everything in the garden, my husband doesn’t smoke or drink, so we manage just fine. Guess what! My second son smokes, although he’s a surgeon. He really should know better, but he blames stress. Can you come back on Saturday for the potato harvest?”

“I’d love to, but I’ll be in Mirny by then.”

“Pity. By the way, the most beautiful women come from Vladivostok!”

“Great! I’ll be there in ten days.”

On the return journey Kirill says that visiting home always reminds him of World of Warcraft .

“There’s a place at the beginning where the hero tanks up on energy. It’s exactly the same for me in Oy.”

Maybe he and his small family will soon have their own loading unit, on his own hectare of land somewhere in the cold expanses of Sakha, with Anya, Wanya, and the dog.

THERE ARE TWOnatural injustices in the world: beauty and natural resources. People with symmetrical faces don’t have to try as hard to be liked. Countries with oil and gas don’t have to be as innovative to become rich.

If you combine beauty and resources, you end up with diamonds. When you look at a diamond mine you can see that everything has its price; there’s always a balance. For example, in Mirny: people seeking beauty (in this case, glittering stones) have to accept ugliness (in this case, a huge, gaping hole in the ground).

In a general store in the small town they sell souvenir plates with pictures of the “asshole of the world.” To make the finished article optically tolerable the artist has painted a yellow bird, a church, and a bowl full of diamonds around the rim. Small plates cost 500 rubles, the larger ones 800. They don’t sell particularly well, the owner tells me.

The day after my arrival in Mirny I meet the director of the Department of Youth and Culture in the library. Her name is Marina; she has black, curly hair and black eyes, both inherited from her parents, who come from Azerbaijan and Georgia. A round pendant hangs from her neck with Forever Young written on it; at twenty-three, she is pretty young for her impressive job title.

Today, however, she is pursuing even greater ambitions: to be a film star. The Italian director Saverio Pesapane is holding an audition as he’s planning to film in Mirny with grant funds from the Venice Film Festival. The screenplay is about a young man who wants to leave the city for good; he has already bought his plane ticket. Then strange things start to happen, which could be taken as omens that maybe he should remain where he is. A mysterious shaman in the snow plays a significant role, and in the encounters between them, viewers have to puzzle out what is reality and what is illusion.

Eight people have come to the audition: seven men and Marina. I think her chances are good, and not only because she is the only woman among the applicants. Her personality seems to be eminently suited to the performing arts: she’s a feisty woman with plenty of bounce who always speaks and laughs a little bit louder than necessary, as is often true of people on the smaller side.

Marina is called into an adjoining room; the door is between two metal bookshelves, one labeled “New Books” and the other “Russian Literature.”

I get into a conversation with two young men with short, practical hairstyles who have hooked their thumbs in the pockets of their jeans, which always looks less casual than it’s supposed to. They say that Mirny is pretty boring after a while for people of their age. There are only two places to go dancing—Malibu, where there’s a fight almost every night, and The Globe, where it’s a bit quieter. To make up for this, there is plenty of good hunting to be had in the surrounding forests—elk, reindeer, geese, and ducks. A couple of days ago, however, a hunter was killed by a bear, which happens from time to time.

Marina comes back. “It went well,” she beams. “The director wanted to know lots about my training and about the city.” She found it very interesting what he said about his choice of location: “You live here in a unique place, far away from the rest of the world, with this huge hole in the ground. Maybe someone who comes from somewhere else can better appreciate this peculiarity and see something in Mirny that you don’t see.”