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

10 weeks

24 hosts

Total mileage 13,411 (21,583 km)

BY PLANE: 7,094 (11,416 km)

BY BUS/CAR: 3,870 (6,229 km)

BY TRAIN: 2,422 (3,898 km)

ON HORSEBACK: 25 (40 km)

WE ARE STANDINGat the edge of a crater; behind the barrier is an abyss 1,722 feet deep. “Welcome to the asshole of the world!” shouts the director of the Department of Youth and Culture. She holds her cell phone high to snap a few selfies of our small group. Smile. Click . Victory signs. Click . Hands in the air. “Closer together!” Click . “Now, everyone look goofy!” Click, click, click . Like kids at Disneyland or in Red Square.

The air smells of sulfur and burnt wood; the evening sun hangs low in the sky, bathing the dusty haze in red light. Romantic sunset, apocalypse-style. On the railings of the viewing platform there are love locks with the names of sweethearts: Yuliya and Sasha; Zhenya and Sveta; Vyacheslav and Mariya. Eternal unions sealed at the gates of Hell; lovers’ vows at the most absurd tourist attraction in the world.

I don’t know the people with whom I am being photographed. They have only just picked me up at a tiny airport where there were more helicopters than airplanes and more junk planes than functioning ones.

They came as three: the cultural attaché, the business relations consultant, and the student. So far we haven’t managed to start a conversation; on the drive from the airport, the music was too loud. In the Lada Priora with Street Hunters emblazoned on the rear windshield, the seats vibrated. The student’s driving style—he liked to take both hands off the steering wheel at seventy-five miles per hour to wave his arms around to the music—marked him out as someone who already at twenty didn’t expect a lot from this life.

Where the hell am I?

The answer from Wikipedia: Mirny, Sakha Republic, in the far east of Russia, 37,188 inhabitants according to the 2010 census. Mayor Sergei Basyrov, postal code 678170–678175 and 678179.

The answer from Google Maps: ringed by Chernyshevsky, Almazny, Tas-Yuryakh, Chamcha, Lensk, Suntar, Sheya, Malykay, Nyurba, Verkhnevilyuysk, Nakanno, Olyokminsk, and Morkoka. It would be misleading to call these “neighboring towns,” however, as they are spread out within a radius of 250 miles from Mirny.

The travel guide doesn’t mention it. Even for Lonely Planet Mirny is a bit too lonely.

And my own answer? I’m exactly where I want to be. Anyone can take selfies in front of Big Ben, and why visit the Taj Mahal when there are already umpteen million photos of it? I’ve seen enough beauty in my travels that I’m ready for the other extreme. I don’t mean the ugliness of a cockroach on the kitchen floor or old car tires in a roadside ditch. I’m talking about anti-aesthetics on a scale that makes you faint. Travel as a horror film or post-apocalyptic thriller: Mad Max , not La La Land . Ugliness with a wow factor; ugliness with a past. It’s only the median that’s boring; the extreme ends of the aesthetic scale are where things get interesting.

The “asshole of the world,” as the locals call it, is a masterpiece of engineering. It took decades of work and clever structural calculations. It’s the second-largest excavation of its type in the world. And it has hidden treasures. So far, sounds like a World Heritage candidate. However, the open mine at Mirny is no feast for the eyes. For decades, diamonds were extracted here, a few ounces of precious stones per ton of dirt. Glittering riches are still hidden somewhere in the morass. Slopes of gray dirt lead downward; a couple of rusty pipes are all that remain of the conveyor system. Beyond the rim on the opposite side of the crater, the eight-story apartment blocks of Mirny look like a Lego landscape.

In 2004, Alrosa, Russia’s giant mining company, closed the Mir mine—the name means “peace”—for the simple reason that if they had continued excavating, the bottomless pit would have devoured buildings in the city. Now the diamond prospectors have to work underground.

“Do you get many tourists here?” I ask the cultural attaché.

“Ha ha, no, actually, just the locals,” she answers. “That’s why all three of us came to meet you; it was something special.” But recently an Italian filmmaker had visited, wanting to shoot a movie here next year. “I’m going to casting tomorrow; you can come along. But first of all, a tour of the city.”

In its best years, Mir was the most profitable diamond mine in the world. The biggest diamond that was ever found here weighed 342.5 carats. It is lemon yellow, as big as a cocktail tomato, and worth a number of million dollars. A sensational find deserves a sensational name, so they called the diamond “The 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” The “60th Anniversary of Komsomol” (200.7 carats) was also blasted here. Not, however, the “70th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War” diamond (76.07 carats), which comes from the Yubileynaya mine, further to the north.

“Got your seat belt on?” asks the student, then off we race, slaloming over the dirt track toward town. Past a hillock with massive scrapped excavators and the inscription Mir 1957–2004 . The Lada bounces over potholes, tires scream, and the student’s arms dance to the beat. The two women from the municipal administration sing along to one of Elbrus Dzhanmirzoev’s songs at the tops of their voices: I’m a brodyaga, a tramp with no money, but still I’m going to marry the prettiest girl .

After being on the road for a couple of weeks I’ve become used to being warmly greeted, but I have never experienced such a reception committee. Because of the musical accompaniment, the city tour lacks a bit of detail; it consists of the two women in the back seat yelling out the local attractions. “Main road, Lenin Street! Downtown! School! Library! Church! Fire Department! War Memorial! Stalin bust!”

Bleak concrete skyscrapers, many fairly new, and long, two-story wooden buildings from earlier years line the streets. There are no ground-floor entrances—all the houses are built on stilts because of the permafrost. Without these platforms the ground would melt in the eastern Siberian winters from the heating in the dwellings. “You should come again in January, then it’s minus forty, sometimes even minus fifty!” shouts the business relations consultant.

We get out of the car briefly at Stalin. The mustachioed dictator in dark-gray stone, wearing a buttoned-up uniform with a Soviet star on the lapel, looks proudly toward the city center. On Stalin’s orders, after sanctions had catapulted western Russia into an economic crisis, the Sakha Republic was fervently probed for diamonds in the 1950s. That’s the only reason there’s a mine here, and the only reason there’s a city here.