in the

Warm heart-beats

coldest spot on earth |

By JOHN WEIR

MOSCOW

HOSPITAL or a rest-home
is ideal for acciden-

tally, so to say, getting to
know interesting people. There’s
both leisure and opportunity... .

I was glad when the tall,
strapping. young man with clip-
ped moustaches invited me to a
game of checkers (my chess not
being up to the mark where I
dare to accept challenges from
Soviet players). Over the board
we exchanged brief biographical
data and I learned that his name
was Konstantin Shifrin, that he
originally came from Ukraine,
and that he was a geologist

3: $. Wallace

She was not bright, despite her eyes

And still the girl was smart

For though she could not memorize
_ She learned all things by heart.*

pe Singer married the beloved and lamented Pat
Forkin and accompanied him when he went to Mos-
cow to report for the Clarion. She has worked there
ever since. Here are extracts from a recent letter:
“Do you know what thrilled
the Hermitage (I’ve seen the Vatican), not Pushkin’s house
nor any of the famous places. but the cell where Vera

working in Yakutia. He added

that his home was in “‘the cold-
est spot on earth”.
' or

Later, walking together for

hours in the park, I learned that
this was not just a turn of

a phrase. The lowest tempera-
ture officially recorded in the
Soviet Union was precisely in
the Oimyakonsk district of Ya-
kutia: 99.4 degrees below zero!
The lowest temperature record-
ed on the North American con-
tinent (at Snag in the Yukon, in
1947) was the comparatively
warm 81 degrees below, which
makes . Oimyakonsk freezing

by side

me most in Leningrad? Not

Figner spent 20 years of her life in solitary confinement.
After her release she was distressed to have anyone speak

to her. She remained a hermit to the day of her death,

treated with all honors by the Soviet authorities, although
she was opposed to the new society. It was her book that
finally made me enter the movement. Her father told her

to be consistent and act as she thought. So I applied it to

myself too.

“My old age pension starts in February when I turn
55. I plan to start an English conversation group for young-
sters learning English in school. It, would come under the
cultural activities of the house committee and would pay
nothing but I would feel useful. They have all kinds of
schemes to keep pensioners in the swim. Even the ill-
educated ones do baby sitting, organized through the
house committee.

“I have just finished reading The Group by Mary
McCarthy. In case you haven’t read it, it’s about upper-
crust women who graduate from Vasaar, and their empty
lives. I’m glad we don’t have to worry about status sym-
bols here, nor keeping up with the Joneses. It’s more com-
fortable and you can spend your energies where they will
‘do the most good. :

- “Albert Moravia also writes that kind of story only
nothing ever happens there except a bit of sex and some
dirty thinking.-It’s really dreary reading and I’m amazed
that he has been so much the rage in the West .. . at

in Italian and Russian and English, and except for Cioc-
cara, a war story, I don’t find anything to like.”

*When I wrote that verse on Phoebe, several decades
ago, I slandered her intellect in order to emphasize her
character. ~

agaonenenennnnts

least that’s what I’m told. I’ve read quite a bit of his stuff,

champion of the world—on land,
that is, for Soviet scientists
have recorded the still chillier
low of 124 degrees below zero
in the Antarctica.

My new friend showed me the
location of his northern home on
the map.

The Lena goldfields are quite
well known throughout ‘the
world, for they have been work-
ed for generations.

Well, Oimayaknsk is about
600 miles ‘still farther to the
east, and it too is “gold coun-
try”, though working there only
began two decades ago.

“Kostya” Shifrin went there
10 years ago, soon after gra-
duating from the geological de-
partment of the Gorky Univer-
sity in his native Kharkov. He
told stories of ordeals and ad-
venture, of young men and wo-

men geologists battling blizzards .

in the frozen wilderness, of
rescues by reindeer-driving Ya-
kuts, and of thrilling discove-
ries, that rivalled anything Jack
London wrote about the gold
rush to the Klondike.

Of course, he told me, it isn’t
always so cold there. Tempera-
tures drop to below 58 degrees
only during two months out of
the 12, and in the summer it
even gets hot, people raise their
own vegetables.

Yes, there are people there
now, thriving settlements where
only a short while back an oc-
casional family of Yakuts or
Eneks ventured with their herds
of reindeer. The district now
has some 30,000 population, the
great majority “immigrants”
from various parts of the Soviet
Union. Seeing that the territory
embraces some 120,000 square
miles, the “density of popula-
tion” is not very great, but it is
permanent and is solidly based
on a local industry—extracting
gold.

This is done by surface min-
ing, where the metal is near the
surface; shaft mining where it
has to be brought up from lodes
deep underground; and “boat
dredging”. This latter is a fas-
cinating method: a river is dam-
med to create an artificial lake
in a depression where streams
had been bringing and deposit-
ing gold together with sand
from the mountain, a boat (“the
size of a_ three-story house’) is
launched on this lake, and its
giant scoops bring the sand up
from the bottom into the boat,
where the gold is separated
from it.

In the old days people could
live here only in yurts (tents of
nomads) or wooden houses be-
cause of the permafrost. Soviet
scientists, however, solved the
problem of construction of large
buildings on the frozen earth, °

In the “coldest spot on the
earth” there now stands a bust-

-

Soviet Siberia’s limitless wealth is being iapped by the
ment of numefous enterprises—large and smail. This is
mining combine in the Miao Chan mountains near the An

‘ ling town, Ust-Neri, with a fine

House of Culture, hospitals, a
new sports. arena, schools
(“even a musical school”), lib-
raries and all the other aittri-
butes of a modern city. They
have their own newspaper, pub-
lished both in the Yakut and
Russian languages, see new
films at about the same time
that folks in Moscow or Kiev
do, airplanes bring them news-
papers from the capital on the
following morning, etc. There
are concerts and plays given by
visiting “stars”, and their own
amateur dramatic group has al-
ready won the title of People’s
Theatre, so there’s no lack of
entertainment.

Life does not “freeze up” dur-
ing the two cold months either.
Buses and taxis are heated.
Work — except in surface min-
ing — goes on without interrup-
tion. All the shops keep open.
Only very rarely do schools
close down for a day because of
the weather.

I thought that food would
have to be’ brought in by. air,
but it seems that airplanes and
helicopters are used almost ex-
clusively for passenger service,
all supplies (apart from vege-
tables provided by greenhouses
the year round and dairy pro-
ducts from collective farms in
the southern half of the Yakut
autonomous republic) are

_than any other kind.

brought by truck and
during the warm mont

This spot was “a
comradeship-in-arms” d
war, Kostya told me
planes brought lend-le
tary supplies from Ca
the United States
Soviet pilots then pic
up and carried them to
lines. It also serves as
of friendship” at the
time: travellers from
America to the USSR
versa often land here’
hop across the “top
world”.

>

I wanted to know
chose this far northern =
when he graduated 1
university in his sunny ~

“Why, what greater
could a fledging geol?
cept?” he asked in won

I haven’t written mu
Konstantin Shifrin hi
know that he has a
two kiddies, to whom
phoned from Moscow |
studying here at th
know he visits his
mother in Kharkov ev®
And yet every time +
turn the conversation
sonal questions, he
telling about his nor
his work, with both
he is deeply in love
that’s a better portrait

February 26, 1965—PACIFIC TRIBUNE