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