anita līcis-ribak's blog

Пос. Черский - to go or not to go: that is not the question.

It will be 25 years this June since I left пос.Черский/the town of Cherskiy in northeast Russia where I lived through my adolescence, my first kiss, my first (and only) 'deadly' confrontation with my father, and many a dream, including a non-realisable dream of escape from home - not very original, being a product of teenage brain.

I am feeling a strong pull to go back and revisit (not so much the trials of adolescence!). The 25 years have added new lines to my face, and presumably to my brain.  Some of the topographic expressions of both may be attributed to the string of information I have been digesting, arriving in a continuous telegraph that started 25 years ago, after I left Cherskiy. The year was 1986, and the geyser of Glasnost had opened up the floodgates of information available to the wary but truth-hungry consumers. It's about the history of the place. In fact, it's about the history of the whole country, USSR then, and how its jagged edges cut up the life of my family, and all other nucleuses of that society (The USSR always proudly maintained that each family is a nucleus of society. And then, it would go on to explode this 'nucleus' from within).

I was telling about my new travel plans to a close friend recently, and she told me, oh it is going to be wonderful, have fun! I thought for a second, and said, uhm, well, I don't think so, and went to the book shelf to take down a behemoth of a tome, called GULAG. This is my very handy travel guide to the place I once called home.

I don't even know how does one get there these days. The transportation system in Russia today is as perplexing as it was during Soviet times. I did some research on the web, and found out that a company called Polar Airlines does fly small planes to Cherskiy. Their website has a map of all their travel routes, all originating in Yakutsk, the capital of Saha republic, and does include Cherskiy. I followed their link to the flight schedules and rates, and found no mention of Cherskiy there. This puzzling discrepancy may as well be a harbinger of things to come, shall I embark on this journey. I've got the bug now, and the only way of ridding myself of it is by obliging....

I will take liberty of blaming my new affliction on Ian Frazier, with his Travels in Siberia, a wonderfully engaging book, alive with characters, history, and humor, which I just finished reading. He took me back home, to Siberia, the easy way: a mere $20-or-so for my hard cover copy, on a warm living room sofa.

The 'hard way' would entail 24 hours of flying on at least 3 different planes, through 16 time zones, and eating dry kielbasa for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a duration of the trip. Did I mention the $2,500 I would be required to furbish to pay for the treatment of this delirium of mine?.... (I welcome suggestions on what health insurance might cover such a 'treatment'!) $2,500 is what it would take to come by the half-dosen airplane tickets I would need to procure, to get me to Cherskiy. Trust me, I would walk, except there are no roads that lead there.  Not in a reasonable season, anyway. (You can walk on the river ice roads, in winter.  But then, would you?...)  I would take a train. But thankfully, there were limits to just how far the great Soviet railway system, with its millions of free slave laborers, would reach. No railways anywhere near Chersky, aslo known as Nizhnie Kresty, one of Gulag's northernmost labor concentration camps, listed as Nr. 27 on some lists, absent altogether from most of Gulag camp maps.

This photograph from the archives of the Museum of Exile and Resistance in Kaunas, Lithuania, was taken in the early 1950s. It shows one of Gulag's gold-mining concentration camps on the Kolyma river in northeast Russia.

Google Maps tells me they could not calculate directions, nor the travel distance between Anchorage, Alaska, and the town of Cherskiy, Russia...

Every day, between yesterday and tomorrow - 4

What do you think of, when you think of BLACK? 

In the Tower: Mark Rothko at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The show runs until January 2011. 

An old picture with a Kolyma story

This recently recovered picture of me, at 13 or 14, was taken by a friend, on one such daynight, at around 2a.m., after we had come across a graveyard of crashed airplanes amidst endless blossoming tundra.  

There were no roads leading to our town*.  The only way of getting there was by plane.  So naturally there were no runaways.  If you were a kid, and you had a problem you had to deal with it without changing your geography.  Skipping town was not an option.  Ironically though, we had a lot of freedom...   

*The origins of the town, called Че́рский (Chersky) are worth mentioning.  It was named after the Polish scientist and explorer Jan Czerski who was exiled to Siberia in the 19th century.  He managed to turn his demise into a fertile ground (no pun intended) by becoming one of the most prolific explorers of the region.  Conveniently distanced to an unimaginable degree from rest of humanity, and positioned on the banks of the mighty, and notorious, river Колыма́ (Kolyma), the town was founded in 1920-s on premises far removed from the noble aspirations of its namesake: it was one of the most dreaded labor camps of the Stalin’s era, originally called Нижние Кресты (Nizhnije Kresti).  There is an old joke, saying: When you come to Kolyma, come visit us!  To which the invitee replies: No, you better visit *us*!