“Dying is prohibited”: four months in the mining town on a polar island

originally written in russian, first published in “Knife.media” online magazine, 2018

I’m digging into the frozen ground with a swiss army knife – black rocky soil is hardly giving in, but finally I’ve managed to scrape out a few inches. I’m putting my yanked-out tooth in that hole and building an improvised mound out of rocks over it. Way down below, at the mountain’s foot, coal-fired CHP pipes are billowing out smoke above the mining town of Barentsburg – Russian enclave on Spitsbergen island, less than a thousand kilometers away from the North Pole. The blinding sun is gleaming in the ocean – it’s 3 a.m. and time to descend.

That tooth was torturing me ever since the ship – awakened by the sound of ice rattling over ship’s deck, right behind my cabin’s outer wall, first thing I did was washing down the painkiller with a sip of flat cherry soda from a can, then shaving and stepping up for a shift in my bar at the stern. Every four days our ferry was briefly moored in Saint Petersburg, but I hardly had any time to smuggle home some cheese¹, which I was hauling from Tallinn or Stockholm, and rush back to the vessel – to ply the next swarm of seasick-melted passengers. Late at night, after working hours we used to gather with the other bartenders in an empty mess room to play “what I’m going to do when I’m off the ship”.

That January was the very last time I got off to shore – the ship was sold and most of the crew have lost their jobs. That very same moment my girlfriend left me (hi, Nastia), so I locked myself in an empty rental apartment near the harbor and there, all alone under Christmas lights in the kitchen, I’ve taken to systematically draining the bourbon bottle I had grabbed in a duty-free shop. When I hit the bottom (in every way), as I woke up one morning and went to wash the dishes, I noticed a job offer from the “Arcticugol” company in my e-mail inbox. Puzzled, I’ve scrolled through this correspondence and, after quite a challenge, managed to retrace that a night before I sent them my resume for a vacancy which I randomly found somewhere in-between porn-sites and lists of prescription-free sleeping pills. Two weeks later I was on a plane to Spitsbergen with my shipmate Artem – the only person who turned out to be reckless enough to accompany me - the next four months and three days we spent there, bartending in the northernmost brewery in the world.

Spitsbergen archipelago – a frozen piece of dryland at the very edge of the Arctic ocean – has been, per the 1920 treaty, recognized to be a part of Norway as a territory with unique geopolitical status, whereby around 50 countries, including Russia, have equal rights to conduct industrial, commercial, and scientific operations in this region. Russia is represented there by the Arcticugol National Trust, which has inherited three mining settlements from its USSR past: Grumant, Pyramiden, and Barentsburg, and while the first two have been more or less closed since the 90s, Barentsburg’s mine remains functioning. I first stumbled upon an article about Spitsbergen around five years ago and immediately fell in love with this absurd: people live on a polar island to mine nowadays-unmarketable coal, most part of which is used for the needs of the local CHP, which are to keep mining the coal. Ever since that moment I’ve had a great notion to dig in this panopticon from the inside, but unfortunately there was not much tourist activity going on. However now, thanks to the belated post-industrialization, it is growing fast, so my humble bartending skills somehow found its application there.

Every two months Arcticugol arranges a charter flight for its employees from Moscow to Longyearbyen – Norwegian capital of the archipelago, administration of which in fact has not more weight, than a cadastral map of the Moon: in contrast to all of the international conventions the archipelago still remains a no man’s land - no marks are stamped in your passport on arrival, so, according to my documents, for the entire four months I was there I’ve been nowhere – just set off from Moscow and came back. In the airport we’ve crossed our paths with the employees who had just finished their contracts and were about to head back on the same plane – this is how the shifts are changing. There’s no such thing as maintained roads between the settlements on the island; for environmental reasons the only inland transport allowed out of towns are tracked vehicles, so at the beginning of every winter Russian guides chart a new common snowmobile path, kilometer by kilometer reclaiming its thin line on the very border between this white wasteland and the pitch black drown-out night.

Longyear is a place where one can find the northernmost skate ramp. A board tied up to my backpack caused understandable curiosity, so I was worrying about its safety, when our luggage was sent off to be carried by a barge, while we got on a helicopter which took us straight to Barentsburg. On our way there I was stubbornly staring through the window despite the sun last being seen hours ago on our way from the plane. I first managed to make out the vaguest shapes of the opposite shore of the gulf only after a couple of weeks, when the polar night slowly started to yield its power.

Pyramiden and Barentsburg were once the biggest and the most technologically advanced settlements on the island, with specialists from all around the country vying to work here for northern allowances and outstanding labor conditions. After the USSR has collapsed, the demographic scale leaned toward Norway, and now Longyearbyen population is at least four times that of Barentsburg, which has almost no permanent residents – only shift workers, which add up to around 450 people at any given time. However, both of the towns are dwarfed when compared to the polar bear population – so it is strictly forbidden by the contract to leave without a rifle and a flare gun, or at least without a guide’s assistance. Moreover, at the legislative level it is prohibited to die or be born here: permafrost would push any burial back to the surface and make it a perfect bait for the mighty predator.

An old “pazik”² took us from the helipad to the dorm campus, which, during an introductory briefing, was assigned to be our new home for the following months. A long hallway on the first floor connects common kitchen, two lavatories and three bunkbed-furnished living rooms – two for men and one for women. The one we moved in was occupied by six persons: me, Artem, one guide from Petrozavodsk, two Karelian cooks, and one Ukrainian. Since the USSR times the national composition of miners has been dominated by a diaspora from Donetsk³, known for its coal industry. Now, owing to well-known circumstances, many of them are moving here together with their families, signing their wives to work in the laundry, canteen or the shop, because they don’t have any job at home anymore (in some cases – no home itself). Thus, in the hotel we were supposed to work in, we’ve met our future colleague – the bartender, whose father was a carpenter in the local workshop, and his mother – a dishwasher in the kitchen.

Barentsburg looks like a block of “khrushchyovkas”⁴ from some working-class outskirts, which, on an odd occasion, got teleported to the North Pole – together with its inhabitants, some of which seem to not notice this landscape substitution, so the town has quite a typical atmosphere of a Russian province, where countrymen’s cohesion and solidarity somehow mix up with constant neighbor-arguing and gossips. A plaque on khrushchyovka wall describes it as “first skyscrapers on the island”: naturally, due to the seismic conditions, heights of buildings in Longyearbyen are limited to two or three stories, and, in contrast to this, Barentsburg’s architecture looks like an inconsistent, yet noble memorial of the majestic breadth of soviet urbanization. In its arctic version all of the buildings gained more than a meter in walls thickness and have been raised on piles along the narrow coastline at the foot of a mountain range – in full compliance with the directions of winds, which are bothering here much more than the cold, which because of gulfstream seldomly goes below -25 °C, but it sweeps so heavily that for the very first time I’ve felt how my eyeballs are frozen under the eaves.

This familiar provincial mood is completed by the essential infrastructure set: a hospital, a school for miners’ children, two shops – a grocery and a hardware one. Prices are close to the Russian averages, payments are processed with a special type of a corporate card, which are also being used for transfers of the part of a monthly salary employee wants to use before finishing his contract – in a word, it’s only possible to figure out this system after personal experience. Supplies are delivered once in one and a half months with a ship from Germany, and on these days queue for scarce fresh vegetables stretch up to the monument saying “Our goal is communism”, which now of course has more of a decorative function, but sugar and vodka are still only available by special limit tickets – one kilogram and liter of each per month per person. Quite predictably, these tickets have a high value in the local market.

Next to the shore there’s also a wooden self-service chapel: the door is open, but nobody is inside, only icons and the Scripture – church officials are rare guests on the island. A bit further – a soviet cultural and sport complex with a library and a concert hall, where movies are screened from time to time – a new “Star Wars” episode which was released around that time looked particularly surreal in this surrounding. In that same place community recitals with singing and dancing are being performed on holidays – I was preparing myself for the worst, when I once decided to take a look at it out of curiosity, and was honestly surprised with how enthusiastically these miners I knew from the bar act themselves on the stage. In the evenings, when the gym was empty, I sometimes used to go there to throw a ball into the basket, but I was impressed even more by an old pool filled with salty water straight from the sea, heated to 28 °C. I swam there for hours during my first days, until, to my own embarrassment, found out that all the newly arrived are supposed to go through two-week quarantine: in the low-microbial archipelago environment all of them are the Noah’s Ark for mainland bacteria.

The above-listed ecosystem in its entirety is an undisputable property of the Arcticugol Trust, main office of which occupies a huge bureaucratic labyrinth-castle, under which there’s the mine entrance (sic!). Therefore, financial relations between the trust and its employees are a mirror reflection of the inward-looped local coal industry: the salary that they pay comes back to the company in a form of medicine bills, food and accommodation, which includes, beside the internet run here from Norwegian neighbors, also a special rent for using the furniture.

I was lucky: soon enough I was transferred from the hotel to the recently renovated bar on the second story of the brewery, which had been opened as an experiment by the local department of tourism about three years earlier. The beer is produced using modern Belgian technologies and is traded in the town by the bar, the hotel, and the workers’ canteen, where many times I’ve witnessed the grandest feasts of miners at shifted tables. I’ve had a key to the bar, so after hours I used to sit there and read a book instead of going back to the dorm, missing my old good ship cabin with Jarmush poster on the door of my own private bathroom. Sometimes during the night we would take an old weary Toyota van, which we normally used to bring some stuff from the warehouse, and to the accompaniment of sledge dogs barking from the kennel, where I was hanging out a lot on my days-off, we were driving around with Artem by the same unpaved empty roads along the coast to CHP toward the helipad and back, chasing the northern lights – for the first two weeks our necks were stiff due to our heads constantly thrown back.

In the morning of February 23rd the whole town gathered in the central square to celebrate unofficial, but the most important local holiday – day of greeting the sun. After the polar night it should have shown itself above the horizon for the shortest while, but long enough to allow locals to roast some barbeque out of pork from the recently closed farm. I was waiting for it no less than others, but that day my mind was occupied with different things: painkillers didn’t help anymore, so for the whole night I was tossing and turning in my bunk because of a toothache, counting minutes for the hospital to open. At nine a.m., horrified, I’ve realized that the hospital is closed due to the holiday, so I went looking for the dentist on my own. Dressed in a bathrobe he opened the door and rubbed his forehead: why today? Moaning, I almost fell over his doorstep – alright, alright, in half an hour by the hospital. When I stepped out his office, my legs were jelly – my hand was squeezing that bloody tooth root for the hell of it. The very tip of the sun was still above the forlorn mountains – I’ve remembered the prohibition of burials and suddenly realized what I’m going to do with my tooth.

In the springtime polar day is taking over the night, and there’s a short period when the solar day is almost balanced, as much as it’s possible in conditions of the 78th latitude. That was the time we’ve began taking walks to the closest mountain, flat top of which was spared by all the winds for some reason. Artem was consumed with a constant hunt for photos of sunrises, polar foxes and reindeers – starved through the winter they lost all fear and were coming to town to pick up bread leftovers from the local bakery. The first time we missed the sunrise – around half past four a.m. chifir⁵ in the thermos was finished, we were frozen to the bone and headed back; looked around on a halfway we’ve discovered that the sun disc finally went out the horizon. Cursing, Artem was reaching for his camera, when the sun went down again. Both astonished on our places, we were trying to figure out what had just happened, and have almost agreed that we’ve imagined it, when the mirage repeated. And again. It took us a few minutes to realize – in the fragile polar twilight the sun was sliding by a long tangent along the horizon, peeking in-and-out mountain to mountain.

At about the same time first cruise ferries have started to come to the town from Longyearbyen, and its foreign passengers have brought some variety to the main traffic of organized tourist groups mostly consisting of wealthy Russians, that our guides were bringing here on snowmobiles during winter. Unlike the miners, who were mostly supposed to stay intown per the terms of their contracts, tourism department workers were theoretically allowed to visit Longyear with the same ferries. By means of some tricky combinations I’ve occasionally managed to get two and a half days-off in a row and once stepped aboard of such vessel. After two hours of a slow sail along the tremendous emptiness of wild fjords between the two towns, I got off to a whole other world: 60-something kilometers away from Barentsburg there is a clean and neat European town – passing by supermarkets, cafes, and bright-painted houses on its well-paved streets safely are moving dozens of cars. I’ve dropped my backpack in the Trust workers’ guesthouse and headed straight to the ramp, where a gang of Norwegian kids was hanging around – at the sight of my skateboard they perked up, begging to borrow it for a ride, so I couldn’t resist. Arctic here was tamed, antlers above the doors seemed to be made of plastic – it missed the rough feeling of polar romance. But still, after three months in Barentsburg, I couldn’t wrap my head around it to believe that this tailors’ workshop is a private enterprise, not connected at all with the Arcticugol, and instead of Lenin’s bust on the central square there’s a free-market cabin, where locals can exchange some of their stuff.

After a couple of weeks, we were handing our luggage to the barge. On our way to the helipad I thoroughly, as if for the first time, gazed through pazik’s foggy windows: slipping clumsy on spring ice, first miners are drowsily breeding to the morning shift and waving their hands to us – I remember the one, who was threatening to beat me as I kicked him out of the bar for the last time, after which I had to drag him to his home. A dog named Plombier – cross-breed of a husky and a hound – was barking and howling long after we had passed by. I think I see a thin tower of rocks on our mountain and with my tongue I’m touching an empty hole in the gum.

¹ Due to the economic sanctions some European goods are not allowed to be imported to Russia, and cheese is one of them.

² an old model of a soviet bus brand.

³ A region in Western Ukraine which was severely damaged by the military action lately, defending its independence as Donetsk National Republic;

⁴ an unofficial name of a type of low-cost, concrete-paneled or brick three- to five-storied apartment building which was developed in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, during the time its namesake Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet government.

⁵ an exceptionally strong tea, associated with and brewed in Soviet and post-Soviet detention facilities.