"Red Gas,” by Edward Topol
(Eduard Vladimirovich Topolberg), 1985
This is a story of the
last days of the USSR. It is 1983.
The gerontological leadership of the Soviet CP is still in power. However, Andropov is dying, Chernenko is
waiting in the wings for his 6 month tour, while Gorbachev is up and
coming. A large gas project centered on
the Yamal Pennisula just east of the Ural Mountains in Siberia is to be
completed, sending gas to Europe and earning the USSR billions in ‘hard’
currency.
 |
| Nenets family in a 'choom' - similar to a teepee |
The towns of Urengoi and
Salekhard on the Ob River are central locations – the latter a place where
Trotsky was exiled during Czarist times.
The story is based on perhaps actual news reports of a serious fire in the gas compressor
station at Urengoi in January 1984 which delayed the opening of the pipeline. Due to censorship, the exact cause of the
fire is not known, so Topol has constructed a perhaps fictional story of
indigenous resistance and sabotage around this news event.
It is the story of the
Nenets people who live on the Yamal, also insulting called ‘Samoyeds’ by
ethnographers. They live similarly to
the Inuit people of Alaska and Canada or the Sami of northern Scandinavia – living
as reindeer herders, hunters and trappers of valuable furs and fisherman in the
rivers and ocean, in spite of efforts by the Soviets to make them agricultural
workers. It is a familiar story of the
destruction of the natural environment – the animals, forests and rivers; the
importation of alcoholism and money; the rape of women and girls - the contradiction
between a Russified industrial or agricultural economy in ‘socialist’ clothing
and a hunter/gatherer society that refuses to be assimilated.
The lead character is a female
Soviet police investigator who is part of a task-force trying to solve the
mutilations and deaths of 3 prominent Russian scientists & engineers in the
Yamal by 3 escaping prisoners from a labor camp. According to Nenets legend, an 18th
century liberator of the Nenets, Vauli Piettomin, killed Russians and cut off their ears and
penises, and this is what happened to these scientists too. The story ultimately centers around the rape
of two 12 year old Nenets girls. A
reader will figure out far quicker than the characters in the story who did
what, though it is constructed as a ‘mystery.’
The best parts are the
description of life in the bitter Arctic cold and that of the Nenets people
themselves. There are now around 40,000 Nenets still
living on the Yamal.
Topol, born in Azerbaijan and the author of ‘Red Square,’ emigrated
to the US
in 1978. Prior to that, he was a Soviet
journalist who went frequently above the Arctic Circle,
which gives the stories their reality. The writer is anti-Soviet and
anti-Russian, but he does paint a realistic picture of the sufferings of the
Nenetsi. Of note, in 2016 the warm
weather in the Yamal exposed anthrax infected bodies from old prison camp
burial grounds, which then infected locals and reindeer. The past lives on.
And I bought it in Napier, New
Zealand
Red Frog
December 25, 2016
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