Since no one stays outside long, human presence is illusive in his photographs. Yakuts, clad in fur, appear like mythic explorers amid an icy, glassy landscape, rendered even more spectral by the thick fog that clings to the city and shrouds most landmarks. This is no winter wonderland but rather treacherous grounds. This serves as an exercise to see how he responds to such environments.
Does he stay in the hotel room? How much time does he spend outside? And how does that affect his practice? All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets. India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.
Yakutsk receives flights from Moscow , Seoul , and Beijing. Adventure travelers looking for a particular challenge might brave marathon drives over unpaved, near-impassable roads, but flying is highly recommended.
Though tourism was slow in the s, the city has since developed larger hotels thanks to a gold- and diamond-mining boom, and out-of-towners go less remarked upon. Just make sure to pack bug spray or buy a local ointment to stave off the summer swarms of mosquitoes. All rights reserved. Invoking the sun and other dieties, the algyschyt, or host, opens the Ysyakh festival at Us Khatyn outside the city of Yakutsk.
This solstice festival draws crowds of nearly , people from Siberia and beyond. Alexey Vasilyev is a photographer native to Yakutia. His documentary work focuses on the daily life and national identity of people in the far north. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.
But there's still a level of endurance that is hard to comprehend. Workers continue working on building sites up to minus 50C below this the metal becomes too brittle to work with , and children go to school unless it's below minus 55C although the kindergarten gets the day off if it hits minus 50C.
Almost without exception, the women wear fur from head to toe, much of it locally produced. In such a climate, ethics count for little. You need to wear fur here to survive.
Nothing else keeps you warm. A decent fur coat can cost anything from several hundred to several thousand pounds, but it's seen as a good investment, and something to be used year after year. Also popular are local versions of valenki, the fur boots that are common across Russia. Here they are made with reindeer hide, and the women's version features colourful sequined patterning.
In these conditions, traditional Yakut food always made use of whatever it could. Things are a little tastier nowadays, although horse still features prominently on restaurant menus.
Being a Yakutian horse doesn't seem like much fun — you are reared in miserably cold temperatures until you're old enough to be slaughtered and turned into "thin slices of baby horse steak" or "slices of raw horse liver with spices". Other delicacies include marinated reindeer meat and semi-frozen slices of raw river fish — a sort of Yakutian sushi. The latter is exquisitely tasty and makes for a good zakuska — a snack to nibble on after downing a shot of vodka.
And after a few shots of vodka, the slices of baby horse don't taste too bad either. I ask Vasily Illarionov, the head of the Yakut Language and Culture Department at the local university, what role the weather played in folklore. Anyway, it's nice cold we have here because we don't have wind.
When it gets down to minus 40C I like to walk to work. I like our weather, but I don't think I could live somewhere windy. But the summers sound even worse than the winters — short and sticky, with two or three weeks when the temperature hits 30C or 35C.
None of the buildings is equipped with air conditioning, and the air is filled with midges and mosquitoes in swarms of biblical proportions. One possibly apocryphal tale tells of reindeer dying because they were unable to breathe, so thick were the clouds of insects.
The short summer is also a time when gargantuan efforts are made to ensure that the region is ready for the onset of winter. The Lena river, more than 10 miles wide at Yakutsk, is not bridged anywhere for hundreds of miles, so villages on the other side have to be stocked up for the months when the river isn't navigable but the ice hasn't thickened enough for a road to be built across it.
Heating pipes are examined and repaired — if they fail, as they did in Artyk and Markha just before New Year, those stuck without warmth risk death. The whole region suffers harsh winters. It was here that the lowest ever temperature in an inhabited place was recorded — minus The conditions are also a nightmare for building.
Yakutsk is the largest city in the world built on permafrost — soil that remains permanently frozen year round. Permafrost covers 15 per cent of the earth's land mass, and 65 per cent of Russia's, says Mark Shats, a researcher at Yakutsk's Permafrost Institute. At a depth of four metres below the ground, the temperature is minus 8C all year round, whether the ground temperature is minus 35C or plus 35C. In the bunker, where ice crystals have formed on the ceiling in perfect geometric squares, it quickly becomes apparent why it's so difficult to build on permafrost.
The soil, which is a combination of sand and ice, is as hard as concrete. But at the edges, where the ice has had a chance to melt, all that's left is powdery sand. If a building is erected in these conditions, the warmth that emanates from the building melts the ice and destroys the stability of the foundations. For this reason, every single building in Yakutsk is built on underground stilts, varying in depth depending on the size of the building.
Although local authorities declared independence in and renamed the region Yakut-Sakha Soviet Socialist Republic, what that means is under dispute. Originally there was talk of political separation from Russia, which would give the republic control over its own resources. Now, the goals have become more moderate. According to Balzer, Sakha scientists and recently elected young Sakha politicians have been negotiating for a percent share of gas, oil, and gold resources.
Still not clear is who the real beneficiaries will be of greater autonomy. Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin has talked about greater autonomy for Yakut-Sakha, but who will be a charge if it is won - the Slavic majority, former Communist Party elites, minorities, or a new elite?
Perhaps the main issue facing Yakut-Sakhas is who will control their destiny and how. Who has the capacity to improve conditions, and how will they accomplish it? Will they just sell off the local resources at higher prices, this time to multinationals and foreign governments? Will Japanese and American firms come and carve up what is left of Yakut-Sakha, as some locals fear? Some Yakut-Sakha say that foreign attention, like that of Russians before, focuses on Yakut-Sakha because of the strategic value of its raw materials.
Recent events suggest that the Yakut-Sakhas may be right. And in July, Mitsubishi opened a branch office in Khabarovsk, Siberia, with plans to serve the region, including Yakut-Sakha. According to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Moscow Radio has reported that the new Russian government, with the participation of companies like Mitsubishi, plans "to turn the entire Soviet Far East region into a district in which free enterprise activities can be practiced.
Giving an open hand to free enterprise may not give Yakuts and others indigenous minorities any more control over their lives than they have had since Russians arrived in On the one hand, a small tourist business is underway, selling some of the local treasures for dollars; demand still outstrips supply for local folk art such as saddles and boots.
On the other hand, some locals are going into businesses that are even less sustainable. A former law enforcement official, who Yakut-Sakhas say isn't one of them, has used his party connections to gain a monopoly on the sale of rare mammoth tusks.
He is carving and selling them for dollars, with little or nothing coming back to the local community. A market economy could, in fact, provide little freedom to minority peoples. Accustomed to a society guided by a central authority, will they simply retreat to one of local leaders, favored officials, and child slavery, all part of the Yakut-Sakha past? Will they become part of a new system in which the Toyons will be multinational corporations, hiring Yakut-Sakhas as laborers to do what they have been doing for decades?
Or will all the locals be fully informed about and share equally in decisions about the use of resources, the distribution of profits, and the work environment and means of production? Balzer sees a cultural and spiritual revival occurring in Yakut-Sakha, a rekindled pride in culture and language that integrates the poetic, the traditional, the religious, and political into a popular movement.
What that means for the average farmer or worker remains to be seen. Horak, ed. Our website houses close to five decades of content and publishing. Any content older than 10 years is archival and Cultural Survival does not necessarily agree with the content and word choice today. Learn about Cultural Survival's response to Covid Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine.
Stephen Dunn, ed. Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc. March
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