Yakutsk: The City on Stilts
In July 2019, the students of Princeton’s Moscow Global Seminar became the first group of foreign students to travel to Yakutsk, Siberia — the coldest city on Earth. Due to climate change, the city is sinking. Here are my impressions.
During Yakutsk’s brief summer, the center square resembles that of any other Russian city. Teenagers skateboard on the base of a towering Lenin statue, hand-holding couples stop at “La Crepperie” food truck to share a snack, and commuters swat mosquitoes as they wait for the bus. However, the effects of the city’s extreme winters, the coldest in the world, are still apparent. The first thing I noticed when our group arrived at the Polar Star Hotel were the German-made red doors — all three sets of them. The maze of doors is designed to keep out the frigid air, which averages -38℉ in January. Fuel, water, and sewage pipes either rest on the streets or hover in the air, forming occasionally beautiful and often grotesque geometric shapes. In the city center, the smell of gas from the overground pipes is mild but inescapable. Yakutsk, the largest city in the world built entirely on permafrost, wears its infrastructure on the outside, its guts exposed.
Yakutsk is nicknamed the city on stilts; most of its buildings are propped five to ten feet above the ground. During the 1960s, these stilts were driven ten meters into the permafrost to provide support and stability. The space between the building and the ground prevents the building from heating up the ground and the permafrost below. These efforts have, however, been in vain. The permafrost beneath is no longer permanent. The arctic is heating at twice the speed of the rest of the planet; the average temperature in Yakutsk has risen 4.5℉ over the past decade. Walking the sidewalks of Yakutsk is like driving over speed bumps. The sidewalk swells and caves, the cement appearing alternately bulbous and leprous. As the permafrost melts, the sidewalk above shifts, the stilts sink into the ground, buildings sag, their foundations crack. The Soviet-designed city is leisurely collapsing.
Scientists at Yakutsk’s Melnikov Permafrost Institute don’t need to go far to examine the effects of climate change on permafrost. After entering the institute building and donning plush coats, our group followed scientist Yuri Myrzin down a few flights of stairs into the icy wonderland below. The lab’s galleries are made of the very thing being studied: ice. As we tread through the crystalline tunnels, Yuri pointed out such artifacts as mammoth teeth and the skull of a 40,000 year-old baby Muskox. The creature starved to death after falling through a crevice in the ice. When the ice melted, the skeleton was found. It lies fully exposed on a table; it is cold enough in the lab that they need no other means of preservation.
Ninety minutes into the tour, the cold had seeped through my coat, my classmates were shivering. The lab is 18℉, warmer than the city above is for eight months of the year. But for the Sakha population of Yakutsk, the cold is a blessing. One of the bartenders at the Polar Star told us that she walks the 40 minutes to work each morning. “Even in January?” we asked incredulously. “You just need to keep moving” she shrugged. She also noted that the people of Yakutsk had hardier complexions than most, but that in extreme cold she puts goose fat on her skin as a balm. As for the clouds of bugs in the summer? “We’ve worked out an agreement with them,” she smiled cheekily. Our group had failed to reach an international accord. My classmate Meredith, apparently the tastiest of the bunch, left the trip with a forest of bites on her legs.
Indigenous peoples, including the Evens and Evenks, have been braving Yakutia’s cold temperatures for centuries. In the 13th century, the Sakha people of Southern Siberia, who are of Asiatic descent but speak a Turkik language, moved into the region. Today, the half Indigenous, half settler-colonialist Sakha, commonly referred to as Yakut, compose the majority of the population of Yakutsk, while many Eveny and Evenki live in villages throughout the republic, Russia’s largest. Historically, many Eveny were Shamanistic reindeer and cattle herders.
In 1632, Yakutia was conquered by the Russians, who established a small administrative center in Yakutsk and imposed a fur tax on the Indigenous population. Over the centuries, the Russians have requisitioned Yakutia’s natural resources, primarily diamonds and oil. In return, they brought (and continue to bring) Orthodox religion and Russian prisoners. Yakutsk is a gateway to the Gulag.
Before he led the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin spent time in a prison in Yakutsk. A Gulag camp was established on the outskirts of the city by Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. The camp is now a high-security prison. In 2016, two members of the activist punk rock band Pussy Riot were arrested on its grounds for protesting the detention of a Ukrainian film maker, Oleh Sentsov. The roads surrounding the prison, lined with family homes, are contaminated with the tuberculosis virus. The disease hangs around the prison like a curse. We had to wear face masks as we passed the prison on our way to go horseback riding, one of our excursions planned by Arkadiy, a “fixer” who could arrange anything and everything from fishing expeditions to paintball matches atop Soviet tanks — for the right price. Our driver motioned to the compound and casually cautioned, “там не надо” (don’t go there). He cracked a gold-toothed grin.
Beyond the city lies the world in untouched splendor. Lenin, born Vladimir Ulyanov, adopted his surname from the awe-inspiring Lena River, which runs south to north in Siberia. We traveled with Arkadiy along its broad banks to the Lena Pillars, columns of rock that stretch up to the sky some 980 feet. From the top, our group could see the expanse of land below, the curve of the earth visible at the horizon. Back on shore we crossed the river to a sand bank and swam in the pillars’ shadow. I’ve never seen such beauty in desolation.
On our ride back from the Lena, I asked Arkadiy about how he had come to be our guide. He explained that he had owned a textile business with a man from HangZhou, China, but it failed due to his partner’s “dishonesty.” After a few minutes, he turned to me again, something else on his mind, “A member of the Russian intelligentsia said in the 20th century, ‘If you scratch the skin of a Sakha, you find Russian roots.’” He sat back in his seat and turned his gaze towards the scenery, a contented smile on his face. Arkadiy is Sakha. He seemed pleased that his people had earned Russian approval, that they are preferred to the Chinese.
There are obvious but uncomfortable intersections between Russian and Indigenous peoples. We visited the Yakutsk Ballet School, where two students performed Joy of the Tundra, a northern Siberian Indigenous dance that mimics the movements of the creatures and elements of the earth while also referencing the classical syntax of Russian ballet. The performance was followed by a selection from Giselle, and the school’s director boasted that her students’ training was “the same as the classical ballet schools in Moscow.” Children are selected at age eight on the basis of their flexibility, coordination, and facial expressiveness, board for nine years, and leave as professional dancers. Yet for the 60% of students who graduate from Yakutsk Ballet School, their professional careers usually extend only to the theater next door. The Joy of the Tundra is less a jubilant unification of two cultures, and more a tug-of-war between the colonizer and the colonized.
The duel between Yakutsk’s two largest nationalities also appears on the political stage, with the mayor of Yakutsk navigating the divide. Despite being barred from displaying her campaign materials on billboards or renting spaces to host town hall meetings with her voters, Sardana Avkesentyeva, a Sakha woman, still emerged victorious in Yakutsk’s 2018 mayoral election. She emphasized the very thing that brought about the ban: her Sakha roots. The “iron lady,” as she is called, is an internet sensation. Since taking office, she has prioritized making the city “clean and comfortable” by building heated bus stops and combating wasteful bureaucratic spending. Her long term goal is to oversee the construction of a bridge across the Lena River. The plan is controversial, in part because the bridge would connect Yakutsk to the “Road of Bones” laid down during the Stalinist era by Gulag prisoners. Hundreds of men froze to death during the process. The road was built on top of their corpses.
The three Chinese companies vying for the contract to build the bridge are also involved in building new housing stock along with ships that can navigate the unthawed arctic ocean. Some Russians, those who shun “the old mentality,” welcome the investment. Chinese people reside in Yakutsk and work in the market there, isolated and alienated from the Sakha-Russian population. As we meandered through the stalls, stopping to admire “Abibas” sneakers, I couldn’t help but wonder what brought the shopkeepers 1,000 miles away from their families to a city with a struggling economy and challenging climate. I asked Dai Li, a shopkeeper from Guangzhou in his 20s, “Why Yakutsk? Why not another city?” His friend Melina piped in, “For starters, he’s so chubby, all his fat protects him from the cold!” Unfazed, Dai Li chuckled and turned to me. He responded in three languages, “我不知道，я не знаю, I don’t know.” When I asked Wang Haibu, a Chinese merchant who has lived here for 15 years, why he hasn’t returned home, he responded that he’s “束手.” His hands are tied.
Arkadiy imagines that to the Chinese, Yakutsk’s isolation was part of its appeal. New businesses could flourish because no one else wanted to work here. That is, until the Kyrgs started arriving. Today Yakutsk contains Orthodox churches, Shamanistic temples, and as of 2006, a mosque. Following anti-migrant protests in March, the mosque had to be protected by a police security unit. In response to the alleged rape of a Sakha woman by a migrant from Kyrghastan, over 5,000 Sakhas and Russians, for once united, gathered in a sports stadium, demanding immigration policy reform.
As a temperate-climate dweller who finds the walk from Forbes to Frist unbearable when the temperature falls below 50 degrees, I assumed that most Yakutians, living in the coldest city on earth, count down the days until summer, and like Wang Haibu, stick around because their “hands are tied.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Yakutians associate their city more with diamonds than with the cold: strong and beautiful. They have worked in diamond mines for centuries, and 1.5km of crystalline palace sits beneath their feet. When you ask them about the winter, they do not speak of the darkness, how each day they receive only five hours of sunlight. They speak of the stars, diamonds that fill the cope of heaven. Yakutains respect, but do not battle with the cold; their true battle is with the increasing heat. As the Earth warms, the ground beneath them is destabilized, and with it, their way of life.
Before our trip, Dr. Olga Ulturgasheva, a professor of anthropology at the Univeristy of Manchester, talked to us about the need, at the end of the Anthropocene, to consider fully the existential climate crisis humankind faces. Olga grew up in a village outside of Yakutsk. She is now the world’s leading expert on the lives of reindeer and reindeer herders, studying the effect of global warming on both communities. She believes that knowledge beyond science is needed; the spirits of the forest fires and the melting ice need to be understood.
Olga’s implorement to respect destructive forces like fires seemed nonsensical to me. Yet now I realize respect is required. Adapting to the effects of climate change will unite the people of Yakutsk — of every nationality. It will unite us all, not as nations but as humans. Being at the mercy of the natural world is our great equalizer.
In Yakutsk climate change has meant more than just rising temperatures and shifting ground. Clouds have invaded Siberia’s historically clear skies. Soon, the starry skies of Yakutia may be just a memory.
