Shift Workers Will Fly to Mars

Chapter 1. Dreams of Mars

I am convinced that the first crew selected for a flight to Mars will consist of shift workers from the Russian North.

In terms of landscape and temperature, Yamal and Taimyr are already surprisingly close to Martian conditions. Of course, we should also mention Antarctica and the polar explorers who stay on the ice for a full year at a time. Those are special people.

They are like shock troops dropped from ordinary life in every city across Russia straight into extreme conditions the moment the helicopter doors open. Not everyone can do the same thing day after day for 30, 45, or even 60 days in spartan conditions. And yet every man has his own function. If I don’t do it, someone else will.

I saw my first shift worker — a real “snowman” — back in 1982 at Tyumen airport. He was lying on newspapers spread across the floor, just like all the others of his breed. The airport had been closed for the third day running because of a blizzard. I had flown in from Ufa after sitting there for forty-eight hours myself.

The shift workers were well oiled and sleeping like bears. One of them opened one eye and asked his mate:

“Mikola, what’s the date today?”

“Twelfth.”

“So we’ve been here ten days since we flew in from Urengoy?”

“Yeah… almost time to head back out to the shift.”

“Got any money left?”

“Ran out yesterday.”

Those were the “dinosaurs” from Ukraine. They wore dog-fur unties, fur hats, and old flight jackets zipped up to the throat. You don’t see dinosaurs like that anymore. Nowadays everyone flies in dressed to the nines, smelling of decent cologne. The only thing that remains from that era is the moment a shift worker opens his mouth — and you instantly know: it’s him.

Any oil or gas field, big or small, has a standard set of professions, just like on a submarine. It’s a crew exactly like the crew of a spacecraft. Two months flying to Mars, working as a team, then returning to Earth.

After everything I’ve seen in the North, I believe this is completely realistic.

Chapter 2. Shift Workers and Bears

Those who have never been to the North will find many things there strange and wondrous. The North has always drawn me with its vast beauty. When you’re sitting in a helicopter, you realize that 500 kilometers in Siberia is not a distance at all. Taiga and bears — and in it, He is the true Master. A totem and symbol of Russia.

I have been to places where shift workers are not the main ones in the taiga, but the bears that roam around a small oil field. Only their well-established way of life keeps them isolated from humans.

Walking into the canteen, I see a frustrated cook loading burnt buns into sacks. You can’t throw them in the trash — it’s a sin. But the bears will be happy.

On a GT-T all-terrain vehicle, we take the “gift” to the spot where they cross the forest road every day. We pour it out and wait for the guest. A couple of days later, we check the tracks — the feast was a success.

Then for a whole month you see a bear sitting on his backside, waiting for another sack of buns to fall from the sky. That’s just how his psychology works.

At remote drilling outposts where black gold is extracted, the crews are small. They live in harmony. Drug addicts and bad people don’t last long, so the team is built up over years — friendly and hard-working. That’s why there’s a banya, fishing, and small joys like hunting and little cabins. It’s a prevention against aggression and alcoholism.

In autumn, everyone looks forward to the trip to Panya — there’s a backwater on the Ob River that is a fisherman’s paradise. Pike weighing 20–35 kilos, like crocodiles, are there.

The expedition starts with a quota from the crew, and only the lucky ones go. We reached the steep bank. Everyone headed down, but Ilyasych lingered by the GT-T and squatted under a bush. At that moment, a bear was sitting in those same bushes, frozen by the sheer audacity of it all.

A hairless, human-like creature — not the Master of the taiga — was marking territory. When Ilyasych went down to the bank, the bear came out, squatted, and marked the spot with his own pile. It was bigger.

We only discovered it after the fishing trip.

On the bank stood a small cabin where salt, flour, and canned goods were stored. Every year began with the same scene: barrels of salted fish were kept in the house. When the snow melted, the fish was taken out and thrown into a pit not far from the cabin. The bear, coming out of his den, would come to eat the rotten fish. This went on for several years in a row. Everyone was happy.

There was just one problem: if you didn’t salt the fish properly, in spring the bear would tear the cabin apart. You should never feed the Master. He doesn’t like it.

Chapter 3. The Brigadier

Oil demands well repairs, and for that there is routine maintenance and major overhaul. PRS and KRS crews. They fly in by helicopter. The equipment is usually already standing at the wellhead, and the work begins at once.

One evening in the canteen the crew came in smiling and announced that they had acquired an external brigadier. Everyone’s curiosity was instantly piqued.

The bear would come and sit down on the berm of the well pad. He would sit there and not interfere with the crew’s work. And so it went, day after day.

Little by little, of course, they began to feed him — bread, condensed milk, stew. The bear was already old; long strands of grey hair hung down from his forehead. In general, he did not violate safety regulations and did not rush at people. They even put a hard hat down for him. No one approached him too closely. The work went on.

I, too, grew curious — after all, He came like clockwork, according to schedule. But I was unlucky; I never saw him. The guys, however, stealing glances at this external brigadier, worked for almost a whole week in excellent spirits. Even the actual brigadier seemed amused by the whole affair.

Perhaps, having lived to such a respectable age, the old bear had never before seen these human-shaped shift workers.

Gradually everything returned to its usual course. The bear left.

Several months passed. The crew flew in again and set up on another well in the same area. The bear did not appear. Yet the whole brigade waited for their Bear Brigadier for all fifteen days. But he never came.

And that is how legends are born — about the Brigadier, the true Master of the Taiga, who walks nearby and checks whether the crew observes safety rules or not.

Man and Bear in the taiga are always side by side.

Even when I walked through the forest with my Laika dogs and a rifle, I would notice Him walking parallel to me — silently, like a forest special forces operative. Where the blueberries or bilberries grew, you could always see that He had already had breakfast: a torn-up anthill, tracks showing that He had passed this way ahead of me — “I was here.”

The most astonishing thing is when a moose cow with her calves walks calmly along the concrete road right through the centre of the shift camp, not afraid of people, while at the edge of the forest stands the Bear who has been following her for days. And she simply cuts her trail by walking among humans. From the moment a moose calf is born, it is a race with death. This is the food chain. Only the strongest survive.

Breaking open the rifle and removing the cartridges in spring, when the males are in rut, you begin to blow into it like a hunting horn — and you hear a bull moose answering your challenge from several kilometres away.

The taiga lives, has lived, and will live — as long as man does not take everything that lives in it.

For the local Khanty and Mansi people, it is a hypermarket from which they take only what they need today, carefully maintaining the balance.

But we who come from the cities — we are the barbarians.

And so the question arises personally for you: who are you? The taiga tests everyone, and if necessary, it punishes.

The Old Believers never killed those who stole, murdered, or broke the Laws of the Taiga. The punishment was one and the same: the man was stripped naked, a four-and-a-half-metre birch pole was cut, his arms were spread wide and tied behind his back to the pole. Then, after crossing him, they let him go in peace. If he reached people, it meant God had forgiven him. When the midges and mosquitoes eat you alive around the clock and you have to move sideways, it is almost impossible. The man perished.

Without observing the Laws of the Taiga, one cannot survive.

Oil fields are the invisible border between the Taiga and Human Civilization. Everyone follows the unwritten rules. Man always advances into the Taiga. And it retreats.

I stopped hunting. The only reason I still carried a rifle behind my back was for protection against bears. Because I had come to understand that I no longer wanted to be a barbarian. This beauty must not be touched. One can only admire it and breathe in the scent of the forest.

Even now, thousands of kilometres away, He still comes to me in my dreams.

Chapter 4. A Second Birthday

We live our lives and sometimes never think that a second Birthday might suddenly appear out of nowhere.

It happened in the nineties. I was working at a large oil field in the Tomsk region, where, amid endless swamps, stood an experimental shift camp for twenty thousand people — lost in the middle of bogs and taiga. There was a road and an airport that accepted the AN-26, a cargo-passenger paratrooper plane, flying the route Tomsk–Pionerny–Strezhevoy–Pionerny–Tomsk. A kind of flying tram.

Three times a day you could fly to Strezhevoy on business.

We were sitting in the plane, waiting for takeoff. I sat on the right, by the window. Outside I could see the wing and the engine. It coughed once, then began to spin up. Slowly we taxied onto the runway, picked up speed. Everyone was buckled in. The plane lifted its nose.

Suddenly a woman sitting in front jumped up and screamed at the top of her lungs: “We’re all fucked!”

The plane reared up like a pear, slowly turned in the air, and began to descend silently toward the concrete runway. It touched down, rolled along a third of the strip, and came to a stop.

Silence.

The aircraft commander stepped into the cabin. In a stern voice he asked: “Who said ‘We’re all fucked’?”

The woman stood up and answered, “I did.”

“Never say that we’re all fucked,” the commander said calmly.

Trying to light a cigarette and missing his mouth a couple of times, he walked through the cabin with perfect composure, stepped out onto the concrete, and disappeared.

Only then did we all rush outside. Only then did the full weight of what had just happened hit us — followed by wild, overwhelming joy. Everything was behind us.

He turned to us and said:

“Now you don’t have to be afraid of flying anymore. This kind of aviation incident happens once in a million cases.”

We tried to lift him up and carry him on our shoulders. That guy had saved our lives.

In those few critical minutes he had made a clear decision: either crash into the treetops or pull a “pear” right on takeoff. If we had hit the trees, the cockpit dome would have been smashed, the pilots would have died instantly, the tail and wings full of fuel would have been torn off, and the fuselage with the passengers would have slid forward. There was a chance of survival — but only for the passengers. He chose the second option, and it was the right one.

Ever since that day, whenever I fly, I know deep down that nothing will happen to me. I believe him.

That is how I received a second Birthday.

I don’t celebrate it, but I know it exists.

And I owe it to the steady hands of that professional pilot who gripped the control yoke of that old workhorse of the North — the AN-26.

Thank you, Captain.

Chapter 5. Shift Worker by Law

This unspoken title is given to the most authoritative shift worker in the crew. His opinion is always taken into account and often becomes decisive in everyday matters and all kinds of disputes.

Before my eyes stands such a man — strong by nature, who had worked on shifts for thirty years. He had never worked a normal five-day week in his life. He was a representative of the older generation.

I first met him during boarding for a helicopter flight leaving the oil field. The helicopter was supposed to take twenty-one people, but thirty-five were trying to cram in. And then I saw the scene: a big, healthy guy ploughed straight into the crowd. In his hands he held two huge bags, and on his back — an enormous rucksack. He deftly swung first to the left, then to the right, then sharply backwards. Three men flew off in different directions, and he calmly stepped into the helicopter.

A real professional.

As he later said: “Work as many shifts as I have, and you’ll do the same.”

Later I got to know him better. His name was Oleg Nikolaevich, originally from Lake Baikal. Nature had not short-changed him in health — only two fingers on each hand had been cut off by steel cables. He worked as a pipe-layer operator.

Once I saw him arguing with a young guy. The lad was getting cheeky, and Oleg Nikolaevich, like a true professor, almost poked the hooligan’s eyes out with the stumps of his severed fingers. That was when the title “Shift Worker by Law” stuck to him for good.

The whole crew rests on people like him.

When I saw him in minus twenty-four degrees Celsius dismantling a hub, removing the track, and rebuilding the bearings, I scolded him: “You’ll freeze your fingers off!” He just waved me away. What can you do — the Old Guard always does things their own way.

He loved order and demanded it from others. Try arguing with him — his fists were like two sledgehammers.

In his youth, of course, he had raised some hell. He was never much of a drinker. For him alcohol was not really a beverage, but more like a food product. If his health was equal to three men, then the dose had to be tripled as well. But from a young age he had not been taught harmful habits. Those who grew up on Baikal, swimming in its icy water since childhood, were simply born as bogatyrs.

And when that pipe-layer was in his hands, it became at once a crane, an axe, and a tractor that could pull any load. You didn’t need to tell him what to do — he knew everything. He would just sit in the cab, give commands, and everyone would run to carry them out. It was a pleasure to watch.

When we met, he was already sixty and officially retired. He worked a little, without overexerting himself.

His main entertainment, when the frost dropped below minus forty, was billiards. Endless tournaments would begin. Everyone had his own cue and chalk, and there was a strict queue. The loser was out. And there, too, Oleg Nikolaevich was always among the first.

Try playing for thirty years — of course the balls will fly into the pockets as if enchanted.

The last time I saw him was at Nizhnevartovsk Airport. He was no longer working shifts; he was seeing someone off. We greeted each other, stood in silence for a while. A strong man. It was simply pleasant to stand next to such a bogatyr. Already grey-haired, but the strength was still with him. Baikal strength.

The Russian land is rich in natural power.

Live long, dear Shift Worker by Law.

Chapter 6. The Tu-134 Flies North

Many things happened over those years, but what stuck most vividly in my memory was my first year on the oil rig shift and, especially, the flight to the shift in August 1990. In the USSR, a sense of anticipation was gradually building. Of course, no one expected things to unfold the way they did, but an air of unpredictability hung everywhere. Up in the North, everything was running as usual: the pump jacks were drawing oil, and people were working.

After my legal fifteen days of rest, the problem arose of how to fly from Ufa to Nizhnevartovsk. There were no tickets. Luckily, a classmate of mine worked as a pilot on an An-2, so I decided to trouble him—maybe he could help. He didn’t refuse, made some inquiries, and delivered his verdict: a charter flight was leaving for Nizhnevartovsk that night, but there were no tickets available. Still, I might get lucky. The commander would come to the medical station from the hotel for a pre-flight check-up. That’s where we held our negotiations. In my hands I carried a diplomat briefcase containing four bottles of vodka. We agreed on two extra fares’ worth. They dressed me in a flight uniform, complete with a cap, and escorted me through the checkpoint straight to the plane. There, the second pilot took me in, led me to the toilet, and asked me to sit quietly. The security service was inspecting the aircraft before boarding. Time passed, and the boarding of the shift workers went quickly; the cabin filled up. A technician came for me and led me into the cockpit of the Tu-134.

The commander said there were no seats left and only one option remained: I would have to fly in the second pilot’s seat, while he went to sleep with the stewardesses. I was, of course, surprised. But where else was I going to go?

The commander requested clearance from the dispatcher to taxi to the runway. A tug hooked onto the nose wheel and pulled the plane toward the takeoff strip. They began flipping switches, and both the first and second pilots confirmed that they saw each toggle being activated in the proper sequence. I sat in the flight engineer’s seat behind them. The engines were already running. We swapped places with the second pilot.

I settled into the seat, put on the headphones, and fastened the belts. The commander was on the left, the flight engineer sat slightly behind and to the side, and the navigator was in the small dome-like space between the seats, a bit lower and forward.

The commander taxied onto the runway and requested permission from the dispatcher to take the active position. We rolled to the end of the runway, turned around, and slowly checked the engines while picking up speed. The flight engineer confirmed: “Speed one hundred eighty kilometers per hour—everything normal.” The commander turned to me and said over the intercom, “Help out.” I grabbed the control yoke and pulled it toward myself. The nose began to lift. I was lying back as if at a gynecologist’s appointment, legs spread. The plane started to rise smoothly into the air. Gradually it entered a left-turning spiral climb. The lights of the city fell away as the aircraft gained altitude to 9,200 meters, slowly leveled out, and the commander switched to autopilot. Then he said calmly, “Let’s go have some coffee.”

The stewardesses poured the coffee, and we drank it with pleasure, though I felt somewhat uneasy. There was no one else in the cockpit. For some reason I had always thought both pilots stayed strictly at the controls throughout the entire flight. We returned to our seats. I asked by what rules civilian aircraft flew in the sky. He replied that they followed civil corridors between major cities, with restrictions on altitude and width. Military planes flew at almost any altitude and tried not to cross the civil corridors. We were now flying from Ufa to Sverdlovsk—twenty-four minutes—and there we would make a turn toward Tyumen, then on to Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk. Below, through the clouds, the lights of cities and small settlements were visible. Time passed, and the moment of landing approached.

At forty kilometers from the airport stood marker masts, then at thirty, twenty, ten, and five kilometers. They created a corridor along which the ground dispatcher guided the commander’s descent. The impulses emitted by the aircraft’s equipment coordinated this process—it was the navigator’s job. We passed over the airport fence; the illuminated T-shaped concrete runway came into view. The plane touched the ground softly, slowed down with reverse thrust, and gradually came to a stop. The commander slowly taxied toward the airport building. He removed his headphones and asked, “How was the flight?”

A storm of emotions swept over me. I understood that never again in my life, for any amount of money, would such a thing happen. From the bottom of my heart I thanked the pilot and his crew. “Fantasy,” you might say. But this was not a dream—it was real. And my last name is not Munchausen. The fresh air and the automatic movements toward the bus released me from the rush of impressions and emotions. I came to my senses sitting in a chair in the airport lounge and began to digest everything that had happened. The task of reaching Nizhnevartovsk had been accomplished.

Probably this could only have happened at that time. The country felt it was slowly heading toward some resolution. No one understood what would come. But everyone was waiting. Everyone was expecting something, yet no one could foresee that the country would collapse. The North had grown fat with financial wealth and lived, like Moscow, separately from the provinces. So at the first stage it was even interesting. Under Yeltsin, one could not shake the feeling that a drunk commander was sitting at the controls of the plane.

Chapter 7. The Long Ruble

In Soviet times, if someone went to the North to get a job, it meant they were chasing the long ruble. My first impressions of the North came in the tenth grade when I flew to a small northern town to visit my relatives. A frost of -26°C greeted me in January, and three days later it was -42°C. What struck me was the little kids wrapped in shawls and wearing felt boots, sledding in front of the store. All the children were outside, regardless of the cold. Life was bustling; people here came from all over the Soviet Union. That’s when I caught the North bug.

After working my first year, in the summer I had to do a shift from June 15 to September 15. Vacations were long — 3.5 months — so I had to cover for others. I arrived in the town, went to the accounting office, and received pay for three months plus my vacation pay for three and a half months. It came out to a full backpack of rubles. By then, the new 100-ruble Pavlov notes had appeared, but they gave me unopened packs of regular rubles.

I flew into Ufa, went into a store, and wanted to buy 10 pairs of socks. I untied my backpack and pulled out the packs. The saleswomen’s eyes went square. I explained that they had just given me my salary. I hadn’t robbed a bank. There was a Sberkassa nearby, so I went in and exchanged it all for 100-ruble notes. The backpack got much lighter, and the feeling of the “long ruble” instantly vanished. Indescribable sensations.

Back then they paid decently. When you tell today’s young people about it, of course they are amazed. On the “mainland” (Earth) the maximum I earned was 135 rubles. My first shift worker salary without any bonuses was 734 rubles. I spent a maximum of 45 rubles on food. The stores had a modest selection — the standard Soviet food assortment. The canteen was mostly staffed by former restaurant workers, so they didn’t know how to cook badly. Everything was proper and noble. Lunch cost 45–55 kopecks. Today a decent lunch like that costs 450–700 rubles. In Moscow it’s one and a half thousand.

What amazed me was that all the Northern towns were like twins: two-story wooden houses, barracks-style buildings, and new micro-districts of five- and nine-story buildings were growing. Houses sprang up like mushrooms. There was a sea of young people. There were no drug addicts back then. What struck me was that at night, drunk shift workers would arrive on the “Uragan” (a heavy vehicle) at the night shop on Lenin Street to buy vodka. When the former rocket carrier drove through the center on the concrete road, the whole street would shake.

The most interesting thing at that time was the people. They weren’t obsessed with money, they were kind as if hand-picked, and there were a lot of guys who had just come out of the Army. Everyone was into sports: skiing, kettlebells, weightlifting, volleyball, basketball, karate, hunting, fishing. You could choose whatever you wanted. In summer — Sochi and the Caucasus. Mountain tourist camps.

Then came the era of the collapse of the Union. Yeltsin was walking around in just his underpants at night on the lawn of the White House in the USA. They were printing rubles like crazy, and inflation reached 1000% per year. Suddenly everyone in the North became millionaires. The ruble shrank. The prosperity of the Gorbachev times was gone. Nowadays on shifts, the majority are paid just a little more than the amount needed so that people don’t start quitting en masse. Though there are places like the Polar regions, Yamal, Taimyr, Yakutia, and Chukotka where they now pay no less than 200 thousand rubles for 30 days. But there a 1.5-liter bottle of mineral water costs 180–200 rubles. Tomatoes are 1500 rubles, cucumbers 1000 rubles, bread 270 rubles — those are the prices in Chukotka.

Once in the library I came across a book from the USSR Council of Ministers about the shift work method, published in Brezhnev’s time. It provided justification for the 15-day shift. Everything was spelled out there: the harm to health, to the family, the psychological aspects. It was a serious scientific work. Shifts of 30–45–60 days were categorically prohibited. That’s why the whole country flew on 15-day rotations from Kaliningrad to Chukotka on Aeroflot, which could not be bankrupted. Once I met some guys on a train from Yamal. They worked for a private oil company called Novooyl — a shady little firm. For the sake of economy, instead of using helicopters they put 200 workers on a 9-month shift. It was like a prison in the tundra. There were practically no women. The only joy after work was when four of them would go to the city of Samara, withdraw all the cash, and empty the ATM. And then the wife would be upset that something was missing. That’s what the “long ruble” looks like these days.

Nowadays taxi drivers, janitors, and couriers in Moscow earn no less than 200 thousand rubles. So now the shifts are filled with people from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

That’s why Moscow has turned into one big railway station. So now there’s a competition between Moscow and the North over whose ruble is longer. It looks like the North is losing.

Chapter 8. Northern Cities

How the northern cities of oil workers and gas workers began to be built. Someone might say that after a Komsomol congress a train full of builders would depart from Moscow to the sound of orchestras and fanfares. Yes, that did happen, but unfortunately, after dropping off the landing party in army tents, at the first frosts this public would take to their heels and run away. Therefore, the main first builders of the northern cities were chemists (convicts), bichi (former intelligent people who had hit rock bottom), and pioneers (desperate trailblazers).

Take the city of Noyabrsk as an example. At that time there were no roads or railways there, and no airfield. It was the last city whose construction began in Soviet times after a decision was made in Tyumen, and after the formation of the Noyabrsk Oil and Gas Production Directorate. Viktor Gorodilov was appointed its head. He had a deputy. The first base was in Surgut. One of the 11 pioneers of this airborne assault told me this story from the airfield. On the airfield, a group of bichi had gathered, and they were offered to take part in this adventure. Two crates of vodka, two sacks of macaroni, four sacks of potatoes, condensed milk, and stewed meat. The combat mission after arriving at the site was: unload the provisions from the helicopter and, within 15 days, build a shed 6 by 10 meters, 3 meters high. At the same time, Gorodilov warned that if he flew in and the structure was not there, he would turn the helicopter around and fly away. The bichi smiled and didn’t believe him. After arriving at the site — the city stands on 7 small hills — a glorious drinking binge began that lasted three days. Helicopters kept bringing in building materials, the vodka gradually ran out, and it started to dawn on them that no one was going to take them away from there, and it was unrealistic to reach Surgut on foot. And so, overcoming their laziness and fear, they began to build the warehouse. When Gorodilov flew in, the acceptance of the facility went off with a bang. That was how the first building in this city was constructed. On the second helicopter, shift workers already arrived in work overalls and dog-fur unty (fur boots), set up a potbelly stove, and began building other premises. In the city museum, all 11 pioneer founders of the city remained as heroic trailblazers, while the bichi — who they were and what their surnames were — history has not preserved. And the city grew like yeast. I was there in 1998, when the fields were coming onto full production mode. Viktor Gorodilov even managed to secretly develop his own personal oil field for the first time in Russia. He had a friend who was the singer Kobzon, and they had a joint business. A personal Gulfstream jet stood at the airport. His wife loved to come to the general director’s planning meeting and say, “Vitinka, I’ll fly to Moscow for some kefir,” and he would reply, “Of course, dear.”

Later someone reported it to Moscow, and the field had to be urgently put into operation. And on the horizon appeared the future oilmen Abramovich and Berezovsky. But the city is still alive and working to this day. Where are they now — Abramovich, Berezovsky, Gorodilov? They are all in the past. The cities live their own oil life. The times were wild. In Nefteyugansk they even shot the mayor. Every city had its own story throughout all those years.

Chapter 9. Mosquitoes

Anyone who has never been bitten by mosquitoes in the North has never experienced the feeling of wild horror from a round-the-clock attack. The 90s and now 2025 are completely different eras of mosquitoes and gnats. Nowadays you plug in a Fumitox in the room or light a spiral, and within a day they are all lying on the floor. All you have to do is carefully sweep them up with a broom into a dustpan and dump them in the trash bin. Maybe one or two will buzz at night and annoy you.

In the 90s there was no Fumitox — only DEET and dichlorvos. And a gauze canopy over an iron bed. The living quarters were a KDMO — a small house assembled from two trailers on stilts. All the mosquitoes were on the ceiling in a thick layer. During the day, mosquitoes and gnats would get into the house. The only salvation was to slightly open the door and launch a gas attack with half a can of dichlorvos. You waited 20 minutes for the exposure, then aired out the rooms. All the mosquitoes were on the floor in a 1.5 cm thick layer. We would sweep them into a dustpan and then into a bucket. We would strip naked, smear every part of our bodies with DEET, put on our underwear, and dive under the canopy. Outside it was polar night with +24°C heat, stuffiness, no wind. You turned on a fan on the floor so the air would circulate. Sweating all over, you would gradually fall asleep, killing mosquitoes all night long. You would wake up covered in bites and blood. It was torture by nature. Only after flying home from the shift, where there was none of this horror, would your nervous system finally relax.

Going outside at the geological base, you would first spray your clothes with repellent from a can and dress as if you were going out into open space. Your face was protected by a net, your hands in gloves. You had to move between buildings or go to the canteen for lunch. But the main mass of workers spent from morning till evening working outdoors. That’s why they got bitten 24 hours a day. When you remember it, the hair on your head stands up automatically. They don’t pay money for nothing. Everything is included.

Nowadays mosquitoes and gnats have noticeably decreased in their natural volume. In years when the Ob River floods and inundates everything for hundreds of kilometers, there is a population explosion. But even then it’s nothing like what it was in the 90s. And the main thing is that mosquitoes bite everyone equally — the general director, you, the ITR engineer, the worker. No privileges for anyone. Mosquito democracy.

In 1991 I had to work at the joint venture “Vahfrakmaster.” They worked all over the world in 182 branches. They flew in to do hydraulic fracturing at fields in the Tomsk region. And that’s when we saw how they protected themselves from mosquitoes. Before leaving the room, they already had Fumitox back then. They would treat their overalls with repellent. Once outside, a Canadian could calmly stand in a cloud of mosquitoes — they wouldn’t come closer than one meter to him. Nowadays, pretty much everything they had back then is provided free of charge to all workers across the entire North. The problem is solved. But even so, when I remember those years, goosebumps still run down my spine.

The local Khanty people save themselves in their own way. They get bitten from the moment they are born until the day they die. Once I saw a Khanty man sitting on the ground muttering something — it was like meditation. Later I learned the translation into Russian: “They also want to eat…”

They are amazing people. They walk in the taiga as if it were their own home. They are excellent hunters. They don’t touch bears or shoot them out of respect for the Spirit of the Taiga.

What is surprising is that they believe things like little children. Once I told one of them that they had caught a talking moose. He froze and said, “Whoa…” and just stood there processing his amazement. They don’t know how to lie. Probably mosquito bites bring a person closer to nature. Shift work and mosquitoes in the taiga are something inevitable. Anyone who isn’t ready for this is not suited for shift work.

Chapter 10. The Afghans

There were a lot of guys on the shift who had been through Afghanistan. The helicopter pilots who had fought and returned to civilian life were especially memorable. What stood out about them was their modesty and daring. They all had combat awards, but like partisans they kept quiet about it and didn’t share memories — only among their own. They flew “Afghan-style,” breaking all the instructions. Takeoff was with a tilt onto the front wheel that was standing on the concrete, everyone in the cabin strapped in at a 40-degree angle. The chopper would slowly lift off, then accelerate and break from the ground, climb to 300 meters, and the machine would head off on its route. Instead of 1 hour 20 minutes, it took only about 55 minutes and we were already there. For landing — instead of circling the helipad in a box pattern, it was a sharp descent and a precise approach from any position straight to the center of the concrete, touching down without the slightest error.

From their conversations you often heard how in the mountains they had to drop off assault troops, deliver provisions, evacuate the wounded — sometimes touching down with just one wheel while the other two hung over an abyss for several minutes, then sharply pulling away, almost falling into the gorge, wringing everything out of the machine to get back to base. That’s why these skills led to conversations among themselves after the engines stopped: “We’re not in Afghanistan anymore.” But they couldn’t fly any other way.

I had a friend, Kolya the Afghan. After a conversation with a colonel at the military enlistment office, when asked if he had jumped off the stove as a child, he answered yes. He ended up in the Airborne Troops. Then he got sent to Bagram; his parachute regiment was based near the airfield. He was a BMD driver. He had to ride along escorting convoys all the way to Termez. He took part in operations. He didn’t talk much about it. But some of his confessions around the campfire while fishing painted a full picture of what an 18-year-old guy had gone through — a boy who had to grow up on the war.

The mujahideen especially loved to hit the convoys in the green zones of citrus orchards and vineyards. Under them ran irrigation ditches (aryks) through which water flowed, and through wells the spirits would crawl up to the road and fire RPG-7s at the fuel tankers, which would burn like candles. To prevent this, along the road the paratroopers on BMDs would drive parallel to the column at 70 meters, crushing the vineyard. Grapes would pour onto the armor, practically into their mouths. A half-bent Afghan with a hoe would look straight into their eyes with hatred, and even years later he couldn’t forget that reproachful gaze. That day not a single tanker burned. He also can’t forget the guy who had just arrived at the unit after training and hadn’t yet been in combat. The old-timers had scared him. “You’re a paratrooper — you’re not supposed to be afraid of anything.” Suddenly he pulled the pin from a grenade, threw it into the driver’s compartment, and jumped in after it himself. The grenade tore off his legs. He died in their arms. For many years now this guy comes to him in his dreams. He didn’t keep an eye on the rookie. His commander was the future General Lebed, and the first company was commanded by the future Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, Grachev. He saw how the boxer Lebed personally punched Grachev in the jaw for mistakes and sneaky tricks that did not honor the reputation of an Airborne officer. That’s why the hatred between them went all the way back to Afghanistan.

After 1.5 years without receiving a single wound, Kolya returned to the Soviet Union. And then there was the North, where I met him. Once I flew in for a shift wearing a telnyashka (striped sailor shirt). He knew I hadn’t served in the Airborne and it really got to him. He made me jump from the ridge of the dormitory roof onto a pile of sand — with concentration and landing on both feet, then falling sideways. The jump was counted — no complaints. He couldn’t do it any other way. Sometimes everything around him would start pressing down on him with the weight of memories, and I would send him off for a week to a little cabin to go hunting. After sitting by the campfire for a few days, he would become a completely different person.

Anyone who has been through war lives with the burden of memories. No pills or sanatoriums can cure it. Only individual work with oneself and with the past. They are all pensioners now. They are among us. And the shift has already accepted “Chechen” veterans; the flow has already begun of those who fought in Ukraine. For them the North is a breath of fresh air — their own territory of taiga. Here you can meet many interesting guys. There is enough space for everyone from Yamal to Surgut. And of course they will never let anyone down, no matter where they work. The Afghans have handed over their shift in the North.

Chapter 11. The Shaman

A hundred years ago, on the bank of the Pani channel of the Ob River, a Shaman lived in a chum on the headland. Khanty people from within a radius of 150 kilometers would come to him with their troubles. The place where he lived was rich in fish, berries, and elk. He was both feared and revered; he always knew everything. Even the Uryadnik — the Tsar’s representative who lived in the Old Believers’ village of Prokhorovka — would sometimes visit the Shaman to find out who had stolen a horse collar, who had stolen a horse, or who had committed a murder. The Shaman would take his drum and begin to kamlat. In his visions, as if watching a video, he saw everything and would name the culprit exactly. The guilty party would then face lawful punishment — the theft or murder was solved. With every case his authority only grew.

In Soviet times, a nature reserve was established on the bank of the Pani. On that very headland, the general director of Tomskneft built a two-story cottage — a guesthouse for rest and fishing. The man who looked after this property was the grandson of that Shaman, the heir to these lands. He did not possess his grandfather’s knowledge or skills — nature often rests on the children and grandchildren. But the great-grandson, Ilya, with his very unusual eyes, already at the age of twelve showed signs that the shamanic knowledge was being passed down to him. His adult speech and unusual judgments were striking. I played billiards with him several times and intuitively understood that the same fate as his ancestor awaited him.

I am convinced that to be chosen by an entire people, to be a shaman, is both an honor and a heavy burden that a person carries throughout his life, often against his own will. It is the call of blood and ancestors. That is why it felt a little eerie to encounter this phenomenon. Now Ilya has grown up. Whether he is a Shaman or simply a young man a little over twenty, I do not know. The modern Khanty I have seen now live quite prosperously —

A Bombardier snowmobile, a laptop in their hands, the most expensive mobile phone, a satellite communication tube, dressed according to the season with very beautiful traditional ornamentation, and beside them a very beautiful woman of the forest. Small children. Their life is full of mysteries, and they live according to the laws of their ancestors. If they do not stray from this path, their life becomes filled with deep meaning. But if they move to the city, the city swallows them and they dissolve into a civilization that is alien to them.

And the Shaman is like a controller of their life. You cannot learn this — it is passed down from the ancestor. To be a mediator between the Upper and Lower Worlds is both a gift and a punishment at the same time. I believe in reincarnation. Watching Ilya, I understood that the spirit of his great-grandfather had entered him. Even his parents noticed this and looked at him as if he were a god in their family. Yes, this is mysticism, but it grew stronger with every day. How can a small child speak with the thoughts of a forty-year-old man?

Chapter 12. Bitcoin

On shift you have to live in a two- or three-person room, and having neighbors is unavoidable. Igor Viktorovich and I lived together in the same room for five years without any scandals or arguments — our compatibility was 100%, like on a submarine. He taught me how to cook pelmeni, and to this day I still make them strictly according to his mother’s recipe. In return, I spoiled him with my signature cutlets, which were always devoured in no time.

My neighbor was about fifteen years younger than me. In 2014, when he flew in for his shift, Igor told me that Bitcoin had appeared. If you bought it for $1,000 — which at that day’s exchange rate was around 31,000 rubles — you could get rich. After the MMM pyramid scheme of Mavrodi, I somehow didn’t feel like climbing into another pyramid. It was tempting, but the fear of another financial scam was gradually overcome. True, we did open Bitcoin wallets. Bitcoin rose and fell. Today, those who bought Bitcoin in 2014 for $1,000 would now be sitting on roughly $230 million.

Igor Viktorovich and I could have been sitting on the shore of the ocean in Thailand right now, having bought two villas next to each other, and reminiscing about that day that would have completely turned our finances around. A thousand dollars back then was a shift worker’s salary for thirty days. This is an example of both our foolishness and a clear demonstration of playing the casino. In Russia, people have grown thoroughly tired of all kinds of experiments, and we’re afraid of being suckers. But sometimes you should listen to the young — they’re smarter than us, even if life is harder for them.

With our generation, everything was clearly laid out: Young Pioneer, Komsomol member, finish school, then institute or the army, then work at the plant, get married, have children, raise them, help with their studies, their weddings, your 60th anniversary, get sick, white slippers, a wooden overcoat, and a plot in the cemetery. A few years later, everyone forgets about you.

Half of my generation’s life was spent in the Soviet Union, the other half in underdeveloped Russian-style capitalism. And everything always moves at a breakneck pace. The main thing is to keep up and not fall behind. Computer, mobile phone, social networks — I’m constantly catching up. I’m already covered in sweat from the effort.

But on the shift, life flowed steadily and monotonously. For almost thirty days it was the same thing over and over. Books from the library saved us. They gave a person the chance to escape this monotony and fall into another world that distracts and heals.

Another main secret of shift work is the fresh air in any weather. You absolutely have to go for walks — the air in the cedar forest heals a person like a sanatorium. The smell of the taiga cannot be described. You have to feel it with your lungs, breathe it in and enjoy it.

Chapter 13. As Much Oil as We Pumped, That’s How Much Vodka We Drank

In the southern part of Pervomayka, at the turn leading to the Senomanian concrete water tank buried in the ground — the one where everyone used to go for a swim like it was a bathhouse — there was hot sulfurous water coming from a depth of 90 meters.

A large sign stood there with the inscription:

“As much oil as we’ve extracted, that’s how much vodka we’ve drunk.”

It was like a billboard of our time. People would shoot at this sign with rifles, and it was soon riddled with bullet holes. When the bosses saw this blatant display and the exposure of a “military secret,” they would immediately take the sign down. The very next day, a brand-new sign would appear in its place. This war went on for a long time.

There were no video cameras back then, and no one thought to take a photo in front of that sign for posterity. That’s how the legend of the sign was born — the one that openly admitted that everyone on the shift drank like shoemakers.

And yes, they drank according to the classic Soviet standard: three guys sharing a half-liter bottle of vodka, chased with a salted cucumber, a tomato, and black bread. In the evening, in the room with two friends.

There was an underground store on the fourth floor that operated 24/7. It sold regular vodka — not moonshine or diluted spirit. In the 90s, no one even thought about counterfeit alcohol yet. The next day, everyone would still show up for work. The real alcoholics who went on week-long benders simply didn’t last — they were fired without mercy.

I personally never got into that. In the mornings during summer, I would go for a run toward the airport with headphones from my player in my ears. When I reached the turn, there was a small flooded quarry. I would dive into the water, dry off on the diving platform, and then run back. I did this every single day.

One day, as usual, I was running along the road when a LAZ bus overtook me, honked, and opened its door on the move. I jumped in. The driver pointed his finger backward. About 25 meters behind, Mishka was running on all fours, apparently hunting me. After that incident, I stopped doing morning runs in the North. It was funny when, eight years later, I returned to the same field and people were already telling this story as a local legend.

Later, while working at my first joint venture in the North — “VahFrakmaster” — I saw how the Canadian oil workers drank. They asked me to buy them Russian vodka in Nizhnevartovsk. In the city, I found a childhood friend, and through a special order desk he arranged for us to buy it with dollars.

When the Canadian named Brian learned that one bottle cost only $2.50 instead of $28 back in Canada, he immediately said in Russian:

“Three cases of vodka.”

After we delivered the vodka to the field, it was interesting to see how long they would drink it. Twenty-one Canadians drank that sacred drink for **nine months**. They had their own bar, just for themselves. They would pour 50 grams of vodka, add 100 grams of soda, a little juice, a cherry or a slice of lemon, stick in a straw, and then sip from the glass all evening, perfectly happy and content. And they all dreamed of learning how to drink “the Russian way.”

My boss was a Canadian — 1.90 m tall, blue-eyed blond with a German surname. In moments of frankness, I would always ask him whether his father had served in the SS. He categorically denied it. But once, after we drank the Russian way, he suddenly confessed. His father had told him a lot about Russia — how he froze during the winter of 1941 near Moscow, and how in 1945 he left for Canada. Russian vodka has this power: it loosens anyone’s tongue. The only problem was that the Canadian turned out to be rather weak — they had to put him on a drip for a whole week afterward. Then came the questions: “How do you drink like that?”

“Not us — life is like that.”

No matter how hard they fought the Green Snake on the shift, it still flies over the oil fields. Of course, not in the same volume as oil production — only within reasonable limits. Only the Snake itself knows how many shift workers it has claimed.

Chapter 14. My Uncle, a Man of Honest Principles…

My uncle Kamil came to the North in 1973. He was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. He had spent only 11 days at the front.

He was drafted in 1944 at the age of 18. They trained him as a VHF radio operator. The radio was mounted in a ZiS-5 truck — it was frontline communication with the Supreme High Command. This was near Königsberg. The war was already coming to an end, and everyone was in a state of anticipation.

On May 9, everyone woke up to the news that Berlin had been taken. They started shooting into the air with whatever they had in their hands. They didn’t drink just 100 grams — they drank, embraced each other, and sang. On the other side of the front, the Germans fell silent; the news had reached them too.

On May 10, their lieutenant ordered them to relocate their vehicle to another sector of the front, to the third line of defense. They chose a large shell crater. Using picks and shovels, the crew of four men had to dig a pit with straight edges so that the truck could drive into it like into a caponier. The top was covered with camouflage netting, and four antenna wires were stretched out in different directions. It took them two full days.

On May 12, 1945, the Germans launched an attack exactly where my uncle’s unit had been just the day before. Several Tiger tanks and an SS battalion crushed everyone who was there, broke through to the highway leading from East Prussia into Germany, formed a column, and were followed by trucks and hospital tractors marked with red crosses.

About a kilometer away there was a small hill. A battalion of Katyushas was urgently moved there, and they fired a single salvo at the column — direct fire. All that remained of the column were pieces of flesh and the charred skeletons of vehicles. No one had a chance to survive. All the men with whom they had drunk to Victory the day before were killed.

They looked at their lieutenant, dropped to their knees, and kissed his boots. He had accidentally saved their lives. That was how the war ended for my uncle.

When he arrived in the North and underwent the medical examination, the doctors categorically refused to approve him for the position of Oil Production Operator in the CDNG (Central Dispatching Oil and Gas Department). The job required skiing from one well to another, and they mainly hired athletes. My uncle calmly did 50 push-ups on the floor and suggested that the doctor do the same. There were no more questions. After 1945, he had served another 12 years in Tashkent. He trained on parallel bars and rings. The pull-up bar was his favorite apparatus. That’s why he had no health problems.

His favorite pastime was fishing. The first time I flew to visit him, we went fishing almost every day for a week. When we caught a full backpack, we would enter the apartment building and all the neighbors would automatically open their doors. Uncle would hand out the fish to everyone, and by the time we slowly climbed to the fourth floor, the backpack was almost empty. We would fry the fish, and my uncle was happy and content.

He was given a three-room apartment after just three months — as a veteran. They apologized that it wasn’t on the second floor. That’s how my uncle worked until retirement. There were quite a few veterans in the town. On May 9, you could see them marching in a circle of honor, their medals clinking, while people applauded.

Chapter 15. May 9th

On May 9, we all gathered at my sister’s house. Rafael’s father had come from Bashkiria. On his jacket hung three Orders of Glory (equivalent to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union). Across the table, we seated Uncle Kamil, whose chest was covered with all the Brezhnev-era anniversary medals he had received through the military enlistment office over thirty years.

The table was set with the highest standards. The whole family sat down together. The two grandfathers kept glancing at each other. One had been at the war for only 11 days, the other had fought all 1,418 days — from the first to the very last — in a fortified area near Murmansk, where the enemy had not advanced a single meter.

“Well, why did you pin all these tin cans on your chest?” said the Knight of the Orders of Glory.

A heavy silence fell over the table. And then the two veterans started fighting right there at the table. The cake flew, plates of salad went flying. We all recoiled from the table. The clash was short but fierce. Eventually they were pulled apart and calmed down. Everyone was in shock. Why did it happen?

It turned out that Rafael’s father was hurt by the fact that time had leveled everyone: those who had never been at the front at all, those who had spent just a few weeks there, and those who had served from the first day to the last. Gradually things calmed down. The old men had a little more to drink.

He had served in naval reconnaissance in the marines. Throughout the war he went on missions to Norway. They were delivered by small “Malutka” submarines. What we heard sounded like something out of Rambo — except it was real.

The submarine would approach the shore at night. They would paddle in on a rubber boat through the fog to the mouth of a river, swim upstream, cut and sink the boat, silently take out the sentry in the trench, and crawl further. They had to climb 75–100 meters up a sheer cliff using mountaineering gear — all in one night. At the top there were more trenches, and again they had to silently eliminate the sentry. Then they would run 18–20 kilometers to a railway bridge, plant explosives, and blow it up along with a train carrying ammunition.

They could not return the same way — the enemy would be waiting for them. They had to take a backup route back to the sea. Just before dawn, a sailor would surface on the deck of the “Malutka” and signal for half an hour with a green flashlight. They had to swim to the submarine in time. If time ran out, the boat would leave, daylight would come, and the group would perish.

He went on seven such missions and always returned. Even once with both legs broken. Then came the hospital in Sverdlovsk. After treatment — straight back to his unit. And so it went throughout the entire war.

There were also British soldiers at the submarine base. They fought together and had to communicate with them. The British gave him the nickname “Lucky.”

Three Orders of Glory are like the St. George Crosses of the First World War — awarded to a soldier for exceptional valor and courage. Sitting in front of us was a tough old man who had miraculously survived.

Uncle Kamil was not to blame for having been at that terrible war for only 11 days. They had both been there — my dear relatives. They are no longer with us, but in my memory they remain as boys of 18 and 23 years old, sitting at our table and still trying to prove something to each other.

The Generation of Victors.

That’s probably how it always happens: when memory becomes overgrown with moss, a new war begins. And only on the battlefield do people truly understand how beautiful the world is — the silence, the morning song of the nightingale, breathing in the fog.

I wish peace to everyone.

All this happened during my rest shift. Still under the impression, I went off to work in the taiga.

In Soviet times, the attitude toward veterans was one of the highest respect. Leonid Brezhnev himself had gone through it all. Back then, the army was still led by generals who had fought in the Great Patriotic War — the generation that had not yet been replaced by those who had served in Afghanistan and later wars.

Chapter 16. Cranberries

In the North there is a berry that’s easy to pick by hand — you can even use a scoop. Bears just eat them straight from the bush, right into their mouths. Sometimes a person and a bear would be picking berries almost side by side, at a respectful distance from each other.

Because of the high vitamin C content, you can’t eat this berry fresh — it makes your jaw cramp up instantly. But once it’s been touched by frost, it becomes sweet and very pleasant. You can make a drink called *mors*: crush the berries with a wooden pestle, add water and a little sugar, and the refreshing drink is ready.

One day the helicopter crew offered to take me out to the swamp to pick cranberries. I prepared two buckets and a scoop. In the morning we took off with a long pipe slung underneath the helicopter for delivery to a drilling rig. The rigger accepted the pipe there, and then we flew over the swamp.

The flight engineer sat in the bubble window, scanning the ground through binoculars, looking for the best patches. “Here it’s not ripe yet… too small here… but over there — look how big and thick it is!” The helicopter descended for landing. I quickly jumped out, and the moment I was on the ground, the helicopter took off again.

I was left completely alone in the middle of the vast swamp. There were cranberries everywhere — an absolute sea of them. I started picking.

About twenty minutes later the helicopter flew over me again with the pipe still hanging underneath. I raised my left hand — meaning the buckets weren’t full yet. I kept picking. After fifty minutes or a little more, both buckets were finally full. When the helicopter passed over me once more, I raised my right hand — the signal that I was done.

The crew dropped the pipe off at the rig and came back for me. I quickly climbed aboard with my two full buckets, happy and satisfied.

Standing alone in the middle of the swamp, with no one around for several kilometers, almost no forest — just occasional stunted trees barely taller than a man’s head — was a strange feeling. When you walk across the moss and cranberry hummocks, the whole bog quivers slightly under your weight. A wave of fear would hit me: what if I suddenly fell through into a “window” of open water? I was wearing swamp boots, and water squelched under my feet with every step.

There was always a risk that a bear might wander out toward me, but bears are afraid of noise and usually run away from helicopters.

Once, while flying back to town, the Afghan-veteran helicopter pilots spotted a bear and decided to chase it. They flew at about 60 km/h, only 15 meters above the ground. When they almost caught up with him, the bear made a sharp 90-degree turn to the left and started sprinting again. The helicopter turned sharply and hovered over his head once more. This game repeated four times. Finally the bear got exhausted, lay down on his back, and raised his paws to defend himself against the “metal dragon.” The pilots didn’t shoot him. They just had their fun and flew on.

For a long time I couldn’t understand why they did it. Among themselves they called it “chasing Mishka.” Chase him a bit, then continue on their way.

They also had other perks. If a hunter on the ground shot a moose (300 kg of meat), he still had to drag it out of the taiga or swamp. One quarter of the meat went to the helicopter crew as a bonus. That’s why there was always moose meat in their freezer.

They also had a small fishing cabin on an island in the middle of a huge lake, where they caught perch weighing up to 2.5 kilograms and smoked them. Sometimes they generously shared with others. Thank you, guys.

I flew back to the helipad with two buckets of cranberries, happy, and went straight to my room to clean them from twigs and debris.

That’s how the tough shift workers used to pick cranberries in the North back then. A helicopter was like an aerial tram in those distant 90s. When I remember it now, it still seems hard to believe.

Today, one hour of helicopter flight costs a fortune — aviation kerosene has gone through the roof. I think the only people who still collect cranberries this way now are the general director of the company and his family. Back then the times were more democratic, and even I could afford such a luxury.

Chapter 17. The Bear Hunter

While I was working at a small oil field, the head of geological exploration called me from Kolpashevo. Their drilling rig had been standing for two years, six kilometres from the shift camp. After finishing their work, the crew flew out in a hurry, and a watchman arrived — a young guy who had grown up in a big city. He had no experience of living in the taiga, and there was no one to show him the ropes.

The crew had left in a rush. Everyone was in a hurry. He lived in a residential trailer, heated the banya, and cooked his food on a small stove. They had left him enough supplies to last six months.

Then the Bear appeared and began hunting him.

Every day he reported the situation back to base by radio. He had no rifle. Gradually he stopped going outside altogether.

The bear kept watch on him around the clock. A wild animal can sense when a man is afraid of him. A whole month of this siege passed. Nerves are not made of steel. Over the radio, they noticed that the young man had begun talking nonsense. The city boy had lost his mind from fear and constant stress.

Then his boss called us, and we set off on a GT-T tracked vehicle to rescue the guy.

He had barricaded himself inside the trailer. We had to break down the door. In his terror, he thought the bear had finally got to him. A pitiful sight met our eyes: a mountain of empty tin cans and a bucket he had been using as a toilet. The man himself was completely out of it — a ready-made psychiatric patient. We tied him up and carried him to the helicopter that had brought the management.

We got acquainted, they thanked us for the help. Taking advantage of the situation, I asked them to send a proper watchman next time — someone who hunted constantly and knew the taiga like the back of his hand.

And so the real Bear Hunter arrived. A man with serious experience.

You could see at once that he had once fallen into a bear’s paws. The marks were clearly visible: deep scars from claws ran across his cheek and above his eyebrow. One leg was shorter after a bad fracture, and there were more scars on his back.

While walking and hunting, I would sometimes drop in on him to listen to the stories of a true Wolf of the Taiga. He had grown up in a family of hunters since childhood, and his grandfather had taught him all the tricks of the trade. Over time he had begun hunting bears himself. His grandfather always warned him: it is not only the hunter who hunts the bear — the bear is always hunting the hunter too.

There is a safe way to hunt. You find a den, and in winter, using long poles, you poke the bear awake. He bursts out, and you shoot him. Spring comes, he doesn’t appear on the trail. For bears there are no questions — well, the bear is gone, such is life. The territory is freed.

But if you kill a bear in autumn, butcher the carcass, and the hunter leaves his scent behind like a passport, the bear’s sense of smell fixes that scent, and the hunt for the hunter begins. Other bears join this “hunters’ union.” As a man walks through the taiga, he leaves his scent everywhere, and they pick up the trail.

He had killed twenty-eight bears. But on the twenty-ninth, the bear and his “brigade” mauled him. Thank God he was not alone. They evacuated him by helicopter and saved his life. He was treated for a long time; surgeons stitched up the torn wounds. After that he never hunted bears again. His grandfather had warned him that this was exactly what would happen, but he hadn’t believed him.

In the old days, men went after bears with a spear and a knife. How much courage and strength it takes to defeat the strongest beast in the taiga!

Nowadays, sometimes a crowd of amateurs buys a den for 450 thousand roubles. Armed with carbines and optics, they stand in a circle around the den. The bear flies out through the smoke hole, while they wait at the main entrance, throw down their rifles, and run away as fast as a car. That is how a rogue bear — a *shatun* — is born.

The unfortunate hunters quickly pack up and leave. No trophy skin for the wall. There is even a chance that the bear will take their skins instead.

Such is the Law of the taiga, and it is harsh. If a man doesn’t have iron nerves, he has no business going after a bear.

I asked him if he might sell me a bearskin — I wanted to give it as a gift to a good friend as a keepsake. After the next shift change, he brought it as promised. The price was not thirty thousand roubles. The gift was given and, after proper tanning by a specialist, now lies in front of the television.

Usually Muscovites order a trophy: a bearskin with the boiled skull of the bear attached, and in the nostrils — the spent cartridge case from the bullet that killed him. Then you can tell hunting stories like Baron Munchausen. Such a set can be bought in any hunting shop in Moscow. Some even have a full-sized stuffed bear made and place it in the hallway — you can hang a scarf on it or put a hat on its head.

I think bears also have a passion for trophies. Once a bear has tasted human flesh, he becomes a man-eater. And his life is practically over. And the one to blame is almost always a human being.

Chapter 18. The Old Believer

We had a locksmith named Viktor Starover working in our boiler house. His father was an oilman, and his mother came from a real skete — she knew nothing of city life. So Viktor’s childhood was spent in strictness and according to the canons of the Old Faith. He didn’t know how to lie; he was always open and honest in conversation. He did his job without a single complaint. Old Believers usually don’t drink alcohol, but to everyone’s surprise, Viktor sometimes didn’t refuse. He had that little sin.

In the taiga he moved as if it were his own apartment. He could easily run twenty kilometers and not show a drop of fatigue. You could always order a wood grouse or a capercaillie from him, and two and a half hours later it would already be lying on the table. Once on the bog I saw him hunting in winter: he would ride out to the center of the swamp and with sharp blows of his ski drive a black grouse out from under the crust. The bird would try to take off, but the Old Believer never missed. The grouse had no chance.

Once I asked him to take me hunting with him. He categorically refused. “What, am I supposed to drag you on my back for fifteen kilometers afterward?” His reasoning was ironclad.

What impressed me most was his moose hunting. On winter days he would carefully watch the temperature swings, and when snow had been falling for four days straight, he would start preparing for the taiga. He would leave in the pitch dark of morning and come running back six hours later, asking the GT-T all-terrain vehicle driver to help haul out the meat. He had already butchered it so that no wolverine or lynx would accidentally find the four quarters of the carcass. He hung them high in the trees with ropes.

He was not a greedy man. A quarter of the meat always went to the dining hall of the workers’ dormitory, and a little bit reached everyone who wanted to taste fresh moose.

Such taiga stockpiling didn’t happen often — no more than three times a season. He took from nature exactly as much as his family needed. He would send the meat by helicopter at a phone call to his village, where a relative would meet the load. I never once saw him return empty-handed. It felt as if he had simply gone to the supermarket and taken several hundred kilograms of meat for free.

A bear also hunts moose. To put on enough fat for the winter, it needs three or four moose in a season. There’s a joke among the shift workers in the taiga: four shift workers replace one moose for the bear. Where I worked, the bears lived nearby and never attacked people — not once in twenty-five years. If there is enough food for it in the natural food chain, the bear remains indifferent to the workers. The workers, however, are not indifferent to the bear.

I was surprised to learn that the main food the brown bear uses to build up fat for winter is the cedar nut. A cedar gives a harvest only once every four years. For three years the bear keeps a strict fast. The bear is omnivorous. In spring it loves to eat wild garlic — *kolba*. It grazes on ordinary grass in the flooded meadows along the river, doesn’t turn its nose up at anthills. There are bees in the taiga, though I somehow never saw them. But if a bear finds a hollow with a hive, it will tear the whole thing apart. Honey for him is like candy for us.

The Old Believer never shot bears. He tried his best not to quarrel with them. Everything left after butchering a moose — if the bear was not yet asleep in its den — went to the bear. If it was already hibernating, then the lynx or wolverine got it. Zero-waste production.

There are also polar wolves that come down the ice of the Ob from the forest-tundra. The Old Believer once shot one of these visitors. It was a huge beast, with paws the size of my fist, light-gray in color — a very large specimen.

How do the bear, lynx, wolverine, and wolf coexist in the taiga? You could say they don’t. The bear does not tolerate neighbors on its territory. It drives them away and even fights with its own kind. The taiga is vast — there is enough room for everyone. A bear’s range might be forty by fifty kilometers, and it patrols its trails like a guard, circling constantly. On the border there is usually a fallen, broken tree with claw marks showing who is the master here. If an intruder sees that the owner’s marks are higher than the ones it can make, it quickly makes itself scarce.

Bear cubs stay with their mother for two or three seasons, then she kicks them out and they have to go wherever their eyes lead them. That’s how settlement into empty territories happens — and, naturally, constant fights. The strongest wins.

I feel very negatively about people taking bear cubs for fun, even if their mother has died. Once I saw a bear kept on a chain, with a hole under the dormitory windowsill. They would pull it up to the open window and feed it. The cub grew up. One day it jerked the chain, ripped out the windowsill and part of the wall, and ran away from the people. It didn’t get far. They shot it. That’s the standard story when someone tries to tame Mishka. He is not a dog or a fox.

So the myth that every Russian keeps a bear is an exaggeration. A bear needs about fifteen kilograms of meat a day. And if you fail to feed him, you yourself will become lunch. That is why in Siberia the shift worker, the Old Believer, and the bear always live side by side in the taiga. They all get along. There is simply no other way.

Chapter 19. Northern Fishing

In the Far North, the Ob River in spring becomes a true conqueror. When the ice breaks and the flood begins, the river rises fourteen to seventeen meters, swallowing vast territories. All the lakes suddenly turn into channels and arms of the river; swamps disappear under water. The sea itself retreats before the mighty flow — ships lose their way as the water spreads fifty to seventy kilometers beyond the usual fairway.

Once, flying as a passenger in a helicopter, I saw a small dry-cargo ship, no more than twenty-five meters long, standing right in the middle of an island in the Ob. It was tied to the only tree on the island. The island was half-submerged, and only the top of a pine tree on a small hillock protruded from the water. Smoke curled lazily from the galley chimney, laundry hung on a line, and the crew seemed to be dozing peacefully — not a soul was visible on deck.

On the return flight, we witnessed a dramatic change. Somewhere downstream, closer to the Ob Bay, an ice jam had broken. The water began to drop sharply, falling ten meters in almost no time. As we flew over the same spot, the island had re-emerged. The ship now sat high and dry on the very top of the hill. The crew was running frantically across the deck in complete bewilderment. The river had abandoned them.

Later, every time we flew over that island, we saw the ship slowly being swallowed by nature. Green grass grew taller around its hull with each passing week. Someone had stayed behind to keep watch; a thin wisp of smoke still rose from the chimney. The rest of the crew had been sent ashore. The vessel stood there for a whole year like a forgotten monument — until the next big spring flood finally lifted it off the shoal and returned it to the river.

When I first arrived in the North in the 1980s, I was stunned by the fishing. My grandfather had told me stories, but I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw. He used to say: “In the old days, a man would come to Pasol with a cigarette between his teeth, chop a hole in the ice with a pike pole, drop in a treble hook baited with that same cigarette, and in a couple of minutes a two-kilogram pike would already be hanging on the line.”

Flying by helicopter to distant lakes, we would drill a few holes with an ice auger. The fish, suffocating from lack of oxygen under the thick ice, would begin to frenzy. They leaped out onto the ice one after another, gasping desperately. In half an hour we would fill several dozen sacks, load them into the helicopter, and that was the end of the “fishing.”

Once in winter on the Pan River, I helped pull a hundred-meter seine through an ice hole to catch crucian carp. On the ice, they marked out a long rectangle of holes stretching a hundred and fifty meters. Long poles were used to pass ropes under the ice from one hole to the next until the net was fully deployed. Then twenty-five men grabbed the ropes and began to haul. Slowly the seine moved beneath the ice until it finally emerged through the main opening.

It wasn’t fishing — it was a massacre. Onto the ice spilled an enormous quantity of large crucian carp, each the size of a frying pan. An entire truckload of them writhed and flopped on the snow. I had never seen so much fish in my life. For a moment, it even felt unsettling.

The funniest moment came on the bank of the Ob when I saw a German tourist from Germany, speaking broken Russian, desperately searching for a payment terminal. He wanted to pay for his fishing. His eyes widened in genuine shock when he learned that fishing here was completely free. We would have been even more shocked if such a terminal had actually existed — along with an inspector standing nearby, ruler in hand, checking permits and measuring the length of every fish.

Fish are everywhere here — in lakes, rivers, streams, and channels. Once on the Yeltsovka River, where the ice had not yet melted, the fish came for spawning. I heard a constant, powerful noise: thousands of fish were beating their tails against the ice, trying to break through it. The sound resonated in my ears with incredible force. It was an indescribable spectacle — the raw power of nature demanding spring, demanding life, demanding to cast its eggs that would one day become tiny fish.

So when you fly to Siberia, do not forget to bring your spinning rod and a float rod. On the Northern rivers and lakes you will receive impressions and pleasure that will stay with you forever.

Time spent fishing is not counted in the chronology of life.

So said the great Prophet Muhammad — and he was right.

Chapter 20. Frost and Roads

In the North, there are roads that periodically claim lives like taxes. So when you get into a UAZ “loaf” van, you look at the driver and, based on how he’s dressed, you understand what awaits you. Frost on the roads where there are practically no villages, no logging crews, and the distance is 230–280 km — this is a game of Russian roulette.

When a “Malchish-Kibalchish” kid is sitting behind the wheel in an Adidas tracksuit and Puma sneakers, with a little sports-style beanie on his head — expect trouble. You start explaining to the young man: if the generator belt breaks at minus 40°C or lower, it’s impossible to change it in the frost — your fingers turn into hooks in about five minutes. This is literally a matter of life and death. I personally always kept flight unty boots, a sheepskin coat, and warm mittens in my bag on that transport. It was much calmer that way.

As for those who live by “ авось ” (maybe it’ll be fine), when the car breaks down, they first sit inside until they start freezing. They wait for someone to drive by and help. Then they start burning the wheels one by one, pouring gasoline on them. Then they burn the car itself. There is firewood nearby, but the snow is chest-deep, and not everyone carries a chainsaw or even a regular saw and axe in the car. The task is to survive at any cost.

After minus 50°C, vehicles usually travel with a second escort vehicle so that if the first one breaks down, everyone can be transferred and delivered to their destination. In severe frost, there are “aktirovannye” days (officially canceled work days) and work stops. Some workers continue even in such frost if the process cannot be stopped. There are heating cabins (vagonchiki) where the crew can go to warm up. The frost tests a person, and the weak ones usually leave after their first winter.

Another problem is a sharp change in temperature: yesterday it was minus 42°C, you wake up to minus four. Your temples throb — it feels like what pilots experience during turns and sudden descents toward the ground. You need Siberian health for this; unfortunately, people with childhood disabilities cannot work on shifts in the North.

The roads were, are, and will be. Winter roads (zimniki), forest trails, dirt roads, concrete roads, and asphalt — cargo constantly moves from base cities to the fields. Shift rotations happen continuously throughout the month. The drivers are brave and desperate people.

Auto companies have appeared in the North where almost all drivers are from Asia, and jokes circulate like: an Uzbek is asked if he worked on special transport, and he replies — yes, on a Zhiguli. Once I was inspecting the building where Uzbek drivers lived — their company hadn’t paid for heating, and from New Year’s the heating pipes were cut off. They set up an army tent inside the building. Outside it was –38°C, inside the building it was +10°C. I asked them: “Are they training you as polar explorers for work on Taimyr?” They stayed silent. In the morning at the planning meeting I reported the incident. Four hours later, heating was restored to them. They later told me that at night in the warmth they dreamed of Uzbekistan.

Homo Sapiens Arcticus — a new species of Siberian shift worker, originally from Uzbekistan. They will probably develop a mutation and grow thick, long fur like bears — in the form of a sweater.

I remember the first PRS crews from Belarus started returning to the North about ten years ago. What struck me most was when a driver lived for two months in the cabin of a KrAZ truck in winter because there were no places in the vagonchiki. They made a remark and issued a warning. Immediately they brought another vagonchik, delivered a bathhouse and toilet — because it was somehow wild to see the guys sitting on the embankment like black grouse. But right away their mood improved. No everyday problems. This is the Siberian standard, and it is always observed.

A special feature of driving on Northern roads in the frost is the mandatory stop on the highway if you see a car standing still and not moving — you must help. Today it’s you, tomorrow it will be you who needs help. You can’t do otherwise in Siberia. Even in Soviet times, they could catch up, stop you, and give you a “boxing lecture” to the jaw. Such is the peculiar ethics of behavior behind the wheel in the North.

Chapter 21. The North and Women

Working on a shift rotation, unfortunately, turns a person’s entire life into one big shift — including family and children. The kids see their father only on specific days, and this isolates the family from the head of the household for at least six months at a time. Years fly by, the children finish school and enter university, all financial problems are solved, all bills are paid. There is only one problem: they never see their father. For years, even decades, there is voluntary isolation from the family.

Sometimes on shift, a family man acquires a “second wife,” like a Muslim. The funniest situations happen when the wife from the mainland calls the shift site, and they have a calm conversation about everyday topics. They don’t fight — they’ve come to terms with it. The whole family has become a shift.

There are other situations when men try to live a double life — hiding things both at home and on shift. I once observed a man who got tangled up in lies and lost his mind. His inner Stirlitz got overworked. Not everyone can live a double life with two women for years like a spy — it’s a serious strain on the psyche. A child was born from his shift wife, and in the joy of it, he developed a psychosis: “Where is my real family — at home or on shift?” From this example, I became convinced that you cannot mix and complicate your life like that. You have to keep home and shift separate.

Of course, over the years scandals, jealousy, and indifference toward each other grow stronger, and suddenly a man finds himself alone, married only to his job. The meaning of everything he did for decades loses its value. The man withdraws into himself and becomes a bachelor again. Unburdened, stripped financially bare. Free.

And that’s when the most interesting part begins. The hunt is on for him like for a bear that brings home the food. Northern single ladies sharpen the spear of Cupid and begin the hunt. They throw a net over the man from which he can no longer escape — and he’s caught. You notice the man has changed: he has a second wind, his eyes are shining. After the divorce he has no apartment, no money, and the children give their father ultimatums.

But here comes a woman with her own apartment, well-groomed, neat, and full of attention. The man buys her a new fur coat, repairs the apartment — there’s a man in the house now, everything goes into the home. A year or a little more passes, and suddenly, flying back from shift, he is met at the doorstep. She hands him two suitcases, presents him with a fact: he has solved all her problems. And now — goodbye. She slams the door. The man stands in the entrance in shock, wondering what just happened and where to go. If this were a single case, I wouldn’t have written about it. This is a whole modern technology of gender relations using the shift-work method.

In Noyabrsk, on the 6th Hill, there are now cottages, but it used to be a bum settlement where people lived for years in vagonchiki (shift cabins). Nearby lived an old man who used to fly in from Kazan. One time he arrived a few days earlier than planned and found that his place in his wife’s bed was already occupied — another “shift correspondent” was on duty. He turned around and flew back to Noyabrsk. Ten years later his wife and now-adult children flew to see him and asked him to forgive her. He was implacable. They never bothered him again. As Woland said in *The Master and Margarita*: “Man is mortal, suddenly mortal.” The old man died after accidentally falling into a ditch, where he was found frozen in the ice — apparently he had suffered a heart attack. The neighbors chipped his body out of the icy captivity and respectfully organized his funeral. His ex-wife and his children with grandchildren were not present. That was how his thirty-year-long shift ended.

The vast majority of male shift workers are married to their job. They love it, happily fly in from all over the country, build friendly relations in the team. The moment of truth comes when they stand in front of an ATM, withdraw money, and realize the trip was not in vain. Stretching out on a beach in Turkey, Thailand, or Vietnam, with his wife lying next to him on the sand guarding him from other huntresses. It seems life has turned out well. A cottage has been built or bought over 20 years. He has purchased the car he wanted. Everything runs in standard mode. But this happens very rarely, and only a few experience this pleasure.

Women fly to the North to marry successfully (VUZ — “get a husband”). The concentration of single men is off the charts, their heads spin from the attention, and the lady very quickly solves her personal problem. She then takes the trophy back to her homeland. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain comes to Mohammed.

Life goes on and gives people small joys. Before your eyes are the shift buses “TOROS,” helicopters, the airport and flights, taxis home, platzkart and coupe train cars, stations and terminals. Hustle and bustle, nothing but hustle. And so it goes every month. You don’t even notice how 25–30 years fly by in a rapid tempo. And then the day comes when it all ends. Retirement. And the realization arrives: a shift is a prison where they release you on parole every month, pay you, and keep you on a leash chained to a doghouse with a bowl of good food. The shift is in your head, in the family, with the children, and in your entire life.

Not everyone can handle it this way. That is why I am sure that shift workers from Russia will fly to Mars. The only thing they won’t forget to take with them is a moonshine still.

Chapter 22. Snakes

In Western Siberia, in the taiga and on the swamps, there is a population of snakes. There are harmless vipers, and there are quite large specimens that are not so harmless. The Vasyugan swamps are not India, but the West Siberian black viper grows slightly over a meter in length, with a red mark on the top of its head. The bite of this snake is equivalent in danger to that of an Indian cobra, which is why snake venom antivenom is kept in every medical station at the oil fields.

They crawl across roads and highways, basking in the sun. Many people pay no attention to these seemingly “harmless” creatures.

One day, a young electrician was walking past the helipad and saw a viper crawling across the road. At the helipad, a group of shift workers waiting to fly out was sitting around. Our culprit picked up a screwdriver and tried to stab the snake. He missed. The snake continued crawling away. He bent down, pulled the screwdriver out of the ground, and tried to stab it again with a swing. The snake jumped up, and the bite landed on his lower lip. He tried to tear it off, but it wrapped itself around his neck. A wild scream attracted attention. The people waiting nearby ran over, picked up the victim, and carried him to the medical station.

The paramedic gave the patient, who was lying on the floor and barely being held down by five men, an intravenous injection of antivenom. He was already beginning to develop Quincke’s edema. Help arrived in time, and the choking attack was stopped. He was then urgently flown out on a stretcher to the hospital.

If he hadn’t touched it and hadn’t tried to kill it, none of this would have happened. Even when walking in the taiga, people don’t wear galoshes or sneakers — they wear high boots up to the knees. If you accidentally step on a snake’s tail in the grass, the snake attacks immediately. Tall boots are a simple way to prevent snakebites.

Sometimes in the grass you see a green viper with a rattle-like tip on its tail, which it uses to warn: “Don’t come closer.” You begin to realize that in the taiga, just like in the Vietnamese jungles, there are dangerous snake species.

Once on the swamp, I saw a snake wedding. We had gone to Zhyolty Yar to pick blueberries. On the large hummocks, the bushes were covered with big berries — it was pleasant to pick them. But the problem was that within a 100-meter radius, the entire colony of swamp snakes had gathered. They were intertwined with each other in some kind of natural dance of love; everything was in motion. Of course, we retreated and, still impressed, moved to another spot where we calmly picked two buckets of blueberries each.

Snakes sometimes crawl into buildings. The guys occasionally catch a grass snake and put it in a 3-liter jar. As a naturalist, I always rescue it and release it back into the taiga, telling them: “Don’t touch it, and it won’t touch you.” They don’t listen. “Don’t wake evil while it sleeps.”

When picking mushrooms in the taiga — for example, red-capped boletes — you can mow them down with a sickle, and the bag fills up quickly. But every time you bend down to cut one, you automatically and carefully check the grass to make sure there isn’t a snake there. I never had such an incident.

There are also snake hunters in the forest: sables, martens, weasels, and even foxes don’t turn up their noses at them. Soaring eagles and falcons hunt not only rodents in open areas. Everything in the taiga is arranged in its proper order. The only one who breaks all the rules in this chain is Man — and his name is Shift Worker Barbarian.

Chapter 23. Malysh

Siberian Laikas are remarkable northern dogs. They are always by your side when you venture into the taiga. These are your main guardians — even a rifle doesn’t bring such peace of mind. Spotting a bear from three hundred meters away, they immediately start barking. If there are three or four of them, they grow bolder and begin to press the “Mishka.”

I once saw the process. They surround the bear. An experienced dog jumps in front, barking and provoking him. The bear tries to swat the dog with his paw, while the other two sneak in and bite his hind legs — the shins are the weakest spot for a bite. The bear tucks his legs under himself, sits down on his backside, and waits for them to get tired of barking and leave him alone. Then he suddenly jumps up and runs from them. After chasing him beyond the three-hundred-meter safety zone and seeing that I’m not shooting, the dogs come running back, whimpering with satisfaction, proud of how brave they are.

Malysh was a special dog — very affectionate and always accompanying me. He remembered that after every trip, when we returned from the forest, I would cut him a slice of sausage as a reward for his faithful service. Malysh couldn’t speak like a human, but his “yes” or “no” answers — a confirming bark or a grumble — created the illusion that he understood me. He didn’t just accompany me; he escorted everyone who went berry-picking or mushroom-hunting. That was his dog’s job.

Malysh ran freely, chasing hares and other small game, constantly training his canine skills and instincts.

One day Malysh cut the pad of his left front paw. The cut was deep, and he wouldn’t put any weight on it — it caused him pain. I went and got some brilliant green antiseptic and bandages. The dog lay on the ground while I cleaned and treated the wound, then wrapped it tightly. It was painful to watch him limp toward the big bowl at the canteen. After lunch, they poured table scraps into that bowl for the dogs.

A pack of seven healthy Laikas gathered around. There was a strict order for feeding based on rank. Malysh was still young and almost always had to eat last.

Limping, he approached the dogs’ “galley.” To my surprise, the other dogs parted and let the injured one through. He ate first while they all watched and waited for him to finish.

This continued for about seven days. Malysh would remove the bandage, lick the wound, I would treat it and re-bandage it. Then, limping, he would head to the bowl, and the others would let him go first.

The wound healed quickly. Whenever he saw me, Malysh would lie down on the ground and stretch out his front paws so I could examine them.

Finally, the day came when Malysh walked without limping and ran around wagging his tail. But he made a mistake: out of habit, he tried to limp again and pretend to be disabled in order to claim first rights at the bowl. What followed was chaos — all seven dogs gave him such a beating that it’s a good thing they didn’t bite off his tail. His canine trick didn’t work.

After that, everything returned to normal. Dogs have their own laws of survival. I always tried to give him extra food on the side, and he guarded his bowl very aggressively, letting no one near it. Because it wasn’t communal — it was personally his.

For a hunter in the taiga, a Laika is a friend, a bear guard, and a game provider. If the dog is smart, it brings real joy to the hunter. I myself saw how Malysh would chase a black grouse and tree it. The bird, sitting on the top of a tree and realizing the dog couldn’t reach it, would calm down, puff out its cheeks with pleasure, turn its head, and look down from above. All that remained was to creep up slowly, take the shot, and bring down the sentry. Whenever I plucked the bird, I would cut off the legs and give them to Malysh. He gnawed them with pleasure — it was his rightful bonus from every bird we harvested together.

When winter came, the dogs would dig a hollow in the snow. The snow would completely cover them, and the dog would sleep and see his canine dreams. That’s probably how wolves sleep in the forest too, howling at the moon in severe frost. The dogs would join in the howling — a sign that long ago, in ancient times, they too once lived apart from humans, then came to him and stayed. While the wolves remained in the taiga.

When the shift ended and we all flew out by helicopter to the base town, Malysh would escort us to the helicopter and then meet the person who would feed him during my absence. Dogs have their own shifts too — the food chain must not be broken.

Man and Dog. This is an ancient alliance for living together. Today there are many breeds. A dog wakes a person in the morning and drags the sleepy owner for a walk; the same thing happens in the evening. Burglars never break into an apartment where a guarding dog is barking.

I once saw a Staffordshire Terrier sitting in the back seat of a car in the Zhiguli Mountains, windows open, no muzzle. The owner came back from the store and told me that once he had left the dog inside with the windows closed. Someone knocked on the car with a stick and ran away. In rage at not being able to reach the hooligan, the dog chewed up the dashboard and the steering wheel. After that, the owner stopped closing the windows. It was harsh. That kind of dog is like a crocodile with dog legs. Maiming a person is no problem for him.

That’s why Laikas are dearer to me than any other dogs. The only thing I feel sorry about is seeing how these poor creatures suffer in the heat on Earth. There is no such warm summer in the North, no lack of hunting, and no sleeping in the snow. People have spoiled the dog’s life. And when you say that, the owner doesn’t understand. The same problem exists with Huskies — they are sled dogs, not house dogs. They need to be harnessed to a sled in winter and given real work.

A dog’s life in the North has its own charms and joys. Their fur stands on end from frost and snow. In any cold, Laikas feel perfectly fine throughout their lives. At the same time, all this does not make the West Siberian Laika embittered by its canine existence.

Malysh remains in my memory forever.

A friend. A guardian. A rascal.

Chapter 24. Geese and Swans

The swan is a royal, beautiful bird that you see everywhere in Siberia. They arrive in spring from distant lands, and in autumn, flying in a perfect wedge and calling with their trumpeting cry, they are among the last to head south, when the first snow is already falling. They fly about fifty meters above the ground. You understand that winter is coming soon, and the entire taiga falls silent. The geese, ducks, and swans all fly away. An unusual silence descends. The taiga house stands empty.

In the taiga, only the black grouse, partridges, and capercaillies remain for the winter.

Swans always return to the place where they were born and where they spent their childhood. On the lake where a pair has settled, only those two swans live. They stay together for life and never part. Even if one of them dies, the survivor does not form a new pair, remaining faithful to the end. They cannot tolerate neighbors — neither ducks nor ordinary geese. They destroy their nests and drive them away. Many times, looking down at the lakes from a helicopter window, I saw the same picture: a single pair of swans, and no one else. Then the next lake — and a whole sea of ducks living together in a friendly collective, never bothering one another. Such is the philosophy of the royal bird.

Once, a friend accidentally shot a swan in autumn. He roasted it in the oven and decided to treat me and the guys. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. In ancient Rus’, only the Tsar was allowed to eat roasted swan. It was forbidden to everyone else, and the Tsar could execute anyone who violated this rule. It was his exclusive privilege. Hunters in Siberia try never to shoot swans. The swan is a timid bird and always settles in places far from humans.

There are no swans living permanently in the deep taiga, so you only see them in flight — in spring and autumn. Sometimes you can accidentally encounter them on a small lake when their wedge descends for the night near a clump of bushes, right by a row of drilling wells. In the corner there stands a small shed left behind after drilling operations, now filled with water. Having rested overnight, they fly on northward without lingering.

They hiss and trumpet. They bow to each other. Accelerating across the smooth surface of the lake, flapping their wings rapidly like a passenger plane, they slowly lift off the water, paddling with their feet and pushing off, make several circles, and then gracefully land again — as if testing their flying abilities. The next day they are gone, continuing their journey to the Arctic Ocean. In autumn the journey is in reverse. And so it goes every year, and in this there is the beauty of Nature.

They raise 4 to 7 cygnets. In autumn these young ones join their parents in the flock, where the father leads the wedge, cutting through the air and making the flight easier for the young. They fly south to the floodplains of Kazakhstan, the Volga region, Azerbaijan, and other countries. There they are shot at. The royal protection no longer exists, so not all of them return in spring. Some wounded birds along the migration route are picked up and nursed back to health by kind-hearted people, and in return for that love, the swans respond with love.

Rasul Gamzatov once wrote poems for a song about fallen warriors who turned into swans. They fly and wave to everyone who is waiting for them and hoping they will return home — a home they will never reach again. It is symbolic and sad.

This bird holds a very special place in the heart and soul of every Russian. Belarusians also have their own bird — the stork, a symbol of family and well-being. They even build artificial nests from old cart wheels right next to their houses. And in gratitude to humans, new residents soon appear.

Bird and Man. This connection serves as a test of the general state and level of life in the present moment. If the birds are doing well and no one harms them, then things are also good for humans.

That is why, when you look up at the sky and see them flying, you understand that everything will be all right — today, tomorrow, and hopefully the day after tomorrow.

Chapter 25. Water in the North

Water is the foundation of life on Earth. Throughout our lives, water makes up 55 to 70 percent of our body — in our muscles, bones, and other organs. That is why our health depends entirely on the water we drink.

In 1982, I flew north for the first time to visit my relatives from the North. The very first thing that shocked me was the rusty water in the bathtub when I took a bath after arriving. The iron content in the water was off the charts. My skin itched after contact with it. When I lay in the bathtub, my body was invisible beneath the water. In the kitchen there was a filter, and we tried to clean the water of iron. Then we added a few drops of potassium permanganate, which bound the remaining iron and made it settle to the bottom. We carefully poured off the somewhat cleaner water and dropped silver coins into it to “silver” the water. If a person had kidney problems, they could easily “play the box” (die) within a year.

Of course, over time, all the cities installed water treatment facilities, and now purified water — with the iron removed — is supplied to the water system. But it is still impossible to turn it into the spring or mountain water of the Caucasus. While working in a state institution in Noyabrsk, I once saw a document from Soviet times, marked “Secret” and “For Official Use Only” by the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In black and white it stated that any testing of drinking water sources in northern cities for traces of petroleum products was strictly prohibited. This order applied to all laboratories of the Sanitary-Epidemiological Stations.

What it meant was simple: when building cities and shift camps, they first drilled oil wells 1,800 to 2,200 meters deep. Then they drilled the city water intake at 90–120 meters. Over time, through cracks in the casings of both the oil and water wells, flooding occurred and traces of oil began to seep into the drinking water. All of this eventually ended up in the tap water.

Once, when I asked for a drink of water at the Olenye oil field, the operator poured me a mug straight from the tap, struck a match, and brought it to the water. The water caught fire. There was methane in it, and it burned. Kidneys could fail immediately from water like that. There was a problem, and they solved it the simple way — by banning any research on it.

That is why there was a mandatory requirement to take vacations in the Caucasus and on the Black Sea. A person had to compensate for the damage to their health by resting in a sanatorium. Today, every shift worker is given 30 liters of bottled water for the shift. But it is produced right there from the same tap water, purified twelve times to remove impurities. Still, it is not mountain water and certainly not from the Caucasus.

Over 25 years, I personally used my own method of water purification. I would take a 1.5-liter bottle, fill it with tap water or the water issued at work, and put it in the refrigerator or outside in the snow in freezing temperatures. After a day, the water would freeze. I would bring it into the room and let it thaw. Two-thirds of the water was poured off and used to cook soup, tea, and coffee. The rest went down the sink. In this way, I obtained my own individually purified water — just like in the mountains of Dagestan. The result was obvious. A year before retirement, I had my kidneys examined for stones. The therapist said I had the kidneys of an infant. That means that for the next 20 years, at least, I won’t need white slippers and special services. That’s already a good prospect.

I will also add that some shift workers, after retiring, continue to work and suddenly discover that with both salary and pension, they have enough money for everything — and this cannot help but make them happy. I am a supporter of this approach: you should leave the shift work on time, while you still have no health problems. Unfortunately, many people do not understand this and live by the principle: “Maybe they will award me… posthumously.” One year on the shift after the age of 60 is minus five years of life. Is the money worth it? I think not. One should live long, and let the Pension Fund worry about your longevity. I wish everyone a long life and good health. And that depends on the water you drink every single day.

Chapter 26. Experiments

Gaidar’s team conducted an experiment on the oil workers, which at the time was called, in the spirit of the era, “price liberalization.” In a single day, they freed prices on everything, supposedly so that the market would set the real prices by itself. The day before this experiment, the entire North was seething like Mount Vesuvius. Everyone was waiting for the eruption.

After standing in line at the Sberkassa, I withdrew all the money I had earned — 8,630 rubles over two years. People who had worked 10–15 years had 90,000 to 160,000 rubles in their accounts. Everyone was rushing around the city trying to buy anything they could. I went to the store that sold fur hats and bought two mink and two rabbit ones. They cost pennies. There was no point in buying ten of them. But people were buying twenty or more. I was simply curious about what I would be able to buy the next day.

In the morning I went to the store and saw the new price tags. The sausage that had cost 2 rubles 80 kopecks yesterday now cost 128 rubles per kilogram. I bought a kilogram and went to my sister’s place. We drank tea, and I treated her to the market sausage. Essentially, that night prices on everything skyrocketed according to the “sausage calculation” formula. My money ran out in a week.

Then the chaos with the privatization of the NGDU began. There were four oil production directorates in the city. A group of 10–11 people — the general director and his inner circle — would prepare a package of documents, collect a certain number of vouchers, pool money for a bribe (about $100,000 in a briefcase), and fly to Moscow to get approval from Chubais, who ran this shady outfit.

Oil was sold centrally, and the money from exports went to the Central Bank. Then the moment came when the enterprises were privatized. At the shareholders’ meeting, the question of allocating shares according to the Charter of the Joint-Stock Company to the enterprise’s employees was decided. No one understood anything about it, so ordinary workers got 100 shares each, while the founders received 1,000 shares each.

Oil continued to be produced without stopping for even a minute. In the first month, the management used foreign currency to buy 1,500 used Toyota and Nissan cars from 1986 with right-hand drive. The entire stadium was packed with these cars. They began distributing them according to waiting lists and queues. The crowd demanded spectacles, and it got them — just like in ancient Rome.

A year later, the four directorates were merged into a single Association through a share exchange. Then came the situation with the Association: the oil had been sold, the currency was in the Central Bank, but for half a year no money was coming into the city. Practically no one was receiving a salary. Everyone was left without money.

Then came the loans-for-shares auction, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky appeared on the horizon. He bought the controlling stake with money he had borrowed from the Central Bank — $620 million that the oil workers themselves had earned. So the previous owners, who had screwed over the workers, were kicked out, and capitalism ended for them.

Years later, I began to understand that Gaidar’s time under Yeltsin — and everything that happened in the city where I lived — was a well-planned operation to seize the collective’s property. Too much money was circulating in the North. It was a murky time, and murky people who were not our comrades were making their profits. What had been state property became “mine.” Meanwhile, the shift workers kept working. It was impossible to figure it all out at the time. Those who lived through it spent half a year eating nothing but pasta.

The entire well-oiled system that had worked for decades collapsed in a single moment. My generation grew up and worked under socialism for half our lives and under underdeveloped capitalism with Russian specifics for the other half. We have something to compare it to. But for those who grew up after the 1990s, there is nothing to compare it with. They were not witnesses to what happened, and I think they are not even interested. After all, back then a shift worker could pull out his shift ID at the airport, get on a flight for free, fly to Kustanai or Rudny, buy socks there, eat cherries, drink a mug of beer, and a few hours later fly back on the same plane to his city in the North.

Chapter 27. The Runners

That’s what I call the former Soviet citizens who grabbed a suitcase full of dollars and fled to the USA. Each of them took at least 1–2 million dollars, and the money was criminal. In total, at least 500 billion dollars left the country. This plunged Russia into a financial depression that lasted 20 years. Russia was on its knees under Yeltsin and slowly rose from its knees under Putin.

The philosophy of that time was “money doesn’t smell.” Something was stolen from enterprises, property was sold off. It was a golden age of enrichment for factory directors and accountants. Massive double bookkeeping and non-payment of taxes were everywhere.

The arrest in Omsk of the head of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was the number one sensation at the time. The state suddenly doubled its income from the oilmen within a month. The government paid off the nine-month wage and pension arrears to pensioners and public-sector workers.

A classic example: a husband and wife worked at the airport. He was in charge of a helicopter squadron, she was the chief accountant. These big shots were greedy. They managed to sell two Yak-42 airplanes, build two nine-story buildings in Novosibirsk for resettling pensioners, sell a certain number of apartments on the side, bankrupt the aviation enterprise, and privatize all the fuel from the airport’s oil depot. Then they safely departed for the USA, where they opened a bank, and they still live there.

Of course, the prosecutor’s office and the police opened a criminal case. But the USA does not extradite criminals — they are the golden fund of citizens who bring criminal money from all over the world. If I were in their place, I would award such VIP citizens the Congressional Medal for stealing more than a million dollars.

The height of cynicism was the celebration of the city’s 45th anniversary. On the podium stood the mayor of the city, the governor of Tomsk Oblast, and these so-called Honorary Citizens who, while living in the USA, had come back to celebrate with the townspeople. Twenty years later, no one remembers what they did to the city anymore — the old-timers have been replaced by a new wave of residents. I think they came to withdraw their criminal files from the prosecutor’s office and police archives. And, of course, no one refused the bankers. Years have passed, but the sin remains, so the actions of these criminals are perfectly logical. The main thing for them is that when they already have a reputation in another country, their criminal past from the country they robbed doesn’t come flying back at them.

If it were up to me, I would now collect all the files on these runners from the archives and create a book about all the major thefts at enterprises — especially in the North of Russia — during that period, and translate it into English. Many people would feel very uncomfortable, because their neighbors would start looking them in the eye and calling them crooks. But I think they would survive it. In the USA there live 42 million former runners from all over the world who usually don’t work, have bought houses, and are enjoying life. They have money to live on, go to the toilet regularly without constipation, and are also called “sausage immigrants.” They warm their asses on the beaches of Florida. Life has turned out well for them.

Their main justification for what they did is that the country was collapsing, the new one had not yet been built, and therefore they took what was a financial fragment of the USSR — as a souvenir. The collapse of the state was a golden time for swindlers, thieves, and scoundrels.

Another classic fraud scheme: a small oil field. They build up a “map” by hydraulic filling — a sand platform the size of ten football fields and 15 meters high. On paper, they supposedly bring in road slabs, road workers allegedly come and lay the slabs on the virtually filled roads. Then the facility is accepted and signed off. Everyone involved is happy — yachts, a house in Spain, cash for retirement. According to the documents, everything has been built. Only the oil workers then drive for 25 years on dirt roads. The documentation sits in the archive, tucked away in the farthest corner so no one accidentally stumbles upon it. And the fraudsters have long been abroad. Everything has grown over with the moss of history. And the sand “map” stands as a monument to the scam. The sand was never used for the roads — and that is the main evidence that the fraud took place.

The main thing for them is that all traces of the crime grow over. There were so many crimes that the state simply could not physically imprison everyone. The principle “steal, drink, and go to prison” didn’t work. The mechanism that worked was “steal, buy a ticket, and run to the USA.” It was a thieving time. That is why the monument to Yeltsin — where he stands drunk, leaning and hugging a lamppost — is a brand of history. Even when someone poured a bucket of blue paint over the Yeltsin monument in Yekaterinburg and the white marble turned blue, I don’t think he turned over in his grave. The monument simply took on its natural color, so to speak. They cleaned it for 17 million rubles, but I think every citizen who walks past still sees it as blue. You can’t scrub the history clean of that blueness.

Every citizen of Russia has their own personal story from the last thirty years, with little sins they feel ashamed of. The main thing, probably, was to remain a Human Being during that time. There were so many temptations. That’s why not everyone can sleep peacefully after the Era of Changes — especially the runners.

Prices in Walmart supermarkets have risen, and the sausage immigration has started flowing back to Russia. When you read them, my God, they act as if they did us a favor. That’s their psychology: the country was built without them, and wherever their ass feels good — that’s their homeland.

Chapter 28. Mikhail Khodorkovsky

He is a well-known figure. I personally am not acquainted with him and have never met him. Therefore, I can judge him only by his actions.

The creation of the Yukos company took place against the backdrop of acquiring the controlling stake in Tomskneft through a loans-for-shares auction. The oil workers had pledged their shares to get a loan to pay salaries. They could not repay the loan, and the assets passed to Mr. Khodorkovsky. Later, in the town of Strezhevoy, people learned that the Central Bank had received money from the sale of oil but had blocked payments to the oil workers for six months. It was in that same Central Bank that Khodorkovsky received the pledged amount. It turns out he bought the oil company with the oil workers’ own money.

Naturally, the management of TN (Tomskneft) had every reason to view this manipulation negatively. They dealt with them radically: everyone was fired, and energetic young guys were brought in from Samara. After all, the Yukos company united Neftyugansk, Samara, and Sakhalin into a single whole. And the main prize was Tomskneft.

Reorganization began immediately. The accounting departments were removed from the four NGDUs (oil production directorates), and fixed assets were transferred to the balance sheet via outsourcing. All financial activity was brought under control. Only work collectives remained in the offices, now on individual contracts. After all these manipulations, the assets and financial flows were separated, the workers became hired labor — and every third ruble went into the pocket of our oligarch. Production continued without stopping. They raised salaries so that everyone would keep quiet. After the city had sat without money for six months, any improvement was naturally perceived positively. They threw a chicken bone into the bowl just in time.

In principle, the same scheme was used in other cities. Khodorkovsky had never worked in the oil industry, so as a PR move he decided to work for two weeks as an intern at the Luginetskoye field, as a driller’s assistant on a drilling rig. How he actually performed there, I don’t know, but afterward there was a meeting of the collective where problems were discussed. They asked him why the salary was the lowest in the North. He replied that if anyone was dissatisfied, he would recruit shift workers from China. The entire collective stood up and walked out of the hall.

This conversation was remembered when, after his arrest in Omsk, messengers were sent to all the fields with a proposal to protest by stopping the oil wells. The collective answered “No” and reminded him of that meeting.

I don’t know how Khodorkovsky served his time in prison. After some madman nearly killed him with a screwdriver, special conditions of detention were created for him, where he no longer interacted with other inmates. Then came the letter to Putin about his elderly mother. This, of course, touched our President, and he was released early. There was an interesting moment: if he had asked Putin for a meeting, Putin would not have refused him. He could have suggested creating a new oil and gas company at the mouth of the Lena or Yenisei River. He had the money and could have started from scratch. For a real man, that would have been pure adrenaline. I think that by building a town there, terminals for shipping oil, and developing fields, in 7–10 years he would have become an oligarch again.

Instead, after fleeing abroad, he began his rotten activities against Russia. All the protests that took place in those years always had the ears of our oilman sticking out behind them. They still stick out today.

That is how the story of the oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the North ended. He is alive and well, wants for nothing, but time has shown that Russia does not need him either.

Chapter 29. The Psychic Aunt Olya

The 90s are remembered for the psychics Kashpirovsky and Chumak. People would place three-liter jars in front of their televisions to “charge” them, twist their heads around, and sit in packed studio halls or on chairs in front of the screen across the entire country. It was some kind of mass psychosis. Perhaps it even helped save Russia from civil war.

This phenomenon eventually reached our shift camp as well. Aunt Olya began conducting individual sessions for both the sick and the healthy, and they cleared out the massage room for her — the very room where my good friend Fyodor Ivanovich had given massages for years.

I volunteered to help her. I was skeptical; I had no faith in miracles. The process was simple: a patient (usually an oil worker) would come into the office, sit on a chair, and Aunt Olya would place her hands on his head, make a diagnosis, conduct a session, and tell him how many days he needed to come back. Everything was free.

I particularly remember one healthy PPN master who came for a session. Aunt Olya examined him for a long time, then began speaking:

“You’re a boxer. You fought 23 bouts. You lost only two. You had a head injury. You’re a Master of Sports.”

He kept nodding in agreement. Then, suddenly, she said:

“You killed a man. No one knows about it.”

The man turned pale, jumped up sharply, and bolted out of the office like a bullet. Later, whenever I ran into him in the corridors of the complex, he always pretended he didn’t know me.

My skepticism vanished instantly. Something new and incomprehensible had appeared against the backdrop of the materialism I had been taught since first grade, and I was suddenly confronted with it.

Aunt Olya looked me straight in the eyes, as if drilling right through me, and said calmly:

“You don’t believe in this, do you?”

I answered, “No.”

She placed her hands on my head and began the session. She named the exact day, month, and year of my birth. It was in winter, in February, at six o’clock in the morning, and instead of snow, it was raining. She gave the full name of the midwife who delivered me. Later I asked my friend Valera about her, and when I flew home on leave, my mother confirmed everything she had said.

Then she told me something even more astonishing: that I had a twin, a clone, who had died in Afghanistan in 1984. A complete copy of me. I later checked the Memorial database where all the data on those killed in the war is posted — the photo, name, and surname were exactly mine, only the patronymic was different. A guy in a blue beret was looking back at me from the monument — and it was me.

After that, there was an incident at the Moscow airport. While buying a ticket, my passport was open on the counter. A warrant officer standing nearby with a “For Courage” medal accidentally saw my first and last name. He became agitated and asked:

“Is that you? Alive?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“But I sealed you in a zinc coffin a year ago and sent you home to the city where your parents live.”

I thought he was some kind of con artist trying to scam me. I left the stunned warrant officer, grabbed my ticket, and ran to boarding. Only later, during my conversation with Aunt Olya, did all these pieces fall into place like a puzzle.

It was fascinating to talk with her. She even offered to tell me the day of my death. I refused, telling her the story of Pushkin. When he learned he would die in a duel, he tried twelve times in minor quarrels to provoke someone into dueling him. One potential opponent finally said:

“Alexander Sergeevich, the whole of St. Petersburg knows that your death will come in a duel. I do not want to go down in history as the man who killed Russia’s great poet.”

Then Dantes appeared, and the gypsy woman’s prophecy came true.

At the end of the session, however, she asked me: when I flew back to the city (I lived in a dormitory on the 8th floor), on June 6th I should not leave my room. I should buy some beer and stay locked inside for the entire day and night. I did exactly as she said. That evening, while I was sleeping, a serious fight broke out in the corridor and kitchen. My neighbor was stabbed to death.

I later asked Aunt Olya to explain. She said:

“They were supposed to kill you. But I couldn’t warn you directly.” She wouldn’t explain any further. The topic was closed.

Then she added that from that day on, I could fly on planes, helicopters, drive cars, and even get into fights — she assured me that I would never die until deep old age. My “day” had already passed. She added that I would die as a very old man, but not in Russia. There is a country where a monument to Bruce Lee stands on the waterfront — Hong Kong. Strange.

Later there was an incident with an An-26 plane. On takeoff both engines failed and we nearly crashed. I walked off the plane as calm as a snake. After all, Aunt Olya had told me I would never die in a plane crash, and I believed her. For the last three years I have been flying strictly by plane with no incidents — as calmly as if I were riding a tram.

Aunt Olya and I continued to communicate for another whole year in the city. We drank tea and talked about everything: yoga, qigong, shamanism, acupuncture, shiatsu, Blavatsky, Roerich, Tibet, Lhasa, Kailash.

Every day people in need came to her house for help. I saw how tired she became. Energetically, it was like constantly discharging a battery. It was a cross nailed to her back that she carried.

Then, gradually, interest in all of this began to fade. Kashpirovsky and Chumak disappeared from the screens. They had fulfilled their historical role. Aunt Olya left for Altai. Before she left, she said that someday we would meet again. An amazing person. When you meet such people in the North, you understand that it was not by chance.

Chapter 30. Abramovich and Berezovsky

2011, November 9. ONPZ and Noyabrskneftegaz themselves gave ABRAMOVICH the money with which he bought them. Kommersant Vesti.

Interesting details from Russia's recent history are being revealed at the trial in London.

All last week, Roman ABRAMOVICH testified in the London court. He had to answer the lawsuit filed by Boris BEREZOVSKY, who claimed that his partner had underpaid him for shares in Sibneft, ORT, and aluminum plants, where he had been a co-owner.

October 31

Roman ABRAMOVICH's testimony begins with his biography. It turned out that he does not have a completed higher education, although he tried to study at two institutes — the Ukhta Industrial Institute and the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute. However, ABRAMOVICH has a diploma from the Moscow Law Academy dated 2001. Boris BEREZOVSKY's lawyer, Laurence RABINOWITZ, commented: “In other statements, it is said that you completed one-year correspondence law courses.” To which Roman Arkadyevich replied, according to *Vedomosti*: “I was not a good student, and I didn’t learn everything,” and according to Kommersant : “And I never claimed that I was a good student!”

Next, RABINOWITZ clarified the position of Yevgeny SHVIDLER in ABRAMOVICH’s structures. In particular, he tried to figure out how Shvidler, who was not initially a co-owner of Sibneft and received much less than the shareholders, managed to become so rich. A document was presented on payments to the board of directors and members of the management board of Sibneft (Shvidler was the president of the company) for 2000 in the total amount of only 210 thousand dollars. To this, ABRAMOVICH replied that after 2000, Shvidler became his partner in a number of projects; in particular, their first joint deal was “Pharmstandard” (this company is affiliated with the owners of OAO “Omsk Lekarstvo,” which unites 15 of the best pharmacies in the city of Omsk — M.I.).

When asked, “Who is part of your team?” — ABRAMOVICH named a small group of trusted persons: Shvidler, Panchenko, Tanenbaum, and Gorodilov (interestingly, the Kommersant correspondent confuses the father and son Gorodilovs — M.I.).

When asked, “Why did you need control over Sibneft?” — ABRAMOVICH explained that he “was engaged in trading oil and petroleum products,” and a vertically integrated company would provide access to oil flows and petroleum products, as a result of which it would be possible to significantly increase the financial volumes of the business. He named the planned growth figure at that time — from 40 million dollars to 100 million. With this idea, at the end of 1994, he approached Pyotr AVEN, who advised him to discuss this topic with Boris BEREZOVSKY.

RABINOWITZ presented the court with a document from a criminal investigation signed by senior investigator GORVIK S.V., which stated that in 1992 ABRAMOVICH, through AVK, received diesel fuel worth 3.8 million rubles at the Podmoskovnaya railway station using forged documents. Roman Arkadyevich calmly parried: “The case did not go further. In the end, it turned out that the documents were not forged.” The plaintiff’s lawyer tried to approach from another angle: “In May or June 1995, you and Shvidler met in Moscow with Stephen CURTIS from Curtis & Co. In Curtis’s notes, there is mention of ‘Brazilians who want to buy a tank for a million.’ Were you trading weapons?” “I never participated in arms trading — that is the prerogative of the state. I don’t know what this is about; there is a tank factory near Omsk, not far from our refinery. Maybe we were talking about engines. There is also an aircraft factory there” (In early 2002, a Moscow company called “MegaTranskor,” which the media linked to Roman ABRAMOVICH’s interests, became an investor in Omsktransmash. In any case, as the Omsk governor stated at a rally at the tank factory at the time, “Sibneft will be the guarantor of the project” — M.I.).

RABINOWITZ quoted Viktor GORODILOV’s testimony that he was the initiator of the creation of the vertically integrated company. To this, ABRAMOVICH stated that the author of the idea was nevertheless Roman Arkadyevich himself, while Gorodilov had proposed a different option — to merge Noyabrskneftegaz and Surgutneftegaz (the second day of the trial began with this same question — M.I.).

November 1

ABRAMOVICH reported that he reached an agreement with BEREZOVSKY on the creation of a vertically integrated company in February 1995, long before the August presidential decree establishing Sibneft. He promised Berezovsky 30 million dollars in the very first year of the new company’s existence for support of ORT and for personal expenses. In return, BEREZOVSKY was supposed to help obtain the president’s signature and ensure the issuance of documents under which 51% would remain with the government, and 49% would be privatized. In other words, money was offered in exchange for influence and assistance.

When asked why ABRAMOVICH did not immediately use the term “krysha” (roof/protection), the defendant noted that it usually has an extremely negative connotation and is associated with criminal activity, but it is also used in cases of providing political influence. In addition, he stated that he did not want to offend the plaintiff, but called the word quite appropriate for the initial stage of their relationship.

“Between 1995 and 2000, were you and Berezovsky friends?” ABRAMOVICH: “From 1996 until the end of 1999 — beginning of 2000, we were. The entire year of 1995, I sat in Berezovsky’s waiting room waiting for a meeting — I would not call that friendship.”

RABINOWITZ listed the Russian assets that BEREZOVSKY had and which he acquired at different times. After that, he asked Abramovich whether he knew about these assets by August 1995. Moreover, when it came to *Kommersant* and TV6, ABRAMOVICH stated that it was he who paid for them. The plaintiff’s lawyer expressed bewilderment as to why BEREZOVSKY, who had a stake in all the companies he was associated with, refused the shares. Abramovich stated that Noyabrskneftegaz was loss-making and production was declining. And Sibneft, after its creation, remained loss-making for a long time.

On December 28, 1995, a loans-for-shares auction took place, as a result of which the state transferred 51% of the shares of the Siberian Oil Company to the Stolichny Bank of Savings and ZAO “Oil Financial Company” (NFK) for 100.3 million dollars. This is the official information. It was previously assumed that the money was provided by SBS Bank under BEREZOVSKY’s personal guarantees. Laurence RABINOWITZ also spoke about this in court. However, according to Roman ABRAMOVICH, SBS did not give “a single cent, kopeck, or dollar” for the auction: “The money transferred by SBS to the government was fully secured by funds that ‘my companies’ held on deposit with it.” The essence of the loans-for-shares auction is that the winner provides a loan to the government secured by the shares. But as Roman Arkadyevich stated, “A bank giving money at 0% on a 3-year loan would not survive for long. Commercial dollar loans at that time were given at 20–35%.” So where did the money come from? ABRAMOVICH: “Some were from Runicom. The rest — long-term oil contracts, under which Shvidler attracted Western financing. We pledged contracts for future supplies of oil from the Omsk Oil Refinery and Noyabrskneftegaz.” Rabinowitz: “It turns out that these companies provided the credit funds with which control over these same companies was acquired?” ABRAMOVICH: “That is a simplification.”

ABRAMOVICH also stated that Ivan LITSKEVICH (at that time — the head of the Omsk Oil Refinery, who died on August 19, 1995 — five days before Yeltsin’s decree on the creation of Sibneft) initially wanted the industrial group to be created on the basis of the Omsk Oil Refinery and did not support the idea of a vertically integrated company.

November 2

RABINOWITZ returned again to the question of how Sibneft was bought with money from the enterprises that were part of it. Without the support of the leaders of these enterprises, it would have been impossible to do this. ABRAMOVICH confirms that at that time he very much needed the support of both directors — Viktor GORODILOV and Konstantin POTAPOV (who headed ONPZ after the death of Ivan LITSKEVICH — M.I.). The judge: “How did you secure their support without an agreement?” ABRAMOVICH: “We had common goals; we worked together. We differed on what would happen next. Gorodilov was against privatization and therefore left later. Potapov was younger; we had similar views, and I took part in his appointment.” “There were no other financial incentives.”

Further, ABRAMOVICH confirmed that BEREZOVSKY convinced the Chairman of the State Property Committee, Alfred KOKH, to include Sibneft in the list for the loans-for-shares auctions, and that Badri PATARKATSISHVILI helped withdraw the competing bid from the company “SAMEKO,” which had offered a much higher price for the package.

ABRAMOVICH did not dispute the fact that from 1998, Noyabrskneftegaz stopped selling crude oil directly to the Omsk Refinery and began working through intermediaries using internal offshore zones — closed administrative-territorial entities (ZATO).

November 3

On this day, the discussion turned to the acquisition of aluminum assets. RABINOWITZ cited an article from The Moscow Times dated February 12, 2000, titled “Berezovsky & co Buy Up 3 Smelters”: “The journalist spoke with a representative of Sibneft and a representative of CHERNY. Both say that the buyers are Sibneft shareholders. This contradicts the version that you were the sole buyer of these plants.” ABRAMOVICH: “For various reasons, in particular for security reasons, I did not want to appear as the sole shareholder, although in reality I was. There were rumors on the market that BEREZOVSKY was a shareholder of Sibneft, and we never tried to refute them. This is the whole point of the ‘krysha’ — to make it seem that the company belongs to BEREZOVSKY. He was the icebreaker who removed all problems, and we paid him for that.” Earlier that same day, he stated: “Without Badri, I wouldn’t have stuck my nose into this business; someone was being killed there every three days, and I didn’t want to deal with such a business.”

November 4

Rabinowitz asks the interpreter to read an excerpt from BEREZOVSKY’s claim. It states that at the end of August 2000, after a report on ORT about the submarine Kursk , Berezovsky met with Alexander VOLOSHIN, who said that PUTIN preferred to manage ORT himself and that BEREZOVSKY should give up his shares in the channel and transfer them to the state. If this did not happen, Voloshin continued according to the plaintiff, “BEREZOVSKY would end up like GUSINSKY.” The claim recalls that GUSINSKY was arrested in June 2000 and released from pre-trial detention only after selling the shares of “Media-Most.” Later, the European Court of Human Rights recognized the Gusinsky case as politically motivated and established numerous violations of human rights by the Russian state. After the meeting with VOLOSHIN, BEREZOVSKY met with PUTIN (Voloshin was also present at the meeting). According to the plaintiff, Putin confirmed the demand to transfer ORT and that “BEREZOVSKY would go to prison if he did not do so.” The final price offered to BEREZOVSKY for the ORT shares was 0 million. ABRAMOVICH says he does not remember the meeting with BEREZOVSKY in Cap d’Antibes in August, where, according to the plaintiff, Abramovich spoke about the need to sell ORT.

Next came a dispute over whether BEREZOVSKY and PATARKATSISHVILI were shareholders of Sibneft. ABRAMOVICH again asserted that he owned 88% of the company’s shares but tried not to show it, creating the appearance that there were several shareholders with connections in the government.

Additional note:

Berezovsky, before fleeing to the UK, sold his stake for $1.3 billion. In court, he demanded that Abramovich pay $5 billion. He lost the case. Abramovich sold the company to the state when it was bought back for $17 billion. Such is the arithmetic among the oil oligarchs.

Chapter 31. Mom

Yesterday I buried my dear and beloved Mom. She passed away quietly and peacefully at lunchtime. For the last 3.5 years, I took care of her and looked after her, putting aside all my affairs, trips, and everything else. And that’s when I started writing books. When you live in complete isolation, fully devoted to this one thing, it happens automatically.

I had tried to write at forty, at fifty. But only when gray hairs appeared at my temples and I passed the test of becoming a real Human by caring for her did it happen—like a second wind. Wings of creativity grew behind my back, and I took flight. Probably, in every endeavor, you need to ripen. Like a fruit hanging on a tree. And then it is picked.

Mom was an amazing person. I truly understood that when she flew up North to check on and inspect how her sons were living—my middle brother and me.

After seeing how my brother was living with his wife and small child in a 17-square-meter dorm room, she said nothing to anyone, went straight to his UTT (motor transport department), and walked into the boss’s office. Sitting right in front of him, she asked directly: “Does my son work poorly?” He had already been working there for 12 years and was first in line for an apartment. The boss replied, “No, he works well. No complaints.” “Can’t you give him an apartment?” Embarrassed, the boss pulled an order for a one-room apartment from his folder and said they could move in tomorrow. Mom flew back home. When we were moving the things, my brother and I laughed and said to each other that our Mom was one tough lady.

They were all tough, our parents. Life and hungry childhood had forged them like a hardened blade of Damascus steel. Compared to them, our generation is ordinary foam rubber. And the current younger generation is even weaker—you can blow hard and they’ll scatter like an aspen leaf. No health, no spirit, no core inside.

And when we walked around Chernikovka, in the area of the Eight-Story Buildings in the city of Ufa, she showed me the houses that her brigade had built in the 1950s when she worked as a bricklayer. They stand like personal monuments to her youth. People still live in those houses today.

In Yekaterinburg, Yeltsin also has his own house in the city center. Working as a foreman after construction institute, he was remembered by everyone as a seller of cement, bricks, and anything else that was poorly guarded on the construction site and could be drunk away. Everyone has their own memories of their youth. When Yeltsin became head of state, his attitude toward him remained the same as during the construction of that first house—his first independent work in building his own life. These are reflexes embedded since childhood. And they control a person on a subconscious level.

My Mom’s reputation was impeccable her entire life. A modest life of an ordinary person. There will be no monument to her in the park or next to the city hall. No one will put a bucket of paint on her monument’s head.

And that is the beauty of this life. They leave us—some at 60, a few at 90, like my Mom. To those whose years are approaching a century, I wish you health and optimism in life. The world is beautiful, and you must greet the sunrise in the morning and the sunset in the evening, enjoying every breath of this life. Our mothers teach us this understanding. And then they leave.

Chapter 32. Surgutneftegaz

«Surgutneftegaz» (SNG) is one of the largest Russian oil and gas production companies. SNG was established by Presidential Decree No. 1403 of November 17, 1992, “On the Specifics of Privatization and Transformation into Joint-Stock Companies of State Enterprises, Production and Research-Production Associations of the Oil, Oil-Refining Industry, and Petroleum Product Supply.” The same decree created Lukoil, Yukos, and Rosneft, but later SNG took a distinctly separate position.

In 1992, Rosneft received in trust management, for a period of three years, nearly 83% of the shares of Russian fuel and energy complex enterprises that remained in federal ownership. In 1995, as a result of the loans-for-shares auctions, significant—and sometimes controlling—stakes in major production assets were bought out. In practice, the owners of the oil companies became banking structures and private individuals. However, when the state-owned Rosneft tried to submit a bid to participate in the loans-for-shares auction to buy 40.12% of Surgutneftegaz shares, the application was not even accepted, citing incorrectly filled documents. In the end, SNG itself bought back these shares through its own pension fund. It turned out that the two companies belonged to each other, but formally to no one, and were in fact controlled by the managers. According to some reports, the price of the package at that time was about 400 billion rubles. The idea itself belonged to the permanent director of SNG, Vladimir Bogdanov, who, by the way, took this post at the age of 33.

Why, at that moment, a fairly large enterprise managed to avoid coming under the wing of the state or bankers remains an open question to this day. There are at least several versions on this matter, one of which may actually be true. According to one of them, Vladimir Bogdanov personally negotiated with Boris Yeltsin about “mutually beneficial patronage.”

According to another version, Bogdanov had influential allies in Moscow. One of them was the founder of ONEXIM Bank, Vladimir Potanin, who at that time had significant political weight. ONEXIM acted as a guarantor for the Surgutneftegaz Non-State Pension Fund at the loans-for-shares auction. In return, SNG kept its multi-billion accounts in ONEXIM Bank for several years.

There is yet another version: during the 1993 non-payments crisis, Surgutneftegaz was the only company that paid taxes to Moscow, for which it later earned some favor from the country’s leadership. As Forbes wrote, Sergei Ignatiev (First Deputy Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation from 1997 to 2002) stated that SNG paid eight times more taxes per ton of oil than Sibneft, and three times more than TNK.

There is also a fourth version, according to which the head of the oil and gas company lived in his office for several months under heavy guard, thus practicing a “policy of non-interference.”

I will add a fifth version: there are 4 thieves-in-law in the city, and this blocks any option like Khodorkovsky’s. It is impossible to carry out such an operation without shooting. Surgut is the gateway to all major cities by rail and road, the flow of all cargo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this company, which has the highest salaries from Taimyr and Yamal to Surgut, operates everywhere in Yakutia as well.

Chapter 33. Lukoil

Lukoil was established on November 25, 1991, by a decree of the Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry of the RSFSR, based on three West Siberian production associations — Langepasneftegaz, Urayneftegaz, and Kogalymneftegaz. The name “Lukoil” was formed from the first letters of these associations.

President / CEO: Andrey Kuzyaev (since 2023)

Share capital structure:

Free float: approximately 97%

Main shareholders: Vagit Alekperov (~8.5%), Leonid Fedun (about 1%), other institutional and private investors.

The company is not under state control. The shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange.

Recalling Kogalym in the 1990s as a depressed city after Bashneft left — which, after the collapse of the USSR, urgently departed as the main enterprise. The city was in an unsightly state, with two-story wooden houses and five-story apartment blocks. With the arrival of Alekperov, life returned to normal. There was a policy of creating joint ventures with foreign capital. All small and unprofitable fields were transferred to 48 foreign companies. Residents from Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and others. Every second ton of oil went to Lukoil. Gradually, things improved, and Kogalym was transformed.

One thing that is disturbing in Lukoil’s history is that both the head of Urayneftegaz and the head of Langepasneftegaz died under mysterious circumstances. In big money, problems and contradictions are solved radically. Only questions remain — why and how. And the lack of answers to them.

Shift workers are generally not bothered by this; the salary is high, and the company is prestigious. They don’t hire just anyone off the street. There is no freedom like in the fields of Tomskneft, Nizhnevartovskneftegaz, or Surgutneftegaz in Lukoil. That’s why, after working for a 15% bonus in Kogalym, many quit. Who wants to work in a prison?

You can’t even step away into the taiga for half an hour just to eat berries — there are 3-meter fences everywhere. These are the rules under the contract. Safety glasses, helmets, special clothing, video cameras, and fines. You must stay within the perimeter, and the foreman has to come up with work for the entire 12-hour shift, even if you have to mow the grass or paint curbs — you must always be working. Even if none of this is part of your duties under the contract.

Глава 34. New Year

New Year on the shift is always modest. Production doesn’t stop — the country needs oil. Just like everywhere else in Russia, the New Year spirit quietly fills every room in the dormitories and the canteen. Every year, I set up a small Christmas tree in my room with whatever toys and decorations I can hang on paperclips. It creates the illusion of home while you’re at work. It lifts the mood a week before the New Year and even after it’s all over.

People drink champagne in the morning only if they’re aristocrats, degenerates… or shift workers. The main thing is that no one gets hit in the eye by a cork — especially not yourself.

Those who aren’t on shift are the lucky ones. They’re at home with their families and children. Just imagine — Dad is actually home. They celebrate to the fullest, both for themselves and for the guy who’s stuck at work.

Of course, Ded Moroz doesn’t arrive by helicopter, and champagne doesn’t flow like it did for the hussars. Everything is decent and restrained — just a modest dose. A sip or two, and then off to bed. Tomorrow morning there’s a shift. If not me, then who?

I still remember the real Siberian cutlets — bear meat and elk mixed with plenty of onions. There used to be no pork or beef in the taiga, so the hunters had their own local taiga cutlets. The taste is specific — a bit sweetish. Instead of chicken in the oven, we had wood grouse with potatoes. That’s also a dish for connoisseurs. Shashlik on skewers, stroganina, fried pike cutlets, pork fat, and pike mince.

There are small joys even on the shift. Of course, Snegurochka doesn’t slip under the blanket in the early morning — she belongs only to Ded Moroz and can’t make everyone happy. Once I posted an ad online saying “Ded Moroz is looking for a Snegurochka to celebrate the New Year on a shift.” I received 264 letters. So many young girls still believe in fairy tales. And that’s not a bad thing.

New Year in Russia is something much bigger than just a holiday. It’s a milestone in life, a starting point for a new chapter. Foreigners will never fully understand it. Today everyone is waiting. The table is set, and the bottle of champagne is an obligatory attribute of the ritual. The glasses will be filled five minutes before the New Year, and everyone will congratulate each other.

December 31, 2025, 23:50.

Chapter 35. Crime and Punishment

On the North, you can meet all kinds of people. Former athletes from the USSR national team, legends who competed alongside Zhabotinsky himself at the 1980 Olympics. I once met a member of the Soviet weightlifting team — one of the twelve athletes from that USSR squad. Everyone called him Uncle Vova. He worked as an ordinary loader at the Slavutich store.

This mountain of muscle would eat a four-liter pot of borscht for lunch and drink a bottle of vodka throughout the day — but only in fifty-gram portions, like it was just food. When there was an incident with a difficult customer in the store, they would call him. He would calmly grab the man by the collar, carry him outside without ever hitting him. The person would instantly calm down and accept his fate. Uncle Vova would quietly carry him out, set him down on the sinful Earth, wish him peace, and return to the hall. A very strong man — and he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

At the 6th Hill in Noyabrsk, I met an amazing man who had been hiding from justice for 25 years. He had committed his crime back in Soviet times. The USSR had long since collapsed, but the man had been living in fear ever since. He told me that after accidentally killing a person, he swapped clothes with a homeless man under a bridge, disappeared among them for two months, lived by campfires, slept in wells, and wandered around. The Soviet militia was searching for him everywhere — his portraits were posted all over the country, and he was wanted across the entire Union.

When the hype died down after a few months, he hitchhiked from the Moscow region all the way to Noyabrsk. He bought a stolen passport, glued in his own photo, and did the same with a driver’s license.

At the 6th Hill there was a criminal UTT (motor transport department) where, in the 90s, stolen Soviet cars and special vehicles from all over the North were brought together. All documents and seals were fake, and the column was led by people with criminal backgrounds. It was something like a construction battalion during the Great Patriotic War that officially didn’t exist. That kind of thing happened.

The fugitive from justice got a job as a driver in this UTT. Only the column leader knew about his past. He settled into a trailer and every night waited for them to come for him. He jumped at every rustle and knock. This went on for 25 years. The man had punished himself. Sitting in front of me was a shadow of a human being.

After thinking it over, I suggested that tomorrow he go with me to the police station and turn himself in. The Soviet Union had already been gone for seven years. The Russian state could not punish him — it was a different country, and the statute of limitations had expired.

We went to the station together, filled out all the papers. They put handcuffs on him and placed him in pre-trial detention while they verified everything he had said. Two months later, he was released. After receiving a new passport, he went back to his homeland.

If someone says he didn’t serve his time, they would be wrong. I think his punishment was far worse than prison. Living like a shadow for 25 years. It’s amazing he didn’t go insane.

Dostoevsky’s book “Crime and Punishment” conveys the full range of the hero’s experiences and suffering. Here, everything the writer described, I saw alive in front of me. It was a shock to the depths of my soul.

Man is weak. And he commits crimes.

A friend of mine had an uncle who was released after serving 15 years for murder. My friend wrote to him, invited him to come stay, they rented an apartment together and wanted to help him find a job. In the North, it’s easier to get settled and start a new life. When the uncle arrived, we were all sitting at the table. The apartment owner accidentally mentioned that he had worked his whole life in the police. The uncle grabbed a knife and killed him. We didn’t even have time to react. Afterward, he asked us to call the police and turned himself in again for another 12 years in prison. Ten days of freedom — and back behind bars. My mind still cannot comprehend it; it defies all logic.

The most surprising thing in the North during the 90s was when you met a “crowned” Thief in Law — covered in tattoos from head to toe, with domes and crosses on his knees and shoulders — who, upon meeting his love, gave up everything and became an ordinary man, a simple driver. For the first five years, everyone who worked with him was tense, but gradually they realized he was just like them, and they worked together without any mistrust.

Once, such an experienced convict, speaking to me — a young man just starting his life — said that a shift is a prison, only they let you out every 15 or 30 days and pay you a salary. Life has shown that he was right. A shift is a prison, and the shift worker enters it voluntarily, without any coercion.

A shift worker is a person who has committed no crime, yet voluntarily serves a sentence in the form of work for money that does not compensate for the lack of complete freedom. It is a modern form of the slave-owning system in our time. At the same time, you can quit any day you want.

Chapter 36. Ukrainians in the North

Since 1990, I have always encountered Ukrainians in the North. There’s even a joke that the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug should be renamed the Tatar-Bashkir-Ukrainian National Okrug. Many Northern cities were initially built by Ukrainian work crews. In Langepas it was the Balts, in Kogalym — builders from Bashkiria. In Soviet times, no one cared where anyone was from. But there was a pattern: cities that were just starting to be built were mostly constructed by Ukrainians. They liked the period when drivers were paid for 48 hours a day and builders worked 18–19 hours a day. The salaries were insane, so they were there.

The last city with this fate was Noyabrsk, and that’s why in 1998 it was practically Ukrainian territory — all the managers were Ukrainians.

After the collapse of the USSR, there was an exodus of Ukrainians from the North — they all went together to build a Great Ukraine. But after 2–3 months, almost all of them started heading back North. It turned out that back home they were called “Moskalі” (Russians), no one was waiting for them, and there was no place for them.

Then came the famous speech by Ukraine’s Minister of Labor in Tyumen, in which he declared that Russia was obliged to pay $40 per month for every Ukrainian shift worker. Within a month and a half, 2.5 million Ukrainian shift workers were fired. Almost all Ukrainian work crews were eliminated.

This is how the “Ukrainian of the North” with a Russian passport appeared — adapted to the frosts and all the whims of nature. They took root in the Northern cities, their children grew up, then their grandchildren. They did not lose touch with their homeland; they visited their grandfathers and grandmothers.

What happened in 2014 hit them especially hard. Phone calls from relatives with accusations. They knew what was happening back home not from television or the internet, but directly. I saw how, in a trailer, people from Western Ukraine (Galicians) almost came to blows with guys from the Donetsk region — two different shifts. We suggested at work that they not start a war on neutral territory. If someone really wanted a fight, they could meet on the battlefield near Donetsk — on opposite sides. The men calmed down.

From their position in Russia, they observed all the processes happening in their homeland and could have their own opinion. Those who are there, unfortunately, cannot understand objectively what has been happening for all these eleven years. Everything that happens in Ukraine passes through the heart of every Ukrainian.

I believe the war will end soon. Peace will come. There is no such thing as an eternal war. After all, I managed to stop a war in a trailer. Reason and the ability not to resolve all contradictions with fists defused the situation.

Even when celebrating New Year in a warm apartment, my thoughts are with those who are meeting it in a cold apartment. These are the realities of our time. The 21st century.

For me, when the Union was collapsing, it was incomprehensible why Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus did not remain as a single state. After all, they are three brothers of one Slavic people. Even then I did not divide them into separate tribes from each other, and I still don’t. They are all Russians, in one word.

I once saw three brothers dividing an apartment after their parents died. It was terrifying to watch — the vodka had switched off their heads, and it turned into a fight to the death.

Chapter 37. Exploration

Oil workers have prospectors in the taiga who search for new oil fields by drilling exploratory wells, analyzing reserves, and using their wells to determine the boundaries of future oil deposits. These geological exploration teams are always in the taiga, always the first ones, and always on the lookout. Development begins only after them.

I observed for 6.5 years how a small oil field — one that had not been fully explored back in Soviet times — was now being completed in our era, finishing everything that had been left unfinished.

Geologists, geophysicists, riggers, and lumberjacks flew in by helicopter. They loaded all their modest belongings into a GT-T (tracked all-terrain vehicle) and headed 14 km toward the first swamp. There they set up camp and, after the surveyors had done their initial staking, began cutting down the forest and stacking the logs for later removal. They lived in army tents.

Winter came, logging trucks arrived, and a convoy of 14 long-haul trucks brought in the disassembled drilling rig, cranes for unloading, and trailers carrying bulldozers and a pipe-layer. After everything was unloaded, the derrick assembly crew began putting the rig together. Every day a helicopter landed at their helipad. Gradually, the drilling rig rose above the taiga and became clearly visible from afar, towering over the treetops.

A convoy with pipes, cement, living trailers, and a bathhouse also made its way in their direction. And then the moment came — the drilling crew flew in, and the process of searching for oil began.

Later, the blasters arrived. Using an old-fashioned method, they drilled small 4–5 meter deep holes with a pyramid of pipes and placed TNT charges inside them. From the drilling rig, like rays spreading out several kilometers, charges were placed every 150 meters across the ground, connected by a red cable. Once they reached the oil-bearing layer, a sensor to record the explosion was lowered into the well. All the cables were brought together in the control trailer — the center for the controlled blast.

Then came the moment of truth: the explosion was carried out, and the equipment recorded the entire subsurface picture down to a depth of 3 km and within a radius of up to 15 km. A forecast of the oil deposit’s volume was then compiled.

After finishing work on one site, they relocated to another. They dismantled the drilling rig, and in winter everything was moved again. Only the wellhead remains. If no oil is found, the pipe is cemented, and all that’s left is a small plaque with the well number, the geological exploration party number, and the year it operated.

Over six years, they moved three times. On the last site, they struck a big oil find — the well flowed almost continuously for three years. All the work was completed. I saw the map of their surveys: everything that lay underground was displayed in three-dimensional view on the computer monitor. The approximate oil reserves had already been determined based on the research.

They have interesting work — determining the future of an oil field.

The guys are friendly and tightly knit, always ready to live in Spartan conditions. That’s exploration for you — that says it all. They are always the first to go.

Chapter 38. VIP Vakhoviki

Yes, there are such representatives of the Vakhoviki Tribe too.

I had a childhood friend who worked as an engineer at an oil refinery (NPP — Neftepereрабатывающий Zavod). When I first came to visit him and walked through the checkpoint onto the plant grounds, I was surprised to learn that his entire office, located in a two-story building right on the plant territory, flies in from Moscow on their own private Gulfstream jet.

They arrive on Monday by 11 a.m., check into a hotel, and fly back on Friday after lunch. Sometimes, after weighing the pros and cons, they fly to Sochi for a couple of days to rest from the hardships of labor at the company’s expense.

In short, the number of office employees is equal to the number of workers and engineers actually engaged in production.

This kind of enterprise with such insane profits could probably only exist in Russia. This plant is basically a simple samovar: they take crude oil from the export pipeline, extract the light fractions — gasoline and diesel — and pump everything else back into the pipe. A waste-free production.

Once, while flipping through an issue of “Neftyannik Sibiri” (Siberian Oilman), I was surprised to learn that there are more than 200 oil companies operating in the Tomsk Region alone, besides AO TNK Tomskneft.

Later, when I was in the taiga, I saw how one of them worked. Since Soviet times, a huge number of exploratory wells had been drilled. They all stand there with shut-off valves, and all of them are gushing oil. No need to install pumps, run electricity, or set up pump jacks. You just open the valve and the oil flows out under high pressure by itself.

All you have to do is connect four or five such wells with an oil pipeline, install a 5,000-cubic-meter tank, put up a trailer for the operators and security. In winter, you cut a winter road from the asphalt so that long-haul tankers with 30–40 cubic meter capacities can drive up, fill up with oil, and then head back along the asphalt to the metering station and pump it into the transportation pipeline.

That’s why 15–20 tank trucks solve the entire problem of moving oil from the wells to the metering unit. This way, oil from the exploratory wells quietly makes its way to export over the winter until spring.

As for the office — it’s just the director and his wife, the accountant. In the taiga there are four operators who fill the tankers from the tank with a hose.

To get such a mini oil business as personal property, you have to be the governor’s son or someone from his inner circle. There are also taxes on subsoil use and on the well itself — I think they simply don’t pay them in principle. It’s not done.

These are the Ostap Benders of the oil industry — they make money out of thin air.

Back in the day, in “Dead Souls,” Sobakevich took bribes strictly in dogs. I once observed how they took bribes in the form of site backfilling for a drilling rig.

In the year 2000, backfilling a future drilling site with sand and gravel cost 4 billion rubles. The company would transfer the money to Moscow for cashing out at a certain percentage. Half the amount was brought north in a bag. A team of 40 Kraz and Tatra dump trucks was assembled — all private owners working strictly for cash — along with two excavators for loading at the sand quarry and two bulldozers to quickly level the ground.

A dump truck would bring sand, unload it, and as it drove past the car where a guy with a bag was sitting, he would immediately hand over two bundles as payment for the trip. The more runs you made, the higher the pay. And the work would be in full swing. The bag of money would grow thinner.

Then they would start hauling gravel on top, and the job would be finished. Everyone was happy. After that, they could install a two-mast drilling rig and drill a cluster of 12–14 wells in different directions. The pipes would spread out like the tentacles of an octopus.

Then they would install an underground pump and barbarically extract the oil. In 4–5 years they would ruin the well. Then they would bring in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and the well would start gushing againThere are also illegal taps into the pipes coming from the oil treatment facility (PPN — Tsekh Podgotovki Nefti). They once caught tanker drivers who were hauling stolen oil to the metering station instead of the oil from the mini-business. Of course, at the treatment facility they discovered a leak from the pipe — the numbers on their meter and at the metering station didn’t match. They walked the entire pipeline and found the illegal tap. Some people extract oil this way too.

Thieves are everywhere. Even on Mars they would try to find scrap metal buyers or buyers for shut-off valves.

In Soviet times, the office didn’t buy gasoline. There was a trailer barrel with AI-93 gasoline standing on the territory. Everyone who worked in that office filled up their tanks for free.

And in the UTT-2 garage there stood a ZIL-131 truck without wheels or a cab. On paper, it drove from NZhV to Surgut every day, without days off. The gasoline that was poured into the trailer was written off. And there was a driver — a “Khokhol” from Ukraine — who came to work every day, filled out the waybill, passed the medical check, and twirled the keys to the ZIL on his finger until lunch. That was communism in a single separate office.

In “The Diamond Arm,” Papanov scares Mironov: “May you live on just your salary...” And up North, there are plenty of people you could say the same thing to.

Chapter 39. The Future of Northern Cities

Over the past thirty years, the Northern cities were built intensively, and now, against the backdrop of events in the country, practically all construction has stopped. Since oil and gas exports are decreasing every year due to sanctions, organizations are undergoing optimization and staff reductions. There is an outflow of population, and production is declining. This already happened in the 1990s. Oil workers have always reacted and adapted to new conditions. I am confident that all this is a temporary phenomenon.

That is why the future of the Northern cities was, is, and will be. Currently, the development of new fields has shifted to Yamal, Taimyr, the lower reaches of the Yenisei and Lena rivers, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, the Kolyma floodplain, Chukotka, and Kamchatka. No one will build cities there the way they were built on the Ob River — Nizhnevartovsk, Megion, Langepas, Surgut, and along the railway — Kogalym, Noyabrsk, Novy Urengoy. These cities each have their own airport, and therefore, by building landing airstrips at the new fields, shift worker settlements will grow. Residents of these Northern cities, amid the curtailment of production in their areas, will fly 1–2 thousand kilometers to work.

There is an example where a project by a 4th-year student from TIASUR in Tomsk was partially implemented — the Pioneer shift settlement, which was supposed to house 25,000 shift workers. Ligachev personally pinned the medal “Hero of Socialist Labor” on the chest of the project’s author. Instead of a full city that was supposed to grow in the Vasyugan Swamps, this settlement was built. Enormous state funds were saved. And the shift settlement fulfilled its function in developing the territory. There are no schools or kindergartens there, no apartments — only hotel rooms for four people with a shower and toilet, and a small kitchen. Five-story complexes with botanical gardens, connected by second-floor passages. Dining halls are located in extensions between the buildings, so you can walk out of your room in slippers to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are gyms and cinemas. A library and a medical station.

Meanwhile, the Northern cities grew and exist thanks to the taxes paid by oil workers. Eighty percent of the population living in these cities do not work in the oil industry. If the oil runs out, the fate of these cities will be unenviable. There are examples like Norilsk, where the city is gradually beginning to die. People are leaving and abandoning their apartments.

Therefore, oil was extracted, is being extracted, and will continue to be extracted. And the shift workers from these Northern cities will make their contribution to this.

I believe in this: airplanes will fly long distances, helicopter pilots will work as they did in the 90s. And sailors delivering cargo along the Northern Sea Route will play no small role. This is the future for oil workers.

The Vankor field serves as an example. Using a base in Turukhansk, an oil and gas production area equal in volume to Novy Urengoy was developed there. Building Northern cities is an expensive pleasure — the cost is approximately 10–12 times higher than in central Russia. The time when oil workers lived in temporary huts (baloks) has passed.

In Yeltsin’s time, there was an attempt to abolish the Northern allowances (polyarki) and reduce wages for working conditions.

I remember how in Novy Urengoy they welcomed Boris Nemtsov when he flew in with this issue. It was -45°C. The plane was parked not far from the airport, no bus was provided, and the entire delegation had to run in their autumn Moscow jackets through the frost to the warm airport terminal. There, against the background of their frostbitten ears, they were solemnly presented with Arctic fox fur coats as a “gift.” Then there was a tour of the production facilities. Welders showed how metal pipes crack from a hammer blow in the frost. A tractor driver overturned a bucket of frozen diesel fuel onto the ground and began cutting it into strips with a knife. The eyes of the Russian Government representatives were wide with surprise. They flew away deeply impressed, and since then the issue of canceling the Northern allowances for people in the North has never been raised again in the Russian Government.

In the North, big money is not paid for nothing. There is remoteness from civilization, winter frosts, swamps, mosquitoes and midges, lack of oxygen, local swamp water, and the impact on health from atmospheric pressure drops and low temperatures. To withstand all this requires excellent health. If a person does not have it, these tests of strength will still “weed out” anyone with chronic diseases.

The climate is also changing in the North. Permafrost is thawing. This year they promise decent frosts. In Yakutsk and Oymyakon it has already been -56°C, and this is just the beginning of winter. I think the forecast that it will be -40°C in central Russia will likely come true. All frosts in Russia are formed in Yakutia and in the West Siberian Plain, where, along the Ob River, all the Northern cities of oil workers are located.

Chapter 40. Ded Moroz Will Always Help

When we were seeing in the New Year 2000, there was no festive mood at all. On 6th Gorka almost everyone was broke. On top of that, a night maniac had appeared in Noyabrsk who was strangling taxi drivers with a garrote wire. All the taxi drivers in the city were on edge.

My neighbor Radik and I decided to take the risk anyway. After all, two people sitting in the front of a VAZ-2109 pretty much ruled out any attack. There were still enough passengers in the city, and little by little we started to have hope that we would see the New Year in a decent way.

In the Fifth Microdistrict, fifteen minutes before midnight, two Ded Morozes with a big sack flagged us down. As expected, they were quite drunk, excited, and told us that they were engineers who had been ordered to congratulate all the management of Noyabrskneftegaz and their children. At their last client’s place, their shared Snegurochka had asked to use the toilet, fallen asleep there, and they hadn’t woken her up. The hosts had laughed and allowed it. So the guys had done their round of songs and dances and quickly run out onto the road and caught us.

We drove them to the address. In their hurry, they forgot their sack of gifts and ran into the entrance.

After driving around the city for a while, there were no more clients — everyone was already sitting at the table. So we headed toward the settlement. And suddenly we discovered that the Ded Morozes’ sack of gifts had been left behind.

The whole of 6th Gorka gathered, and we set the table: four bottles of champagne, candies, oranges and tangerines, chocolate, and a thick wad of money that the Ded Morozes had collected as tips. It was enough for twelve people to sit at a decent table until January 7th, against the backdrop of total lack of money.

The Ded Morozes had been pretty tipsy — I doubt they even remembered where they had forgotten their sack, let alone their Snegurochka. But we believe in fairy tales, so we had been waiting for gifts from Ded Moroz — and we got them. Thank you to them. After all, as you meet the New Year, so it will go.

New Year in the North is always celebrated with great enthusiasm. Once I saw how, right at midnight after the fireworks shot, a firework rocket flew into an open window on the sixth floor of a nine-story building. A fire immediately started. The fire brigade was called; they broke down the iron door and began putting it out. A crowd gathered — everyone after the festive table, excited by the spectacle. Then the owners of the apartment arrived. Of course, their mood dropped sharply. No one wanted to celebrate the New Year in a burned-out apartment.

That’s why I suggest to everyone: on New Year’s Eve, be sure to close your windows and vents. Otherwise, something like a firework might fly in.

In the old days, they used to set up truck-sized fireworks right in the crowd on the square in front of the city executive committee. Imagine: after the shot, colored balls would fly out of the tubes one after another, rising up to 150 meters before exploding. One of the charges must have been defective — it fell from a height and killed a boy in the crowd, hitting him in the head. After that, all fireworks were launched from the stadium, where no one was allowed inside.

The main thing on New Year is that there should be no incidents. That everyone stays alive.

Happy belated New Year to all of you.

Chapter 41. The Raven in the Law

From the depths of the taiga, accompanied by a flock of young ravens, flew in a massive hundred-year-old Raven. I didn’t see the moment he arrived and landed on the pile of snow that the bulldozer had pushed up near the canteen entrance. The old Raven was nearly blind from age and was surrounded by the constant attention of six or seven young ravens, who escorted him everywhere and never stopped cawing.

All the Laika dogs had gathered in front of the canteen, waiting for the cook to bring out the leftovers from lunch — whatever the workers hadn’t eaten. As always, Malysh was in the queue, and as usual, he would be the last one to approach the bowl.

The ravens were also waiting.

And then came the moment of truth. The cook came out, dumped the scraps into the bowl, stepped back onto the porch, and disappeared inside.

The largest Laika approached with an important gait, ready to begin the feast. Suddenly, one of the young ravens swooped down and snatched a piece of bread right out of the bowl. The dog didn’t even have time to react. With the bread in its beak, the raven flew straight to the old Raven, who was sitting on the snowy mound, and began feeding him. The old one croaked in response and ate greedily.

Three more ravens launched another raid. One boldly landed right behind a dog’s tail and started pecking at it, distracting the animal from the bowl. Meanwhile, the other two brazenly climbed into the bowl from different sides, grabbed two more pieces of bread, and flew back to the old Raven to continue feeding him.

The rest of the dogs rushed to defend the bowl. But the raven gang continued their daring robbery with obvious pleasure, cawing joyfully. The dogs whined in frustration but could do nothing about it. Sheer agility triumphed over all their canine instincts. At this rate, they risked being left without any lunch at all.

I watched this battle between the ravens and the dogs with great pleasure. Unfortunately for the dogs, they were losing — they didn’t manage to catch a single raven by the tail.

The Raven in the Law gradually ate his fill. Satisfied and full, he began preparing for flight. He turned his head in different directions, trying to get his bearings, but could barely see anything because of his age. Then he spread his wings, ran down the slope of the snowy mound, flapped once, and the young ravens instantly formed up around him — on the sides, above, and below — cawing in turn, guiding him and telling him which way to fly.

Like a Hercules transport plane, he slowly lifted off the ground. Flapping his powerful wings, he rose above the canteen and, slowly turning, headed toward the treetops about a hundred meters away.

His escort flew in perfect sync with him. When he reached the top of a tree, he landed in his usual way — not seeing the branch clearly — and gripped it tightly with his claws. Then he began to croak.

The escort immediately returned to the bowl by the canteen and once again brazenly started stealing bread from under the dogs’ noses. They would fly off to a safe distance, eat their fill, and then, hearing the croaking of their elder, quickly finish and fly back to him. Gradually, the croaking grew fainter as it moved deeper into the taiga. The raven gang, together with their leader, flew away.

Later, I saw this old, hundred-year-old, half-blind Raven in the Law many more times. He would fly in and feast, surrounded by his offspring.

A hundred years ago, he must have seen a Russian Tsar’s constable riding through the taiga on a dog sled, followed by a shaman in a dog-fur coat with his own escort of dogs. His youth passed, and he went blind. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren grew up, and now they serve as his eyes and ears in flight.

Then restless neighbors appeared. They built some structures, and from one of the chimneys came a delicious smell that the wind carried all the way to the taiga. It was amazing to watch this Wonder in Feathers living side by side with humans. Even now, he probably still croaks from the treetops, announcing his presence and showing that he is still alive.

In the taiga, everyone has their own territory. For over a hundred years, this Raven has held legal claim to his patch of forest. Many have tried to drive him out, but his loyal offspring have always restored his rights. He was born here, lived his whole life here, and will die here like a sentry on duty. And even if he goes completely blind, his young ones will watch over him. They will not let him starve.

As for the dogs — of course, they are not thrilled about the ravens’ racketeering. A raven will never peck out another raven’s eye. Only age has clouded his eyes with cataracts. The ravens of the taiga have not yet learned how to perform surgery. So complete blindness for him means death. We are all mortal.

Chapter 42. Kystyby

In Bashkiria and Tatarstan, kystyby is the favorite dish on the table at any celebration. It’s a thin flatbread made from unleavened dough, filled with mashed potatoes mixed with finely chopped onions, and generously brushed with butter. This dish is like a symbol of home. Especially in the North, in freezing cold, the sensations it brings are unforgettable — warmth spreads in your stomach, and before your eyes appear your mother, your native home, and a belyash pie on the table.

One day, our entire free brigade from 6th Gorka went to lay a pipeline in the swamps north of the base town. The team gathered, we lived in trailers, and I cooked lunch and dinner for the guys. The days flew by unnoticed. The frosts grew stronger, and the temperature gradually dropped to -52°C. The machines and the excavator stopped working. The guys hadn’t gone out for the second day, waiting for the cold to ease up. Outside, a thick fog hung over the ground with no wind. When you ran the twenty meters from one trailer to another, you instantly started freezing, even though we were wearing special clothing rated for -50°C — it didn’t help. For the first time, I was truly testing my limits in such severe frost. At night it grew even colder.

We decided to make kystyby. Everyone helped: we rolled out the unleavened dough into flatbreads and fried them in a pan. Potatoes were boiling in a pot, we turned them into mash with a little milk and butter, then added the onions. We filled the flatbreads with the potato mixture, and then the main ritual began — we stacked the flatbreads into a pyramid, generously brushing each layer with melted butter. Everyone watched in anticipation as I, covered in flour, finished this sacred act of preparation.

The kettle boiled, we poured tea into glasses, added sugar, and began our meal. Each person got half a flatbread. We ate slowly, savoring every bite in silence. Outside the trailer — freezing cold. In our mouths — warm kystyby. My cousin quietly said, “It smells like home.” Everyone agreed — that’s exactly what it was.

Probably that tasting of kystyby in the taiga, at work, when it was so cold you didn’t want to step outside, was the best in my life. Everyone rated it excellent.

Sometimes, when I eat kystyby at home in my native land, I always remember that frosty evening — the trailer, the faces of the guys sitting and patiently waiting for their piece of the dish. It was such an unusual greeting from my mother, who always waits for her son to return from his shift, meets him, and prepares this unusually warm and, in its own way, simple dish that carries the warmth of her hands.

We’ve been eating it since childhood, and it has always been with us — warm and always number one on the table. If someone says otherwise, I’ll reply that you’re not deceiving me — you’re deceiving yourself.

And so, a small literary hymn to this dish was born. I wish everyone to try it.

On Russian Maslenitsa, pancakes with tea and jam on a frosty day also give an unforgettable feeling. And yet, before my eyes is kystyby. It melts in the mouth.

Chapter 43. Beer Expeditions

If you tell young people today that there used to be beer expeditions from all across the North to Surgut, where sections of Czech beer from Czechoslovakia arrived in 30-liter aluminum barrels, they simply wouldn’t believe you.

In the 90s, entire expeditions were sent from every city to buy beer for the whole town. From Novy Urengoy, Noyabrsk, Kogalym, Langepas, Megion, Nizhnevartovsk, Strezhevoy — from all these places, Ural and Toros trucks would set off on a beer expedition.

The whole city would wait for this caravan. Thousands of people stood on Yubileynaya Square in Strezhevoy with buckets and canisters. And then several Ural trucks would pull up into the center of the square. The crowd would surround the source of beer in a tight ring.

The tasting would begin: a person would lie down on the snow, the door of the truck would open, the cap would be unscrewed, and beer would pour out in a stream straight into the mouth of the thirsty man lying there. The crowd would roar with delight like spectators in the Colosseum in ancient Rome.

Then came the buying. People would pool their money, buy a whole barrel for cash, roll it aside, and immediately start pouring the beer into whatever containers they had brought. Everyone drank as if they were dying of thirst in the desert and had finally found an oasis. The entire square was drunk, everyone was singing songs at the top of their lungs, no one was fighting — people were just hugging each other.

The caravan with Czech beer from Surgut had arrived in Strezhevoy and made the whole city happy — because back then, there was a serious beer shortage.

This strange ritual only faded away once a brewery was built in town producing real Bavarian beer. The German whom the company had invited along with the equipment arrived straight from Bavaria. He was a brewer of the third or fourth generation. Beer flowed in his veins instead of blood.

At the plant, they installed 18 stainless steel tanks, each with a capacity of 3 tons, producing 3 tanks per day — a total of 51 tanks. The beer took 18 days to mature.

On the opening day, they were supposed to drink 9 tons for the whole city. But it wasn’t enough for everyone. The German tried to explain that you couldn’t break the technology and sell unaged beer, because the next three tanks were only filled a day later. No one listened to him — everything went straight into sale. He became extremely upset, threw all his suitcases together, and demanded to be flown home to Germany immediately.

After that, they no longer produced real Bavarian beer at the plant. We are beer barbarians, after all. The brewer was deeply saddened by what he had witnessed.

I and my friends were lucky enough to drink his very first beer — real Bavarian beer, brewed for the first time in the North. For the opening, they brought blue-eyed blonde girls from Bavaria who skillfully carried ten beer mugs in their hands at once. It was a real Beer Festival in the city of Strezhevoy. Some people, after drinking heavily, crawled out of the bar on all fours, where taxis were already waiting for them.

Nowadays there are no problems with beer at all. All that remains is a cheerful memory. Sometimes I wonder — did this really happen? Or did I dream it? But no, it really did happen.

And I think: for every ton of oil extracted in the North, just as much beer was drunk. As the great artist of our time Arkady Raikin once said: “Many oil workers started drinking, smoking, and talking all at the same time. And no one taught them how.”

Chapter 44. Apples

When I was born, in the spring, my father planted an apple orchard. My entire childhood was spent at the dacha plot. I was growing up, and so were the apples in the garden. They were delicious, of many different varieties — Bashkir Beauty, Medovka, White Filling, Antonovka, Ranet. Some would ripen and fade away, then the next ones would come, and later the autumn varieties were carefully wrapped in paper and newspapers, placed in boxes, and lowered into the cellar. All winter long we would gradually bring them up to the house along with tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, sauerkraut, salted mushrooms, potatoes, and jams made from various berries. The typical Soviet table was always loaded with everything we had preserved. And on New Year’s, of course, all of this was on the table — including the apples.

I adore apples. They have accompanied me throughout my entire life. Even now, when I buy them at the vegetable store, I strictly choose apples that have worms and a real smell. Most often these are apples from Azerbaijan. My childhood garden has been abandoned for over 20 years now, overgrown with grass, but amazingly, a few apples still grow there every year. I sit down on the trunk of a tree and just sit there, remembering my childhood. And, of course, remembering my father. He was a great authority for me.

For him, the collapse of the USSR was a huge tragedy. The garden was his big escape — a place where he rested both body and soul. And the garden filled him with great pride: he had planted it himself, and he watched it grow. Currants, raspberries, gooseberries, plums, thorns, cherries, rowanberries, viburnum.

My favorite childhood activity was to collect a couple of sacks of apples, load them into the trunk of our Moskvich 412 with my brother, drive home, carry them up to the second floor, wash the apples in a basin in the bathtub, and then bring them out into the yard. In an instant, the whole gang of neighborhood boys from my childhood would come flying over. A feast would begin — happy faces chewing away. It gave me the greatest pleasure. No one else in our apartment building’s courtyard had such apples in their garden. These were the apples of our happy childhood.

Now life has scattered all of us. Some live in Ufa, some in Novy Urengoy, some in Tyumen, Anapa, Samara, Serpukhov… And whenever I ask any of them if they remember the apples we used to regularly chew while sitting on the porch, they all answer: yes, they remember. And I remember too. It feels like it was only yesterday. Warm memories unite all of us.

In our building there were 18 apartments and practically 18 different nationalities, so I have been an internationalist since childhood. There were Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians, Chuvash, Jews, Mordvins, Roma, Bashkirs, Uzbeks. In almost every family there were three or four children, mostly boys. There is a lot to remember, and there are things that simply cannot be forgotten.

From first grade through tenth grade, I played chess with my best childhood friend on the steps of the first entrance — three games every single day. We also played the guitar. Once my friend told me: “Don’t pick up the guitar — it doesn’t play, it just screeches in your hands.” I haven’t touched a guitar since. My friend said it, and he would never give bad advice.

And apples are still on my table today. I eat them with pleasure. When I breathe in their aroma, I smell the apples of my childhood.

Chapter 45. The Shift-Worker Parrot

I was fortunate enough to get a cockatiel who, for 7.5 years, saw me off and welcomed me back from my shift work. He was a full-fledged member of the family in every sense of the word. He appeared in my life at a very difficult time. I was suffering from depression, and when this 100-gram bundle of happiness entered the house, my heart began to thaw. Harmony returned, and everything fell into place again.

I had previously kept a Rottweiler, various exotic fish in a large aquarium, and a cat named Matroskin — after which I swore I would never have another cat in my house. The sheer insolence of that cat left a lasting impression.

The cockatiel behaved modestly. He understood that he had been brought into the house not just for a day. It was a new environment for him; he was young and didn’t yet know what to expect from me during that first month. Everyone dreams that their parrot will start talking, sit on their shoulder, play with their hair, and show affection.

I had no experience keeping a cockatiel. I had only kept budgerigars up north — they were given to me as a gift, but when my friend’s son asked for them, I couldn’t refuse.

That’s why Innokenty Petrovich watched me carefully, and I watched him. He was a wild one; he had never known human hands, so there was almost no trust at first. Two months passed. I built him a cage, but I never locked the door. Gradually, the parrot got used to being free in the apartment and only flying into the cage at night.

One evening, I tried to get him into the cage for the night. By accident, I pulled his tail, and it came off — he was molting. The scream was heart-wrenching, and the swearing in parrot language went on for a long time. Trust was lost. From that moment on, he no longer trusted me.

His tail slowly grew back, about 2.5–3 cm. Whenever he saw me entering the room, Kesha would fly to the table, deliberately turn his back to me, fan out his little tail, and show me that it was growing. After six months, the tail had fully grown back — that steering mechanism so important for a flying parrot.

Then, at the end of spring, he suddenly began to sing like a nightingale. The concert lasted a full 20 minutes without a break. It moved me to tears. He might not talk, but he could sing. That’s how his morning concerts began — right after sunrise. I never covered his cage with a cloth. Gradually, we all started waking up early and going to bed at sunset. The parrot wanted to get married, and this urge would begin in spring and last until the end of June.

Every year, nature prepared him for the sacrament of marriage. I just couldn’t solve this problem, and eventually he chose my mother as the object of his adoration. He began courting her. She became the subject of his love and worship. He would sit on her head, preen her hair, perch on her shoulder, and even on her chest when she was lying in bed in the morning.

Toward me, he remained indifferent. The only thing he noticed was that I periodically disappeared. He always greeted me with joy when I returned home from my shifts. To win him over, I tried to bring him treats, of course. But because of his modest childhood spent in an aviary where he had to make do with millet and no one spoiled him, his greatest joy was a simple apple. So I tried to give him one almost every day, and that was the peak of his happiness.

Every day the parrot would do a lap around the apartment. He had three favorite perching spots on top of the cupboards, from where he would observe us. What was surprising was that he never pooped just anywhere, never chewed cables, and never knocked over lamps. Even inside his cage he had a bio-toilet: sitting on his perch, he would relieve himself into a dish of water. I would wash it thoroughly and refill it with clean water. I lined the bottom of the cage with newspaper every day. He constantly looked out the windows at the street. What parrot doesn’t dream of escaping from home? But outside, death awaited in the form of jackdaws and crows, who would surely have torn him apart. The apartment had been his entire world since the day he was brought here. We adored him. He always behaved very modestly. But when he opened his beak and began to sing, we would freeze in delight.

Cockatiels usually live up to 14 years, and his departure was completely unexpected for me. He had lived only half his life, but he had lived it beautifully and given us many hours of happiness through our time together.

My mother fell ill in December of last year and began to slowly fade away. Sometimes she would scream all night long. In the morning she would sleep, and beside her was the parrot, sitting fluffed up and slowly fading as well. During the day, he tried to help her eat semolina porridge. But I could see that he had fallen ill from grief, watching how my mother was slowly dying. And then he died. I understood that my mother would soon follow. He couldn’t bear to outlive her. So he left first. Their love had warmed them both in life. Like swans, they could not help but leave together.

Chapter 46. The Rocket Scientist

In Noyabrsk, in an apartment undergoing major renovation, I met an interesting guy from Oktyabrsk — a fellow countryman from Bashkiria. He was plastering the walls, and he did it with real skill.

We got talking. He told me that after graduating from university, he had worked in a closed city. His faculty was Rocket Engineering. He spoke about his studies in Ufa, where their lectures were given by a student of Sergei Korolev himself — a man who had worked with him and remembered everything about the time when the R-7 rocket launched with the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, on board.

The professor’s favorite exam question was about “Product No. 1.” It turned out that automation and hydraulics were not the main thing in rocket engineering. The key element was the forged chain that ran from the top all the way to the ground.

The hydraulics would lift the entire structure from horizontal to vertical position, and then the chain with the hook would be secured so that nothing would collapse. Anyone who couldn’t answer this sacred question could not get more than a “three” — and was considered professionally unfit.

He told me a lot about his beloved profession. Then he picked up a piece of chalk and began writing on the fresh plaster a program to be loaded into the computer. Back then they were ancient 286 machines, which were used in the control system of a ballistic missile. In fifty minutes, three entire walls of the room were covered from top to bottom with writing.

Launch coordinates: the city of Noyabrsk, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Target coordinates — for example, New York, latitude and longitude. The rotation of the Earth and the exact launch time were all taken into account.

Once the program was written, all that remained was to type it into the computer, copy it onto a flash drive, and load it via USB into the device called a Ballistic Missile.

I was in shock. Standing in front of me was a true man of the state, who, after the collapse of the country, had been thrown away like an unnecessary object. At the moment of the Soviet Union’s collapse, there had been only 21 such specialists. Four went to Iran, three to North Korea, and three to Iraq. And judging by how the rocket programs of those countries developed over the last thirty years, their knowledge proved very useful there — but not in their homeland, Russia.

Some remained in the system, but one of them was standing right in front of me on a construction site, plastering walls just so he wouldn’t starve. Yet knowledge cannot be drowned in drink. I was stunned. Before me stood a genius — and nobody needed him.

This was in 1998. The country was slowly beginning to rise from its knees. But I still couldn’t believe that a real specialist was standing in front of me. Perhaps later the department that oversees rockets found him. Maybe he didn’t drink himself to death and didn’t lose his knowledge. But at that moment, he was not needed by the state.

He was in the wrong place. He had passed an extremely tough professional selection. He told me how, from Novosibirsk, the results of the work of 2,500 of the best Soviet programmers — gathered in Akademgorodok — were taken to the United States. That’s how, in Silicon Valley, under the guidance of a college dropout, the company Windows appeared, along with the Windows 95-97 programs. The director of the institute and his deputy had stolen and exported it all.

They even gave interviews — I saw them on YouTube — saying that all versions and updates are written by programmers from Russia, but they are forbidden from indicating their authorship. This is written into the contract with the company and signed with Bill Gates. When it comes to stealing, especially intellectual property, Americans are true masters.

As for the guy himself, I think he was plastering the last apartment of his life. Specialists of such caliber do not lie around on the trash heap. At least, that’s how it should be in a state whose security is based on the Triad:

On land,

In space,

And at sea.

Chapter 47. Burglars

There was a period in the North when people’s apartments were robbed with such enthusiasm that it was astonishing — especially right before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was like an epidemic. That was exactly when iron doors first appeared as a means of protecting apartments. If you also had bars on the windows and a triple-locked iron door, your apartment turned into a habitable safe.

A person would fly off for a twenty-day vacation. They were well-off people who didn’t limit themselves to trips to Bulgaria or East Germany. They’d return, open their apartment — and find nothing inside except a rusty nail on the floor. Everything they had earned through hard labor was gone: two tape recorders, three leather coats, crystal glassware, a video player with a TV...

I had an acquaintance who was robbed four times in five years using the exact same scheme. They would drive up a KAMAZ truck with a shipping container, six to nine strong men would open the apartment and start carrying things out. When neighbors asked what they were doing, they would calmly reply that the owner was moving to another house.

Her problems ended only when she bought all her furniture strictly from classified ads — shabby sofas, worn-out cupboards, and old sideboards. After that, the burglars stopped bothering her. She managed an oil depot and sold gasoline; people called her the Queen of the Gas Station. She lived too well, so it wasn’t considered a sin to rob her a little once a year. She wasn’t the only one in the city who suffered from this. Everyone did.

My boss asked me to stay in his apartment instead of the dormitory while he was on vacation. It had a standard video player, typical furniture of that time, and two leather coats. Safes weren’t installed in apartments back then. I agreed to stay there since I didn’t have my own place yet.

On the fourth night, they started breaking in. They opened the locks on the outer door and began working on the second one, shining a flashlight inside.

I stood there in my underwear in the darkness, holding a stool ready. The moment the door opened, I struck the entering “apartment specialist” on the head. The man collapsed and lay unconscious between the two doors. The thieves quickly dragged their partner out by the legs, threw him over a shoulder, and hurriedly disappeared, carrying the injured man with them. They slammed the entrance door of the building behind them. I calmly closed both doors and went back to sleep. Until the return of Yevgeny Ivanovich, there were no more attempts on his property.

When the owner came back, he thanked me warmly. Back then, this was something inevitable — a well-organized mass “dekulakization” of well-to-do northerners had been put on a conveyor belt. It felt like thieves also came to the North on a shift-work basis.

People didn’t keep money at home in those days. There was no gold or diamonds either — women wore everything on themselves. So carrying out all the furniture and everything that was in the apartment, then immediately loading it onto a truck headed for the mainland, was a painful blow for any family. And yet, I think there was actually nothing much worth stealing in the USSR at that time. Everyone lived modestly; no one was rolling in excess. Buying anything decent from abroad was extremely difficult. Everything was standard for that era.

Nowadays it’s the Age of Iron Doors. There are no more specialists who can open all the locks with lock picks. The “safecrackers” have gone extinct like mammoths. In the last twenty years or so, I haven’t encountered a single break-in at all. These days, theft mainly happens through the internet — stealing from a bank card by getting the four-digit code from an SMS sent to a smartphone via Gosuslugi.

If such a theft happens to you, then congratulations — you’ve passed the Idiot Test.

In the 90s in the south, at the entrance to any market there used to be teams playing the shell game (thimblerig). That was also a test for fools. Many bandits started their careers exactly like that — by taking other people’s money.

As the character Docent said in the film Gentlemen of Fortune: “Stole it, drank it, went to prison. Romance.”

When you remember Soviet times, it feels like a period when crime as such was almost absent. The vast majority of the population simply worked. There was no drug addiction, and you could count the alcoholics on your fingers. Homeless people (bomzhi) back then were almost a philosophy of protest. We were a sterile society. That’s why, after the collapse of the USSR, a flood of swindlers and thieves poured into the country. For them, it was a golden age. Especially since an ordinary alcoholic was sitting in the chair of the country’s top leader — and he couldn’t even manage to drink the whole country away.

Chapter 48. The Bear Operators in Oil Production

When you think about them, you realize that sometimes bears actually manage to get jobs in the oil industry — especially in the CDNG (Oil and Gas Production Workshop). Their surname was Medvedev, as it should be: the father was Potapych and the son was Pestun. They didn’t have bear skins on them — just the standard work clothes of Tomskneft. When you walked into their room, which was in a constant state of bear-like disorder, you immediately understood that this was a genuine den.

The bears were always busy stockpiling food. They gathered berries — lingonberries, blueberries, bilberries, cranberries, cloudberries — and froze, dried, or salted mushrooms. They collected pine nuts, rolled the cones, and cleaned them of debris. They prepared fish — dace from the Yeltsovka River. They made canned food in the oven, cooked sprats on the stove, dried fish, and made spiced salted fish. This process never stopped for even an hour. They devoted only one day a week to their actual job.

When their shift ended, the loading of the finished products began: two boxes on the left and right, a small backpack in front, and another box of cranberries strapped to their backs. Their main den was in Tomsk.

Once, Pestun set a snare for a hare in winter. It didn’t work. They asked him, “Did you grease the wire with lard?”

“No.”

“Grease it.”

Again, no luck.

“What kind of lard did you use — salted or unsalted?”

“Salted.”

“You should have used unsalted.”

Still the hare didn’t get caught. It turned out that he had set the snare on the trail too close to the ground, and the hare was calmly passing without sticking its head into the loop. Pestun got angry, while the entire oil field roared with laughter.

At work, both of them were constantly covered in oil. They never washed their work clothes, and gradually their room turned into the real den of true Oil Bears — the word “oil” being the key part.

In spring they gathered “kolba” (bear’s garlic, or ramson) on the flooded meadows of the Yeltsovka River. Bears in the taiga also love this greenery in spring — it drives worms and other bear parasites out of their guts. Our bears seemed to be doing the same kind of prevention, and they harvested it in industrial quantities.

Once Pestun took the keys to the PP Unit (mobile steam generator) truck from the driver, parked it on the handbrake on a sloping hill where the road ran, and went off to pick mushrooms. The truck rolled down into a ravine. The cab was smashed, the body damaged, and the boiler of the steam unit nearly torn out. The whole team of drivers spent a full week restoring the vehicle. They brought in a new cab, welded the frame of the body, and repainted everything. The PP Unit truck looked brand new again. After that, no one ever gave Pestun the keys again. The little bear cub was offended.

Looking at them, I came to the conclusion that we all have different surnames inherited from our ancestors, and these surnames leave their mark on us through generations in the form of instincts. The Medvedevs were real bears in human form. The only difference was that they didn’t go into their den for four months in winter and didn’t suck on their paws. They were wandering Oil Bears (shatuny). They didn’t accumulate bear fat for the winter either.

What was surprising was that both of them had clubfoot, and when they walked, they waddled in a distinctly bear-like manner. They were good-natured, not aggressive, looked at life philosophically, and never took offense at anyone. Over time, they became a natural part of the team. After all, every proper crew should have bear operators with the surname Medvedev.

Later they were transferred to another oil field, and their easy life of stockpiling taiga treasures came to an end. The “sanatorium-resort” oil field lost a pair of bears. Then the elder Medvedev retired. One day a newspaper was brought to the field with a photograph of the senior Medvedev — he was giving a speech at some rally and running for the local Duma in Tomsk. Whether a representative of the Bear clan actually made it into the Duma, I don’t know.

But a couple of years later, the little bear cub (Pestun) was transferred back to our field. When he arrived for work, someone approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said:

“You’re not Pestun anymore. You’re Medved — the Bear.”

The guy straightened his shoulders and understood that the childhood of young Pestun the Bear Cub was over, and the adult life of a Bear Operator had begun.

Глава 49. The Unspoken Law

This law states that a shift worker who has only one year left to work on the shift becomes untouchable. Of course, on large fields this law doesn't work — the dismissal machine operates without regard for anything. If you slip up — you're fired, no questions asked.

On small fields, the situation is completely different. People have been working together in the team for years, gradually getting to know each other. The security service, the medics, and the supervisor (usually the CDNG engineer) bring together representatives from all the organizations. Firing a person who has reached the final stage of his working life is considered a great sin. The person is often struggling with health problems, which sometimes scares him, and everyone around knows that the same thing will happen to them one day. He still has several months left before he can apply for his pension.

I’ve also noticed that in a small team, sometimes 2–3 people start drinking like fish. They get fired, and suddenly a person you’d never expect starts drinking heavily too — as if the alcoholic’s cross has been nailed to his back. Nothing at work brings him joy anymore; he becomes indifferent to everything. He’s just tired. People try to cheer him up, and he crawls on his belly toward that date.

Then comes the first month after he retires. Along with his pension, he also receives his salary. For the first time, he feels that he has enough for everything. He transforms. His back straightens, he’s no longer lying down — he tries to stay on for another year or two as a working pensioner. He becomes the ideal shift worker: he doesn’t open his mouth, he approves all management decisions, and fulfills every request. At the same time, sometimes there’s a resignation letter with his signature lying on the table — with an open date.

About two years ago, they tried to kick me out like a roller flattening everything. Even the fact that I had worked 25 years without a break didn’t count for anything. Well, I didn’t always keep quiet either. Nobody likes it when you argue with them — it builds up like a snowball of grudges and mistakes.When I arrived at the office, I directly said that I was ready to write a resignation letter with an open date. This confused them, their death grip loosened, and it allowed me to work the last year without any pressure. I calmly finished that period and then had the audacity to extend my presence for another year and a half. For them, you’re already a spent cartridge — they’re already preparing the next young round for your place.

The most vile thing you can expect from a shift mate is snitching. In order to save his own ass against the background of his constant screw-ups, he starts leaking everything — whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. For the managers, this creates the illusion that they know everything that’s going on with you.

There’s also the practice of making someone work an extra three months, especially new guys fall for this. They’re asked to replace someone who’s on sick leave or has written a leave-without-pay application for the entire shift. After working a quarter of a year and receiving only 12–14 thousand for working in someone else’s shift instead of 55, with no bonus and no extra payments, the person realizes he’s been tricked like a fool. And he still doesn’t know that the difference goes into the Wage Savings Fund. The chief accountant and the manager receive 20% of a million as a bonus at the end of the year — not bad to get 200 thousand before the New Year for a meeting on the Red Sea in Hurghada. Meanwhile, production hasn’t suffered, everything keeps spinning, and they spin you along with it.

When you know their mechanics and categorically refuse to go along with their decisions, you become the enemy — you’re inconvenient. Because there’s constant staff turnover, they quickly find the next victim. Such is life: their interests never coincide with ours on the shift. They know that you know, and at the same time you know that they know that you know.

Chapter 50. The Geologist

I often had to travel by train, and in the compartment you get to know your neighbors — you meet all kinds of people heading in the same direction. One fellow passenger I remember particularly well was a geologist who would spend months at a time deep in the taiga and forest-tundra without coming out.

He was a very intelligent, well-educated man and highly competent in his field. Someone brought in some cheap jewelry and offered it for sale. He examined it carefully and smiled — almost all of it was plastic, with only a small amount made of semi-precious stones. The conversation smoothly turned to geology.

He had practically traveled the entire length of Siberia — from the Urals to Kamchatka, from Altai to Taimyr. His last assignment had been in Taimyr, where he was flown in by helicopter. He told us about the geology of that region and shared something interesting: there is practically no gold on the territory of the West Siberian Plain — not a single industrial deposit.

He put forward an interesting theory for discussion: that a catastrophe had occurred between 1816 and 1830. There are no trees in Siberia older than 300 years; they all began growing from a certain period onward. He suggested that some cosmic body, in the form of a meteorite, had struck the area of the North Pole. This caused a massive tsunami carrying an enormous volume of sand and seabed material from the Arctic Ocean.

This sand covered a huge territory, from the Urals to Yakutia. All the river valleys were buried under a 25- to 50-meter layer of sand. In the North there is no usual chernozem (black soil); the taiga stands directly on sand. Even the excavator operators have a strict rule: they are not allowed to dig deeper than 50 meters. They are probably afraid of uncovering some buried city.

There is no gold, but that shouldn't be the case. Along riverbeds there should be placer deposits of the precious metal. He believes that the thick layer of sand acts as a barrier, cutting off access to the gold. All the swamps have underground river channels flowing beneath the sand. There are also many large, round lakes scattered across the North with relatively shallow depths.

This geology lecture lasted almost two full days, until we finally reached Surgut.

In Lomonosov's time, an archive of Tartary was kept in Tomsk, but it was conveniently burned by foreign professors who kept losing arguments to the great Russian thinker. Tamerlane came on a campaign to Siberia and burned 12 cities along the Ob River. What existed beyond the Urals before Yermak is almost not reflected in the chronicles.

In modern times, until the development of the region in the 1970s, this was a land of exile. In Russia they used to say: “You can’t be exiled further than Siberia.” In Tomsk I saw an old house with an entrance to a basement room that had a plaque saying that Radishchev — the author of the book *Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow* — had been held in that cell on his way to exile.

Before the appearance of the northern oil cities in the 1970s, Siberia had extremely low population density per square kilometer. Before the revolution, the main cities were located along the Trans-Siberian Railway; there were also Tyumen and Tobolsk.

In Tomsk there is strong evidence that the city of Grustina once stood on this site. There are maps of Tartary that specifically mark this city.

If the geologist is right, then the conclusion suggests itself: we modern people of Russia know practically nothing about the history of Siberia within the last 300 years.

Whether there was a catastrophe or not — we don’t even know for sure where the free fur-trading city of Mangazeya was located, the one where adventurous European sailors used to sail during the time of Ivan the Terrible.

Chapter 51. Cooks

I will always treat cooks with the deepest respect for their incredibly hard, almost slave-like labor in the oil fields. A cook preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner spins like a squirrel in a wheel, getting up at four-thirty in the morning. By five or six o’clock, they are already rattling pots and pans like sentries, constantly on the move. How they manage to do all this still remains a mystery to me.

Then comes lunch — feeding the hungry tribe of oil workers. If the cook prepares the food excellently, the entire field lines up in a queue that sweeps everything away in its path. After lunch, they get a short horizontal rest on three chairs in the dining hall for half an hour, and then the hell continues.

Constant preparation for the next day follows. In the evening the rush eases a bit, but still two-thirds of the clients lazily chew their dinner. Yet the cooks’ day is not over. They finish the wet cleaning only by half past ten, and around midnight, exhausted, they head to their room, take a shower, and finally get some sleep. And in just a few hours, they have to get up again.

This hell lasts 30, 45, or even 60 days. If the relief crew isn’t sent in time, it’s like in the army — “Spirits, you can go hang yourselves.” But they don’t hang themselves. They are made of steel. And they hold a ladle in their hands.

One day I walked into the canteen earlier than usual and saw the cook crying. I asked what had happened. She said that some young kid from the instrumentation and control workshop had been rude to her that morning while talking on the radio (Ku-ya). Soon after, this little “correspondent” showed up as if nothing had happened. I had a talk with him.

I asked: “Do you know what they do on a dry cargo ship at sea to someone who was rude to the cook and told him to fuck off?” He stayed silent. I told him that the sailors throw the guy overboard, and then say he fell during a storm and disappeared. The same thing can happen among oil workers — they can discuss the behavior and make a collective decision so that we never see this little shit again. A cook at sea and a cook on the oil field are untouchable when it comes to raising people’s spirits through their stomachs. You cannot be rude to them or swear at them.

The guy went to apologize — and he did the right thing. The cook calmed down and stopped salting the mashed potatoes with her tears at the serving counter. The conflict was resolved.

I love cooking myself and often skipped the canteen. Borscht, cutlets, pilaf… Once the head of all the catering facilities made a remark that I rarely visited. I replied that if I had eaten strictly in the canteen for thirty years, three times a day, I would have died long ago. She got offended. I explained that I’m simply a supporter of home-cooked food. When you have the time and aren’t lazy, it’s better. For me, the canteen on the oil field is like a restaurant in the middle of swamps and taiga. Especially since some serious professional cooks from Moscow and other million-plus cities sometimes worked there. By the nature of their professionalism, they simply don’t know how to cook badly.

And just imagine: you sit in an establishment where they don’t serve you at the table — you serve yourself on a tray. Seven kinds of salads, fish under a fur coat, herring with onions, three first courses — various soups, a second course with four different side dishes plus schnitzels or chicken Kiev cutlets, compote or kissel, tea or coffee. They don’t serve little glasses of cold vodka or a glass of wine — we’re at work, after all. Sometimes there are shashlik skewers, and how can you possibly get up from the table without a good mood?

A cook is a great magician, especially when there is snow all around, the sun rises for only two hours a day and then sets again, and in summer it hangs at its zenith and practically never sets.

The work is the same throughout the entire shift — both for them and for us. Everyone is a small cog in this complex mechanism performing their function. But cooks have a special job. A well-fed worker finds joy in his work and is in a better mood. It’s like on a ship in the sea of taiga. We are all crew. That’s why the respect for their labor is maximal. Not everyone can work like a horse for a very modest salary.

I ask for a mental salute in their honor.

A cook is a special tribe that also extracts oil in the North — with the help of pots, a ladle, and a well-sharpened knife for cutting meat. And bears sometimes come to the garbage bins next to the canteen as if it were a supermarket, hoping the cook will throw out something tasty. Besides, cooks always smell delicious. That’s why at night, when leaving the canteen toward the dormitory, the cooks walk with caution. And the bears try not to scare them. Four 110-kilogram shift workers make up one moose. But a cook is sometimes small and skinny, living on the pleasant smells from the pots and frying pans.

Greetings to everyone who cooks in Chukotka, in Yakutia, in the northern cities, on shift work at drilling rigs and shift camps, and to those who, after leaving the North, are now working in Moscow and all the cities of Russia.

Chapter 52. A Man of the State

There was a short period in my life when the authorities tested me for “weakness,” and by pure accident I became a State Man.

In Noyabrsk, through the Employment Center and based on my work record, I was invited for an interview at the Linear Center for Sanitary and Epidemiological Surveillance in the settlement of Zheleznodorozhnikov for the position of assistant sanitary doctor. My education was not in the relevant field. The question immediately arose: why me? They needed a man for the role. Curiosity got the better of me, so I took the job. They immediately solved the housing problem by giving me a room in a dormitory.

The team was small but friendly. They gradually brought me up to speed. Once every quarter I had to take the train to Yekaterinburg for briefing. The entire sanitary department of the Sverdlovsk Railway would gather there. We were met by a general with whom I regularly communicated via the communications room. After spending twenty-four hours there, we all returned to our workplaces. The Railway was essentially a military unit.

The first serious test by the authorities came when, in the settlement of Purpe in June–July, they dismantled the boiler house and cut out the old boilers. It suddenly turned out that the new ones had been sent by rail to Vanino in Primorye. The boilers were then urgently airlifted by military transport aircraft to Noyabrsk, and from the airport they were transported on trailers to Purpe. On August 20, snow fell in the town and the temperature dropped below –20°C.

At that time, 20,000 people lived in Purpe. From the very beginning of the installation work, the four of us — representatives from the Noyabrsk Railway Directorate (NGCh), the Mayor’s Office, the Surgut branch of the Railway, and myself representing the Sanitary Service — stayed there around the clock. Every four hours we had to report via the secure line to the General in Yekaterinburg in emergency mode. The installation also went on non-stop. There were no walls or roof yet. Welders and fitters worked heroically to solve the problem. It was a classic case of “first we create the problem, then we heroically overcome it.”

We lived like lords, sipping vodka in small portions — without it, it was impossible to endure the freezing cold. We warmed ourselves in the trailer and waited for the result. After two days, hot water finally reached the apartments. Then they began erecting the walls and roof. Eventually the facility was commissioned. We all breathed a huge sigh of relief. A state-level emergency had been resolved. What surprised me was that none of this was shown on ORT (Channel One). There were no central television correspondents in the town, so Moscow knew nothing about it due to the lack of information.

Only local TV was present, and for the first time in my life I gave an interview.

With a sense of fulfilled state duty, I returned to the settlement, entered my room and discovered there was no heating — the temperature inside was almost 0°C. Electric heaters stood everywhere, but they couldn’t save the situation.

The next morning I went to report to the communications room at the Railway Directorate. The general asked if there were any problems. I informed him that the temperature regime in the dormitory where I lived was far from acceptable standards.

The following night, a repair train with 150 workers — fitters and welders — arrived from Surgut. They brought radiators and pipes, cut out everything old, and within two days replaced it all. The rooms became like Africa — scorching hot. When I came back from work, the entire dormitory greeted me like a god. All that was missing were samurai bows.

A problem that had been dragging on for four years was solved with just one phone call.

Of course, they called me into the office. It was a difficult conversation. I was accused of undermining the Boss of the entire Surgut Railway Division.

Then the pipeline builders came to me. They had carried out a major overhaul throughout the entire Zheleznodorozhny settlement of Noyabrsk-2, replacing the entire large-diameter pipe — work worth 4 billion rubles. But they had deliberately left half a meter unwelded so that hot water could not be supplied.

If they supplied it, they would only see the money in 2–4 years — standard practice for the customer. A typical racket based on the final result. And I was supposed to report that everything was in order and the settlement was ready for winter.

Instead, I reported that the settlement was not ready. The general was delighted. The authority of the Sanitary Service rose to the skies. Four hours later, the builders came to my office. The money had been transferred to their account. They placed the keys to a brand-new “Niva-9” (a Lada 4x4) that was already parked under the windows of the dormitory in front of me. I categorically refused the bribe. They looked at me as if I were crazy.

Then came a call from Surgut telling me straight out that I would not be allowed to work there. Of course, I understood that they would solve the problem radically and use every lever at their disposal. So, without even completing a full year, I quit while I still could. My colleagues also breathed a sigh of relief — who needs a “Hedgehog in the Fog” who constantly creates problems for everyone during the course of his work? The system was supposed to be softer. I was a glitch in the system.

That is how my state service ended. I have not described the smaller incidents. I disappointed the general — he really wanted to get me into the sanitary faculty of the Yekaterinburg Medical University, where they train sanitary doctors. I never became an official in the state apparatus.

Chapter 53. Exiles and Oil Workers

Along the entire Panin and all its side channels (protokas), there were small settlements of exiles, especially those deported from the Volga region. The Germans were brought there in 1940. A barge would sail down the Ob River, unload 14–18 families with children on the bank, throw them an axe, a shovel, a pickaxe, and a knife, and then the barge would continue on to the next channel. Afterwards, an official would approach the shore by motorboat. The exiles would line up on the bank in a row, while at the end stood the crosses of those who had already died. Without stepping ashore, the official would count them according to his register, and the motorboat would move on.

What saved the people was fish, berries, mushrooms, and moose meat if they managed to hunt one. They built dugouts first, then houses. The strongest in spirit survived — against all the conditions that made survival almost impossible.

Later, when the oil workers arrived, these Germans worked on the construction sites. Almost all the heads of the construction organizations in Strezhevoy were Germans. In the 1990s, they left en masse for Germany.

In 1973, my uncle and aunt wanted to buy fresh milk in a village standing on the bank of the Pasol River. They asked some locals, and while talking between themselves in Tatar, a woman asked who they were. My aunt answered. Unexpectedly, the woman pointed to a house where exiles from Bashkiria were living. They went inside, started talking, and it turned out that this family had lived in the village of Bakayevo, where my aunt had grown up. They told them that they had been exiled as kulaks — they had owned four horses and hired one worker. After arriving in exile, they rebuilt their household again. All those years they caught sterlet and beluga sturgeon, ate caviar, and held no grudge against the Soviet authorities. They lived well both there and here — they had everything in abundance. They were lucky. They all survived.

My relatives kept in touch with them constantly while they lived in the city. After all, they were fellow villagers whom they had met thousands of kilometers away from Bashkiria.

Memory has a way of forgetting things. I think such stories should not be forgotten.

On the Vakh River, I saw in the taiga leaning barracks and watchtowers of a camp. What struck me was that on the table stood rows of mugs, aluminum plates, and spoons — left behind by the last inhabitants of those barracks. It was as if everything was waiting for new prisoners to be brought there again. Now everything is being overgrown by forest and tall weeds. Wood rots, even the rusty barbed wire decays. And right next to it was a canal that had been dug by hand from the Vakh River, without any excavators. We once caught a whole bathtub full of fish there with a seine net. I felt a little uneasy after seeing all that.

Chapter 53. Ice Swimming (Morzhevaniye)

I love cold water. I started hardening myself by pouring cold water over my legs in the bathtub at night. Then I got carried away with the philosophy of the great Porfiry Ivanov and for three years I was dousing myself outdoors. Of course, the neighbors were twirling their fingers at their temples, thinking I was crazy.

When the body and spirit become about four times stronger, all diseases disappear. You begin to feel that you are part of nature, and big shifts happen in your head. I tried to continue the practice even in the North. There, frosts reach -50°C and below. You freeze instantly, your hair turns into icicles, but inside you burn as if you’ve just stepped out of a hot steam bath.

In Noyabrsk, before turning toward Noyabrsk-2, there is a small river just over 10 meters wide, with a railway bridge nearby. While walking one day, I saw a Niva car parked at the end of the road bridge and a man on the river who was sawing the ice and making a hole for swimming — a “mayna.”

I went down to the river. The man, wearing an army sheepskin coat that reached his ankles, was just finishing up. I helped him remove the cut ice, and the water turned out to be crystal clear. The frost was quite strong — about -15°C.

He lowered a wooden ladder into the water, kicked off his valenki (felt boots), stood on them, took off his short sheepskin coat, took several deep breaths, and slowly descended the ladder, submerging himself completely. He calmly climbed back up, stood on his valenki again, and within one minute his body had dried. He put on his sheepskin coat and quietly walked back to the car, got in, and drove off to the city.

The master class was over.

That’s how I met a real Russian “Walrus” who lived not on Wrangel Island or the Commander Islands, but right here. He even had a mustache like a true inhabitant of the Arctic Ocean.

A week later we met again, got acquainted, and became friends. Our meetings became regular — once a week. He explained all the safety techniques to me: three slow inhalations while standing on the valenki, and two slow, deep exhalations. The final breath-hold is very important. During that phase, you must slowly go underwater headfirst and exhale under the water.

When you’re drying off afterward, the main thing is not to overdo it — don’t wait until you’re covered in goosebumps. The body gives off heat very sharply at that moment, and you can easily get sick.

My Walrus friend had started ice swimming after a serious accident. For a whole year he lay in bed recovering from numerous fractures. He also had cuts on his face that left scars. Everything healed incredibly fast, “like on a dog,” as soon as he began morzhevaniye. The man was happy. Our friendship grew stronger with every week, like the bond between two walruses.

Closer to spring, a third Walrus joined us. He had prepared in the bathtub and by rubbing himself with snow outside. He was from Dagestan. One day, we decided to perform the initiation ceremony for him. He endured it and, like all Dagestanis, was incredibly proud. The following week, almost three hundred Dagestanis showed up at the ice hole. Our Dagestani Walrus demonstrated the entire procedure himself. There was no mass swim — just one man. Everyone was thrilled that one of their own had overcome his fear and become a Siberian Walrus.

I continued the season. Spring came, the ice gradually became thinner, then the ice drift began. I especially remember swimming among the ice floes, pushing them apart with my hands like an icebreaker. The water was steaming, even though 14 degrees can hardly be called warm.

Then summer arrived, and strangely enough, swimming became harder than in winter. Sometimes, even in the wind, my teeth would chatter, tapping out Morse code.

What conclusions did I draw for myself?

With ice swimming (morzhevaniye), you can cure all diseases. I won’t even mention the common cold — that disappears completely. You forget about a runny nose after the first six months of pouring a bucket of cold water over yourself. The body works like clockwork. You develop a wolfish appetite, fall asleep the moment your head touches the pillow, and there are no more insomnia issues. Fat gradually disappears, leaving only muscle. In a healthy body — a healthy spirit.

Chapter 55. Children of the North

Children are our joy and pride. When my brother was flying out from his shift, he asked me to take his daughter with me to our mother. To transport a child under 7 years old, you only needed a birth certificate. You would sit the child on your lap and fly together like that.

And so, imagine this: at the airport, some women approached me. Seeing that I was flying to the mainland with a child, they asked me to take their child as well. I couldn’t refuse. They assured me that the child’s grandfather and grandmother would meet them at the Ufa airport.

All of this happened right before the flight. Before I could even blink, I suddenly had six children and six birth certificates on my hands.

We went through security and headed to the plane. The flight attendants greeted me like a father of many children. I showed them my ID, and we began seating the kids. The flight attendants helped and placed them in the empty seats. Those who didn’t have a seat sat on the laps of unfamiliar men.

No one objected. The flight began, and I kept turning my head, constantly checking on the children. The situation was unusual, but in the 90s it was completely acceptable. You couldn’t just buy plane tickets to send a child to the mainland back then, and people didn’t travel by train either — the train from Nizhnevartovsk to Samara ran almost empty.

The plane landed. I counted the children again, gathered the documents in my hands, and we began to exit toward the gate. Then we walked across the airfield to the exit, with the children holding hands in a chain.

Strangers started coming toward us, hugging the children and calling out their surnames. I handed over the birth certificates. First child, second, third, fourth — I transferred them to their relatives on complete trust, without any formal handover act. There were no cell phones back then, so it was impossible to confirm anything.

My niece Lena and one other child whose relatives hadn’t shown up were left with me. What to do? My father had come to meet us in the car. I stood by the exit and waited. Fifteen minutes passed, then half an hour, then an hour, then an hour and ten minutes. Finally, a car pulled up and a frightened grandfather jumped out. He asked about the child and showed his passport. In the birth certificate, the surname, first name, and patronymic were listed, and the grandfather correctly named them all.

He was late because he had a flat tire and had to change it for the spare. In the end, all the children were successfully delivered. At that time, this was considered normal. There was nothing wrong with it. That’s how things were done, and it will never be like that again.

I was always touched when I saw a little Siberian kid sitting on a sled in the freezing cold, wrapped in a shawl and sucking on a pacifier, while his mother stood in line at the store buying apples and a carton of milk.

These children grew up in the Northern cities. They finished school. Sometimes they would spend ten years sitting in front of a computer monitor playing games, not doing any sports, afraid to go outside because of criminal peers and local gangs.

Then they would enter the Polytechnic Institute in Tomsk or Novosibirsk. In their first year, a girl would appear. While walking with her, he would get into a situation where local thugs would punch him in the face and take his money. The guy would immediately go and join a boxing or karate section. A couple of years later, he would already be knocking out those same thugs in the alleyways. Better late than never.

All their childhood summers were spent by the sea. That’s why they always had an allergy to their own city. Conquering Moscow, Tyumen, Tomsk, or Novosibirsk was the dream of almost all the kids who grew up in the Northern cities. And many of them did conquer those places. But not all.

Some repeated the fate of their parents: they finished oil rig training and returned to their city. Sometimes you would meet entire dynasties — grandfather, father, and son. And you would know all of them for thirty years.

Financial stability in the North gives children the right to free choice: where to live, how to live, and with whom to live. They were spoiled. They were given cars for their 18th birthday — which they would then crash in accidents. For weddings, tables for 200 people would be set in restaurants. A month later, the young couple would split up. As a wedding gift, parents would buy them an apartment and a car. They had everything. And because of that, the desire to strive for something often disappeared.

Such is Northern life — with its big advantages and even bigger disadvantages.

Chapter 56. The Sea

From childhood, I dreamed of the Sea. I grew up in a settlement where all the adults worked at oil fields. We had no seashore or beaches, no ship horns blaring, no military vessels passing by.

My dreams and pencil sketches on paper were filled with galleons and brigantines, naval battles on the Black Sea. I was obsessed with it. I had a friend, and after eighth grade we dreamed of entering the Kronstadt Naval School, sailing around the world as sailors on a tall ship, and finishing school at sea. We wanted to round Cape Horn and wear a gold earring in our left ear — the sign that you had been to the devil knows where.

But dreams remain dreams. My friend entered a River Navigation School. He would come visit in his striped sailor’s shirt with new friends. Later, I saw him off to the Army. Some of them ended up in Afghanistan. One continued on his chosen course even after losing a foot, leaning on a crutch. My friend was supposed to go to Khaluai on Russky Island, but instead they sent him to a strange training unit in Chita. According to him, he served as a bugler, waking everyone in the mornings with the sound of the horn. Thirty years later, he confessed to me that he had actually spent a year and a half in Africa. He was never recognized as a veteran of the Afghan war. What the unit commander had told them turned out to be true: there are no records of you in the archives. Live peacefully, lads, get married, raise children — the state won’t bother you anymore. For the state, you were never anywhere.

I remember his “Volgar” and his first mentor, Captain “Nikolaich,” the work and life of the crew on a river tugboat that sailed with two barges along the Belaya River. I loved visiting them: endless water, river rapids, fishing while sitting in deck chairs by the side. Borscht and navy-style pasta eaten in the fresh air. Quiet sleep on the river, morning mists. For at least one day, all of this would bring me back to my dream.

Sailors and rivermen are special people. Some plow the oceans and seas, others sail the rivers and sometimes venture out to sea. On the river, everyone knows one another. They greet each other over the radio, respectfully addressing one another by their patronymic. By autumn, all the ships are laid up in the backwater, and the entire winter is spent on routine repairs. The river freezes over, life on the water comes to a halt. There is painting and hull inspection. Everyone waits all winter for the next navigation season. With the ice breakup, life on the river awakens again. Icebreakers finish off the remaining ice, and the first ships begin to move. Work comes back to life.

All these years, my friend lived and worked both for himself and for me — a man who was destined to walk strictly on land, not on the sea.

Once, while vacationing in Adler in the Nizhneimeretinskaya Bay with my beloved girlfriend, I saw a small fishing boat (shalanda) at the pier of the local fish factory. It went out to sea for sprat. I talked to the captain and asked him to take me along. At 7 o’clock in the morning we were already on the pier.

There it was — the Black Sea. The smell of seawater. We moved a good distance from shore, and the fishermen began their work. We watched them with great interest. They managed to cast the net only once. There was very little fish. Gradually, the color of the sea and the water began to change — a storm was approaching. The captain turned the boat into the waves, and together we started cutting through them. The waves kept growing. At the peak of the storm, their height reached that of a three- or four-story building — up and down, up and down.

My girlfriend laid her head on my lap. She was constantly vomiting. We sat in the wheelhouse and surrendered ourselves to the will of the elements. The sea looked just like in Aivazovsky’s paintings — foaming, dark green. I had always thought “The Ninth Wave” was the great artist’s fantasy. But now, at sea, I understood that the artist had not fantasized. He had conveyed exactly what the Black Sea sometimes takes — human lives.

Time seemed to stop. We came to our senses only when the boat approached the pier of the fish factory. We crawled on all fours along the pier toward the shore. Then I carried her in my arms to the beach. We lay on the warm sand still fully clothed, rejoicing that we were still alive, that the sea had not taken us.

The next day we walked together along the bay. Nearby stood an old pioneer camp. There were small cabins half-buried in pebbles. Almost nothing remained of the pioneer camp — the sea had licked up all the buildings and covered them with sand and pebbles. It had not touched us. Sometimes love and recklessness save lives. Meanwhile, the sea gently lapped at our feet.

It is alive — tender and treacherous at the same time. The little fishing boat, having survived the storm, was once again preparing to head out to sea. The factory needs fish every single day. Later we see it on store shelves in the form of canned goods. A greeting from the sea. It was, it is, and it will always be. And the pirates of the 21st century are also alive and well. And so are the people who have dreamed of the Sea since childhood. Let it visit me in my dreams at night — so distant and yet so close.

Chapter 57. The Artist

My dear neighbor, the artist Dmitry Mikhailovich, has left, continues to leave, and will always leave a profound mark on my life.

When I was still a small child and hadn’t yet started school, he gave me a little easel with paints. We would get on his bicycle and ride around the settlement. I sat on the rear rack. Together we tried to capture the wonders of the nature that surrounded us. Every trip was a discovery — a reminder of how beautiful the world is.

I was always by his side. I watched as he painted a portrait of an Old Believer sitting on a chair in front of him. Thirty years later, I met that same man in the settlement — he looked exactly as he did in the portrait from my childhood. For him, time had stopped.

An abandoned church with birch trees growing through the roof, a nearby house, and an old woman feeding her chickens — all of this is captured in the painting my Childhood Artist created. There is also a portrait of his mother and father sitting on a chair, his grandmother, his sisters, and my own portrait — a skinny, frail little boy. These are not photographs. They are Eternity. A moment frozen forever in my human memory through brush, paint, and the artist’s unique way of seeing life.

I also remember the day we loaded his paintings onto our bicycles — hanging them all over two bikes — and rode to the overgrown pond. We stood on the shore before the “execution.” The artist took a knife and cut up everything he had painted over the past few years. Like barbarians, we hurled the pieces into the air. They fell onto the water and slowly sank.

Years later, my Artist confessed that the paintings he now creates for a gallery in Germany — copies of 15th- and 16th-century Dutch masters — sell for 100,000 euros each. Ships, windmills, Dutch people skating on ice, the sea. Yet the ones dearest to me are those we threw into the sky that day. They now lie in the silt at the bottom of that pond, which keeps them safe like a time capsule at the bottom of Time itself.

In recent years he has traveled a lot: he has been to Paris by the Eiffel Tower, to Berlin by the Brandenburg Gate, to Times Square in New York, and to see Christ the Redeemer with open arms in Brazil. He still dreams of visiting the North and South Poles. We communicate regularly. Soon WhatsApp will disappear forever, and it’s a pity. Talking for hours on a mobile phone has become too expensive even for oligarchs.

Malevich’s painting “Black Square” — there are about eighteen versions circulating among collectors around the world. A painting of protest. I could paint one too: take black paint and a primed, stretched canvas. But I am not Malevich and never will be. Neither is my Artist.

Aivazovsky never took his paintings on world tours. He painted from memory after visiting a place. He was an extraordinary man. No one can repeat what he did. That is why his paintings hang in the Louvre and in all the most famous museums of the world.

The paintings of my Childhood Artist hang in the gallery of My Memory. They stand before my eyes. From time to time I walk through this hall, stop, look at them for a long time, and return to them again. No one else can visit this museum. Only I can.

Artists have always existed in the life of every person. They struggle financially under any political system. Many remain unknown. That is their fate. Fame and unexpected wealth during their lifetime come to only a few. It is like Russian roulette held to the temple. Some are understood and praised only after they are gone.

As for me, I wish my Artist of childhood many more long summers. Live long and stay healthy. And if your hands once again pick up a brush and the process of creating a new miracle — a new painting — begins, I will freeze in anticipation, just as I did in childhood, waiting for the birth of a masterpiece… but only in my personal gallery, inside my head.

Chapter 58. Chess

This Great Game was not given to Humanity by chance. It brings pleasure and gives the brain a real massage. And if one begins to learn chess in childhood and plays almost daily training matches, it wonderfully develops thinking, memory, intuition, logic, character, patience — and one could go on listing the benefits of chess forever.

I was fortunate to play three games every day that determined the winner. From the third to the tenth grade, we played on the stairs in the entrance of our building. Of course there were occasional skips, but we tried to continue our matches regularly.

Chess was played by Napoleon, Stalin, Lenin, Nicholas II, and many others. One could probably count on one hand the great commanders who did **not** play chess. In ancient India, the game was considered a Secret Game for the Chosen — only for those in power. A commoner would have his hands cut off for playing it. But we lived in the 20th century, and such barbarity was no longer practiced.

According to one legend, chess was invented by a wise man named Sissa, who presented his invention to the ruler of the country. The ruler liked the game so much that he allowed the inventor to choose his own reward. The sage asked the ruler to pay him one grain of wheat for the first square of the chessboard, two for the second, four for the third, and so on, doubling the number of grains with each subsequent square. The ruler, who was not versed in mathematics, quickly agreed and ordered his treasurer to calculate and issue the required amount of grain. But even a week later, the treasurer still could not compute how much grain was needed. When the ruler asked what was causing the delay, the treasurer showed him the calculations and said that it would be impossible to pay — unless one drained the seas and oceans and sowed the entire surface of the Earth with wheat.

That is why we worshipped the chessboard and the pieces that moved across it. We did not become great chess players. We became friends. That is why there is distance between us now, but once a month we call each other. We don’t play over the internet, but I know that my opponent continues to play matches through an app. I also try not to abandon the game. I play against a robot — a machine is not a human, and it surpasses me many times over. It practically never makes mistakes.

In the 1990s, in sanatoriums in the Caucasus, I saw chessboards laid out on the ground with large pieces that you move during the game. Fresh air, shade from the sun blocked by the trees in the garden. You can also find a pensioner on a bench in any city in Russia who will gladly play a game with you.

Once I tried a simultaneous exhibition. The load on the brain is colossal — your memory literally boils from the strain. Of course, one could play like Ostap Bender — e2-e4 on all boards, and then lose to everyone one by one in fifteen minutes, shaking the winner’s hand. There is no city of New Vasyuki on the map, even though Ostap got carried away in Ilf and Petrov’s novel.

But I think our childhood matches brought both of us enormous benefit. Only now do I realize in what harmony we grew up: hockey in felt boots with makeshift sticks, skiing in winter, sledding down a decent hill, football in summer, riding bicycles (we never got off them), swimming in the pond, weekly trips to the dacha, playing the trumpet, singing in the choir in 4th grade where I was the soloist.

We explored this world at such a frantic pace, and it gradually adapted us to adult life.

My friend played the guitar and still plays it today — it has been his lifelong outlet. I don’t play; my friend once asked me never to pick up his guitar again, and I haven’t touched one since. The sister of our Artist was a teacher at the music school in the accordion class. Once she conducted a test by tapping a pencil on the table. I didn’t have perfect pitch. Otherwise, I would have had to practice scales and play the accordion. After watching a film about Paganini, I dreamed of playing the violin. About ten years ago I bought an electric violin on AliExpress, but at my age I no longer have the persistence. I learned a few basic lessons I found on YouTube, but then my interest gradually faded. My train had already left the station.

My friend from apartment 5 and I loved to solder. The smell of rosin, watching the solder melt, the joy when I soldered my first circuit — a crystal radio receiver. Transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes — all these were stages of discovery, and they remain vivid in my memory even now. The schematics and books on radio electronics were clear to us and read like children’s books.

But chess was always in first place. It was our ticket into adult life. And when they asked us to show it, we took it out and presented it. And they told us: “You may pass.”

Chapter 59. Grandmother

Everyone had a beloved and wonderful grandmother in their childhood. She still lives in my heart. Every summer we would visit her grave — my mother and I, for as long as she could get into the car and walk to the place where my grandmother had rested for the past 45 years.

From first grade through seventh, our parents would send us to the village for the entire summer — from June 4th or 5th until August 27th or 29th. For my older brother, life in the village was uncomfortable; he wasn’t thrilled about it. My middle brother took it calmly. I was the youngest, so everything felt new and exciting to me. I saw the world and its beauty in the brightest colors. Our parents got a break from us, and we took our first independent steps into this unknown world under the watchful eye of our dear Babulya.

Grandmother always waited for us, sitting on the bench in front of the house. We brought her great joy, though we also tired her out quite a bit — she was already well over seventy. We weren’t the only ones who came for the summer. All the grandmothers in the village received their grandchildren, and the season of rest and lively village life would begin.

After drinking a glass of fresh warm milk with a piece of village bread in the morning, we would run off to swim in the pond, eat bird cherry, play football, or pick wild strawberries in the forest. We were in constant Brownian motion.

The bread was porous, with large air pockets, and it crunched between your teeth. Its smell was intoxicating. Unfortunately, no one bakes bread like that anymore. Every two weeks, Babulya would bake it in cast-iron pots in the Russian stove, using coals. She would cover the loaves with a damp towel, and for two whole weeks the bread stayed soft, never going stale, melting in your mouth. For me, it remains the standard of what real bread should be — bread touched by my grandmother’s hands.

In the entryway hung the carcasses of geese, their insides filled with salt. There were no refrigerators back then, so this salted meat went into the soup, and we ate it. The taste of that soup is unforgettable. Fresh meat, however, came from a chicken that had been running around the yard just hours earlier. We would weed the potatoes, and as they ripened, the fresh ones went straight into our dishes. Greens from the garden went directly from the bed into salads and soups.

We played chess, dominoes, and checkers, and combined them with horseback riding. We sawed firewood with a “Druzhba-2” chainsaw for Babushka’s stove. From morning till evening we were constantly on the move, and then we would instantly fall asleep from exhaustion.

My main enemies were the cunning geese. They were always trying to pinch me, and I would dodge and run away from them in fear. In the morning, when they left the yard, they would take off and fly just above the electric poles, cross half the village, and land on the lake by the river to feed until evening. We, like little goslings, would splash around in the river and pond. Babulya would sit on the shore with a switch, keeping watch over us.

In the evening, there were about twelve geese. They would run from the lake, rise into the sky, and land right by the garden gate. Then they would walk importantly into the yard and eat peas, steamed grain, and chopped greens. It was a daily ritual.

In mid-August, the geese began preparing to fly away. The first migratory ducks and geese appeared. And right before our departure, a sensation occurred: the leader of the flock — a female goose — gathered all the young geese and led them south for the winter. The geese had flown away. The whole village was in an uproar. No one had ever seen domestic geese escape like that.

People from all the neighboring households brought over a goose each. Grandmother wanted to refuse, but no one could be turned down — it would have been impolite. In the end, they brought twice as many as had flown away. This event became part of village memory. Even years later, when I would drive to the village by car (after Babulya had already passed away) and people asked who I was and whom I had come to visit, I would say: “My grandmother used to live here — the one whose geese flew south.” They would immediately smile, and the Legend of the Great Escape would come alive again in their conversations.

What’s surprising is that the geese returned in the spring — not all of them, but four geese along with their leader, the same female goose. Babulya immediately sent her to the soup pot. After that, she always clipped their wings. From then on, the geese no longer flew above the poles from the house to the lake and pond — they walked there on foot.

I also remember how we would go to collect her pension — 14 rubles. We would walk to the store and buy four loaves of bread, two kilograms of “padushechki” candies, and a three-liter jar of real Ceylon tea, which the shopkeeper scooped out of a big sack for us. The state paid her this pension — not just sticks for her work in the collective farm back in the 1930s. She had worked her whole life, raising three daughters and a son all by herself. Her husband had gone missing in 1943.

Sixty-two years later, I found his grave in the city of Oryol through the Memorial database. He had died in a hospital from his wounds. That was when I also learned about the order from the autumn of 1942 — something that even generals and marshals didn’t know about, only battalion captains and headquarters clerks. After a battle, if a soldier was not from Moscow or the Moscow region, or from Leningrad or the Leningrad region, they would simply write “missing in action.” It was simple financial economy. If an official death notice was sent stating exactly where the soldier lay, the pension was 364 rubles.

A widow could raise and feed her children on that amount after the war without falling into poverty. But there were millions of dead. And my grandmother was one of those widows who never saw her husband return from the war. From our village, 124 soldiers went to the front. Only two disabled veterans and three men who miraculously survived came back. That was the price of Victory.

Photographs of Babulya remain. As long as we remember her, she is with us. Her living eyes that looked at us and her smile are always with us.

Chapter 60. Submariners Are Never Former

Yes, that’s true. Special service makes them special people even in civilian life.

One day, a big, sturdy man in a striped sailor’s shirt with anchors on his shoulders and arms climbed onto the pipe-layer during the shift. While we were talking, he recalled his youth.

On June 24, 1983, off the coast of Kamchatka, the nuclear submarine K-429 of the Pacific Fleet sank. It was commanded by Captain First Rank Suvorov. The senior officer on board was the division chief of staff, Hero of the Soviet Union, Captain First Rank Gusev. There were 120 people on the submarine. As a result of the disaster, 16 crew members were killed.

He had been part of that crew. He evacuated from the sunken submarine using the escape hatch from a depth of 42 meters. Some later suffered from barotrauma. He was lucky, but he was still discharged and returned to civilian life.

And now, sitting in front of us drinking tea, was a Man from a Legend. Calm, composed. Of course, on the shift, such a man automatically received the highest respect. He was accepted into our shift crew without question.

Another time, in the train compartment, I had a fellow traveler who boarded at the same station. During our conversation, he learned about my father and it turned out he had been the head of the column where my father had worked in his final years. He had gone to the North back in the late 1980s. He didn’t talk much about his naval service, only that he had served as an officer in the naval special forces in the North. His fists were like two sledgehammers. In the old-fashioned way, he liked to start his mornings by crossing himself with a 16 kg kettlebell, like Kotovsky. He was already 64 years old and worked as the head of the boiler house in Nadym.

Once he bought two Ural-Toros trucks, planning to put them to work and hire drivers. Then two fellows from sunny Azerbaijan offered to rent them. They discussed the terms, shook hands on the deal.

Several months passed — no trucks, no money. He tracked down these two “correspondent members.” They talked. The pair started getting rude and threatening him. The result: he knocked out one man’s eye and broke his jaw, and broke the other’s arm. The next day, the “overseer” responsible for these southerners arrived. He apologized for the behavior of his countrymen, paid triple the penalty, and assured him that he would recover everything they owed from them. At the end, he added that he knew his past. He apologized once again for the idiots.

The following day, our submariner got rid of the trucks. He still worries that because of this he crippled two lovers of deception. He had come to the settlement wanting to buy a house for his old age. He already had everything up north — a cottage, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Like a walrus of the Northern Fleet, he had frozen and adapted to life in Nadym. He was in excellent shape and never complained about his health. The only thing he couldn’t stand was summer and the heat. Maybe he shouldn’t change his location. Walruses don’t like warmth — they need a beach on the Arctic Ocean.

When I was a student, I once met a submariner on leave at night. The buses and trams had stopped running. It wasn’t safe. We walked together, and he told me about his service — how they sailed to the shores of Cuba, how the boatswain would drive everyone off watch up onto the deck at night in the Atlantic. The moon would be shining, and they would do kettlebell training. In two years there were results. Muscles like Schwarzenegger’s. He had one more year left. Then at Lenin Square we each went our own way. That’s how a random stranger shared with me how submariners live. Like a tight-knit family. Back in Soviet times and even now, everything with them remains the same. The only difference is that nowadays they mostly serve as contract soldiers.

Three different submariners, and what unites them all is one thing: having been at depths of 150 to 300 meters, in any situation they remain calm as pythons. There is some kind of glow that comes from them — reliability. Life in the crew makes a man part of a single whole. And years later, a person can no longer live any other way. That’s what submariners are like in civilian life. They walk on land, but only strictly underwater and at a certain depth.

Chapter 51. Revolution

In 1918, my grandmother was 20 years old. She often told stories about those wild years of the revolution. She spent almost the entire summer hiding in a haystack. Her father had built the haystack right in the yard of their house and made a camouflaged opening so she could quickly dive inside.

Whites, Reds, Greens, and Blacks — all kinds of forces passed through their village during those years. They hid the horses and cattle in the forest. No matter who came — everyone robbed them, searched for moonshine and young girls. Everyone suffered, and they suffered from everyone. As my grandmother used to say, two Nagant revolvers and a saber were enough to rob, drink, and take whatever fell into your hands. And most importantly — not to work in the fields or sow grain.

There were three friends in their village who had gone off to fight in 1914. They went through the First World War, then the Civil War, fighting for the Reds. After Crimea in 1920, they returned home. They divided up the land, and each received a plot.

The first one was a cheerful fellow who never missed a single skirt and played the accordion. His land became overgrown with weeds.

The second one had everything go well for him. He got married, had children, worked the land diligently, and it gave him bread. Year after year he grew richer. He had golden hands and could make anything needed around the household.

The third one also got married, but everything fell apart in his hands. His farm fell into neglect, and sometimes his children went hungry. He worked half-heartedly, without any real drive.

Then 1932 came, and the collective farm (kolkhoz) was organized. The one who played the accordion became the Chairman. The “kulak” who had worked hard all those years was dekulakized and sent to Siberia. The one whose farm had never prospered became an ordinary kolkhoz worker.

That was the truth of life, according to my grandmother.

The accordion player was later replaced by my grandfather as chairman. The collective farmers became worried that he would drink away all the collective property. My grandfather brought his four horses into the common herd — he was a middle peasant. He worked quietly for the first year, and people gradually got used to the new rules of life.

Then someone stole his horses and sold them to the Gypsies, and wrote a denunciation claiming that grandfather had slaughtered them for meat.

A “black raven” (secret police car) came for him. Men in leather jackets arrived and took him away. He was sentenced and had to build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. When he fell ill there, my grandmother traveled by horse and cart to the camp and brought the dying man home. She nursed him back to health. He recovered, but was left with a stomach ulcer.

One night a neighbor came, knelt down, and confessed that he had stolen the horses and written the denunciation. Grandfather forgave him, saying he held no grudge.

In January 1942, Grandfather went to war. In Sverdlovsk he underwent surgery — they removed part of his stomach. After recovering, he went to the front. He started serving as a cook. He died from his wounds in a hospital on August 14, 1943, in the city of Oryol. Sixty-two years later, I found him in the Memorial database. That was when Grandfather stopped being listed as “missing in action.” Unfortunately, my grandmother never learned about it.

The revolution was a great evil for most ordinary people. It destroys everything dear to you and makes life many times worse. And history has shown that it always comes from outside, against the will of the people, and ordinary people cannot influence this process in any way.

The consequences are colossal. The country is brought to its knees, and then it slowly, over decades, rises again. Like the Phoenix bird, it is reborn from the ashes.

My grandmother told me all this in allegorical form through fairy tales. Everything was too sad in her life. Only in the 1970s did a time of peace finally come for her — a time without experiments on her life. And in her own way, she was finally happy. Her children had grown up, and we, her grandchildren, pestered her for years. She gave us her warmth, and we responded to her with the same gratitude.

The situation today is essentially the same as in 1917. History moves in a spiral. And it only depends on us whether the country will plunge into a whirlpool of unpredictable events.

“God forbid you should live in an era of change,” they say in China. And they are right. Give Russia a hundred years of peace, without war — and you will not recognize Russia. — Stolypin.

Chapter 62. Students

I once had to witness how the head of the NGDU (Oil and Gas Production Department) worked with students in my office — young specialists who had just received their diplomas from the Tyumen Oil Institute back in Soviet times.

Not every manager in those days personally toured his entire production facilities at the oil field. But this one did. He would walk around the field himself, quickly resolving all issues on the spot. Personal acquaintance with the workers was a normal production practice.

One day, specialists from the personnel department knocked on the door and entered my office. They had finally managed to catch the head of the NGDU there.

He asked them to come in one by one, in my presence. It was a short interview, followed by his signature on the assignment slip.

As the boss said to the first one: “You’ll go to the drilling rig as a pombur (assistant driller) for three months.”

The second one he assigned as a slinger at the pipe base.

The third — as a storekeeper at the BPT OiK supply base.

The fourth — as an operator at the commodity park of the CPPN (Central Production Preparation Facility).

The fifth — as a production operator in the CDNG (Oil Production Workshop).

The sixth one barged in arrogantly and immediately demanded to be sent “as it should be” according to his specialty — Engineer in “Development and Operation of Oil and Gas Fields,” in line with his faculty.

There was a pause.

The head of the NGDU tore up the assignment slip and told him to go to hell and immediately leave the office.

Then he invited the remaining guys in, wished them success in their work, and warned them that in three months there would be a rotation. Over the course of that year, they would understand where oil actually comes from, how supply works, how production and preparation are done, and how it is transported via pipelines to the refinery.

As he said at the end of the conversation: “Who knows, maybe in fifteen years one of you will be sitting in my chair.”

Democracy and the social elevator worked for every young specialist in Soviet times.

It was completely normal to personally shake hands with a manager of such rank. There was no squeamishness or professional ignoring based on status. Everyone performed their function. This led to the fact that the real owner of the field knew everything — not because people snitched on each other, but because he was genuinely interested in everything that was happening in his domain.

Under capitalism, this no longer exists. The time has come when the entire ITR (engineering and technical) apparatus lives by itself according to paperwork, while production lives by its own laws. A generation of theoretical engineers has grown up — they know nothing except their office desk and don’t want to know anything else. In practice, the workers no longer even know the Chief Engineer by sight. From the height of his position, he disdains to descend from the heavens to the ground.

Democracy in production has died.

This breakdown happened during the times of Khodorkovsky. They turned the NGDU into a Komsomol city committee. If a person had worked as a Komsomol functionary, what could you expect from him when he came into the oil industry?

They did not follow the path of foreign oil companies and did not adopt their experience — where there is one engineer for every 20 workers, and the engineer earns 40 dollars per hour. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been possible to pocket every third ruble.

That’s the kind of strange capitalism that was built in the distant 90s — on the fragments of a destroyed production mechanism that had once worked like clockwork.

As Gorbachev used to say: “The main thing is to start.” And then whatever happens — God knows.

For some reason, I’ve always remembered the monologues of “Batyka Angel” from the film “The Adjutant of His Excellency,” where he said: “We will conduct an exkriment.” The officers would laugh: “Again, we got the funny ones.”

In those times, instead of an “experiment” in production, very often an “exkriment” turned out.

Old experienced personnel were mercilessly driven out. In their place came half-educated people, and their mistakes were constantly visible.

And yet, cadres decide everything.

At least I saw this process with my own eyes back in Soviet times — how they worked for the long term. For the future.

Chapter 63. Older Brother

My older brother left us too early. He was far smarter than me and our middle brother. All his life he was a true technician, just like half of Russia.

As a kid, I would sometimes get cocky and pick fights with my opponents, relying only on the authority and strength of my brothers. I was the youngest and lived in safety and comfort, always in the shadow of my brothers. If the middle brother couldn’t help, the older one would appear. The opponents would back off immediately. Victory in street arguments was always ours. After all, we were brothers — and there were three of us.

My older brother played football; it was his real passion. I remember the old wooden stadium where the village team trained. Later he went into the Army and served on Sakhalin. He told stories about burdocks as tall as a man, about fishing in an OZK (chemical protection suit) while standing waist-deep in water, holding a noose made of aluminum wire. He would catch salmon right in the water, then they’d have a whole cup of caviar and fish soup.

He got married, had two children, and worked at the factory as a turner. He had golden hands.

When I came back from my shift, I saw how down and depressed he was. His last job had been at a car service station. I offered him a job on a rotational shift, and he agreed. I was genuinely happy that I could help my older brother.

He worked at a Transneft oil pumping station. There was a loading control unit there, and the workshop was heated during winter. My brother serviced those heating networks. He lived in a trailer. He carried out a full inspection of all the pipes and shut-off valves, painted everything, and hung up nameplates. When a commission arrived — the General Director and his workshop supervisor — they added another 20 thousand rubles to his salary. My brother kept asking me why they were paying him so much money. I would answer: “It’s compensation for everything they underpaid you at the factory.”

I gave him a double-barreled hammer shotgun as a gift, and he started hunting. On the very first day he ran into a bear. It all ended with him sitting at the top of a tree while his gun lay on the ground below. After sitting there all day, he never went hunting again.

Fishing remained his outlet — on the lake. They would set up nets from a small boat (oblasok), catch pike with a spinning rod, and do ice fishing in winter.

Ten years of working at that sanatorium-resort oil field flew by. He fell ill just two months before he was due to retire. He suffered a heart attack, and while in the hospital, he had a stroke. Twelve days in a coma. Then he opened his eyes, stood up, and started walking. They couldn’t stop him — he would pace the corridors of the department for hours. The doctors gave him sedative injections, and finally he fell into a deep sleep. The next day his recovery began. But the brother I had known was no longer there.

We brought him home. He slowly faded away, and four years later he was gone. We all leave eventually. He left too. Seven years have already passed. I still remember him.

His life was the classic life of his generation, strictly according to the Soviet standard: Komsomol, army, got married, factory, children, rotational work, got sick, died. That’s how millions of people in Russia live.

My own life has always gone differently from everyone else’s. I was never obsessed with money. There was always enough. I never had to worry about making a living. But for my brother, money came only through monotonous hard work. The factory meant strict pass control, work scheduled down to the minute, a cafeteria lunch with thousands of people in line, the tool shop, a lathe, and the mandatory fulfillment of the production quota.

He would have made a wonderful engineer. In his last years on the shift, the taiga and the small close-knit team somehow healed him. He came back to life. He put his daughter through school and spoke about it with pride.

It was also a joy for me to see my older brother happy during those last ten years. The taiga changes anyone — and always for the better.

Chapter 64. The Bicycle

The bicycle has always been a constant companion in my life. I adore turning the pedals and traveling on it. Our whole courtyard gang pedaled through all the forests and plantations around us. There was even a trip when the older guys from our yard rode 120 km to Lake Kandrykul for fishing.

Later, I bought a sport touring bicycle. My first karate coach was most surprised when I rode to training on it — 30 km one way, two hours of training, and then 30 km back. He didn’t know that sometimes, at the first bus stop, I would load the bike onto the back platform of a LiAZ bus and get off already in the village. I simply didn’t have the strength left to pedal. But I didn’t want to destroy the myth that I was such a tough, iron-willed guy. Cycling trains the legs extremely well.

In the North, I also pedaled all summer long. I bought a titanium bicycle from some athlete by chance — it weighed almost nothing, like a feather. People even called me “the guy who rides the bicycle.” I lived on the 8th floor of a dormitory at SPTU-15, and the elevator never worked, so I had to carry the bicycle on my shoulder up and down the stairs. That was also good training.

I rode it to work. Imagine: I would ride to the airport, board the An-26 aircraft (the “air tram”), with the bicycle going into the luggage. I’d fly, then ride from the arrival airport straight to work. Then there were constant rides around the shift workers’ settlement. If I needed to submit documentation or reports and appear “on the carpet” before the boss, I would call the “Glass” (the dispatchers’ room) and ask them to suspend takeoffs for 15 minutes. I would ride through the airport gates straight to the plane and carry the bicycle up the stairs. Then I’d walk to the back of the cabin and sit in a free seat.

One time I noticed a familiar face. Oleg Basilashvili was sitting by the window, holding a bag of cranberries in his hands. He asked, “Were we waiting for you?” I answered yes. “What do you do for a living?” I told him my profession. “And what’s your area?” “500 by 700 km.” He was amazed.

Later I learned that the actors who had starred in the film Station for Two had all flown in — everyone except Lyudmila Gurchenko. Before the film screening, they performed in the hall, bringing culture to the masses. The audience responded with thunderous applause. The artists loved coming to the oil workers — they were never short-changed financially. Alla Pugacheva, Allegrova, Natasha Koroleva — they all came.

When we landed at the airport, I was the first to exit the plane. I got on my bicycle and rode along the concrete runway toward the exit to the office. I still couldn’t believe I had been sitting next to Oleg Basilashvili. Upon arriving in Moscow, I had asked someone to check the cranberries with a Geiger counter for radiation. In the 1970s, containers with radioactive waste had been dumped into the swamps, but no one knew exactly where or when. The cranberries there grew unusually large — almost the size of the tip of a thumb. Nobody picked them. I had simply scared the respected actor. You could see the surprise and fear in his eyes.

The bicycle was always with me. I even rode to my dacha plot — 23 km there and back. The town was small: I’d ride up to a store, lock the bike with a chain, and go inside. I didn’t have a car, and buying one was difficult at the time. Besides, my lifestyle back then didn’t push me toward owning one. The bicycle solved all my transportation problems.

Before leaving during the hungry period just before the arrival of the new owner Khodorkovsky, I decided to give the bicycle to my niece. She hadn’t asked for it, but I could see in her eyes how much she wanted it. I gave it to her, and her eyes lit up with happiness. I warned her that she must always lock it to a pipe with a chain and padlock.

A week later, after I had already left the city, her mother told me during a phone call that the bicycle had been stolen. I could hear the child sobbing in the background. She hadn’t locked it. Well, that must have been the bicycle’s fate. Some lucky thief is riding around the city on it. If I had still been in town, I definitely would have caught him. The bicycle was very noticeable — titanium, a one-of-a-kind item.

Nowadays, young guys mostly ride Yamahas, roaring at intersections while lying on the tank, and all the girls are theirs. The bicycle has become a thing of the past. But I just can’t agree with that.

In my time, a bicycle was a whole philosophy of life — movement, health, and sport all at once. For the fans, the era of expensive carbon bicycles has already arrived. And electric bikes, where you don’t even need to pedal when you don’t want to, are appearing everywhere.

As for me, I bought a fatbike, installed a front electric wheel, soldered the controller and battery myself. It turned out to be a perfect trainer: you can pedal the old-fashioned way, and when you get tired, you switch on the electric mode and rest. A pensioner can’t do without that.

Chapter 65. Bees in the Village

In those days, every house in the village had beehives standing in the garden. People didn’t keep many — usually three or four hives. Almost everyone had a bucket or two of honey. My grandmother also kept bees. She had four hives with supers.

In the house there was a honey extractor, frames with honeycomb hanging on the walls, and there was always a cup of honey on the table. Sugar was used almost entirely for making jam. And, of course, on the shelf stood the smoker, which always gave off a special, unusual smell.

In the morning, my grandmother would go outside, approach the hive, open it, and the cluster of bees would fly out and land on her hand. The bees crawled all over her without stinging. She would talk to them gently, stroking them with her hands. Then she would lightly press on one bee on her wrist, and it would sting her. She would do the same with three or four more bees. After that, she would carefully take the cluster and place it onto the frames. The bees would begin to crawl down inside the hive. She would cover them with a cloth, close the lid, and the procedure was finished.

She performed this ritual almost every summer morning for more than thirty years. She never got sick, remained slim all her life, and was always active, even though she was already over seventy.

I only learned about apitherapy — treatment with bees — when I grew up. Of course, my grandmother didn’t know the scientific term, but intuitively, by receiving these bee stings, she must have noticed how well the small doses of bee venom healed and strengthened her body. That’s how this morning bee ritual appeared.

When I first saw it as a child, I was horrified. I was terribly afraid of bees back then, and it seemed they could sense my fear and paid special attention to it, attacking me even more. They often “punished” me. I only overcame my fear when I started my own apiary.

The first time I put on the beekeeper’s suit and opened a hive, childhood memories began to paralyze me. But then I remembered what my grandmother used to do, and I calmly began to work — checking the frames, moving them apart with the hive tool, and never forgetting to smoke the bees with the smoker. From that moment on, my childhood fear disappeared.

Whenever my grandmother planned to inspect the hives, remove frames, or extract honey, we would run through the village, about 150 meters from our house, warning all the neighbors: “Grandma asks everyone to be careful and not to go outside for the next 3–4 hours.”

The process would begin. The bees would become agitated and angry, trying to find someone to sting, but everyone had been warned, so there were no stings. The frames were brought into the house. The bees gradually calmed down, and under my grandmother’s guidance, we would start spinning the honey in the extractor. Soon it would be on the table. We would drink tea and enjoy its wonderful taste.

Often the next day the bees would be waiting for me and would sting me. It felt like payment for yesterday’s pleasure. As if they could smell where their honey had gone.

By the first of September, when my parents came to pick us up, my grandmother always sent us home with a bucket of honey. It would sit on our table for the next three months, and the honey never had time to crystallize — we ate it all.

Nowadays, when grandchildren come to visit their grandmothers in the village, if a poor, spoiled child gets stung by a bee, the parents immediately run to the local police officer, make a scandal with the beekeeper, and accuse him of endangering their child’s life. Because of this, many villagers have stopped keeping bees. Even setting up a small apiary on their own plot makes many people hesitate.

In the days of my childhood, no one made a big deal out of it. Bees flew around, stung people, and died afterward. Today, people have become much angrier toward bees than the bees are toward them — and not because the bees are taking honey from people. Yet everyone happily devours the honey.

When bees are working, they are busy and pay no attention to humans. But when a person is afraid, a hormone is released through their sweat that provokes the bees to attack. After the first bee stings, the others are attracted by the alarm pheromone and continue the attack. That is simply their nature. To them, a human is not a friend, but an enemy.

Why do bears love honey? Because they do. Ironclad logic.

And so does man love honey.

For twenty years I dreamed of starting my own apiary. Now, for the fourth year, I have been doing it with great passion. There is always honey on my table. And for me, it is a living memory of my grandmother and her bees.

Chapter 66. The Last Commandant

For work, I traveled from Noyabrsk to Korotchaevo. The trains after Noyabrsk are almost half-empty. I got into a compartment and there was only one other passenger. We got acquainted. His gray hair gave away his age, his eyes revealed intelligence and the attentiveness of a good listener, and his straight posture showed that I was looking at a former military man.

The conversation, which had started about nothing in particular, gradually turned to the current events in the state. Unexpectedly, the man began talking about the collapse of the state and the consequences of its destruction.

He had been the last commandant of the Semipalatinsk Test Site at the time of the collapse of the USSR — the site where nuclear weapons tests had been conducted.

The barracks, the soldiers, the equipment, the test site, the military town, the perimeter — all of this could not be spoken about at the time. While on leave, you couldn’t go to Turkey or Thailand. Everything he had seen constituted a state secret.

And now Kazakhstan is a different country. The test site is closed. Everyone who served there is retired. The non-disclosure agreements for everything they had seen expired 20 years ago. The state to which they had sworn that oath no longer exists.

Perhaps this man was opening up this information for the first time — and to an ordinary civilian. And that civilian was me.

This was not a conversation on the internet where Google or an AI answers your questions. Sure, they can provide a lot of information. But sitting in front of me was a Witness of an Entire Era. It felt like an interview or a confession.

He told me how they drilled wells to a certain depth, cemented the casing, lowered the nuclear charge with cables from the control panel. Then everything was cemented again so that radiation after the explosion would not reach the surface. The cables ran to the bunker where the controlled detonation of the charge was carried out. The preparation followed a well-established procedure.

And then the detonation would happen. The sensors recorded a local earthquake, the power of the explosion in kilotons. Soldiers in full protective gear (OZK) carried out radiation reconnaissance. The contaminated zone was fenced off with barbed wire — an area that would be off-limits for the next 50 years. The process was complete. Until the next explosion. And a short message would appear in the central newspaper: “On such-and-such date, a nuclear weapon test was conducted at the Semipalatinsk Test Site.”

The Earth is alive. Every tremor at the test site, she met with pain. Even the clouds seemed to stop moving without these periodic shudders from the depths. The Commandant had noticed this.

After the signing of the moratorium in Nevada and at Semipalatinsk, silence fell. The whole process stopped. Even nature around noticed it. The Earth stopped suffering from the explosions. Some time later, the test site was closed.

The only thing that surprised him was that “death seekers” (mortal risk-takers) began appearing at the site. They started collecting and removing all the radioactive metal. They opened up the concrete fillings around the cables. Only God in heaven knows how many people died from this curiosity.

Gradually, life at the test site began to fade. The day came when it was completely closed. As is proper for the captain of a ship, the Last Commandant of the Test Site was the last to leave.

The military left, blowing some things up and abandoning others. So the scrap metal collectors always followed behind them. They didn’t care that the metal was radioactive. It’s no coincidence that radiation detection equipment was installed everywhere on the border with Russia.

After leaving the ranks of the Russian Army, the Commandant went to the North and got a job. A military education allows you to find work anywhere — it is universal. And a military background forms the backbone of a true professional. In the oil industry, that is especially true. Where exactly he works now doesn’t seem important to anyone.

He had fulfilled his duty as a soldier. He didn’t reveal anything secret to me — it was just work like any other. But in my memory, he will remain the Last Commandant of the Semipalatinsk Test Site.

Chapter 67. The Honor of the Oil Rig Workers

There was this restaurant called "The Three Little Pigs" in Noyabrsk. There was a period when my friends and I were regular visitors there. My friend wanted to propose to his lady. We planned to go to her mother’s place and officially announce our decision. I was going along as the future witness at the wedding. So there we were, sitting at the table and witnessing this scene.

A guy came in to celebrate his wife’s birthday — she was a very attractive woman. As unfortunately often happens in restaurants, some guests from sunny Azerbaijan sitting at the neighboring table started persistently inviting his wife to dance.

The guy said she didn’t dance, it was her birthday, and this dance belonged to him. One word led to another, and unfortunately the fight broke out outside. One against three, of course — the fight was short. The southerners won. Pleased with their entertainment, they went back upstairs to the hall and continued their banquet. The guy came back in, staggering — you could see he’d taken a beating. They asked him if he wanted more. From helplessness, you could see how he dropped his hands and left.

Half an hour later he returned. Unexpectedly, gunshots rang out. All three offenders were now lifelessly slumped in their chairs with bullet holes in their heads. The entire hall watched him. He calmly walked over to his table, sat down, and began eating his dinner in peace. Everyone was silent.

The police soon arrived with automatic weapons. He calmly handed over his pistol and asked them not to disturb him while he finished his meal. He said they had ruined his evening — especially his wife’s birthday.

To everyone’s surprise, the officers sat down at the neighboring table. When he finished eating, they put handcuffs on him, and he calmly, without any emotion, walked out with them. The whole hall applauded him. People said he was an ordinary oil rig worker on a shift rotation. He had defended the honor of his family — albeit in such an unusual way. Of course, he was given a serious prison term for it. The offenders were wrapped in shrouds, and the next day they were sent back to their historical homeland in a truck.

Everything happened so quickly, like in a gangster movie. I personally saw someone get killed in real life for the first time. So our emotions were running high.

We kept going over what had happened. The chain of events replayed in our heads again and again: if they hadn’t touched that married couple, they would still be alive. Judging by the way he shot, his skills suggested this wasn’t the first time he had done it in his life.

In this restaurant, all the tough guys of the city used to hang out. Ninety percent of the visitors with empty pockets created problems for the ten percent of visitors with money. So the fact that they ran into an oil rig worker was a shock for many.

We were there by chance — we didn’t visit regularly. But the thought that you could accidentally catch a bullet made us decide to stop going there. Which is what we did. Since then, I don’t like restaurants.

Live music, guys playing guitars. You order a song from the repertoire for a couple of hundred for your best friend, the music and song play. Time passes, and then he orders one for you in return.

To say that you can relax in such an establishment is an illusion. The funniest thing is that there are people who practically spend their lives here in the restaurant, staying up all night long.

Well, the next day we were at the bride’s house proposing. To our surprise, her mother embarrassed us with her statement. She said her daughter had been passed around from hand to hand, and here we were still coming to propose. Against the backdrop of yesterday’s events, we were in a daze and silently left. It wasn’t meant to be. That Wild West-style shooting also wouldn’t leave my head.

Chapter 68. Delta Wing

My middle brother had dreamed of the sky since childhood. Well, what can you say — he was born with wings on his back. All his dreams came crashing down when, as a kid, he got hit in the eye with a pea from a slingshot. During the military medical examination in the 10th grade, the commission ruled him unfit for aviation: one eye with 0.8 diopters. He became a driver, but the dream remained.

Then one day, already up North, he saw guys on the Pasol attaching a device on a string to a Buran snowmobile. They would accelerate, and the person controlling it like a bird would soar into the sky on a hang glider. After completing a theory course at the Club, my brother took to the sky for the first time.

I came to watch. He offered me to make a short flight from a small cliff as well. On a training UT-2 hang glider, I flew about 7 meters above the ground at a height of 1.5 meters, landed hard, and chipped the tips of my upper front teeth. I had to go to the dentist. Unfortunately, I am not a bird-man. Born to crawl and walk — but definitely not to fly.

My brother, however, kept climbing higher and higher. We would go to the Karakan mountains, where he soared like an eagle among the peaks. His dream had come true. Later he started flying a powered hang glider (motodeltaplan), and sometimes I flew with him as a passenger over the city. My brother was happy, and so was I. Yes, it’s dangerous, but the sky is not for everyone. It’s for people like my brother.

The delta club united everyone who had ever dreamed of the sky. They all worked, and would always gather in the basement — sauna and tea drinking. I remember them packing parachutes that they took up into the sky.

There was a parachuting section in the city with its permanent leader. Once he went up with my brother on a powered hang glider and, from an altitude of 500 meters, made a parachute jump right from the passenger seat. He did everything neatly, and right near the ground, controlling the canopy, he landed. About 40 meters before touchdown the wind caught him and turned him almost horizontal. A paratrooper always remains a paratrooper — whether jumping from an Il-76, from a trainer in his unit, from the ridge of a house roof, or from a hang glider. Later my brother and all the guys from the club also jumped from an An-2. He landed on a lake where the water was knee-deep. They had theoretical knowledge of how to land on water.

They had such an interesting life — their eyes were always shining. I didn’t fly, but I was with them: Birds who spent five days a week walking on the ground, and on Saturdays and Sundays rose into the sky.

Almost every city in Russia has delta clubs where all those who once couldn’t make it into the sky have come together. The hang glider helped them fulfill their childhood dream. Such people cannot live without the sky — and my brother is a perfect example of that.

A powered hang glider can be transported on an ordinary car like a trailer. So if you see a strange trailer on the road with an engine and three-bladed propellers in covers at the back, and tubes of the wing in a package on top — you’re looking at a hang glider pilot.

Arriving at a field, the entire structure is assembled in 20 minutes. Every joint is checked, they fill up with 95 gasoline bought at a regular gas station, run a ground check of the engine, find a small clearing for takeoff — and my brother is already in the sky, while I watch his flight carefully through binoculars.

Once he went with the guys to Kazakhstan to treat locusts. He had a shiny suit and a helmet that looked like a bee’s head. While flying past people working in the field, he got a bit lost and decided to land and ask where he was. He set the craft down and walked toward the people with the sun behind him — he was all glowing. The man, his wife, and their children dropped to their knees. The head of the family said: “This is Planet Earth, the third one in the Solar System.” They had taken him for an alien. My brother asked which way to fly next, and they gave him directions.

He once flew over a lake where fishermen were fishing. He landed nearby without even turning off the engine. They brought him a whole bag of fish. He flew back to the camp, everyone was thrilled, and he even managed to do some fishing.

What’s surprising is that former military pilots who are now retired often cannot learn to fly a powered hang glider. Their minimum safe altitude is 25–30 meters from their airplane days, and they cannot overcome that mental barrier. But powered hang glider pilots fly at very low altitudes, and that requires real personal courage and bravery.

I remember pilots from An-2 planes working nearby. They drove up in a car just as my brother had landed. They examined the craft, touched it with their hands, and said to my brother: “How is he not afraid to fly on this fragile dragonfly?” To each his own, and everyone has their own path to the sky. And the sky loves the brave. I am not brave. But I am proud of my brother — he is the bravest among the brave.

Chapter69.The Russian banya

Soulful gatherings in the bathhouse, with a birch whisk and a samovar, always stay in my memory: clean bodies, that sharp contrast of diving into the snow, and it all depended so much on the crew, the vibe, and that ability to make time stop during our talks.

My captain had arrived for winter quarters. Back in Yeltsin's time, when the whole fleet was mothballed, he came to the village, built a bathhouse on his father's dacha, and we — his friends — loved steaming in that little bathhouse. In the entryway stood a massive samovar; we'd pour vodka, wine, and beer into it in different ratios, add herbs like meadowsweet, St. John's wort, leaves from all the fruit trees, water, fire it up, and get a hot brew for our conversations.

In the steam room we'd whip each other with the whisks, turn red as lobsters, burst outside, dive into the snow, then race across it to the fence and back. Teeth chattering, we'd fly back into the steam room. We were young, at the peak of our strength. We talked about all the problems in our lives.

Our cocktail stopped time — a whole night would fly by, and in the morning there'd be a knock at the door: the wives of my friends standing on the threshold, inspecting the bathhouse for girls. There were none. They'd be amazed — how can you steam all night? With a good drink, you can.

The country was convulsing — some things were collapsing, others appearing; people were hauling bags, flying abroad, many factories stood idle. The only escape was to hide in that bathhouse, shutting out all that reality. It was a real outlet — those conversations with friends.

A lot of what we discussed is forgotten now; the arguments and emotions have sunk into the personal archive of History. Even if I rack my brain, I don't remember anything. Probably that winter we four just hid in that bathhouse.

The Russian banya is a club that strengthens friendship, gives health through steam and the whisk, cleanses the body, the mind, and clears the head of everything extra.

So winter flew by, and the bathhouse did its job. I'll never forget the smell of unwashed bodies and the train station in Chelyabinsk, where refugees sat — Russians heading to Russia from Central Asia. I had a layover on my tickets; I was going to my parents on leave.

It was a stream of people from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan — Russians leaving, sometimes abandoning everything or selling it, given sums that couldn't buy an apartment in Russia.

It was an uncontrolled exodus. No one in Russia was waiting for them. The state didn't help. Later I met people who had come north from that stream, who rose despite everything, settled down, bought apartments, found work.

How many perished back then, no one knows. The fate of each person at that time is a whole story for every Russian citizen.

But I can't forget the smell of rotting, sun-scorched clothes and unwashed bodies. Is that what the collapse of an empire smells like? The migration of peoples, state indifference? Many years later people will say it never happened. But it did.

The bathhouse on shift, wherever I've worked these twenty-five years, has always been an outlet for the soul and body.

Saunas in organizations, ones on the bushes next to the river, official industrial baths on big fields — I've visited them weekly. Oil workers have always paid attention to this, and they still do.

The coolest bathhouse is definitely the drillers'. On the platform they bring it first to the field. The rig isn't even assembled yet, but the cleanliness facility is already working — you hear the thwacks of the whisks, cries of pleasure, and jumps into the snowdrift.

A bathhouse is a whole philosophy in the life of Russians. Will there be a bathhouse on Mars? I think there definitely will. Not like on Earth, of course — more like a barochamber. If Russian shift workers ever fly to Mars, this question will come up. If there's water, then Epiphany dipping in an ice hole will happen too.

Chapter 70. Bright Memories of Childhood

Next to our house there was a large empty field where we spent almost all our time until I started school. Today it is Glory Park, with monuments to the Great Patriotic War, the Chernobyl liquidators, paratroopers, sailors, and border guards. Flags flutter in the wind. There are paved “health paths” where people walk in circles, a stadium where they play football, and an outdoor gym. Everything is set up for sports.

Back then, a helicopter would land right in the middle of the field, and the whole settlement would come running to touch it with their hands and hold onto the tail rotor. The helicopter pilots seemed like gods to us. The next day they would fly off to inspect the oil pipelines. In the evening the helicopter would be back in its place.

One evening, a TU-95 flew over the settlement at low altitude with one of its engines on fire. We could clearly see the crew bail out on the commander’s order. Parachutes opened in the sky like dandelions, and the airmen landed far away in the distance while the plane continued flying onward. The whole settlement was in an uproar. Then everyone stopped, realizing we wouldn’t see the plane touch the ground.

The next day my father told us the plane had landed on a large flat field not far from Yermekeyevo. Later they brought a new engine, replaced it, and the plane flew away safely. It had stood there in the field for over a month.

The commander had been looking for a flat landing spot and he found one. He saved the plane.

Once an artist painted a huge 2x3-meter kite with the image of a devil with horns. The whole yard launched it from the field, and the entire settlement watched the flight of the “devil.” It rose to a good height, but a sudden gust of wind snapped the string and it fell near the House of Culture. We found it and brought it back.

After the boys from apartment 9 told us about elephants in Africa and the film “Bobo and the Elephant,” we little kids who weren’t even in school yet decided the next day to go to Africa ourselves. The whole yard searched for us all day and finally caught us in the field beyond the settlement. All six of us received preventive “anti-running-away” treatment — a belt that beats any desire to travel or be overly impressionable. Afterward, the belt was hung back on its nail.

The boy who told the story was nicknamed “Bobo and the Elephant” in the yard from then on. Years later I met him sitting on a bench at Adler airport. I was seeing off the girl I loved. I had no money in my pocket at all and was racking my brains about how to fly back to Ufa. A regular-looking man sat down next to me. We started talking. He asked questions, I answered: the settlement, the street, the house, the apartment. Then he said, “It’s me — Bobo and the Elephant from apartment 9.” Of course he bought me a ticket, and I flew safely to Ufa, where my father met me. Later, when Bobo was working as an oilman in Kogalym, I sent him back the money he had lent me. It was mystical, but the help came from childhood at the hardest moment.

The whole yard would go to the pond together. There was a small peninsula with the shallowest water nearby. Two people would lock hands, take a third, swing him, and he would fly into the water with a jump. I did it too, but I hit the bottom hard, started sinking, and swallowed a lot of water. My middle brother pulled me out. I was vomiting afterward. For a long time after that I was terrified of swimming — I developed an animal fear of drowning. Meanwhile, drunk people regularly drowned in the deeper parts of the pond.

In the 1980s, a Ferris wheel was installed in the park. As usual, we were the first to go up. From the top the whole settlement looked like it was in the palm of your hand. Height always drew us toward the sky. No one in our yard became a pilot, though. Only my brother took to the skies on a hang glider.

I remember September 1, 1972, when I went to first grade with flowers in my hands. The school was just 100 meters away. As I walked, I understood that childhood was ending and the carefree life was coming to a close. The corridor into adult life began with that first step — when my mother and I entered the school and I sat down at my desk. Unfamiliar kids sat next to me. I studied with them for ten years. Some left after eighth grade, some moved away earlier. It was life in a collective, and years later I found true close friends among my classmates.

My first teacher was Natalya Grigoryevna. My first “tormentor” with a ruler in her hand was Valentina Kirillovna in fourth grade. Like a sergeant in the army, she didn’t let us slack off on discipline, so by the time we reached the senior classes we were already orderly and without chaos. Nowadays people sometimes mock teachers, but from my personal school experience, that seems wild.

Bright memories of childhood live in the heart of every person. We didn’t sit in front of a computer monitor or play with smartphones while still sucking on a pacifier and unable to speak. Every day we discovered this world. Our eyes saw the bright colors of nature, and we breathed the fresh air deeply, with full chests. This world belonged to all of us.

We fought with our peers, argued emotionally, and the best friends were often those who had been sparring partners the day before. Natural selection happened as it does in nature.

We were different, and we are grateful to our parents for giving us a Happy Childhood. Thank you to them.

Chapter 71. Gold.

My older brother decided to go work a season from spring to autumn in an artel right on the border between Magadan and Chukotka regions.

The crew was led by a guy from our hometown, so with that connection my brother figured he wasn’t heading into the unknown. He flew from Ufa to Moscow, then a direct flight to Magadan. From there, the artel arranged transfers.

They picked him up on the road in a jeep, he got to the site safely, called home. He got a job at the repair base as a lathe operator. All the equipment was Japanese, but he still had to machine bolts and studs that kept snapping. No machine can handle the taiga in Russia.

The crew was small, but everyone was there to make money mining gold. The artel sat on the site of an old prison camp — they’d stripped the topsoil along with the buildings and even a graveyard with dead prisoners’ remains. Everything around was dug up, old tailings piled along the river. But right where the camp had been, they hoped to wash gold.

Bulldozers pushed the dirt toward the river, where a dredge and a water cannon washed it. Mining ran nonstop. When something broke, the repair team fixed it, and my brother turned repair parts on the lathe.

As autumn approached and it was time to fly home, they found out they’d only get twenty thousand rubles in cash and a paid ticket. The rest — two-thirds of what you earned — would be sent over the next six months, and the final third only after you came back for the next spring season.

That’s how they kept people tied down. If you didn’t return, they forgot about you and you’d basically worked a month and a half for free. My brother wasn’t having it. He bought a double-barreled shotgun and shells, then went to the owner right before the flight to get paid.

When the guy started talking about their rules, my brother put the shotgun to his head and demanded full settlement. They paid him everything on the spot. Next day he left — the only guy in that artel who flew home with his full earnings.

The boss told him on parting that he respected him and invited him back next season. My brother just smiled — he’d already decided wild horses couldn’t drag him back. Been there, done that.

That’s how my brother worked a gold mine.

Once me and my buddy went berry-picking outside Noyabrsk. We crossed a cranberry bog and a small hill, reached the top, and below the peak found a strong spring flowing into the swamp. Right by the stream someone had built a wooden sluice running down the slope, with screens nailed on for separating dirt. At the bottom were mats and felt from old valenki. Up top were test pits, shovels, and buckets. There was quartz in the sand. We’d stumbled on a proper equipped gold claim.

I told my friend, “Let’s try washing some gold — maybe there’s something.” We got to work, eyes shining at the thought of gold.

We shoveled sand into the sluice, poured water, everything was moving. I kept checking the mats. After four hours — zero result. No gold.

I told him so. Rage in his eyes, shovel in his hands — he chased me for half an hour. I’d stolen his dream; he thought he’d wash a handful of gold and buy a car.

Later I remembered a geologist who’d said there are no gold deposits anywhere in Western Siberia. So we never had a chance. That was the first time I saw how professionally someone could set up a gold mine.

And most importantly, I saw how gold can take a man’s mind — he’s even ready to kill his friend over it. Especially when there isn’t any.

Chapter 72. The Nephew.

Sadly, sometimes in our lives the brightest and most beloved people leave us far too soon. All that’s left are memories and the regret of things left unsaid. Nothing can be changed. A person burns up like a moth in a candle flame. Only memory remains.

My cousin had a son — my nephew. To him I was like a real athlete. I trained karate, he was in first grade and always begged me to show him the moves. I made up a set of ten exercises on the spot to build health and strength.

Seven years later I was shocked to learn he’d been doing those exercises every single day, and the results were excellent. From fifth grade he started training at the same karate club. He grew strong, everything came easy. Shotokan is karate almost without contact — lots of katas you polish your whole life.

By eighth grade he was already sparring with tenth-graders and they started to fear him. It was a small town — sometimes you had to stand up for yourself with your fists. By eleventh grade he was a grown man, ready for life.

He got into university in Novosibirsk, but after eight months he came back — studies didn’t work out. We talked, and I suggested going to the training center. I knew an engineer there, we got him a study referral. He graduated successfully and got a job.

Then came Vankor — new people, new oil field. He enrolled in university for his specialty. He told me he flew a lot by helicopter. Everything was automated — you plug in a laptop and check all the processes. He loved the work. Bought an apartment, got married, they were expecting a baby.

He left for his shift, flew out from Vankor-1 platform. Eighteen people died — three crew and fifteen passengers, including my nephew.

The helicopter was heading from Vankor to Purpe. The crash happened 180 kilometers north of Igarka, near the number-one oil-pumping station.

Two helicopters took off from the Vankor field. First, a Mi-8 with an external sling load and no passengers. Second, a Mi-8AMT carrying workers. For unknown reasons, the Mi-8AMT hit the sling cable and crashed. On impact both fuel tanks exploded, the helicopter was completely destroyed and burned.

Later I met a helicopter dispatcher from our settlement at the station. She mentioned she worked at Vankor. I asked about the crash. She told me everything. All the guys passed through her computer log, then went to board.

From her window she saw both helicopters taking off. The passenger one sliced the sling cable with its blades, rolled over, and fell. She watched the whole thing from her desk.

Life can be so unfair — it takes the best ones right at their peak.

I later looked up aviation accidents. Helicopters rarely crash, but when they do it’s in places with no roads, no winter tracks — just tundra. Oil fields are scattered everywhere, only helicopters can get shift workers to their destinations like a tram.

I remember that kind old UAZ “loaf” van that drove operators, electricians, instrument guys, and drillers over land and concrete. That’s exactly what we were talking about the last time we spoke.

Chapter 73.Kozhedub

While working in the Valuysky district of the Belgorod region on a motorized hang glider, my brother flew crop-dusting fields with chemicals. After my first tour up North, I was free, and I couldn't turn down my brother's offer. I was his helper — mechanic servicing the hang glider. The Valuysky district sits right on the border with Ukraine, which back then practically didn't exist — no border posts, no barbed wire.

In the Valuysky district there's a village called Urazovo. At the entrance, a La-7 fighter stood on a pedestal with a plaque saying Ivan Kozhedub had flown that very plane himself. There was a museum in the village. The locals told us Kozhedub wrote to Stalin asking permission to install his personal plane there as a monument to the 1943 battles. He flew it over from Germany himself. Stalin didn't refuse. The internet says it's actually a mock-up of an La-5 unveiled by Kozhedub in 1988. I saw the monument in 1997.

Over this village of Urazovo in 1942, pilot Kozhedub was shot down — the one who already knew how to take off and land. In the basement of the museum house where the exhibition was, he sat in captivity for four hours after police caught him. That night he broke open a small basement window and escaped toward our lines.

The next day his commander tore into him — almost half the new kids had already been shot down. He told Kozhedub, "You shoot down a Messerschmitt and I won't report you to the special section." And so Ivan Kozhedub started downing Messers, Fockes, Heinkel bombers — right up to the end of the war. He even managed to shoot down a jet Me-262 that unexpectedly dropped out of the clouds. Two Mustangs that mistook our fighters for German ones shot down his comrade in the sky over Berlin in April 1945.

Then came Korea and the fierce air battles between MiG-15s and American Sabres. Those were terrifying dogfights.

My father served at the jump airfield in Spassk-Dalny at that time. That's where planes were prepared for the flight to Korea. Dad would put on the radio operators' headphones and listen to the air combat chatter: "Hop ho — enemy on the right, hop hu — enemy on the left." And then the swearing started — every other word was "mother"... "Can't you see... enemy... behind you... your mother." How could you do without it?

Ten or twelve planes would leave, and only three or four would return a week later. Sometimes a hundred fighters from both sides would clash up there.

I'm curious whether the monument in Urazovo is still standing. I think it's probably gone. Those were the Yeltsin years — the first and last drunk engineer-builder. Kozhedub, the great pilot of the last century. Ukrainian. A maestro.

I always watch "Only Old Men Are Going to Battle" with pleasure. The film perfectly captures the whole atmosphere of the war in the air and on the ground at that time.

A motorized hang glider gives you the chance to climb into the sky and see exactly what they saw in the sky and on the ground in 1942–1943 over the Belgorod region. White chalk hills are everywhere — the chalk shows through the grass and bushes. That's where the name of this land comes from. The girls here have blue eyes and pale blonde hair. This land is purely Russian — neat villages, asphalt roads everywhere, no crooked abandoned houses. It really smells of Russia here.

Flying with my brother as a passenger on the delta, I saw from the air a fortified district of pillboxes and bunkers built in 1942. It stretched for dozens of kilometers. The Germans simply bypassed it, and it remained as a monument — overgrown with grass, covered in sand and plowed fields.

My brother said he'd seen the field airfields from those years. They'd grown over with bushes, but you could still make out the runways and see the traces of bomb craters.

The trenches, already slumped from the soil, sometimes echo the war from the air, from the hang glider. Sometimes at dawn you want to see a signal rocket fired into the sky, an La-5 squadron taking off, and a burning Me-109 tumbling out from the bottom edge of the clouds, falling behind the forest edge. A quiet Ukrainian night, I think — and a Belgorod night is just as quiet, dark, with bright, distant, beckoning stars.

I was here for two years, and I really liked this land. It's like a museum under the open sky of true Russian soil.

Chapter 74.Schema monk

Alright, let's do it. Here's the translation of your text:

My brother and I stayed at a local hotel in a small village in the Belgorod region. We'd already treated almost all the farmland, applying chemical reagents with a motorized hang glider. Only one field of about 150 hectares was left, and we'd be done.

But then the rains started. Our work depends on wind speed and low humidity, so all the conditions kept us from finishing.

A neighbor appeared who was dressed head to toe in monastic robes. Whenever he went out, he wore a hood with a big cross on it, and he'd only appear at the end of the day, no matter the weather.

One evening he asked, "Guys, what do you do?" We told him we were applying chemical reagents with a motorized hang glider. "What's the problem?" he asked. We said, "We're not going to complain about the weather when it's raining."

He said he could help. That got us curious.

The next morning, speaking in the church, he asked the parishioners to gather after lunch by the field near the village and do a religious procession around it. The village is big, with a decent number of people. About 60-70 showed up. Carrying church banners and icons, they walked around the field three times in a light drizzle. The schema monk was reading prayers the whole time. We didn't see it ourselves.

That evening he smiled slyly, looking at us with kind eyes, and said, "We'll wait for morning."

In the morning we drove to the field. It was drizzling on all four sides, but right above the field the sun was shining, the wind was drying out the moisture. That evening we treated the field.

I told the schema monk, "We should treat you to something." He smiled and said, "I don't drink." Later in the hotel lobby we had a serious talk. He said it wasn't a miracle. People have forgotten how to ask God for things, but He never refuses a sincere request from the heart.

Prayers for the weather, for drought, for a good harvest, prayers before meals — people have forgotten all that. He told us about the monastery where he reads prayers from the Bible for 20 hours a day in his cell, because 90% of Russian citizens don't do this every day. By taking the schema, he carries this cross on his back, atoning for the sins of those who don't.

He came out into the world because he was asked to audit the church's finances in this village. By profession, he was a financier with a higher education.

There's an even stricter schema — a monk's vow where he never leaves the monastery, just fresh air and his cell. Complete isolation from the outside world.

The next day we were leaving. Driving past the field, we saw a light rain drizzling over it.

This isn't really about faith. Sometimes when you see something unusual, you don't want to believe it, even if it happened right in front of your eyes. It's strange. We left under a strong impression.

After that, I always have great respect for monks of any denomination, any religion. It's not just service, and they're not just intermediaries between us and God. By renouncing everything and taking a vow of celibacy, away from the temptations of our world, they serve and carry on their shoulders the burden that we all comfortably take off our own shoulders. They voluntarily put it all on themselves and don't complain. There's a great meaning in their voluntary ascetic life.

In Thailand, almost all men go through a monastery. There's no school in our sense — most people get their knowledge from staying in the monastery.

Russia doesn't have that, but it has its own purely Russian path of faith. And we choose it ourselves. Nobody stands over us with a stick controlling the process. That's the beauty of Russia.

Chapter 75.UFO

This is a topic that stirs the imagination of any thinking person in our time. Even the President of the United States, Trump, is supposed to make an official statement about contact with aliens in the US. This topic has always been secret in any country for many years. Cosmonauts who flew into orbit after Gagarin encountered many events they stayed silent about like partisans, terrified of it — the topic was forbidden. For anything unusual or unexplained, you could end up in a psych ward and get kicked out of the cosmonaut corps. Hallucinations, objects that suddenly appeared and disappeared. Many cosmonauts only admitted it years later.

When I was a kid, I had an aquarium with fish. I loved watching them for hours. But I always felt they were watching us too, just like I watched them. They're always nearby, but we don't always see them.

I realized this when I was standing with my father after leaving the garage. We walked up to the bulletin board, next to a park, and suddenly above the trees in the ravine a silver saucer appeared, 25–30 meters in diameter. In the middle there were portholes around the edge, and in one of them you could see an observer. I said to my dad, "Do you see it?" Dad confirmed he did. Other people came up and stood mesmerized, watching the object hovering 30–40 meters up, right above the treetops. Then the object drifted over the trees, made a zigzag, and slowly disappeared upward — right where it had first appeared. That sighting explained a lot, including what happened to me when I was six years old.

Six of us boys, like a flock of goslings, were always playing on the wasteland. There was a ravine with a stream. One day while we were playing, we suddenly saw a very bright light. Then everything went silent, and we fell asleep — except me. I saw huge beings about three meters tall appear. They came up to us but didn't touch us. Then another bright light, and everything vanished. The older boys from our yard found us. All of us had sunburned faces and hands, like we'd been lying in the sun too long and got burned.

For three or four days I couldn't open my eyes — my eyelids were so swollen. After a week we all forgot about it. The other kids remembered nothing. There were no health consequences. And when I saw that object appear, it clicked — what happened in my childhood was also visitors coming through a portal. Maybe from the future, maybe aliens, maybe from another dimension. I won't guess. It doesn't matter. They exist, and they're nearby. And they don't interfere in our lives. They're observers.

We're on Earth in a round aquarium.

I always tried never to talk about this topic. Everyone keeps it taboo. They don't exist, and they do.

In one comedy I like the scene where the guy meets his ex and asks who she's with. Standing in the yard of her house, she says she married a cosmonaut and points to him sitting on the roof ridge of a two-story house. He's in space right now, he has contact.

I believe there is a second, third… up to the ninth dimension. The main thing is not to fall from your own into another. If you get drunk, you will. As the cops say in the movie "The Diamond Arm."

I even believe that sometimes at night naked women fly on brooms like Baba Yaga. We just don't always notice them. And they don't notice it themselves because while they're flying, they're asleep, in a trance.

I believe there will be Contact with the Creators, and they'll tell us everything straight to our faces. That they're tired of watching without interfering what idiots we are — a civilization that destroys nature like barbarians sitting on the branch of life and sawing it off so we can fall from a height.

They're not gods. They're not the arbiters of our fate. They're modest observers who are forbidden to interfere in our lives. Our Solar System was created artificially. The asteroid belt around it is like a minefield that controls any large body from outside. The Sun is covered with an ordinary colander, and through the holes solar prominences and solar wind fly out up to 200 kilometers — without that protection, everything living on Earth would be burned.

All the planets orbit the Sun strictly in one plane. Even the Moon, which causes ocean tides up to 12 meters, is an artificial object. Earth itself oscillates 3–6 meters with its buildings due to gravity, but we don't even notice it. The Moon is hollow inside — the Americans experimented by hitting its surface with a stage, and it rang in resonance like someone had struck it with a stick.

Did the Americans fly to the Moon? I'll say no. A person can't go weeks without using the toilet. The toilet appeared in the American segment only after they copied it from the Russians. They even drilled a hole in the Russian segment for a lady sitting on the toilet when theirs broke. Of course we'll fly to the Moon and Mars — humanity has the equipment now, it's the pinnacle of space technology. Back then, it didn't exist.

The Americans are great showmen and fooled the whole world. But now they have Elon Musk, a man on the level of Korolev and von Braun. So Mars has a bright future ahead — conquest by humanity. And they will watch. And rejoice for us that we're not fighting each other but spending colossal resources on exploring space. Taking a step in our development.

Chapter 76.Aunt Valya and the Watermelons

We always bought watermelons with my brother in September, straight from tractor trailers parked along the road near Shakhty. We’d be driving from Krasnodar Krai to Valuyki District for work. Twenty watermelons and six or seven melons — that was enough to keep us in dessert the whole time. When we sat down in the village canteen for lunch or dinner, the cooks — kind rural women — would always be amazed seeing that pile of fruit on the table. We always shared with them.

Then Azerbaijani trucks started arriving, bringing potatoes and pumpkins. They’d trade sack for sack — potatoes for watermelons. That’s when the whole of Belgorod region would go into a watermelon frenzy.

After finishing the job, we came to Rostov Region, to Aunt Valya. The chairman assigned us to stay at her place.

She got up at five in the morning and spun like a squirrel in a wheel. Her farm was huge — two hundred Muscovy ducks, forty geese, fifteen ordinary ducks, forty-five chickens, twelve more geese, eight piglets, four calves, two massive bull calves. She didn’t keep a cow — the neighbor brought her a three-liter jar of milk and half a liter of sour cream every day.

Her son, a farmer, delivered grain to her in sacks on his Gazelle. Aunt Valya ran it through the grinder and turned it into feed for the whole farm. They had a deal: he gives her grain, she gives him a hundred Muscovy ducks in the fall. From morning till night she handled everything herself.

In front of her house grew a tree absolutely covered with cherries the size of plums. Every day we stuffed ourselves with them. Some local variety — incredibly juicy, with a taste that mixed cherry, sweet cherry, and plum. I’ve never eaten anything better. We just couldn’t stop.

Aunt Valya never told us not to, and we couldn’t stop ourselves — even on an empty stomach in the morning. It was heavenly. Every garden and every street in the village had these cherries.

And if it grew on the street — it belonged to nobody.

In the evenings we’d come back from the sunflower fields, and dinner would be waiting — roasted Muscovy duck, a royal meal, plus a little homemade wine. Sometimes her son would drop by. We’d sit on the veranda under a single light bulb, talking about life. The duck disappeared in minutes.

Aunt Valya gave me a real understanding of how Cossacks live. When she showed me her storage cellar, I was stunned. An underground room four by four meters, two meters high, walls lined floor to ceiling with jars. Two hundred three-liter jars of salted and marinated tomatoes, a hundred and fifty with cucumbers, compotes from cherry, sweet cherry, plum, apple, currant, gooseberry, black rowan — up to a hundred jars of each. Jams, mashed berries with sugar. Hanging from the ceiling — cured and cold-smoked hams, pork and beef, dried sausage. A gastronomic paradise. Homemade wine. Moonshine aging with walnut partitions, slowly turning into cognac.

When Kuban people slaughter a pig, they salt all the lard and roll it into three-liter jars — a strategic reserve in case of war. Every house, every stanitsa in Rostov and Krasnodar regions has such a cellar.

For ten or twelve years of drought or war, every Cossack household can survive on these stocks without any problem. Aunt Valya said they never had famine. They never trusted the Tsar, never trusted the Soviets, and don’t trust the current government either. That’s the Cossack way — rely only on yourself, your farm, your own hands, and your storage, which can feed an entire company of soldiers for a week.

Seeing all this, I felt a terrible thought: we have a completely different mentality. In our cellar we don’t even have two boxes of canned meat as emergency supplies. And a store can close anytime. That’s why there was famine in the thirties — and why they didn’t have it. And why some people ended up eating each other back then.

Aunt Valya said that beyond the Bataysk bridge over the Don live “katsaps” — not very smart people. In their villages you see a doghouse, a cat with kittens, ten or fifteen chickens — and that’s it. In her mind, every yard should look like hers. And you couldn’t argue with her.

Every year Aunt Valya produced several tons of meat. No days off, no trips to the Black Sea, no sanatoriums, no abroad. I saw her sell a bull calf for seventy-two thousand. Financially she could afford a lot — but she simply can’t stop this rural production. The process itself won’t let her.

Chapter 77.The Horse

A horse’s smart, sad eyes and its heavy fate — when it’s harnessed to a cart — always made me, an outside observer, think that this is a real miracle in our lives, one that sometimes carried us from point A to point B. No matter what kind of horses they are, they are beautiful. I always tried to give a horse a piece of bread or a sugar cube, and it would chew my gift and look at me with gratitude.

My uncle was a simple herdsman in the village, and his only transport was a horse and cart. One day he took me on a night journey. Fresh air, the smell of freshly cut grass, sleeping on hay, watching the sunrise — it was all so unusual and stayed in my memory in bright colors.

Especially memorable was the smart horse my uncle commanded “Igya!” — which means “Home!” — and it took us along the familiar route while my uncle and I slept soundly in the hay in the back of the cart. The horse brought us all the way home, used its teeth to pull the strap off the gate hooks, opened the gates, walked into the yard by itself, and patiently waited for us to wake up and unharness it.

Then came the day when his old horse could no longer pull the cart. My uncle tried to harness a young horse instead. The old horse bit the young one’s sides and drove it away from the cart. My uncle hugged the old horse, put on the collar and all the harness, attached the cart, and gave him one last chance. The horse tried to move the cart but couldn’t.

And suddenly the horse cried from helplessness. My uncle hugged him tightly and whispered, “Don’t worry, no one will take you to the sausage factory. I won’t let them. You’ll be free. There will always be a bucket of oats and hay for you.” And the horse, like a person on four legs, began to calm down. My uncle left him in the stable. They had lived too many years together. It was a real friendship between a man and a horse.

We see horses in movies, read about them in books, watch them at racetracks in big cities, see them giving children rides in parks. Sometimes weird people even bring a horse into an apartment and it lives in the room. Sometimes people betray horses and abandon them to their fate. They die in pain and suffering.

There are horse lovers who keep them in stables and train them in arenas. But I believe there is no happier horse than one that lived in a village thirty years ago. That simple everyday life, the bond between man and horse, created a special relationship that grew stronger over the years.

The most beautiful holiday in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan is Sabantuy. Wrestlers compete on a grass ring to see who is the strongest, and the winner gets a ram on his shoulders. The highlight of the whole event is the horse races. The strongest wins, and back then the prize was a Ural motorcycle — now it’s car keys. For a seven-year-old boy sitting in the saddle of a horse flying like a bullet ahead of everyone, it was the ultimate achievement and the pride of his parents.

Horses still exist in the villages, not many, but they have always been and always will be next to humans.

In my memory, my uncle and his horses will remain forever. The stable with a whole herd of horses, foals playing around, always watched by their strict mother. It always seemed to me that horses are like people, only they can’t speak like we do.

Riding a horse is a test of a person’s agility, courage, and whether you can become one with her when she gallops at full speed. If you do something wrong, you fly out of the saddle and can end up with a bunch of fractures. I fell off too. It’s like life — when it throws you out of the saddle. In childhood you learn to tuck and roll so you never fall hard.

The tears of a horse when it cried stayed in my memory forever. They touch anyone who has a soul connection with this amazing creature that has always been next to man and brings him happiness, when it is loved simply for being in our lives.

Chapter 78.Father

He’s been gone for 24 years, but I remember him every single day. My father grew up at fourteen — in 1944, when a man with a rifle shoved him into a truck. They came to the village and took all the boys for the FZO. Furious women stood against them with pitchforks, like against wolves stealing their children.

The oldest of them explained that he was taking the boys where they would be fed, clothed, shod, given three meals a day and a trade. Each woman had four or five children and they lived half-starved. The people lowered their pitchforks in helplessness. That’s how his childhood ended. In the back of the truck my father cried, and all the boys cried with him.

A captured German taught them the art of plaster molding. In two years my father mastered it perfectly. He returned home in 1944 — wounded, a bullet had gone through his eye and out his temple. His mother had died of typhus. His father remarried, and the stepmother disliked him. He felt completely alone. His older brother had gone to the front, the others were younger. A barracks and an overcoat became his home instead of his father’s house. He rarely came back, and everything felt foreign. In tenth grade he proudly showed me the houses in Ufa where he and his brigade had made cornices, balconies, and façade decorations for the House of Culture. That was the memory of his hands and of his peers, whose childhood had also been taken.

Then the army — four and a half years in the Far East. New impressions, working a grader clearing the airfield in Spassk-Dalny, the war in Korea right across the border, pilots flying out on MiGs. All of it healed his soul wounds.

He returned to Ufa, met my mother. Their first daughter was born in the village at our grandmother’s and died a year later from typhus. Then my older brother was born. My parents told stories of their simple life in a dormitory in Chernikovka, Ufa. One room was divided by ropes into four sectors for four families. They lived modestly, without private apartments or even proper communal flats. They started with one stool, two aluminum bowls, four spoons, and two mugs. That’s how everyone lived — and they were happy.

Mom worked as a bricklayer on construction sites, Dad drove a dump truck bringing mortar to her site. Later they decided to move to a small settlement where the big Bashkir oil development was beginning. That’s where my middle brother and I were born. That’s where our happy childhood passed.

Grandfather died in 1961, before I was born. Father went to the funeral and never returned to his village again. When I finished tenth grade, he suggested we visit Grandfather’s grave. At the cemetery he couldn’t find it for a long time. I asked if he had planted anything on the grave. He said he had planted a poplar. I saw a tall poplar standing in the center. We walked up to it and found a metal pyramid with the name “Abdulla.” That was my grandfather’s grave.

The year I was born, my father planted an apple orchard. All our childhood we ate those apples. The taste of childhood is apples.

My father believed in Communism. He thought he was building it. He was a Communist. When everything started collapsing under Gorbachev, it hit him very hard. For his generation it was a shock.

I was curious. For him it was an event equal to the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome fell. So did the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He suffered four strokes, kept ending up in the hospital, walked with a cane, aged a lot.

The country was already living by different laws. Father died early in the morning — quietly, unnoticed.

We saw him off. We remember. His children. His grandchildren. And I think his great-grandchildren won’t forget him either.

Chapter 79.Еngineer

Up north, I never met a single starving engineer. And if someone arrived with two higher educations, an ascending career was guaranteed. A white-collar worker always starts as a foreman. If you have an oil tech school behind you and correspondence studies at an oil institute, that's standard. Education in Soviet times was top-notch and made it possible without any problems, as long as you had the desire.

My friend arrived in Zlatoust and, while working at the metallurgical plant, managed to finish a branch of Chelyabinsk University with a degree in mechanical engineering in his field. He told me about a plant where they rolled hot metal rods of different diameters.

That's where simple crowbars were also born, with a factory wholesale price of four thousand rubles. Yet some guy in a train compartment, working in the bathhouse at Yamburg, told me that the same crowbar was listed on his books for thirty-two thousand rubles. And God forbid if he lost it, drank it away, or it got stolen — they'd deduct it from his salary.

And it seems, using the crowbar as an example, that's the markup formula for any item that passes through ten middlemen to reach the Arctic. Anything used in the oil industry becomes gold-plated.

My future friend flew to my small field as a foreman for our boiler house PVS, where two operators and one mechanic worked. Minimal staff for such a valuable engineering employee — basically a fresh graduate sent there for three months on his diploma alone.

My engineer gradually integrated into the team, went fishing with the guys, picked mushrooms, played billiards. There wasn't much work at the boiler house, so the sanatorium-style field assumed self-employment to keep spirits high and leave no free time for mischief.

The first thing that surprised me and made us friends was that my engineer started hauling old radiators from the tractor graveyard to the helipad to sell for scrap. I stopped him — not allowed with two degrees, and I wouldn't let a legend be born about an engineer with two higher educations who might, in seven or eight years, be sitting in the deputy general director's chair. He sincerely agreed with me, and we became friends.

And it happened a few years later, and it was nice to walk into his office in the multi-story central office building. The paths of an engineer with two degrees are inscrutable.

I observed another example — a young engineer sent to a small repair shop. I watched him through my office window. Few workers, but welders with huge experience — one built the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhgorod pipeline, the other the Ostankino Tower. Everything he studied in theory, they had lived in practice.

He started bossing them around exactly as taught in oil university — pure hazing of the "grandpas" with no young "rookies" around. The old guys stayed silent. Morning briefings, production assignments, checking what was done after lunch, end-of-day summaries. The question of when a wrench or hammer would fly into his hard hat was just a matter of time. The guy was overdoing it and the stick could easily swing back and hit him in the forehead.

Many young fresh-faced diploma holders still don't see workers as equals — they look at them like cattle or slaves who somehow personally belong to them.

I invited the guy to go pick blueberries in the taiga. We talked, he changed his approach to the team. The main thing — when planning the next job, he started consulting them on technical solutions, and he immediately noticed the atmosphere change. He wasn't teaching them anymore — they were teaching him. Pipeline repairs are daily non-standard problems. No need for back-slapping familiarity, just respectful human relations. They started greeting him.

At the preliminary pumping station there was a guy who, together with five operators, was changing a 120-kilo valve, straining his gut. I suggested he should actually be an engineer and use the K-700 bucket with a welded hook and slings next time instead of doing bodybuilding. Sure, he'd have to sign a four-hour work order, to the driver's delight.

An engineer in the North — that sounds proud. Everyone I met as a PRS foreman later came back as a deputy within about ten years. When they arrived at the field, the old-timers still remembered them. Greeting by old habit was a sign the guy had a good memory and hadn't gotten a big head.

Of course there are also those who, thanks to parental connections, just shuffle signed papers from one desk to another in the office. They don't know production, spend their whole engineering life boiling in their own ITR pot. Boring. But the guys who went through the fields climb the ladder slowly, and everything's top-notch wherever they work. Experience as baggage behind them is what forms the elite of any Arctic company. And of course, ballast with engineering diplomas hangs around them too.

Chapter 80 .Samurai

In tenth grade, after that unforgettable encounter, I never again walked in a pack of the same desperate and young stallions we were at eighteen. We’d formed a gang, roaming around and causing trouble. Who could stand against twelve of us? How naive we were.

Here’s our victim — a drunk guy, barely standing, almost falling over, pissing on the flowerbed by the Oil Workers’ dormitory. We start provoking him, he mumbles something incoherent, and that’s it — he’s ours. Then it begins like in a Bruce Lee movie, but we hadn’t even seen those yet — video didn’t exist back then. We rushed him like wild animals, but he just clicked through us, using different combinations, turning us into chopped meat. He dropped low and hit me from below right in the jaw. I did a backflip. For a second I lost all sense of direction.

It was over for my friends. Everyone was lying on the ground. Our drunk opponent sobered up, carefully checked each of us to make sure he hadn’t crippled anyone, and calmly walked away. That’s when I said I’d never walk in a pack again. I wanted to be like him.

After meeting this amazing man, they reset my jaw at the hospital emergency room, put a bandage on it, and for two weeks I drank juice through a straw. I couldn’t speak.

He was a real samurai who remained a mystery all these years. No one knows his name or surname. But he exists and lives in our settlement. What we know is that in Soviet times he lived in Japan for sixteen years, working as a gardener in the embassy garden. Across from the embassy there was a bar where he often drank sake.

Once three Japanese intelligence guys sat down with him, hissed that they knew who he was, that no one behind the Soviet embassy fence was better than him. They invited him to their base where real ninjas train. They blindfolded him in the car, drove outside the city. And he saw what the Japanese don’t show to Europeans.

A brick wall the height of a five-story building, and at the base four men stood. At a clap of hands, in a few minutes they were already on top. They stuck their fingers into the cracks between bricks and climbed up like spiders at full speed. When they came down, he asked to see their fingers. Instead of nails they had webbing, and the fingertips were solid calluses.

When they held wushu and martial arts competitions in Ufa, there was a ninjutsu representative. He asked to see his fingers, and after looking at them the Samurai said the guy wasn’t a ninja, just a clown.

He was acquainted with Talgat Nigmatullin. Everyone seriously into martial arts — all roads led to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

In forty-two years I’ve never crossed paths with him once. Never met him again, but I know he’s alive and well, living in my settlement.

I once asked my coach if a drunk has to drink every day. He answered that it’s camouflage, the man uses his mastery to imitate very strong intoxication for the public. And if you believe it, then you’re looking at a true master.

In Ufa one night around three I went for beer to the twenty-four-hour store on Prospekt, at the Yuryuzan stop, and saw a seventy-year-old grandpa buy two bottles of vodka, put them in a string bag, and clinking away walk down the avenue home. Two big street thugs followed him. I tried to catch up and warn him. Didn’t make it.

The old man dropped both thugs with two uppercuts and they sat on their asses on the asphalt, shaking their heads in a trance. The grandpa laughed and said, “I was Ufa champion in the fifties, master of sports in boxing.” And from boredom he sometimes does preventive work against street crime in his city. I expressed my admiration, still impressed, and went back to my relatives’ place where I was staying. Who you don’t meet in this life.

Every samurai in this life has a past, a present, and of course a future. He exists in this life and at the same time he doesn’t. Living a life hidden from the public is his right. And he has exercised that right.

If someone goes to Japan, flies into Tokyo, you need to walk very carefully in any crowd — every fifth person is a descendant of a samurai. That’s why they bow and hiss, showing respect to any stranger. We Europeans don’t understand it.

Accidentally bumping a shoulder can lead, a few hours later, after a short duel with katanas, to the prospect of lying in the nearest ditch with your head chopped off. That’s the reality where the concentration of samurai is highest. But in our settlement there’s only one. He was and remains forever. He appears and disappears.

Chapter 81.Karim

Uncle Karim was the husband of my mother’s older sister. By age he could’ve been my grandfather — he’d been through the war from the very first day to the very last. My paternal grandfather came back from the war in 1944 after being wounded and died in 1961, four years before I was born. On my mother’s side, my grandfather went missing, and only sixty-two years later did I find his burial place in Oryol through the internet.

After finishing my school exams I came to the village to rest a little and regain strength — and to help my uncle graze the sheep and cows of the village’s common herd. From morning till evening we were out in the field, rain or shine.

In the evenings we had a black sauna waiting. A wheel rim stood on stones with a pile of pebbles on top. After hours of heating with firewood the stones were blazing hot. We’d splash hot water from a dipper, the scalding air burned, and I’d try to drop to the floor as fast as I could. We whipped ourselves with birch branches, came out red as lobsters, and finished it all with a bucket of cold water over the head. Pure bliss.

Sitting on a bench outside, my quiet relative began telling me about the war. The scars from his wounds were the proof — I saw the fragments still left in his body: in his leg, his buttock, his back. Those were the shards from the very mine that ended his service in 1946 and got him discharged.

He stepped on an anti-personnel mine in the woods of Western Ukraine. Click — the mine was armed. He was walking in front, a group behind him. He ordered them to jump off the path, made sure everyone was safe, then took the risk himself. The fragments caught him in the air. First aid, tourniquet, bandages, raincoat-tent, then he woke up in the hospital. His foot wasn’t torn off. The question was whether he’d walk on two legs or one — he simply got lucky.

He remembered his Korean instructor who taught him ancient combat arts back in 1940 when he was drafted. He even showed me a few moves. Two or three motions and you kill a man. Could it really be that simple? I was stunned. And he said those skills had saved his life more than once. In hand-to-hand combat with an SS man nearly two meters tall in the winter of 1941, he — at one meter sixty-four — defeated him. The guy must’ve boxed, and his eyes showed huge surprise as he was killed by an opponent of such frail build — him, an Aryan, a fledgling of Reichsführer Himmler.

The war began for him with his battalion being dropped near Yelnya, where Zhukov delivered the first blow against the Germans. They fought their way out of encirclement back to their own lines.

Paratroopers were always protected. They were the reserve for a painful stab in the enemy’s rear. Near Moscow there was a problem — no parachutes, and in combat no one collects them. This wasn’t training.

For the first time I heard from him that he had two jumps without a parachute from a Li-2 into enemy territory. First skis down the chute, then weapons, then the soldier himself dives down. The plane flies in daylight at minimum altitude, skimming over the bushes along a stream. The snow in 1941 was very deep. He also told me about drops from a TB-3 skimming the treetops near Tula. He wasn’t there himself but had heard about it.

After the jump, out of fourteen men, two had broken spines and legs. They carried them on raincoat-tents to the nearest village, left them with a granny, and ran on. They carried out sabotage on roads, planted mines, blew up bridges, and fought their way back to friendly lines. Against the backdrop of freezing cold and constant attacks by partisans and saboteurs, the ground was burning under the Germans’ feet.

And there were thousands of Komsomol members like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya who went on missions across the front line — and they perished. Because of the frost there was practically no continuous front, only strongpoints. Sabotage warfare bore fruit. Then the offensive began. The Germans started retreating. In 1943 he jumped across the Dnieper too. He got lucky and survived.

He finished the war in the Vienna commandant's office. Then he was sent to Western Ukraine. There was already a partisan war on both sides. During a free search his good friend was captured. They found him nailed to a board in a village — fingers chopped off with an axe, eyes gouged out, stomach ripped open. The boy was still alive. Even animals don’t act that way. After that, their search team swore never to take prisoners. And they didn’t.

When we buried him, I told his grandchildren and great-grandchildren: be proud — your grandfather was a paratrooper, a saboteur, and a cleaner. He never told any of this to his daughters, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. Why he told exactly me, I don’t know. He was a very closed man with a very beautiful, combat-rich biography.

Chapter 82. Coach

My childhood friend trained in the Eastern Martial Arts section. Everything was going well for him, and on his recommendation I first stepped into the gym where the guys trained. It was a former boiler house that the boys themselves had converted into a sports hall. That’s where I met the Coach I’ve been friends with for almost thirty-five years.

There were three groups. The younger kids trained in the morning, the adults after ten at night — doctors, engineers, police officers, businessmen went to that one. The middle group, eighth to tenth grade and those under thirty, started at six in the evening. That’s the group I joined. Sessions lasted about one and a half to two hours, three times a week, every other day so muscles could recover in forty-eight hours. Weekends were for independent training, if you wanted.

Everyone was paired with someone of roughly the same weight and height. Mandatory equipment: two bricks, a forty-by-forty centimetre makiwara — a piece of board — boxing focus mitts, and a one-metre stick made from a shop-bought mop handle. All of it for practising series of strikes.

We always started with a warm-up: running forwards, backwards, sitting on each other’s backs while the partner held the legs so you had to run on your hands. Thirty-five to forty minutes of constant movement. Anyone who couldn’t keep the pace sat in the centre of the hall, rested, then tried to catch up with the others.

Then came work with the bricks, series with them. We did push-ups on our fists. Then series on the makiwara that your partner held. With the stick we practised thrusting, cutting and chopping sword strikes. After that came light sparring so we wouldn’t injure each other. Day after day, never missing a session, we felt our bodies getting stronger and stronger.

The body can adapt to any load in skilled hands. The first days each of us left the hall completely soaked, sweat soaked into the gi.

Discipline was strict. If someone did something wrong, the punishment was an open-palm strike to the stomach. The person flew across the floor and landed on his backside, sitting there for a long time.

Every now and then fighters came from Kazan, Samara and Ufa to spar with our coach. Many had heard of him, and we had an interesting show ahead. The coach never turned anyone down. We sat in a circle around the centre of the hall.

The challenger in gi stepped into the centre with our Coach. A short fight and the man was lying on the floor. The coach took his foot, struck the sole with the edge of his palm and brought him back to consciousness. He never injured anyone. We’d gently take the guy by the legs, drag him to the exit, where the people who brought him would shoulder-carry him out.

Month after month we grew stronger. The day came when the coach pointed at four of us in the hall. Still in our gis, we walked through the snow, got into a car and drove to the Ural restaurant. We entered the hall. Three huge guys were sitting at a table. The coach asked, “You were looking for me?” Silence.

He took a glass of water and started pouring it down one guy’s collar. The moment he twitched, a kick to the chest. The man smashed through two glass panes and flew outside. The second started to get up — the coach struck his head on the table with a moving hand, and the table slowly sank. To the third, the main one, he said “Freeze.” And he froze. “Any questions for me?” A short “No.”

We turned, left the hall, drove back in the Zhiguli to the gym and continued training. The coach was calm as a python. Our adrenaline was off the charts.

The first year flew by unnoticed. The coach was preparing us for an outdoor exam. The day came: we arrived by LAZ bus after eleven at night in the forest. Each of us cut a log of fresh wood, the height from ground to chin. A small sixty-degree slope, one hundred and fifty metres up. At the bottom — a stream with a pool of ice-cold spring water.

At midnight the training began. Up and down the slope several times for each exercise. Log on the shoulder, log on the wrists, squeezing with the hands and lifting from the ground. We entered some state where time stopped. He squeezed out of us everything nature had put in us. Someone was already collapsing from exhaustion.

The moment came when I realised I couldn’t go on. The coach and the LAZ driver grabbed me by arms and legs and threw me into the stream. Lying on the bottom in the water, I slowly started drinking that spring water, then an explosion — and I flew out like a spring. The weakness disappeared instantly. I was alert and ready to continue. The coach looked me over carefully and said I had passed the test.

He looked at the others — they all went through the same. No heart attacks, no convulsions. Everyone was healthy, no sick ones among us. The moon disc lit everything up so bright it was like daylight, dawn was gradually breaking. We got on the bus and drove back to the city. Some fell asleep right away. And I kept thinking — did I dream everything that happened? The coach said we had all moved to a new level.

Later, in our second year, we no longer felt the load. The body had adapted and grown strong. That’s how my modest sports life began. An interesting life. I never became a champion. I never set that goal. There were conversations when, after training, the coach sometimes taught us about Life. And we caught every word.

Chapter 83.Era of Change

I saw it with my own eyes when one era left and another took its place. Walking past the city executive committee building in a small provincial town, I saw this picture: two police officers in bulletproof vests with automatic rifles stood by the entrance to the city executive committee and didn’t let the staff of the old government inside. An order had come from Moscow.

Yesterday there was still Gorbachev, and today in Moscow Yeltsin was taking power from those who no longer held the Kremlin.

What I saw was happening in every city in Russia — one era replacing another. All the officials stood patiently in front of the locked doors.

You can understand them. What were they supposed to do if that door might stay closed forever? Replacing the entire bureaucratic apparatus across Russia was impossible. There was no ban on former officials working, so there was a chance they could reclaim their own chair with their own ass. That’s why they stood there patiently until four in the afternoon. One of them, out of habit, marked in a journal who had arrived and who hadn’t. Maybe the new government would appreciate that zeal.

The next day the same scene — officials came in the morning to the closed doors and waited patiently. It was humiliating for them. It was an adult game, and patience was supposed to win. Only on the fourth day of this standing did they receive the order to let them into the city executive committee. They happily rushed into the building to occupy their same chairs. They muttered to each other: “They can’t manage without us,” “Where would the new Russia be without officials?” “The state apparatus is the foundation of the state.”

I knew several people from that crowd of satisfied officials. They went into their offices and for two weeks there was total paralysis of power — no calls, nothing. They were guarding their chairs so no one would accidentally take them. Then everything fell back into place. Vigorous activity resumed. The apparatus had defeated the new government.

How power changed in 1917 in this same city was told to me by my brother’s neighbour who worked in the police personnel department. The details came from his mother, a honoured “Chekist of the USSR.” She was a well-known figure in the city. At the time she was fourteen years old and the first to put on a red headscarf, a leather jacket, and carry a Nagant revolver in a holster on her side.

A dashing sailor arrived at Aksakovo station with machine-gun belts crossed over his chest and a mandate signed by Lenin. Two Nagants hung at his sides like a cowboy. He approached the cab drivers, paid three rubles, and rode into town where he was supposed to establish Soviet power. The cab driver brought him to the local police station.

Entering the police chief’s office, he presented the mandate. The chief gave up his desk to him. The sailor asked if there was any factory in the city. The police chief said there was a tannery across the road with one hundred and twenty workers.

He went straight there. The owner tried to stop him, but he pushed him aside and walked into the workshop to the workers. He spoke to them and declared that power in the city now belonged to the workers and peasants. They asked what to do next. He suggested they all go with him to the police station.

When they arrived, the sailor demanded the keys to the armoury, armed them, and the first order in the city was to arrest the police chief, the officers, and the constables. Three days later they were shot. All the merchants’ warehouses were seized and put under armed guard. That’s when our young Marusya appeared in her red headscarf. She took part in the executions. When she walked down the main street, all the townspeople gave her a three-hundred-metre berth like she was plague-ridden. That’s how power changed in this city in 1917.

Then in 1918 the Whites came, and of course all those involved left with the Red Army. Later Chapayev liberated the city, and the now grown-up Marusya had a lot of work to do. How many townspeople she shot, no one knows. Then came 1937. She died in old age after breaking her hip — I called an ambulance for her. When my brother was building a house nearby, she often asked through the fence when we would be dekulakized. We answered — never.

God forbid you live in an Era of Change. And that is the truth.

Chapter 84.Where no shift worker's foot has ever stepped

I was in a place where no oil worker's foot had ever stepped.

On New Year's Eve, a family from Chebarkul arrived and settled in the neighboring cabin. Everyone was getting ready to celebrate the New Year when suddenly their wiring caught fire. They tried to put it out, called the firefighters, but it was all in vain. The cabin burned down, and the victims stood in front of the ashes in -30°C frost, not knowing where to go.

I was alone, went out to them and invited them to celebrate the New Year together. The table was already set, so they accepted the invitation. At midnight we welcomed the New Year. Still shocked by everything that happened, they immediately went to bed from exhaustion. They stayed with me for another three days.

Then they moved out, and two months later I ran into the head of that family. He invited me over — they were working in logging, and he was the foreman. I wasn't working at the time, so I decided to visit. It was my first time on a logging site. The impressions were unforgettable — sauna, ice hole, loading cut logs onto trucks.

In autumn, the same guy invited me to the forest-tundra, to the upper reaches of the Itapur River, for fishing. From the Vengapur heliport we flew about 200 kilometers strictly northeast by helicopter.

The helicopter landed near the river. Not far away stood a burned-out drilling rig. The locals, the Khanty people, had burned it down when oil workers tried to set up a rig on their lands. It turned into a real war, even shooting started. Eventually the oil workers backed off. So we were in a place where no oil worker's foot had ever stepped.

My friend fired two shots from his rifle. Fifteen minutes later, an old man with a huge beard arrived by motorboat and asked: "Which bend?" "The eighteenth." It was local water transport. Payment was 10 cartridges, two packs of salt, and a bag of flour — we had brought them by helicopter. Money didn't mean anything there.

We got into the boat and took off. You had to watch your head so you didn't smash it against the logs hanging over the river. And here it is — the eighteenth bend.

His family was there. The trees were already turning yellow and red — it was golden autumn. For the first time in my life I fished with my soul. We caught ide using bells, throwing the line from the bank under the overhang, then cut the fish in half and fried them on a huge frying pan over the fire in the evening.

We slept under a canopy with two logs burning at our feet — the Siberian way. Three weeks in the fresh air. In the morning small snowflakes would land on your face. Gradually you start thinking that you don't want to leave this place. It's paradise on Earth. No TV, no phones, no politics. A real break from civilization — pure nirvana. Way better than Sochi or any Turkey.

Want chicken? There's a wood grouse sitting on a branch fifty meters away — you shoot, pluck it, and it's already in the broth. Only there did I realize what the taiga used to be like where I worked before. Wherever a shift worker comes, the taiga dies. Always this barbaric approach to nature.

Such corners where no shift worker's foot has stepped are almost gone now. Later I found out that even there everything got drilled and the taiga became like around any northern city — orphaned.

When a Khanty hunter shoots geese or ducks, he picks the oldest and fattest one in the flock and leaves the rest alone. Shift workers shoot in volleys — feathers fly everywhere, nothing's left of the flock. These city-grown "savages" don't know how to hunt any other way.

That trip stayed in my memory. It was the first time I truly rested in the taiga. Before the snow, nature was preparing for winter — no mosquitoes, no midges, cool air. At night the temperature dropped to about +5°C, during the day it warmed up to +20°C. All good things come to an end. And I left the forest-tundra for the city. The journey was over.

Chapter 85.Gas Processing Plant

My friend told me an amazing story about the Novo-Urengoy Gas Processing Plant. Back in the late Soviet era, just before the USSR collapsed, they started building this facility in Novy Urengoy — it was badly needed by Gazprom and the country. They bought the most modern equipment in the West, complete documentation, certified software — everything was shipped by rail to the city and construction began.

They prepared the site, fenced it with a concrete wall, laid a railway spur, built concrete roads inside the plant, a boiler house that heats all the industrial buildings through pipes, a garage with a set number of vehicles, drilled wells for technical water, installed sewerage, substations for electricity, and brought a gas pipeline right to the plant to feed the columns. Basically, they built everything. The only thing they didn't manage to do was assemble the plant itself — the equipment was still sitting in factory packaging.

For all these years, 300 people have been working at the plant. There's a General Director who periodically gets fired and replaced. A secretary, the Director's Mercedes. A Chief Engineer. The office is fully staffed as it should be. The company was privatized, shares were issued, dividends are paid every year. Accounting calculates salaries and bonuses that the General Director signs. There's just one problem — the plant itself doesn't exist.

When my friend told me all this, my jaw literally dropped. I myself own Gazprom shares, and now I finally understand why they're trading at 118 to 130 rubles apiece.

According to Gazprom's reports, there are over a thousand such objects from Kaliningrad to Chukotka. Thousands of workers there pretend to work, with no shame about receiving decent salaries and bonuses.

It's impossible to revive the plant — after thirty years, the software and electronics are morally obsolete, certificates and licenses have expired. The cost of buying everything again is equal to the cost of all the equipment that's lying in boxes in foreign currency. It's a dead-end situation — easier to scrap it all for metal and close the project.

Of course, the General Director and those three hundred employees won't understand. They'll be against it. Probably only in Russia can such a situation exist where everyone is perfectly fine with it.

That's the kind of capitalism we have today. When they told me that all supplies of consumables, after passing through a chain of intermediaries, increase the cost almost a hundred times — a simple rubber gasket becomes gold-plated. Although you can buy it directly from the manufacturer or on Ozon, which is what real entrepreneurs do.

Gazprom is the backbone of the entire state. It's no coincidence that in the wild 90s they tried to break it into separate segments — it didn't work. Now a historic moment has come: gas imports to China equal the volume that used to go to Europe. Immediately, they're trying to stir things up in China. And Europe this year, like in the fairy tale "The Fisherman and the Golden Fish," looks like it'll be left with a broken trough.

Perhaps it's time for Gazprom to shed all this unfinished ballast and remove the gilding from everything that suppliers buy from middlemen.

Such big companies are like a big elephant — it eats a lot, turns around slowly. You shouldn't stand under its feet — it might accidentally crush you. And definitely don't stand under its tail — it might crush you when the elephant takes a shit. Right now in the North, production is being cut. Over the last thirty years, this is already the third time. They're laying off shift workers, disbanding offices. Engineers from the city are smoothly moving to the fields. That's how it was, and that's how it will always be. If they cut staff somewhere, those positions automatically appear at the fields.

Years later, the number of people working at the plant increased to two thousand, a temporary construction camp was built, and at the same time it started producing finished products — aviation kerosene and so on. The main thing is that it finally moved off the dead point.

The fate of Gazprom is directly linked to the fate of Russia. That's already an axiom. I want to say to the company: Gazprom, memento mori. Remember death.

Chapter 86.Flying Shop

I once came across an incredible business operating across the vast distances of the North. A former helicopter pilot bought a Mi-8 for personal use. As a private individual, he would load up in Novy Urengoy’s stores with pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, green peas, canned corn, bananas, mangoes, oranges, tangerines, grapes, and kiwis, then fly around the tundra like a flying shop — from the Ob Bay all the way to Chukotka. It’s a unique flying store where Nenets and Evenki people can buy cartridges for their carbines or shotguns, gunpowder, and shot. You can order anything you want on this helicopter. You can even place an order via satellite phone. The whole tundra knows him. For them, he’s a wizard and Santa Claus rolled into one.

I’ve always been shocked by the prices in Chukotka and the Far North — where there are no roads, just tundra and dwarf trees waist-high. A loaf of bread costs 270 rubles, as if it was baked in the Moscow suburbs or Tyumen and delivered by helicopter or Il-76 a thousand kilometers away.

Fresh tomatoes cost 1500 rubles, cucumbers 1000, apples 500, bananas 600. Red sea fish never costs less than 1000 rubles, as if it wasn’t caught right there in Kamchatka or Sakhalin. At the same time, salaries are not in proportion — they don’t start at 500 thousand rubles. Proper nutrition is the key to these northerners not getting sick.

You can add to that the utility bills for their apartments. From Surgut to Nadym, chain stores have appeared in every northern city. Now it doesn’t matter if you buy groceries in Krasnodar, Moscow, or Novy Urengoy — the prices are almost the same. But in the tundra, a bottle of mineral water starts at two hundred rubles. As if it was brought by reindeer or on this miracle helicopter.

They have their own markup and calculation there, their own customers, and they’re always waiting for the helicopter to arrive. Kids grow up on oranges and bananas, holding smartphones and laptops, riding Japanese Yamaha snowmobiles, and the best, most expensive Japanese motors on rubber boats.

This helicopter can deliver a Maserati or swamp buggies to the tundra. A thousand kilometers is nothing to it.

The pilot knows the entire tundra, and the tundra residents know him.

One businessman told me he used to be in Kazakhstan, near Baikonur, where there were military strategic reserves in the steppe. He often bought popular goods there for cash. When the country collapsed, a lot of ownerless stuff was simply abandoned.

It was a station where a diesel locomotive would drive underground. All the warehouses were invisible from space. Canned stew, condensed milk, and other long-storage products were all shipped to the North by train. A Mi-8 helicopter cost about as much as three train cars of stew. MiG planes, armored personnel carriers, and so on.

Today a helicopter costs about 300 million rubles. When that golden vein dried up, the businessman regretted buying stew instead of the helicopter.

He became famous for ordering a drilling rig from Uralmash, loading a full set into 24 train cars — four of which were just documentation — and when Novy Urengoy Oil and Gas didn’t finance him, he unloaded the cars right there on the factory grounds. Tough guys from the Urals showed up and stripped him completely naked as compensation for his human stupidity.

He’s the coolest businessman I’ve met in the North.

Is the flying shop helicopter still operating? I think so. If not that pilot, then another one. It’s like an air taxi with delivery to any distance — pizza, sushi, everything we have in any city. Just with extra zeros on the price.

The tundra isn’t just reindeer, a chum tent, a chum worker wife, and kids. It’s sleds, snowmobiles, boats, and boat motors. There are reindeer sled races, jumping over sleds. Their own tundra heroes who are known for thousands of kilometers. And the helicopter that brings treats to the kids.

I was surprised to learn that a chum costs 3 million rubles, and people buy it like an apartment — on mortgage. If I were the state, I’d give young tundra residents one for free as a wedding gift.

Someday they’ll put up a monument to this helicopter in the tundra — as a symbol of the era of developed capitalism in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

Chapter 87.Baby

The teaching of the Great Self-Experimenter Porfiry Ivanov, I consider it the Russian yoga of Our Time.

1. Bathe in cold water twice a day, so that it feels good to you. Bathe wherever you can: in a lake, river, bathtub, take a shower or pour water over yourself. These are your conditions. Finish any hot bathing with cold.

You start in the bathtub and gradually move to nature.

2. Before bathing or after it — and if possible, together with it — go out into nature, stand barefoot on the ground, and in winter on snow for at least 1-2 minutes. Inhale air through your mouth several times and mentally wish health to yourself and to all people.

- On the first breath-exhalation, ask health for yourself; on the second, for your family and loved ones; on the third, for all people on Earth — and without exhaling, pour water over your head.

3. Do not consume alcohol and do not smoke.

Not a drop of beer or anything else.

4. Try to go without food at least once a week, from Friday 6-8 PM until Sunday 12 PM. This is your achievement and your peace. If it’s hard, hold it for at least a day.

One day of dry fasting equals two days on water.

5. At 12 o’clock on Sunday, go out into nature barefoot, breathe and think several times as described above. This is a holiday for your body. After that, you can eat whatever you like.

You’ve endured the fast, and a new week of your life begins.

6. Love the nature around you. Don’t spit around… Get used to this — it’s your health.

Gradually you begin to understand that this is also important.

7. Greet everyone everywhere, especially elderly people. If you want health for yourself — greet everyone.

You can do it mentally. Some strangers may think you’re crazy. But you’re simply wishing them health.

8. Help people in any way you can, especially the sick, the poor, the offended, those in need. Do it with joy. Respond to their need with your soul and heart…

This doesn’t mean you give away everything you have. Give a hungry person half a loaf of bread and see if he eats it or throws it in the trash.

9. Overcome greed, laziness, self-satisfaction, acquisitiveness, fear, hypocrisy, and pride in yourself. Believe in people and love them. Don’t speak unfairly about them and don’t take unkind opinions about them to heart.

This is important — the struggle with yourself.

10. Free your head from thoughts about illnesses, ailments, and death. This is your victory.

Faith must defeat illness together, against all logic. This is very important.

11. Don’t separate thought from deed. You read it — good! But the most important thing is to do it!

Embodying everything you’ve conceived is important.

12. Tell and pass on the experience of this practice, but don’t boast or elevate yourself because of it.

This is the hardest part — spreading the teaching to the masses.

Be humble.

The teaching works, I’ve tested it on my own experience. You have to follow all the points, and then a miracle happens. Grandpa was right — the main thing is patience.

In the first spring, your feet get covered in ulcers and it’s very hard to walk — you cannot stop the practice. In summer, pouring cold water is many times harder than in winter. When you complete a full yearly cycle, a feeling of pleasure appears. You start sleeping very little — 4-5 hours is enough, and you have no dreams at night. Your appetite becomes excellent. Fat tissue disappears, only muscles remain. Memory improves, all organs work like clockwork.

Chapter 88 .Tank driver

My uncle, my father's younger brother, served as a tanker in Hungary on a T-34 during the events when the uprising of the civilian population was provoked and the Soviet Army entered Budapest.

He remembered how, at a military tank firing range, they shot at a Tiger standing on a hill. The gunner fired from different positions — under the turret, straight into the front armor, from the side, into the tracks, and from behind. The shells ricocheted. Only when they got closer than five hundred meters did the shells start to do real damage.

At the same time, the Tiger could hit a T-34 from twelve hundred meters. The Tiger at that time was like a six-hundred Mercedes compared to a T-34, which was like a Zhiguli Kopeika. The barrel was purged of gases, the spent shell casing was ejected from the turret. The turret had spacious interior. It was easy to get out if it caught fire. After five or seven shots in the T-34's turret, it became impossible to breathe because of the gas buildup. In a head-on fight, the crew often didn't even manage to get off a second shot.

The Tiger, thanks to its weight, could move without problems in dry weather, but snow, mud, and swamps were its doom. The T-34 handled those conditions perfectly. That's why by the end of the war, Tigers mostly worked from ambush.

Even if a T-34's crew was killed, practically the same evening they would drag it out from no-man's land. They'd set up a hoist between two trees, turn the turret aside, pull out the broken engine, put in a new one, change the gun barrel if it was damaged, weld up the holes, remove the remains of the dead crew, put four new tankers in front of the tank — and by morning it was back in battle.

A knocked-out Tiger was dragged out with special evacuation tractors and taken to the railway station. Then it was sent to a repair plant in the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, or Belarus. There it was repaired, and only then sent back to the front by train. At least two or three weeks. Partisan attacks sometimes put an end to that too — they'd derail the whole train.

The Germans did create special teams that blew up our T-34s that could still be repaired. That's why there's so much arguing about the number of Tigers and T-34s knocked out at Prokhorovka. The Germans pulled out almost all of theirs, while our damaged ones were finished off by those special teams and left in the field. That's where the legend comes from that they won that battle.

My uncle didn't talk about what happened on the streets of Budapest. But it wasn't a fight against unarmed Hungarian civilians. There were Panzerfausts, bursts of automatic fire, Molotov cocktails, sabotage on the railways — they derailed a train full of demobilized soldiers. This coup was prepared in advance and was doomed from the first hour. They just needed a historical picture: a Russian soldier suppressing an uprising.

They were facing a regular army. It was given an order, and it carried it out.

After the army, my uncle became an oil worker and worked as a derrick hand in well servicing. All his life he did hard men's work. He loved fishing in his free time on any nearby body of water.

Time spent fishing doesn't count in life's stopwatch.

Chapter 89.Wholesale Base

"After finishing school, I worked as an operator of a 200-ton refrigeration unit. I completed six-month courses at the city dairy plant.

My first job and first impressions. A month passed, and the small team at the inter-district base decided to celebrate my success according to tradition. They sent me to the wine shop run by the perpetually drunk Mikhalych. They gave me four 700 ml bottles of good vintage wine.

Every week, 60-ton wine tankers arrived here from the Caucasus. This was the source of wine in every sense. Bottles were constantly clinking, and women on the line were pouring wine.

As soon as I tried to leave the shop with the wine, Mikhalych stopped me and demanded I fill a 300 ml mug. I did. 'And remember, young man, I'm not an alcoholic – but I'll always drink with the team,' said the technical director of the wine bottling shop. Meanwhile, I pointed to the line where he could always grab a bottle, which made him grimace.

They celebrated me, and chuckled that Mikhalych had shortchanged the team again.

My first salary was 62 rubles. When I brought it home, my mom greeted me like an adult and offered to buy something for myself. I said it goes into the family pot – I eat the same as my brothers. It was nice for mom and dad. I had become an adult who could earn money. That's a really important moment, when you grow up.

At work, there were shifts and temperature checks.

Mikhalych was a symbol of the era. He wore a tattered robe with pliers, screwdrivers, and a hammer hanging from rubber bands. He'd circle around the base looking for adventures. Sometimes his route would cross the director's, and an interesting dialogue would begin. Both were tipsy. Still makes me laugh to tears.

'What are you doing, Mikhalych?' the director would say. Mikhalych would frantically look for a nail sticking out of the warehouse wall. 'Working,' he'd answer, and start hammering it furiously. Then, to continue their delicate state and conversation, they'd retreat to the wine shop. A review of the strategic facility would take place. Afterward, the director's driver would hoist him onto his shoulder, carefully carry him to the official car, and drive him home.

Porters in the shops worked on pallets, loading goods for rural stores. Loaders unloaded railcars. I saw this every day. The base was packed to the ceiling with goods, while stores were mostly empty. Everything that wasn't in stores was in warehouses.

Naturally, everyone who ate well hung around here. Ham, balyk, all kinds of fish, black caviar, red caviar, and overseas eggplant caviar. This was supposedly a privilege in the distribution of goods in the USSR. Today you can buy all this in any supermarket – you just need decent money. Back then, money meant nothing. Only a strictly regulated pyramid of official positions mattered.

The Ors and inter-district bases across the country served the same function as Yeliseyevsky Store No. 1 in Moscow, where Brezhnev's daughter Galina shopped. There weren't enough goods for everyone in the USSR, there were no ration cards – just under-the-counter distribution. And I, just starting to live, saw all this with my own eyes.

When I listened to Arkady Raikin's monologue about 'deficit,' I'd seen it all in real life. Now it's time – the head of the shoe department warehouse is coming, and we're giving him the finger. White top, black bottom – we have it. Black top, white bottom – we have it.

Naturally, all these facilities gradually died out. They stand like monuments to that distant sausage era of underdeveloped commodity shortage. Yes, it really was like that. Now in the capitals there are logistics bases of 200 hectares where trucks, by computer order, deliver everything to supermarkets. And we fill our home fridges with carts according to our income.

Back then, abundance was in my 200-ton base refrigerator. But at home in the apartment, it was modest. Still, people somehow managed to stock up. For New Year's, everyone had a full table despite the shortage. Where it came from – that's a military secret of every family."

Chapter 90 .Immigration

"Everyone who lives in Russia, and even those who lived in the USSR, has thought about emigration at some point in their life. Not everyone, but most people have had this thought. Especially during Gorbachev’s time before the collapse of the USSR. When the Union was falling apart, about twenty million people left for wherever their eyes led them, all over the world. You can hear Russian spoken in almost any country.

About two million eight hundred thousand people left the USSR for Israel. One million eight hundred thousand basically adapted and settled in. But some were left behind. These former citizens stay silent like partisans. A woman who flew there with three children told me about it. As soon as she deposited fifty-two thousand dollars into an account that she wasn’t allowed to withdraw from, they forgot about her the very next day.

I also got the urge to leave when I was around forty-two. I studied English, consulted with people, checked every website I could find, watched YouTube videos that lured people in, and researched my potential future home in Calgary, Canada. It’s like catching a cold — you get infected with the idea of this phantom future and go on an adventure. The psychological advertising from these countries is very well done — they make you feel like they’re waiting for you. It captivates many people, and the spirit of adventure and thrill pushes them to set off into the unknown.

Emigrant paratroopers come in all types: with a golden parachute, with a modest one, or without any parachute and just five dollars in their pocket. The main thing any emigrant says is that everything is wonderful for them. They tell relatives, friends, brothers and sisters — they can’t admit they made the biggest mistake of their life. For many, there’s no going back.

For me, Alex Brezhnev on YouTube is the perfect example of someone who answered all the questions about emigration. He lived in his car for twenty years without buying an apartment in Toronto, and for over ten years he’s been regularly posting videos about life in Canada and the USA.

I didn’t want to become another janitor, security guard, watchman, or loader. The main thing waiting for an emigrant is a change in status. The higher your education and experience, the more painful the experience is for you.

I got over this sickness and don’t regret it. The country fell to its knees in front of me, and I watched it slowly rise back to its feet. Many people who left are now coming full circle after twenty years and returning. If there was a chance to fly to Mars, many would go there too. We, former citizens of the USSR and Russia, are big adventurers and risk-takers. That’s why many Americans, Canadians, Germans, and other nations look at us with admiration. The 'Russian Mafia' isn’t just about gangsters — we all fit that bold standard. When someone tries to rob us in a dark alley with a tiny penknife for twenty dollars, our reflexes almost turn the guy into a disabled person. That’s the nature of anyone who grew up in Russia.

I think those twenty million emigrants will return. And from Mars too, after living there a while. Still, it’s better at home. Welcome back to all the wanderers who want to return home.

As for me, I never left. I’ve been building Russia all these years, and I’ve made my small contribution. Live and prosper, Russia, in spite of all the devils who dream of destroying it."

Chapter 91.Sour cream

"There was a ritual in every family — a glass of real sour cream for lunch. It was sold by the liter, there were no packages back then. It was my job to go to the glass-store, stand in a small line, and buy it. Mom would give me money, a jar, and a bag. I had to go every two days.

One time I had an idea and decided to buy three liters of sour cream. I paid seven rubles twenty kopecks and brought it home. Mom wasn’t thrilled. Half of it went for pancakes. Those three liters of real sour cream stayed in my memory. Not every businessman today can say he can buy three liters of sour cream, but I could as a kid.

Of course they can buy the palm oil surrogate, but it’s not the same.

When I was a student, I had to load cheese for Afghanistan at the dairy plant, and we saw the entire production process. That’s where I met technologist Natalya — she ran the shop that produced sour cream and cheese.

Years later I ran into her on a train. We rode together to Nizhnevartovsk — she was going to visit her sister. She told me a lot. Today, according to Soviet standards, a 200-gram pack of butter would cost at least 720 rubles. Twenty percent of it is raw material — milk — and the rest is palm oil. The same goes for sour cream, cheese, and other dairy delights. She told me that as a cheesemaker, she’s ashamed.

So if someone buys a three-liter jar of sour cream, it doesn’t count in a bet with me. They’d have to buy fifteen liters of the surrogate product.

Dairy products are health and longevity. We can’t have balanced nutrition without them. The time for experimenting with food on Russians is over — it’s time to bring order to this.

The number of cows has dropped several times since Soviet times, so the amount of milk produced has also decreased. Less raw material means less milk in the final product. Palm oil appears on the horizon. The main supplier is Indonesia. They bring it in tankers to Novorossiysk, then transport it across Russia in silver MAN barrels, and they stand in front of the gates of dairy plants. How much ends up in the sour cream, butter, and cheese is decided by the Technologist — the God of Cheesemaking — on the separate territory of the plant.

There’s also the state of Big Sovkhoz, headed by Batka, a very strong manager and former chairman of a sovkhoz. Under him, dairy products are on the shelves in every store in Russia. Does Belarus indulge in palm oil? Not as much as Russia, but greed for higher profits always wins. At first, they produced excellent products according to USSR GOST standards.

It’s a remnant of the Union. Under Lukashenko, not a single sovkhoz went bankrupt. They still operate and produce roughly the same volumes as in the USSR.

Prices for real village sour cream are steep. And even there, palm oil technology has reached them. Finding real sour cream from actual cows is difficult.

When I saw a video of some substance from China undergoing a chemical reaction and turning into a bucket of milk, I understood why milk yields are rising while actual output is falling. It’s like a circus — the farmer can be a magician. You realize this product exists in Russia, and you can only tell real milk from surrogate in a lab. This is a question of our health. And most importantly, it’s a matter of state control.

So a three-liter jar of sour cream is no longer an achievable dream in our time. It’s already a legend, and I’m its witness."

Chapter 92. Sausage

"In Soviet times, sausage was strictly according to GOST and had a very attractive smell. Everyone remembers that smell from the Moscow commuter trains — people would travel 300 kilometers from all around Moscow to buy it in the capital of the USSR. We also had trouble getting it.

I was ten years old and begged my mom to try to buy some sausage. She tried to talk me out of it, but I didn’t understand the whole situation and kept insisting.

At five in the morning we came to the store and stood in line in the dark until it opened. Then at seven o’clock mom left for work, I stayed in the queue. Later my older brother came, then my middle brother, and we took turns holding the spot all day.

Evening came, and at half past seven we finally bought five kilograms of sausage as a family of five and went home. Mom cut me a piece and offered me a taste. I refused. The whole family looked at me in surprise.

I was in shock from the result. To buy this sausage, the five of us had basically lost one full day of our lives. I swore to my mom that I would never stand in line again. And I still don’t, on principle.

Today, hundreds of varieties of sausage don’t bring any joy. This is the era of surrogate sausage. From one kilogram of meat they make a hundred kilograms of sausages. It’s all smell and nothing else — 99 kilograms of fillers.

When I was working with my brother in the Belgorod region, I met a Russian German who had come from Germany. He built a pig farm with his own money using German technology. When the complex reached full capacity, he went to Moscow to find a sausage factory that would buy his pork.

He visited all the factories in Moscow. Everyone smiled mysteriously at him and refused. The volume was decent, the price was attractive. They didn’t laugh at him, but they gave no explanation why.

Finally, the last one couldn’t hold back and took him to the warehouse. There stood blue two-hundred-liter barrels. He opened one and showed what was inside. All over Europe he had a network that bought up all the pâté a week before expiration for pennies. They rolled it into barrels, and it went by trucks to factories in Russia.

Why buy meat in Russia when you can buy raw material that replaces it for 10% of the cost? Then you add lard, hooves, and skins from pork hams. You get a mass from which you can produce sausages by adding soy.

My German was shocked. But he wasn’t used to giving up, so he built his own sausage factory. Then he opened a chain of small shops in Moscow. Girls from his own farm started coming to Moscow on rotation; he rented apartments for them.

He created a closed-loop production: meat — sausage — sales. And everything worked out for him. Just God forbid you deal with the local bloodsuckers.

He also told me about kangaroo meat. After the war ended in 1945, Stalin ordered the creation of a large strategic reserve of meat, stew, and other canned goods. The USSR bought a huge amount of kangaroo meat in carcasses, and all of it hung in special storage facilities until the 90s — without oxygen and at low temperatures.

Some smart guy in the 90s suggested using all this meat for sausage. This intervention lasted three years. And if someone asks whether you ate kangaroo meat, and you want to say no — I think everyone ate it. It’s just that 99% didn’t know.

The soy they add to sausage isn’t as harmless as it seems. A fourth-year student at a St. Petersburg university did an experiment on rats, feeding them soy beans. The result: it sterilizes males. By the fourth generation they become eunuchs.

So when you’re chewing on some sausage, sometimes think about that.

As for me, I bought a ham maker. I take meat, cut it into small pieces, add spices and gelatin, put it in a chicken boiling bag and into the ham maker. Or even better — take the meat, roll it with spices and bake it in the oven.

It gives that same smell of childhood sausage, for which we had to give up one day of our lives. But I couldn’t even eat it back then.

That’s the sausage story. Some people even emigrated for it when the country collapsed. Sausage emigration."

Chapter 93. Bread

"I already wrote about the bread my grandmother baked in cast-iron pots using hop sourdough when I was a child. You can’t buy bread like that in a store. We eat it almost every day, and our health depends on its quality.

When they tell me that 30–50 million tons of grain were sold through Taganrog, I understand it wasn’t the worst grain — it was the highest quality.

The quality of bread depends on the quality of the flour. If it’s made from fodder varieties with low gluten, it’s no surprise that the shelves are full of foam bread. Turkish yeast will raise any dough.

Back in 1942, Goebbels said that if they didn’t win the war, the yeast Germany was introducing through Turkey would defeat the Russians. Hop sourdough raises bread overnight, while Turkish yeast does it in just a few hours. The baker’s laziness won.

In the North I once met a baker from Tajikistan — a seventh-generation baker. His bread was amazing and had an unforgettable taste without any flavor enhancers or super-yeasts. Even the pilot who flew in with a shift from Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan bought his bread. The stewardess would come on an Ikarus bus and buy a whole tray for the entire TU crew. They didn’t buy bread at home. The commander’s wife tried it once and asked her husband to buy that bread in Pionerny once a week.

I was curious why his bread always turned out so wonderful. He was Muslim and would always read verses from the Quran before starting work. After mixing different types of flour — from Altai, Kuban, Orenburg, Rostov, Omsk, and Tatarstan — in a large mixer, he would blend the flour even longer in a blender. Then he’d add all the ingredients, put the dough into forms by hand, cover it with a towel, and wait for it to rise.

When baked, his loaves would rise almost twice in size. After taking them out, he’d cover them with a wet towel and leave the bread for a full day to finish. When you cut it, it had a texture with big airy bubbles. The bread didn’t go stale. Everyone ate it with pleasure. His replacement did everything the same, but the bread never turned out as good. The Tajik’s bread had soul and melted in your mouth.

He spoke with pride about his ancestors — they were all bakers, respected people. His son and grandson would also bake bread, he dreamed of continuing his beloved craft.

Unfortunately, after that period I never met such a professional or tasted bread like that again. I had to order it from the city by helicopter or when a work car went to the store.

To check the quality of bread, you can wrap a small piece in a plastic bag and leave it in the sun. It will turn green and grow mold.

The same thing happens inside our intestines.

The bread of my

Chapter 94. Fish Day

"In Soviet times, every week there was a Fish Day — once a week in all restaurants, canteens, cafés, and in many families at home. We were supposed to eat fish regularly — it's good for the brain and the whole body. Now a kilogram of fish costs almost as much as a kilogram of meat, sometimes two or three times more.

Fish starts its journey to our table from the sea, caught by fishing trawlers. When the Baltic states and Ukraine separated, Russia lost almost all of its fishing fleets and trawlers, except for those in the Murmansk, Kamchatka, and Sakhalin regions.

Today, the main supplier of fish in Russian stores is Belarus, which provides about a fifth of all processed fish.

In Soviet times, thousands of trawlers plowed the oceans and seas — off the coasts of Africa and South America, near Iceland and Svalbard, in the Indian Ocean and off Madagascar. Our sailors were everywhere. In all the countries of the Mediterranean, on the Iberian Peninsula, in Britain and Ireland, the Netherlands and Denmark — everywhere you could find fish caught by Soviet sailors on the shelves.

Currency made fish cheaper already inside the USSR. That's why fish prices started at 10 kopecks, and the most expensive raw fish was 1 ruble 50 kopecks. Pollock cost 40 kopecks, and my classmate ate it almost every day — his family didn't have money for meat. His mother raised three kids alone. He was given meal vouchers, and we classmates would go with him to have lunch at the canteen next to the school for 35 kopecks.

Once a week there was always a Fish Day — at school, in any canteen, and at home mom would cook fish for the main course. It was a ritual, like a nationwide food religion.

In the summer, we boys were always fishing. With the older guys from the yard, we'd go fishing on the nearest rivers, spending the night, taking the commuter train. Tent, campfire, fishing, fish soup in the evening, overnight stay and stories all night long. All of that existed.

In the North it's not fishing anymore — it's industry. Large pike were cleaned, the fillets were ground into mince with lard, and fish cutlets were made. After freezing, you could always have a fish day.

Today Russians have fish on their table, but that cult-like reverence is gone. Some people swallow capsules with vitamins and phosphorus, some eat nelma or trout, but it's still expensive. That old system no longer exists.

Even in the North, not everyone eats stroganina from sterlet or nelma. There's caviar for New Year — both red and black, plus overseas eggplant caviar.

They're trying to bring back Fish Day for Russians now, but for that they need to restore the per capita supply of fish to stores. That requires state subsidies. The sea has also become poorer in fish.

The oceans are polluted with plastic that breaks down and ends up in fish. By eating it, we introduce that plastic into our own bodies. We're in a closed loop of our civilization. We pollute the ocean, and the ocean returns it all to us through fish.

You sometimes see fresh fish in ice in supermarkets. If it doesn't sell, it goes into canned goods that aren't the freshest. The best canned fish aren't made in coastal cities. The highest quality ones are produced at sea on floating fish-processing factories from freshly caught fish.

Each of us is now searching for fish delicacies on our own and playing this fish roulette. After working as a refrigeration operator after tenth grade, I learned pretty well what you can eat and what you can't. There were always 200 tons of fish from all over the world, and it was always fresh.

So I suggest we return to this good tradition: fish on the table every Thursday — Fish Day. For the phosphorus and vitamins."

Chapter 95. Polyglot

"On the North I met an amazing man who knew 18 languages and could easily speak them in conversation. Anatoly Vasilyevich was a remarkable person, full of energy, and his aura affected everyone who spoke with him.

During the war, as a ten-year-old boy, he was evacuated from Kharkov to Bashkiria. His parents died during a bombing. He was left alone. They brought him to a Mordovian village. Speaking Ukrainian and Russian, he learned Mordovian in two months. Then they moved him to a Chuvash village, and in three weeks he was already speaking Chuvash. After that came Tatar and Bashkir.

In school he mastered English, and optionally German, French, and Latin. After finishing school in Bashkiria, he entered the oil institute. He learned Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, and Hebrew.

He wanted to speak 18 languages like Lenin. Though many native speakers didn’t understand what Vladimir Ilyich was actually saying.

Anatoly Vasilyevich spoke fluently using everyday slang, within about 3000 words.

For example, I’d walk into his office, he’d greet me in Tatar, and we’d have a nice conversation. Then the phone would ring from Hamburg, and he’d switch to perfect German without any accent and continue the conversation. When a girl brought him documents, he’d speak Russian. It was constant language practice, and he did this every day for the last fifty years. With Ukrainians he spoke Ukrainian, and everyone noted how pleasant it was to talk to him.

When I asked how he switched from one language to another, he said he had a kind of switch in his head that he flipped automatically.

I myself spent seven years growing up in a village with my grandmother. Everyone around me spoke Tatar. By June I would forget Russian, and by September 1st I could barely speak it. It took me a whole week to slowly recover the language.

With Anatoly Vasilyevich, it happened in seconds — sometimes three languages in one day. It was unusual and incredible.

Tibetan monks have a practice where a lama speaks to someone in their native language without ever learning it. He enters a state where he connects to the universal mind, and from the first phrase the person says, he automatically switches to their language.

Anatoly Vasilyevich learned every language diligently and for a long time. Constant practice strengthened his skills, and I think some kind of connection to a higher database occurred. In my life, I’ve never met another person like him.

In Soviet times he was the secretary of the CPSU Party organization at NGDU “Noyabrskneftegaz.” From his example, I can say they didn’t keep fools in the ranks back then. It was always interesting with him. He worked at the NIPINN G research institute as deputy director for scientific work.

He worked on scientific topics in the oil industry that only three or four people in the country truly understood. A frequent guest in his office was the head of the research institute from Minsk. When Berezovsky and Abramovich appeared on the horizon, they cut off the institute’s funding.

So Anatoly Vasilyevich moved to Moscow. Our paths diverged. Now the internet can give information about any person, especially if they’re no longer alive. He passed away in 2012. All his private enterprises were closed, and he was removed from tax registration. It’s a shame such a unique person is gone. I remember him often.

There are people who leave a good, unforgettable mark on our lives. He was 80 years old when he passed — exactly according to Herodotus. Every twenty years is a lived period. Women are supposed to live another 10 years — nature rewarded them for giving birth to a child conceived in love."

Chapter 96. Inner Picture of the World

"Can you share candid memories and moments from your life these days? I’ve found the answer to this question for myself.

Every chapter went through a test — through comments from fellow authors who were writing their own books. I felt uncomfortable distracting them from their work. The book was conceived as a flash drive of my memory. I’m 60 years old — according to Herodotus, three-quarters of my life is behind me. I have a rough idea of what I’ll be like in another twenty years.

We are born almost completely free of atherosclerosis, and then throughout our entire lives we compete with it as it tries to damage every organ. The main thing that suffers is our brain, and as a result, memory fades.

I grew up on books like Homer’s *Iliad*, *Myths of Ancient Greece*, *The Argonauts*, Cicero’s *Letters*, and Plutarch’s works. Books like Radishchev’s *Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow* especially amaze me — a writer of just one book. Catherine the Great happened to read it, and he was put in chains and left to rot in exile. A nobleman who didn’t invent anything — he simply described what he saw from his carriage window. He couldn’t have written something like that. Only Potemkin villages.

Shalamov’s *Kolyma Stories* — twenty-five years in chains, then released and wrote everything he saw, giving an entire era its diagnosis. Practically a writer of one book.

Of course, I don’t claim to stand alongside them. Time will show what came of it. It usually takes 7–10 years. I don’t think I’ll face chains or exile — the state probably won’t even notice what I’ve written. To be a witness of your own time and describe everything you see is not given to everyone. Maybe I didn’t succeed either. At least I made the attempt. I preserved my memories of the interesting moments in my life.

I’ll print 30 copies and give them to all the people who appear in my memory. A trace will remain in my life and theirs. Books don’t burn. I know that for sure on the internet.

There have already been reviews. Youth and lack of life experience have already declared that I’m writing crap. I disagree. For my first book, I deliberately chose memoirs.

Of course not everything is described — otherwise it would have turned into *One Thousand and One Nights*. Like Baron Munchausen — at first he wrote the truth, or close to it. But when they accused him of making everything up, he gave in and started fantasizing.

My good friend sent me his feedback, and it was like balm to my ears:

'This is your WKM — your inner picture of the world. This is how you think and see.

You don’t argue with the author.

The most important thing is that you enjoy sharing it.

The image builds as you read, and I liked that it’s not just shift work stories. There are many historical events that we’ve already started to forget. There’s nature, animals, birds that I love.

And healthy thinking and interesting, unforgettable meetings.

I read it with pleasure and will share it with our shift workers and former colleagues.'

In the comments, I intuitively felt that many people also have things to remember. Write — maybe for yourself, not for the public. Life goes on, memory fades. What remains is a flash drive of memory.

The main thing is probably to leave a little unsaid. Nowadays people hardly read. Very many just listen through a player in the car or with headphones on their smartphone. That’s why short stories are an attempt to find my reader. I’m always surprised when someone at 30 years old says they haven’t read a single book. They say it’s not interesting and not necessary. The computer, smartphone, and tablet have won.

Superficial study of the world through gadgets has led to information entering the head and immediately flying out. People appear who are like Google intellectuals or walking Wikipedia. It’s as if there’s a hole drilled in the back of their skull for USB, and they insert a memory flash drive, periodically pulling it out. And the brain erases everything.

The book is finished. Maybe this will be my only book — as a person who tried to write one."