I will take you to the tundra,” promises Nikolai, who seems to pine for the treeless lands of his Chukotka even when he is there. He was advertising for fellow Chukchis to get in touch at the Doski.ru classified site.
Nikolai has his own blog,
Nikopo.blogspot.com, where he writes of life in Chukotka. There is a welcome absence of Roman Abramovich, the money-bags former governor of the land, which as one joke goes the Americans were too mean to buy in the 19th century when they picked up neighboring Alaska for a song.
Instead, it has him sticking up photos of his life working in the far-flung republic. It is often tinged with an aching nostalgia for the hard life of his younger years, a life where the weather was worse, the flowers prettier, the winters longer and the day as dark as the night. There are also some rather odd paid blogs, such as the one for a device that tests for both herpes and chlamydia.
The photos of the 1980s could be from any decade previous to that one; tightly wrapped workers, large, strong faces, few smiles or poses in sight. Not one person posing in skimpy clothes by the kids’ swings, although it may have just been too cold for that.
Then again there are beautiful photos of huge flowers blooming in the brief and bright summer months — or is it month?
Making huge assumptions, Nikolai is a worker who went to Chukotka rather than a native Chukchi. He travels a lot, installing antennas in the region.
“At Anadyr airport there is that feeling that you know everyone, not that they are all from one village but as if all from one family. Have you had such a feeling?” he asks, painting a rosy glow almost unrecognizable to anyone who has been to a provincial airport.
He tells of those who spread songs about Chukotka around the Soviet Union, quoting a song that talks of different people who came to the region. The first verse goes something like this: Some ran from fate, money brought them here, some were looking for a fog to hide in, the weak returned and a special people were formed.
A bear comes knocking, metaphorically, at his door, only to be scared away by his dogs barking. He came back the next day, but “the dogs were in place and did not let the bear get their food,” he writes.
“Minus 30 is not minus 40,” he writes proudly of the Chukotkan winter posting a series of photos of the Anadyr in the relative warmth of minus 30 degrees Celsius, where daylight is still evident before the winter dark.
Nonetheless, according to the blog’s temperature application, it is a balmy minus 18 C in Anadyr on Thursday.
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