Movement is most interesting in a journey. On the move, I feel like I am in between worlds which opens the new possibilities; I have departed, but I did not arrive. In this gap, the openings become available that make one measure ready assumptions against the shifting backdrop of reality.
The main location of my research is the settlement situated on the shore of the Angara River called Anosovo. In its current form, it was brought to life by the great industrial transformations in the region--the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric dam. The previous Anosovo, along with several villages surrounding it, of which Yandi (Янды) was the oldest and the biggest, was transported to the higher ground from the zone of flood. Anosovo knew better times; in the 1970s, Anosovo had a population exceeding 2,000. Now, the population is about 500 people. A disturbing trend; since 2006, I observed the population's decline. If when I visited the village in 2006 for the first time, I was informed that 700 people live here, in 2016 it was 600; in 2018, I find it on the 500 mark.
The main paradox of the place is that even though in its current form it emerged as the result of the construction of a mighty hydroelectric dam, it has never known central electricity, and into the current day it is powered by diesel engine.
One of the conditions of living in Anosovo that heavily contributes to the disturbing trend, is not as much the remoteness of the place as the difficulty to reach it. A part of the land road from Anosovo to the village of Mooia (Муя), ninety kilometers (approximately sixty miles), is in a particularly devastated state. The road had been covered with gravel at some point in history, when the rich lespromkhoz (state-owned wood collecting farm) Yegorovsky was the main economic entity and job provider in vicinity.
The main location of my research is the settlement situated on the shore of the Angara River called Anosovo. In its current form, it was brought to life by the great industrial transformations in the region--the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric dam. The previous Anosovo, along with several villages surrounding it, of which Yandi (Янды) was the oldest and the biggest, was transported to the higher ground from the zone of flood. Anosovo knew better times; in the 1970s, Anosovo had a population exceeding 2,000. Now, the population is about 500 people. A disturbing trend; since 2006, I observed the population's decline. If when I visited the village in 2006 for the first time, I was informed that 700 people live here, in 2016 it was 600; in 2018, I find it on the 500 mark.
The main paradox of the place is that even though in its current form it emerged as the result of the construction of a mighty hydroelectric dam, it has never known central electricity, and into the current day it is powered by diesel engine.
One of the conditions of living in Anosovo that heavily contributes to the disturbing trend, is not as much the remoteness of the place as the difficulty to reach it. A part of the land road from Anosovo to the village of Mooia (Муя), ninety kilometers (approximately sixty miles), is in a particularly devastated state. The road had been covered with gravel at some point in history, when the rich lespromkhoz (state-owned wood collecting farm) Yegorovsky was the main economic entity and job provider in vicinity.
Anosovian main ground road in the 1970s. Private photo album, courtesy of Elena Faleeva. Obtained by the author in 2017
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Since the 1970s, the main ground Anosovian road connecting the place with the rest of the world is on the stable decline. If there is a stability, it does not look too good in Anosovo since when it comes to the material infrastructure it is a stability of devastation. The road is a big part of what constitutes Anosovo today. Anosovians call their road BAM referring to another ambitious project of the Soviet industrialization, Baikal-Amur Mainlain--the construction that span for decades, required enormous injection of labor, and pierces unimaginable distances of Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, in the map above the Trans-Siberian Railway to the North.
Needless to say, Anosovians are ironic in their use of the abbreviation naming the great railroad project familiar to everyone in Russia as the name for the local land road. What was worthy of such a title is the amount of effort invested into the Anosovo-Mooia road. The condition of the road cost not only nerves, tears, or sweat to those who have to deal with stoppages of flow caused by the infrastructural malfunctioning. To Anosovians, this road cost lives. Its impassibility means the inability of delivering the sick to the hospital, the unattainability of the urgent medical help, births happening on the road, car wreckages with murderous consequences, as well as affect of hopelessness and godforsakenness that these conditions produce. |
Trans-Siberian railway: red; BAM: green. Source
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Failed infrastructure for the extreme exercise of mobility: the road in 2013
In the way Anosovians speak about the road, you would think it is an alive being possessing agency. It can display a favorable attitude towards the travelers, and it can be suddenly hostile. One can "dry the road" (wait until the road is dry after the rain). Stories proliferate: having spent the cold Siberian October night in the car stuck in clay with another pregnant woman, my interlocutor would humor her friend: "Well, I at least went because I had to have the planned screening, and why did you go?"--"I wanted new wallpaper [in the baby bedroom]."
The log darted off and killed the driver as he was trying to refasten the poorly fastened wood; his body lay on the side of the road for more than a day until it was discovered.
In the summer 2018, for two weeks people discussed the news in Anosovo: a 16-ton tank truck with gasoline got stuck. The driver spent several days on the road waiting until another truck passing by could pull it out; if he had opportunities for help, they were not available due to the lack of the tools of communication (no satellite phones for the majority of drivers, and the mobile telephony is not available because of the absence of cell tower).
Without an urgent need, people try to not travel the road alone. They try to make sure someone follows their steps and has the tools necessary to pull out the car. No one travels without the shovel and the axe, the tire jack and the winch strap--and if they do, like I happened to travel once, so much the worse.
The log darted off and killed the driver as he was trying to refasten the poorly fastened wood; his body lay on the side of the road for more than a day until it was discovered.
In the summer 2018, for two weeks people discussed the news in Anosovo: a 16-ton tank truck with gasoline got stuck. The driver spent several days on the road waiting until another truck passing by could pull it out; if he had opportunities for help, they were not available due to the lack of the tools of communication (no satellite phones for the majority of drivers, and the mobile telephony is not available because of the absence of cell tower).
Without an urgent need, people try to not travel the road alone. They try to make sure someone follows their steps and has the tools necessary to pull out the car. No one travels without the shovel and the axe, the tire jack and the winch strap--and if they do, like I happened to travel once, so much the worse.
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Getting into Anosovo. I am traveling with my 9 y.o. child; his voice is in some of the videos
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In all the obvious need of the road, the villagers are not at all times and not entirely on the same page regarding it. There is a party of progressivists, Alexander jokingly explained to me, and the party of obscurantists (mrakobsy). While the progressivists are firmly in favor of the road, mrakobesy, while not being adamantly against it, tend to seek a good side in the current status quo, and ask inquisitorily (like mrakobesy should) whether there is nothing to lose with the acquisition of the road. What if suspicious strangers will appear at the village with the advent of the smooth road?
Much as it is not by any means the main framework in which the road problem is perceived and cast, the analogies are not too far away: in the rich American suburbia houses tend to decline in prices after the bus stops appear in the previously relatively enclosed areas of the growing city. Likewise, in his book Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Brian Larkin describes similar sensibilities (of not wanting strangers in the neighborhood) in the rural areas. |
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Another paradox of Anosovo, in addition to the electricity paradox that I mentioned before, is that in these conditions that seemingly prevent movement and preclude the exercise of mobility, mobility flourishes. Because there is a limited number of goods and services available locally, even most avid champions of the sedentiary lifestyle have to travel in order to obtain things necessary for the living. "They growl and growl that there is no road and you can't go anywhere," says hunter Nikolay, "but all I see is everyone vzhik-vzhik (going back and forth) along this supposedly unpassable road." He's waving a hand rapidly illustrating the speed and frequency with which his neighbors conduct their peregrinations. I am laughing, but I know that several hours spent on the road playing the game of finding the flat rocks, extracting them from one wheel track and transporting into another is not fun, particularly when you do it regularly. Nikolay agrees with my comment: "Transfering stones from one track into another, whoever likes which track best."
Traveling such a road transcends the limitations of driving. It is not driving as much as it is sailing, navigating of the agglomeration of petrified clay blocks and clay blocks smoothed by rains. It becomes a journey of not only surmounting the materiality of the world resisting you going through the space, but a roller-coaster of feeling where you are alternatively joyous and deeply saddened as if you’re waiting for a message but the ones that fall into your box are all the wrong ones. Perhaps, I am asking my co-travelers, we’re in something like an abusive relationship with the Deleuzian single State? "The business is not going to maintain the road here," my interlocutors say referring to the timber enterprise functioning in the region. "This is the task of the state (gosudarstvo)." The palpitation of metal things in the car combines into a symphony of reverberating details each of which continuously repeats its monotonous repertoire of several tunes available to it. At some point each of details will go out of order, or, to be more precise, will flow into the order of different level, into a grandiose disorder of the machine turning into a ghost. Each detail sings about its imminent destruction.
The utopian dreams do not hesitate to make themselves known. The driver, Alexander, recalls his working in a porcelain manufacture as a young man--he suggests we may have smoothed the tracks and exposed them to the flow of fire, transforming the mess into the porcelain road. Nikolay, Anosovian master, carpenter, artist, and inventor shares that as he falls asleep different ideas come to his mind, and one of them is a huge machine with two rotating disks, which would have allowed, had it been in existence, to level the bumpy road. We invent a lot of machines, why not this one? I ask to tell me more about the machine, and Nikolay clarifies, moving his hands in circular motions, one hand towards another: "Strogala bi rovno dorogu" ("It would slice the road evenly [like this]"). Traveling such a road becomes an embodied experience, because there is no way to put the head to rest in the moving car throughout all the ninety kilometers until the relatively smooth road begins near Mooia. It can take a considerable toll on the body of the sick person, the old, the dying, the children.
The utopian dreams do not hesitate to make themselves known. The driver, Alexander, recalls his working in a porcelain manufacture as a young man--he suggests we may have smoothed the tracks and exposed them to the flow of fire, transforming the mess into the porcelain road. Nikolay, Anosovian master, carpenter, artist, and inventor shares that as he falls asleep different ideas come to his mind, and one of them is a huge machine with two rotating disks, which would have allowed, had it been in existence, to level the bumpy road. We invent a lot of machines, why not this one? I ask to tell me more about the machine, and Nikolay clarifies, moving his hands in circular motions, one hand towards another: "Strogala bi rovno dorogu" ("It would slice the road evenly [like this]"). Traveling such a road becomes an embodied experience, because there is no way to put the head to rest in the moving car throughout all the ninety kilometers until the relatively smooth road begins near Mooia. It can take a considerable toll on the body of the sick person, the old, the dying, the children.
To push the car out of the mud with the human force, a piece of thick fabric will come handy: otherwise, the heated metal is too hot to touch with bare hands
While the road unfolds, unravels under struggling wheels, the memories of the submerged villages resurface. The previously existing places are the constant theme reemerging seemingly by itself in conversations, even though I do steer talks to the past whenever it's appropriate, and my interlocutors already know it. They wave in front of me the pictures of Yandi--they are both from there--and they can share only their childhood memories, as in the year of relocation, 1961, one of them was eight years old, another, six. The town of Yandi, submerged by the water (grad, ushedshiy pod vodu), reappears in their tales as a miraculous place: the houses were built out of the dark, silver-black logs (the timber fluffing; the top of the log is covering, over time, with light down glistening like silver); the breathing roofs had gaps through which the sun shed light, but planks nevertheless did not let the rain pour through. Some of the mastery no longer in the everyday use is recreated in the architectural and ethnographic museums Taltsy, Irkutsk, and Angarskaya derevnya (Angara Village), Bratsk.
Not only the houses in these childhood recollections were like houses no longer are--even though some of the buildings were transported from the previous, deluded places onto the new ones and agglomerated into the villages like Anosovo--but the very dust on the road of the Yandi frontier (Yandinsky ostrog) was medicinal. The dust, a delicate powder finely grated by wheels, formed deep layers on the both sides of the road. The sun heated the dust during the summer; tender waves of dust lay glistening. When children cut hands or broke skin on their elbows and knees, they scooped the dust and plastered the wounds with it. "We were afraid of no contagion," Alexander said (Mi ne boyalis nikakikh zarazhenij). Thanks to the salubrious dust, the wounds were encrusted with scabs which fell off quickly revealing the pink, freshly restored skin. I was marveling at this magical world with magical dust as we continued rolling along in the buzz of flies and clouds of dirt in the air that didn’t resemble the miraculous Aesculapian dust at all. The car conditioner couldn’t cool the heated salon, and the windows were down. With this, we finally reached Mooia.
Not only the houses in these childhood recollections were like houses no longer are--even though some of the buildings were transported from the previous, deluded places onto the new ones and agglomerated into the villages like Anosovo--but the very dust on the road of the Yandi frontier (Yandinsky ostrog) was medicinal. The dust, a delicate powder finely grated by wheels, formed deep layers on the both sides of the road. The sun heated the dust during the summer; tender waves of dust lay glistening. When children cut hands or broke skin on their elbows and knees, they scooped the dust and plastered the wounds with it. "We were afraid of no contagion," Alexander said (Mi ne boyalis nikakikh zarazhenij). Thanks to the salubrious dust, the wounds were encrusted with scabs which fell off quickly revealing the pink, freshly restored skin. I was marveling at this magical world with magical dust as we continued rolling along in the buzz of flies and clouds of dirt in the air that didn’t resemble the miraculous Aesculapian dust at all. The car conditioner couldn’t cool the heated salon, and the windows were down. With this, we finally reached Mooia.
The village of Mooia: once the traveler reaches it from Anosovo, the rest of the trip is smooth
The rest of the travel is easy. From Mooia onward. To reach the town of Balagansk, you have to take the ferry; to the town of Ust Uda, another ferry. The only trick is to make it on time to both. In the attempt to gain some time, we used the freight ferry paying the crew 200 rubles. After that, there remains the beeline Ust Uda—Angarsk—Irkutsk. To counter the monotony of the road, Vanya Lavrentyev spared us the disk that he recorded earlier, a grand collection of the unbelievably long new Russian songs each of which excessively detailed some love story, mostly unhappy. I imagined how many hours he spent putting together the endless playlist of endless songs as monotonous as the road itself. During the whole day while our little team was conquering these ninety kilometers, we met only two cars, one oncoming and one catching up on us coming from Anosovo for such was an agreement in case we get stuck and couldn’t rescue ourselves. Until September, one still can use the river tram to return to Anosovo via the Angara River from the town of Balagansk or Ust Uda. In October, the river tram stops going, and Anosovo hushes waiting for the freezing cold
to catch the Angara in ice.
to catch the Angara in ice.