Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 10 – One of the most powerfully affecting novels of the last decades
of Soviet power was Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell
to Matyora, the story of villagers facing the loss of their small
motherland because of a new hydro-electric dam. Many Russians viewed it as a metonym
for their own existence.
But
as important as that novel was, few asked the obvious question it posed: what
was going to happen to those forced to leave their homes? How would they live?
What would they remember? And what difference would their experiences make for
the way they would lead their lives or try to convince others to live theirs?
Those
questions have now been posed by Svetlana Khustik of Radio Svoboda’s Sibreal
portal to a group of real life survivors of a similar tragedy, the destruction
of their villages as a result of the Boguchany hydro-electric dam in Siberia
which was completed only three years ago (sibreal.org/a/29560666.html).
Each year, the journalist reports, people
from the dozens villages that were destroyed by the waters behind the dam come
together to renew their ties and remember the past – and to share their grief
about an entire world that has been taken from them. Their stories tear at the heart just as much
as those of the characters in Rasputin’s novel.
Nikolay Popov, one of the victims of
this march of progress, recalls that the resettlement operation was organized
in a horrific way. “People had lived in one village, made friends, and shared a
life together,and then they were resettled far apart.” That wwas by design, he
suggests, because “officials feared that if all those who suffered were
together, they would rise up.”
In place of their houses, they were
given tinny apartments. They were forced to throw away almost all they
possessed. In the villages before the flood, Popov says, there remaned “mountains
of tractors and motorcycles. I consider that this was fascism of the most complete
kind.”
He says that each year he travels by
boat over the place his village once was and sees that the despoliation has
spread. Now, his land has been destroyed not only by the flooding but by
Chinese firms coming in and taking the lumber from the banks of the
reservoir. Each trip is hard to bear.
“After the authorities threw out the
people, they organized the move of the cemeteries. If the relatives put in a
declaration, the graves were dug up and shifted to Kodinsk. I didn’t see this
but those who did say that they are afraid even to speak of it. It was an
action not for the weak of nerves.” Some priests urged people to leave the
graves where they had been.
According to Popov, “this is not our
hydro-electric station. Today, there is no work in Kopinsk.” What are we to do?
People say that a lot of power is being generated by the three power stations,
but this hasn’t helped any of those who have lost their homes. And there are
rumors that the whole thing was simply “an experiment.”
Tamara Turova, another victim of
this “progress,” was one of the last to leave. She watched officials burn down the
houses and other buildings in her village. “I did not see the war, but at a certain
moment, it seemed to me that this is what it must have looked like. I walked
along the street, and everything was burning on both sides of me.”
“When they burned our house, we couldn’t
watch,” she continues. Her neighbor couldn’t take it, ran back into his own
house, and was burned alive. “We left in
a column. Along the road, we passed the cemetery and said goodbye to the graves
of oour relatives. My adult sons couldn’t hold back their tears. We received a
one-room apartment in Sosnovoborsk” but no jobs.
And Elena Kalinina, a longtime
teacher and head of the council of one of the villages that was drowned, said
the entire tragedy had been a slow-moving one. Plans for the reservoir were
announced in 1974, and people lived in fear ever after that. They kept being told the dam would be
completed “soon” but “soon” turned into decades. Now everything is gone.
Andrey Grishakov, a documentary film
maker who has tried to record this tragedy, says he believes it is important to
know and remember about all of this. “In
Soviet times, one couldn’t talk about negative things. Now, the official press tries
to play them down.” He says he found out about the flooded villages only by complete
accident.
“In our time, when the construction
of the station was completed,” he says, “I heard that the television was paid
not to mention this on the air. I am certain that today, 80 perecent of the population
of Krasnoyarsk Kray doesn’t know” what happened or why. That is something art if not journalism must
try to rectify.
“I have become a completely
different person,” he says, as a result of his contacts with the people flooded
out. I suddenly began to be interested in my own roots and the history of my
family … Having become acquainted with the Angara people, I came to understand
what a family is and how valuable it and the connections between the
generations are.”
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