On a recent trip to Russia, Anatol Lieven found himself in Khanti-Mansiisk in Western Siberia. If you have never heard of the place, you are forgiven. However, it is very much worth getting to know since it is the epicenter of Russia’s oil industry.
Last autumn, I found myself by invitation of some very respectable investors in a high-class Moscow night-club shaped like an amphitheatre. The rake-thin, huge-eyed “models” perched in the tiers above me, and under the flashing strobe-lights, adopted in my inebriated imagination the forms of exquisitely beautiful, slightly predatory roosting birds.
My previous, sober after-dinner speech on Russia’s economic prospects to these international investors had been succeeded by a line of can-can dancers clad only in feathers and led by a bear waving a Russian flag.
Reminders of the past
The moment reminded me of a British journalist colleague, who a few years ago wrote that Russia needed a new version of John Reed to describe the transformation of the 1990s. As far as I can tell, Fellini would have been much closer to the mark.
The preternatural thinness of the women in the night club also reminded me of another dancer 1,700 miles away and a week earlier during my trip. By contrast, this dancer was the most perfectly spherical human being I have ever met in fact an accumulation of circles, like a human armillary sphere.
Maria Kuzminichna, an amiable matriarch from the formerly nomadic Khanti people of Western Siberia, had been produced by the local authorities to perform folk dances for a collection of rather bewildered international experts (including myself) on the forested banks of the river Ob.
A different sort of party
Although perfectly sober, the scene had its surreal quality. A wooden stage on the riverbank had been erected for our visit, on which performed Maria Kuzminichna and her granddaughter in traditional Khanti dress.
The event also featured a Russian M.C. and pop singer dressed out of 1970s Pittsburgh, some disappointed fur salespeople (they had obviously been seriously misinformed concerning the incomes of Western experts on Russia) and an array of local staff serving roasted reindeer and some sort of prehistoric-looking monster fish.
Alone in the wilderness
The temperature was that of a warm West Siberian old wives’ summer like a blanket with a knife in it. And yet, we were greeted by the usual dazzlingly beautiful women wrapped up to their necks in mink coats as an advertisement for Khanti-Mansiisk’s second-most famous product.
While Maria Kuzminichna chanted and drummed and the M.C. and pop singer screeched and warbled, in the background the river flowed on quietly under an enormous sky. That river was as broad as a great lake, but moving steadily northward towards the Arctic. On either side of our tiny island of jollity, the forest stretched away forever.
In a more than 100 mile ride north in our fast hydrofoil from the regional capital of Khanti-Mansiisk (in Tsarist days, Samarovsk), we had seen not one town or village. Just endless trees, tinged with the brown and gold of autumn, and flood-plains so limitless that they defeated all sense of perspective.
Beneath the surface
When I took a walk along the beach to get away from the pop singer, a tell-tale sign of human endeavor along the river became immediately apparent. With every step, my shoes broke through the crust of sand and came up coated with an oily sludge.
Oil is Khanti-Mansiisk’s most important product, dwarfing by some distance fur and folk-art, and the reason why we had gone to Khanti-Mansiisk this year.
An important location
Come to think of it, the whole of the immense apparatus of the Russian state with its nuclear arsenal, still-powerful army, public services, giant bureaucracy, vast and overstretched transport network and geopolitical influence could be described as a huge inverted pyramid whose tip rests on Khanti-Mansiisk.
How could that be? Well in 2005, Khanti-Mansiisk produced 267 million tons of oil, or 57% of Russia’s total production: If it were an independent state, it would have 7.5% of the world’s oil production, second only to Saudi Arabia. With about 1% of Russia’s population, the region contributed 22.7% of the total tax revenues of the Russian Federation.
Khanti-Mansiisk is therefore one of the spots on the earth through which flows the indispensable life-giving heroin, called oil, that permeates the present world economy.
Foreign appearance
It flows similarly through the Persian Gulf, the Niger Delta or, in smaller ways, the North Sea and the bayous of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. This raised an interesting question in my mind: When it comes to the things that make life worth living for the people who live there, where to place Khanti-Mansiisk on that spectrum?
The town of Khanti-Mansiisk itself looks like a small, very prosperous town in Finland. That is the case for a very good reason to a considerable extent, Finns built it. When the regional authorities in recent years gained a greater share of their region’s immense revenues, they decided to turn their small capital into a magnificent regional showcase.
Finnish influences
They chose mainly Finnish firms to do this, partly because of the excellence of Finnish design, partly because of a desire to create a regional style with references to the Finno-Ugric origins of the Khanti and Mansy. Those peoples have given the region its name and autonomous status.
Pure Kanti and Mansy now make up less than 5% of its population, though to judge by many local “Russian” faces, their contribution to the local gene pool is very much larger.
The result is rakishly-angled buildings, often brightly coloured against the gloom of the Siberian winter, and often furnished inside with simple but strikingly elegant woodwork.
A mixture of cultures
This being Russia, however, a certain surreal element is not lacking. The center for the performing arts is modernist on the outside but neo-baroque on the inside.
It also includes a row of immense, writhing, tropical-looking trees, festooned with creepers all of which turns out on closer examination to be made of plastic. Facing these curious growths are plaster roundels of old Soviet cultural icons like Pushkin and recovered ones like Diaghilev.
A new facade
Dominated by a magnificent new Orthodox church, and a rebuilt one from Tsarist times destroyed under Communism, the small town of 70,000 people boasts an array of magnificently furnished new schools, hospitals and sports centers, much new gleaming public housing, a very attractive theatre-cum-opera house and a fine civic park.
It also has an arts center with training facilities for local artists, including dancers (beautiful) and musicians (brilliant).
The new gallery of painting boasts an array of icons and works by great Russian 19th and 20th century masters, contributed by a mixture of the state and oil magnates anxious to display their civic-mindedness (including the now-imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the green and yellow colors of whose former Yukos company still adorn local petrol stations and some buildings). -------
My Visit to Khanti-Mansiisk, Part II April 17, 2007
After becoming acquainted with Khanti-Mansiisk, Anatol Lieven attends a grand feast in the Western Siberian town. There, he discovers how far the political leaders of Khanti-Mansiisk are from the Kremlin and finds the town to be the very embodiment of Gorbechev's dreams for Russia.
The museum of the Khanti and Mansii tradition is intelligently and attractively designed, with vaguely New-Ageish references to Khanti and Mansii religion, but also genuinely interesting and informative about their beliefs.
Among these, following the Russian conquest of the 17th century, was a conflation of Jesus Christ with their traditional principal object of worship, the bear. Hopes for Khanti-Mansiisk
For anyone with a sense of Russian history, Khanti-Mansiisk has a certain heartbreaking quality. This was the dream of the Soviet reformers under Gorbachev a Russia whose immense natural resources freed from the crushing burden of bloated military spending, insane ideological constraints and geopolitical megalomania would be spent for the benefit of the Russian people.
And not just for their material benefit, or even on public services, but also by improving them through exposure to a mixture of moral exhortation and Russian and Western classical culture. This aspect of the Soviet tradition had its authoritarian and absurd side, but also a rather touching one. After all, there are worse things than being forced to read Tolstoy and respect the ballet, albeit possibly from a respectful distance.
The Governor of Khanti-Mansiisk reminded me of Gorbachev in a couple of ways. He is a very Siberian-looking figure, a former oilman with a craggy face and an air of natural authority, though in a considerably better suit than he would have worn in Soviet days.
The governor
The first recollection of Gorbachev was in his genuinely good intentions for his people, demonstrated by what we had seen in his region.
The second Soviet leadership feature began as we started on our official banquet and what a banquet it was!
Feast of the gods
This one didn’t just resemble one of those feasts of local notables from Gogol it was the very thing itself: white sturgeon, smoked sturgeon, salmon, black caviar, red caviar, head-cheese, stewed veal, stewed mushrooms with sour cream, tongue, smoked pork, ham salad, potato salad, beetroot salad, fish soup, beetroot soup, fish pie, mushroom-pie, beef-pie, cheese pie, onion pie, ordinary pancakes and potato pancakes. And that was just the appetizers.
This being Siberia, there was also a local delicacy in the form of a kind of fish sorbet, a dish that I very much doubt ever spreads far beyond its native land, even on a sea of vodka.
Where was I though? Ah yes, time to introduce the governor’s other Gorbachevian, or rather Gorbacho-Brezhnevo-Khrushchevesque, feature.
The governor speaks
Well, he began his speech to us about the Basic Indicators of the Social and Economic Development of the Khanti-Mansiisk Autonomous Okrug-Yugra with the frozen fish. And he talked steadily through the rest of the appetizers.
He came to an apparent end with the mushroom julienne, and we all applauded. But then he began again with the soup. He talked through the reindeer, and the beef stroganov, and the whole sturgeon, which was facing me.
Never-ending speech
Sturgeon, you know, often have melancholic expressions. That is not surprising given the circumstances in which one usually meets them, but this one’s face seemed to me to grow sadder and sadder as the speech went on and the bottles went away empty.
Where was I again? Well, the Governor talked and talked and talked and talked. What made it even worse was that, unlike in pre-Gorbachev Soviet times, neither my Western nor my Russian colleagues had to be afraid of him any more. So they all started talking and laughing loudly as well, and he droned on and on like a kind of bagpipe accompaniment in the background.
Those of us at my end of our table being closest to him and therefore compelled to some kind of decent manners silently drank more and more to numb the increasingly agonizing embarrassment of the whole affair. That was a pity, given his administration’s achievements and that he had given us a feast for the gods but then, imagine having to live on Olympus and listen to Zeus every night.
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