Azerbaijan: The Original Petro-State

Long before Dubai, Brunei, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan was the original petro-state.  It’s now controlled by the autocrat Ilham Aliyev, son of the previous autocrat and former head of the Azerbaijan KGB and the Azerbaijan SSR, Heydar Aliyev. The Aliyev’s have long been the west’s favorite dictators because they’re happy to sell oil and gas to the west, and better yet, to give western companies concessions to do it. People I speak seem ok with autocracy, because it’s stable and successful and peaceful, and the only thing you’re forbidden from doing is criticizing the President. As for me, I wouldn’t trade freedom-of-conscience for all the material goods in the world, so I can’t say that I relate. And it may be all of those positive things now, but like all petro-states, when the bottom falls out of petroleum prices (as it tends to do), God help them.
The peninsula on which Baku sits is a veritable wasteland. Not only is the oil and gas here plentiful, it’s close to the surface and cheap to extract. This is the original petro-state. Long before Arab oil was even an idea, Azerbaijan was a global powerhouse. In 1901, more than half of the world’s oil was coming from Azerbaijan. There are pumpjacks (the oil wells that move up and down and look like grasshoppers) covering the horizon. Left to itself, oil here pools on the ground. It was here that up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude. The environmental wasteland isn’t even a human-imposed condition like elsewhere in the USSR, like the Aral Sea. No, here it isn’t a matter of man polluting Mother Nature, but of Mother Nature polluting herself.

Ok, so it’s also a matter of man polluting Mother Nature.

Everything here revolves around petroleum and fire. The whole country smells like a gas station. Sulfur fumes periodically waft over the city. Sculptures in parks resemble flames.

The locals are quick to boast of the world’s only flame-shaped tower, as though it’s a triumph of engineering rather than merely a triumph of poor taste.

There’s a Zoroastrian temple for fire-worship. It was originally fed by naturally occurring vent, but nearby drilling ended that, so now fed artificially.

However, just outside the city there is a place where natural gas vents naturally.  Interesting picture of orange rocks, you say?

They’re actually on fire. Ragingly on fire.

I’d love to tell you a story about ancient religions practicing here for ten thousand years, or some such thing (and I will, if you really want), but the truth is that they think this fire was accidentally started by a shepherd in the mid-1970s when he stumbled across the gas vent.

The first impression of Azerbaijan is very European. But once you go inside, it’s the tackiest place in the world. It’s also the whoringest place in the world. It’s famous for nightlife, but really they just mean there are lots of clubs and lots of hookers. The idea of sleeping with someone who, you know, actually wanted to, seems completely foreign to people here. And even though it’s Muslim, the beer flows here like Oktoberfest. The people here are incredibly friendly to me, as they’ve been almost everywhere I go. But, like everyone, there’s a darker side.

Everyone in the Caucasus has problems with someone else. Here, the enemy is Armenia. Turkey (on Armenia’s other border) and Azerbaijan both have closed borders with Azerbaijan. So to visit all three, I’ll have to travel from Georgia to Azerbaijan, then back to Georgia, then to Armenia, then back to Georgia, then to Turkey. And I’ll have to do in that order, because you can’t go to Azerbaijan if you’ve ever been to Nagorno-Karabakh, which is both the result and the source of the animosity. Tensions between the Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis and Turks go back centuries. At the break-up of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh was a majority-Armenian region within Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh tried to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, and ethnic violence broke out. Azerbaijanis were driven from Armenia, and Armenians were driven from Azerbaijan. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but long story short, Armenia/Karabakh won the contest, humiliating Azerbaijan. Today, Nagorno-Karabakh is in a state of frozen conflict. It’s de facto independent, though closely tied to Armenia, but unrecognized by any UN member state, including Armenia.

Zvi Rex once said, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” To be sure, it isn’t an exact parallel, but Azerbaijan and Turkey will never forgive the Armenians for the genocide of the 1915. Further exacerbating the social psychological complex is the Azerbaijani humiliation in the early 1990s. Azerbaijan has 3 times the population of Armenia and 5 times the GDP. Yet Armenia presently controls over 10% of Azerbaijani territory. Aliyev has announced his determination to have it back, by force if necessary. To that end, Azerbaijan now has a military budget the size of Armenia’s total budget. Russia supplies both, and keeps a military base in Armenia, so the situation remains tentatively stable. But Aliyev seems determined to restore Azerbaijani pride. If Azerbaijan trips the Russian tripwire, it risks bringing Russia in. Which probably means Turkey, a full NATO member, joins as well, on the other side. Add in Iran (along the southern border of both countries), and the jihadi connections with the Azeribaijani side from the early 1990s, and a little bit of trouble here could have far-reaching global consequences. It may not be as sexy in foreign affairs circles as pan-Arab nationalism, Chinese domination of the South China Sea, or Russia choking off European gas supplies—but it’s very much a powder keg, and in a place where loyalties and alliances are less a matter of expediency and more a matter of fundamental self-identity.

And it’s getting worse. Russia and the west have spent the decade distracted elsewhere. Both countries were engaged in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. In 2004, soldiers from many NATO PfP nations met in Budapest for language training, including two Azeribaijanis and two Armenians. One of the Azerbaijanis, Ramil Safarov, bought an axe one evening and spent the night sharpening it. The next morning, he entered the room if one of the Armenian soldiers and hacked him to death. He was arrested and convicted to life in Hungarian prison. During his interrogation, he said, “I regret that I hadn’t killed any Armenian before this…the reason why I committed the murder was that they passed by and smiled in our face.” In 2012, Safarov was extradited to Azerbaijan to serve the rest of his sentence. Upon arrival, he instead received a hero’s welcome. He was retroactively promoted, given an apartment and back-pay, and praised throughout the country. Such is depth of ethnic tension here.

In July and August of this year, shelling broke out along the border, resulted in 15 deaths. You can’t get to Nagorno-Karabakh from here, so I’ll have to head back through Georgia, but in a couple of days, we’ll look at the conflict from the other side.

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Chiatura Cable Cars

There’s a mining town in Georgia called Chiatura. It was made famous in the revolutionary period as the main Bolshevik stronghold in otherwise Menshevik Georgia, mainly because the horrid living and working conditions further radicalized the local workers.

In 1954, a system of cable cars (or gondolas, or tramways, depending on what part of the English-speaking world you call home) was installed to ferry workers between the town and the mines. Most are still in operation, and none have been updated. They look terrifying, but I’m not sure that they’re really all that dangerous. An American mining consortium now owns the mines but by agreement with the government continues to operate the cable cars for free. The town has become somewhat notable in recent years after a number of articles were written about the area, all with sensationalist titles and content. (All mention Stalin, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with him–he died in 1953, before they were built.) But as they’ve already written the story, there’s no real need for me to repeat it in detail.

“Stalin’s Rope Roads” (The Atlantic Monthly)
“Stalin’s cable car: Death-defying ‘metal coffins’…” (The Daily Mail)
“Stalin-Era Cable Cars Make for Thrilling Daily Commute…” (The Wall Street Journal)

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Svanetia

When I was last in Georgia, I saw much of the country, but everyone lamented that I’d not seen Svanetia. They described it as the most beautiful place in Georgia, and maybe the most beautiful place on the planet. They were right.

The area is populated by the insular and mysterious Svanetians. Everyone here are “mountain people”, but the Svanetians are “mountain people” even to other “mountain people.” The Svanetians were one if the few peoples not conquered by the Mongolian horde. To this day, they’ve only been placated rather than conquered.

Svanetia is not easy to get to. There was formerly a helicopter providing daily service from Tbilisi, but no more. Now a Twin Otter flies from Tbilisi thrice weekly, but sells out weeks in advance. Or you can drive. But the conditions on the main east-west road in Georgia aren’t great, and after that, you’re rock-hopping for hundreds of kilometers. Fortunately, I found someone willing to rent me the right tool for the job—the Lada Niva (since renamed the Lada 4×4). Lada was the mainstream Soviet brand of car, but the company has continued to operate, more or less, to this day.

I put this thing through its paces, working it harder than a Road & Track road test, and so feel well-positioned to tell you something about it. The Niva is sprung like a dumptruck. It has a torque curve like the Matterhorn. Its single-overhead cam 1.7L inline-4 connected to a 5-spead manual gearbox pushes it up to a top speed of 91mph. I can vouchsafe that in the right conditions, you can hit 91mph—I have. But that’s its terminal velocity. With the aerodynamics of a box of Kleenex, this car wouldn’t go any faster if you dropped it out of an airplane. It weighs about 2,500 pounds, gets 26 mpg highway, generates a whopping 85 peak horsepower at redline, and does 0 to 60 in 19 seconds flat. For comparison, you could race a 2015 Lada Niva against a 2015 Ford F150 2.7L Ecoboost carrying another Lada Niva in the bed. The F150 would beat the Niva to 60mph by 10 seconds while getting better gas mileage. Cutting edge design, the Niva is not.

On the other hand, it has a classic look, and the poor stereo quality is irrelevant in a land with no radio stations. And it’s only 5.9 feet wide (it’s as tall as it is wide), so you can get in and out of some very tight spaces. There are a couple of routes that you can take, but the Niva is not built for the highway, so I chose the off-road route. Over 5 hours of unpaved road, it didn’t as much as break a sweat, including driving perpendicularly over railroad tracks at not-a-railroad-crossing. Thus we get to what must be the single best driving road in the world. There may be short stretches of other roads that are, but this is the best covering any meaningful distance—it beats the Pacific Coast Highway a couple of times over. You pass alongside the most beautiful turquoise reservoir, up and down hairpins, and through dozens of tunnels blasted from the granite with concrete or other finishing. Falling rocks signs are common here, and they mean it—rock patrols drive the road regular to clear the rockfalls, but you still need to avoid a dozen or so fresh falls each time you drive—there must be hundreds a day.

I have no idea what makes the water so turquoise. Stranger still, the turquoise water is separated by gray water by a logjam.

You also never know when you’ll encounter an eighteen-wheeler or a cow or a stretch where landslides have reduced the road to less than one lane. If you push the Niva as hard as it can be pushed, you can almost, but only almost, kill yourself. Your foot is always on the floor, moving down through the gears as quickly as you can, windows down, Dire Straits playing on your phone because the radio doesn’t work, cool alpine breeze through the windows. You might be chugging along at 45mph, but you feel like you’re running a tenth of a second off the split in the Pikes’ Peak Hill Climb.
The drive was worth the trip on its own, but even if that isn’t your bag, Svanetia is worth it even if you have to walk. Here’s the view from my bedroom window.

There are plenty of hikes to do ranging in difficulty from walk-in-the-park to you-better-have-brought-oxygen. I only had one day of hiking, but wanted a full day of hiking. I had the option of hiking up to a glacier or up to a mountain peak. They insist on guides for hikes, but not wanting to pay for it, I decided to do the mountain peak hike alone. I followed what I thought was the right route, and ended up at the glacier. So it all worked out, in a way.

There wasn’t much excitement, other than the views, though it’s exhilarating to spend some time in such beautiful country entirely alone. I did encounter one local Svanetian shepherd when one of his dogs attacked me from behind—he got a tooth stuck in my gaiters, so didn’t draw blood (h/t Mountain Laurel Designs). But don’t pity me—you ought to see the dog. The shepherd was friendly enough but spent 10 minutes trying to speak to me in Svan. Svan is an offshoot of Georgian, but it shot off, as it were, a few thousand years ago, so the two are now mutually unintelligible. Georgian itself it was linguists call an “isolate”, with a unique and very strange script and more consonants than you can imagine. It’s unrelated to any other language group in the world. Long story short, there are maybe 20,000 people in the world who speak Svan, and clearly the American in technical gear is not one of them, but that concept was lost on this man—perhaps he thought the whole world speaks Svan.

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Georgia (The Country, not The State)

I spent a summer in college in Georgia, and it’s still my very favorite place. So I’m spending about three weeks here and in neighboring countries, collectively known as the Caucasus, after the Caucasus Mountains. The Caucasus usually refers to parts of Russia and all of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Sandwiched between the Black and Caspian Seas, the Caucasus Mountains have been on the frontier for millennia. There are areas here that have never really been conquered. This is the region that gave us Stalin and Beria, whose train robberies financed the early Bolshevik movement.
Politically, the area is and always has been a mess. Of the four countries here…

Russia gets along with Armenia and Azerbaijan, but not Georgia.

Armenia gets along with Russia and Georgia, but not Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan gets along with Russia and Georgia, but not Armenia.

Georgia gets along with Armenia and Azerbaijan, but not Russia.

 

Then there’s Turkey. Turkey gets along with Georgia and Azerbaijan, not really with Russia, and definitely not Armenia.

The USA likes all but Russia, but is liked only by Georgia.

This is to say nothing of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Or of the only recently subdued breakaway regions of Chechnya in Russia and Adjara in Georgia. Even in the non-breakaway regions, no one gets along. Georgia is about the size of Pennsylvania, and has under 5 million people—but among them the Kartlevelians don’t like the Kakhetians, and neither like the Svanetians, and on and on and on. As far as interethnic friendships are concerned, they’re stuck in the Middle Ages.

 

Georgia has beautiful Black Sea beaches, twenty-thousand foot Caucasus peaks, temperate forests, etc, all in a country you drive across in a day. It’s renowned for hospitality and wine-making, both very good attributes in my estimation. It’s also changed dramatically in the 10 years since I was last here. For everyone but me, the changes have been almost entirely for the better.

In 2004, the public threw out the existing regime, and elected the pro-western and American-educated Mikhail Saakashvili. In the beginning, he was the darling of the public and of the west.
But now the hero has become the anti-hero. Now, he’s despised by many and under indictment for public corruption and murder. Still, he did quite a bit of good, although every positive act had its negative.

For example, because of intractable corruption, he fired the entire 30,000 strong police force, tore down the police stations, and built new all glass police stations. Now anyone walking by, day or night, can see everything going on inside any Georgian police station. The police formerly stopped you four or six times on a drive across town to demand bribes. Now, if you’re driving drunk, you can just ask the police for help—they’ll be happy to follow you home, or drive your car there for you, if you like. But the corruption and torture didn’t go away—they moved to the Interior Ministry.

As another example, Saakashivili began by peaceably reintegrating the breakaway region of Adjara. He ended by starting and losing a war with Russia after attempting to forcibly reintegrate the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

He cleaned up the streets by clearing them of petty thieves and junkies. It’s now safe to walk at night, or alone, or without a weapon. It’s safe to ride the bus, and the subway, and to go through the pedestrian underpasses at intersections. It’s safe to drive here now—10 years ago, you’d be thrown out of a cab for putting on your seat belt, assuming the driver hadn’t cut it out. But in cleaning up, Saakashivili reportedly jailed 100,000 in the process…this in a country of fewer than 5 million people.

By the end, the power had gone to his head. He would clear out restaurants to eat alone. He traveled with a security detail that would be the envy of Obama or Putin. He built himself a tacky copy of the White House. And there were the rumors of bacchanalian orgies. He’d become like a Roman emperor. Now he’s been thrown out himself. There’s a new coalition government, and Saakashivili is persona non grata.

Personally, I’m okay with him. Except I liked the driving better before.

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McDonald’s Georgia: The Beef Roll

Of all the McDonald’s products in the world, the Beef Roll has to have the least appetizing name. But don’t be deceived.

This thing is a monster, way more filling than a Big Mac. It’s a large flour tortilla with two all-beef patties, lettuce, tomato, onion, shredded cheese and sauce. The all-beef patties are either the 1/4 pound Quarter Pounder patties or the 1/3 pound patties that go on the Big Tasty, which is an international version of the Big & Tasty with bigger patties and a smokier version of the Big & Tasty sauce. So basically what you’re working with is a smoky double Big & Tasty served in a tortilla.

If the name and pictures don’t do it for you, that’s understandable enough. But I guarantee that if you like fast food, you’ll like this. And if you don’t like fast food, you’re either a vegetarian or a charlatan.

Shadows of Trees

From Odessa. I hope you weren’t expecting the title to be a poetic reference to something more interesting.

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Odessa, Ukraine

Odessa, on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, was famous for it’s beauty in the days of the Russian Empire. With a heavy French influence, it became popular with the aristocratic elite, along with much of the Black Sea coast, especially Crimea. I’ve always wanted to visit Sevastopol, but the crisis in Ukraine prevents me, so Odessa provides a great back-up. The city is probably most famous as the home of the Potemkin steps, featured in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, about the famous Russian Imperial Navy mutiny. However beautiful they may have once been, the steps have now been ruined by the monstrosities constructed on the pier at their base.

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, it’s now also home to what remains of the Ukrainian Navy.

Odessa has a large Russian-speaking minority, so there have been concerns over what the future here will bring. The only out-of-doors political activity that I witnessed was a pro-Ukraine parade one afternoon. Note the kid with the light machine gun.

Only a handful of Odessans turned out in support. This guy had the right approach.

Taking advantage of the week currency, I went to the ballet at Odessa’s world-famous opera house. I had a box to myself–for $4.

 

 

 

Kiev: The Frontier of Europe

Kiev, capital of Ukraine, looks and feels like Europe It’s increasingly cosmopolitan but has beautiful old architecture abound. As with other former Soviet cities, it has it’s growing pains–like Moscow, every restaurant offers bad sushi, every bar offers karaoke, and every lounge offers hookah, those being the “in” things to do, like Europe circa 1998.

The modernization of Europe has proceeded west to east since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 1990s, the places to find a European feel but at low cost and with a bit of an edge were Prague and Berlin, both long since sterilized. In the 2000s, it was Budapest or Krakow. In the 2010s, you have to go further still, to Kiev or Bucharest. Because of the political situation in Ukraine, money has been flowing out of the country at a furious pace, forcing the near collapse of the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia (not misspelled, just unpronounceable). It’s down by around 40% this year, which makes Kiev a traveler’s paradise. The collapse is recent enough that imported goods are still widely available, and it hasn’t yet been accompanied by domestic price inflation. The result is that you can have anything you like, but it costs about half of what it should.

I won’t go into the political situation in Ukraine in any more detail here, having already covered it, except to point out that the large public square in the photos below is the Maidan, home to the Euromaidan protests that toppled the government earlier this year.

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The Russian Woodpecker

Is, of course, not a woodpecker at all. Inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone (outer zone), this was a Russian Duga-3 over-the-horizon radar system–codenamed “Steel Yard” by NATO, if you happened to work in Signals Intelligence during the Cold War. (If you’re wondering whether that means you, given the readership of this blog, it almost certainly does not.) It was designed to detect, from standoff range, intercontinental-ballistic missile launches in the United States.

It became active in 1976 and was immediately observed in the West, being alternatively thought to be a mind control device, weather control station, etc, along with interfering with all manner of radio broadcast, including aviation radio traffic and standard radio broadcast. It reportedly consumed 10 megawatts (10 MW) of electricity, or about 200 times as powerful as the most powerful radio broadcasts in the US. (I’m sure you’ve heard, many times, something to the affect of “50,000 watts, the maximum allowable by lawwwwwww!!!!!.) The array is almost half a mile long and almost 600 feet tall. If it were in Washington, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument but would stretch from there all the way to the Potomac. If it were in any one of about 20 states in the US, it would be that state’s tallest structure. The photo below is taken from 15 miles away.

The name “Russian woodpecker” comes from the amateur (HAM) shortwave radio community. The radar waves from the Duga-3 were broadcast on a wide array of frequencies that included shortwave bands, and appeared in short, repetitive, very strong bursts. The effect was the sound of a woodpecker on shortwave receivers.

In 1989, the Russian woodpecker was decommissioned, because Soviet Signals Intelligence officer aren’t any more immune to radiation than the rest of us. The structure remains standing, though the control room and power supply have been thoroughly looted. Although the outer zone has been open to limited visitors for some time, the Russian Woodpecker has only been accessible for about 18 months. The morning that we arrived, someone had attached a Soviet flag to the top, visible in some of the pictures–given the political situation in Ukraine, the meaning here was very clear. And so the site was again closed to the outside world. Given that we were already here, they allowed us to walk around, but it’s anyone’s guess if and when it will be reopened. (The guards asked some very pointed questions, through a translator, suggesting that we may have put the flag up. I replied, also via translator, that if they see a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag up there, I’m likely their guy, but I’ll be damned if I fly a Soviet flag from a decommissioned radar station, or anywhere else for that matter.)

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Pripyat: Nuclear Ghost Town

For 28 years, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has remained largely closed to the outside world. The Exclusion Zone (outer zone) covers a 20 mile radius around the power plant, including the town of Chernobyl. Inside the Exclusion Zone is the 6 mile Absolute Exclusion Zone (inner zone). Technically, no one lives in the Exclusion Zones. The staff necessary to secure the area and maintain the nuclear site sleep in the town of Chernobyl, in the outer zone, but they don’t live there. No one sleeps in the inner zone. Of the 135,000 people who evacuated, about 180 have returned, illegally and unofficially, to live in the outer zone. Only two people, man and wife, have returned to live in the inner zone. According to the police/military/intelligence guys who look after the place, this 80 year old man is the toughest son-of-a-bitch on the planet, trying to fight anyone who tells him he can’t stay there. Their options are to leave him there or to kill him trying to make him leave. And so he stays. (In the US, of course, we would kill him trying, or at best take him alive only to institutionalize him at public expense.)

Chernobyl remains largely off-limits today. But if you (or the person you hire) jump through the right bureaucratic hoops, they’ll let you in. There’s a strict dress code, an 8pm curfew, military checkpoints, and mandatory decontamination checks. No alcohol is permitted, but, this being Ukraine, enforcement here is more lax than with the other rules. Martial law still prevails here. Each day is scheduled to the minute and the specific location, in map coordinates, in the exclusion zone. No deviation from the schedule is allowed.

To leave the inner zone or outer zone, you have to pass radiation control, for vehicles and people. Clothes often don’t make it out of the exclusion zones. It’s unclear what happens if you, yourself, become radioactive–maybe you cut off the offending body part.

The liquidators were more effective in some spots than others, but there’s no major acute risk, as you’re followed by “envoys” who keep you far from trouble.

An “envoy.”

But you and they can’t see what’s radioactive and what’s not, and inhaling a single highly radioactive dust particle can kill you. I’m trying to avoid a lengthy diatribe on radiation, so I’ll only say this—the intensity of gamma radiation (the type that passes through most objects) decreases exponentially with distance. So a speck a dust may not register on your Geiger counter held inches away, but that same speck of dust, in direct contact with the lining of your lungs, can do serious damage to the adjacent cells. So you become best friends with your Geiger counter and try to avoid contact with pretty much everything.

Here, the Geiger counter shows 0.17 micro-Sieverts per hour at the entrance to the outer exclusion zone, or about the same as the background radiation living in New York City.

Despite the sarcophagus, radiation levels nearby reach between one and two orders of magnitude (between 10 and 100 times) higher than ordinary background radiation. But this is still nothing to worry about–standing here for an hour is like having a dental x-ray.

You can find hot spots that get much higher still, like this one, an otherwise unnoticeable spot of ground near an oak tree outside of a village kindergarten. Stand here for an hour and you’ll absorb about as much radiation as you would flying New York to London.

 

Because of the near-complete isolation of the area, it’s informally become one of the most pristine wildlife sanctuaries in Europe. Wildlife that is otherwise hard-pressed thrives here—roe deer, wolves, songbirds, wild boar, elk, and the extremely rare Przewalski’s wild horse. The genetic make-up of some short-lifespan animals, particularly insects, has been found to be altered. But there are no examples of 3- or 5-legged deer, or other such things, the idea being that even if any animal were so effected, it would not long survive. Having said that, the nuclear power plant cooling ponds are full to brimming with catfish the size of humans, by far the largest I’ve ever seen. We watched them eat full loaves of bread in single bites. The scientists say it’s the natural result of no fishing for three decades. I say they’re radioactive mutant catfish that will grow to the size of dinosaurs. You may choose whom to believe. In the picture below, the red box shows a quarter-end of a loaf a bread. The blue line roughly traces the center of the ~4 foot catfish swimming underneath.

Pripyat and surrounding other villages are post-apocalyptic and otherworldly. Much has been looted, but much remains just as it was left 28 years ago. The video below is at the Pripyat hospital and shows a scrap of clothing worn by one of the original 6 firefighters, brought here for treatment. None survived. Many more pictures of various locations in and around Pripyat are below.

Pripyat Hospital (The graffiti on the wall in the room with the interrupted game of chess reads, in Ukrainian, “Check and Mate”. Indeed.)

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Pripyat Amusement Park

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Pripyat High School (This happening at the height of the Cold War, all schools were stocked with gas masks.)

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Pripyat Town Square, including a supermarket, movie theater, rec center, and pool

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Various other sites in/near Pripyat, including a lakeside café, music school, apartment building, police station, and kindergarten.

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Village kindergarten, the only remaining structure of a highly contaminated village near Pripyat, other buildings having all been demolished by the liquidators.

 

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Chernobyl

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23am, a series of steam explosions tore through Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine. Thus began the largest nuclear disaster in world history. The few people who witnessed the explosion described it as the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen, with a column of smoke, fire, and superheated radioactive particles, in all colors of the rainbow, shooting thousands of feet into the otherwise jet-black night sky.

Six firefighters on shift at the power plant responded immediately. As they approached the reactor, they had to kick burning chunks of graphite out of the way, indicating that the core of the reactor had itself been destroyed. All instantly received extreme doses of radiation that would ultimately prove fatal, Thirteen minutes later, additional firefighters from the town of Pripyat arrived to assist. Pripyat was the company town for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Unlike so much of the USSR, life in Pripyat was an idyllic existence. The roughly 49,000 residents were young (average age 26), well-educated, and had access to beautiful parks, great schools, and state-of-the-art healthcare.

By 6am on April 26, the fires had been extinguished. But the battle to contain the meltdown had not even begun. The USSR was slow to understand and ever slower to react. Priypat was not evacuated until late on April 27, over 36 hours after the accident. By this point, the area was highly contaminated and most residents were showing signs of acute radiation poisoning. When receiving the evacuation order, they were given 2 hours to gather any belongings necessary for a 72 hour stay away from home. None of them would ever return.

To give you an idea of how serious this was, the International Atomic Energy Agency has a 7-level nuclear event scale. The scale is logarithmic, like the Richter scale for earthquakes—that is, each level represents a release of 10 times more radiation than the next lower level. The Three Mile Island disaster, from which much panic resulted, was a Level 5 event. There have been only two Level 7 events in history: Chernobyl and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan. But that doesn’t even begin to tell the story, because the scale tops out at Level 7. The worst exposure at Fukushima, to two plant firefighters, was approximately 180 milli-Sieverts (mSv). At Chernobyo, 10 minutes near the core of the Chernobyl meltdown exposed workers to 50 Sieverts (Sv)—but some spent hours there. The first firefighters, therefore, were exposed to almost 1,000 Sieverts of radiation, or 5,000 times the worst exposure at Fukushima. In other words, if the scale went high-enough, there would be only two nuclear events greater than Level 6—Fukushima at Level 7, and Chernobyl at Level 11. If that’s too much math and science for you, try this—Chernobyl released more than 20 times the radiation of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and that only through selfless sacrifice of thousands of lives. It could have been, and by all probability should have been, much, much worse.

Over the coming days and weeks, the USSR slowly swung into action. The fires were extinguished, but the nuclear core itself remained exposed and the super-heated nuclear chain reaction continued to spew radioactivity into the atmosphere. By the 28^th, in an effort to contain the meltdown, 2,000 helicopters were sent to Chernobyl. The helicopters would hover while soldiers dumped 120 pound bags of sand and radiation-absorbing boric acid into the destroyed core. They dumped 2,000 tons (4,000,000 pounds) into the core, by hand, one bag at a time. It’s estimated that 600 helicopter pilots ultimately died from radiation exposure.

The cloud of radioactive particles, meanwhile, spread across Europe. On the 28^th, alarms were triggered at nuclear power plants in Sweden, awakening the rest of the world to the disaster still underway. Finally, finding the boric acid and sand ineffective, they dumped 2,000 tons of lead into the core. The highly toxic lead created problems of its own, but, melted by the heat, it finally sealed the nuclear core on May 10.

Over the next 8 months, 500,000 soldiers and civilians, known as “liquidators”, worked to clean up the site as much as practicable. Radiation clean-up is probably not what you think. This is not chemical—there is no special spray or liquid to make the radiation go away. You can only take the offending material and isolate it. In the exclusion zone, this meant bulldozing whole forests, digging the up top foot or two of soil up, and burying whole villages. At the reactor core itself, they used robots to start construction of a steel and concrete “sarcophagus” over the destroyed plant. The radiation was so intense that it destroyed the robots. So Army reservists were sent in with nothing but shovels and homemade lead armor, working in 7 minute shifts, to do the work. By December, the sarcophagus was complete and the situation finally stabilized. Even today, the paved roads are still regularly washed as part of routine re-decontamination of the area. Below are pictures of the robots used in the cleanup, their electronics fried by radiation. And the three bare trees that you see are all that remain of a pine forest adjacent to the reactor, known as the “Red Forest”, so named because radiation turned the pine needles bright red.

A new sarcophagus (known as the New Safe Confinement, or NSC) is now being constructed, primarily with international funding. The NSC is to have a 100-year lifespan, and is designed with two purposes—to protect the existing sarcophagus from further deterioration, while allowing robots to work on dismantling the sarcophagus in a controlled way to allow proper and permanent isolation of the nuclear waste. Because of the difficulty in working in close proximity to the sarcophagus itself, the NSC is being constructed on rails, making it the largest moveable object ever constructed—when complete, it will be rolled over the existing structure and sealed into place.

Tomorrow, if the internet connection is cooperating, more on the abandoned lives and homes left behind in Pripyat. Below, the still-standing sign welcoming visitors to Chernobyl–note the radiation suit.

McDonald’s Russia: The Greek Mac

This may not have gotten much publicity in the west, but the Russian government responded to US/EU sanctions with sanctions of their own. They banned the importation of food products from the US and Europe. This puts pressures on Russia’s pro-western “café culture”, Eastern European economies, and, most importantly, western multi-national chains like McDonald’s.

Then Putin went a step further and had health authorities make an example of Moscow McDonald’s locations under the guise of sanitary concerns. (McDonald’s in other countries are cleaner than hospital operating rooms, for the record). Thus for the second consecutive country, McDonald’s has become a hard to find commodity. I understand there’s a war on, but for God’s sake, this is just cruel.

I finally managed to find an open McDonald’s in Yekaterinburg. They offer a pretty straightforward US menu, with two exceptions: the Greek Mac and Brie Bites. I had to go twice. The first time I ordered a Greek Mac and Brie Bites, and got a Big Mac and fries. The second time I ordered a Greek Mac and Brie Bites, and got a Greek Mac and Brie Bites.

The Greek Mac is two Big Mac patties with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and tsatziki served in a pita pocket. It’s not that complex of a flavor. The tomatoes are a nice touch and the tsatziki is good, but it’s no special sauce. The pita is messier and more unwieldy than the normal Big Mac bun. And a hint of Greek seasoning on the beef patties would go along way. It’s no Big Mac, but it’s still better than anything you’ll find at Burger King.

The Brie Bites are what we call cheesesticks in the US, but in the shape of triangles. In the US, you’ll occasionally hear complaints that we can’t get real brie because of USDA food safety concerns. Maybe we shouldn’t take our fake-brie for granted. If what they call “brie” here is even a dairy product, I’m Boris Yeltsin.

Name Your Communists

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, statues honoring Communist leaders were pulled down all over the USSR. Some of them have been gathered near Moscow’s Gorky Park, where they’re displayed in whatever condition they were found.

So, without further ado, here is everyone’s favorite game, “Name Your Communists”.  Everyone who gets all correct receives a free hologram refrigerator magnet that’s either Putin or Medvedev, depending on the angle. Submit responses by email or in comments.  Old people, Soviet historians, and nerds admittedly have an unfair advantage here.

A couple of hints: one Communist appears twice, one photo isn’t a Communist at all, and the last two are the most difficult.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Moscow

Moscow is an astonishingly beautiful city, perfectly cosmopolitan and European. It is still developing beyond Soviet culture, and there are growing pains as it mimics European and American trends. Every restaurant serves sushi, all of it bad–sushi being perceived as trendy in the west. The fashion sense is New York circa 1998, and there are some very misguided architectural monstrosities, like the giant statue of Peter the Great along the river. But otherwise, the beauty speaks for itself–to me it rivals Paris.

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Yekaterinburg (Sverdlosk)

Almost everyone in Russian lives in far western Russia. There’s then a relatively narrow strip of populated areas that runs east-to-west along southern Russia–the area north of there is almost too cold and remote to be inhabitable. The railroad follows this narrow strip, with a handful of large (by European standards, not by Asian standards) industrial towns along the way, places like Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg. I chose Yekaterinburg for a break from the train. Yekaterinburg is mildly famous for a few reasons/events. It was the place where the last Czar was executed along with his family, where the Russians shot down Francis Gary Power’s U2, and where Boris Yeltsin rose to power. More infamously, it was the site of the largest biological weapons accident in history, home of the world’s shortest subway, and more recently the power base of the Russian mafia. The ceiling of the train station is painted with the more famous events, but obviously neglects the infamous though more interesting events.

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In Soviet times, Yekaterinburg was named Sverdlosk, after Yakov Sverdlov, who ordered the execution of the Czar. Their deaths make a fascinating story. To share just a small fragment, the Bolshevik henchmen were obviously hand-selected party loyalists, but they couldn’t help but having grown up in a society where the divinity of the Czar was taken as given. The royal family had sewn diamonds from the crown jewels into the undershirts of the children to hide them from the Bolsheviks. When the firing squad fired the first volley, the diamonds worked as armor, and the bullets simply bounced of the Crown Prince. This proved too much for some of the executioners, who fled the scene in terror. Others, though, were made of sterner stuff and so remained to finish the job with bayonets.

As Sverdlovsk, Yekaterinburg was a center of weapons production, and so was a closed city, with all access restricted even to Soviet citizens. In 1979, weaponized anthrax was accidentally leaked into the atmosphere from a secret facility called “Sverdlovsk-19”, killing at least 100 residents. The Soviets covered up the accident because the work at Sverdlovsk-19 violated the Biological Weapons Convention, or because they were assholes, or both. An international investigation occurred in 1992 and the demilitarization of the site was ordered, but access remains restricted and the current work of the site remains unknown.

As for the subway, the story that I’ve heard is that under Soviet central planning, any city with one million residents automatically got a subway, regardless of need. And so Sverdlovsk had a three-stop, one-line system. Similar examples can be found throughout the former USSR. The subway itself, despite being a bit antiquated, is still far more comfortable and reliable than the DC metro.

Yekaterinburg today is actually very nice. It’s still very much a working town, but there is plenty of green space, nice art and architecture, and friendly people. Think of it as a heavily-graffitied Russian Houston.

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Siberia and Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal in Siberia is utterly unique on Earth. It’s the largest freshwater lake on the planet, containing fully 20% of the planet’s fresh water. There is 40 times more freshwater here than in all the world’s rivers combined. There’s more freshwater in Lake Baikal than in the entire United States, including all 5 Great Lakes. Baikal is also the world’s deepest at over 5,400 feet, and the clearest, with visibility beyond 30 feet deep. The water is the cleanest in the world and so is perfectly drinkable. More than 300 rivers feed Baikal, and only one drains it—the average water molecule has been in the lake for almost 350 years. The water is largely fed by Siberian ice melt and so is shockingly frigid, so much so that it affects the climate for miles around (sort of like the water below Blakely Dam). Over 1,500 species of plants and animals live here, 80% of which are found only here, including the world’s only freshwater seal. On an intellectual level, it is positively otherworldly.

But having said all of that, on a visceral level, it’s simply a really big, really cold lake. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea—it is lovely here—but maybe the real attraction of Lake Baikal isn’t the presence of anything but the absence of many things—noise, pollution, people, civilization. Or maybe it’s simply one of those things that is better imagined than described.

The forests here, bordering the Russian taiga, are the most extensive on the planet. The region is undeveloped, so much so that wildfires tend to run their natural courses, leaving forest canopy largely shorn of undergrowth. Evergreens like fir and Siberian pine abound, but the most common, by far, are the dense stands of birch. Also common are something like a red bud, and the biggest poplars imaginable.

here are fields thick with wildflowers and homes made from rough-hewn lumber. In short, Siberia looks pretty much what you’d expect it to look like.

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This is the home of the traditional Russian steam bath, or banya. It’s essentially a steam sauna in which you whip each other with tree limbs. Traditionally, you use oak and fir. (Odd, because there are no oaks in Siberia.) The leaves capture the steam in the air, so it gets incredibly hot close to the branches. The whipping is by no means gentle—traditionally the person who is being whipped manages the person doing the whipping by screaming at the top of his lungs when the pain become unbearable. Then you lie outside until your head stops spinning (in the winter you lie in the snow), and repeat three or four times. The saunas are incredibly hot—mine showed 178 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than I like my steak. Very strange, and not altogether pleasant, but you do feel clean afterwards. I’m certain this is because you’ve steamed off the outermost layer of your skin, like blanching a tomato.

There’s a railway circling the lake that was considered one of the engineering marvels of the world when it was built, and there are beautiful streams and lakes all around. The cuisine here, as in much of Russia, is borsch and beef stroganoff, though often by different names. Around Baikal, the best smoked fish you’ve ever had is common. I don’t normally love smoked fish, but here they have omul (found only here), a really tasty mix between an anchovy and a trout, but without the fragile bones of the latter. It’s gold and silver on the outside, which I guess explains why Rapala makes those gold and silver ice fishing jigs. As for why you can buy them in any Walt-Mart in Arkansas, that’s because, as John Hardman once said, “the lures are designed to catch fishermen, not fish.”

The major city here is Irkutsk, known as the Paris of the east (along with Saigon, Shanghai, and dozens of other places). It is just as meaningful a designation as “One of the New 7 Wonders of the World”, of which there are 20 in every country. From Irkutsk, it’s back on the Trans-Siberian to Yekaterinburg.

The Trans-Siberian Railroad

The Trans-Siberian railroad is the longest and most famous railroad in the world. The entire journey takes over a week without stops, if you take the traditional St. Petersburg-Vladivostok route. In some cases, on a single ticket, you can travel from Belarus or Ukraine to North Korea, covering almost half the globe. When it was completed, it was considered an engineering marvel for the ages, like the American trans-continental railroad a couple of times over.

Today, there are three routes that are collectively called the Trans-Siberian. All three follow the same route east from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk in Siberia, via Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, and Novosibirsk. The Trans-Siberian proper continues from Irkutsk east to Vladivostok. The Trans-Manchurian follows the Trans-Siberian proper east from Irkutsk before turning south and entering Manchuria and China. The Trans-Mongolian turns south just east of Irkutsk, through Mongolia and on to Beijing.

Mongolia operates in a different rail gauge (i.e. width between rails) than either China or Russia, so that has to be addressed at border crossings. On the border between Spain and France, they have the same issue, but use a device that automatically changes the width between wheels, a process taking about 20 minutes. Here, they break the train up and jack up each car (with passengers and luggage still aboard) to change the bogies (or “trucks”) by hand. This process takes between 6 and 11 hours.

Because I’m coming from China, I took the Trans-Mongolian, with multiple stops along the way–in Ulan Bator (Mongolia), Baikalsk (Russia), and Yekaterinburg (Russia) before terminating in Moscow. Because of the stops, the trip took a couple of weeks. The pictures here are my attempt to provide an unbroken image of the train trip. I’ll address the stops along the way separately. These are in chronological order, east-to-west, Beijing-Ulan Bator-Lake Baikal-Yekaterinburg-Moscow.

 

 

Mongolian Jackson Browne

The Mongolian Steppe (cont’d)

Ronald Reagan famously quoted Will Rogers in saying, “There’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.” It was a damn lie when Will Rogers said it, and even more so when Reagan quoted him.

Winston Churchill once said, “I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.” Spoken like a cavalryman, and like a true asshole.

You show me a post-pubescent male who enjoys horseback riding, and I’ll show you a masochist.

I hate horses, but was assured that Mongolian horses were shorter and smaller and therefore more pleasant. They are not. The saddles are narrow, and high, and metal. Whatever they were designed for, it was not for a human to sit in. The stirrups aren’t adjustable, and if you’re reading this, you’re taller than the average Mongolian man, so you’ll end up as I did, with your legs tucked close underneath like a racehorse jockey.

I joined my second host to go find his two camels, to ride the following day, but weren’t able to find them, which is pretty much the way things go around here. So we headed back to the ger for some fermented mare’s milk. Drinking fermented mare’s milk is sort of like smelling dogshit—once you’ve done it, you’ll never undo it as long as you live. But unlike smelling dogshit, you get used to drinking sour mare’s milk. You take turns drinking from a big bowl. Who drinks is determined by playing a game similar to rock-paper-scissors. I never quite understood the rules, but was good enough to have my share of the booze. (I may have the causation backwards there—maybe I didn’t understand the rules because I had my share of booze.) In any event, you haven’t been drunk until you’re been drunk on sour horse milk.

My third host has things figured out. Rather than moving the yurt, he’s built himself a spring camp, summer camp, and winter camp. All of the furniture and furnishings still move, but not the houses themselves. They were the least nomadic of the group, with a son studying in Germany and a daughter studying acupuncture in China. (As an aside, I saw pictures, and it ain’t acupuncture she’s doing in China.)

I joined his son to herd (corral? gather? I don’t know) their sheep and goats, by motorcycle. If this isn’t obvious, if you’re doing it by horse instead of motorcycle, you’re doing it wrong. You can even use the horn to save your voice.

Afterwards, they took me to an “oasis”, which turned out to be a large puddle. Then they asked if I would help them in the field for “a minute”. After four hours of back-breaking labor (gathering “fuel” from the world’s largest dung heap, scything and threshing hay by hand), we returned back to the summer camp for my last night in the wild. We’re so far north that this time of year, the sun comes up at about 4am and sets about 9pm. They start late and work right up until sunset. They have to quit at sunset because the temperature drops precipitously. I’m guessing it falls by between 20 and 30 degrees in the first hour. It falls so fast that water condenses on everything, just like the morning dew. You won’t believe this, but it drops so fast that you can feel the relative warmth of objects around you—buildings, piles of hay, anything—on your skin as you approach them.

So here I am, in Mongolia, living with nomads, on a diet without fresh food, freezing by night and burning by day, without electricity and water, using an open field for a latrine, and spending hours laboring in the fields without any tools or shade. And you think to yourself, “Gray, are you on vacation, or imprisoned in a Soviet gulag?” The answer is that sometimes I don’t know either.

 

 

 

Mongolia: The Land that Time Forgot

Mongols were the “barbarians” whom the Chinese were defending against for thousands of years. The rest of the world learned about them the hard way in the 13^th century when Genghis Khan, at the head of the Mongolian Horde, conquered pretty much everything between the Pacific Ocean and the Caspian Sea. To give you an idea of how much raping and pillaging was done, an estimated 16 million people today are direct male descendants from Genghis Khan himself.

2.7 million people live in present-day Mongolia, with 1.7 million of them in the capital, Ulan-Bator, leaving the remaining million to occupy 600,000 square miles. That makes Mongolia the 2^nd least-densely populated place on the planet, after only Greenland.

Many of the rest are nomads, living pretty much as they did 1,500 years ago. They live in gers (yurts) that they move as necessary to allow sufficient forage for the animals, but at least seasonally. The gers have collapsible walls for easy transport, and are entirely covered in a thick windproof felt, with a single door and a hole in the center of the roof to allow smoke to escape. Entire families occupy a single ger. There is no electricity, no running water, and effectively no sanitation here—no outhouses or even ditch latrines, just open fields. There is an occasional modern touch—many families have cars or motorcycles, cell phones, small solar panels for short-term electricity, etc. But life here still revolves around the horse.

All families own many, many horses. Most own sheep and goats, and some own cattle or camels. I decided to spend my time here with the nomads, so went to Bulgan province, just northwest of the Gobi Desert. 60,000 people and 1.7 million livestock live in Bulgan, which works out to 100+ animals per family. Dogs help as shepherds, spending the night protecting the flock, mostly fighting off wolves. They’ll attack anything that isn’t their master at night, including horses, camels, and people. The orange guy attacked a guest a few months back, but you wouldn’t know it by the look of him. All are milked and all are eaten, except for the dogs. Have you ever milked a horse?

Mongolia has the harshest climate on the planet. The Gobi Desert is among the coldest places in the winter, and among the hottest in the summer. The annual temperature here ranges from -50 degrees to +100 degrees Farenheit. It gets so hot by day that you think the sun will never set, and so cold by night that you yearn for daylight, to say nothing of the supercell thunderstorms and sandstorms. The landscape may look a lush green, but the soil is mostly sand. If you look closely, you’ll see that even the grass is having a hard go of it.

Almost nothing edible grows here, with the exception of onions, carrots, potatoes, and other underground plants. The nomads rely on animals heartier than people to eat the grass and weed shoots and turn them into something edible. Their diet is entirely meat, fat, dairy products, and other animal parts. They even slaughter the goats and sheep in such a way as to preserve the blood.

My first stop was with Dashfangtung and his family (wife and three kids), but in the same encampment were his mother, and his brother and family (wife and two kids). Upon arrival, I was swarmed by the kids, who ran me ragged. One of the girls relieved me of my camera for a little while and took some pictures of her own, shown below and now among my most prized possessions. I later learned that they were so interested in me because I’m the hairiest person they’ve ever seen—they got great pleasure from rubbing my arm hair and calling me a monkey.

 

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Dashfangtung is in his mid-30s and has a gorgeous 30 year old wife with a lovely personality who’s a great cook and better mother. I might have a thing for her, but she’s taken (and a nomad in Mongolia).

The itinerary had Dashfangtung hiking with me to some sort of a destroyed temple. But he offered to go by motorcycle instead. Now, I’m all for hiking….to places that can’t be reached by alternative means. Given the choice, I’m going with motorcycle every time. We drove no more than a mile before the motorcycle broke-down, nearly catastrophically.* So we did what any two red-blooded Mongolian men would do—we walked to the closest bar and got three-quarters drunk. The bar featured a woman removing all usable parts of a sheep, with a knife-sharpening assist from her toddler.

An hour or so later, Dashfangtung’s brother arrived with a replacement motorcycle, and off we went. He showed me a pile of stones that was once a structure that was important or something. He cared about as much as a did, which is to day he didn’t give a twopenny damn, so we relieved ourselves and headed back to the ger to repair the bike.

 This kid riding herd is 9 years old.

 

*The rear sprocket came unattached from the rear axle, and gouged the rim pretty severely. The only thing that kept the wheel from coming off entirely was the limited gap between the two rear arms of the bike frame. Another fraction of an inch and it would have been the end of the blog, among other things.