Railway. The town’s location seems counterintuitive—the train station is
twenty minutes away, down a long dirt road—but this is typical. Most of
Siberia and the Far East were settled by Central Committee: a map would
be spread out in Moscow, or maybe Irkutsk; a location would be chosen,
usually with a particular industry in mind, and a village, town, or city
would be thrown up—in many cases by forced labor, or soldiers (which,
in Russia, amounts to almost the same thing). Construction was generally
hasty, with little thought for the long term, and the harsh utility of these
settlements suggests a thinly veiled gulag. Main roads in and out are
punctuated by checkpoints manned by armed guards. It is only when you
get past the steel bulkheads that pass for apartment doors here that you
are allowed to return to a world of color, warmth, and human scale.
One visiting scholar described the Soviet urban anti-aesthetic as
“Terminal Modernism,” and Yuri Trush’s forty-year-old hometown,
perched as it is on the rim of a vast open-pit coal mine, is a classic
example.^2 The town proper is a battered collection of urine-stained
apartment blocks placed at irregular intervals along potholed, gravel-
strewn streets. In some cases, these slab-sided, wire-draped five-story
buildings are arranged around grassy commons littered with bits and
pieces of playground equipment so badly damaged that they look as if
they had weathered some kind of natural catastrophe. There are strangely
few children and fewer dogs, but many cats in a state of what seems to be
permanent heat. Trush’s building is a short walk from the town square,
which is overseen by the once obligatory statue of Lenin. This particular
Lenin—a two-tone plaster bust—faces the town’s digital thermometer,
which spends months in negative territory while the father of Russian
communism looks on from beneath a luminous skullcap of snow. From
his vantage he can catch a glimpse of a rickety but gaily colored Ferris
wheel that stands, motionless now, several blocks away. Over his left
shoulder is the power plant.
Luchegorsk means “Light City”; it is home to the region’s biggest
coal-fired power-generating station, and its belching stacks are visible
from fifty miles away. About ten hours up the Trans-Siberian from