from there, to work in the woods in southern Primorye, not far from a
town named for the explorer Arseniev. Around 1980, when Markov was
in his late twenties, he moved up to Sobolonye, which offered both better
prospects and an opportunity to put some distance between himself and a
failed marriage. Sobolonye had been carved out of the forest a few years
earlier by the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise, a state-owned
logging company that had been set up to log the old-growth poplar, oak,
and pine throughout the Bikin valley. Primorye contains some of the
biggest and most varied timber anywhere east of the Urals and, at the
time, the middle and upper Bikin were largely unexploited.
Sobolonye is the last settlement at the end of a road that, when not
buried in snow, can go from choking dust to sucking mud in the space of
an hour. At its peak, the village was home to about 450 people who lived
in small log houses built in haphazard tiers on a hillside above the river.
The place has the feel of a North American mining town circa 1925, only
with fewer straight lines. There are no sidewalks or paved streets, and no
plumbing; the houses are heated with wood, and water is drawn from
common wells. Telephones—of any kind—are a rarity. Electricity, which
was viewed as a symbol of modernity by the Soviets and a means of
keeping pace with the West, is provided by a diesel generator on the edge
of town. Where the village ends the taiga begins, stretching away for
miles in all directions.
For a certain kind of person, Sobolonye offered a life that was hard to
improve on: decent housing, predictable employment, ready access to a
river full of fish, and, for those who knew what to look for, a forest full of
nuts, berries, mushrooms, medicinal roots, and wild game. In the
summer, you could even grow watermelons. The logging company was as
generous as the forest, providing a school, clinic, library, general store,
recreation center, and even a hairdresser. Sobolonye, at the time Markov
arrived, was a place of optimism and fresh starts, and the young people
who settled there felt lucky. From their vantage, communism worked:
here, it truly seemed that Man, Nature, and Industry could coexist for the
common good. Most of these young men and women had arrived from
other parts of the Far East, including Khabarovsk Territory and Sakhalin
ron
(Ron)
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