Sobolonye has, like Chernobyl, become a kind of accidental monument
to a Russian catastrophe, only nobody outside the Bikin valley has ever
heard of it. Though it was hailed as a positive development in the West,
few Westerners fully grasp the toll perestroika took and continues to take
on the country. Among Russians, it has since earned the ignominious
nickname “Katastroika.” Proof of this abounds in Sobolonye, a place
where civilization as most of us understand it has effectively collapsed.
The status quo of dysfunction here was summed up by the local postman,
who traveled his hairy, backcountry route in a government van decorated
with tassels, fringe, and an inverted American flag. After stopping in at
Sobolonye’s administrative offices one winter day in 2007, he returned to
his vehicle shaking his head. “There’s no government here,” he said.^5
“It’s anarchy!”
To get an idea of day-to-day village life, one need look no further than
Grigori Peshkov, the local gas merchant, a man who supplements his
meager income by wading through thigh-deep snow in subzero
temperatures to search for pinecones. The Chinese, whose voracious
appetite for natural resources is keenly felt in this part of Russia, prize
the wood of the Korean pine, and they consider the nuts a delicacy.
Peshkov can get 30 rubles (about one dollar) for every pound of cones he
finds buried beneath the snow. If he takes the time to remove the
individual nuts, he might—if he’s lucky—make 100 rubles per pound.
One could argue that this is an activity better suited to a pig or a squirrel,
and one would be right, but, as a young Nanai woman from a neighboring
village observed, “People don’t live in Sobolonye, they survive.”^6
Sometimes, they don’t even manage to do that.
Under these circumstances, Markov’s humor became a precious
commodity and, for many who knew him, he was a rare bright spot in an
otherwise bleak situation. Incidental humor of the kind Markov
specialized in tends to defy translation, having less to do with a punch
line than it does with what one might call situational alchemy. It is one of
the keys to surviving in Russia, where random insults and deprivations
seem to occur more often than other places, and where the sum of these