surplus—came from this remote corner of western Siberia. The pioneers who discovered the field were showered with medals. Desperate for anything that could be turned into hard currency, Soviet leaders repeatedly raised production targets. In order to keep pace with the demands from Moscow, the oilmen began cutting corners. In their haste to get the oil out of the ground, they skimped on infrastructure and paid no attention to the surrounding environment. They used crude extraction techniques that caused the fields to become waterlogged and lose their natural pressure. They left valuable timber to rot in the swamp, rather than take the trouble of processing it. Instead of building pipelines to remove the excess natural gas, they simply torched it. Every day enough gas was burned off from the oil fields around Nizhnevartovsk to heat several European cities. 62
With sensible conservation techniques, the Samotlor field could havecontinued to produce large amounts of oil for many decades. But the oil was extracted in such a slipshod fashion that the natural life of the field was unnecessarily shortened. By the time Gorbachev came to power, production had already entered a sharp decline.
Scarcely any of the oil wealth trickled down to the people of Nizhnevartovsk. Home to more than three hundred thousand people, the city had a transient, makeshift quality about it, as if the flimsy apartment blocks and potholed streets would be abandoned to the taiga as soon as the oil wells dried up. An entire quarter of the city consisted of nothing but metal wagons designed as temporary accommodation for oil workers. Frequently three or four families were forced to share a single outdoor toilet, despite sub-zero temperatures for more than half the year. For serious shopping, residents were obliged to fly to Moscow, three hours away by plane. Recreational and cultural facilities were practically nonexistent.
A S G ORBACHEV STEPPED OUT of the bulletproof Zil that had been specially flown in from Moscow, the crowd surged forward. The Kremlin security men had trouble preventing the grimy oil workers from sweeping the general secretary and his fashionably coutured wife, Raisa, off their feet. Wherever they went, the couple was greeted by a wall of cheering, inquisitive people. The local party bureaucrats, anxious to avoid an embarrassing scene, hovered uneasily in the background. The expressions on their faces suggested an unctuous desire to humor the new leader, combined with alarm over his unpredictable ways.
It was an encounter between two different worlds: the apparatchiks in their homburgs and heavy overcoats and the unshaved, unwashed masses in their threadbare anoraks and woolen ski caps. And there, bobbing up and down in the middle of this tableau vivant, was the smiling face of the Soviet Union’s new leader, arm outstretched to the people, like a modern-day tsarbatyushka (little father).
The sight of a Communist Party leader rubbing shoulders with ordinary people seemed miraculous to the inhabitants of Nizhnevartovsk, as it did to the rest of the country when it was broadcast on television that evening. The propaganda machine had done its best to drain of any individuality the men who waved feebly from the top of Lenin’s tomb on national feast days. Like the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Communist leaders derived their authority from participation in endless rituals, rather than their ability to impress the masses with their brilliance. The aura of mystery andanonymity that surrounded these men was one of the principal sources of the durability of the regime.
In order to achieve his goal of pushing the world’s second superpower into the twenty-first century, Gorbachev knew he had to extricate himself from the grasp of the conservative party apparatus, which had no interest in challenging the status quo. If he allowed himself to become a prisoner of the bureaucracy, change would be glacial. The solution was to forge a
With sensible conservation techniques, the Samotlor field could havecontinued to produce large amounts of oil for many decades. But the oil was extracted in such a slipshod fashion that the natural life of the field was unnecessarily shortened. By the time Gorbachev came to power, production had already entered a sharp decline.
Scarcely any of the oil wealth trickled down to the people of Nizhnevartovsk. Home to more than three hundred thousand people, the city had a transient, makeshift quality about it, as if the flimsy apartment blocks and potholed streets would be abandoned to the taiga as soon as the oil wells dried up. An entire quarter of the city consisted of nothing but metal wagons designed as temporary accommodation for oil workers. Frequently three or four families were forced to share a single outdoor toilet, despite sub-zero temperatures for more than half the year. For serious shopping, residents were obliged to fly to Moscow, three hours away by plane. Recreational and cultural facilities were practically nonexistent.
A S G ORBACHEV STEPPED OUT of the bulletproof Zil that had been specially flown in from Moscow, the crowd surged forward. The Kremlin security men had trouble preventing the grimy oil workers from sweeping the general secretary and his fashionably coutured wife, Raisa, off their feet. Wherever they went, the couple was greeted by a wall of cheering, inquisitive people. The local party bureaucrats, anxious to avoid an embarrassing scene, hovered uneasily in the background. The expressions on their faces suggested an unctuous desire to humor the new leader, combined with alarm over his unpredictable ways.
It was an encounter between two different worlds: the apparatchiks in their homburgs and heavy overcoats and the unshaved, unwashed masses in their threadbare anoraks and woolen ski caps. And there, bobbing up and down in the middle of this tableau vivant, was the smiling face of the Soviet Union’s new leader, arm outstretched to the people, like a modern-day tsarbatyushka (little father).
The sight of a Communist Party leader rubbing shoulders with ordinary people seemed miraculous to the inhabitants of Nizhnevartovsk, as it did to the rest of the country when it was broadcast on television that evening. The propaganda machine had done its best to drain of any individuality the men who waved feebly from the top of Lenin’s tomb on national feast days. Like the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Communist leaders derived their authority from participation in endless rituals, rather than their ability to impress the masses with their brilliance. The aura of mystery andanonymity that surrounded these men was one of the principal sources of the durability of the regime.
In order to achieve his goal of pushing the world’s second superpower into the twenty-first century, Gorbachev knew he had to extricate himself from the grasp of the conservative party apparatus, which had no interest in challenging the status quo. If he allowed himself to become a prisoner of the bureaucracy, change would be glacial. The solution was to forge a
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