‘If your earlobes freeze up, don’t touch them. They might snap off’
Ahead of my trip to Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, I get valuable advice from a former resident. ‘‘If your earlobes freeze up,’’ says Muscovite lawyer Tatiana, who spent her childhood in the city in northeast Siberia, ‘‘don’t touch them. They might snap off. Wait instead until they thaw out.’’ She isn’t joking.
I amwearing 16 items of clothing, including all-body thermals, when I step off the aircraft at Yakutsk’s icy airport, after an overnight flight from Moscow. I rush to a taxi, and the frozen air snatches my breath away. The outside temperature is minus 32 degrees Celsius. The thermometer will fall even more during my threeday stay.
Average winter temperatures in Yakutsk (population 270,000) are a bone-chilling minus 40C, a full 5C beyond the point at which exposed skin is in constant danger of frostbite (and earlobes can snap off). Even for Russians, who know a thing or two about the topic, Yakutsk is a byword for extreme cold.
‘‘Moscow is a warm city, of course,’’ says my taxi driver, Vasily, as we skid along snow-covered roads. It’s easy to understand why Vasily feels this way. The daytime temperature when I left Moscow, my home for the past decade or so, was a relatively balmy minus 6C. That’s not even chilly enough for the moisture in your nostrils to freeze (that occurs at minus 20C).
The cold is a constant danger in Yakutsk and locals are taking no chances – almost all the women that I see on the streets during the drive into town are wrapped in fur. Just to underline the hazards, the lead item on the news shortly before my visit was about a two-year-old boy who had wandered out of a Yakutsk nursery dressed only in shorts and T-shirt. The toddler was, fortunately, found minutes later by passers-by, but was taken to hospital with frostbitten fingers and toes.
Despite Tatiana’s warning and the timely news item, I make a major mistake as we arrive at my hotel. I’m so engrossed in the scenery that I forget to put
Chilling out: my hat back on. As I walk from taxi to hotel door, the cold launches a sneak attack on my head, pummelling me in the five steps or so it takes to reach the hotel lobby. It feels as if someone has punched me in the side of the face, and I experience an odd ringing in my ears for the next few days.
Despite the vicious cold, the sky is a brilliant blue. ‘‘Frost and sun; a day of wonder!’’ wrote Russia’s 19th century national poet, Alexander Pushkin, and for the first time his words make perfect sense to me.
The combined cold and sunshine is invigorating, as I discover when I visit the city centre. It is an effect only slightly offset by the clouds of fumes belching from parked cars, which I initially mistake for a freezing fog.
‘‘We leave the engines running when we go somewhere for a few hours,’’ a driver, Stanislav, tells me later. ‘‘If we don’t, the motors conk out and we are stranded. Some people sometimes leave them running all day while they are at work.’’
The centre of Yakutsk is dominated by a huge statue to Vladimir Lenin, the father of the October Revolution in 1917. Lenin was exiled to deepest Siberia by the Tsar ahead of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia.
Across the street, children scream with delight as they hurtle down an ice slide. Some are no more than toddlers. How cold is too cold for the kids of Yakutsk? ‘‘We let our children go out to play until it gets below minus 35C,’’ says Nina, as her son or daughter (it’s hard to tell with all the fur) runs towards her. ‘‘Otherwise they would have to sit indoors all winter.’’
‘‘Besides,’’ she smiles, ‘‘the frost kills off all the cold viruses. Our job is to keep the little ones wrapped up warm.’’
Apart from being very, very cold for much of the year (the lowest temperature recorded in the city was minus 64C), Yakutsk is also extremely remote. Six time zones from Moscow, the flight here from the Russian capital takes almost seven hours, much of it over frozen tundra. Yakutsk is capital of the vast ice-kingdom republic of Yakutia, which was conquered by tsarist Russia in 1632. Covering an area of more than 3 million square kilometres, it would be the world’s eighth-largest country were it an independent state.
Yakutsk only began to develop under Joseph Stalin, who saw it as the ideal location for Gulag labour camps. It grew further with the arrival of thousands of Soviet workers, who came to mine for gold and diamonds. It is now the world’s largest city built entirely on permafrost – soil that is frozen all year round. Less than 400km from the Arctic Circle, Yakutsk boasts theatres, museums, a university and a zoo, as well as an outdoor sports stadium.
The shifting permafrost makes it impossible to build in the normal manner, says Viktor Shepelev, of Yakutsk’s splendidly named Institute of Permafrost.
‘‘The permafrost means that the soil is unsuitable for construction before about 10m-15m beneath the surface,’’ he says.
‘‘Engineers have to hammer concrete poles down to a depth lower than this and build on top of them.’’
It might not look pretty but it works . . . most of the time. In midwinter 2008 the heating system in parts of the city broke down, with the temperature in Yakutsk at minus 50C. No-one died but residents had to huddle around makeshift fires as the authorities scrambled to get the heating on again.
In my hotel room to unwrap myself from my never-ending layers of clothes. My earlobes, I’m delighted to discover, are intact.