As I clamber back into the cramped, steamy log cabin-within-a-log cabin, my host politely enquires if I have any family history of heart conditions. His implication: that I am taking the sauna-and-snow ritual to extremes. But Siberia is a location of superlatives, and I have just sustained, twice, the intensely sensual experience of leaping from an intolerably hot sauna into an unbearably cold drift of snow.
Siberia is preposterous. Were this a country in its own right, rather than merely a region of Russia, it would be by far the largest nation in the world. The Tatar root of the name is “Sleeping Land”. The land ends at a serrated coastline measuring thousands of miles. But because it faces north, to the Arctic Ocean, any moderating influence of the sea is negated. There’s cold, and then there’s Siberia – where vodka isn’t a drink, it’s a cure.
So acute are the temperature differences between a fiercely heated wooden cubicle and the trillions and trillions of snowflakes east of the Urals that your body and soul are elevated to a radical new scale of sensitivity. You shriek simultaneously with pain and delight. This is life close to the edge. Third time lucky? You bet.
Seven miles is as near as most of us get to the world capital of cool. If you are on a flight between Heathrow and the Far East, you may be that close right now, gazing blankly at the read-out from the moving map on your personal screen: 38,000 ft, announces the altimeter; Outside Air Temperature -65°C, reports the thermometer. As a flyer you will be well aware that the rarefied air at the cruising altitude of a 747, higher than Everest, is way below freezing. But the disconcerting thing about northern Siberia in winter is that life does not get significantly warmer at ground level.
In property, location is everything, which means that you could probably snap up some real-estate bargains in the city of Norilsk, were foreigners allowed to go there. Ninety degrees east of Greenwich, three degrees inside the Arctic Circle and close to the uncomfortable cusp between Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, Norilsk is doggedly negative. The average temperature across summer and winter is -10.9°C. The sort of vodka-solidifying weather that brings Western cities to a standstill is just another day in a place that seems permanently to reside in the bleakest of midwinters.
“Bleak” may sum up the view from your aircraft window. Agreed, the raw desolation of Siberia looks entirely unfit for human habitation, a monochromatic land of frozen shadows. But, close up, in the excellent company of veterans of the perpetual war against absolute zero, this is a land where man prevails over mortal cold. Usually.
Subzero Siberia does not sneak up stealthily. It slams into anyone reckless enough to be outside, searing any patch of exposed flesh and infiltrating your lungs. So you rarely stray out of doors, unless you hunger for sensation. Which is what I am seeking, at a country dacha in the woods somewhere north of Novosibirsk, the self-styled Chicago of Siberia.
Since the collapse of communism, the exploitation of the mineral wealth that lies beneath the permafrost has fuelled a capitalist frenzy. Forget the salt mines to which political prisoners were routinely dispatched; today, Siberia is slowly being taken apart by men desperate for diamonds, gas and oil. Some, like the billionaire Roman Abramovich, have made fortunes on a Siberian scale and used their small change to, for example, buy up a foreign football team. The Chelsea owner, though, is the exception. Many Siberians still yearn for the certainties they had back in the USSR. The Soviet rouble may have been “a piece of paper giving us the right to stand in line and be humiliated”, but at least the basics of shelter and warmth were provided. Exposure to market forces is all the more painful when amplified by extreme cold.
Outside, moonlight bounces from the deep banks of snow that smother the huddles of cottages and clusters of birch trees – offcuts from which are currently being deployed in the cramped hothouse. On me. If the SAS ever went into hedge warfare, I imagine this is how it would be. I am lying, nearly naked, flat on my face while a man armed with a fistful of birch branches beats me to a pink pulp to tone up my skin (well, that’s his story). Simultaneously he berates the warm snap that is disrupting the usual anaesthesia of winter. The temperature has barely fallen below -15°C all week, he complains, and tells of winters so cold you can hear your breath freeze as you exhale: the droplets of moisture crystallize audibly on contact with the atmosphere.
