Bitter Cold Is Sweetest Season for Russians

The Fantasy: “Frost and Sun! A wonderful day! And you are still asleep, my sweet friend. It is time, beauty. Wake up!”

--A.S. Pushkin, 1829

The Reality: “Nine people froze to death in Moscow and 162 were taken to the hospital with frostbite” in the first week of this year.

--Interfax news agency, 1997

The Moral: “He who likes sledding [had] better also like to pull.”

--Ancient Russian proverb

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It is where fairy tales and horror stories converge, this hoarfrosted season of fabled landscapes, frozen drunks, sleigh rides and Siberian exile.

While Europeans and Americans shiver and curse this season’s record cold and disruptive snowfalls, winter--with all its severity--is just a natural part of the Russian year’s rhythm.

Winter is a time of more fondness than fear for Russians, despite the hardships and hazards regarded by less hardy folk as cruel whims of Mother Nature.

Steeled by tradition and long familiarity with matters beyond their control, most Russians greet cold, dark and discomfort like bosom buddies with whom they have spent time brooding. To most Russians, that Western visitors shrink from outdoor activity and cringe at the sight of laborers toiling heedlessly without gloves gives smug reassurance of superior national mettle.

“Cold is part of the Russian character. People here believe that it helps harden them and make them unpretentious,” sociologist Oksana Fais says. “When it was still mild and gray in November, everyone was complaining and demanding, ‘Where is winter?’ It was like waiting for guests who are late.”

This season’s saga of snow frolics, skiing and sledding got a later start in central Russia than in most years; the gray and muddy urban landscapes were transformed into white wonderlands only in mid-December.

The force with which winter arrived just before the holiday season horrified uninitiated outsiders but barely ruffled a Russian feather. When the mercury plunged to 15 below zero during the last week in December, not yet the holiday season in this Orthodox Christian country, the streets and sidewalks and embankments were as full of strollers as on any summer evening.

Winters before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution saw the aristocracy sometimes retreat to kinder climates favored by fellow bluebloods--the Crimea, Venice, the south of France.

“Why don’t Russians leave for the winter?” Fais asks after detailing the drudgery and dangers of having to plod on with work, school and responsibilities irrespective of the cold. “Now there is often a financial barrier. Those free to go where they like are mostly pensioners who have no money. But even if they had the opportunity, I doubt many would leave. Most people have a positive attitude toward winter. It’s part of our past, and these days all remnants of the old days are idealized.”

The best of winter, January and February, drapes the gray metropolis of Moscow in sugary clouds of white bunting, obscuring the dirt and grime. Snowfalls vary from light, papery flakes that float into gossamer, flyaway piles to damp clumps that collect with alarming rapidity, turning roadways into skating rinks and slowing even Moscow’s notorious speed demons.

The worst weather, most Russians agree, is the advent of springtime, when the mercury begins its occasional jaunts above freezing in March and April. The storybook white backdrop melts into brown slush, making the landscape as bleak as late autumn and coating cars and clothing with mud.

But the cold heart of winter enjoys the acceptance, if not outright esteem, of most Russians because of this vast country’s roots in the peasantry.

“Winter was the time to rest, to gather with friends and family inside. It was the best part of the year’s cycle,” says anthropologist Anatoly Yamskov, head of a research group within the Russian Academy of Sciences. “There was no field work to be done. Spring was for planting, summer for tending and there was the big job of harvesting in the fall, but winter was the closest Russians then came to vacation.”

The hazards of winter have mostly emerged in modern Russia. Until the development fever of dictator Josef Stalin drew millions of Soviet citizens from the villages to new industrial sites, the vast majority of the population was rural. Perilously slippery sidewalks are a pitfall of urbanization.

And winter became a weapon against opponents only during Stalin’s campaign of terror against real and imagined enemies of the state.

Sentences to Siberian exile usually were accompanied by deprivation of property, which left many among the millions purged and punished during the Communist era with no place to return to after serving out their terms. Some stayed in the harsh hinterlands to build new lives far from Moscow’s meanness. Others joined them on the remote frontiers to escape the monotony of urban labor and enjoy a modicum of freedom beyond the clutches of Communist dictators and the party’s bureaucratic dolts.

Even the old regime’s conscription of Russian cold as a means of punishment failed to inflict much damage to popular regard of winter as a time of folkloric release.

“Unlike Hitler’s camps, Stalinist prisons and labor camps built in harsh climates were not intended for extermination,” says Viktor Kozlov, a professor of ethnography at the Center for Russian Studies in Moscow. “Many died from the hunger and cold in Siberia, but the reason for establishing these camps was more a matter of economics.”

Political prisoners were banished to the bitter extremes in Magadan in the Far East so that they could unearth the gold embedded in a frozen landscape no man would go to voluntarily, Kozlov notes. Likewise, the packed prisons and camps of the Ural Mountains were built to accommodate forced labor for mineral extraction, and conscripts built power stations, roadways and coal mines throughout what writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn christened the “gulag archipelago.”

“Obviously, not all Russians can be lumped together as lovers of the dark and cold,” says Kozlov, observing that many in southern Russia, particularly the Caucasus regions, where winter is short and gentle, regard the northern conditions as nothing short of barbaric.

But he notes that hundreds of thousands migrated east and north from European Russia voluntarily, seeking their fortunes in the wilderness much as American pioneers staked their claims in the Wild West or followed the lure of the Klondike gold rush to Alaska.

Russians who inhabit Siberian industrial sites or academic enclaves in climatically inhospitable regions were enticed by bonuses and benefits proffered by the government, but most say they were sold on the pioneer lifestyle by the allure of professional and personal freedom.

“To ask a Russian how he manages to live and survive and even enjoy himself in such seemingly hostile and harsh weather is very much like asking a polar bear how he manages to get along among icebergs,” says Stanislav Rassadin, a noted literary critic and essayist.

“The Russian winter is just an integral part of us, or rather, we are a part of it,” Rassadin continues. “There is not much we can do to change. That is the way it is. That is the way we are. A Russian would never ask himself such a question.”

Indifference to the elements can be seen throughout the cold areas of Russia. In this artists’ community on the edge of Moscow, families flock in from the polluted city to cross-country ski on weekends. In the far-flung northern provinces, generations of reindeer herders and game hunters eke out a spartan living on the stingy tundra with little heed of the harsh conditions that surround them all year.

Throughout Russia, young mothers bundle their infants--leaving only their tiny, pink faces exposed--for long strolls in their buggies in subzero temperatures, convinced that the frosty air is good for the constitution.

Russia’s ubiquitous “walrus clubs” take that notion to extreme measures, as hardy souls go for group plunges into the icy Moscow River in a bracing daily ritual that they claim strengthens the body and prolongs life.

Ice fishing enjoys an almost fanatic following in early winter, when the first ice is thought to offer the best catch as anglers can see their prey (the desire to drop a line as early as possible often results in tragedy, with frequent reports of fishermen crashing through still-thin ice and drowning).

Housewives consider the November-to-April cold weather a blessing for food storage, as the season turns window casements and apartment balconies into substitutes for the freezers that even most city households still lack.

The delays and disruptions winter brings to more-affluent societies are mere revisions of the daily routine for Russians, says anthropologist Yamskov.

“By and large, our people still do not have personal cars, so there’s no frustration over the time needed to clean the windows of snow and ice or to get the motor started,” he says. “Even those who have cars tend to garage them for the winter.”

Even manual laborers contend the cold is a source of inspiration, as idleness intensifies the pain.

“Look how much digging is going on in the streets around you,” road worker Vladislav Tikhonov, wearing warm felt boots but no mittens, observes of the Moscow building boom that continues unabated through the snow and ice. “You will never see this flurry of activity in summer.”

Winter is also a handy excuse for increased vodka drinking in a land where alcohol is the favorite remedy for every hardship year-round. Even summer teetotalers tend to take a morning nip to warm them up before they go out into particularly cold winter weather.

“I love this weather!” enthuses Vladimir Ivashkevich, a 70-year-old retired aircraft designer. “I love to go to the dacha, ski for about two hours, then heat up my bath. You soak for about five minutes, then rush out and fall and roll around naked in piles of snow.”

At Novodevichy Cemetery in southwest Moscow, 70-year-old Viktoria Maltseva takes off a knitted mitten to wipe clean her parents’ black marble headstones, oblivious to the atmosphere--10 degrees below zero--as she bustles about her business.

“It’s not cold, it’s invigorating,” she insists, smiling.

Pensioners like Maltseva lament the current economic woes of the country that delay their monthly paychecks and have turned down the subsidized heat. But they blame political tumult and experimentation--an unwelcome revolution over which they have no control--for intensifying the hardships.

Maltseva waxes nostalgic over the sleigh rides and treks through the forest that form the memories of winter from her youth, remembering wartime privations with the satisfaction that the bitter cold of the early 1940s inflicted greater suffering on Russia’s enemies.

An exceptionally harsh winter in 1941 forced Nazi invaders to halt their advance on Moscow, and the equally legendary spring thaw held them back in transfixing mud. They were not the first troops to be turned back by harsh Russian weather. In 1812, French soldiers under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Moscow but were unable to persevere through the bitter winter. They eventually withdrew.

Most northern Russians plod through months of subzero days--and long nights that end close to lunchtime--with few complaints. However, health care workers report the odd case of “polar hysteria,” especially among women in the most light-deprived areas of the country, says Kozlov.

In Murmansk and in remote Yakutia, depression and suicide are the occasional consequences for recent settlers driven mad by the unbroken darkness.

Flu epidemics are another unwelcome tradition in winter, as are the spate of falls on black ice and the grim daily statistic of how many derelicts died of exposure overnight. Last year, more than 500 deaths occurred on the streets of Moscow among alcoholics and homeless people.

But cold, the scientists say, is a vital factor in Russian culture and a long-standing part of a national self-image that casts the individual in the role of innocent victim.

Rather than feel isolated or alienated by their hostile climate, says Fais, most Russians see it as a validation of their sturdier souls.

“People now mythologize everything from the past,” says the sociologist, “and cold is certainly part of Russia’s heritage.”