Anna Nemtsova, special for Russia Beyond the Headlines
Russia’s nomadic reindeer hunters now coexist with roads, rail, pipes and drilling towers.
Lena Sarteto’s puffy, rough-skinned hands are a flurry of activity. As water boils over the fire in the center of her teepee, Sarteto, a nomad with the Nenets indigenous people of western Siberia, is cooking a feast for her guests and her family of five. She chops up dark red pieces of jerked deer meat, peels a huge silver fish and places pieces of dry bread and cookies on plates that she stores in a wooden sled. Her floor is the grass beneath her feet; fish bones and scales litter the room around the fire. The fish bones will stay there when they move on.
Sarteto is in a hurry. In a few hours, her small nomadic group of about 10 families — still called Brigade No. 5, their official name from Soviet times - will push further n orth. It is early Polar summer, and taking advantage of the almost continuous light, they herd their 3,000 reindeer to the shores of the Kara Sea, reaching that part of the Arctic Circle in August. And then they turn around, fleeing the biting frost and returning their reindeer to grass and moss of the warmer tundra.
It is an age-old cycle, but one that these families know is increasingly under threat.
The Yamal Peninsula is also home to Gazprom, the huge Russian energy company that supplies natural gas to much of Western Europe. And as Gazprom pushes into the peninsula, it has brought the kind of development — road, rail and pipelines — that is transforming the tundra. The Nenets have been introduced to asphalt highways, rusty metal, wire and drilling towers. Russia’s wealth appears to be cut out of the tundra they once called their own.
“The fish tastes dead; we feel sick after drinking water out of the lakes; our reindeers get stuck in wire loops or trip over pipes, break their legs and die,” Sarteto said. She repeats this line as if it is a mantra: “We are the last generation to lead a nomadic life; our children will live in towns, without tundra.”
The Yamal Peninsula contains the Bavanenkovo gas field, a vast tract containing about 4.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas that Gazprom expects to begin pumping next year. Drilling towers have begun to dot the horizon. And to help exploit the gas resource, a new 325-mile long railroad opened last year.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.....................
