Siberian central heating and spring cleaning

Spring here isn’t the gradual change of season found in temperate climates but a transformation into a completely different world. For more than half the year the people are in a state of semi-hibernation; only leaving their homes out of necessity, heads down and eyes fixed, swaddled in layers of protective padding, to get to their place of work or forage for food from the local shops dotted at the bottoms of concrete apartment blocks.

But then the world moves on its axis and children emerge to kick footballs and play on the swings, old woman who haven’t been seen for months occupy the wooden benches and blink in the warm sunlight, and from our apartment can be heard a rhythmic thwack. This is spring cleaning. Young men are sent out with the rugs from their homes which they drape over the children’s’ playground equipment and ritually beat. No doubt this was an important task after a winter in a yurt with a wood fire that had been kept burning for months but, with a custom of always removing outdoor shoes and central heating, it seems less of a necessity in apartment living. And the central heating is ‘central’.

January 7^th is Christmas Day in the Orthodox Church which uses the Julian calendar and May 8^th Victory Day to celebrate the successful conclusion to the Great Patriotic War, but in Pavlodar the dates that everyone knows are October 15^th and April 20^th; this is when the heating is turned on and off. It comes from a power station on the edge of town through many miles of large bore pipes which are mostly underground. The system constantly needs attention and there always seems to be a digger working somewhere to remove the sandy soil and fix a leak, but the radiators are fed with water that makes them too hot to touch and they kept our apartment warm and cosy. The only control on the temperature is to open and close the windows.

We went back to the centre of town for the end-of-war celebrations. There was marching and bands playing patriotic tunes and the crowd was much larger than it had been for Unity Day. The bulk of casualties from the Second World War were borne by the Soviet Union and it is commendable that their sacrifice is not forgotten, but I felt saddened that bloodshed and chauvinism had so much greater appeal than the tolerance and understanding celebrated on Unity Day. A hundred years ago Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and their contemporaries changed how war is perceived in our culture and commemorations are now sombre affairs where tribute is paid to those who died in the service of their country. Here in the old USSR the emphasis is much more on celebrating victory and triumphalism.

I preferred Unity Day.