The Lost Lighthouses of Siberia

This afternoon I visited the always fantastic Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, a slightly oddly put together gallery attached to Manchester University and making up one corner of the much maligned Whitworth Park. At the moment there is a fantastic exhibition by Jane and Louise Wilson titled The Toxic Camera detailing some of the after effects of Chernobyl. Chernobyl has always fascinated me: in particular because of the abandoned buildings, slowly decaying relics of a lost time and place. I have always loved abandoned buildings and wondering what stories they contained, what events happened there which are now perhaps lost forever.

The rest of this post has nothing to with this gallery

The former Soviet Union is rife with lost things, building and projects disappeared in the chaos of the collapse, it is part of the reason the region has so often captured my imagination. One tale that has always stuck with me though is the story of the Siberian lighthouses. Like so many Russian stories it is a mix of fact and fiction, stories told by a man who knew a man who knew a man who knew… but as with all these things there is always a kernel of truth in them and if anything this mystery created by the blending of truth and legend just increases the allure.

Anyone looking at a map can see that Russia has a huge coastline, marking the boundary of almost half of Arctic Ocean. For a lot of the year this sea is icebound but when the ice retreats for the summer the coastline is full of boats, fishing, exploring for oil, and ferrying food and supplies to Russia’s remote northern outposts. These boats hugging the rugged and mostly uninhabited coastline are obviously at great risk and so it was obvious to the Soviet government that some safety precautions needed to be put in place. Lighthouses guarding the most dangerous rocks seemed an obvious option but the cost of crewing and supplying these remote outposts was prohibitive. The solution as with so many Soviet projects was to go nuclear.

The idea was that small reactors would be put in to power the lighthouses automatically. Once every few years when the ice had melted the navy would send out a boat to make sure that the reactor didn't need replacing/ check it hadn't exploded. The story goes that because it was a nuclear project there was only one map which had the location of all the lighthouses on it and this map was kept under lock and key by the Soviet Navy just to make sure those dastardly Americans didn't try to steal their lighthouses or something. Of course this “security” measure ended up in near catastrophe after the collapse as the new Russian government took over and found out that someone had mislaid the map.

The coast of Siberia

With resources already stretched thin by the entire country collapsing not a great deal of effort was made to track down the errant lighthouses as there were immediate concerns which effected a lot more people. While Russia was being rent by poverty, conflict, and destruction the automatic lighthouses keep their nuclear powered lights burning to keep the nations coast safe. But eventually without their human masters the lights faded away and the nuclear hearts of the great towers fell silent.

Before the Russian Navy was able to track down all these hulks they were stripped down by scrap merchants, risking their lives for the promise of the precious metals which lay within, leaving nothing but the concrete and the signs warning of the dangers of radiation. One particular rumour that has stuck with me is a team of these scrap metal scroungers going out one summer and discovering a lighthouse surrounded by human and animal remains. Apparently one previous winter of a group of nomadic caribou herders had gone to the lighthouse for the shelter and warmth it provided; the warmth coming from a leaking reactor which in time killed them all.

It might just be a footnote in a greater drama, indeed it is hard to say how much of the detail is really true, but regardless those empty Siberian ruins stand testament to an extraordinary story; a story of hubris and bureaucratic incompetence, a story of what once seemed permanent and unstoppable fading away, a story of desperation and destruction, and I am sure their strange forms will inspire many more stories.