Trial By Fire
Originally Published in The Sun Star.
In the fall of 1998, a 29-year-old Micheal Koskey stumbled out of the Siberian forest, bruised and bleeding from his neck. Breathless, he approached an airport police officer, telling him of the robbery and the beating he had just endured.
“And what do you expect me to do about this?” was the officer’s only response. Still losing blood, Koskey turned and made his way back through the woods.
“It was in Siberia during the post-soviet collapse,” Koskey said. “I was doing field work at a time when Russian society had come to a standstill, especially out there on the edge.”
The “edge” he referred to was the Chukotka region, situated in the northeastern corner of Russia, across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Koskey went to Russia to gather information for his graduate work, making one trip to Yakutsk in 1997 and another to Chukotka in 1998. He was studying the political and economic viability of reindeer herding as a Ph.D. student in the College of Liberal Arts’ Anthropology department.
“Things were tough,” Koskey said. “People had been working without pay for years. The local governments in some areas were shared between the legitimate government and the Mafia—and that was typical in Russia at the time.”
A professor had warned Koskey of the corruption, cautioning him not to claim more than $500 upon entering the country, or he would be robbed. He followed the advice, but it did little good: shortly after his arrival in Sokol, Koskey was attacked.
Half of Koskey’s research funding, about $1,800 worth, was stolen by his assailants. He had hidden the rest in his boots, where they hadn’t thought to look. After his run in with the officer at the airport Koskey went back his hotel to stop the bleeding. The cuts caused no lasting damage. He later said he carried no resentment towards his attackers.
“It was a very rough situation,” Koskey said. “Their main economy, reindeer herding, had collapsed. So, needless to say, people were hungry, they were dis-empowered—and the natives were dis-empowered even more so… People were malnourished. You could see their joints and bones. I’d go into the store and there would be a few pieces of old reindeer meat, and maybe a can of olives from Spain from 1967.”
After leaving Sokol and working in the local archives in Anadyr’, Koskey began his journey to the town of Lavrentiia, a town situated on the coast of the Bering Strait, a mere 85 miles from the most eastern shores of Alaska.
“The Soviets would often build airports in inaccessible places because… being Soviets, [they] were paranoid not only of the outside world, but of their own people,” Koskey said
Koskey made it to the airport safely. But when his plane touched down in Lavrentiia the Border Guards (the rough equivalent of the United States’ National Guard) rushed in, looking for Koskey. He was taken to a car by armed guards and whisked away to a police station, and his research confiscated. After about three hours of waiting, Koskey’s passport, visa, and research was returned and he was told to leave.
“So I walk out to what’s probably 45 or 50 below zero, pitch black with hardly any streetlights, howling wind, with nowhere to go,” Koskey recalled.
…
Read the full article here.