Fifty-eight degrees below zero, three times colder than the average household freezer, halts about everything except Friday night.
School is let out, coal miners stay indoors; but Neryungri`s discotheque, Timpton, named after the ice-encased river nearby, remains the place to be.
On a recent Friday night, the eastern Siberian restaurant-dance hall was rocking to the house band`s rendition of ”Masks, Masks,” a musical diatribe against superficial personalities.
It could have been a portrait entitled ”Jack London on Rush Street,” as young men with biceps bulging from work in the Russian Klondike glared over their shot glasses at women spinning each other on the dance floor.
”The men, they come to Siberia for the money,” said Yuri Vargin, a union organizer at the local coal mine.
And the women?
”They come for the men.”
Three Westerners who wanted to come to the Timpton for a little music and conversation were, at first, refused by a manageress whose mouth was a gold mine of false teeth. Good-natured cajoling and reminders of detente finally melted her resolve.
Sobriety laws strictly enforced back in Moscow, as distant from the Yakutsk Republic as Paris from Chicago, were not in evidence.
Locals say hard play is the reward for hard work to many who chose residence in Yakutia as a means to get away from big-city constraints.
Social pressures remain, however, and a poster on the wall of the town`s cultural center announced in large letters that A.T. Gubar and V.G. Yuzhanik had arrived inebriated at their respective workplaces.
”I`ll stay perhaps five more years,” said Yuri Mixin, 45, a truck depot employee who invited a group of correspondents into his apartment. ”Then I`ll have the money to build a boat and live on Lake Baikal. A boat and a dacha.” Mixin said he was satisfied with work and leisure in Neryungri. His only complaint was that his building`s heating plant broke down on New Year`s Eve, plunging areas of the complex to minus-62 degrees for three hours.
The cold, in some ways, is an ally; residents can save on utility bills by hanging sheet-metal boxes out their windows instead of buying freezers.
How cold is it? Even Lenin, father of the Soviet Union, depicted in numerous posters and wall paintings, wears a parka while exhorting Neryungri`s citizenry to greater achievements.
Mining machinery idles all night when temperatures drop below minus-58, and owners of private cars remove their batteries and take them indoors. In the morning, a special blow torch is used to reheat the oil pan before the battery is reinserted and the car is started.
Those venturing outdoors soon find their faces and hats coated in a white frost from walking into the mist of their own breath.
A recent visitor was momentarily blinded when his eyelashes were frozen together by tiny icicles that had formed. Rubbing with a gloved hand thawed the lashes apart in seconds.
”I have lived in Yakutia for 33 years,” said Nikolai Chersky, who is with the republic`s branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Chersky, who gave his age only as ”older than 80,” added, ”I don`t think the climate is harmful for a human being.”
The average age is 26 in Neryungri, a 10-year-old coal mining center. Of the 60,000 residents, about 3,000 get married every year.
The resulting baby boom caught city planners off guard, and the scarcity of classroom space forces students to attend school in two shifts.
Delays in obtaining a private apartment may stretch to three years, according to Viktor Yaroslavtsev, who manages a plant that produces prefabricated siding.
”Our biggest problem in apartment construction is in trying to give Neryungri an identifying face, individuality,” he said.
Back at the Timpton disco, young men also were busy identifying faces in a last bid for companionship as restaurant employees and local militia attempted to clear the hall after last call.
Outside, the midnight air was so cold, so heavy, so still–so dead–that it seemed a wonder an airplane could stay aloft overhead.
A young woman, her head in a beaver cap, her coat perhaps of wolf and her boots of reindeer skin, came skipping down the street. She spun into the embrace of her escort.
Locked in a kiss, their heads were immediately shrouded in the frozen white mist of their breath.
