LIFE IN ISOLATION

The universal quarantining and self-isolating due to COVID-19 has put millions of people in something of a predicament. Every day is the same as the one before, and sometimes we can’t even get together with our closest family members. But for a few, being solitary is a way of life. And so we decided to touch base with people in remote corners of Russia who, because of their jobs or the unique features of their culture, socialize with only a narrow circle of people, yet somehow never feel lonely.

- Yuliya Skopich

The Pomors

Data from 2019 show a little more than 4,500 people living in Umba, a town in Tersk District that lies over 220 miles south of Murmansk and is still the most densely populated place in the entire district. Here, on the Tersk coast of the Kola Peninsula, kelp (usually found in salads) is worked into the soil (along with local varieties of brown and red algae) to fertilize the potatoes, and virtually every family owns at least one fishing rod.

This is the land of the Pomors.

Time has changed the Umba lifeways. Whereas the shore was once home to dozens of tonyas (complexes where commercial fishermen lived and worked), now the local professional fishermen can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Some couldn’t handle the endless reports and audits; others stopped using their seine nets when Umba’s fish processing plant closed and there was nowhere to sell the catch. And it’s trickier than it used to be to get a commercial fishing permit, which requires dedicated fish-cleaning facilities that not everyone has.

So the fish processing plant is gone, and over time, the polar fox farm and the food plant followed. Work has become hard to find, and more and more young people are moving to Murmansk, Petrozavodsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major Russian cities after graduation. Some do return after a while, though, and that’s how things worked out for Dmitry Komarov. A lawyer by training, he worked for a time in a law firm but finally realized that he couldn’t live without the White Sea.