Yakutsk, Siberia: How to celebrate summer in the world’s ...

Most people know the story of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who ditched US Airways flight 1549 in the middle of New York’s Hudson River after birds destroyed both engines, saving the lives of everyone on board. Also well-known is the story of flight attendant Vesna Vulovic, who survived a mid-air bombing at 33,000 feet and went on to become a Serbian folk hero. These are remarkable tales of survival against the odds that stick with us through the decades—those moments when everyone lived, when some should have died; or when one lived, when all should have died. But there are more of these stories than you think. What follows are two obscure sagas of survival from the skies over Russia, both of which easily rival those that have become household names.
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A Falling Star: the crash of Aeroflot flight 811
Crashes in the former Soviet Union were sometimes brought to light years after they actually took place, while those whose loved ones died were given no official explanation. In an effort to avoid embarrassment, the Soviet government frequently covered up crashes involving its state airline, Aeroflot, especially if the government itself was at fault. Aeroflot flight 811 was one such incident.
Information about what happened to flight 811 is scarce, even in Russian, but there is enough to sketch out a basic sequence of events. The flight in question was a twin turboprop Antonov An-24RV operating a scheduled commercial service in the Soviet Far East, beginning from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Sakhalin Island and ending in the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border, with a stopover in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. (A map of these locations and other places important to the story can be found here.) On the 14th of August 1981, Aeroflot flight 811 landed in Komsomolsk-on-Amur after its flight from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. However, before continuing on to Blagoveshchensk, the plane was delayed for four hours due to a passing storm system. When the weather finally cleared, 27 passengers and 5 crew boarded the plane for the approximately 1.5 hour flight. Among them were 20-year-old Larisa Savitskaya and her new husband Vladimir. The newlyweds from Blagoveshchensk had been celebrating their honeymoon and were now on their way back home, though they were very much still in the honeymoon mindset. Not much is known about the other passengers, except that they included a small child.
Flight 811 took off at 14:56 and proceeded west toward Blagoveshchensk. Approximately one hour later, air force personnel at Zavitinsk air base east of Blagoveshchensk prepared to conduct a weather reconnaissance mission. The plan called for two Tupolev Tu-16k strategic bombers to fly in formation up to 8,000 meters, perform the mission, and then return. The plan also called for an intermediate hold at 4,500 meters. Their flight plan was sent to the regional authorities in Khabarovsk, who approved it without any changes. The plan was then filed with the military air traffic control centre in Blagoveshchensk, where controllers were supposed to inform their civilian counterparts. However, the civilian controllers were only informed that military planes would be operating between 4,200 and 4,500 meters, and not that they would then climb to between 7,900 and 8,100 meters. There was poor communication in the other direction as well: civilian authorities only gave military authorities scheduled flight times, which could not be updated to reflect delays. Military controllers, if they knew about flight 811 at all, probably assumed that it had already arrived in Blagoveshchensk three and a half hours earlier as originally scheduled.
Military controllers at Zavitinsk air base made a critical mistake as well. Although radar was installed at the base, controllers there did not use it to track the two Tu-16k bombers. Official reports do not clearly explain the reason for this, but such lack of depth was typical of investigations in the Soviet Union, which only dug deep enough to discover who made mistakes and did not typically attempt to find out why those mistakes were made. Based on what little information exists, it is likely that controllers either were not accustomed to using the radar, or they did not believe there would be any conflicting traffic to warrant its use.
Descending through 5,400 meters, Aeroflot flight 811 entered airspace covered by Zavitinsk air base as well as civilian and military controllers in Blagoveshchensk. However, none of these three entities knew about both flight 811 and the military weather reconnaissance mission. With Zavitinsk monitoring, Blagoveshchensk military controllers cleared the Tu-16k bombers to leave 4,500 meters and climb to 8,000 meters. No one knew that they would pass right through the air corridor along which flight 811 was traveling. A collision was imminent, but the only control centre in the area that had radar wasn’t using it.
At 16:21, one of the Tupolev Tu-16k bombers crashed headlong into Aeroflot flight 811. In all likelihood, neither crew ever saw the other, even though they were flying in clear conditions. The impact was incredibly brutal. Both wings were ripped off of the An-24 while the Tu-16k broke in half and caught fire. As it plunged to the ground, the ruined An-24 split into several more pieces, spewing debris and passengers into the summer sky.
By all rights, the story of the crash should have ended right here with, “All 38 people on both aircraft were killed.” But it did not. All six crew members on the strategic bomber lost their lives, as did all five crew of flight 811, and 26 of its 27 passengers. But, against astronomical odds, Larisa Savitskaya survived the crash. And even more remarkably, she remembered the whole thing from beginning to end. What follows is a translation of an interview she gave to Izvestiya in 2002.
“The planes collided tangentially. The wings of the An-24 were ripped off together with the fuel tanks and the roof. For a few very long seconds the plane turned into something like a boat. At that moment I had been sleeping. I remember a terrifying impact, and a burning sensation—the temperature immediately dropped from 25˚C to -30. There were terrible screams, and the whistle of the wind. My husband died immediately—in that moment, life ended for me. I didn’t even cry. Due to the grief, I couldn’t feel fear.
“The ‘boat’ then broke into two pieces. The tear passed right in front of our seats. I turned out to be in the tail section. I was thrown into the aisle and straight back to the bulkhead. At first I lost consciousness, then as I came to, I lay there and thought—not of death, but of pain. I didn’t want the fall to be painful. And then I remembered an Italian film called ‘Miracles Still Happen.’”
The movie she referred to is a 1974 film by Giuseppe Maria Scotese documenting the true story of Juliane Koepcke, who survived a 10,000-foot-fall after LANSA flight 508 was struck by lightning and disintegrated over the Peruvian jungle in 1971. All 91 other passengers and crew were killed, but Juliane survived after her row of seats acted like a crude helicopter and slowed her fall, such that she was not severely injured on impact with the ground. (Some other passengers also survived the fall for similar reasons, but were too badly hurt to move, and subsequently died.) Finding herself alone in the Amazon, she wandered through the jungle for 10 days, until she was rescued after stumbling across a logging camp. Suddenly faced with the same situation she had seen in “Miracles Still Happen,” Larisa Savitskaya decided that she would try to learn from Juliane Koepcke.
“Most important of all was one scene, where the heroine survived a plane crash while strapped into her seat. Somehow I got to a seat. I didn’t even think of buckling up; action preceded conscious thought. I started to watch through the window, in order to “catch” the ground. I needed to anticipate the impact in time. I’d given up any hope of survival; I just wanted to die painlessly. There was a very thin layer of clouds, then a flash of green, and impact! I fell in the taiga, on top of a birch tree—lucky again! I had a concussion, my spine was damaged in five places, and I had fractured hands, ribs, and feet. Almost all my teeth were knocked out.
“I was in the taiga for three days. When I woke up, my husband’s body was lying right in front of me. I was in such shock that I didn’t even feel pain. I was even able to walk. When the rescuers found me, they couldn’t say anything except “Mu-, mu…” I understand them. For three days they’d been collecting pieces of corpses out of the trees, and suddenly they saw a living person. And I kind of looked like a dead person. I was entirely coloured like a prune with a silver shimmer—the paint from the fuselage was extremely annoying; mother of god, I was picking it out of my hair for a month! And because of the wind, my hair had turned into something like a big lump of steel wool. Surprisingly, by the time I saw the rescuers, I could no longer walk. Then, in Zavitinsk, I learned that they already dug a grave for me. They dug them based on the passenger list.
“I think the military was at fault for the crash. They approved a flight path without verifying it with the civilian controllers. But I only learned about this two years ago. The official investigation came to the conclusion that both crews were responsible.
“They say that Voice of America covered the crash. But the news was first published in the USSR in 1985—curiously, in ‘Soviet Sport.’ Apparently they really wanted to write about it, but it was forbidden to mention the crash. So they wrote that I, like a female Icarus, flew on a homemade glider and fell from a height of five kilometers, but I survived because a Soviet citizen can do anything.
“Investigators later concluded that the piece of the plane in which I fell was shaped like a leaf, and a leaf either falls around the circumference, or from side to side like a swing. This depends on its shape. I don’t know how my piece of the plane was shaped. Eventually I read an investigation into my fall somewhere on the internet. One scientist by the name of Gorbovsky considered my case alongside those of children and cats that have the ability to fall from great heights without dying. By the laws of physics, the force of the impact depends on one’s weight, the height of the fall, and the amount of air resistance. He concluded that in my case, and with cats and children, some of these quantities don’t follow the laws of physics, and that in stressful situations a mechanism is activated that blocks the force of gravity. I don’t know if he’s right, but I like the comparison with cats.
“I didn’t have any sort of spiritual awakening as a result of this experience. I didn’t turn to religion, or drunkenness, or depression. I love life. But sometimes I say half seriously and half-jokingly that I am ‘God’s favourite little girl.’ Because he only sends such experiences to his favourite creatures.
“I live as I lived before. I only think about it around the 24th of August, when I celebrate my ‘second birthday,’ and also in the spring and fall when the pain returns. And of course whenever there’s another plane crash. At those moments I relive everything that happened. All crashes are my crash. I have a feeling that part of me is still back there. It still hasn’t landed.
“Five years later my child was born. At first I worked as a teacher, then when Gosha got sick, I took any job I could find. I worked as a typist, sold books, and went hungry. After Perestroika I started a company selling shoes. Then I worked as a representative of Borzhomi, until I was paralyzed. That was the result of my traumatic brain injury. But then I got better. Now I work as an office manager in a real estate company. After work I try to go straight home because my spine is very tired. Did you know that I’m in the Russian Guiness Book of Records twice? And do you know what the second one is? The smallest compensation ever received for bodily harm. One single payment of 75 rubles.”
At the time, 75 rubles was equivalent to about $20.
“By the norms of the state insurance company, the dead were entitled to 300 rubles and the survivors received 75. I can only hope that Tatiana and Arina won’t have to beat this record. [Here she refers to two flight attendants who survived the then-recent crash of a Pulkovo Airlines Ilyushin IL-86 during a repositioning flight without passengers.] Fortunately, I healed, not thanks to the health ministry but by a civilian healer-chiropractor from Amur oblast. I think his last name was Volkov. The whole year, he worked for free, because I was such an interesting patient. He re-broke my bones and then set them back properly. He did everything he could, but he said that if I’d come to him immediately, I could have been good as new. And I didn’t have new teeth put in until ten years later. A wonderful person helped me with that.
“I know that a Yugoslavian stewardess who fell from a height of 10,000 meters in 1972 is still alive. [Here she refers to Vesna Vulovic.] In a recent interview with some Germans, they told me that in Germany there’s a woman there who fell from 3,000 meters. [She probably means Juliane Koepcke.] And now there are two Russian stewardesses as well. I’ve always had a strong desire to speak with a person who survived what I did. I’m very happy for Tatiana and Arina. Once they’ve recovered, I’d like to get to know them. I’m always holding on to the idea that it’s possible to learn how to survive in such situations. For example, why are basically all such survivors women—are they simply more receptive to the quiet voice of intuition? It seems to me like it’s necessary to take the research in this direction.”
The investigation, like most in the USSR, did little to bring about change. It is not at all clear what safety recommendations were made, if any, or whether anyone was punished as a result of the crash. Although the civilian investigation blamed poor coordination between civil and military sectors, the military investigation blamed both crews for failing to see and avoid each other. Of course, the 11 crew members from both planes conveniently were all dead. The fact that Larisa Savitskaya survived and remembered everything so clearly was somewhat of an inconvenience for Soviet authorities, but she never broke her silence as long as the crash remained an official secret. The Soviet Union’s reluctance to allow the news to cover accidents prevented Larisa Savitskaya from achieving the fame afforded to Juliane Koepcke and Vesna Vulovic, and to this day she lives in relative obscurity, receiving virtually no recognition outside of Russia. That’s not to say that she wants any—based on her interviews, she’s perfectly content to live out the rest of her life as one more face in the crowd.
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The Siberian Miracle: the crash-landing of Alrosa Mirny flight 514
So many crashes in Russia are the result of sheer incompetence, often by the pilots, that it becomes easy to forget that Russia has good pilots too. In fact, there is one story that stands out from the crowd: Alrosa Mirny flight 514, an incident sometimes referred to as Russia’s own Miracle on the Hudson. The sequence of events that took place aboard that flight on the 7th of September 2010 simply defies belief.
Alrosa Mirny Air Enterprise (now known as CJSC Aviakompaniya Alrosa) is a Russian domestic airline specializing in flights to, from, and within the Sakha Republic, the largest federal subject of Russia. Covering a swathe of eastern Siberia three times the size of Alaska, the Sakha Republic is dotted with extremely remote towns and cities that are sometimes accessible only by air. One of these is the mining town of Udachny, located 965km (600mi) northwest of Yakutsk, the main urban centre of the Sakha Republic. Udachny (which means “lucky”) is served by Polyarny Airport, a main hub of operations for Alrosa Mirny.
Alrosa Mirny flight 514 was a regularly scheduled flight from Udachny to Moscow on the 7th of September 2010. The airline operated the 5-and-a-half-hour flight using a Tupolev Tu-154 trijet, a mid- to long-range passenger airliner analogous to the Boeing 727. The Tu-154 is an extremely tough airplane, capable of landing and taking off on dirt runways in polar conditions. The Tu-154 involved in this incident was 20 years old and still had plenty of service life remaining.
Early in the morning of the 7th of September, flight 514 took off from Udachny with 72 passengers and 9 crew on board, bound for Moscow. For several hours, all was normal. Then, shortly before 7:00 in the morning, while cruising high over Siberia, the crew became aware of the first signs of trouble.
The specifics of the technical malfunction that occurred are not publicly known. However, investigators later reported to the press that one of the plane’s main batteries suffered from a thermal runaway, where the overheating battery started a feedback loop that caused it to get hotter and hotter. The most likely cause for such a failure is a manufacturing defect. Regardless of what started it, once the thermal runaway began, it caused the progressive failure of all the plane’s electrics. Within 30 minutes, the failure became catastrophic, disabling the Tu-154’s autopilot, navigational equipment, and fuel pumps. The last of these items proved to be the most problematic. Because all three engines were located at the tail of the plane, they all drew fuel from the two centre tanks. Without pumps to move fuel from the wing tanks into the centre tanks, the engines only had access to the 3,300kg of fuel that happened to be in the centre tanks at that moment. This was only enough for 30 minutes of flight, which was insufficient to reach any airport marked on the pilots’ charts. Flight 514 was at that point cruising high over the Komi Republic, a sprawling, sparsely populated autonomous region near where the Ural Mountains cross the Arctic Circle. Ditching the plane in this remote and heavily forested region would be positively nightmarish. Further complicating matters was a layer of low clouds at an altitude of 400m (1,312ft) that would make the search for a place to land very difficult.
The crew declared an emergency, and shortly thereafter, the cascading electrical failure knocked out the plane’s radio. They were now completely on their own. In an effort to find a field or a river in which to ditch the plane, the pilots flew down to 1,000 feet to get below the clouds. By this point, all of the plane’s instruments that required electrical power had failed, including the attitude indicators, which display bank angle. The pilots allegedly determined how much they were banking by observing a glass of water. Furthermore, some flight controls couldn’t be used because the cockpit switches were electric, even though the controls themselves used hydraulics. This meant that it would be impossible to deploy the flaps, slats, or thrust reversers on landing.
After contact with the plane was lost, controllers rushed to figure out where it might try to land. One potential location jumped out at them: not far from flight 514’s last known position was a disused airfield in the town of Izhma. Controllers informed local authorities that the stricken plane might attempt to land there, and emergency services were put on standby.
The pilots didn’t know about this airfield because it wasn’t on their maps. But as they flew over the trackless forests searching in vain for some kind of clearing, they suddenly caught sight of the Izhma airstrip. The pilots reportedly thought they were hallucinating, because a runway was the last thing they were expecting to see. Unable to believe their luck, they lined up to land on the disused airstrip.
The airport at Izhma had not been used by fixed-wing aircraft since 2003, after which it was only used by Russian military helicopters. However, the airport’s sole employee, Sergei Sotnikov, had taken it upon himself to keep the runway clear of plants and debris in the hope that planes might one day return. As a result, the runway was still in good enough condition to handle an aircraft. But flight 514 still faced a much larger issue: the runway was obviously too short to accommodate a Tupolev Tu-154. A safe landing under normal conditions usually required a 2,400-meter runway, and this one was only a little more than half that. But these weren’t normal conditions. The flaps and slats increase lift when deployed, allowing the plane to fly at lower speeds; without them, they would be coming in hot. And once they were on the ground, they wouldn’t be able to use reverse thrust to slow the plane down. Landing under these conditions required nerves of steel, and at first the pilots balked. The first attempt ended in a missed approach as the pilots decided to climb out, loop back around, and try again. A second approach also failed. With barely any fuel left in the centre tanks, they had one last chance to land. There would be no fourth approach.
The pilots ordered the flight attendants to move all the passengers to the front of the plane to increasing the weight on the wheels and improve braking power. After that, nothing remained but to give it their best possible shot. Coming in at well over the normal landing speed, the pilots greased it onto the tarmac as close to the threshold of the runway as possible. With what limited braking power remained, the crew fought to slow the aircraft, but it was evident that the runway was nowhere near long enough. Still moving at considerable speed, the Tu-154 ran off the end of the runway and into the taiga, smashing into bigger and bigger trees as it plowed through the forest. But then the wheels dug into the muddy ground, and the plane suddenly lurched to a stop, coming to rest 160 meters (520ft) past the end of the runway.
To everyone’s amazement, the plane was intact and nobody was injured. The 81 passengers and crew evacuated using the emergency slides and emerged into the taiga. While waiting for firefighters and police to arrive, passengers discussed the flight and gathered mushrooms in the forest. When firefighters came, they found that there was nothing for them to do, because everyone was fine.
The small town of Izhma didn’t have hotel rooms for 81 people, so most of the passengers spent the night in a sports complex. The next day most were transported to the town of Ukhta by helicopter, where they flew on to Moscow on another Tu-154. Just two of the 81 passengers and crew chose to continue their journey by train. In recognition of their heroic flying, Captain Andrei Lamanov and First Officer Yevgeny Novoselov were both named as Heroes of the Russian Federation, Russia’s highest honorary title, and were personally given awards by then-president Dmitry Medvedev. In a heartfelt gesture, Sergei Sotnikov, the man who kept the runway clear for 7 years, also received an award for his role in the safe outcome of flight 514.
Despite considerable damage, both from the original failure and from the landing, Alrosa Mirny decided to recover the plane. It was towed out of the Taiga, partially repaired, and stripped out to make it lighter so it could take off on the short runway. Six months after the accident, the plane lifted off from Izhma and flew to Ukhta, then to Samara, where the damage was fully repaired and the plane returned to service. The Tu-154, now nicknamed “Izhma,” continued to fly passengers for Alrosa Mirny until 2018, when it became one of the last Tu-154s to be retired.
Much more could be said about Alrosa Mirny flight 514 if it weren’t for the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Russian government. A preliminary report identifying a thermal runaway as the cause of the electrical failure was released seven days after the accident, but no final report ever materialized. To this day, it is not publicly known what caused the thermal runaway, how specifically it led to the total electrical failure, or even whether a final report was written at all. If it was, it certainly has not been released. In all likelihood we will never know all the details of what almost brought down flight 514, leading to the Miracle at Izhma. The least we can do is recognize the heroism of its crew, who against all odds saved 81 lives on that cloudy September day.
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The lesson to be learned from these two accidents is that tales of survival and heroism can be found in Russian and Soviet aviation. Nevertheless, both incidents also remind us that these stories are often tempered by injustice. Larisa Savitskaya received only $20 in compensation for surviving a fall from a height 5,200 meters, and the crash that almost killed her (and took 37 lives) was a state secret for years. Matters have since improved drastically, with all the heroes of flight 514 duly recognized for their efforts. But major steps remain. Without a final report, the near disaster on board Alrosa Mirny flight 514 won’t provide any safety lessons, even if government agencies are willing to make changes, as they were so reluctant to do after the crash of Aeroflot flight 811. But, regardless of their impact on aviation safety, or lack thereof, these are both tales that are worth telling. And so I have told them as best I can with the sources that are available to me, even in the face of a frustrating lack of answers.

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Date: 2016-04-15
Link to submission (Has self-text)

Questions	Answers
How does the education system work there? (Not necessarily relating to the fact that it is the coldest city on Earth; I'm just curious about places outside of the U.S)	At the age of 2-5 we go to kindergarten (or however you call it). It is not necessary. People are not really being taught anything there.
	At the age of 6-7 people go to elementary school where they study basic math (up to muliplying, dividing and something more, I don't even remember), Russian, somewhere English, literature, drawing and PE.
	After studying four years in elementary school, they transfer to middle school, aka 5th-8th grades. There they start real studying. A lot of new subjects like Biology, Chemistry, Physics, German/French (it's your choice which one) and some others.
	After that they get transferred to High School, where they study three years (9th to 11th grade). Also, at the end of the 9th grade every student muss take an exam for various subjects (math and Russian are required, some are by choice). This exam is very serious - it changes every year, it's the same for the whole country and it determines whether you can go on or not. If you fail, you have to wait another year to retake it. At the end of the 11th grade you take the most important exam, which includes Math, Russian (and soon English) as required subjects and other subjects that you choose depending on where do you plan to move on. There, you get from 0 to 100 points. If you pass all the exams, you can go to university.
	At the university you will have to show your portfolio - what you have achieved, your final grades and, of course, the exam results. There you study from 3 to 5 years after which you get the highest edication and you can use it to get a proper job.
What is Yakutsk culture like?	It's quite unique. The Yakut/Sakha people were originally a completely standalone nation until Russians came in. Our religion is sort of complicated, I don't even fully get it. We have a pagan religion, meaning we have multiple gods, such as Bayanai - the god of hunting, and many others. People always note that our buildings are sort of unique, too. It is kinda hard talking about it being a part of it yourself, so I'm just gonna link to the two internet pages about the culture, as it will certainly be easier for both of us: Encyclopedia.com, Cosmicelk.net.
	One thing I should definitely note, though, is the Olonkho. It's sort of our epic poem. And it is really epic, by which I mean its length. The best known olonkho is "Nyurgun Bootur the Swift", which consists of more than 36,000 verses. According to various sources, the olonkhos are sung during a period of up to seven nights, so yeah. And one thing about it is that the words almost never repeat themselves. Neat, huh? Although it is only like that for the original version, told in Yakut language, and I can't speak/read it.
How old are you? You speak very good english, how come?	I'm only 15 and the situation around my English skills is very funny, really.
	When I was only 3-4 years old, I had a PC and my parents didn't limit me the time I could use it for, because they knew that if I grow up like them, I'll have trouble living in the future (a phrase from the song Red Flag comes to mind - "The kids of tomorrow don't need today when they live in the sins of yesterday"). So I had like two games teaching basic English, like the alphabet and the pronounciation, which lead me learn the English alphabet faster than my own one (Russian). That aside, back then almost no game had a Russian translation, so I had to grow up playing games in English. Specifically for that my brother bought me a dictionary and I started learning quite a lot of English words. When I finally went to school, there English was taught from the first grade and I got a wonderful teacher with whom I study to this day. After several years I got internet connection and I finally could connect with the rest of the world. This required English, so I started studying harder and now I speak English so much that I even think in English and that feels super weird.
If English is taught from first grade, does that mean that most people can speak English?	Sadly, no. Not every teacher is as great, and not every student is willing or has the needs to learn. They can speak basic sentences, so they will be able to survive in foreign countries as tourists, but they can freely speak it.
What kind of clothes did you wear and sleep with?	On winters, when I go outside I always wear down jackets with maybe sweaters and hoodies underneath it. And by down jackets I mean really warm down jackets with fur hoods and stuff. If it's December-January, I also sometimes wear down pants above my regular pants that might even have leggings (or however you call them, I don't know the translation) underneath them, too. Though in February-March the temperature warms up to -20C (-4F), so I only wear something like a normal jacket like this one and any normal pair of pants like jeans and stuff. Summers are super hot, too - they can get from +30C (+86F) to +40C (+104F), so I wear a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. However, because winters are so cold, we warm up our houses so much that I can sleep just in my underwear while it's freezing outside.
What do you do all winter as a kid?	I was never really limited to the use of my computer and videogame consoles, so I used to play games most of the time, as it was too cold to play outside. Hell, I'm still the same now.
How many people live there?	The city's population is around 260k. Though, in the republic of Sakha (Yakutsk is its capital) there are 950k people living there. Still not enough to get a golen play button from YouTube (hahaha, I'm too funny).
What do you when you need fuel or anything in the mid of winter?	When you need fuel, or food, or anything, you basically go buy it. No matter what people may tell you, we are pretty okay with temperatures like this. It's nothing special for us to go out in -40.
How would it feel to move to California or Florida after up there your whole life?	I don't know much about the climate of California or Florida. but I've heard it's hot. Though, our summers are hot, too, so I would appreciate some more precise info on that. The winters, on the other hand, will feel super weird. It would certainly feel uncomfortable to move somewhere with such warm winters.
What are your favorite video games?	Oh, there's plenty. Of course there's classic like Half-Life series, I'm also into MGS (well, any Metal Gear, really), and I'm a huge fan of Sam Lake's works (Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break etc). If a game has a neat story and/or gameplay elements - I'm sold.
our summers are hot, How hot?	Varies from +30C (+86F) to +40 (+104F) and above.
Pretty much in so cal the weather can be explained as such in the winter you can go surfing in the morning and snowboarding at night. Ha.	Seems like fun. My organism wouls go nuts trying to readapt, though.
What are your dreams and aspiration and why do you pursue them?	My dream is to become a doctor. No idea why and what kind of a doctor. Maybe it's because I have a very low immunity and got ill a million times already (my hospital records are already bigger than those of my parents).
What matters to you most and why?	To me what matters most is probably how much fun does one have. If life isn't fun, then what's the point? I don't mean to say "What's the point to live if nothing is fun - let's just kill ourselves", though.
Why do you think we exist at all and what our purpose is?	We exist to evolve into such state where we question our purpose and then kill ourselves because we can't find the answer.
What makes life so worth living?	Just the fact that we live is already worth not dying. I don't really know what else can there be to it.
What's the best thing about living in Yakutsk? The worst?	The best thing is that it's kinda small (122 sq km/47 sq mi, if Wikipedia is to be trusted) and everything is really close to each other. The worst thing is that it's kinda small, which makes it forgotten. We don't even have McDonalds or any other thing like that here. By the way, check this out. The word translates as "Kebab". It always cracks me up.
	Also, a good thing about living in Yakutsk is that you can brag about your winters, which I am basically doing right now.
Do you feel more turkic or more russian? Do you still speak your native language? Do you still have shamanic rituals in your community?	I feel more Russian, but I look more like a Korean. Because I didn't learn Yakutian/Sakha language when I was a child, I find it extremly hard to learn it now, so I can't speak my own native language. Most of the times I can understand it, though, since everyone around me (including my family, except my brother) speaks Sakha as well as Russian, plus Sakha has a lot of words that sound like their Russian analogs or are completely ripped off from Russian.
	Shamanic rituals don't happen on a serious note, they are either for performances or for some superstitious people.
Yeah figured it out, your name is also Russian. What about the people there? How do they identify themselves? Are turkic roots completely wiped out in the public sphere?	You can easily tell the difference between native/half Yakuts and Russians, and more than a half of Yakutsk's population are Yakuts. We may not follow the culture completely, but I believe we are still completely different from other nations of Russia.
Can it be said then that Yakuts are culturally assimilated by Russians?	Basically, yeah. They kinda invaded us, but we also were super agressive to them. But if it weren't for Russians, I can't imagine who we would be right now.
	EDIT: I misunderstood that question. However, the answer remains the same, kind of: "Basically, yes".
Well, you would not be Nikolai now.	Yup :D.
	I would probably be something like Ayaal.

Last updated: 2016-04-15 13:53 UTC | Next update: 2016-04-15 14:53 UTC
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