Kurile Lake, Kamchatka: 30 Humans & 300 Bears at the End of the Worl
Downhearted, I regarded the scenery behind the drawn-aside curtain. The Orwellian, drab, concrete human containers the Soviets named Khrushchyovkas seemed even drearier behind the veil of the haze. The dense mass of black clouds that covered them did not allow the slightest trace of a sunray to even indicate the location of the sun, which would have just risen beside the imposing cones of the Koryaksky and Avachinsky volcanoes. Only a dispiriting drizzle penetrated the sky’s endless greyness and sprinkled the window. Petropavlovsk resembled the stage of some dystopian tale.
This unknown and mysterious city is the capital—and practically sole urban center—in Kamchatka: a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East that hosts a population half the size of Wyoming in an area larger than Alaska. Two-thirds of all its residents live along the tens-of-miles-long main road that constitutes the capital, while the remaining third is scattered in military bases and rudimentary, mainly fishing and logging, settlements throughout the inhospitable wilderness. The whole region was designated an exclusive military zone during the Cold War; access to it remained strictly forbidden until 1989 for Soviet citizens and until 1991 for aliens.
