Lena River

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lena River begins its life just 7 kilometres west of Lake Baikal, rising at an elevation of 1,640 metres in the Baikal Mountains. From that quiet upland source, it travels 4,294 kilometres before fanning out into one of the largest river deltas on earth, where it meets the Laptev Sea and, beyond that, the Arctic Ocean. That makes the Lena not only the eleventh-longest river in the world, but the longest river contained entirely within Russia.

  Three great Siberian rivers drain northward into the Arctic: the Ob, the Yenisey, and the Lena. Of the three, the Lena sits farthest east. Its drainage basin covers 2,490,000 square kilometres, a territory so vast and so cold that permafrost lies beneath every part of it, continuous across more than three quarters of the basin.

  How did Russian explorers first encounter this river in the early seventeenth century? What happened when a stranded naval expedition limped to its delta in 1881? And why might the most consequential political alias in modern Russian history trace back to this river's name? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The River's Path

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  The Lena departs its Baikal Mountain source heading north-east, crossing the Lena-Angara Plateau before gathering the first of its major tributaries: the Kirenga, then the Vitim, then the Olyokma. Each of these rivers drains a distinct reach of the Siberian interior, with the Vitim pulling in water from the highlands northeast of Lake Baikal and the Olyokma arriving from the south.

  At Yakutsk, the character of the river shifts. The Lena enters the Central Yakutian Lowland, a broad, flat corridor that channels the river northward. There it absorbs the Aldan from the east and the Vilyuy from the west, two substantial tributaries that nearly double the river's volume. The Vilyuy itself belongs to a larger T-shaped network, the Chona-Vilyuy system, that drains most of the territory to the west.

  Past those confluences, the Lena bends both westward and northward, threading between the mountains of the Kharaulakh Range on its eastern side and the Chekanovsky Ridge on its west. Travelling approximately due north from there, the river gradually broadens until it spills into a delta roughly 400 kilometres wide that pushes 100 kilometres into the Laptev Sea, southwest of the New Siberian Islands.

  Only about 3,540 kilometres of those 4,294 are navigable. Ice rules this river. The navigation window runs roughly 125 days in most stretches, shrinking to about 70 days in the estuarine reach where the Arctic's grip tightens.

• 3. What the Basin Holds

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  The Lena discharges a mean of 489 cubic kilometres of water per year, a figure that reflects the enormous catchment it collects from. Beneath the riverbed and across its floodplain, that basin holds other things besides water.

  Gold is washed out of the sands along the Vitim and the Olyokma, two of the river's right-bank tributaries. Deeper in the delta, workers have dug mammoth tusks from the frozen ground, relics of an older Arctic preserved in the permafrost that underlies the entire basin. Scattered across the river's floodplain are numerous lakes; Lakes Nedzheli and Ulakhan-Kyuel rank as the largest within the Lena basin.

  The fish population reflects the river's remoteness. Because the Lena runs through undeveloped reaches of the Russian Far East, its fishery has remained largely intact. Species such as Siberian taimen, Siberian sturgeon, and Upper Yenisei grayling live in the river, sustained by a watershed that industry has touched only lightly compared to more accessible waterways.

  That gold in the Vitim and Olyokma sands would eventually draw miners into the basin, and the conditions those miners faced would ignite one of the most politically charged incidents in early twentieth-century Russia.

• 4. Explorers and Expeditions

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  According to folktales recorded a century after the fact, a party of Russian fur hunters led by Demid Pyanda sailed up the Nizhnyaya Tunguska between 1620 and 1623, discovered the Lena, and either portaged their boats overland or built new ones to continue. In 1623, Pyanda pushed some 2,400 kilometres along the river from its upper reaches down into central Yakutia.

  Other expeditions followed quickly. In 1628, Vasily Bugor arrived with ten men, collected yasak, the tribute levied from indigenous communities, and went on to found the settlement of Kirinsk in 1632. That same year, 1631, the voyevoda of Yeniseysk ordered Pyotr Beketov and 20 men to build a fortress at Yakutsk, which was formally established in 1632. From Yakutsk, further expeditions fanned out south and east. By 1655, Russian explorers had reached the Lena delta itself.

  More than two centuries later, the delta became the scene of a different kind of arrival. Two of the three surviving groups from the ill-fated Jeannette expedition reached the Lena delta in September 1881. The group led by engineer George W. Melville was rescued by Tungus huntsmen. The group led by Captain George W. De Long fared far worse; most of those men died of starvation, with only two surviving.

  In 1885, Baron Eduard Von Toll, accompanied by Alexander von Bunge, brought a scientific expedition to the delta and the New Siberian Islands on behalf of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. The following year they extended their survey to the New Siberian Islands and the Yana River. In the span of one year and two days, the expedition covered 25,000 kilometres, of which 4,200 kilometres were travelled up rivers, with geodesic surveys carried out throughout.

  Fyodor Matisen later mapped the delta itself, adding cartographic precision to what earlier expeditions had traced only by travel.

• 5. The Lena Massacre

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  The gold that washed from the Vitim and Olyokma sands drew workers to mines near Bodaybo, in northern Irkutsk. In 1912, those workers went on strike to protest the conditions they faced underground and in the surrounding settlement. The response was violent: striking goldminers and local citizens who had joined the protest were shot down.

  The incident became known as the Lena massacre. Its political aftershocks spread far beyond the river valley. The shooting was reported in the Duma, Russia's parliament, by Kerensky, and historians credit it with intensifying revolutionary feeling across the country. A labour protest at a remote Siberian mine became one of the accelerants for a transformation that reshaped the entire twentieth century.

  The river lent its name to that moment, and it may have lent its name to something larger still. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, during his period of exile on the Central Siberian Plateau, may have adopted the alias Lenin from the Lena River itself. The connection is not certain, but the possibility sits there in the historical record: the longest river wholly within Russia quietly lending its syllables to one of the most recognisable names of the modern era.

• 6. The Delta and Its Islands

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  The Lena delta covers 30,000 square kilometres, a figure that places it among the largest river deltas in the world. Seven main branches carry the river's water through that terrain, with the Bykovsky channel, the farthest east of the seven, considered the most important.

  For roughly seven months of the year, the delta is frozen tundra. In May, the freeze breaks and the landscape shifts into a lush wetland that persists for a few months before the cold returns. Part of that seasonal world is protected as the Lena Delta Wildlife Reserve.

  The delta divides into a multitude of flat islands, a sprawling archipelago built from silt and shaped by shifting channels. Among them, one carries a name with a striking origin. Ostrov Amerika-Kuba-Aryta, also known as Ostrov Kuba-Aryta, sits on the northern edge of the delta. It may have been named after the island of Cuba during Soviet times. An alternative explanation traces the name to an earlier period: Kuba is the Yakut word for swan, and the American Swan is found in the area, which would place the island's naming well before the Soviet era.

  A long, narrow island called Turukannakh-Kumaga lies off the delta's western shore, one of many landforms that give the Lena's mouth a geography as complex and layered as the river's own history.