LOSING “MIR”: THE STORY OF RUSSIA’S MOST EXPENSIVE INDUSTRIAL DISASTER
There is hardly a single person in Russia who hasn’t seen pictures of the giant funnel in Yakutia: the town of Mirny is standing at the edge of an abyss. At the bottom, there is a toxic lake, but elevators brought miners below it. There, half a kilometre deep, other exhausted men were waiting for them – for their shift change. The Mir open-pit mine has been out of operation for a long time, but it was succeeded by an underground mine, whose workers lived in constant fear of being flooded from above by a lake large enough to fit the Titanic. Its water kept oozing down through the cracks every day, towards the workers – all part of a giant experiment with living participants.
The top management thought it would be possible to control the elements by constantly capturing the underground waterfalls: an idea as ambitious as it was naive. That idea had specific authors, a patent. Time and again, the Earth sent warning signals – but no one was listening.
On 4 August 2017, at 16.35, the delayed catastrophe finally happened: the lake burst into the underground mine, crushing metal and people. Miraculously, 143 workers survived because they had not yet fully descended; but not all were so lucky. Up to $14 billion in unrecovered diamonds were buried in the flooded Mir mine that day, as were eight miners who never came back to the surface. Baza tells the full story of the world’s most famous hole.
⬇ 63 Years Before the Disaster. Feminism, Soviet-style
A geologist has an abortion – this is how the country’s diamond epic begins. She is a fragile woman with ambition in her eyes, her father an executed “enemy of the people” from Odessa, her mother an art historian from St Petersburg. Her name is Larisa Popugaeva, and she is sure that the influential Amakinsky expedition, which has been searching for diamonds in Yakutia by plane and helicopter, is mistaken. Popugaeva believes they are not looking the right way. In the summer of 1954, she and her colleague Natalia Sarsadskikh try their own method. They want to look not for diamonds themselves but for a bright-red mineral called pyrope – after all, it always accompanies African deposits, so why shouldn’t the approach work in Russia? Moscow scientists doubt the method and are reluctant to help the two women from St Petersburg, but eventually, they do draw up a forecast map. The expedition can start!
The timing is bad, though: Sarsadskikh had just given birth, leaving the team one person short. Then Popugaeva also becomes pregnant – but she is not one to miss the most important journey of her life. She decides to have an illegal abortion – a gruesome operation at the time. “Only our family knew about it”, her second daughter would later say in an interview. “In tears, in pain, my father saw off my mother to Yakutia. She was still weak.”
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How Diamonds Are Formed
Imagine a vast ocean in place of Russia. 3 billion years ago, in the Earth’s mantle, where the pressure is enormous and the temperature reaches over 1,000 degrees Celsius, carbon is pressed into perfect crystals – diamonds, the strongest mineral of all. They are deep inside the Earth. A stream of liquid mantle rushes up, like in a lava lamp, forming a bubble beneath the planet’s crust, trapping and lifting dozens of different minerals – including diamonds. This is called a mantle plume.
The diamond-filled lava is restless in the plume, using every crack in the surface to get out. When it finds one, an explosion occurs. The many cracks and the many explosions leave funnels that end in thin tubes going deep down into the Earth, the whole thing having the shape of a cocktail glass. As they cool, each such glass and its stem fills with a bluish diamondiferous rock called kimberlite, forming a kimberlite pipe. Gradually, in another hundred million years, these pipes are concealed beneath new layers of sedimentary rock; they are not visible on the surface and thus very difficult to find.
While the first kimberlite pipes were found in South Africa, today, almost half of the world’s explored diamond deposits are in Yakutia. They seem to be strung like beads onto a vertical line running straight from north to south between 70 and 63 degrees latitudes in the permafrost zone.
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All that Popugaeva gets out of the Amakinsky expedition is an old tent, a couple of shovels, a magnifying glass and an assistant/bodyguard called Fyodor Belikov. The two of them arrive in the remote taiga, and after just two months, in August, they discover the first Soviet kimberlite pipe. Popugaeva is looking forward to fame and gratitude; instead, she is kidnapped. Lured to a base in the town of Nyurba, she is held hostage for three months. The kidnappers won’t let her go until she retroactively signs up for the Amakinsky expedition, so that its team can be hailed as the discoverers. They threaten to kill her: “Five metres away from the base, and nobody will find you.” They promise that she’d go the way of her father, who was shot. They say she’d never see her daughter again. They blackmail her, promising she’d be accused of divulging state secrets and even of stealing diamonds. Desperate, she signs the contract. This is how history is falsified.
Popugaeva went on to live a long life, never calling her diamond experience anything but “the big fuck-over” – if she mentioned it at all, which her pride usually prevented: “I’ve experienced so much betrayal, so many lies and stabs in the back. Most of all, I just want to forget the whole story.” All that her assistant Belikov received were two measly monthly salaries. He spent the rest of his life in a communal flat on Vasilievsky Island in St Petersburg and died as a rubbish collector in the great oblivion of the nineties.
As Larisa Popugaeva’s success is appropriated, it becomes clear that the method of diamond prospecting developed by her and Sarsadskikh is the only one that works. In the summer of 1955, another great woman, Natalia Kind, uses it to calculate the location of new deposits four hundred kilometres to the south. She does it brilliantly – but ironically cannot participate in the expedition for the same reason that had stopped Sarsadskikh. A team of young geologists is sent to Yakutia with the map she created: Yuri Khabardin, Ekaterina Elagina and the assistant Vladimir Avdeenko.
13 June 1955, white nights in Yakutia. The team is returning from another failed attempt when they notice a foxhole in the roots of a tall tree. The soil scattered around the hole is turquoise in colour: it’s kimberlite. Better still, they see a blood-red sparkle in it – the long-awaited pyrope. They pitch a tent in what will turn out to be the very centre of the Mir kimberlite pipe, the largest deposit in the Soviet Union. Mir will become a national brand; it is here that industrial diamond mining will start.
Elagina sends a coded telegram, one that will go on to become famous: “Have smoked peace pipe, tobacco is excellent.” But then, she, too, is betrayed. Again, the discovery is classified. Avdeenko disappears. Elagina is given a letter of commendation – and promptly fired. Natalia Kind, who put them on the right track, is also dismissed. (Only fifteen years later will she receive the tiniest recognition, a “Deposit discoverer” badge.) Never again does she look for diamonds. Instead, she becomes a crucial part of the underground dissident movement: it is Kind who manages to get Solzhenitsyn’s and Shalamov’s manuscripts into the West for publication. The one member of the team to get all the laurels is Yuri Khabardin. He receives awards, one of the settlements is named in his honour, and for a long time to come, he is credited as the sole discoverer of the Mir mine.
Thus, the “diamond women” are made to disappear. The main state prize for the discovery of the first Yakut deposits is awarded to six geologists and officials, all of them male. The wooden prospectors’ shack near the Mir pipe is replaced by the town of Mirny with its 30,000 inhabitants, and the Amakinsky expedition turns into the main diamond enterprise of the country. Thus, with a story of betrayal, Alrosa is launched – or simply “The Company”, as many call it.
⬇ 40 Years Before the Disaster. An Underground River
In Nikolai Alexeev’s family, the tradition is to call all sons Nikolai. He is a native Yakut, one who knows the taiga like the back of his hand: diamond expeditions use such locals as guides and mushers, this is, drivers of dog and reindeer sledges. The search for new deposits continues. By now, fifteen pipes have been discovered in Yakutia. Nikolai Alekseev Senior works as a guide as well, until his native village Tuoi Haya is flooded to launch the Vilyui hydroelectric power station: the new town of Mirny requires a lot of electricity to mine its huge pit. As always, the Soviet Union is in a great hurry and doesn’t care about the destruction of a few villages for the sake of a big construction project. This strategy will never change.
In the 1970s, this diamond Eldorado lures thousands of people to Yakutia: the explored reserves reach a kilometre deep into the Mir mine and guarantee decades of stable income. It is here that the largest diamond ever found in Russia is unearthed – a lemon-yellow crystal the size of a walnut weighing 342.57 carats. An airport is built right at the edge of the mine; some people still believe the urban myth that wind can suck a plane or helicopter right into the funnel. KamAZ trucks take an eight-kilometre-long serpentine route to deliver the ore to the surface.
Along with everyone from their village, the Alekseev family is relocated to Mirny, and they all begin working for The Company. Here, the eldest son, Nikolai, meets a girl and falls in love. She is an Evenki [one of the Indigenous peoples of the Russian North]. They have a son, whom they name Nikolai, of course. He will perish in the Mir mine before having a son of his own.
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Who Decides How Much a Diamond is Worth
The Diamond Consortium is the world’s most notorious monopoly, steeped in Black blood, imperialism and collusion. In 1883, Cecil Rhodes, a British capitalist and one of the architects of apartheid, buys the main South African diamond deposit in the town of Kimberley. Backed by the famous Rothschild bank, he continues the expansion so that the new company, De Beers, ends up controlling all the kimberlite pipes found in Africa. Then Rhodes starts selling diamonds to Europe – only a few at a time, creating an artificial shortage. He is now the only large supplier of rough diamonds, which go on to be facetted and sold by jewellers. Prices immediately skyrocket; for the next 150 years, De Beers has complete control over them.
The second step of the expansion is the world’s most famous advertising campaign. In 1938, De Beers commissions the New York agency N.W. Ayer & Son to promote diamonds on the American market – to create an inexhaustible demand, the precious stone needs to become a symbolic engagement gift. And so, out of thin air, the tradition of giving your fiancée a diamond ring is created, along with the ingeniously simple slogan “Diamonds are forever.” Over the next forty years, the company increases its sales hundredfold and even manages to pull off the engagement trick in conservative Japan.
All the while, De Beers maintains total control over the price of rough diamonds through a secret, closed price list. Wholesale contracts for the sale of the precious stones are concluded only with a few select diamond cutters.
Enter Soviet diamonds. In the late 50s, the Soviet Union could have become a major problem for the Consortium: the newly discovered Yakutian deposits are as rich as the African ones, threatening to destroy the whole ideal monopoly scheme. Instead, something amazing happens: the USSR is in such dire need of foreign currency that the communists make a humiliating arrangement with the most blatant imperialists on the planet.
In 1960, the Soviets conclude a secret deal with De Beers, agreeing to export all diamonds mined in the country to the Consortsium at the rates it sets. Some sources claim that this co-operation had begun even earlier, in the 1920s, with the Bolsheviks selling confiscated tsarist and “kulak” jewels to De Beers.
Thus, the USSR is integrated into the single-channel system of the world diamond market as a passive seller with no real chance to influence prices and thus no levers of control. Ordinary Soviet people have no idea that all gem-quality diamonds mined in Yakutia go to De Beers.
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The crux is an ancient underground river. The starting point is 19 June 1977, when the first waterfall erupts inside the Mir mine and begins slowly but steadily filling the funnel. With their in-depth view of the planet, geologists had long warned: if the miners went deeper than -300 metres, they would encounter an ancient waterflow under the permafrost layer known as the “metegero-ichersky horizon” (all underground layers are called “horizons”; you can imagine them like floors of a reversed skyscraper.) We do not know the precise age of this ancient river, but it must be millions of years old; it crosses the entire Mir diamond pipe. Still, The Company makes the fateful decision to keep digging deeper and deeper, although once an aquifer – a water-bearing layer – has been opened up, there is no way to close it.
The Soviet authorities have the water pumped out and decide to discharge it into the surface rivers of the Mirny district as if it were a sewage system. To the locals, they even claim that this liquid from under the ground has health benefits, going as far as attempting to produce local Metegero-Ichersky mineral water and sell it as an analogue of the famous Borjomi from Georgia. The project fails miserably: the water turns out to be toxic enough to corrode metal.
Two members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences are secretly sent to Yakutia to collect material on the environmental damage caused by these discharges. The results are staggering: the main river of the Vilyui district and its tributaries are poisoned; all the fish are killed; the locals are literally drinking poison and slowly dying of gastric diseases.
This goes on for decades until the pitpit is shut down in 1988 after another eruption at 455 metres. 4,000 cubic metres of water are flowing out per hour – that’s five standard swimming pools. The sides of the funnel are dissolving and collapsing, making open-pit mining unsustainably dangerous. By that time, the Mir open pit has brought the Soviet Union $17 billion, but many more diamonds – two-thirds of the kimberlite pipe – remain beneath it, untouched. This temptation is hard to resist.
In another five years, the Soviet Union collapses, further jeopardising the diamond utopia in Mirny – until The Company comes up with a new “brilliant” idea.
⬇ 14 Years Before the Disaster. Rock Bottom
“They aren’t afraid of anything, are they? Will this really work?”
March 2003. Dr Alexei Arkhipov is standing at the edge of the kilometre-long open-pit mine, doing calculations in his head. It is he who one day will challenge the cause of the Mir disaster as presented by the authorities. For now, he is watching the beginning of an ambitious project – the creation of an underground mine right under the open pit with its toxic lake. In the hungry Russian nineties, Alrosa had managed to deepen the pit by another hundred metres, unleashing one ancient waterfall after the other. Since then, water has been the engineers’ main headache.
Arkhipov is here for a reason: he needs to “listen” to the rocks and look for cracks in them. A team at a special institute in St Petersburg had spent decades building a device for acoustic sounding.
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How Acoustic Sounding Works
If you plan to do a lot of drilling, you should be able to predict when the rock is about to crack – otherwise the water will break through and flood you. Arkhipov’s innovative method is a high-tech version of the echolocation used by bats, His device creates miniature lightning bolts accompanied by loud clicks; as the 4-kilohertz sound wave passes through the rock, it is refracted by irregularities in its structure. As a result, all the cracks and voids inside the rock become visible – like the shadows of raised hands on a projector screen. This method can be used to analyse mineral layers up to 100 metres deep.
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To create a new Mir right under the flooded pit and continue mining diamonds, Alrosa uses calculations by a little-known firm from the city of Belgorod called Novotek. Why a private company is chosen over a major institute remains a mystery, but it is Novotek that makes the main mistake leading to the tragedy.
The roof of the mine is directly below the floor of the open pit, separated only by a safety layer of diamond kimberlite. Designed to act like a cork in a bathtub, this layer will prove to be the weakest point of the new Mir. Soviet engineers advise a height of at least 100 metres, but the design is changed again and again, until finally, in 2006, Novotek leaves only 20 metres – if the water is constantly pumped out, they claim, this should be enough to withstand the pressure of the lake. This plan is hardly the engineers’ initiative: Arkhipov supposes that Alrosa has given Novotek an ultimatum, reluctant to leave the diamonds within the higher horizons untouched. It is in these layers that the mining begins. The whole project is marketed as “dry conservation” of the Mir open-pit mine.
Soon, Dr Arkhipov is removed from the project: according to unofficial sources, for being too inconvenient, uncooperative, and unwilling to take kickbacks. Worst of all, in the following years, The Company gives up on the whole idea of continuous acoustic sounding: rather than using it permanently in the mine, scanning and searching for cracks, it only monitors shifts of the rock. This is not a good idea: the ground behaves differently when it is below a huge underground river. At that point, the mine is doomed to be flooded.
In 2008, Rostekhnadzor, Russia’s main inspection agency, approves the fateful decision to maintain only 20 metres of protective layer. By then, however, Alrosa is facing an unexpected mutiny.
⬇ Nine Years Before the Disaster. Drugs in the Forest
“When we got off the motorway [to Mirny: Baza] into the taiga, I heard: ‘Spread out some plastic sheets, we don’t want to leave any marks.’ (...) I said goodbye to my life. I felt calm somehow, resigned. I lay on the floor of the car, waiting. Hands behind my back, handcuffed. They pulled me out, made me kneel down and fired three shots above my head. But they didn’t kill me.” This is what Valentin Urusov told the Russky Reporter magazine.
He had been living in Yakutia since the age of two, working since he turned sixteen. In the summer of 2008, he – an ordinary electrician – decided to found an independent trade union, “Profsvoboda” [Prof(essional) Freedom]. The idea is for “Profsvoboda” to replace Alrosa’s official trade union, which is in the company’s pocket and does nothing to help the workers. Urusov explains: “You work day and night, on holidays, too, and on other people’s shifts – you work when the management tells you. And you still only get paid for an eight-hour day. The service branch where I worked used equipment that should have been written off twenty years ago. As a result, there were accidents all the time. The part that came to light was just a grain in a mountain of sand. I’ve had a chunk of flesh ripped out of my arm, for example, and there was no reaction at all. Fatalities are of course hard to cover up. But fractures, various injuries – there are thousands of them, nobody keeps count.”
Urusov has no idea what he is getting himself into. In August 2008, he organises a rally in the main square of the town of Udachny, where he lives and works. By the evening, a thousand people, mostly miners, had joined Profsvoboda to demand overtime pay and higher salaries.
On 3 September, three shaven-headed men in leather jackets are waiting for Urusov right in front of the house where he lives. He is strangled, handcuffed, thrown into an SUV and kidnapped. The kidnappers, Sergei Rudov and Maxim Dobarkin, are operatives of the FSKN: the Federal Drug Control Service of the Russian Federation. They had come from Mirny, about 600 kilometres away, to detain the union leader. After the mock shooting, they drive him to a detention facility in Mirny – but with some sudden stops along the way.
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From Urusov’s statement to the Prosecutor’s Office, 18 September 2008:
“Someone approached me from behind, where my feet were, and started pressing something metallic against my fingers. He said: ‘Now we have your fingerprints on a gun, in a moment we’ll shoot you for resisting arrest and trying to escape.’ After two or three minutes they started putting something sticky on my fingers. (...) Then I heard the rustle of a bag and they put something in the left pocket of my jacket. After about five minutes they pulled me out of the car (...) and started shooting near my head.”
Urusov states that he was forced to write a confession on drug possession, or he’d be killed: “‘Either you stay here in the forest, or you stay alive.’ Dobarkin wanted me to write that it was Renat Azizov who gave me the bag, but I know him, he was my deputy at the trade union.” The whole trade union was to be crushed in one fell swoop. “While I was lying on my back, Dobarkin asked: “How about I take a shit on you?”
At a fork in the road in the remote taiga, the activist is searched. The obligatory witnesses to the search arrive in a white van – they turn out to be Alrosa security officers. “They took a small grey bag from my pocket”, Urusov continues. “Rudov immediately produced a pair of scales. (...) 70.3 grams, he announced, (...) took the baggy, showed it to the witnesses, gave them a sniff. (...) Then Rudov explained that it was hashish oil.” They only arrive in Mirny in the evening: “On the way, Rudov told me: ‘You knew who you are up against. The company will not let you go ahead with this trade union stuff. It will do what it needs to do to make you and people like you stop.’”
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In December 2008, the Mirny court declares Valentin Urusov guilty of drug possession and sends him to a penal colony for six years. A large-scale public campaign in his defence is launched in Russia. The human rights organisation Memorial (now declared a foreign agent and liquidated) recognises Urusov as a political prisoner; activists put his photo on posters alongside those of Pussy Riot and other political prisoners.
Yakutsk journalists who cover the case are threatened, too. Alla Demidova, editor of the Gorodok newspaper, receives a call from the FSKN operative Dobarkin after publishing a short article. She says he was drunk when he called her: “He told me how many bullets he would put in me, said that he ‘shoots first, thinks later’, that he knew where I lived, that he would ‘get’ me ‘no matter if I’m in Udachny or Sochi’.” Aitalina Nikiforova, a journalist from Moya Gazeta in Mirny, reports from each court session. “During one of them, Rudov pulled me aside and said the following, literally: ‘Your eldest daughter is fifteen. It would be interesting to see how you go on defending Urusov after some old drug addicts drug and gang-rape her.’ It definitely sounded like a threat at the time.” The city’s only printing house refuses to print the paper, and Nikiforova flees, seeking safety in Yakutsk.
Some time later, Colonel Sergei Rudov is suddenly arrested on charges of abuse of office – but this does not change the fate of the trade union leader. Indeed, Dobarkin is actually promoted, becoming the head of the Mirny FSKN.
“Unfortunately, they won’t let me work in Yakutia”, Urusov said in an interview after his release. “There, our trade union cell was smashed. It was crushed completely, just wiped off the face of the earth. The Alrosa management fired all those who had started union activities with me. They are blacklisted in Yakutia. They all had to look for new jobs, the last one of them only recently found one. (…) Everything was smashed, broken, people were so intimidated by this story that nobody wants to listen to anything anymore. People are very afraid.”
So in 2009, when the underground Mir mine is finally launched and produces its first ore, Alrosa has no independent trade union. Those who would have been the first to raise the alarm about the dangers and control violations – the activists, the participants of grassroots movements – had been sacked or worse.
⬇ Five Years Before the Disaster. The First Death
A dead miner is lucky if he gets a few bureaucratic phrases in the Yakutian newspapers. In 2012, a foreman perishes in the Mir mine: “On 9 October, around 14:30 Moscow time, the roof at – 270 metres collapsed under the rock mass. (...) In the accident, the miner Igor Banayev suffered a closed chest wound and a fracture of the base of his skull” – that was all the journalists were told.
Igor Banayev was born on the Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal and grew up in Mirny. He was a carpenter, good with his hands, loved to work with wood. The chandelier he made is one of the things remaining to his wife, who still lives in their home village. When the Mir mine opened, Igor went to work there. He had big dreams for his son, hoping to give him a higher education in sport – but the boy was not even a year old when his father was buried under the ore.
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A year before this tragedy, the German pumps relieving the water pressure in the open pit had broken down. It took time to replace them, and all the while, the lake grew, putting more and more pressure on the safety layer. The roof of the mine began to leak through the cracks. But the Alrosa engineers treated Mir as a technical experiment. They decided to abandon the failed pumping project and capture water inside the mines instead, right at the -210 horizon. Paradoxically, they drilled holes in the safety ceiling so as to have control over the leaks. This system was called “The Trident”.
A month before Igor Banayev’s death, the mine was completely shut down – for the first and last time before its final collapse. The decision was made by Rostekhnadzor, the same regulator that had approved the “dry conservation” project in the first place. Now it looked more like wet conservation… However, every day of the mine’s downtime is very expensive, with lost profits running into tens of millions of roubles. Rostekhnadzor must have had good reasons for shutting down the mine – yet it simply reopened ten days later without taking any action. Alrosa’s chief engineer personally explained that the company had “come to an understanding” with the inspectors, convincing them that the situation was not really an emergency.
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In October 2012, when the roof caves in, killing Igor Banayev, there are 109 other people in the mine. All of them are alerted and brought to the surface. A criminal case is opened – and immediately closed: an accident, that’s all there is to it. The family is paid a compensation in order to hush the accident up. The never leave Mirny. Later, she says: “My son goes to school here. My husband’s grave is here. Who will take care of it if we leave?” Igor’s widow Vasilisa tells Baza. She remembers that the miners were always aware of the danger: “[They’d say] the ceiling keeps leaking. But Igor never complained; he did what they told him.”
⬇ Four Years Before the Disaster. Another Death
April 2013. Another casualty, a few more lines in officialese: “In the supply gate of the -310 metre horizon, a powder man working on the ventilation section was crushed by a slurry of rock mass bursting into the mine. The man (born in 1956) died of his injuries.” Even his name remains unknown. Again, an investigation is opened and immediately closed: another chance accident, of course. The mine remains open.
“It is like standing in the rain under an umbrella but make holes in it. (...) Look at what we are doing! We are extracting the carats at the cost of miners’ lives instead of mining safely” – the speech of former Alrosa President Yuri Doinikov makes history in 2013. He delivers it to the State Assembly (Il Tumen) of the Republic of Sakha in Yakutia – though, as journalists point out, this flash of brutal honesty happens only after he’s been dismissed without a golden parachute. Still, what he says remains valid: “Today, people are afraid to go into the mine. How can we let two months pass without a single inspection by safety engineers? Ideally, we should close the mine and tell everyone to get the hell out of there. If we don’t change the project today, if we go on working like this, let me tell you frankly: given the current situation, tomorrow, there will be not one death but more than you care to imagine.”
⬇ Two Years Before the Disaster. Yet Another Death
On 13 April 2015, workers are fixing a pipe when it suddenly bursts under pressure. The surge kills Damir Valitov, a mining foreman, on the spot. He originally came from Fergana [in eastern Uzbekistan]. As a child, he’d loved to ride horses; in his youth, he’d taken up boxing. Then he’d studied to be a mining master, and in the eighties, he’d moved to Russia – to Uchaly in Bashkortostan. Finally, he’d come to Mirny hoping to make better money and ended up working for Alrosa for thirteen years. He loved fishing and a good Russian banya. About a year before the tragedy, he said his dream was to buy a pick-up truck, to return to the Ural mountains and to build a house there…
“My father talked about death quite a lot,” his son told Baza. “Many of my memories feature my parents talking about someone’s death in the mine. (...) My father said the responsibility was huge. He was a strict man, but fair.” The report called his death a “group accident”. There was a court case that “ended in nothing”.
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On 28 October 28 2015, ten people receive state awards from Dmitry Medvedev and the Russian government for developing the mines in Yakutia, and the Mir mine in particular. The list includes Alrosa’s top managers, Rostekhnadzor expert Alexander Filatov, one of Novotek’s chief scientists, Grigory Genzel, and other developers of the fateful “dry conservation” project. “Thus, they were the creators of precisely the technologies that ended up failing to protect the mine from groundwater inflow. It seems that, in 2015, the scientists didn’t anticipate the possibility of a catastrophe, otherwise they’d have been cautious about publicly declaring their authorship of these flawed technologies”, Dr Arkhipov concludes.
After the disaster, none of them will accept a share of the blame; none will return the reward.
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In the same year, Alexei Burkser becomes the director of the entire mine. He is regarded to be a perfectly obedient executor of every wish, and for good reasons; the miners interviewed by Baza, on the other hand, describe him as a “tough guy” who “had no understanding for the people whatsoever”. He never lets go, always finds someone to blame. He makes the miners “write a lot of explanatory notes”, looks for scapegoats, and threatens people with physical violence if he needs to.
Burkser’s biography is rather eccentric: a citizen of Uzbekistan, he had worked in Uzbek gold mines for 28 years before arriving in Russia – where he immediately became the general director of Buryatzoloto, one of the largest Russian gold mining companies. Then, one day Burkser was arrested right in his office at the request of Interpol and held at a pre-trial detention centre in Ulan-Ude for two months: Uzbekistan had put him on an international wanted list on suspicion of embezzlement, forgery and several other crimes. Miraculously, though, Burkser was not extradited but released – to quietly become the head of the Mir mine in 2015. No noise, no news, no questions.
Burkser is likely hired specifically as a manager for times of crisis who’d be easy to pressure in case of emergency: while cutting costs, Alrosa demands that Mir reach a capacity of one million tonnes of ore per year – this number is the only thing that matters, so a tough executive is needed at the helm. Burkser fits the bill.
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In February 2017, the president of Alrosa, Andrei Zharkov, decides to resign. Interfax reports that at the meeting of the supervisory board – the most important body that decides on the company’s strategy – Zharkov spoke out “against changing the company’s budget”, calling the cost cuts “extreme and unjustified”. The board, though, wanted to increase margins and reduce costs as quickly as possible – which had a direct effect on monitoring the state of the mines. Shortly before handing in his resignation, Zharkov had witnessed a collapse at the Udachny mine with his own eyes: underground at the time during a guided tour for top managers, he remained miraculously unhurt.
In March 2017, just six months before the disaster, Sergei Ivanov –whose father, Sergei Ivanov Senior, happens to be Vladimir Putin’s KGB colleague from their Leningrad years and former head of the presidential administration – becomes the new president of Alrosa.
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⬇ Six Days Before the Disaster. One More Death.
Nikolai Alekseev had believed in God since his youth, but it is in the year of his death, 2017, that religion gains in importance for him and he gets baptised. Son of an Evenki woman, grandson of that hunter from the flooded village of Tuoi Haya, he is a big, kind, hospitable man who likes to cook unusual dishes for his guests. At the age of 33, Nikolai begins to talk a lot about the age of Christ, worrying about what he’d leave behind, talking about the afterlife. At this time, it turns out that he’s a crypto-millionaire. “He had more than a thousand [bitcoins] at the time of his death”, Olga Pavlova, Nikolai’s aunt, tells Baza. That’s about $3 million at the 2017 exchange rate: “We were just sitting there, drinking tea; suddenly, he takes out a pen and a notebook and starts writing everything down. Here is the login and password, he says, keep it safe. He just wrote it down on a piece of paper. He wanted to invite us to [a/his] wedding, to rent a fancy restaurant in Yakutsk, to get an aerial photographer. (...) He wasn’t thinking of things like buying property in the Maldives. What he said was ‘I’ll help all my relatives’.”
Here are the few lines of bureaucratese that were published about the death of Nikolai Alekseev: “At the horizon of -320 metres, the water flow increased, in connection with which additional pumping units were installed. In the evening, at mark 295 of the mine (...) there was a rockfall. A combine harvester and a loading machine were blocked. A few hours later, rescuers extracted a 30-year-old machine operator from under the rubble.”
He is still conscious when he loses feeling in his arms and legs. He lapses into a coma and is rushed to Yakutsk, where doctors try to save his life.
To no avail: Nikolai Alekseev dies a month later, leaving behind two daughters and a pregnant wife. He’ll never get to see his son. As for the bitcoin wealth, aunt Olga had simply lost that piece of paper by that time. It must have fallen out of her purse: “I don’t know what happened to those bitcoins. These billions of roubles are just stuck there. I simply can’t remember [the login and password], whatever I try, even hypnosis.”
Alekseev’s fatal accident feels like an omen; by now, the whole town is talking about the underground deluges down in the Mir mine. The miners film their equipment floating in the underground streams and send each other the videos. Every shift is a lottery, every miner knows that one day the bottom of the lake will collapse, all they can hope is that it doesn’t happen on their shift. Still, nobody closes the mine. The same day, Aleksandra Dubovich, a resident of Mirny, contacted the Russian President’s “e-reception centre” [the “Presidential Directorate for Correspondence from Citizens and Organisations”]. After the disaster, all local media would cite this cry of despair as proof that the tragedy could have been avoided.
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Correspondence No. 733813, style and punctuation retained
“Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, I live in the Sakha Republic, in the town of Mirny. Since 25.07.2017, the MIR mining and processing works, is being flooded, it’s a mine, today is the 29.07.17. The management says nothing and does nothing. And this is not the first case of flooding of the Mir mine in the last 5 years, either. What will happen to the people, where will they work, they all have families and mortgages? Usually the workers themselves have to clean up the traces of flooding and patch up the holes. I ask to sort out this grave problem, also how come the Mir mine was built on a river? (...) I have video footage of the flooding of the mine.”
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⬇ 1 Hour Before the Disaster. Farewell
4 August 2017. It’s Friday in Mirny, a sweltering day. The sun is blinding even in the evening and sets only shortly before 22.00. Mosquitoes and midges everywhere, ready to envelop you as soon as you stand still. You have to move all the time, preferably fast. Gleb Mirontsev, 31, is on the way to his shift. From the bus going to the mine, he calls his fiancée Inna. They always talk before the start of a shift. Gleb grew up in Makiivka [a city in Donetsk Oblast], the only son in a family of hereditary Donetsk miners. He has been friends with his future fiancée since high school, but in 2014, as the war had started, he’d decided to move away. The option of Mirny had seemed promising, but moving to Yakutia wasn’t easy: for several months, while getting all the right papers to work for Alrosa, Gleb lived from hand to mouth at a friend’s dacha. Eventually, he got back on his feet and invited Inna to move in with him.
A week before the disaster, Gleb falls slightly ill. Just a cold: a sore throat, general weakness. He decides to take no sick days so as not to anger the bosses. His mother Tatiana explains: “I call him, I say: ‘Son, have you taken sick leave?’. And he said: ‘It’s fine, I drank lots of Coldrex. They don’t like [us taking sick leave]. They’ll think it's on purpose.’”
On the morning of 4 August, Inna for some reason says to Gleb: “Good luck!” She’d never said this before. This turns out to be their last conversation.
⬇ 30 Minutes Before the Disaster. Shift Change
By and by, 150 miners gather by the mine lift. In groups, they go up to the surface from their different levels. One of them, Igor Mazikov, remembers talking to his colleague Mikhail Neustroyev: “I said: ‘Misha, finally we can go home and have some tea!’ And he said: ‘The hose has been bursting all shift; they’ll make me write an explanatory note if I don’t get enough drilling done today.’ So he stayed because of that hose.”
At that time, four more people are working on a separate schedule – an external team of drillers from Belgorod, invited to drill a few new holes in the bottom of the lake, at the -210 horizon. This is where the Mir mine will collapse in a few minutes: the roof will cave in, releasing 300 thousand cubic metres of water – that’s how much Rostov-on-Don [a city with a population of over one million] consumes in a day. The men drilling at the -210 horizon will die instantly. On the other horizons, the lights on the miners’ helmets will start flashing simultaneously: One. Two. Three.
⚫ 0 Hours 0 Minutes. The Disaster
At first you feel a blast of wind: the invisible stream of water somewhere out there is pushing out all the air in its path, like an underground train. A special system makes the light on your helmet flicker, giving you the universal signal: “Accident. Run!” But you don’t have the time to run: you hear the approaching roar, and ore dust covers your face. A blue smog appears, the pressure difference hits your ears. The lights go out. Then you die.
This wave in the confined space of the mine is not just water. It is an icy, thick mud that smells like rotten eggs, that burns your skin, eats right into it, leaving wounds. Bursting through cracks under immense pressure, it carries an avalanche of rocks, planks, equipment and debris. The miners call this mixture “machmala” [a regional word for viscous, dirty fluids]. It inexorably fills the labyrinth of the mine, overturning multi-tonne machines like matchboxes. You can’t swim in it; you can’t see through it. Federal Rescue Service divers will refuse to work in it: they’d be useless. The chance to survive if the stream hits you is miniscule. It can only happen if you find yourself in an air bubble before the machmala breaks all your bones.
“There was a lot of dust, my eyes were stinging”, the 26-year-old miner Renat Sagdiyev recalls. He and others close to him got lucky: they were all in an air bubble at the -310 horizon: “I fell down, my mouth filled with mud, I couldn’t feel my feet in the water because of the cold, but I had to get up and run. (...) We held hands tightly and moved forward together, supporting each other like a single organism.” Having reached a safe place, Renat counts the people: from each section of the mine, one person is missing. He calls the dispatcher via his SUBR alarm system console, asking to locate them: in addition to the lights, each miner’s helmet contains a sensor. Every time a miner enters a cave, the sensor sends a signal to the antenna at the entrance. This creates a map showing the locations of all the workers in the mines, on all horizons: if a person has entered and not come out, you can see it.
Renat returns to his horizon to get several machine operators who’d been left behind. Then he calls the dispatchers again: Gleb Mirontsev is nearby, at -295, also in an air bubble. Renat calls him: “I said: ‘Hold on, brother’ and advised to go to that one exit. A few minutes later he called back and said the way was blocked. Everything under the roof was chockful with mud.” At this point, Mirontsev makes a completely calm impression, though he adds that he’d lost his “self-rescuer” – a portable breathing device. He is barefoot, soaked to the bone.
Renat assembles another small rescue team. Two passages led to Gleb: “We tried one, but it was blocked by mud; we turned round, took the second one – and then, we heard the sound of rushing water again. It was filling the passage, heading toward it meant certain death. The main stream was coming through this passage. We hurried away, and I called Mirontsev again. No one picked up.”
Four had already died an instant death at the -210 horizon. Mirontsev is lower, at -295. Two more men are missing at -310 and another one, Alisher Mirzaev, is lowest of all at -447. In absolute figures, this is almost 800 metres down from the surface. The others have some chance to be rescued. Alisher does not.
He had grown up in Mirny, knew and loved every corner of it. A strong man who did some heavy lifting at the gym, he’d been working at Mir since its opening. On the day of the accident, Mirzaev has his last shift before going on holiday to his native Guzar in Uzbekistan. To go down on the day of departure is considered bad luck, but he does what he has to: this is Alrosa, after all. Alisher works as a banksman, loading vessels with ore into the lift. Usually, it’s a job for two, but his partner is not around today. Alisher is all alone.
The lights go out. And then Alisher sees a wall of water. He is in a booth, a nine-metre vertical shaft behind him. He still has the time to call his colleagues above and say that the water has reached him. This means the whole mine is flooding: “It was important for me to warn the guys so that they could get to the surface in time.” He hangs up and at once receives a powerful blow to the head. Still, he manages to hold onto the iron wall of the booth. There he hangs, his lower body in the stream: “This one wall stayed up and saved my life.” Over the next 30 hours, he passes out three times.
Alisher doesn’t remember how long he had hung on; his sense of time wasn’t working anymore: “The water subsided, but my left foot was jammed. I moved the toes in my boot and I couldn’t feel them. The skin, muscles and nerve endings were torn. I still can’t control this foot. But I realised that I could breathe – that was what mattered. There was air, I was not underwater.” After painfully pulling out his foot, he jumps off the booth and loses consciousness for the second time. He does not notice the night falling.
⬇ 1 Day After the Disaster. The Agitated City
“I woke up from the cold, soaking wet. And very thirsty.” Alisher finds a hydrant that miners used to wash the mud from their boots. To him, the rusty water seems delicious, sugar-sweet. Now he has to walk another forty metres to the workers’ elevator, find a telephone and ask to send down an elevator car.
He throws off his clothes, which are heavy with brine and concrete. Then he gets on his way: “I found a stick (...) and limped through the water, poking and prodding my way forward. The thought came that I had to do everything in my power to survive. I had to keep on fighting till the end. For the sake of my son, my wife, my family and friends. Before that, I’d been thinking things like: Is all this a dream? Maybe I’m dead already? Maybe all this is happening to someone else?”
In the dark, he wades through the water and rubble, which reach up to his chest. Several times, he has to dive into the slurry. He manages to pass one gate, but the second one is glued shut; the water behind it is up to his neck. Mirzaev has to climb through a one-by-one metre ventilation hatch. “I reached the elevator. There was a telephone next to it. I picked up the receiver – the phone was off. I had to keep walking, and so I did. Then suddenly I heard it ringing! I didn’t get to it in time, but I called the dispatcher back and told him I was alive. ‘Wait there!’ he said.”
The images of his rescue hit the Russian media: 30 hours after the disaster, there was hardly any hope left for the nine miners down there; now, one of them is lifted out on a stretcher! This gives the city hope that others might still be saved, too. There’s applause all around. “Let me tell you honestly: nobody helped me. People who supposedly saved me got medals; on TV they said, look, they managed to pull out this miner. But actually, I did it all by myself. I got to the elevator by myself. Everybody knows that. Where is the rescuer who can come up to me and say ‘it’s me who pulled you out’? I’d shake his hand, but there is no such person.”
The rescue operation is paused several times as new water accumulates, threatening to burst through again. The relatives who fly into the city are accommodated separately and watched so that they don’t communicate with each other. “I don’t see any journalists in the city at all! The news on the local TV channel is just bland repetitions of the same stuff. It feels like the country doesn’t care about its citizens at all”, Alexei Maryin, brother of the miner Dmitri, exclaims in desperation in several rare interviews. “The management from Belgorod, those who sent them down here, don’t give a damn! It’s like they have nothing to do with the whole thing. (…) I’ve seen the wives and mothers of the guys from horizon -310. They are on sedatives, half-dead themselves – they don’t live, they only exist. It’s worse than death, this waiting for the unknown. God save us all from such a fate!”
Someone starts a WhatsApp group about a rally in support of the miners and against the corporation’s management. Photos of three bodies wrapped in cellophane – fake, as it turns out – go viral in messengers. The mayor of Mirny, Klim Antonov, threatens activists with arrest: “A state of emergency has been declared in the city, and any unauthorised rallies and actions will be suppressed by law enforcement officers. Whoever hits the streets will be dispersed and prosecuted.”
Almost immediately, Alrosa makes a statement: allegedly, the preliminary analysis of the accident showed that the cause of the disaster was “a rapid deterioration of mining and geological conditions and the erosion of the enclosing rocks in the pit”. This sounds almost like blaming the weather for the disaster. No one believes this explanation. On the asphalt and walls of houses in Mirny, graffiti appear: a question written in the form of a hashtag: #Ktoubilshakhtyorov? – “#Who Killed the Miners?”
⬇ 5 Days After the Disaster. The Rescue Operation
“Let’s put it another way. There was the Kursk submarine, someone sank it, someone came to pull it out. Think of us as those who’ve come to pull it out.”
On 9 August, the relatives gather for the first meeting with representatives of the rescue operation headquarters. Quotes from the transcript are reprinted by many Yakutian publications. Probably, the first male voice on the recording [cited above] belongs to Vladen Aksyonov, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations:
“I worked in a detachment in Kuzbass before, and our losses were huge – one in five rescuers, 37 people in five years. Twenty died at the Raspadskaya mine, half of my detachment died at the Yesaulskaya [mine]. I don’t want to add to the list of the dead, either. The rescuers under my command are young guys, too. Of course we take risks, but every risk has its limit. Who’d bang on a landmine with a hammer? We do what we can. When the water recedes, we’ll go out and search again. We’ll search as long as we can.”
At this point, the fate of the miners from horizon -310 is still unknown. Rescuers proceed on the theory that the miners could have gotten out of the dead-end tunnel and to a higher level, where the water had receded and the exits were not blocked. Alisher’s case keeps coming up as an example that the men still have a chance. This doesn’t seem to be an act.
“How long can they last under these conditions?”
“Well, look. You can manage seven to nine days without food, with a small supply of water. Let’s say, there are three of them. Volodya, you just said there are three of them, let’s assume that. These are experienced men. They’ll use their lamps in turn, and not all the time. So light will last longer. Right? I don’t know what will happen next, Volodya, I don’t know how this story will unfold.”
“Seven to nine days sounds pretty alarming. It’s been almost five.”
The day before the meeting, about a hundred people – other Mir miners – gather at the dispatch office to offer help in removing the rubble at depth: after all, they know the mine better. The rescuers only let a few people do this work – there simply isn’t enough room in the tunnels for such a crowd of volunteers. A special exception is made for Alexei Maryin, who is allowed to go down and look for his brother Dmitri. He spends three hours underground. Then, for some reason, a container is dropped into the pit from a helicopter, trying to cause a water shock, so that the bottom would crack again and release more water. At the meeting, the people say that cannot understand this proceeding; again, the women lose their nerves.
“As much for those slogans of yours that you’ve put up all over the place – ‘People are worth more than diamonds’ – yeah, sure (Alrosa’s long-standing slogan can be found everywhere in Mirny, even in polyclinics. Baza). What do you want with these slogans if that’s how you actually treat people? No equipment, no pumps, no nothing. You must have planned for such events, this is a mine, after all! A decrepit one at that; how many times was it closed [for repairs]? No, you still want your diamonds, more diamonds! We live perfectly well without diamonds. And now what? What now? How can we live? Tell me, how can we live? I don’t know how to live with this!”
“Without diamonds, the whole place will shut down. Shut down the mine, half the town shuts down with it.”
“So let it shut down! (...) I mean really, enough with your slogans, just let it be! I mean, there had been the first flood, the whole city was talking about it, and still you went on sending people down there. Otherwise you’d lose billions. Billions of money. You’d fail to hit your target, the boss won’t get a new Jeep, or he won’t go to Miami this year. And here we have eight ordinary men, with salaries of 70,000 roubles, and nothing is done for them, nothing whatsoever.”
Gleb Mirontsev’s mother Tatyana is sure to the last that her son will be saved. On her way to Mirny, she seems to hear his voice in her head: “What’s with the fuss, I’ll come and visit soon enough!” The family still believes that Gleb actually lived a whole week longer than the official date of death suggests. “The thing is: He appeared to my father in a dream”, says Inna, Mirontsev’s fiancée. “For a long time, my parents didn’t tell me about it. And in this dream he spoke to my father and said: ‘Please forgive me, I just can’t do it any longer. I love her so much, but I can’t hold on anymore.’”
⬇ One Month Later. Mourning
On 26 August, the rescue operation is terminated, and mourning is declared in Yakutia. Eight miners remain underground among the diamonds. They are: Gleb Mirontsev; the team from Belgorod – drillers Dmitry Zhukov (26 years old), Alexey Vlasenko (33, two small children), Dmitry Maryin (37, two children), Valentin Misnik (48) – and three more locals: the machine worker Mikhail Neustroev (42), the site supervisor Vitaly Kulikov (42) and the powder man Igor Stepanov (35 years old, a young son). A memorial stone is improvised near the Mir mine; people bring photos, flowers, and a bottle of drinking water for each victim – like people did after Beslan [the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis]. Later, another framed portrait joins the eight: Nikolai Alekseev, the secret bitcoin millionaire killed on the eve of the greater disaster; still, he won’t become the ninth dead miner in the future memorial.
“We are deeply shocked by what happened. This is a tragedy for the entire company” – all the news media cite the words of condolence by Alrosa’s president Sergey Ivanov. To his credit, Ivanov has been in Mirny from the very day of the disaster, but for some reason he does not come to the final meeting with the relatives. Instead, three strangers in business suits meet the families:
“Given that so much time has passed, you must know that the miners are dead. Forgive us.”
“How do we get the bodies?”
“Hopefully we can get out the remains in a year.” (Of course, this never happens. Baza)
“At how much did Alrosa value our husbands’ lives? A million roubles?” [Ca. 14,000 euro at the 2017 exchange rate.]
“Firstly, Alrosa is making these payments voluntarily; they are not mandatory. Secondly, they do not put a value on a life.”
“Yes they do! Don’t think that our grief makes us too stupid to understand what’s going on. (...) Wives with children and mothers are left behind here. We are not talking about material compensation but about Alrosa being held accountable for its actions. I will sue you, and I won’t stop for the rest of your life. We won’t leave you alone. You’ll be seeing us in nightmares. You will answer to God, to the court – and to us.”
⬇ 2 Years Later. Guilt
In autumn 2019, the head of Mir, Alexei Burkser, hangs himself. The tough man takes his own life with the help of the elastic band from his trousers and a clothes hanger in his cell of a pre-trial detention centre – at least, that’s what is reported by the TV channel Rossiya-24. This happens just a day after he is arrested along with his deputy Kisilichin and the chief engineer Mann. They are accused of violating safety rules during mining operations and causing death. This is the only criminal case relating to the disaster. The scapegoats have been chosen.
Burkser’s acquaintances, colleagues and friends are sure that a man of his character could not have committed suicide. Before his death, he left a note to his wife and daughters, but its contents are unknown: the family refuses to communicate with the press after receiving some threats and signals. Burkser’s defence attorneys told Baza about an expert opinion which showed that he’d been tortured three days before his death, and again three hours before it. Bruises had allegedly been seen on his body in the morgue. Alexei received a full Russian-Orthodox burial service, which normally should have been denied in case of a suicide.
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An Independent Investigation
In the winter of the same year, Dr Alexei Arkhipov finishes his own investigation of the catastrophe and publishes a book entitled The End of the Mir Underground Mine. Here are his main conclusions and hypotheses:
The collapse was probably immediately triggered by the four drillers from Belgorod, who were making boreholes from the mine upwards into the open pit on 4 August and who were the first to die. What happened was not their fault, of course, but the fault of those who gave them this assignment.
Arkhipov found a tender for this very operation, which was won by the Belspetsmontazh company. It is not known who designed the drilling scheme, but clearly Yakutniproalmaz, Alrosa’s main institute, must have controlled the process. The documents suggest that the workers only needed to drill through 14 – not 20 – metres of mineral from the “drilling chamber” to the water above. The number is not stated directly; Arkhipov calculated it based on the composition of the mineral layers described in the documents. Thus, it was known that, at least in this particular place, the protective layer was six metres thinner than the already dangerously slim twenty planned by the mine’s creators. Still, no one sounded the alarm.
Officially, the investigation into the causes of the disaster was entrusted to Rostekhnadzor – the very same body that had approved all the changes to the mine’s design and all the failed battles against the water flows without voicing any criticism. Rostekhnadzor finished its investigation in just one month. Arkhipov believes it to have been a sham.
The commission was headed by Alexander Filatov, who had worked at Alrosa before joining Rostekhnadzor – the conflict of interest is obvious. Moreover, he was among those who had received a government award for the Yakutian mines in 2015. And he is directly linked to the very construction of Mir: Arkhipov found Filatov’s name as a co-author in several scientific articles on the “dry conservation” project.
The full conclusion of the commission was never disclosed. It remains concealed from the public. All that we have are some quotes from a conversation between the head of Rostekhnadzor and the head of Alrosa. Arkhipov cites the statement that “at present, there are no reliable control systems in Russia or abroad to detect the development of cavities in rocks” and reminds the readers that the method of acoustic sounding was available but ignored back in the early noughties.
Today, the website of Novotek, the company that had co-developed the failed “dry conservation” of the open pit with Alrosa, features not a single mention of Mir. It has all been cleaned up, as if they’d never had anything to do with the mine or the disaster.
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On 20 March 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Kisilichin and Mann are each sentenced to 2.5 years in a penal colony settlement. The court rules that it was their duty to temporarily close down the 24/7 operations of the mine. Mir’s history shows that the top management never considered that step. Kisilichin and Mann have since been released from prison.
The criminal case against Burkser is dropped due to his death. Nobody knows why he had to kill himself, since he was likely to receive the same rather lenient sentence. [Colony settlements are the softest sentencing option. The inmates live under observation, may move relatively freely and have family.]
In its conclusions, Rostekhnadzor labels the disaster a “mass accident”. After the inspection, it identifies sixteen officials responsible for the accident but never makes their names public. The reaction of Alrosa’s president Sergei Ivanov is limited to reducing the salaries of 22 top managers and firing two more. It goes without saying neither the “inspector” Alexander Filatov himself, nor the Novotek specialists, nor any other scientists who had worked on the failed “dry conservation” project are held responsible. “This is the big problem the whole world over. How can a person – a mere engineer, a cog in the machine – remain a human being, a responsible specialist, and resist the shared desire of all the people who just want to make money?” Alexei Arkhipov comments.
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How to Find the Guilty Parties
From the outside, it is very difficult to calculate the culpability of each of the company’s top managers. In the seventeen years that diamonds have been squeezed out of the agonising Mir mine, Alrosa has had eight presidents and seven chairmen of the Supervisory Board (the main body that makes global decisions on the development of the company and the mines). But what happened on 4 August was a project disaster, and so we can single out the managers who must have had signed off on the most flawed decisions.
Dr Arkhipov lists the following people as probably responsible for launching the “dry conservation” of Mir: in 2001-2002, the president of Alrosa was Vyacheslav Shtyrov, who soon left to become president of Yakutia. The board consisted of 24 people, including First Vice President Vladimir Dyukarev, Chief Engineer Vladimir Kalitin, Director of the Yakutniproalmaz Institute (“the main think tank of the corporation”) Gennady Melnik, Director of the Capital Construction Department Yury Popov and Director of the Mirny Combine Valery Leonenko.
The fatal decision to reduce the protective layer of the mine from 100 to 20 metres was made in 2005-2006, when Alexander Nichiporuk was the president of Alrosa, Mikhail Ganchenko the chief engineer, Alexey Vedin the director of the institute, Alexander Chaadaev the director of capital construction, and Yuri Doinikov the director of the combine. However, it was another team, one headed by President Sergei Vybornov, that started to implement this decision in 2008. Alexander Efimov, chief engineer, Igor Sobolev, director of capital construction, and Dmitriy Mostov, director of the plant, were new on the list.
From 2002 to 2011, Alexei Kudrin, then Russia’s minister of finances, was the chairman of Alrosa’s supervisory board. Finally, only six months before the disaster, Sergei Ivanov became president of the corporation. Whether he was aware of Mir’s condition, whether he could have sorted out the problem and stopped the mine within such a short period is a subject of heated political debate to this day.
A complete list of those involved in “designing” the disaster or allowing it to happen by their inaction would feature about a hundred people – but no one wanted to dig so deeply.
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The corporation finds new jobs for only half of Mir’s miners. After the disaster, Alrosa begins large-scale layoffs in Mirny, and the Yakutniproalmaz Institute is reorganised, with employees forced to move to Novosibirsk.
In 2020, the journalist Andrei Karaulov (currently listed as a foreign agent in Russia) and his crew fly to Yakutia to film a story about the layoffs. The journalist Lera Popova is followed by several unknown people; her hotel is put under surveillance. All miners who agreed to an interview get a call: “If you communicate with Karaulov’s team, your work here might be over.” A photo of Karaulov circulates through the city’s chat rooms: “Don’t talk to him, don’t answer his questions, politely send him away. He might be recording the conversation.” Still, the journalists do make a film, but it is soon removed from YouTube for reasons unknown.
⬇ 6 Years Later. Now.
Today, a 23-hectare turquoise lake once again fills the heart of the pit. The locals call it “the Maldives of Mirny”. Forty million tonnes of water have accumulated there – enough to last all of Moscow for two weeks. The mine remains a mass grave. The main brand of diamond mining in Russia is virtually destroyed; tens of billions of roubles invested in the construction of the mine are flooded with toxic brine, and diamonds valued at roughly $14 billion remain underground. This makes the event of 4 August 2017 the most expensive industrial disaster in Russia. On its anniversary, the company offers relatives of the victims free air tickets to Mirny.
The city holds its breath, waiting: every year, Alrosa promises to restore the mine, again and again pushing back the launch date. Journalists are used to treating these statements as reveries. In May 2023, though, everything changes: the Head of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) Aysen Nikolayev meets with Vladimir Putin, and the Mir-Gluboky [gluboky meaning “deep”] mine project wins the president’s support. Which means state support. An investment of no less than 121 billion roubles into a brand-new mine at the deep horizons of the Mir pipe is planned. The company promises 400 jobs for construction workers and another 800 for future miners. Alrosa keeps the details of the mine’s design and safety secret. The first ore is to be produced in 2032: this is, the corporation is now starting from scratch a project that will go on for decades. Sergey Ivanov resigns and is replaced – in that same May 2023 – by Pavel Marinychev, who was born in Yakutsk and had worked in the oil industry before starting his career at Alrosa. In summer, Marinychev is added to the US sanctions list.
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On Sanctions and Blood Diamonds
The diamond market is more complicated today than in the 20th century. Now, rough ware from Yakutia accounts for a third of the world turnover, and 90% of all diamonds pass through India, where they are facetted. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has been established to make sure that no so-called blood diamonds enter the world market. Originally, the process concentrated on stones that various rebel groups involved in civil wars, genocide, as well as slave and child labour, used to pay for weapons in Africa. The film Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio illustrates this rather well.
For a long time, Russia held a key position in the Kimberley Process commission, even chairing it in 2021. But with the outbreak of the armed conflict in Ukraine, everything changed. The US imposed sanctions on Alrosa and a direct ban on imports of rough and polished diamonds from Russia. The G7 countries (UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, France, Japan and the US) are pushing to change the status of Russian stones from “clean” to problematic and intend to impose import bans from January 2024. Some experts fear that this could destroy the entire industry, while others point out that it is very difficult to impose sanctions on diamonds in general: for example, Alrosa diamonds currently continue to enter the US because they are considered Indian after being cut there. In general, there is no reliable way of identifying the origin of a diamond.
At the same time, the demand for diamonds in the US and China is dropping – and sociologists believe this trend to be long-term: millennials and zoomers simply do not want to spend their money on precious stones; the old marketing doesn’t work for them.
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After the accident, Alisher Mirzaev – the one who survived and miraculously found his way to the surface – is plagued by depression and panic attacks. As a tough miner, he never thought he would suffer from something like this. Usually, it’s the miners’ backs and eyesight that give them trouble. For Alisher, the disaster has wreaked havoc on his nervous and hormonal systems. He cannot sleep at night, he cannot stand the darkness, keeps the light on, needs someone close to him all the time. Being alone is the worst.
The doctor prescribes sedatives, then antidepressants. Alisher tries a lot of pills, struggling with grave side effects. He still lives in Mirny. He’s been formally enrolled at the Inter mine, the nearest one to the city, but he only works on the surface: the medical commission concluded he can’t go underground.
But the mine still strangely attracts him. One day, Alisher does go down, just once: “I know I’m not allowed to; well, let them scold me. At first, it was so quiet. I felt all different in my soul. When we came down, I sensed a wind blowing. But the lights were on, the guys weren’t worried. I asked: ‘What’s that?’ They said: ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s a stream going through the sluice gates, the mine is working fine.’ Of course I still feel the fear.”
This is how Alisher describes his panic attacks: “During the day, you are among people, socialising – it’s never as bad as the fear at night. At night, everyone falls asleep, but you don’t. Say, you watch a horror film on TV, there is that eerie music – and all at once, it’s like you are back in the mine. That disaster, that place. The way I got out of there. I just can’t get it out of my head. How can I explain it to you if never experienced something like that? Your mind is healthy, and mine – after what happened, maybe it isn’t.”
