Don't say you weren't warned.
Even from last week's stupor at work, at a time when most offices in Moscow might have been forgiven for occasional displays of sluggishness and torpor, people came to life with talk of a cold front engulfing the capital in -25 to -34 C weather - temperatures rarely seen this side of John Howard and GW Bush's version of a petrol-guzzling ideal world. Had any of your colleagues resorted to raising eyebrows, citing Gismeteo.ru would've been enough to silence any doubts.
The Russian weather bureau has had its share of flubbed forecasts but this one, you can ignore lethally at your peril. If the warnings weren't clear enough, The Moscow Times made sure that our fellow expatriates took a break from bashing Russia and Russians or talking about Russian women as if they were heifers and pay attention: its online site had the article "Record Cold Blows Toward Moscow" above the fold, as it were, and on Page 3 (indubitably an attention-grabber in the UK) in the paper edition. It warned of a "record cold snap" that gripped Western Siberia over the weekend, of temperatures plummeting to -50 C and below in the Tomsk region.
Interfax news agency, which has yet to attain the credibility of Reuters or AFP, caught a chap at the west Siberian office of the Federal Weather Monitoring Center mixing his maps. Arctic weather in Siberia, Renat Yagudin said, trying metaphor for heightened effect. This anageographic quote may make good copy, but for a seasoned (or even twice-seasoned) traveller like me who quits Murmansk or Lapland in disgust for producing +4 C weather the soundbite sounds somewhat strange.
Ringing the alarm, the article continued: "Moscow will not escape the cold snap, with the mild weather of the last week set to end. Temperatures will drop to minus 21 C on Monday evening as the cold front from Siberia sweeps in, falling to minus 20 to minus 27 C on Tuesday."
Recent residents of Moscow familiar with Portuguese or Finnish literature may have even remarked that reporter Kevin O'Flynn's writing style appeared to have bizarrely taken, if briefly, Jose Saramago's or Markus Nummi's. It was 0 to -1 C just this morning - how can temperatures drop by more than 20 degrees overnight? (Shades of A jangada de pedra or Kadonnut Pariisi?)
How about 50 degrees, as experienced in Tomsk, a region that skeptics insist exists only to prove that severe weather is still possible in the supposed ice-bound wastes of eternally frozen Russia (if only not to disappoint tourists and twice-seasoned travelers)?
In fact the situation was so serious that a state of emergency was actually declared in Tomsk. So extreme that at least one man died in connexion with the weather conditions while hospitals scrambled for cold medicine to treat non-doubters. For good measure utilities and public transport were disrupted. (Since I don't know anyone who has actually been there, so allow me to suspend my belief.)
Like an epidemic, the cold snap also affected other areas. In Novosibirsk, the mercury fell to a 100-year record low of -40 C while in Krasnoyarsk, where some residents were prophetically preparing to head to the beach and asking us for visas, some people even saw it fit to cancel Old New Year's Eve festivities after fearing an onslaught of -40 C. In the Komi-Permyatsky autonomous district, temperatures of -40 to -45 C forced the collapse of a heating system for 600 residents in the Evetsky settlement, thus prompting authorities to evacuate 85 people mostly preschool children to the capital of Vorkuta. (Googling "Evetsky" of course and getting a grand total of zero hits doesn't necessarily mean that the settlement is just a figure of Interfax's imagination.)
For some good news for a change, The Times said freezing temperatures actually (ahem) stopped dead cold an expected flu epidemic in Tyumen. I suppose these successive accounts of Arctic conditions in a "hot" (in retail, tourism, real estate and energy sphere jargon) country such as Russia could cause either tremendous apprehension or mass hysteria in the population, forcing them to actually believe it and take real measures. But since The Moscow Times didn't really affix an asterisk to the report and the calendar does plainly show that there are still 85 days until 1 April, there might be something to all this.
It's 10 pm. I'm going outside now to check.
* In case you were wondering, the coldest inhabited place on Earth - The Moscow Times reports so that you wouldn't have to subscribe to their News Archive - is Oimyakon, in the Sakha republic, where in 1926 a temperature of -71.2 C was recorded.
Even from last week's stupor at work, at a time when most offices in Moscow might have been forgiven for occasional displays of sluggishness and torpor, people came to life with talk of a cold front engulfing the capital in -25 to -34 C weather - temperatures rarely seen this side of John Howard and GW Bush's version of a petrol-guzzling ideal world. Had any of your colleagues resorted to raising eyebrows, citing Gismeteo.ru would've been enough to silence any doubts.
The Russian weather bureau has had its share of flubbed forecasts but this one, you can ignore lethally at your peril. If the warnings weren't clear enough, The Moscow Times made sure that our fellow expatriates took a break from bashing Russia and Russians or talking about Russian women as if they were heifers and pay attention: its online site had the article "Record Cold Blows Toward Moscow" above the fold, as it were, and on Page 3 (indubitably an attention-grabber in the UK) in the paper edition. It warned of a "record cold snap" that gripped Western Siberia over the weekend, of temperatures plummeting to -50 C and below in the Tomsk region.
Interfax news agency, which has yet to attain the credibility of Reuters or AFP, caught a chap at the west Siberian office of the Federal Weather Monitoring Center mixing his maps. Arctic weather in Siberia, Renat Yagudin said, trying metaphor for heightened effect. This anageographic quote may make good copy, but for a seasoned (or even twice-seasoned) traveller like me who quits Murmansk or Lapland in disgust for producing +4 C weather the soundbite sounds somewhat strange.
Ringing the alarm, the article continued: "Moscow will not escape the cold snap, with the mild weather of the last week set to end. Temperatures will drop to minus 21 C on Monday evening as the cold front from Siberia sweeps in, falling to minus 20 to minus 27 C on Tuesday."
Recent residents of Moscow familiar with Portuguese or Finnish literature may have even remarked that reporter Kevin O'Flynn's writing style appeared to have bizarrely taken, if briefly, Jose Saramago's or Markus Nummi's. It was 0 to -1 C just this morning - how can temperatures drop by more than 20 degrees overnight? (Shades of A jangada de pedra or Kadonnut Pariisi?)
How about 50 degrees, as experienced in Tomsk, a region that skeptics insist exists only to prove that severe weather is still possible in the supposed ice-bound wastes of eternally frozen Russia (if only not to disappoint tourists and twice-seasoned travelers)?
In fact the situation was so serious that a state of emergency was actually declared in Tomsk. So extreme that at least one man died in connexion with the weather conditions while hospitals scrambled for cold medicine to treat non-doubters. For good measure utilities and public transport were disrupted. (Since I don't know anyone who has actually been there, so allow me to suspend my belief.)
Like an epidemic, the cold snap also affected other areas. In Novosibirsk, the mercury fell to a 100-year record low of -40 C while in Krasnoyarsk, where some residents were prophetically preparing to head to the beach and asking us for visas, some people even saw it fit to cancel Old New Year's Eve festivities after fearing an onslaught of -40 C. In the Komi-Permyatsky autonomous district, temperatures of -40 to -45 C forced the collapse of a heating system for 600 residents in the Evetsky settlement, thus prompting authorities to evacuate 85 people mostly preschool children to the capital of Vorkuta. (Googling "Evetsky" of course and getting a grand total of zero hits doesn't necessarily mean that the settlement is just a figure of Interfax's imagination.)
For some good news for a change, The Times said freezing temperatures actually (ahem) stopped dead cold an expected flu epidemic in Tyumen. I suppose these successive accounts of Arctic conditions in a "hot" (in retail, tourism, real estate and energy sphere jargon) country such as Russia could cause either tremendous apprehension or mass hysteria in the population, forcing them to actually believe it and take real measures. But since The Moscow Times didn't really affix an asterisk to the report and the calendar does plainly show that there are still 85 days until 1 April, there might be something to all this.
It's 10 pm. I'm going outside now to check.
* In case you were wondering, the coldest inhabited place on Earth - The Moscow Times reports so that you wouldn't have to subscribe to their News Archive - is Oimyakon, in the Sakha republic, where in 1926 a temperature of -71.2 C was recorded.
