Long Way Round

The works at Sary-Bulak was opened in 1961 and for sixty years the settlement of Rudnik has lived by it. The house of culture is a long grey building with a stage, a library, a billiard table and, at the end of the corridor, a room with a plaque: "Museum of the Labour Collective, 1981."

Nina Sokolova, 81, has been the keeper since the year it opened. Before that she worked in the works laboratory for twenty years, weighing samples. She wears a navy cardigan, thick glasses, and a bunch of keys that she does not need, because the museum door has been open since 1981.

The museum is one room. On the walls are four hundred photographs of workers, arranged by decade. In the glass cases: helmets, lamps, a ledger of the first shift, a miner's boot worn thin at the toe, a banner from the 1971 competition. Nina knows every person on the walls by name, their shaft, their children, and how they died, and she tells it in the voice of a woman reading the weather.

"They say a museum is for the dead. Mine is for the ones who forgot they were alive. Then they come, they see themselves at twenty-two with a lamp on their head, and they sit down."

She tells me about the day in 1993 when the works stopped for four months and the whole settlement came to the museum, "not to look, to be in a warm place". About the woman who comes every year on the same date to stand in front of a photograph from 1968. About the schoolboy who last winter asked if the people on the walls were actors.

The museum has no budget. The house of culture pays for the electricity. The works sends a box of new photographs each January. Nina frames them herself. There is room on the wall for perhaps twenty years more. "Then," she says, "I will have to find a second room, or a second Nina."