«Kerosinka» («the kerosene place») is the enduring nickname for the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow, the country’s premier institution for training petroleum engineers, geologists, and drilling specialists since 1930. Its graduates, stereotypically, end up exactly where Seryoga did: rotating through remote drilling rigs in West Siberia, far from Moscow’s comforts, in a culture that prizes hard, ascetic fieldwork over polish or spending money on appearances. Langepas, the town Zhorik mentions, is a real oil town in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, founded in the 1980s around its oil fields and, by the early 1990s, effectively a company town for the newly formed LUKOIL — one of dozens of similar boomtowns that made the fortunes of the Seryogas of the country while looking nothing like Moscow at all.
"Kerosinka" and the Oil Fields of Langepas
