Within the context of the Gulag, Magnitogorsk and Norilsk were not unique. A survey of some of the Siberian projects on which forced labor was used makes plain that the atrocity was enacted in every region and clime: highways in Mongolia; the double-tracking of the Trans-Siberian; the railway spur to Ulan Bator; a hydroelectric power station at Ust-Kamenogorsk; the port of Nakhodka; oil pipelines from Sakhalin to the mainland; the mining of various ores and (after 1950) of radioactive elements like uranium and radium near Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tura in connection with the nuclear industry; rare-metals mining in the province of Akmolinsk; logging operations almost everywhere, and so on. Not all the projects were useful, and among the more costly and ill-conceived was an attempt to build a railway along the Arctic coast. Beginning in 1947, hundreds of thousands of forced laborers, with a huge investment of technical equipment, toiled at more than eighty Arctic campsites along a 2,000-mile stretch to lay a line from Vorkuta through the uninhabited tundra to Yakutsk. Another line was supposed to connect Igarka and Norilsk. Millions of ties were riveted in place, but in the end had to be torn up as useless and removed thousands of miles away to other projected lines.
Of all the island clusters of the Gulag, the most infamous by far were the Dalstroy Camps of the Far Eastern Construction Trust, established by the NKVD in the winter of 1931-32. Altogether, Dalstroy governed about 160 camps, including numerous gold-mining operations in the Kolyma Basin. Soviet propaganda depicted the basin as a sort of Russian Klondike, but it was an atrocity unto itself.
Before the Revolution, the region had been regarded as a wasteland, and as late as 1925 had only 7,580 inhabitants. Known mostly for its considerable deposits of mica, big sheets of which were bartered in the town of Srednekolymsk by nomads, it wasn’t until a White officer who had been hiding in the taiga emerged in 1925 with a few ounces of platinum that economic interest in the area began to grow. Two years later prospectors discovered gold on the Aldan River, and commercial mining began in 1927, under the auspices of Soyuz-Zoloto (Union Gold), a government trust, which dissolved in 1938 to become the Far Eastern Construction Trust or Dalstroy. Administered by the NKVD, Dalstroy eventually controlled the whole of northeastern Siberia east of the Lena, even to the Chukchi Peninsula, but most of its camps were in the Kolyma Basin, which was almost as large as the Ukraine.
For the labor force summoned to do the government’s will, the deep-water harbor of Nagayev – possibly the most inhospitable place on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea – was chosen as the principal port of disembarkation, and here, surrounded by steep ridges of overhanging rock sparsely covered with larch, Magadan was founded on a swamp as Dalstroy’s base of operations. En route to Nagayev, prisoners were brought to the huge transit camps on the Pacific Coast, located near Vladivostok, Nakhodka, and Vanino. One survivor, who passed through Vanino, recalled:
When we came out on to the immense field outside the camp I witnessed a spectacle that would have done justice to a Cecil B. DeMille production. As far as the eye could see there were columns of prisoners marching in one direction or another like armies on a battlefield. A huge detachment of security officers, soldiers, and signal corpsmen with field telephones and motor-cycles kept in touch with headquarters, arranging the smooth flow of these human rivers... 100,000 were part of the scene before us. One could see endless columns of women, of cripples, of old men and even teenagers, all in military formation, five in a row, going through the huge field, and directed by whistles or flags.748
Assembled into transport battalions, they were herded onto freighters – up to twelve thousand prisoners at a time, and under such terrible conditions that Audrey Sakharov justly called them “death ships of the Okhotsk Sea.”749 Women (who made up from 10 to 15 percent of the Gulag population) were not spared. Michael Solomon, a deported Romanian on board, later wrote:
We climbed down a very steep, slippery wooden stairway with great difficulty and finally reached the bottom. It took us some time to accustom our eyes to the dim light of the dingy lower deck.
As I began to see where we were, my eyes beheld a scene which neither Goya nor Gustave Dore could ever have imagined. In that immense, cavernous, murky hold were crammed more than 2000 women. From the floor to the ceiling as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot-square space. The floor was covered with more women. Because of the heat and humidity most of them were only scantily dressed; some had even stripped down to nothing. The lack of washing facilities and the relentless heat had covered their bodies with ugly red spots, boils, and blisters. The majority were suffering from some form of skin disease or other, apart from stomach ailments and dysentery.
At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or to empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet, seeing a man coming down the stairs, although a mere prisoner like themselves, many of them began to smile and some even tried to comb their hair. Who were these women? And where had they come from? I soon learned that they had been arrested all over Russia and in those countries of Europe overrun by Soviet armies.750
Upon landing at Nagayev (after an eight- to nine-day voyage), the prisoners were put to work building or enlarging the harbor facilities or on the construction of Magadan. Their meager rations of bread, dried fish, soup, and hot water were typical Gulag fare, and their tents and brushwood huts (which they had to put up themselves) did little to ameliorate their fate. With little more than their bare hands they constructed piers for ocean steamers, cut broad roads through the stone leading down to the piers, felled trees, built sawmills, brickyards, drydocks, and a power station. In the winter they worked in icy water up to their knees, and in summer their nakedness was a feast to swarms of “disgusting, fat Kolyma mosquitoes” that could sting through horsehide and “resembled tiny bats.”751 In time they also built the houses of their oppressors, with a special house for the police dogs, and cold-resistant barracks with double walls filled in with sawdust for the troops. Last of all they erected simple plank accommodations, without insulation, for themselves. During this time, prisoners shipped from Arkhangelsk were also disembarked at the mouth of the Kolyma River in the Arctic Ocean, to be dispersed to the mines or put to work on a long highway through the taiga to the gold fields and Magadan. On the Chukchi Peninsula, thousands of other prisoners were mining lead.
Continuous prospecting extended the Kolyma mining to the Lower Yana River on the Arctic Ocean, and after the surface deposits were exhausted, veins deeper down were reached by shallow shafts. Finally, true underground mines were blasted 120 to 150 feet deep into the rock-hard ground. The gold dust was put into 20-kilogram bags, and sent in special wooden crates to Moscow. As year succeeded year, the inhumanity of the camp regime became fixed, and it is estimated that every kilogram of Kolyma gold cost one human life. Starvation drove prisoners to eat the rotting corpses of animals, lubricating grease, or “Iceland-moss, like deer.”752 Those unable to march to work themselves were dragged there on sledges by their compatriots, and those who lagged behind were beaten with clubs and torn by dogs. Although working in -50 degrees Fahrenheit, “they were forbidden even to warm themselves by a fire.”753 One prisoner who worked as a nurse in the prison hospital in Magadan remembers that the surgeon routinely went down the line of cots snipping off the frostbitten fingers and toes.