One evening, as the sun fell, casting its orange light over Vladivostok’s staggered cement warrens and the forested sopki beyond them, we took a taxi to the lookout point. (The funicular, for some reason, was not running.) The driver sped up and down the hills, but mostly up, until we reached the summit, with its view of the soaring, V-angled towers and taut cables of the Golden Bridge, teeming with traffic, over the Golden Horn Bay, busy with cutters and small chugging craft. In the time we had spent in town, no one had spoken to us about immigrating to Europe or the United States—a common topic of conversation elsewhere, including in Yakutsk, where we had just been.
Vysotsky’s lyrics came to mind about “the open ‘closed’ port of Vladivostok.” As did words from the next line, meant to be ironic: “Paris is open, but I don’t need to go there.” (He was married to the French actress Marina Vlady, so Paris was not off limits to him, as it was to other Soviet citizens who were not allowed to travel abroad.) Presumably, though, if Russians here wanted to go anywhere, it was not just to Europe, but to Seoul, Beijing, or Tokyo.
The bard penned these words in Moscow decades ago. But they hold now, in this hospitable port city, on the other end of this vast country.
11
MAGADAN AND BUTUGYCHAG
FROM THE GULAG CAPITAL TO THE VALLEY OF DEATH
TIME ZONE: MSK+8; UTC+11
People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its color—white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyzes the nervous system.
Thus sang Vladimir Vysotsky, standing casually with his guitar on the shore of Nagayev Bay, on the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, which flows into the northernmost expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, the bard died in 1980. His raspy recorded voice here came from a speaker hidden behind his weathered bronze statue erected in his honor in 2014. The recording plays twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all year, in memoriam both of Vysotsky, who visited here, and the millions of Gulag prisoners. For them this seascape was the last they would set eyes on before being marched to labor camps in the interior of the wild, bear-haunted province at our backs now called the Magadan Oblast, but historically, and so evocatively, known as Kolyma Krai. The Kolyma was the Stalin-era Soviet Union’s terrestrial Hades, a deathly cold boreal realm populated by living shades, remnants of men and women being worked to death for political crimes more often imagined than real. Stalin’s NKVD dispatched almost twenty million Soviet citizens to the Gulag, and the most unfortunate landed here, by boat, shipped around Russia’s eastern coast from the railway line ending in Vladivostok, or from the White Sea through the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk.
We stood by the statue and turned to gaze back at the barren landscape of gray, rounded sopki dotted with dwarf pines and lichen-mottled stone overlooking freezing (even when not frozen) sea waters and a rocky shoreline. Vysotsky’s posthumous electronic performance here was, we found, improbable and yet possible in today’s Russia, striving, as it is, to bring together the divergent, often mutually contradictory elements of its past and present.
Vysotsky’s song from the 1970s reflects Kolyma’s Gulag history and that of Magadan, its capital, a city shot through with reminders of the inhumanity that long ruled these realms. A banner in the airport met us with what seemed a hideous, mocking greeting: “Welcome to Kolyma, the golden heart of Russia!”
Was this a joke? No, it referred to the gold mines abounding in the region. Yet strangely, just as Vysotsky sang—it is, indeed, the golden heart of Russia, the measure of man’s endurance, kindness, and forgiveness, if that heart beats, as a Gulag-era song has it, in Kolyma, a “wondrous planet, with ten months of winter and all the rest of the year summer.”
Riding back to our hotel, we passed a statue called Vremya (Time) depicting a woolly mammoth, brown with rust and covered with clocks. Once again, improbable and yet appropriate: here time absorbs all, from prehistoric animals, the relics of which are still found in the vicinity, to the remnants of labor camps that once dotted this vast northern krai.
Kolyma’s history is tragic. Its main, and almost sole, thoroughfare was and remains the Kolyma Trassa (Route), running from Magadan north and then looping west to finish 1,300 miles later in Yakutsk. Historically synonymous with grief and unimaginable remoteness, it became something other than a dirt road only a decade ago, when parts of it were paved and others graveled over. (It is now officially known as the R504 Kolyma Highway.) Yet another Kolyma prison folk song—there are many—mourns the krai’s icebound isolation from the materik (mainland)—an isolation long so complete that one spoke of being na Kolyme (on Kolyma), as if on an island. Until recently, getting to Magadan by road from, say, Irkutsk, could take weeks. (Gulag prisoners, again, came by sea.) Ports at Nagayev and other local bays “welcomed” new arrivals during the brief summer months of navigation, when transport ships brought inmates in their hollow hulls, discharging them offshore at low tide. The exhausted, malnourished prisoners would stumble toward land in the chilly waters, with those who faltered washed out to sea by the hundreds.
The Soviet government established Magadan in 1929, in what may charitably, and without too much exaggeration, be described as the middle of nowhere. No permanent population dwelled along the seacoast here, and even indigenous reindeer herders were scarce. Yet Stalin’s state was eager to exploit the precious metals and other natural resources his geographers had discovered inland. The dictator’s crash industrialization program needed raw materials, and quickly. The gold and uranium mines of Kolyma provided many of them, and they passed through Magadan to be shipped west. The Soviet song “Aviamarch” once declared, “We were born to make our dream a reality,” and it was Stalin’s dream to turn the Soviet Union into a superpower. There were other cruel yet lucrative endeavors of this sort, from the White Sea–Baltic Canal to the Baikal–Amur Railroad (BAM); these were also projects carried out at great cost in human lives. Yet ultimately, they all had limited practical use. They only brought short-term dividends—they enhanced Stalin’s industrialization program—but were not economically viable until redesigned decades later.
In the early 1930s, Stalin sent Gulag prisoners, many from SLON on Solovki, to build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. To impress the dictator, construction was hurried to finish ahead of schedule. (Recall the Nizhne-Bureysk hydroelectric plant that failed before Putin’s visit, and ours, to Blagoveshchensk.) Builders dug the channel too shallow, thereby limiting its use. Though dating from the late 1920s, the Kolyma Route connecting Yakutsk and Magadan became a viable, year-round highway only during the Putin years. BAM began as a forced labor enterprise in the 1930s, but, under Brezhnev decades later, morphed into a volunteer “youth” construction project. It took decades more to make it actually work.
1
Vladimir Vysotsky,