The Kolyma region subsists off gold mining—it is the third largest supplier of the precious metal in the world, in fact. On its 287,500 square miles dwell only 140,000 people. Still, 40 percent of its budget comes from Moscow—a bizarre arrangement for such a rich place. In Russia, regional prosperity often depends on the oblast governor, and Vladimir Pecheny, the man in charge until 2018, was not particularly entrepreneurial or honest, at least according to locals with whom we spoke. They envy Chukotka, the oblast to the north that once belonged to Magadan’s zone of authority but is now autonomous. Chukotka was the domain of the oligarch Roman Abramovich, its former governor and the current owner of the British Chelsea soccer club. Abramovich, according to the envious locals, “brought it into the twenty-first century by finding gas, improving infrastructure, and making their salaries one of the highest in Russia.”
Magadan, as yet another prison song goes, is simply “cursed” by the millions of convicts passing through its “inhumane heart.” In 1929, before the Gulag mentality firmly took hold in the Soviet Union, the newly established settlement welcomed contractors. Most were demobilized soldiers from the Red Special Far Eastern Army, and they would dig for gold and build roads and other infrastructure for the state. But the rough conditions in these northern lands—Chukotka and Magadan, bordering Sakha to the east—ultimately proved too trying for these hardened military men. Even the high salaries they earned were not sufficient to motivate them to toil in the region’s inhospitable climate. In fact, the aboriginal tribes of Chukchis and Evenks, along with the rare exile, barely survived the climate, in which winter temperatures drop to −80 Fahrenheit.
Then change came. In the early 1930s Dalstroi, a Soviet bureaucratic abbreviation for the Far-Eastern Construction Directorate, decided to employ zeki (inmates) to develop gold mines and build roads. But the brutal conditions killed most of those imported—both zeki and their guards—during the first years. The first thousand workers failed to turn Dalstroi into a workable enterprise. That would necessitate the mass import of prison labor. Thus were born Berlag (Coastal Labor Camp) and Sevostlag (Northeastern Labor Camp), as the networks of forced-labor facilities in the region were known. The Solovetsky camps on the White Sea provided for excellent models to replicate.
Benefiting mightily from the Great Purges, Magadan in 1939 officially acquired the status of a city. The locals grimly joke that the sham judicial proceedings leading to the detainment and imprisonment of millions were carried out to populate Magadan and man the resource-extraction industries it served. Of the almost two million arrested in 1937–1938,[49] according to the human rights organization Memorial, many would be shipped to Kolyma. Forced labor fully replaced the paid workers.
Yevgenia Ginzburg, author of the critically acclaimed and heartbreaking dissident memoir Journey into the Whirlwind, published abroad in 1967 and censored by the Soviets until the era of Gorbachev, described her years as a victim of the purges in Kolyma Krai. She survived her ordeal to write a book that became the manual for understanding the Gulag experience for decades to come.
Ginzburg described the detention camps as ghastly, cruel institutions and explained the labor camp system as a product of policy, politics, and the mentality of the ruling regime, which set about persecuting entire segments of the population; executing potential opponents; and, most of all, exploiting them as forced labor. (Nina as a child knew Ginzburg and considered her a woman of extraordinary spirit.) Despite all the horrors she had experienced, Ginzburg continued to believe in the bright communist future officially proclaimed as inevitable. More than anything, though, she believed in the fundamental goodness of humanity—an astonishing paradox, common to many former Gulag prisoners. The leaders may betray them, they thought, but not the ideal of the communist brotherhood on earth.
The message, indicative of Russia’s split-personality syndrome: one-half of the population was imprisoned, the other half guarding it. One would imagine the rancor of those years between prisoner and the imprisoned would survive in some fashion here. Yet despite the Gulag heritage, or maybe because of it, we found people in Magadan to be helpful and disarmingly openhearted. Vysotsky sang that there were no fewer “murderers and killers” in Magadan than in Moscow. Walking around town, we began to understand what he meant.
A city mostly constructed during Soviet times, it fit the purposes it was built for. Edifices in the center, as if defying the wild, and desolate sopki to the west rose grandly in Classical Stalinist style; sweeping, broad avenues bore the names of Lenin and Karl Marx, and spires topped with red stars stood against a boundless azure sky. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, its white walls rising towerlike to finish in gilt onion domes, replaced the never-completed House of Soviets, which was torn down in 1985. The house of worship faces a hulking, Soviet-era structure that once housed the Dalstroi administration, with a statue of the Siberian missionary Saint Innokenty standing between the two. By a twist of post-Soviet irony, Magadan’s statue of the fiercely atheistic Lenin used to occupy the spot, but authorities have moved it to Cosmonaut Square, which today is dull, dirty, and invaded by pigeons, occupied by a huge hexagonal apartment building reminiscent of, well, the Pentagon—with, of course, an additional side. Cafés are a rarity in Magadan, yet bakeries offer a variety of buns and pierogies to rival those on offer in hospitable Perm. After a few days in town, we concluded the people were the most genuine we have ever encountered. No matter what the past, in such wild Siberian realms, at the edge of a thrashing cold sea, human kindness thrived. Few Russians from outside the region visit to discover this.
An eight-hour flight east from Moscow (almost the same amount of time it takes to fly to New York from the Russian capital), Magadan sits at the edge of Russia, just as it long represented the limits of human suffering, of almost unimaginable misery and pain. We arrived aiming to travel by vehicle the way Ginzburg once was forced to tread on foot the Kolyma Trassa. She did her time at the Elgen and Ust-Tuskan camps 600 miles north of Magadan; we, however, wanted to visit Butugychag, a uranium mine once manned by Gulag inmates about 160 miles to the north of the city, one of the sources of the radioactive mineral used in the first Soviet atomic bomb.
In the late 1930s, Magadan functioned as the chief distribution center for the region’s 250 labor camps,[50] dispatching prisoners into the interior to log and build roads and to dig for gold and other precious minerals, including uranium. The “lucky” ones—including Ginzburg’s fellow inmates—did their “light” time cutting firewood for the Tuscan Food Processing Plant.
Almost wherever one looks, one’s eyes fall on edifices that once sheltered the bureaucracy required to keep the camps staffed with their half-dead inmates. Yet, strangely, locals told us, “Nobody here is interested in the past.” This was an astonishing statement, considering that the past in Magadan intrudes so starkly on the present. It stands embodied in, say, the half-ruined sorting facilities of Dalstroi, overgrown with high grass and fireweed plants. Dalstroi’s barracks are now nothing more than carcasses of stone and rotting wood. The barracks’ windows, their panes of glass long since broken or looted, peer down like sightless eyes on the town through rusting skeins of barbwire running over the crumbled remnants of the surrounding fences. One part of the facility has been maintained; it is dilapidated but still used for a police headquarters. Why let what’s left of the Gulag go to waste?
2
Sergei Bondarenko, “Stydnye Voprosy O 1937 Gode” [Embarrassing Questions About 1937],
3
“Spisok I Karta Lagerei Gulag” [A List and a Map of the Gulag Camps], Magadan Jewish Community Site, http://magadanjew.berlev.info/history/gulag/map-legend.htm.