We set out into town on foot, listening to the mournful cries of seagulls, inhaling the briny maritime air. Despite the center’s grand architecture, we found the sidewalks and pavestones chopped up, a legacy of the brutal winters and poor urban management. Rising above us, and visible from almost everywhere in town, was the imposing, fifty-foot-high Mask of Sorrow, a lead-gray concrete bust with one eye shedding tears that are themselves configured as faces shedding tears, the other eye nothing more than an empty socket, which, with a platform beneath it, serves as a lookout post for visitors. This magnum opus of grief is the progeny of the artist Ernst Neizvestny and was commissioned in 1996 when Yeltsin was eager to put to rest Stalin’s murderous legacy. Each step on the way up to the monument’s plinth bears the name of a labor camp, chiseled in stone. Atop the monument, a red lamp flickers in memory of those who perished here.
How could Magadan escape such a tragic past?
We spoke about this with Andrei Grishin, a twenty-eight-year-old local journalist. One of the few social activists in town and a supporter of Alexey Navalny, Russia’s main opposition figure, Grishin found himself fired from his newspaper, Vecherny Magadan (Evening Magadan) for criticizing Russia’s bellicose foreign policy. Pale, bespectacled, and wearing a ponytail, Grishin typifies the image of a Russian intellighent, a member of the intelligentsia.
Grishin spoke eloquently about what he called the “soft despotism of Putinism, when people are silent because they fear losing the little comfort they have—useful connections severed, a trip abroad blocked.” Magadan, he said, lives in apathy, in a state of “arrested development.” Most people here live “a postponed life,” in expectation that another, more comfortable and rewarding existence awaits them elsewhere in Russia, which absolves them from concerning themselves with improving the here and now in Magadan.
What Grishin was describing was, in fact, an originally Soviet phenomenon. (He was clearly too young to have understood this.) When the state’s victories—in the Great Patriotic War, in “building communism,” in eliminating illiteracy or bringing electricity to the hinterland—no longer satisfied Soviet citizens, the desire for emigration to the West became overwhelming, especially in the late Brezhnev years. For most, daily life was a dull grind, even if the social safety net provided people with a material security that gave them the leisure to dream of something better. Russians, for most of their history, have wanted to move elsewhere and begin anew—Muscovites to Europe and America, the people in Omsk to Yekaterinburg or Saint Petersburg, those in the west of the country to the freer Siberian outback or cosmopolitan Vladivostok. Better economic opportunities draw them, of course, but there is more to it than that. In a country where the state’s victories have taken precedence over individual prosperity and happiness, Russians have found themselves ill prepared to lead a life restricted to the pleasures of the present—say, enjoying a cappuccino. They have sought grandeur on the world stage, which has let the Kremlin use them for its own agendas.
“There is always a feeling that life would be better and have more meaning elsewhere,” Grishin said. “This ‘postponed life’ comes from living in the shadow of the Gulag, from the constant state oppression. And yet the Gulag doesn’t interest us anymore. The labor camps, the cemetery—they’re all here, yes, but you can’t dwell in the past all the time,” he insisted. Everyone needs a present, a future.
One cannot, in other words, endlessly pity Ginzburg, who along with thousands of others, tread the Kolyma Route hundreds of miles toward her destination, he said.
Early in the clear morning of the day after we spoke with Grishin, we met Yevgeny Radchenko, our other local contact and a renowned Kolyma guide. According to him, Ivan-chai, or fireweeds (purple-petaled long-stemmed wildflowers that bloom during the region’s brief summers) commemorate Stalin’s victims, popping up in fields after fires have struck or bombs have fallen—in the wake of tragedy, in other words. From a Ukrainian family, fit and in his early thirties, with lively eyes and an auburn crew cut, Radchenko explained that fireweeds were both “flowers of misery and of resilience; a perfect metaphor for a country of death camps. Organic matter is what makes Ivan-chai grow; from all the people who died of hunger and hardship, marching on the road in convoys for weeks, for months, make fireweed grow into endless fields.” He told us this as we were setting off along the Kolyma Route to visit Butugychag. Even now, the site is radioactive, so visits, if undertaken at all, must be brief.
As do most camps, Butugychag sits well off the road, on a dirt track long since largely returned to nature. To get there, we needed both a knowledgeable guide and an experienced driver. For the latter, we chose another Yevgeny, Yevgeny Viktorovich—Viktorovich was his patronymic, which we use here in lieu of his last name, which we never learned—a middle-age fellow with a tousle of white hair and a pair of translucent blue eyes. Yevgeny Viktorovich manned a sturdy yellow UAZ, a four-wheel drive vehicle originally produced in Soviet times for military use. Its independent suspension obligated Yevgeny to reach deep under the steering wheel to change gears. Yet the UAZ, we learned, could put Jeeps to shame and overcome almost any terrain.
When we reached for our seat belts, both Yevgenys looked at us with an air of contempt, as if to say, “Such wusses!”
And so we drove into the wilds of Kolyma, talking about the endless fields of Ivan-chai sweeping away from the road toward the sopki and labor camps, all the while listening to the life stories of our two Yevgenys.
Radchenko, in jeans and a khaki bush jacket—adept at playing up his Siberian he-man persona for foreigners—formerly worked as a distributor of technological gear. He has turned local historian. For somebody who takes visitors to Gulag camps, his lineage is surprisingly pro-Gulag and based in the military. Radchenko’s grandmother came to Magadan to work as a naval code breaker during the war, earning a salary of seven hundred rubles—a fortune in the Soviet Union at the time, much more than the then-excellent salary of two hundred rubles in Moscow. His Ukrainian grandfather drifted north to work as a labor camp guard for even more money. After the camps closed, they stayed on. Raised in Magadan, Yevgeny decided to turn Kolyma into his profession.
Does he feel remorse for what his family did? we asked.
Not in the slightest.
“They just tried to get by in the country they lived in,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “If the leaders could be cruel, why couldn’t others? They were just doing the job the state assigned to them. Do you feel remorseful?” he asked Nina.
Khrushchev was, after all, a Soviet leader. Even if he denounced Stalin, he did issue orders for mass repression in the earlier part of his career.
“I do,” Nina admitted. “In fact, I’m in the habit of apologizing for the Soviet injustices, especially for those during my great-grandfather’s rule.”
Radchenko seemed rather keen on the Soviet state, though he lamented its “excesses.” As he put it, “Well, people used to come here, workers, intelligentsia, as in Vysotsky’s song, and they used to contribute to the country’s might.”