As did so many in Russia, he thought that Stalin had no other choice but to use forced labor to industrialize the Soviet Union, which Western powers hoped would fail. He did feel bad, though, for those who perished, for those who were made to work in inhumane conditions.
For one of Ukrainian heritage, Radchenko proved rather anti-Ukrainian. His family hailed from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking, largely ethnic Russian east, and he complained that West Ukrainians took poorly to compatriots who felt more Russian than Ukrainian. Of course, Western Ukrainians accordingly disparage Russian domination in the east.
Some hours after leaving Magadan, we turned east off the Kolyma Route and picked up the Tenka Trassa—or Tenka in local speak—another highway that despite decades of road construction in the region remains a broad gravel road, with no markers or traffic lights. Occasionally, though, signs appear, reminding drivers to “follow the rules” and threatening them with fines. What rules? we thought. We were rolling along a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
Radchenko explained: “Our government is great at making people guilty of its own shortcomings.” He was once stopped for speeding by police hiding in the roadside bushes. When he argued that the Trassa has no signs and he would have followed the rules if the road were marked, he was fined double.
Mostly alone on the road, at times we caught up with giant orange oil tankers, construction rigs, and then a pair of trucks belonging to the Siberian wine company Krasnoe i Beloe (Red and White). Enveloped in a cloud of dust, we lumbered along behind it. It took all Yevgeny Viktorovich’s skill at the wheel to pass them without provoking an accident. Truckers on such Siberian roads pay little heed to passenger vehicles.
After hours of ascending low mountains strangely reminiscent of the Italian Apennines—the Kolyma Upland, as the sopki around us were known—we stopped to stretch our legs. Before us spread a stunning green mountainscape pitted with the gray patches indicating uranium deposits. Yet at the bottom of an abyss opening up at the roadside lay the mangled steel of a yellow truck once used to transport gold from mines.
“Ukrainian,” Radchenko said with a shrug.
“How do you know?”
“Only they drive on these difficult roads with no regard for others. They don’t understand the locals’ respect for each other. Those from the materik (mainland) can’t comprehend that when you live in such harsh conditions, with such horrible roads, you have to be considerate of everyone. But they drive like maniacs, as if on an autobahn!”
Despite the Russian annexation of Crimea, he added, a lot of Ukrainians were still signing up for lucrative jobs in Kolyma’s gold mines. They get along well with the Russians during the workday, but fights break out between the two groups in the evenings. The Russians, of course, are victorious in Radchenko’s account, and he was annoyed that Ukrainians came and took Russian jobs. (In Russia, Ukrainians are known to be excellent workers, generally, while Russians, who could be, often are not.) As the “superior race,” at least within the former Russian empire, the latter tend to be more careless than those born without such status.
Radchenko’s political convictions were complex and confusing. He was for Krym nash (“Crimea is ours”) and a strong Russia. But he had become disillusioned with Putin, and now supported Alexey Navalny, who built his reputation on exposing corruption. Some of his views coincided with those described by Grishin, as the belief in the passion of Kolyma residents for getting out of here to go on vacation.
“In our cold climate most people’s major concern is to get out of Siberia, even for a short while. There’s a lot of apathy about local problems. Here if they hold rallies against corruption, only a hundred people show up. Until your own roof collapses on you, people won’t do anything.” Collective concerns, in other words, hardly motivated people.
Perhaps such apathy leads Russian patriots to pardon the Gulag. After all, Stalin created it to “make the nation great”—les rubyat, shchepki letyat (chop down a forest and wood chips will fly). Navalny is a popular politician, however, Radchenko explained. Putin is the state leader—far away, unapproachable, with support in Kolyma running at 56 percent, the lowest score in the Far East.[51] Pecheny, as the governor, couldn’t deliver acceptable polling numbers for his boss in Moscow and so retired early, in May 2018, to avoid being ousted by the Kremlin. (His replacement, Sergei Nosov, is a Siberian local.) People in Magadan expect little from the new governor, but Pecheny, they said, was the worst. He didn’t have a reputation for caring about his electorate, which allowed Navalny to open his regional headquarters here (“a great coup,” in Radchenko’s words). People looked to Navalny to improve their quality of living, and to put Magadan on the map, and not just the Gulag map. “If Alexey,” said Radchenko using the opposition leader’s first name, “makes it further up the political ladder, many in Magadan will turn to him.”
According to our guide, Navalny’s appeal is that he appears to be as pro-state and Russian-nationalist as Putin—before his anti-corruption crusade Navalny popularized the slogan “Russia for the Russians,” insisting on the primacy of the Russian nationals—but he appears to be less vain.[52] Although some in Magadan appreciate Putin’s affection for Siberia—he often spends his vacation in its wilderness—for most, he has discredited himself with, as they see it, “a fake show-off tough man persona,” rarely venturing as far east as Kolyma. Putin last visited here in 2011.
Regardless of Navalny, Radchenko told us that he has thought about leaving “for Irkutsk, perhaps, to tour those gorgeous places around Baikal—with shamans, old churches, and Siberian beauty.”
Though Butugychag lies only some 160 miles from Magadan, making it there in one day can be trying. It is better, Radchenko insisted, to drive to the settlement of Ust-Omchug (with a stop for provisions in Palatka) to spend the night, and travel to the labor camp in the morning. Palatka and Ust-Omchug would seem to have nothing in common. Both places, however, could serve as real-life metaphors for Putin’s Russia. Their patriotic facades plaster over a deep despair.
Just forty miles out of long-suffering Magadan, Palatka is a town of some 4,200 souls founded in 1932 as an outpost to support prospectors operating in the area, and itself was once a home to three labor camps. The name Palatka would translate from Russian as “tent,” as in enthusiastic communist youth camping, but in fact derives from an Evenk-Yugar toponym (palya-atkan) meaning “rocky,” in reference to the adjacent river. Palatka, in any case, appeared to have sprung from the pages of Nikolai Nosov’s didactic Neznaika (Dunno), a 1950s children’s book about Soviet Smurfs describing the childish inhabitants of Flower City—Palatka, as we saw it—which now is interpreted as a metaphor for paradise, the “bright future” the authorities ceaselessly told Soviet citizens they were working toward.
Palatka’s buildings of yellow, blue, or red; its flower-shaped street lamps; and its new white miniature church with shiny gilt cupolas all seem to have sprung straight from Neznaika’s pages. We turned off the road and parked by a grocery store on the main square. (Radchenko had warned us we should buy provisions there, as there were no restaurants in Ust-Omchug.) At the store’s entrance a cornucopia of ice cream, modeled after those kinds beloved during Soviet times—plombir, eskimo—caught our eye. Russians take pride in their love of cold treats all year around, but here in this permafrost climate with barely a few summer months, the homage to ice cream seemed more a tribute to the tough Siberian character than to the sweets themselves.
4
“Samyi Nizkii Reiting Vladimira Putina Na Dalnem Vostoke—V Magadane” [Putin’s Lowest Rating in the Far East Is in Magadan],
5
Dmitry Olshansky, “Navalny Menyaet Svoi Vzglyady V Ugodu Okruzheniyu” [Navalny Changes His Views Depending on His Surroundings],