The square featured a collage of slogans heralding the Russian government’s program incentivizing eastward migration and inviting newcomers to Siberia to become landowners (we saw this in Blagoveshchensk and Yakutsk as well), a portrait of Putin, and a red hammer-and-sickle monument. A tank that supposedly participated in the annexation of Crimea serves as the main attraction of this serene Neznaika village, imported, as far as we could tell, to stir up patriotism and pride in Russia’s might—most of all, the might welling up out of Siberia, the country’s largest landmass.
Low clouds rolled in. Six hours after departing Magadan, we reached Ust-Omchug, a settlement of some four thousand people centered around an ore-processing plant and a logging company. We could be forgiven for mistaking Ust-Omchug for a vision of the apocalypse.
Ust-Omchug’s Lenin statue, next to a yellow wooden hut operating as a church, stood covered in pigeon droppings likely dating back to 1991. Trees surrounding the bronze revolutionary were so overgrown that they threatened to subsume the statue. A block away from Lenin, stray dogs rummaged through piles of garbage at a dumpsite untended for months. Right next to the refuse was a playground where pregnant women watched over their toddlers digging in the gray, dusty earth. In the only real food store, we found a line of already tipsy men and women buying alcohol for the night. The middle-age fire marshal and policeman—we divined their professions from their uniforms—staggered in, bent on buying more booze to pass the brief night ahead.
“It’s a ghost town after eight in the evening here,” Radchenko explained. “When the alcohol shop closes, so does the town.”
Small, formerly industrial towns rarely flourish anywhere, but in centralized Russia, even if a place like Ust-Omchug produces wealth (as it does, subsisting off gold mining), Moscow syphons away most of it. Larger cities are allowed to keep something for themselves, but as we saw in Omsk and Novosibirsk, a lot depends on the governor’s will to resist the center’s demand for revenue. For example, the former governor of Magadan Oblast, Ukraine-born Pecheny, moved to Siberia to advance his career and so owed no apparent loyalty to the people he was supposed to serve. Moreover, those who complained publicly about the subpar quality of services his government provided and attributed it to the embezzlement of state resources were charged with defamation.[53]
Stocked up on bread, sausage, and bottled water for the night, we drove onto the crunching gravel of an unpaved road—only the Kolyma Trassa had asphalt—to the local “hotel,” a renovated second floor in a derelict five-story apartment building of soot-streaked cement. The hotel had no name but announced itself with a sign reading HOTEL.
We were, it turned out, the only guests. We flung open the spring-equipped door and climbed the dark crumbling stairway to reception.
“No electricity,” said the friendly woman administrator with a sigh.
“Why?” we asked.
“It happens.”
“Often?”
“Once in a while,” she answered evasively. Best not to go into detail here with outsiders.
We settled into our rooms—which were perfectly serviceable, white-walled and clean, with windows opening onto a vista of cement hovels and gray barren lots strewn with trash, and sweeping away from beyond all this, under a sky of low leaden clouds, the rocky, possibly irradiated slopes of sopki. The sense of being lost in the middle of Armageddon was difficult to shake.
Ust-Omchug does have one remarkable feature—a museum substantially dedicated to the Gulag. It owes its existence to Inna Gribanova, a local geologist who lost her job under Yeltsin and found herself reduced to doing janitorial work. Soon after, though, she found a discarded pile of Gulag-related papers in the town’s administration office and launched into what would become her life’s quest—documenting the labor camps of the Magadan Oblast and particularly of the Tenka region (where Ust-Omchug is located) for the Regional History Museum. It occupies three rooms in a onetime school building and presents the history of the Butugychag camp.
We piled into Radchenko’s vehicle for a bumpy ride over potholed dirt roads to the museum. Once inside, we headed for the Gulag section. There we examined rusted buckets and saws, tangled skeins of barbwire, ruined rails from railway lines, and other detritus from the mines, plus yellowed maps, photographs, and books about the most dreaded of all camps, Butugychag. When Russian settlers arrived in the area in the nineteenth century, they discovered sopki slopes littered with both the bones and skulls of reindeer and of members of the region’s few local people. Uranium- and tin-enriched lands exercised a malignant influence on both man and beast, often leading the living to early deaths. Those locals had branded the area “the valley of death,” a name later appropriated by camp inmates. The actual mining of uranium was a deadly occupation, finishing off the laborers assigned to it within a month.
Radchenko explained that in the 1990s, the Butugychag camp itself, like Perm-36, was supposed to become a museum, but authorities scrapped plans for this in the 2000s because of its radioactivity. At least that was the reason the Kremlin advanced. Really, our guide suggested, it just wanted the mine to disappear. With each passing year, the road there becomes less passable as the weather leaves its marks and vegetation encroaches. Likely access to the site will be lost to nature within a decade; the authorities wouldn’t need to forbid it. A visit now seemed even more imperative.
The next morning, which broke cloudy and cool, we boarded the UAZ and drove northwest out of Ust-Omchug along the rough gravel Tenka Trassa. Hoping to gauge our driver’s fitness for what we understood to be a rough journey, we queried Yevgeny Viktorovich and learned his story. He told us that he hailed from the southern town of Krasnoyarsk, just east of Crimea. He often drove this UAZ across Russia, although he owns other—foreign—vehicles.
“Why?” we asked.
“In every village along the way you can get spare parts, even if they are no longer made.”
His story hinted at the two Russias we had been seeing on our travels. One, urban, with foreign cars overwhelming the roads of cities. The second, rural, with villages still surviving off the vehicular legacy of the Soviet Union. The Stalin military industrial complex originally manufactured the UAZ, and it and other Soviet-era cars—Volgas, Zhigulis—still serve their owners well across the outback of the former Soviet Union.
Thirty-five miles and two hours later, we suddenly veered right and picked up a pair of tire ruts leading to a rocky creek bed through a brushy forest of stunted firs—the track to the mine. Yevgeny Viktorovich, manning the UAZ’s two gearshifts, yanked the nobs and switched repeatedly, wrestling with the wheel as we lurched about in the cabin (saved from damaging bruises only by interior handles), water splashing over the windshield, the engine roaring.
“One time we tried to come here with a Jeep,” Yevgeny Viktorovich shouted over the crashing and banging. “Afterward it needed major repairs. Its bottom was demolished by the creek’s rocks. With this UAZ, I just wash it after the trip and it’s ready to go again.”
After two hours we had covered only about nine hundred yards—as far as we could go. We lurched up out of the creek bed and onto the bank of the Detrin River, reduced to a trickle by the arid summer months. A black-and-yellow sign warned visitors that they would enter this zone of increased radiation at their own risk. Across from us stood the ruined stone walls of the uranium enrichment plant and just to the south of it, yellow mounds of uranium ore, far too radioactive to approach. Beyond, under a low overcast sky, rose leaden hills bearing only a mangy covering of vegetation. Aside from the trickling of the Detrin’s clear waters, we heard nothing but perceived an eerie silence, interrupted only occasionally by the piercing, plaintive screams of airborne eagles.
6
“Zhitel Magadana Obvinen V Rasprostranenii Porochashchikh Svedenii” [Magadan’s Man Is Charged with Defamation], Lenta.ru, July 21, 2016.