Arming ourselves with walking sticks fashioned out of branches from alder trees, and now and then whistling loud (to scare bears away; we also carried sound grenades), we set off along the Detrin riverbed, which was, mostly, a rugged channel of rocks. Now and then collapsed wooden shacks appeared above the river.
“Just small administrative offices,” Radchenko said. “The mine and prison and living quarters are up ahead of us.”
Two hours later, after climbing a steep rocky trail between low alder groves, we came within sight of motley brick walls—the bricks were in fact stones dragged here by the prisoners themselves—invaded by scrawny larches. Elsewhere in Siberia the larch is known as the “queen of trees” for its majesty and height, but here it is stunted, the size of a Christmas tree. The ground of this small plateau presented a soft-hued crazy quilt of grays, reds, and yellows, hinting at the subterranean presence of uranium, tin, and gold. Far above, atop a hill, loomed a black cave—the entrance to the mine itself.
We stepped over tangles of barbed wired and peeked into the glassless prison windows, between cast-iron bars, to see the wooden shards and latticework of bunks scattered across a common cell. A bit further on, there were the remnants of a library and a scattering of discarded prison shoes, some surprisingly well preserved, some with little remaining save for soles and nails, all weathered into varying shades of sooty gray. Some soles had apertures in the heel—hiding places for matches, coins, or razors.
After the 1993 opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., it became a tradition to display shoes once worn by camp inmates as memorial vestiges of their torment. But here in Butugychag, the same draws few spectators. They do keep alive the memory of the Gulag, but for whom? Almost no one comes to visit, to witness. Even Radchenko guides people here only two or three times a year. What interest there was in the camp is fading.
We looked about us. It is not an exaggeration to say that it did seem that the inmates’ souls were trapped here—in these cold stone ruins, within, even, these shoes, in the crannies of their soles, so haplessly strewn over patches of grass and bare rocks. Souls and shoes.
Much else of camp life remained up here: metal ovens, truck tires, a rusted bedpan, a kettle, an aluminum mug. Each rail from the narrow-gauge railway, uzkokoleika, that used to carry ore up and down the mountain, was engraved with the words “Zavod Imeni I.V. Stalina” (the J. V. Stalin Factory). None here was ever to forget for whom they toiled—to the death.
The next day, riding back to Magadan’s airport, we encountered the image of another leader whose presence is constantly felt everywhere in Russia—Vladimir Putin. From a billboard towering over the once deadly Kolyma Route, dressed in khaki fatigues and a naval cap, he wished us, said the caption, “a good trip.”
12
PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY
THE VERY FAR EAST
TIME ZONE: MSK+9; UTC+12
Before you make fun of children who believe in Santa Claus, please remember that there are people who believe that the president and the government take care of them.
From the air, the Kamchatka Peninsula, strewn with erupting geysers and snow-streaked volcanoes, riven by crystalline rivers, and stalked by bulky brown bears, resembles a lost world, or perhaps our world at a prehistoric, certainly prehuman, stage. No roads connect the peninsula to continental Russia; there is also no logging, no pollution. Across its hundred thousand square miles live only 375,000 people, and most of those in a few scattered towns.
Arriving in August in its capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, one steps off the plane onto a runway abutted by a small functional hangar and feels the sun warm on one’s cheeks—an unexpected sensation given that the city almost shares a latitude with Seattle, across the Pacific, some 3,300 miles to the east. Alaska is only 1,800 miles away—Sarah Palin, once the state’s governor and the 2008 vice-presidential nominee, memorably saw Russia from her backyard. The arc of the Aleutian Islands, divided between Russia and the United States, reaches even closer.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky sits at the edge of Avacha Bay, just beneath the towering Koryaksky Volcano. Koryaksky imposes an atmosphere of precariousness on the town, as if a couple of tectonic jolts from the stony behemoth might, one day, dislodge the city and send it slipping into the sea. The region is in fact seismically active, with the most devastating earthquake in modern times having struck in 1952; it registered nine on the Richter Scale and caused a fifty-foot-high tsunami that killed as many as fifteen thousand people and reached as far away as New Zealand.
The Russians inhabiting this remote territory are in both the literal and figurative senses frontiersmen and women, dwelling in a border region and, also, often wresting their livelihood from its wilderness. Most famous of these are the fishermen, who risk life and limb to haul in the millions of tons of seafood that ends up on dinner plates across Russia and abroad—in Japan, Korea, and the United States.
As many around the world know from the Discovery Channel reality show Deadliest Catch, the commercial fishing industry is not for the weakhearted. Each year, it places thousands of workers at the mercy of the most hostile, wave-roiled seas on the planet, and job lists consistently rank commercial fishing as among the most perilous livelihoods. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented that the industry’s fatality rate is three times higher than that of the other most dangerous professions.) Deadliest Catch follows American fishermen laboring on the Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast. On the Kamchatka Peninsula their Russian counterparts do the same work but with less advanced technology and equipment, and with inferior insurance. All this they suffer to bring in their catches of king crab and, the most prized of all, the salmon that produces red caviar. Fully a third of the world’s Pacific salmon spawn in Kamchatka’s pristine streams. This luxury product has made Russia famous throughout the world, but the fishermen themselves say the fish eggs are not worth the dangers they undergo to harvest them.
Before arriving in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, we spoke in Moscow to one of these fishermen, Vladimir, a tall, tough, muscle-bound Kamchatka seafarer in his late thirties with a Popeye-like build and hands as rough as tree bark. (Local fishermen were out at sea during our visit; they pursue salmon mostly during the summer months, as the fish approach the peninsula to spawn.) Vladimir, who seemed to possess a propensity for colorful language, struggled to hide it in a woman’s company when he talked, which provided for some funny pauses and stumbles in the most unexpected moments. His face, reddened and chafed, had suffered the ravages inflicted by years of outdoor work in cold maritime winds. He had recently changed his profession and place of residence, having decamped to Crimea to cultivate apples and cherries in the region’s famed orchards, which Chekhov celebrated in his play The Cherry Orchard.