In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  They died in miners’ tunnels from falling rocks and snapped lift cables, from ammonal fumes and silicosis, scurvy and high blood pressure, spitting up blood and lung tissue. In winter, when steam-hoses melted the gold-bearing sand, they wheeled its slag from the hot panning-sheds into temperatures as low as -60°F, and were dead of pneumonia or meningitis within a month. In less than ten years Kolyma was producing one third of the world’s gold. Every kilogram, it has been computed, cost a human life. But the numbers of dead are in fact unknown. They have been guessed at over two million.

  It was night by the time we landed fifty miles from the Pacific, at Sokol, where I slept in an empty rest-house. Two long-distance buses, I heard, still travelled into the hinterland when snowfall allowed, and by these–and some wary hitch-hiking–I went back into the Kolyma hills.

  They had the monotony of the everlasting. They circled the road like echoes or reflections of one another, rounded like old tumuli. Sometimes the wind had dusted their summits to pates of brown rock. The whole land looked unformed, withdrawn into some other geological age. And it was only half-lit. The sun struggled up a quarter of the sky, fell again.

  The road I travelled past silent villages had at first connected Magadan for three hundred miles with an archipelago of gold-camps. People still call it the ‘Road of Bones’. Thousands of prisoners were hurled into its building at the start, but mud engulfed it, then frost tore it up. One mile of it alone consumed 80,000 wooden beams. By the onset of the first snows in 1932 the convicts were still living in tents and brushwood huts. It was one of the most savage winters in memory. Blizzards raged for weeks on end. Whole camps were frozen alive–prisoners, guards, even dogs. Out of many thousand workers, barely one in a hundred returned to Magadan next spring.

  Dalstroy’s first chiefs were shot as spies in 1937. Then a purer cruelty set in. The prisoners’ fur clothes and boots were exchanged for canvas shoes and wadded jackets, which soon hung in tatters. The intention was now to kill them. Their diet was reduced to famine level: 800 grams of bread, with occasional scraps of salted fish or brined cabbage. They took to consuming animal carcasses, reindeer moss, wheelbarrow grease. Their work-day extended to fourteen hours, their sentences to twenty-five years. Their end was hastened by the setting of unreachable quotas. Work brigades laboured frenziedly to meet them, but their starved bodies could not hold up. As their output fell, their food was reduced in punishment, and they entered a fatal spiral of decline. Every evening and morning lists were read out of those to be executed or those who had already been shot, while the officer dusted the hoarfrost from his papers and after each speech a band of criminals played a little fanfare. The mines broke a man’s health after three weeks, and killed him within a few months. Sometimes whole brigades were taken from the work-face and shot out of hand. The criminals among them were appointed overseers, armed with clubs, and murdered the politicals with impunity. (They executed a man, typically, by lifting him up and smashing him to the ground until his already decalcified bones were broken.) But mostly people faded unnoticed into death. Only a few commandants relished their task, and would empty their revolvers into the paraded workers with shouts of joy. There were camps where nobody survived at all.

  You lose your own eyes here, and start to imagine through those of the dead. You have no right to this country. It belongs to them. Is it sometimes beautiful? You cannot say. You only see signposts to atrocious places: Shturmovoi, Urchan, Oimyakon. The camps along the road have been pilfered away. Only a few barracks are being reused as warehouses, or have rotted to heaps ringed by stray concrete stakes. The watch-towers have fallen. Man-made mounds and trenches heave and wrinkle under the snow, the colourless shrubbery.

  In the dark my bus stops among the floodlit tenements of Orotukuan: sixty years before, it was a snail-pace interrogation centre, littered with the frozen corpses of those who had waited too long. A girl sells you fruit-juice from an unlit kiosk. Forty miles beyond, a side-valley leads to Elgen, the women’s camp where the newcomer Yevgenia Ginzburg joined a herd of robots with brick-red faces, and wept at what she would become. Even the camp overseers disdained to rape them.

  At Yagodnoe I ran into a quartet of genial mafia who drove me around town in a Nissan jeep. ‘English! Not really? Then why here? Here is shit. Are you doing some kind of business? Then why, why?’ It was past midnight and they were hunting prostitutes; but the place looked dead. They found me a bed in a workers’ dormitory, paid the porter–‘Russian gift!’–and vanished into the dark.

  I woke to a cold dawn and mountains shining under a porcelain sky. It was, yes, bitterly beautiful. In this half-deserted town my arrival had been noticed. Nobody sane came to Yagodnoe. Two local journalists drove me along the Horse river and south to Serpentinka. The road was lacquered with black ice, and the Kolyma tributaries sordid with the hummocks of old waste-heaps which followed them like the detritus of a mole. The vaster hummocks of mountains repeated them in the sky. Abandoned dredgers littered their banks. The convicts had gone forty years before, and prospectors had taken their place. But during the past few years half of these had drifted away, the journalists said. Here and there a gutted settlement overlooked our route, or the shell of a factory or brick kiln.

  On a spur above the road snaking down to the river, we came to Serpentinka. Pavlov and Garanin, the new lords of Dalstroy, had built it as a torture and execution centre. It was the black heart of Kolyma. In an overhang beside the isolation cells, two tractors would rev up their engines to drown the shots and screams of execution. In 1938, 26,000 prisoners died here, hundreds by Garanin’s own hand. Their bodies were dragged behind its hill on tractor-sledges, or else they were led, alive and blindfolded, to trenches there, and shot in the head. Then, in line with Stalin’s occasional policy of liquidating those in state security, Garanin was shot and all the personnel of Serpentinka with him, and the place razed to the ground.

  We crunched through its void of snow. Our voices were too loud in its silence. A granite block, bound with barbed wire and a strand of plastic flowers, was engraved to the memory of the ‘tens of thousands’ murdered by the state. It glistened with ice. Beyond it, a trail of mounds and dead-looking shrubs followed the ghost of a track into nowhere.

  You gaze with their dead eyes, and see no hope. Nobody escaped. They called Kolyma ‘the Planet’, detached from all future, all reality beyond its own. Desperate to escape into hospital, the prisoners injected kerosene under their skin, rubbed acid in their eyelids, hacked off their fingers, feigned madness. But bit by bit they were reduced to savages, famished and broken. They became the animals that the authorities had decreed them to be, so their death left no conscience. They descended into the walking dead, who lingered about camp on depleted rations, then slipped into oblivion. Frail from a characteristic high blood pressure, they longed only to see their families before they died. Their only forced labour was to bury one another. Sometimes nobody knew whose corpses these were. Young men became old within a few months. Their tooth-fillings might yield more gold than they had mined in life. They were tossed into mass graves.

  Not far west of where I slept next night is the coldest inhabited place on earth. At Oimyakon a temperature has been recorded of -97.8°F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call ‘the whispering of the stars’.

  Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.

  The cries that might rise from this earth do not bear thinking on.

  In a rare passage of despair, the poet Mandelstam, who died on his way to Kolyma in a transit camp near Vladivostok, imagined his meanings draining away in the deafness of Russia. No future would hear
them.

  At ten paces, our speech has no sound….

  But the words returned–Mandelstam, Shalamov, Ginzburg, Babel: they came back to haunt and undermine the frozen empire, even after those who had spoken them had gone.

  As my bus descended before dawn to Magadan, the capital of sorrow, it flooded up in a constellation of lights against the unseen Pacific, and I realised with disgust that it was handsome. Squeezed between sea and hills, its main street dipped and climbed through facades of golden stucco and stone, before it dropped out of sight to the harbour.

  After locating a hotel and wrangling about my visa, I marched out into a smarting wind. Everything here was in place, or nearly. The banners in Lenin Square were rasping on their poles, frozen stiff, and Lenin himself (who stood, hands in pockets, giving nothing) stared across with demonic authority to where gold-mining offices had supplanted the Dalstroy building. The tallest edifice in the city–the aborted headquarters of the old Communist Party–had been stopped in mid-construction ten years before, and gaped behind him. The wind howled through its apertures.

  Along the main street the high-pedimented, high-columned offices and tenements looked built to stamp out the earth and its memories for ever, stuccoed with flags and hammers. Alongside, the classical blocks built by Japanese POWs loomed in facades of plastered honey. The whole city core was convict-built. The old telegraph office remained; so did the theatre (now a market) where condemned divas and ballerinas sang and danced for their persecutors.

  In those years prisoners who endured to the end would be assigned work in this limbo of Magadan. It was full of strange meetings and deranging memories. The survivors, wrote Ginzburg, had the omniscient look of snakes. And fear remained. They knew that the next political earthquake might see them all rearrested. Nobody trusted, nobody confided. It was overwhelmingly male. The scarcity of women turned wives faithless, men said, and attracted prostitutes. ‘Kolyma is the land where the sun is without warmth, the flowers without scent, and the women without hearts.’ In the 1980s Magadan was still the divorce capital of Russia.

  Now the populace was less than 150,000, and falling. Many workers had come temporarily to earn the ‘long rouble’ of high pay in eastern Siberia, and were returning west. The mines and fisheries were in decline. In the shifting cold, almost no one was about. The wind was slicing snow off the hills. I followed Transport Road where the columns of prisoners had climbed up from the port. It was grimly ordinary. A few people were clearing snow from their doors. A pack of dogs scavenged in the wastes. To the north, long ridges were pressing on the suburbs, and factory chimneys smoking beyond, as if a steamer was sailing just behind the hills. Below me the circling mountains and promontories of the bay threw a snow-capped palisade over the sea. The water was slate-blue, and so calm that it still showed the passage of a vanished ship.

  I was descending the road which prisoners had hewn out round the headland from the quay. Along its crest a few huts threw down rickety stairs. It was shored up with concrete slabs, and the road was rutted concrete. Nobody was on it. Only in my mind they were marching up to meet me.

  I dipped my hand in the water beyond its fringe of ice. I felt an odd, transient elation. Everything that had happened here seemed immeasurably past. It could never (could it?) happen again. The shore was littered with iron and cables, burst concrete, old ropes, unhewn stones. A few cargo boats were anchored offshore. Then my head began filling with other ships: the ‘death-ships of the Okhost Sea’, Sakharov called them, carrying their human cargo of 8,000 or 12,000 slaves caged in their holds. As they passed Japan the hatches were battened and they moved unlit through the night. In 1939 the SS Indigirka went to the bottom with her freight trapped inside. In 1933 the SS Dzhurma mistimed her sailing and was locked in pack-ice for nine months while her 12,000 prisoners all froze to death, and half the crew went insane.

  When ships docked, the sick and the dead were laid together on the quayside where I stood. Yevgenia Ginzburg was one. She was saved by a woman doctor, who nursed her back to life, and who was trying to atone, perhaps, for her husband’s atrocities as a police interrogator. Ginzburg understood. In Kolyma, she said, the most unendurable thing was the memory of those you loved.

  Perhaps because Fedor was a Russian Jew, he had grown obsessed by the labour camps. His apartment was full of political journals and old samizdat. His mirrors hung by string. The kitchen was littered with empty Moldovan wine bottles, and mountaineering and caving equipment blocked the hall. His beard, I think, had grown by default, and the study of persecution, or perhaps something else, touched him with melancholy.

  It was he who knew that in this city whose darker past had been casually destroyed, one of the chief transit camps survived as the barracks of security police. ‘They abandoned it five months ago. It’ll probably be bulldozed soon. Everything gets bulldozed here. Now it’s walled up of course.’ His soft eyes assessed me. ‘But I know a way in.’

  So we returned to Transport Road where it dipped over a stream towards the northern mines. In a silent compound, ringed by cement walls and barbed wire, Fedor had found a crumbling hole. We squeezed through. On the far side, the snow showed no tracks. For a second we stood and stared, covered with cement dust. I wanted time to write down things, to remember. I was the first outsider to see this, he said, and would be the last. But we started furtively to run. Now when I scrutinise my dashed-off notes–their words jagged with cold–the place returns in violent snapshots.

  I remember the canteen (we crawled in under barred windows) which prisoners had painted with naive scenes in pastel tints: a dream of rural peace. Its floor sagged in a storm of crashed timber.

  I remember the dormitories, and the rooms where the prisoners (I imagined) had been issued their bombazine coats and wadded jackets.

  Then I remember Fedor pointing to the three-storeyed block in front. Where a door opened on stone steps, he tugged from his satchel some waders and some helmets strapped with lights, and we lowered outselves into a fetid darkness. Unfrozen water brimmed to our knees. Our words echoed and whispered. ‘This was the punishment block.’

  We waded down its passageways as down a sewer. I lost count of the iron doors awash with stench, the grilles giving on to blackness. Each dungeon was still fixed with twin wooden platforms bound in iron, and might have held forty prisoners. There were twenty such chambers in the basement alone. Their walls were sheathed in ice. Prisoners here, said Fedor (he had known one), used to press the bodies of the dead against the walls to insulate themselves from the cold. In the stone they had scratched weakly, illegibly, with their spoons. ‘Ser…olenko…1952…Pant…’ Our lights faded over them. In these hopeless caverns, he said, most people died. His friend had survived because he had been young.

  ‘What had he done?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t know,’ Fedor said. ‘He lost his memory.’

  You lost your memory easily in Kolyma, Shalamov wrote. It was more expendable than lungs or hands. In fact you did not need it at all.

  An hour before dawn I go back into the hills for the last time. A young geologist, Yuri, says he knows the track to Butugychag, and that his twin-axle van can reach there. But it is no place to linger. The native Evenk called it ‘the Place where Reindeer Sicken’, and their herdsmen sensed something was wrong there. Its earth is filled with radioactive uranium.

  The moment we enter the mountains, the snow hits us in a blinding curtain. It swirls like ground-mist over the road, concealing crevices and black ice together, while our engine coughs and roars. Yuri goes quiet as the flakes thicken. The beam of our fog-lamp sucks them towards us down a funnel of silver light. Towards dawn we grind to a halt on a pass, while the blizzard tears the surface from the mountain above us in a howling dust. We wait as a wan morning breaks and Arctic hares shelter against our wheels.

  Yuri just says: ‘It’ll pass.’ He has a slow, open face. He never smiles. His yellow hair and moustache, and his lemon skin, are pure Russian. After a while he e
ases us down into a valley in the breaking dawn, while the falling snow thins and withdraws. Ahead we glimpse distant mountains, no longer rounded but fragile and one-dimensional, like the veins of giant leaves swept against the sky. Slag-heaps are hunched along the river, and sometimes a gold-panners’ settlement starts up neat and white-walled, until we see its windows gaping. Beneath us the dead streams make translucent estuaries over the waste.

  ‘This region’s emptying. Its workers leave for Magadan.’ Yuri is still employed, but there is no work for him, and his salary is ten months in arrears. He does not know what he will do. He is nearly thirty. ‘And from Magadan the workers go west.’

  Suddenly he tilts off the road on to a half-visible track. In front of us the falling snow sends wavering columns over the mountains. He says: ‘This was the worst place, Butugychag. It didn’t get worse than this. There were 25,000 prisoners working the mines, politicals and criminals together. They didn’t know about radiation. Even the guards didn’t know.’

  Already we are axle-deep in drifts, butting and plunging as if our chassis were elastic. The tracks of a hunter’s Land Rover are filling with snow in front. ‘If he can make it, so can we.’ Once we crash through the ice of a stream, its released waters slapping at our doors, but we lumber out and up the far bank. ‘That’s what these machines are made for! Russian roads!’

  For ten more miles we blunder in and out of drifts, over the half-wrecked bridges of the miners, along a sunken stream. A flurry of white ptarmigans gets up under our wheels, their black-tipped wings dipping like fighter-planes over the scrub. The tracks of the hunter’s Land Rover disappear now, and soon we are climbing into a valley where even the larches thin away. Mountains circle and close it off, dropping their ridges in steep blades out of the white sky. As we go higher, the land becomes scarred and unnatural. The black embrasures of mineheads open in the summits, and cableways stagger high up across the snow-fields, then descend in a relay of broken gibbets to the valley floor. Under the mineheads the waste has tumbled down and powdered the slopes smooth. And the air around us has changed. The snow hangs in a luminous haze, filling the valley with its unearthly shining, and a smeared sun has risen.