In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  The takeaway: Vladivostok, like the rest of Russia, though less dramatically, suffers from a split-personality syndrome. It is both open to the world and fearful, as it lies so close to China, a country with a population more than ten times Russia’s size.

  One afternoon in our hotel’s lobby, we met Andrei Ostrovsky, the regional editor of Novaya Gazeta. The thin, tall, energetic Ostrovsky had traveled much in the Russian Far East and in China. To escape the ever-present din from the Chinese and Korean guests, we retired to a secluded table near the elevators. We asked him about the Chinese presence in town.

  “We have about 300,000 Chinese visitors a year here,” he replied. “Most are tourists but some are investors, businessmen. Our Primorsky Krai has only six million people, but the province across the border has 100 million Chinese. We’ve had to make it illegal for them to enter Russia by car here, or our streets would be totally jammed.”

  “Do you feel threatened here by the Chinese?” we asked, as we had asked in Blagoveshchensk, another city on the doorsteps of Asia. He gave the same answer we heard there: “No, I do not feel the ‘China threat’ you hear so much about.” He explained: “If the Chinese want something from us, they can just buy it. They hire Russians, which is good. The problem is they send their profits back to China, which doesn’t help us. But there’s no real xenophobia toward them. Our relations are all about doing business. The Chinese also come to study, too, at the Far Eastern University. We’re trying to attract investment and have just begun issuing electronic visas to twenty countries, including China.”

  Tourism was also a major draw, he added, as “we have the most varied scenery in Russia. We have tigers, the Amur tigers! Plus killer whales off the coast.” Moreover, young Russians in Vladivostok study Chinese and other Asian languages to improve their chances of finding work. “Most of us have been to Japan or Korea or China, and much less to Moscow. We’re looking east; in fact, we’re looking everywhere.”

  Surely the demographic trends of the region worried him, we insisted. But he denied this. “Look, the population in Primorsky Krai might be dropping, but Vladivostok’s isn’t. We have people arriving from all over the country. Historically, it was the risk-takers and entrepreneurial folk who came out here, and this is still true. They come to this special city of ours because they want to really achieve something. They are good for us and our economy.”

  One evening, as the sun fell, casting its orange light over Vladivostok’s staggered cement warrens and the forested sopki beyond them, we took a taxi to the lookout point. (The funicular, for some reason, was not running.) The driver sped up and down the hills, but mostly up, until we reached the summit, with its view of the soaring, V-angled towers and taut cables of the Golden Bridge, teeming with traffic, over the Golden Horn Bay, busy with cutters and small chugging craft. In the time we had spent in town, no one had spoken to us about immigrating to Europe or the United States—a common topic of conversation elsewhere, including in Yakutsk, where we had just been.

  Vysotsky’s lyrics came to mind about “the open ‘closed’ port of Vladivostok.” As did words from the next line, meant to be ironic: “Paris is open, but I don’t need to go there.” (He was married to the French actress Marina Vlady, so Paris was not off limits to him, as it was to other Soviet citizens who were not allowed to travel abroad.) Presumably, though, if Russians here wanted to go anywhere, it was not just to Europe, but to Seoul, Beijing, or Tokyo.

  The bard penned these words in Moscow decades ago. But they hold now, in this hospitable port city, on the other end of this vast country.

  11

  MAGADAN AND BUTUGYCHAG

  FROM THE GULAG CAPITAL TO THE VALLEY OF DEATH

  TIME ZONE: MSK+8; UTC+11

  People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its color—white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyzes the nervous system.

  —Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

  Land of Bones and Ice

  My friend has left for Magadan.

  Take off your hat!

  He left as a free man,

  Not a convoyed prisoner.

  Perhaps someone would say: Insane!

  Why would he decide to leave behind everything, just like that?

  There are only labor camps there,

  With murderers and killers!

  He would reply: Don’t believe everything you hear.

  There are no more of them than in Moscow.

  And then he’d pack his suitcase,

  And would go, to Magadan.1

  Thus sang Vladimir Vysotsky, standing casually with his guitar on the shore of Nagayev Bay, on the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, which flows into the northernmost expanses of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, the bard died in 1980. His raspy recorded voice here came from a speaker hidden behind his weathered bronze statue erected in his honor in 2014. The recording plays twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all year, in memoriam both of Vysotsky, who visited here, and the millions of Gulag prisoners. For them this seascape was the last they would set eyes on before being marched to labor camps in the interior of the wild, bear-haunted province at our backs now called the Magadan Oblast, but historically, and so evocatively, known as Kolyma Krai. The Kolyma was the Stalin-era Soviet Union’s terrestrial Hades, a deathly cold boreal realm populated by living shades, remnants of men and women being worked to death for political crimes more often imagined than real. Stalin’s NKVD dispatched almost twenty million Soviet citizens to the Gulag, and the most unfortunate landed here, by boat, shipped around Russia’s eastern coast from the railway line ending in Vladivostok, or from the White Sea through the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk.

  We stood by the statue and turned to gaze back at the barren landscape of gray, rounded sopki dotted with dwarf pines and lichen-mottled stone overlooking freezing (even when not frozen) sea waters and a rocky shoreline. Vysotsky’s posthumous electronic performance here was, we found, improbable and yet possible in today’s Russia, striving, as it is, to bring together the divergent, often mutually contradictory elements of its past and present.

  Vysotsky’s song from the 1970s reflects Kolyma’s Gulag history and that of Magadan, its capital, a city shot through with reminders of the inhumanity that long ruled these realms. A banner in the airport met us with what seemed a hideous, mocking greeting: “Welcome to Kolyma, the golden heart of Russia!”

  Was this a joke? No, it referred to the gold mines abounding in the region. Yet strangely, just as Vysotsky sang—it is, indeed, the golden heart of Russia, the measure of man’s endurance, kindness, and forgiveness, if that heart beats, as a Gulag-era song has it, in Kolyma, a “wondrous planet, with ten months of winter and all the rest of the year summer.”

  Riding back to our hotel, we passed a statue called Vremya (Time) depicting a woolly mammoth, brown with rust and covered with clocks. Once again, improbable and yet appropriate: here time absorbs all, from prehistoric animals, the relics of which are still found in the vicinity, to the remnants of labor camps that once dotted this vast northern krai.

  Kolyma’s history is tragic. Its main, and almost sole, thoroughfare was and remains the Kolyma Trassa (Route), running from Magadan north and then looping west to finish 1,300 miles later in Yakutsk. Historically synonymous with grief and unimaginable remoteness, it became something other than a dirt road only a decade ago, when parts of it were paved and others graveled over. (It is now officially known as the R504 Kolyma Highway.) Yet another Kolyma prison folk song—there are many—mourns the krai’s icebound isolation from the materik (mainland)—an isolation long so complete that one spoke of being na Kolyme (on Kolyma), as if on an island. Until recently, getting to Magadan by road from, say, Irkutsk, could take weeks. (Gulag prisoners, again, came by sea.) Ports at Nagayev and other local bays “welcomed” new arrivals during the brief summer months of navigation, when transport ships brought inmates in their hollow hulls, discharging them offshore at low tide. The exh
austed, malnourished prisoners would stumble toward land in the chilly waters, with those who faltered washed out to sea by the hundreds.

  The Soviet government established Magadan in 1929, in what may charitably, and without too much exaggeration, be described as the middle of nowhere. No permanent population dwelled along the seacoast here, and even indigenous reindeer herders were scarce. Yet Stalin’s state was eager to exploit the precious metals and other natural resources his geographers had discovered inland. The dictator’s crash industrialization program needed raw materials, and quickly. The gold and uranium mines of Kolyma provided many of them, and they passed through Magadan to be shipped west. The Soviet song “Aviamarch” once declared, “We were born to make our dream a reality,” and it was Stalin’s dream to turn the Soviet Union into a superpower. There were other cruel yet lucrative endeavors of this sort, from the White Sea–Baltic Canal to the Baikal–Amur Railroad (BAM); these were also projects carried out at great cost in human lives. Yet ultimately, they all had limited practical use. They only brought short-term dividends—they enhanced Stalin’s industrialization program—but were not economically viable until redesigned decades later.

  In the early 1930s, Stalin sent Gulag prisoners, many from SLON on Solovki, to build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. To impress the dictator, construction was hurried to finish ahead of schedule. (Recall the Nizhne-Bureysk hydroelectric plant that failed before Putin’s visit, and ours, to Blagoveshchensk.) Builders dug the channel too shallow, thereby limiting its use. Though dating from the late 1920s, the Kolyma Route connecting Yakutsk and Magadan became a viable, year-round highway only during the Putin years. BAM began as a forced labor enterprise in the 1930s, but, under Brezhnev decades later, morphed into a volunteer “youth” construction project. It took decades more to make it actually work.

  The Kolyma region subsists off gold mining—it is the third largest supplier of the precious metal in the world, in fact. On its 287,500 square miles dwell only 140,000 people. Still, 40 percent of its budget comes from Moscow—a bizarre arrangement for such a rich place. In Russia, regional prosperity often depends on the oblast governor, and Vladimir Pecheny, the man in charge until 2018, was not particularly entrepreneurial or honest, at least according to locals with whom we spoke. They envy Chukotka, the oblast to the north that once belonged to Magadan’s zone of authority but is now autonomous. Chukotka was the domain of the oligarch Roman Abramovich, its former governor and the current owner of the British Chelsea soccer club. Abramovich, according to the envious locals, “brought it into the twenty-first century by finding gas, improving infrastructure, and making their salaries one of the highest in Russia.”

  Magadan, as yet another prison song goes, is simply “cursed” by the millions of convicts passing through its “inhumane heart.” In 1929, before the Gulag mentality firmly took hold in the Soviet Union, the newly established settlement welcomed contractors. Most were demobilized soldiers from the Red Special Far Eastern Army, and they would dig for gold and build roads and other infrastructure for the state. But the rough conditions in these northern lands—Chukotka and Magadan, bordering Sakha to the east—ultimately proved too trying for these hardened military men. Even the high salaries they earned were not sufficient to motivate them to toil in the region’s inhospitable climate. In fact, the aboriginal tribes of Chukchis and Evenks, along with the rare exile, barely survived the climate, in which winter temperatures drop to −80 Fahrenheit.

  Then change came. In the early 1930s Dalstroi, a Soviet bureaucratic abbreviation for the Far-Eastern Construction Directorate, decided to employ zeki (inmates) to develop gold mines and build roads. But the brutal conditions killed most of those imported—both zeki and their guards—during the first years. The first thousand workers failed to turn Dalstroi into a workable enterprise. That would necessitate the mass import of prison labor. Thus were born Berlag (Coastal Labor Camp) and Sevostlag (Northeastern Labor Camp), as the networks of forced-labor facilities in the region were known. The Solovetsky camps on the White Sea provided for excellent models to replicate.

  Benefiting mightily from the Great Purges, Magadan in 1939 officially acquired the status of a city. The locals grimly joke that the sham judicial proceedings leading to the detainment and imprisonment of millions were carried out to populate Magadan and man the resource-extraction industries it served. Of the almost two million arrested in 1937–1938,2 according to the human rights organization Memorial, many would be shipped to Kolyma. Forced labor fully replaced the paid workers.

  Yevgenia Ginzburg, author of the critically acclaimed and heartbreaking dissident memoir Journey into the Whirlwind, published abroad in 1967 and censored by the Soviets until the era of Gorbachev, described her years as a victim of the purges in Kolyma Krai. She survived her ordeal to write a book that became the manual for understanding the Gulag experience for decades to come.

  Ginzburg described the detention camps as ghastly, cruel institutions and explained the labor camp system as a product of policy, politics, and the mentality of the ruling regime, which set about persecuting entire segments of the population; executing potential opponents; and, most of all, exploiting them as forced labor. (Nina as a child knew Ginzburg and considered her a woman of extraordinary spirit.) Despite all the horrors she had experienced, Ginzburg continued to believe in the bright communist future officially proclaimed as inevitable. More than anything, though, she believed in the fundamental goodness of humanity—an astonishing paradox, common to many former Gulag prisoners. The leaders may betray them, they thought, but not the ideal of the communist brotherhood on earth.

  The message, indicative of Russia’s split-personality syndrome: one-half of the population was imprisoned, the other half guarding it. One would imagine the rancor of those years between prisoner and the imprisoned would survive in some fashion here. Yet despite the Gulag heritage, or maybe because of it, we found people in Magadan to be helpful and disarmingly openhearted. Vysotsky sang that there were no fewer “murderers and killers” in Magadan than in Moscow. Walking around town, we began to understand what he meant.

  A city mostly constructed during Soviet times, it fit the purposes it was built for. Edifices in the center, as if defying the wild, and desolate sopki to the west rose grandly in Classical Stalinist style; sweeping, broad avenues bore the names of Lenin and Karl Marx, and spires topped with red stars stood against a boundless azure sky. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, its white walls rising towerlike to finish in gilt onion domes, replaced the never-completed House of Soviets, which was torn down in 1985. The house of worship faces a hulking, Soviet-era structure that once housed the Dalstroi administration, with a statue of the Siberian missionary Saint Innokenty standing between the two. By a twist of post-Soviet irony, Magadan’s statue of the fiercely atheistic Lenin used to occupy the spot, but authorities have moved it to Cosmonaut Square, which today is dull, dirty, and invaded by pigeons, occupied by a huge hexagonal apartment building reminiscent of, well, the Pentagon—with, of course, an additional side. Cafés are a rarity in Magadan, yet bakeries offer a variety of buns and pierogies to rival those on offer in hospitable Perm. After a few days in town, we concluded the people were the most genuine we have ever encountered. No matter what the past, in such wild Siberian realms, at the edge of a thrashing cold sea, human kindness thrived. Few Russians from outside the region visit to discover this.

  An eight-hour flight east from Moscow (almost the same amount of time it takes to fly to New York from the Russian capital), Magadan sits at the edge of Russia, just as it long represented the limits of human suffering, of almost unimaginable misery and pain. We arrived aiming to travel by vehicle the way Ginzburg once was forced to tread on foot the Kolyma Trassa. She did her time at the Elgen and Ust-Tuskan camps 600 miles north of Magadan; we, however, wanted to visit Butugychag, a uranium mine once manned by Gulag inmates about 160 miles to the north of the city, one of the sources of the radioactive mineral used in the first Soviet atomic
bomb.

  In the late 1930s, Magadan functioned as the chief distribution center for the region’s 250 labor camps,3 dispatching prisoners into the interior to log and build roads and to dig for gold and other precious minerals, including uranium. The “lucky” ones—including Ginzburg’s fellow inmates—did their “light” time cutting firewood for the Tuscan Food Processing Plant.

  Almost wherever one looks, one’s eyes fall on edifices that once sheltered the bureaucracy required to keep the camps staffed with their half-dead inmates. Yet, strangely, locals told us, “Nobody here is interested in the past.” This was an astonishing statement, considering that the past in Magadan intrudes so starkly on the present. It stands embodied in, say, the half-ruined sorting facilities of Dalstroi, overgrown with high grass and fireweed plants. Dalstroi’s barracks are now nothing more than carcasses of stone and rotting wood. The barracks’ windows, their panes of glass long since broken or looted, peer down like sightless eyes on the town through rusting skeins of barbwire running over the crumbled remnants of the surrounding fences. One part of the facility has been maintained; it is dilapidated but still used for a police headquarters. Why let what’s left of the Gulag go to waste?

  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.