How could Magadan escape such a tragic past?
We spoke about this with Andrei Grishin, a twenty-eight-year-old local journalist. One of the few social activists in town and a supporter of Alexey Navalny, Russia’s main opposition figure, Grishin found himself fired from his newspaper, Vecherny Magadan (Evening Magadan) for criticizing Russia’s bellicose foreign policy. Pale, bespectacled, and wearing a ponytail, Grishin typifies the image of a Russian intellighent, a member of the intelligentsia.
Grishin spoke eloquently about what he called the “soft despotism of Putinism, when people are silent because they fear losing the little comfort they have—useful connections severed, a trip abroad blocked.” Magadan, he said, lives in apathy, in a state of “arrested development.” Most people here live “a postponed life,” in expectation that another, more comfortable and rewarding existence awaits them elsewhere in Russia, which absolves them from concerning themselves with improving the here and now in Magadan.
What Grishin was describing was, in fact, an originally Soviet phenomenon. (He was clearly too young to have understood this.) When the state’s victories—in the Great Patriotic War, in “building communism,” in eliminating illiteracy or bringing electricity to the hinterland—no longer satisfied Soviet citizens, the desire for emigration to the West became overwhelming, especially in the late Brezhnev years. For most, daily life was a dull grind, even if the social safety net provided people with a material security that gave them the leisure to dream of something better. Russians, for most of their history, have wanted to move elsewhere and begin anew—Muscovites to Europe and America, the people in Omsk to Yekaterinburg or Saint Petersburg, those in the west of the country to the freer Siberian outback or cosmopolitan Vladivostok. Better economic opportunities draw them, of course, but there is more to it than that. In a country where the state’s victories have taken precedence over individual prosperity and happiness, Russians have found themselves ill prepared to lead a life restricted to the pleasures of the present—say, enjoying a cappuccino. They have sought grandeur on the world stage, which has let the Kremlin use them for its own agendas.
“There is always a feeling that life would be better and have more meaning elsewhere,” Grishin said. “This ‘postponed life’ comes from living in the shadow of the Gulag, from the constant state oppression. And yet the Gulag doesn’t interest us anymore. The labor camps, the cemetery—they’re all here, yes, but you can’t dwell in the past all the time,” he insisted. Everyone needs a present, a future.
One cannot, in other words, endlessly pity Ginzburg, who along with thousands of others, tread the Kolyma Route hundreds of miles toward her destination, he said.
Early in the clear morning of the day after we spoke with Grishin, we met Yevgeny Radchenko, our other local contact and a renowned Kolyma guide. According to him, Ivan-chai, or fireweeds (purple-petaled long-stemmed wildflowers that bloom during the region’s brief summers) commemorate Stalin’s victims, popping up in fields after fires have struck or bombs have fallen—in the wake of tragedy, in other words. From a Ukrainian family, fit and in his early thirties, with lively eyes and an auburn crew cut, Radchenko explained that fireweeds were both “flowers of misery and of resilience; a perfect metaphor for a country of death camps. Organic matter is what makes Ivan-chai grow; from all the people who died of hunger and hardship, marching on the road in convoys for weeks, for months, make fireweed grow into endless fields.” He told us this as we were setting off along the Kolyma Route to visit Butugychag. Even now, the site is radioactive, so visits, if undertaken at all, must be brief.
As do most camps, Butugychag sits well off the road, on a dirt track long since largely returned to nature. To get there, we needed both a knowledgeable guide and an experienced driver. For the latter, we chose another Yevgeny, Yevgeny Viktorovich—Viktorovich was his patronymic, which we use here in lieu of his last name, which we never learned—a middle-age fellow with a tousle of white hair and a pair of translucent blue eyes. Yevgeny Viktorovich manned a sturdy yellow UAZ, a four-wheel drive vehicle originally produced in Soviet times for military use. Its independent suspension obligated Yevgeny to reach deep under the steering wheel to change gears. Yet the UAZ, we learned, could put Jeeps to shame and overcome almost any terrain.
When we reached for our seat belts, both Yevgenys looked at us with an air of contempt, as if to say, “Such wusses!”
And so we drove into the wilds of Kolyma, talking about the endless fields of Ivan-chai sweeping away from the road toward the sopki and labor camps, all the while listening to the life stories of our two Yevgenys.
Radchenko, in jeans and a khaki bush jacket—adept at playing up his Siberian he-man persona for foreigners—formerly worked as a distributor of technological gear. He has turned local historian. For somebody who takes visitors to Gulag camps, his lineage is surprisingly pro-Gulag and based in the military. Radchenko’s grandmother came to Magadan to work as a naval code breaker during the war, earning a salary of seven hundred rubles—a fortune in the Soviet Union at the time, much more than the then-excellent salary of two hundred rubles in Moscow. His Ukrainian grandfather drifted north to work as a labor camp guard for even more money. After the camps closed, they stayed on. Raised in Magadan, Yevgeny decided to turn Kolyma into his profession.
Does he feel remorse for what his family did? we asked.
Not in the slightest.
“They just tried to get by in the country they lived in,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “If the leaders could be cruel, why couldn’t others? They were just doing the job the state assigned to them. Do you feel remorseful?” he asked Nina.
Khrushchev was, after all, a Soviet leader. Even if he denounced Stalin, he did issue orders for mass repression in the earlier part of his career.
“I do,” Nina admitted. “In fact, I’m in the habit of apologizing for the Soviet injustices, especially for those during my great-grandfather’s rule.”
Radchenko seemed rather keen on the Soviet state, though he lamented its “excesses.” As he put it, “Well, people used to come here, workers, intelligentsia, as in Vysotsky’s song, and they used to contribute to the country’s might.”
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 so
pki 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.4 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.5 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.
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.6
Stocked up on bread, saus
age, 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.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 24