In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  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.

  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.

  —A contemporary Russian joke

  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.

  We asked Vladimir why he left Kamchatka.

  “I’m sick of caviar,” he replied. “It’s hard to get, and to me it tastes like salty red fire in your mouth. Sometimes we would get so much of it that my wife used it as garden fertilizer. Yet for everyone else it was hugely expensive.”

  Vladimir told us that he had long served as a crew member aboard huge trawlers, often disused craft ready for the junkyard, but bought from Norway or Japan at cut-rate prices, and not always sailing under Russian flags. The captains often, in years past at least, violated the law, heading out into international waters to fish for king crab and salmon; operating in other protected zones or during months when fishing was illegal; or, worst of all, in dangerous weather.

  “We surely have an incentive to take risks, earning up to $150,000 a year,” Vladimir explained. In doing so, boat owners kept their activities secret from the port authorities and tended to ignore regulations meant to ensure the safety of their crews. The Federal Fishing Agency now administers the business, so illegal fishing, he said, has diminished. Nevertheless, “things in the trade were as chaotic as the Wild West capitalism we had in Russia in the 1990s,” when rules were few, profits high.

  He was already tiring of practicing his profession in such punishing conditions when the capsizing, in 2015, of a trawler took sixty lives and convinced him that he needed to move on with his life. He and his wife moved to Crimea, a “gift from our great president … a dream, really.”

  The dream had faded since then, though, Vladimir admitted, and so had his admiration for the president, who failed to deliver on promises of the bucolic life described by Chekhov. The Russian government called on Russians to settle the Far East and launched a similar campaign to revive the cultivation of apples, pears, and cherries in Crimea on the Black Sea. Ten-foot-tall apple trees had been left unattended for decades, reflecting the ruinous legacy of Soviet collective agriculture. But with lands now handed over to new Russian owners, the Russian authorities plan to restore to glory the Crimean apples—an uncommonly tasty variety.

  “Yet the five-year subsidies,” Vladimir complained, “are not enough.” The old trees had been neglected for too long—“by the Ukrainians,” he added resentfully—to render decent crops, and the new ones they planted on their eight-acre lots would take a few years before they were ready for harvesting. At the moment, he said, the orchard hardly produced anything. Their second crop, gathered in 2017, was meager owing to frosts and summer hail. Whatever they grew, fortunately, a local cooperative bought, and at prices “higher than those for foreign-grown bananas.… For now, the sanctions from the West and Russian countersanctions, when we no longer buy Polish apples, have helped local farmers sell on the Russian market, but subsidies they receive will soon be discontinued. And if the weather is poor again, we will not be able to survive.” He chuckled. “The tough job of fishing still leaves you more in control of your fortune.”

  All the uncertainty involved with agriculture has taken its toll on Vladimir, and since our talk he had signed up as a fisherman on a trawler in the Black Sea.

  Beside the fishing industry, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky hosts the military port where Russia’s Pacific fleet is moored. It is also, at least theoretically, a tourist town, a place from which aficionados of rugged outdoor sports embark on adventures into the pristine wilds. We, however, would remain within its urban confines, so we set out to walk, always finding the soft azure waters of the bay within view and the maritime breeze refreshing and welcome given the heat of the summer day.

  Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is young for a Russian city, having been founded as the settlement of Petropavlovsk by Vitus Bering (a Dane on a mission for the czar, after whom the strait and sea separating the United States and Russia were named) in 1740, and receiving the status of city seventy-two years after that. Backset on three sides by green sopki, with a concave seafront, the city sits only a two-hour flight from Tokyo, yet there is little discernible Asian influence, with, rather, a plethora of kebab eateries overseen by owners hailing from Russia’s mostly Muslim Northern Caucasus region. True restaurants, we discovered, are few. Grocery stores brim not, as one would expect, with fresh seafood, but rather with fish one might call, charitably, in a phrase from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, “secondhand fresh.” The state, as Bulgakov noted, sold truly fresh fish in Torgsin stores, where only foreigners and party apparatchiks had the right to shop and had to pay in hard currency. He wrote of the ridiculous incongruity between the communists’ promise of a better, more just world, and the government’s practice of restricting the sale of certain foodstuffs to a privileged few. Torgsin stores exist no more, of course, but the victory of capitalism in Russia now means that fresh fish goes to those who pay top prices for it, which means to big cities in Russia or abroad. Our tour of seafood stores put us in mind of Yeltsin and his moment of discovery in Blagoveshchensk—in a town supposedly chock-full of fresh fish, fresh fish is, in fact, in “deficit.”

  Except, that is, in one store where we stopped, a grocery coop affiliated with the Lenin Fishery Kolkhoz. There we came across quite a few varieties of salmon and at least a half-dozen types of red caviar ranging in taste from highly salty to hardly salty, with all available for the absurdly low price of 1,000 rubles ($16) a kilogram (2.2 pounds). We remarked on our delight to a stall owner named Natalia, who was busy ordering her wares in a large freezer. In the Soviet era, she told us, centralization and a state-dominate
d market hardly helped the caviar business, but there were, back then, “many more species of fish, rainbow trout, char, and certainly other seafood products you could buy. You could just head out to a fishing village in the morning and buy everything fresh. These days many suppliers opt out of this coop and try to sell on their own”—something prohibited by law, as fish stocks have diminished with overfishing. At least here they still have red caviar; in the Caspian Sea and Volga, the most prized caviar of all, black, has almost disappeared.

  In Lenin Square, in the shadow of the imposing, five-story granite-and-glass Kamchatka Krai Government Headquarters, and not far from a statue of Lenin striking a defiant pose with a cape flaring as if fluttering in the wind, young families push baby carriages and teenagers practice their skateboarding moves. The leader of the world’s proletariat shares a space with the recently constructed red-marble column topped by a double-headed eagle—the sight we no longer found surprising. Beneath them, coffee vendors dispense their beverage from stands, and locals sell ice cream from rickety carts. The unmistakable atmosphere of a seaside resort resembling that of Sevastopol in Crimea prevails. One would expect decent beaches here, but a disappointing, gravelly strip of sand runs along the water; people sit and stand tanning, with few venturing into the possibly less than clean sea. Elsewhere, the government has restricted access to the coast for security reasons; this is, after all, a border zone. Although the city hosts all sorts of tourists, the paucity of amenities recalls a salient fact: most visitors use Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as a stopover on their way out, by Jeep or by helicopter, into the wilderness yawning just beyond the city’s boundaries.