In Putin's Footsteps

11 MAGADAN AND BUTUGYCHAG ^{FROM THE GULAG CAPITAL TO THE VALLEY OF DEATH TIME ZONE: MSK+8; UTC+11}

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 exhausted, 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,[49] 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,[50] 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.

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 sopki 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.[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]

Stocked up on bread, sausage, 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.

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.”