“Caucasian mafia” was how the taxi driver characterized those detained. The word “mafia” is enjoying a tremendous popularity these days. It is increasingly replacing the word “nation.” Here where one hundred nations once lived “in harmony and brotherhood,” one hundred mafias have now appeared. The nations have vanished, have ceased to exist. Three large mafias have taken their place — the Russian mafia, the Caucasian mafia, and the Asiatic mafia. These large mafias are divided into an infinite number of smaller ones. There are Chechen and Georgian mafias, Tatar and Uzbek, Chelyabinsk and Odessian. The smaller mafias are divided into even smaller ones, and these in turn into utterly small ones. Small, but dangerous, armed with pistols and knives. Thus there are mafias operating on a national scale, on the scale of the republic, on the scale of the city, the neighborhood, a single street — even a single courtyard. The geography of the mafias is most complicated, but as to who belongs to what mafia, this the other mafiosi know precisely, for it is after all on this kind of discernment that their life depends. All the mafias have two characteristics: (a) their members do not work but live well, and (b) they are continually squaring accounts. Stealing, smuggling, or squaring accounts — that is what the everyday life of a mafia member looks like.
This obsession with the mafia — the annoying habit of thinking about everything in terms of the mafia — didn’t arise totally out of thin air, but has deep, tragic roots. The great cataclysm that occurred in the first three decades of this century — the world war, October 1917, then civil war and mass starvation — deprived millions of children in Russia of their parents and their homes. These millions of orphans, millions of bezprizorny, wandered the roads of the country, through villages and cities, searching for food and a roof over their heads. (There is indeed a difference between being hungry and homeless in Africa and being so in Russia; in Russia, without a warm corner somewhere, one freezes to death.) Many of these bezprizorny lived by theft and robbery.
The grandfathers of many of today’s Russian mafiosi are these homeless and frequently nameless bezprizorny. Breaking with one’s past was not easy, and at times downright impossible. Whoever once came into conflict with the authorities handed down his embattled status to his son and grandson. In today’s post-Soviet society there exist not only individual criminals, not only criminal elements, but an entire criminal class possessing a genealogy and tradition different from the rest of society. Each successive crisis — the Second World War, the postwar purges, the corruption of the Brezhnev era, the disintegration of the USSR — reinforced and augmented the ranks of this class.
The maniacal, obstinate view of the world as a great, all-encompassing network of mafias (who is trying to secede from Georgia? The Abhazian mafia. Who is attacking Armenians? The Azerbaijani mafia, and so on) has additional sources. The first is the conspiratorial theory of history, for years promulgated by Stalin: behind everything that is bad stand conspiracies, organizations, mafias. And the second is the tradition, practice, and climate of mysteriousness that is characteristic of the political and social life in this state. (Who was in power? Gorbachev’s mafia. Who will be ruling in the Kremlin in a few years? Some other mafia!)
IN TOWN, nobody asks me anything. Despite the fact that the receptionist in the Magadan Hotel is severe and looks at me (I do not know why) reprovingly, she gives me a bright and warm room, number 256. From the window I can see the snow-covered street and the bus stop and, farther on, a wall behind which stands an old prison.
One can come to Magadan like the three Japanese from a textile firm in Sapporo, whom I met in the hotel.
They do not know where they are.
They are conducting business and bowing — courteous, clean, efficient. They want to sell their textiles; that is what brings them here. But while they arrive here laden with elegant fabrics, one can also come with an utterly different type of baggage, that is, the baggage of knowledge — about the place in which I now find myself talking with the Japanese. The fact is that we are standing on top of human bones. And even if, as a result of this awareness, one were to spring back a step or even run several hundred meters, it would not matter: everywhere it’s just cemeteries and more cemeteries.
Magadan is the capital of the northeastern territory of Siberia called Kolyma, after the river that flows here. A land of great cold, permafrost, darkness. An empty, barren, almost uninhabited terrain, visited only by small nomadic tribes — Chukots, Evenkis, Yakuts. Kolyma aroused Moscow’s interest only in our century, when news spread that there was gold here. In the fall of 1929, on the Bay of Nogayev (the Sea of Okhotsk, constituting part of the Pacific), the first base was built. This settlement was the beginning of Magadan. At that time one could reach this place only by sea, sailing north from Vladivostok or Nahodka, for eight to ten days.
On November 11, 1931, the Central Committee of the Greater Russian Communist Party (the Bolsheviks) adopts a resolution to create in Kolyma a trust to excavate gold, silver, and other metals — it is called Dal’stroy. Three months later the ship Sachalin sails into the Bay of Nogayev, carrying the first director of Dal’stroy — a Latvian Communist, the general of the GPU, Edvard Berzin. Berzin is thirty-eight years old at the time. He will live five more years. Berzin’s arrival marks the creation of the Gehenna, which, under the name Kolyma, will pass, together with Auschwitz, Treblinka, Hiroshima, and Vorkuta, into the history of the greatest nightmares of the twentieth century. In colloquial Russian, Kolyma was transformed, bizarrely, into a word denoting the consolation of relativism. That is, when things are truly bad, awful, frightful, one Russian consoles another: “Don’t despair, it was worse in Kolyma!”
In the frozen desert of Kolyma, people are needed to work. That is why, simultaneously with Dal’stroy, Moscow calls into being here a directorate of the Northeastern Camps of Correctional Labor (USVITLag). USVITLag fulfilled the same role vis-à-vis Dal’stroy as the concentration camp Auschwitz/Birkenau did vis-à-vis IG Farben — it supplied the slaves.
THE BEGINNINGS of Magadan coincide with the onset of the great terrors of the Stalin era. Millions of people are imprisoned. In the Ukraine, ten million peasants die of hunger. But they are not all dead yet. One can still deport countless throngs of “kulaks” and other “enemies of the people” to Kolyma, limited only by the transportation bottleneck. For only one railroad line goes to Vladivostok, and only a few ships ply the waters from there to the port in Magadan. It is along this very route that for twenty-five years, nonstop, living human skeletons are transported from across the entire Imperium to Magadan.
Live ones, but also the already dead. Varlam Shalamov, who spent twenty years in the camps, tells about the ship Kim, which was carrying three thousand prisoners in its holds. When they mutinied, their escort flooded the hold with water. It was forty degrees below zero. They arrived in Magadan as frozen blocks. Another ship, carrying thousands of deportees, became stuck in the Arctic ice. It reached the port after a year — none of the prisoners survived.