After passing through the street of Berzin-Stalin, the exhausted columns vanished inside the gates of transit camps, of which there were several in the town and its immediate environs. Until recently Magadan had barely a couple of brick buildings, and the whole town, comprising numerous small wooden houses above which rose the watchtowers, looked like one large camp scattered over the hills, covered by snow in the winter, drowning in mud in the summer.
After several days the prison columns set forth once again, pushed along by the shouts of their escorts, by rifle butts, by the baying of dogs. The most important thing was to reach one’s final destination, for whoever weakened and fell was finished. The columns shuffled deep into Kolyma, to their designated camps and to primitive gold, platinum, silver, lead, and uranium mines, hollowed out with pickaxes. For decades they marched from Magadan sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, one after the other, hundreds upon hundreds, thousands upon thousands, walking toward their appointed places along the town’s only road — the northern one — and one after another vanishing into the eternal, thick, and cold fog.
• • •
“ALBERT,” I asked, “can we see the old camps?” We proceeded to drive up from the bay, along the trail of the prisoners, to town.
Forty-seven Years was cursing the local bureaucracy. It turned out that Magadan and the state of Alaska had made an arrangement. A group of American children was invited here for two weeks. Each child was to live with a Russian family. War broke out in town because everyone wanted to have such a child at their home. What was at stake, naturally, wasn’t just a young American, although, being extremely generous, the people here were more than glad to have them. The point was that whoever was assigned such an overseas guest would see an immediate overhaul of their entire apartment building: walls would be painted, lightbulbs replaced in the stairwells, panes inserted into windows, the courtyard swept, the sewage pipes repaired, the faucets fixed, the sinks and bathtubs exchanged, locks and hinges on doors oiled. It just so happened that someone in the apartment block where Forty-seven Years lived was trying for such a little Yankee, but, as she told us amid shouts, laughter, and curses, he offered too small a bribe. So the stairwell is still dark and there is no hot water.
In general life is hard.
A resident of Magadan, K. I. Ivankienko, complains in a letter to his newspaper:
Several days ago, in the periodical Krestianka, I read my horoscope, from which I deduced that a likelihood existed that I would succeed in buying something expensive, but useful. Consequently I lined up in front of the doors of the Melodia shop, before it even opened, in the hope that I could buy a television set. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed. But right next door, after all, is a shoe store, so I rushed in to buy shoes. Unfortunately, here too I didn’t succeed. I went to three vegetable shops in a row — there were no potatoes anywhere. I started walking from shop to shop trying to buy something, anything at all, no longer necessarily expensive or necessarily useful, but I couldn’t get anything anywhere. Finally I found myself in shop number 13, commonly known as Three Pigs. They were selling beer. But it was no matter, since it turned out that they would sell you beer only if you had brought a tankard from home. (Magadanskaya Pravda, April 27, 1990)
WE DIDN’T HAVE far to drive. The old camps have remained in the old neighborhoods, near snow-covered streets without sidewalks or streetlights. Some of them were turned into warehouses or depots. The rest are decaying and falling apart. The watchtowers are still standing, visible here and there, crooked, leaning, rotting. In the snow and the mud lie shattered gates, fences, and posts without wire — the wire was stolen. The majority of the barracks were torn down for firewood; several are still standing, but they are empty, without doors and windows.
Everywhere, in Vorkuta, in Norilsk, in Magadan, one is struck by the squalor of the camp world, by its extreme, shabby poverty, its clumsy, careless provisionally, slovenliness, and primitivism. It is a world stitched together from patches and rags, nailed together with rusted nails driven in with an ordinary ax, tied together with a burlap rope, secured with a piece of old wire.
If one wanted to erase the evidence of the crime, nothing here would need to be broken apart, dismantled, blown up. Half of the gulag archipelago has already sunk into the mire. Half of the camps in Siberia have been overgrown by forests, and the roads to them washed away by spring floods. In the cities, new neighborhoods, factories, sports stadiums, already stand on the sites of many of the camps.
In the summer, if one drives across Kolyma on the northern road — toward Karamken, Strelka, Bol’shevik — and one knows where the old camps lie, concealed by forests and hills, one will find there piles of rotting poles, a piece of iron rail, the clay remains of a kitchen. It is doubtful that one would find any object of use: there will be no spoon or bowl, no pickax or shovel, no brick or plank — all that was taken by the prisoners or their guards or later scavenged by the local population, for each of these things has its price here, its value.
In a few more years every last trace of the world of the camps will be erased from existence.
ALBERT, I asked again, is nothing left in Magadan of those years? No physical evidence?
He grew thoughtful. “Virtually nothing,” he said after a while. “The headquarters of Dal’stroy was torn down. The barracks of the NKVD — torn down. The prison where interrogations took place — torn down. There are already new houses everywhere and new streets.
“But there is still one building. It has survived because it’s a little out of the way, hidden between the apartment buildings of a residential neighborhood. It’s the old House of Political Instruction of the NKVD cadre of the Kolyma camps.”
We went there, scaling enormous snowbanks. It is a single-storied old building that appears small today. In the main hall a dozen or so schoolgirls, pale and serious, were practicing their ballet steps.
In was in this very hall that the briefings of murderers took place. It was here that they determined the frequency and size of executions. Here came Garanin and Pavlov, Nikishov and Yegorov. And hundreds of others whose gun barrels were still warm.
Before their eyes, with their help, and sometimes by their very hands — three million people died.
We walked around the empty building. “And here?” I asked Albert, pointing at a door.
Behind it was the bathroom of the executioners. It was the size of an average room. No toilet bowls. Only six oval holes in an unevenly laid, concrete floor. Gray walls covered with brown water stains. A broken faucet.
“Is this everything that’s left, Albert?”
“That’s everything,” he replied.
I HAVE TWO books with me: Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Alex Weissberg-Cybulski’s The Great Purge. The juxtaposition of these authors, of their outlooks and stances, is fascinating. The comparison enables one to penetrate, if only slightly, into Russian thought, into its riddle and its nature. Both books are documents of the same experience — that of a victim of Bolshevik repression — but how different are the minds of the two authors!
Both were members of the same generation (Weissberg was born in 1901; Shalamov, in 1907). Both were arrested in 1937: Shalamov in Moscow (for him it was the second time); Weissberg in Char’kov, where he was working as a contract engineer. Both tormented, tortured, harassed, humiliated by the NKVD. Completely innocent, pure, honest men.
But here the differences begin.