The main concentration of camps was in the Kolyma gold fields, based on Magadan, with its port of Nagayevo.118 Gold mining started on a big scale in the early 1930s. In 1935, a series of awards was announced in the gold-mining industry, with great publicity to all concerned. Most of those named were mentioned as working at Kolyma, under E. P. Berzin, the “Director.” High among the awards of Orders, a different decree was inserted—commuting the sentences and restoring the civil rights of five engineers in the gold industry for their services.
Berzin is described as comparatively reasonable about prisoners’ complaints.119 He, his wife, and his chief assistant, Filipov (who is said to have committed suicide in Magadan prison), were arrested, together with scores of others, in 1937, in Yezhov’s purge of the NKVD. There seems to have been some apprehension of resistance, and Berzin was promised awards and promotion, feted by the NKVD “delegation,” and only arrested on the airfield.120
He was succeeded by K. A. Pavlov, who, through his deputy, Garanin, launched on a campaign of, even by NKVD standards, maniac terror, torture, and execution, with the shooting in 1938 of an estimated 26,000 men in a special camp, Serpantinka, set up for the purpose. Garanin was soon shot, and his successor, Vyshnevetsky, also lasted a very short time, receiving fifteen years for a disastrous expedition intended to open up new areas.
Pavlov himself was promoted to head Gulag, and was succeeded in Kolyma by Ivan Nikishov, described as “icily, mercilessly cruel.” He married an NKVD woman, Gridassova, who was put in charge of the women’s camp at Magadan. They lived in a comfortable country house forty-five miles northwest of Magadan, in their own hunting preserve.121
The slave route to Kolyma had its own Middle Passage, the trip to Magadan from Vladivostok by boat, with thousands of prisoners battened down under hatches. The trip took a week or more, and was much feared. An alternative route was tried to Ambarchik on the Arctic Ocean, at the mouth of the Kolyma—a 4,000-mile voyage through difficult seas, taking some two months. The first ship sent that way, the Dzhurma, was caught in the autumn ice, and when it arrived in Ambarchik the following year (1934), none of its 12,000 prisoners remained. This was at a time when the exploring ship Chelyushkin was caught in the ice and sank, and there was worldwide interest in the safety of its crew camped on the ice. American and other offers to try to rescue them by air were refused, and it has been suggested that the reason was that their camp was only a couple of hundred miles from the wintering place of the Dzhurma, which might have been stumbled upon by foreign fliers.122
More usually, the shorter passage to Magadan, on the Dzhurma, the Indigirka, the Dalstroy, and other freighters, was the prisoners’ route. The ships, referred to by Andrei Sakharov as “death-ships of the Okhotsk Sea,”123 were the scene of the worst of the urkas’ acts. It was on the Dzhurma that General Gorbatov lost his boots (see here). By 1939, the guards were not entering the prisoners’ hold, only waiting outside with raised guns when the prisoners were let out on deck in small groups to go to the latrine. As a result, the urkas had a freer hand than at any other time. There were always numbers of murders and rapes. In 1939, on the Dzhurma, the criminals managed to break through a wall and get at the provisions, after which they set the storeroom on fire. The fire was held in check, though it was still burning when the Dzhurma entered port. But there was no attempt to release the prisoners locked in the hold, and a great panic ensued when they realized that if it came to the point, they would be abandoned.124 A similar tale—perhaps a version of the same event—is told by a Soviet writer. The ship took fire. Male prisoners tried to break out and were battened down in the hold. “When they went on rioting the crew hosed them down to keep them quiet. They then forgot about them. As the fire was still burning the water boiled and the wretched men died in it. For a long time afterwards the Dzhurma stank intolerably.”125
On another occasion, several hundred young girls, sentenced for unauthorized absence from arms factories and so on, were in a compartment of the hold on their own. Again the urkas managed to break through and raped many of them, killing a few male prisoners who tried to protect them. This time, the combination of the rapes, the breakage, and the murders resulted in the arrest of the commander of the ship’s guard.126
On arrival at Nagayevo, first “the sick were carried ashore on stretchers and left on the beach in tidy rows. The dead were also neatly stacked so that they could be counted and the number of death certificates would tally.”127
The survivors found themselves in a strange land.
The Kolyma Basin alone is almost as big as the Ukraine. It is intensely cold: the temperature may go down to – 70°C.128 Outside work for prisoners was compulsory until it reached – 50°C.129 In spite of this, in 1938, fur was banned in the Dalstroy camps, and only wadding permitted; felt shoes were replaced by canvas. The rivers of the region are ice-bound for eight to nine months of the year. A camp rhyme ran:
Kolyma, wonderful planet,
Twelve months winter, the rest summer.
For about two months in winter, there is no sunrise at all. One calmly written account of the Kolyma camps has as a natural chapter heading: “Sickness, Self-mutilation, Suicide.”130
Not, of course, that these were limited to Kolyma. But in Kolyma the death rate was particularly high, and the despair rate, too. Gorbatov, a strong man with great will power who had even resisted interrogation successfully, tells us that he barely survived less than a year in the gold camps. The death rate among the miners is estimated in fact at about 30 percent per annum,131 though it varied to some extent with location, type of work, and personality of commandant. A Kolyma prisoner comments that it is rarely possible to live on the camp ration for more than two years. By the fourth, at the very latest, the prisoner is incapable of work, and by the fifth year he can no longer be alive.132 In one of the Kolyma penal camps which had started a year with 3,000 inmates, 1,700 were dead by the end, and another 800 in hospital with dysentery.133 In another—a regular camp—it is estimated that 2,000 out of 10,000 died in a year.134 Of some 3,000 Poles, over a period of about fifteen months, about 60 percent were counted dead.135 A Soviet article of 1988 says that “of every one hundred inmates of Kolyma, only two or three survived.”136
In a camp there described in the Khrushchev-period press,137 inmates did a twelve-hour day. The food ration for 100 percent norm was 800 grams of bread per day. Nonfulfillment of norms, through whatever cause, automatically entailed a reduction of the bread ration to 500 grams. This was just above starvation level; any further reduction to 300 grams (as a punitive measure) meant certain death. Work at the surface gold sites was performed in accordance with a strict division of labor. Two men had to start a bonfire, and this had to be done without matches, by the ancient method of striking sparks with flints. Another man had to fetch water from the frozen river and melt it. Next, the deeply frozen ground had to be softened, then excavated, and the sand passed through sieves in search of gold.
Three youths of about seventeen appeared in this camp. They looked younger than their age, perhaps because they were so thin as to be almost emaciated. After the death of the father of one of them, the son had found a collection of Lenin’s works, and in the last volume an envelope containing a copy of Lenin’s Testament. Not keeping it a secret, he and his closest associates were arrested on a charge of terrorism and counter-revolution, and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. So there they all were—three boys and two girls in Kolyma and others of the youthful group dispersed in other prison camps.