Kolyma Gold

Without slave labor there would be no Kolyma.

Since the late 19th century, prospectors have ventured to this inhospitable and remote region in the distant Northeast of Russia, searching for gold. But severe climate and geographic isolation prevented colonization. For their part, the indigenous people – Evenk reindeer herdsmen – believed that Kolyma’s gold was inadvertently left behind when the Great Spirit sought to deliver Earth from gold, because the metal sowed wickedness among people. Little did they know about the magnitude of evil Kolyma was to see in the 20th century because of its gold.

Vladimir Ilyich came to Kolyma thirty years ago as a young geologist. Today, he works for a Moscow bank, trading in precious metals and looking after the bank’s interests in Kolyma and Yakutia. Every month, he makes a bone-rattling, 1,500-mile “tour of duty” of the region in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He invited us – myself and Sergei –  along for the ride.

Our trip began in Magadan, 4,500 miles from Moscow, where,  outside the air terminal a billboard proclaims: “Welcome to Kolyma – the Golden Heart of Russia.”

The road to town from the airport is part of the legendary Kolyma highway – built by Gulag prisoners and known as the “Road of Bones.” Every settlement here began as a labor camp. Every facility dating back more than 50 years was built and initially manned by prisoners. Under Stalin, every sort of “enemy of the people,” from alleged spies and traitors, to POWs and kulaks, were sent here to mine gold.

Prisoners who survived an arduous sea passage in cargo holds from Vladivostok to Magadan landed in a frozen wilderness (temperatures rarely rise above –30o F from November to March) and had to survive on daily rations of 500 grams of bread, two bowls of watery soup and a serving of kasha (for “under-achievers” and during “slow” winter months these were scaled down to 400 grams). Harassed by guards and common criminals who were assigned “privileged” jobs such as cooks and orderlies, housed in unheated barracks with virtually no medical care (wounds were routinely treated with gasoline), political prisoners worked 12-hour days, armed with nothing but shovels, pickaxes and wheelbarrows. Official records say that almost two million persons were sifted through the Kolyma camps between 1932 and 1953, and more than 200,000 died here - victims of hunger, sickness or execution. Some historians argue that the number of dead was three times higher.

On the wave of the post-Stalinist “thaw,” young Communist enthusiasts rushed to Kolyma to de-stigmatize the place (most of the Kolyma camps had been closed down, but the Gulag system remained) and turn it into a romantic symbol of new beginnings. Prisoners and romantics had much in common: both could survive for a time without schools, theaters, hairdressing salons, hospitals, and libraries. But as the romantics put down roots and started families, their taste for deprivation ebbed. To keep the gold flowing, the state had to offer higher salaries and create a civil infrastructure to keep people from leaving. Soon, the government was pumping up to six percent of its GDP into its Northern and Far Eastern regions to sustain economic activity there.

State subsidies to Kolyma ended with the arrival of perestroika. Soon, state enterprises became burdened by debt and unpaid wages, and were eventually shut down. Annual gold production declined from 160 tons to slightly over 100. Russia, previously the world’s second largest gold producer (after South Africa), fell to seventh place.

Then, in 1993, the Russian government took a drastic step: in an attempt to breathe life into the stagnating industry, it denationalized gold mining. Local governments were given authority over concession licenses, production volumes, and foreign investment. Instead of improving social conditions, the move kindled “Wild East” capitalism and attracted adventurers in search of quick riches. Over the past decade, some 270 licenses have been given to prospector cooperatives – known in Russian as “artels.” But only 180 artels deliver gold to a local refinery. The rest could not make it without state subsidies or went bankrupt, unable to repay loans to commercial banks, like, for instance, Vladimir’s.

Most gold mining occurs along the circular Road of Bones that runs 400 miles north to Susuman and then turns back via Ust-Omchug for another 450 miles to Magadan. Beyond Susuman, a 240-mile stretch runs to Ust-Nera in Yakutia. From there, drivers take chances and continue to Yakutsk for another 600 miles over a packed snow tract – there is no year-round road to the rest of Russia, which adds to the heightened sense of isolation and the islander mentality of Kolyma residents – they call the rest of Russia “the mainland.”

Winter driving requires special skill, since heavy trucks compact the snow into solid ice. Steep mountain passes and hairpin turns normally reveal a wreck or two rusting in the ditch below. Trucks never travel solo and always carry easily ignitable materials to start a fire – to keep the driver warm in case of a winter breakdown. And breakdowns happen. Trucks are old, maintenance is costly and thus most often performed by drivers, with improvised replacement parts. Diesel engines are run continuously during stops and overnight, when the temperature drops below minus -40o F.

On average, trucks lose one tire to unpaved roads and extreme cold for every 350 miles traveled. We could hardly drive 100 yards without seeing a discarded tire by the side of the road. Equally noticeable (and only slightly less frequent) were roadside graves of drivers killed in accidents. These are usually marked by a steering wheel or a tire, with a photo of the deceased in a wreath of plastic flowers. Despite these solemn reminders, truckers, as a rule, drive recklessly and at high speeds.

Our driver, who we called by his patronymic, Yevgenich, was a handsome man of reserved demeanor. Yevgenich took his smoking breaks seriously: we stopped religiously every 40 miles. Like most people who came to Kolyma in the 1980s, Yevgenich was drawn here by the prospect of money: while an average salary on the mainland was R120 per month, here it started at R330. He thought he would save some money and go home to central Russia in three years, but was sucked in by the promise of doubling his earnings in seven years. A dream of buying a R5,000 Lada suddenly became a reality. With R160 airfares to Crimea, Yevgenich vacationed at Black Sea resorts every summer. His savings account was growing fatter at a time when few consumer goods were available. Then one August day in 1998 the Yeltsin government devalued the ruble and Yevgenich’s savings evaporated. This was a blow to many Russians, but it was an even greater tragedy in Kolyma, where people had managed to save large sums. Yevgenich and thousands like him were stranded, unable to book passage to the mainland and start a new life there.

We met another marooned soul at a place called Atka. Some eight years ago, Atka was a warehousing center with a population of about 2,000, supplying food to the outback mines and settlements from a huge truck depot. Today, all that is left are collapsed or burned-out houses, barns with caved-in roofs, truck skeletons rusting away in high grass and thousands of crushed, empty wooden crates once used to transport vegetables. Huge mosquitoes and gadflies appeared to be Atka’s only inhabitants, but Vladimir suggested we stop here for lunch. Apparently, nearly 200 people still live in Atka and it boasts a little canteen for truckers, which turned out to be a ramshackle wooden cabin sunk into the permafrost. There we met Anya, a robust, crimson-faced, 40-something chef who served us a hearty meal of cabbage soup and blini.

Everyone who had a chance to leave Atka took it. Anya stayed because she could not afford the move to the mainland. She had been offered a one-time grant of R50,000 ($1,650) to help her and her son move to Magadan, but she calculated this would only cover five months of food and rent. During the school year, her son lives with relatives in Magadan, because the school in Atka closed a couple of years ago. Having a husband would help, but most single men are gone for five months, prospecting for gold, and can’t pull their own weight the rest of the year. “My life has no space for courtship,” Anya said. “I am in a love-hate relationship with this canteen!” Her laughter was younger than her years.

We reached the base of the Belichan mine near Susuman after eleven butt-numbing hours. The lot around a huge equipment repair and storage hangar was littered with rusted bulldozers, graders and trucks in varying degrees of disassembly. The derelict village, with its yawning black holes of burned out windows, and smoke from distant forest fires crawling over surrounding hills, created the eerie feel of a recently-emptied battlefield. It looked like the Belichan “infantry” was losing its fight.

It turned out the infantry was enjoying a smoke between 12-hour shifts. We were introduced to Fasil, the owner of the artel, a stocky man in black dress shoes and a shiny polo shirt. We shook hands with Ivan Ivanovich, a gray-haired, lanky foreman with a Popeye face. A real pro, Ivan has been mining gold for 25 years. He had recently started his own artel, only to be swindled by an unscrupulous partner. “He would not be toiling here now if he didn’t have a new wife at home,” announced Rustam, a swarthy fellow with a mouth full of gold teeth. “She must be so-o-o-o bored alone,” winked a short, bald, bearded man in rubber boots and an unbelievably dirty quilted winter jacket, which he wore without a shirt. We asked if they got any gold today. “Could be better,” Ivan Ivanovich said, spitting on the ground. “Last week we got a 700 gram nugget, but today’s take is just over a kilo.”

The new shift was about to board the bus. “Come, I’ll show you the works,” said Ivan Ivanovich, opening the door of his beat-up Toyota. We followed the bus around waterlogged pits and gravel mounds to what Ivan Ivanovich laconically referred to as the “pribor” (the “device”). We were driving through an immense desert of “tailings” – rocks and gravel left behind after the gold has been extracted. Magenta willow herb was the only vegetation that this scarred wasteland had produced in 60 years. There was not a patch of grass to be seen.

“They collected a lot of gold when this claim was first mined 60 years ago. A lot of lives to spare back then, but the gold recovery rate was poor. One of our devices here re-processes the tailings. The yield may not make us rich by the end of the season, but it sure keeps costs down,” Ivan Ivanovich chuckled.

Belichan is a “placer” gold mine, which means that loose gold is present in alluvial sand, gravel and clay. When the mine was developed in the 1940s, prisoners removed six to ten feet of topsoil and vegetation to expose the gold-bearing “pay-dirt” underneath. This hard work was done in the winter, when water for sluicing gold was unavailable. Once the ice melted, the pay-dirt was washed with massive quantities of water over a grate of parallel bars called a “grizzly.” The bars caught larger stones, but the mix of gravel, sand and water ran down the sluice-box, a 30-foot-long trough with metal ridges – “riffles” – along its bottom to trap the gold. Gold is 19 times heavier than water and would deposit at the bottom, while soil would be carried through and disgorged at the end of the sluice to form heaps of tailings. This is how gold was mined in California in the 1850s and in Kolyma in the 1940s.

The pribor in Belichan operated on the same principle. Every four minutes, monstrous 25-ton trucks backed up to the edge of a pit and emptied their holds of gravel and sand over a mechanized grizzly, its plates moving in waves, pushing larger boulders into the pit. A giant sprinkler sprayed water over the pay-dirt and the watery soil rushed down into three parallel sluice-boxes. The pribor resembled a ravenous creature that devoured and expelled hundreds of cubic feet of earth every minute. A couple of bulldozers pushed mounds of tailings away from the sluice-boxes, challenging nature with a new, barren landscape. The roar of bulldozers and trucks, the clanking sound of the chains that moved the grizzly plates and the noise of stones banging against the metal of the sluice-boxes silenced us. We watched in awe as the earth was raped for the sake of a handful of the yellow metal.

On the way back we stopped at a second, slightly different pribor. A water cannon propelled water at pay-dirt that bulldozers moved within its range. A young fellow, a cigarette glued to his lip, was playfully aiming the nozzle at huge boulders. The jet stream, apparently strong enough to kill a man, hurled the boulders away, allowing gravel and sand to pass through the grizzly below. The mixture of water, gravel and sand was then pumped up the rig equipped with a sluice-box at the top. The tailings were disgorged below, forming high mounds to be levelled. “Tomorrow you can watch the requisition. That’s when they clean the sluice-boxes and pick the gold,” said Ivan Ivanovich motioning us to the car. It was getting dark.

Our home in Susuman was a former hostel where Soviet bureaucrats stayed when they flocked to attend training sessions on how to be better Communists. Other than a sauna, it was a typical five-story apartment building. But in Kolyma they sit on concrete stilts to prevent the permafrost from melting and the building from sinking. The town was entwined by a web of huge heating and sewer pipes wrapped in shabby insulation.

Susuman is the second largest town in the region, after Magadan. It had a forlorn look; half of its population, primarily the younger, better-educated professionals, has left over the last decade. The pensioners, the sick and the dispossessed have stayed, subsisting on pensions averaging R1,800 ($60) a month. The airport, which used to have a daily flight to Magadan, was closed – a symbolic reminder that getting out may be a tricky endeavor. The 12-hour bus trip to Magadan costs about R800; a one-way ticket to Moscow R12,000. Susuman’s population would be even smaller, if not for the inflow from outlying villages, where municipal authorities, saddled with costs of maintaining the crumbling infrastructure, shut off heat and electricity to places with fewer than half of its original inhabitants.

A 2002 $80 million World Bank migration program to finance the outsettlement of pensioners and invalids upsets many able-bodied locals. “I don’t want to rot here while I still have a good chunk of my life and health left,” said Lyudmila, a stout woman I met at a 24-hour grocery store, where 50% of the shelf space is taken by vodka, and a billboard outside advertises Cuban cigars. “Why not accommodate everyone who wants to leave? Look at these prices – we have to pay twice what people on the mainland pay, but our pensions and salaries are not what they used to be. Once they get rid of the old people, they will cut the heat in our apartments and force us into barracks. It will be a camp, just like before.”

Two respectable buildings rise out of the ruin that is Susuman. One is the company headquarters of Susumanzoloto (“zoloto” means “gold”), the second largest gold mining company in Kolyma, which has 1,100 employees who mined 5.8 tons of gold in 2002. Director General Vladimir Khristov has overseen the company’s difficult transition. Paradoxically, the August 1998 default that swept away the savings of millions of Russians lent the industry a helping hand. The collapse of the ruble while having gold as an asset made it easier to pay off ruble loans. Helped by lower production costs, lax gold production and export controls, and stabilizing global gold prices, the profitability of gold mining appealed to investors. Small companies and artels began merging into larger groups such as “Susumanzoloto” to better adapt to a shift from seasonal placer mining to year-round and more capital-intensive lode mining. Realizing that returns from extraction of placer gold are diminishing, Khristov negotiated a $13 million credit line from Sberbank to develop the Vetrenskoye lode deposit. The company’s most valuable asset, however, is the license for the development of the largest gold-ore deposit in Magadan region – Natalkinskoye, which holds an estimated 245 tons of gold in residual reserves. After investments of about $220 million, the deposit could produce up to 10-15 tons of gold a year.

The second well-kept building is the local police headquarters with parking spots (not that Kolyma is scarce on parking space) designated for the Head of Hard Currency and the Head of OMON, the Special Police Force. These are not typical police jobs in Russia, but Susuman is not a typical town. “Stakes are high,” commented Yevgenich. “Officially, Kolyma produces about 30 tons of gold per year. A National TV program recently stated that another third gets stolen. I think this is way too high; I’d say one-fifth. With 30 percent of the locals living below the poverty line, panning for gold illegally may be the only chance for some to make ends meet. We call these prospectors “khishchniki” [predators]. If the police find gold on them, they seize it, beat them up and then arrest them. Nobody knows how much gold is stolen and how much the police recover, if you know what I mean.”

There is no shortage of middlemen willing to buy gold from “predators.” Some of the middlemen are Ingush, a Muslim people from the Caucasus. We saw Ingush women in Susuman dressed in colorful ethnic gowns. They acted as if they owned the place. “Most of them are officially unemployed. They run their own company – ‘Ingushzoloto’!’” Yevgenich laughed at his own joke. “They are close-knit and not afraid of the police because they pay everybody off. Many of the Ingush buy a license to a claim, get a loan from a commercial bank to buy equipment and go into the business of... buying gold from illegal prospectors at ridiculously low prices. I heard about desperate ‘predators’ swapping gold for canned meat. The Ingush then sell the gold to the bank at official rates, pay back the loan and pocket the difference. This way, they don’t have to worry about shipping the metal to the mainland inside wheelchairs or cans of red caviar. They say the Ingush use the profits to finance the Chechens’ war for independence. I believe it. All people from the Caucasus are like brothers.”

The next morning, when Rustam, sporting his fatigues and a shiny golden smile, drove up in a beat-up Russian jeep, we realized that he had not slept since last night. “It’s OK. Come October, all we’ll do is sleep... Yesterday you were asking about predators. Come, I’ll show you their lair.”

A twenty-minute off-road drive took us into the far end of the tailings field, with islands of bushes and grass among water-filled gullies. “I saw them yesterday and hopefully did not chase them away,” said Rustam, pulling the jeep to a stop. We walked the last 100 meters. All we found was a smoldering fire, empty food cans and tools. “They are around here somewhere. They dig in a few places and move between them when they sense danger. This is no joke: if OMON spots them, they may not get out of here alive.” Rustam slapped a mosquito on his neck. “These predators must be a desperate and hardy bunch. Look, they are making preparations for winter,” he pointed to piles of firewood covered with oil drums cut into halves and a few old tires. “They will burn tires and wood to melt snow in these oil drums, in order to sluice the gold. In -40o cold! You should see them in early spring, faces black from tire smoke, clothes reduced to oily shreds,” Rustam got tired of the swarm of mosquitoes hovering around him and lit a cigarette.

“Can we try it to get a feeling of what it’s like?” I asked, a wave of anticipation ran through my body. “Suit yourself. I’ll tell you what to do.” Rustam looked amused.

The principal tool of the predator is a prokhodnushka, a cradle-like box three to four feet long and two feet wide with one end open to allow water and earth to escape. The bottom is lined with riffled rubber mats and small wooden planks to hold them in place. We propped the prokhodnushka at an angle and placed the hopper, a huge scoop made out of a sawed-off oil drum with a perforated bottom, over its elevated end. Sergei and I were ready for some serious gold mining.

I filled a pail with gravel and sand, and emptied it into the hopper. After two more pail loads, I scooped water from a nearby hollow and poured it over the earth in the hopper. Sergei’s job was to rock the hopper and mix its contents with a stick. The mixture of muddy water, small stones and sand ran through the holes into the cradle-box, over the riffled mats and out through the open lower end. We poured in more water. When only large stones were left in the hopper we set it aside and inspected the riffles. Nothing. More pails of earth and water and – could it be happening – tiny yellow specks shone on the mat.

Feeling encouraged, we worked for twenty more minutes and ended up with roughly half a gram of gold. The sun was shining brighter, the mosquitoes were kinder, and the pulsating thought was to dig, haul, and wash until the first snowfall. Call it beginner’s luck or the highest concentration of gold in Kolyma, but if a dozen pails bring in this much, what would the yield be from 25-ton trucks that come in every four minutes? Conservative calculations produced a daily take from the big pribor in the range of 25 kilograms. We asked Rustam how off we were. The clever Ingush just gave us his golden smile: “The requisition will start in half an hour; you’ll see….” The last thing we wanted at that moment, however, was to part with the prokhodnushka, the pail and the shovel.

On the ride back, Rustam told us about the Ingush people. “We take care of each other. This is our strength. At first, Russian foremen were suspicious of us, because we are different. Then they saw that we do not drink and are not afraid of hard work. Many Ingush became foremen or even artel directors like Fasil, but would be listed as Russians. When the war in Chechnya started, many problems began for us. We have lived side by side with the Chechens for centuries. We are Muslim, too, and empathize with them, but we do not want to fight the Russians. I deal just fine with the Russians in the artel. But many Russians think that the Ingush loathe work and live off gold smuggling. When the Governor of Magadan was gunned down in Moscow in 2002, many fingers were pointed at us. Life is tough for many here and with Russian soldiers being killed in Chechnya, it just takes one little spark...” he left the sentence unfinished.

When we returned, Ivan Ivanovich, two fellows in high rubber boots, and a roly-poly, AK47-toting guard were waiting for us. With trucks gone and the giant grizzly stopped, the place no longer looked like hell’s waiting room. Ivan opened the seals on the three sluice-boxes one by one and the two guys started cleaning rocks and sand out of them. After about 15 minutes, we could see tiny nuggets and gold sand caught in the riffled rubber mats at the bottom. “Should be about a kilo and a third,” estimated Ivan Ivanovich matter-of-factly. Later we learned that his margin of error was less than 50 grams. One after another, the mats were placed into a round red canister and rinsed. The canister was then sealed. The catch did not come close to our guesstimate, made on the pinnacle of our gold-mining luck. Apparently, Mother Earth does not always bestow her gifts in a predictable manner.

I asked the men how prospectors decide where to mine gold. Aside from estimating the total reserves in a particular deposit and the purity of the gold, the big factor is the gold-to-dirt ratio. If our math could still be trusted, in the last 24 hours the Belichan artel went through about 9,000 tons of dirt to get 1,300 grams of gold, averaging about 1.4 grams per ton. “We break even at about 1.2 grams per ton,” Ivan explained. “Processing tailings rarely gets you more than 5 grams. Placer deposit yields are generally low compared to lode deposits, where gold is embedded in solid rock. Exploration drilling is expensive and most artels use data from 1960’s geological surveys which are often inaccurate.”

“Why don’t you invest in reliable exploration if it means so much for your bottom line?” I asked the miners.

“You remind me of Lord Judd, this British parliamentarian who visited Chechnya,” said Rustam. “He thought he had stopping the war all figured out. There was just one problem: none of his proposals made sense in Chechnya! We have a geologist on staff. You can ask her this question,” said Rustam, emphasizing the gender.

An area of the base surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and with a viciously barking dog inside is the “golden heart” of the Belichan artel. Inside were a tiny hut – the geologist’s office – and a second fence. Through a door with a barred peephole we entered the sanctum sanctorum. It was a shack where two teenage boys and a somber but amply maquillaged matron washed nuggets and golden sand from tenacious earth on a vibrating table. Looking at the silently moving brushes in the washers’ hands, I thought how gold’s beauty and value result from such unattractive multiples as thousands of square miles of defaced land, predators with faces black from tire soot, and these hands dancing for hours in icy water.

It was past lunchtime and we walked to the mess hall to grab a bite to eat. Andrei, a Ukrainian who had just been hired as a welder, joined us. We sat at a long table covered with an oilcloth and the ubiquitous flies. Ads for imported food aspired to give the drab walls a homey look. After serving us a meal of soup, rice with tiny pieces of meat, and a dried fruit compote, the cook wiped her hands on an apron and started warmly reminiscing about the Communists while cursing the new life. “We are like slaves. We can’t leave and the jobs are few, so we are stuck with what’s available. If I am lucky, by the end of the season the management will pay me whatever they feel like.”

“But don’t you have a contract with them?” The Lord Judd in me raised his stately head once again.

“What do we know about contracts? I signed a piece of paper today, but there was nothing there about money,” interjected Andrei. The major scars on his scalp could tell a few chilling stories. “If the artel does well at the end of the season, we get paid. But the management may say that the cost of diesel went up or that the price of gold went down and that there is no money left. We can’t say anything. We are the slaves.” He thanked the cook and left.

Back at the base, Vladimir was pacing impatiently in his slippers. Once inside the car, he vented his frustration: “How will they pay back the loan in the fall, mining less than two kilos per shift? I told them to look into developing new claims. Sure, they can always buy gold on the side. Either way Fasil won’t lose his shirt over it... The bank will have the headache of liquidating the dozers and trucks to get some money back... Oh well, it’s only gold, right? Are you hungry? We have been invited for dinner.” I was thinking about the cook and the welder and their slim chances of eating well this winter.

After a short drive, we reached the village of Kholodny, Russian for “cold.” The village looked deserted and had an appropriately cold and desolate look about it. Yevgenich pointed at a huge eagle sitting motionless on a concrete fence: “That’s Vitaly’s pet. It’s always there.” An ordinary looking man dressed in a plaid shirt came out to shake hands with Vladimir Ilyich. We were introduced to Vitaly, the owner of the Fortuna artel and a successful gold mining entrepreneur.

“Of course, I was scared when I decided to go on my own,” Vitaly said, “but the situation was so bad that I really didn’t have much choice. I didn’t want to leave Kolyma. You may think I’m nuts, but I like it here. Going to the mainland meant starting a new life at a new place. I said to myself, ‘I know this land. I know gold mining.’ So I chose to start a new life at the old place.” Vitaly was talking to us at his office – a wagon-like house on wheels that is often used in Russia to house workers at construction sites. Geological maps, log books and machinery parts occupied all the free space. “I got a loan through Vladimir Ilyich and bought the machinery. I repaid the loan in one year and took another one. I borrowed only what I needed for mining, not a ruble for myself. I do not sleep well when I owe money.” He had a good smile.

“Come, I’ll show you something,” Vitaly motioned. We stepped outside and walked to the far side of the lot. We heard them before we saw them: a dozen or so piglets were feeding next to their mothers. Adjacent was an enclosure with goats and a chicken coop. Behind it were greenhouses with tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.

Vitaly proudly showed us around. “We grow our own food. The boys are happy. I bought a grocery store in the village that my wife runs, so she can sell any excess produce. You know, the ground we are standing on is the site where I first prospected 12 years ago. When I started this artel I wanted the base to be here. I had to bring a lot of topsoil for greenhouses and livestock and to insulate the soil so that the permafrost does not slow down the growth.”

The dinner table was set outside with vodka and deliciously tender salmon caught and smoked by our host. The main course was boiled caribou hunted by Vitaly. “Caribou are easily scared and dash for the woods before you can come close enough to take a shot. I chase them from an ATV, but never kill more than what we can eat. I got two this time and gave one to the boys in the field.” The caribou meat was chewy, but tasty, and the broth, spiced with local herbs, was robust and fragrant. “You may hear people say that Kolyma’s days are numbered and that it is just a matter of time before Russia gives it to the Chinese or Japanese as a concession or sell it just like Alaska. We’ll bite our elbows if we do. I feel I own a claim on this land in more senses then one, and I’m staying put.”

When we were leaving, Vitaly’s eagle turned its head and gave us a stern look. The vodka and the warm evening light must have had something do with it, but the empty streets and lopsided houses of Kholodny did not look quite as cold. But that was not the only reason. I was thinking about Vitaly. His grandfather was exiled here as a kulak [private farmer opposed to collectivization]. His father stayed because, after Stalin’s death, life in Kolyma did not seem that bad. Two generations later, Vitaly was building wealth in the land where his grandfather had been forced to toil for the benefit of those who had taken away everything he had worked for.

The next day, Yevgenich took us to the Shkolnoye underground mine. Nikolai, our guide on the track inside the mountain, gave us orange helmets with headlamps and battery packs. A fellow with a face that betrayed a lifelong affair with alcohol handed us padded jackets: “Take these, or you’ll freeze your –– off,” he blurted. Dark and cold, the mountain’s innards felt alive with muffled noises. As we went further, condensation painted every surface in shades of white, giving the place an eerie, out-of-this-world look. We came across a welder strengthening the ceiling supports. The light of his torch illuminated an endless tunnel with numerous branches.

In eleven years as a miner, Nikolai has worked throughout Siberia and the Russian Far East, but Kolyma was his favorite. “It must be the hardship and the climate that make people here so unique. Have you heard the joke that winter is here for twelve months and the rest is summer? Well, it does take a special kind of a person to live here. It also takes a special type of friendship, because a man can’t survive here by himself. I can be making the same kind of money [$620-680 a month] elsewhere in Russia, but it won’t be the same. You have to live here to understand. I know guys who left and came back after a year or two. I guess Kolyma conditions humans a certain way.”

We clearly fell short of the Kolyma spirit: with gold veins still a mile ahead, Sergei and I turned back, overcome by cold and by what we later found out were residual explosive gases. The smell of the outside air and the light at the end of the tunnel suddenly took on new meaning. I stepped out into the warm sunlight and acknowledged to myself that I was indeed a warm-blooded, diurnal animal. My frozen fingers resisted attempts to unbutton the loaner jacket. My mind reeled as it grappled to understand how inured to hardship one has to be to commit to not seeing the light of day for weeks on end.

The visit continued at a processing plant, where ore from the mine is crushed into powder in giant cylindrical mills by eight-inch steel balls. Dust was everywhere. Crushed ore is mixed with water and circulated through tanks containing a weak solution of sodium cyanide, to dissolve the gold. The solution is then separated from the rock pulp, which is filtered off to a tailings lake lined with 1⁄16-inch thick plastic – the only barrier between low-concentration cyanide and the environment. Zinc powder is mixed into the solution to make gold, silver and copper precipitate. Gold is then removed by filtration, melted down and cast into so-called gold doré bars containing about 90% fine. The solution is sent back to the leaching circuit. The doré bars are then sent to an off-site refinery near Magadan, where they are smelted into bullion.

“Are you turning into mining pros?” joked Vladimir Ilyich back in the car.

“Getting to know what Kolyma is all about?” played along Yevgenich.

This stretch of the Road of Bones had plenty of sharp turns and passes. The name of one of them surprised us – the “Rio Rita Pass.” Yevgenich told us the story. The prisoners who built the road over this pass in 1949 had a gramophone with only one record, which happened to be from the soundtrack to the Abbot and Costello film. I imagined starved and exhausted men in scruffy clothes pushing heavy wheelbarrows to foxtrot music. This little glimpse into what Kolyma was all about moved me more than Magadan’s colossal “Mask of Mourning” Memorial to the Victims of Stalinism.

Behind the next curve, two men were squatting by the side of the road. A flatbed truck carrying an ATV was lying on its side in a ditch 15 feet below, apparently the result of an accident. Yevgenich made no sign of slowing down. Through the rear window I saw the two men, their posture unchanged, looking lost yet resolute.

“Should we stop and offer help?” I asked Vladimir.

“They did not motion us to stop, so we shouldn’t,” he said, sounding as if he was explaining the obvious. “They may be drunk, or their documents may not be in order, or they may need to be elsewhere right now. The last thing they want is to attract the attention of strangers. It is their problem and they will take care of it the way they know. In this part of the world, you stay out of other people’s business. And forget about insurance – they can’t afford any,” added Vladimir Ilyich, anticipating a Lord Judd type of question.

“What about people helping each other and that special Kolyma spirit?” I knew I was pushing it.

“We drive the wrong type of car and that’s where the spirit stops. It is not a classless society anymore.” The finality in his voice told me the topic had run its course.

We took a detour to check some equipment Vladimir Ilyich’s bank had a lien on because an artel went insolvent. A half a dozen Komatsu and Caterpillar trucks and bulldozers slept under the watchful eyes of two guards who were cooking lunch over an open fire and who almost jumped to attention upon seeing the Land Cruiser.

On the way back, I saw something moving in the distance and asked Yevgenich to stop. “Predators,” he said without much emotion. “They ducked when we first passed here, but didn’t expect us to come back that fast and did not take cover.” Sergei and I exchanged glances. “Look, if you want to get whacked over the head with a shovel…” started Yevgenich. But we were already out of the car and walking towards the two men who stopped whatever they were doing and were just staring at our cameras and camcorder. Then we saw the dog, a big German shepherd one of them was holding by the collar.

“Your dog will not hurt us if we come closer, will it?” I asked, making the first attempt at dialogue. They did not encourage us to, so we stayed a few feet away while talking with them.

Their day is off to a good start when they get a lift. If not, it is a 40-minute walk along the main road and another 40-minute shortcut to the site. Then it is 14 hours of digging and shoveling. Pavel used to be a metal worker. Vladimir used to work at a school that closed down. Both dig for gold mainly to support their families. They actually have an official permit to “explore,” but not to mine gold. The punitive raids of the OMON made illegal panning too dangerous.

“If you didn’t have papers, they would start by breaking or burning your gear. Then they’d beat you up ‘for preventative measures’ if they didn’t find gold on you.” Between the two of them, Pavel was the talker. “Otherwise, one gram of gold means one year in jail. But now they realize that our grams are nothing compared to the hundreds of kilos funneled through organized crime routes, so first-time offenders get a suspended sentence.”

“The water is way too far from here, but this old river bank is a decent spot, so we pick at its side with metal sticks, looking for larger specks and small nuggets,” explained Pavel letting go of the dog to show us their instruments. “On a good day, we get four grams that we can sell for about R200 ($6.50) per gram [the world market price for gold is about $13 per gram]. To whom? We do not really care, as long as they pay. Of course, it isn’t much. We’ll be in really good shape if we could get seven grams per day.”

Would they switch to something else? Yes, if the job paid well, which automatically excludes going back to metalworking or teaching. Would they move? Moving to another village makes no sense, as any village can become a candidate for demolition. Moving to Magadan and beyond is unrealistic. What are their plans for winter? “We’ll shovel coal at the central boiler that heats the village. We may get lucky next summer, though. A couple of settlements nearby will be razed to the ground and rumor has it that they sit on some placer gold.”

Pavel and Vladimir are but two of the many faceless captives of liberal reforms for whom the change of seasons means a change of shovels. The paradoxical misnomer of “predators” with which they have been branded betrays the reversal of attributes that has always been handy for manipulating the perception of the masses. Even today, enigmatic Kolyma has a relentless hold over its inhabitants.

The last detour of the trip proved to be one of the most memorable. After an almost idyllic drive on a dry riverbed, we came to the ruins of the Butugychag uranium mining camp. Decades ago, prisoners mined tin and uranium in the surrounding hills and then brought the blasted ore down to the valley for processing. Railroad beds, ore wagon cars and mine workings were visible at the summit. “There is a little graveyard halfway up the hillside,” Vladimir Ilyich spoke slowly. “It took a lot of effort to dig graves in the permafrost, so most bodies were stacked in the unused shafts. When the shafts were full, the camp administration would blow up the entrance. After the Americans dropped their [atomic] bombs on Japan, we had to have our own, whatever the price.”

Although the wooden structures of the camp had been burned when the mines were abandoned in 1953, it was easy to see where they stood. We came across a stone barrack with grilled windows, overgrown with willow herb. Here and there we stumbled upon a boot sole, an aluminum plate or an empty food tin.

“See this white building in the middle of the valley?” Vladimir said. “It used to be an uranium-processing factory and barrels leaking uranium were found there. I am not sure they’ve cleaned them up since. I suggest we don’t hang around here for too long.” We hesitated to leave and continued to wander about the site, unable to satisfy our compulsion to find a conduit into the past, to understand what it was like to be a prisoner here fifty years ago.

We were flying back to the mainland the next morning. The sign, “Welcome to Kolyma – the Golden Heart of Russia” still greeted new arrivals at the airport. Its cruel irony was now readily apparent. What sign greeted the Gulag prisoners when they walked ashore in Magadan after a gut-wrenching voyage in cargo holds? What slogans greeted those who came here in the 1960s, full of youthful ardor and a belief in Communism’s human face, only to realize a generation later that they had given their best to a country that was no longer and that the new Russia does not have a place for these prisoners of freedom.

Where in fact is the golden heart of Russia if not in Kolyma? Is it in Moscow, where you can casually spend for lunch what a laborer elsewhere in Russia makes in a week? When you get off the eight-hour flight from Magadan, Moscow feels like another country. In fact, being just 50 miles out of Moscow feels like another country. What empathy can it then have for the rest of Russia?

Take away Kolyma’s gold, Yakutia’s diamonds and Siberia’s oil and gas, and Moscow’s $300-an-hour spas will run out of steam. For now, Moscow seems oblivious to the needs of the hand that feeds it. Eventually it will have to face the consequences. What will happen by then to the 200,000 people (down from 300,000 in 1989), still calling Kolyma home and cursed to live through interesting times?   RL