Magadan

On July 14, 2019, Magadan will celebrate the 80th anniversary of its founding.

Alas, this date, like so much else in the city’s history, is a lie. Although it is true that the settlement of Magadan was elevated to city status on July 14, 1939, it would be more accurate to use gloomier but more meaningful milestones.

Seven and a half years earlier, on November 11, 1931, the Soviet Central Committee passed a resolution titled “On Kolyma,” aimed at developing mineral resources in the Kolyma River Basin, gold first and foremost. To this end, the notorious Dalstroy Trust was established to facilitate the mining operations that would eventually inflict misery and death on thousands upon thousands.

This remote corner of Siberia was sparsely populated. Only a few nomads and hunters were inclined to live where winter temperatures of 40º or 50º C below are the norm, spit freezes midair, and in summer there is no escape from the swarms of midges. Since nobody wanted to live there voluntarily, another institution was founded several months after the creation of Dalstroy: the Northeast Corrective Labor Camps, or Sevvostlag.

Another date that truly deserves to be commemorated is February 4, 1932, when the first prisoner transport arrived in Nagayev Bay to supply Dalstroy with workers. Magadan and the unimaginable suffering of countless innocent people thrown into the meatgrinder that was Kolyma have remained a part of Russian culture, however hard the authorities tried to keep the horrors of the Kolyma camps under a veil of secrecy or cast them in terms of “the heroic labor of pioneers.” Songs about the experience have entered the Russian folk canon:

I remember the port of Vanino,
The first desolate view of the steamer,
How we clambered onboard on a ladder
And into the hold’s chilling darkness...
The prisoners moaned from the rocking,
As the sea let out primeval roars,
Magadan was our ship’s destination,
The capital of Kolyma, our shore.

Я помню тот Ванинский порт
И вид парохода угрюмый
Как шли мы по трапу на борт
В холодные мрачные трюмы…
От качки стонали зэка
Ревела стихия морская
Вставал на пути Магадан
Столица Колымского края.

There are many gruesome accounts of how prisoners were transported to Magadan, but the real horrors lay ahead. Magadan was just a transit point from which inmates – zeks in Russian – were sent on to the camps.

Since 1996, a statue titled Mask of Sorrow, by the famous sculptor and artist Ernst Neizvestny, has stood on a hill dubbed “Крутая” [steep], where the transit camp was located (Neizvestny had been forced into emigration in 1976 and spent the rest of his life in New York). The plan was for three memorial statues to form a “Triangle of Sorrow,” with the masks placed in center points of high concentrations of camps: Magadan, Yekaterinburg, and Vorkuta. The memorial in Yekaterinburg appeared after Neizvestny’s death, and, not surprisingly, the work of this avant-garde artist has been a source of controversy. There is still no memorial in Vorkuta, and there are doubts as to whether or not there ever will be. In Magadan, vandals recently defaced the memorial with the words “Stalin lives” in red paint.

These vandals may have had a point, judging by the number of new statues of Stalin that have appeared in Russia in recent years. Another sign that his memory lives on are the flowers regularly placed at his grave at the foot of the Kremlin wall. Meanwhile, residents of Tver Oblast’s village of Khoroshevo, where Stalin spent all of one night during the war, have created a “museum hut” out of pride that the vozhd honored them with a visit. Furthermore, a recent survey found that the percentage of people with a positive opinion of Stalin has reached a record 70 percent. The survey’s findings have prompted indignation and puzzlement, and doubt has been cast on its methodology and the validity of its findings. Nevertheless, the fact that a large number of people continue to feel nostalgia for a time when there was “order” is undeniable.

The popular videoblogger and journalist Yury Dud (pronounced “Dude”) says that it was specifically this survey that prompted him to take a trip to Kolyma, a trip that resulted in his film, Kolyma: Birthplace of Our Fear, which has millions of YouTube views (and can be watched with English subtitles: bit.ly/kolyma-film). Dud sets off from Magadan along the Kolyma Highway and talks to local residents: drivers, tour guides from Magadan, a woman who founded a museum to commemorate the prisoners, as well as to the descendants of those who suffered through the Stalin years in Kolyma. The result is a marvelous film that is both a powerful anti-Stalinist statement and an analysis of current attitudes.

Dud is an amazingly talented interviewer, and one aspect of this talent is his gift for finding truly interesting people to talk to. The famous actor Yefim Shifrin; Natalia Korolyova, daughter of Sergei Korolyov, who founded the Russian space program; and many others talk about their relatives’ shattered lives. Along with Kolyma’s stunning natural beauty, we see depressing attempts to build lives on the ruins of the past by people born in Magadan or brought there by twists of fate, in either case unsure of how they can survive where there are no jobs or housing – just a horrific past.

But not everyone agrees on how to characterize that past. Even people engaged in gathering information about Stalinist repression, establishing museums, and recording the recollections of zeks, calmly tell Dud that the camps were, of course, awful, but that doesn’t diminish their respect for Stalin. He was a great man! The argument inevitably draws on the old and amazingly durable myth that Stalin won the war. Kolyma has its own particular Stalin myth: the torment prisoners went through was worth it because the gold they mined went toward paying off Lend-Lease. There’s no point trying to explain that this wasn’t so, that the aid that came through Lend-Lease was relatively inexpensive, costing almost nothing.

Magadan is a place of terrifying memories and a wellspring of mythology. And that Kolyma is the Birthplace of Our Fear – even today, whether or not people realize it – continues to be true. We owe Yury Dud, who is in his thirties – generations removed from the Stalin era – a debt of gratitude for having the courage to take on this topic. Dud’s film received rave reviews, but also, naturally, indignant accusations of slander. The writer Zakhar Prilepin, who is not shy about admitting that he has killed people fighting for the Donetsk People’s Republic, has called the film “superficial and not very clever” and “nauseatingly banal,” claiming that it was mainly thugs who were imprisoned in Kolyma and that Dud was doing the bidding of anti-Russian forces.

So here we have further evidence that whoever vandalized Magadan’s Mask of Sorrow had it right: Stalin lives.

If only life in Magadan could be as beautiful as Kolyma’s nature appears in Dud’s film.