Siberia

Kolyma

Journey into the Gulag Archipelago

© Gerard Jacobs 1993

Stalin built the remote Soviet goldfields of the Kolyma, in eastern Siberia, on the back of convict slave labour. In today's market-oriented Russia, conditions remain almost as hard, for miners and mine-workers, pioneers and immigrants, native Siberians and ex-convicts alike.

Sergei Bachmatov struck gold two years ago. In a natural hollow on the bed of a silted-up river he found more than a kilo of the stuff. "I just scooped it up with a spoon," he recalls. "I took a teacup and filled it to the brim, and there was still more lying there. A lot more."

Sergei was paid eight roubles per gram for his treasure. "The state owns the land, and they paid a poor price." He shrugs his shoulders. "They should have paid at least 200 roubles per gram, but they said 'You were just lucky. And we don't reward the lucky.'

"I drank my way though some of the cash," he admits sheepishly, "but not all of it."

Bachmatov was sensible. Foreseeing the massive hyperinflation which now strangles the developing Russian economy, he decided to go into business. He borrowed 25,000 roubles from friends and used them to buy two bulldozers. This year he'll be repaying that loan. But, he says, "Today that's only enough to buy a pair of Russian-made shoes, a poorly-fitting Russian-made jacket or a packet of razor blades. Russian money isn't worth the paper it's printed on."

Russian President Boris Yeltsin abolished the state monopoly on gold prospecting in 1991, in an attempt to stimulate the stagnant economy. Bachmatov was one of the first to take advantage. He set up a co-operative, or artel, which he named "Good Luck".

"Now I have 26 employees," he proclaims, showing off the site where he has a mining concession for the next three years.

"We'll have extracted 100 kilograms of gold by the end of this season. Now we're getting a fair price for it: 14,000 roubles per gram, which is the world market price. At the end of the season I'll be able to pay each member of the co?operative 3?4 million roubles.

"You need to have vision," he adds. "That's what Russians need to learn. To take the initiative without waiting for the state to tell you what to do. And we need to put the bottles of vodka back in the cupboard. This is a country rich in resources, but we have to learn how to make good use of them."

East Of The Sun

Sergei's concession is in the north-eastern Siberian province of Kolyma, one of the most inhospitable areas in the world. This is the land "east of the sun" where, according to Chekhov, "only migrating birds know the boundaries".

The first gold was discovered here in the 1920s. Stalin made mining it a top Soviet priority; Kolyma gold was to finance the Communist workers' paradise. Young Communist volunteers, known as "The Possessed", were sent into the hills where the winter temperature falls to minus 60 degrees Celsius, and every valley and creek contains gold. They found tin, tungsten and uranium too. Kolyma became the treasure chest of the Soviet Union.

The town revolves around gold mining. "We are the largest employer in the area," says mine director Vladimir Khristov. "There are about 3500 people involved in mining, and the rest of the population is dedicated to taking care of them."

Khristov is young and flamboyant, the type of modern manager who takes his example from New York or London -not from Moscow, 10,000 miles and seven time-zones west of here.

"Yet even we can go bankrupt," he affirms. "We have no more petrol to run the machinery. Russia has ground to a standstill."

"But I'm optimistic," he laughs. "You have to be optimistic to survive in the far north. There's a local saying: 'In Kolyma, it's winter for 12 months of the year and the rest is summer!'

"But it can't continue like this," he adds, the gleaming smile fading from his face. "We're on the edge of the abyss."

During the long hard winter, the goldfields are prepared for the short summer. The permafrost is thawed by dynamite and hot water. As soon as the snow melts, bulldozers and dredgers move in. "We move about 45 million cubic metres of earth per year," claims Khristov. "It takes 110 tons of petrol per day to run this operation. This year I could only get 50 tons a day, but since last July I've been able to get none at all. We had to stop the whole operation. It was a total disaster.

"We used to be supplied by the state. But now we get nothing: no fuel, no parts, and food for the population just doesn't come here any more. We don't even have any money to pay the salaries." His smile returns, "Welcome to Russia's largest gold mine. We have gold to spare and no paper money.

"What we need is a strong leader like Pinochet, who can put the country back on its feet."

Khristov has scant respect for the "incompetent" Moscow leadership, which has brought the country to chaos.

"Every development has its price," he responds when I compare Pinochet and Stalin. "It was no holiday camp in those days either. But those days are long gone. Now everybody is fighting. The whole country is at war, in the Caucasus and in the Central Asian republics. We need someone strong enough to stop the chaos."

Many workers have left the Kolyma, particularly specialists. Last year at least 15% of the workforce resigned. According to Khristov, "It is a mass exodus. The villages are empty. If it continues like this, the mines will have to close."

Gold Or Potatoes

The heart of the gold mine is the sluice house, a ramshackle wooden building built by political prisoners at the end of the 1930s. The door is guarded by a drowsy dog, who barks without conviction at approaching strangers. We are the first foreigners to be shown the sluice. A young woman in a tight blue dress lets us in with a wave of a large pistol from the heavy leather holster strung around her hips.

The gold, transported in iron containers from the excavation sites, is washed in a ramshackle wooden shed, warped and skewed as it has sunk into the permafrost. Only women are permitted to work here, up to their ankles in water as they collect up the nuggets according to size.

"We walk on gold and we live in shit," exclaims team leader Olga Lysenko. She flashes a smile as she puts more nuggets onto the scales. "6874 grams in just three hours. That's not bad. On average we get 14?15 kilograms per shift. Sometimes 20 kilos, and never less than 10."

She grins at my reaction to the huge, prehistoric safe in which 150 kilos of gold are stored in black linen sacks.

"It's like being married. After 12 years of this it doesn't excite me any more."

The women are dripping wet, their hands broad and filled with deep grooves.

"We only wash gold during the summer months," explains Tamara. "In the winter we work at the central boiler which heats the town. Then we spend 12 hours a day shovelling coal. What difference does it make? Gold or coal, work is work. How do you think I look?" She gives a pirouette in her scruffy cloth jacket. "How do you like my perfume? Don't I smell sweaty?"

Tamara came to Kolyma 15 years ago, with dreams of getting rich quick. Salaries in the far north are much higher than those on the "Mainland", as they call the rest of Russia.

"Do you know why the women here have black rings on their arses? Because during the winter they get frozen to the toilet seat." The women laugh enthusiastically.

"I live with my husband and 19 year old daughter in a 24 square metre wooden shack," relates Olga. "I had saved 3000 roubles. A year ago that was virtually a fortune. Now it'll buy us a bucket of potatoes. I want to get out of here. Everybody is trying to get out of Kolyma and back to the Mainland, but a removal container alone costs 40,000 roubles. I only earn 13,000 a month." She bursts into laughter. "I'm doomed to wash gold for ever!"

Last year the mine was privatised and women who had worked in the sluice house for more than five years were entitled to shares in the business. But Olga is not interested. She doesn't know what to do with them. "I have pigs," she explains. "You can eat pigs, but you can't eat shares."

According to Olga they don't get paid anyway, because there is no money in the bank. They can withdraw only 5000 roubles in cash, while the rest is put into their account. She shrugs. "It makes no difference, anyway. There's nothing in the shops to spend it on.

"Next time you come this way, please bring me a man." The women are suddenly laughing again. Most are divorced. "Our husbands are drunken bums," they agree. "But then who wouldn't take to drink in this country?" asks Olga, as the other women shout her down.

"I live in a flat without running water, "says Tamara. "If I want to wash I have to fetch water from the standpump. Gold? Potatoes would be better. Or tomatoes. They're more valuable with each passing day."

Reindeer Nomads

Next day we set off in search of the native inhabitants of Kolyma. According to the local authorities, the Evenken or reindeer nomads, in the area now number just 150 people.

We fly by helicopter, skimming the mountain peaks and desolate landscape -bare slopes without a trace of human habitation. Even now, in the middle of summer, the rivers are covered in ice and the melt-off turns the whole area into a huge bog. According to local legend, this is the place where God forgot to separate the earth from the waters. An expanse of icy swamp that stretches from the Bering Strait to the Ural mountains.

We land on the banks of a frozen river, 200 kilometres north of Susuman.

The Evenken work for a sovchoze, a state farm. Each year they drive their herds hundreds of kilometres through the taïga, the vast Siberian forest, in search of grazing pasture.

"They used to live along the coast," says Viktor Margaritto, our guide. "They've been driven inland by the gold prospectors. They are constantly marginalised. The mining companies have seized their herds to feed the workers. Those who protested were called kulaks," continues Margaritto, who has been in contact with them for 30 years. "Now they have reached the end of their road.

"They have degenerated. They can't take care of themselves any more. There's no means of survival for them. Don't give them any vodka," he pleads. "They get drunk on a single glass; they have no acquired resistance to alcohol, just like the native American Indians."

On the banks of the river are pitched six canvas tents. In front of one sit two old men and a woman, using an upturned sledge as a bench.

"The Evenken?" The old man looks up. "I'll tell you about the history of the tribe." He thinks for a long time. "The Russians say we are descended from the apes," he pronounces finally. He stares silently out at the taïga, seemingly unbothered by the swarms of mosquitos that surround us. We don't seem to bother him either. He gazes blankly, as if neither we nor the mosquitos even exist.

The old woman chips in. "Our history is so terrible that I hardly dare talk about it. Not that I'm shy, you understand."

She stands and enters the tent. There she sits down again, on a pallet covered with reindeer skin. The place is in chaos, with clothes thrown in a heap.

I ask her to retell the legends of her people, the stories she has been told by her grandmother. She shakes her head and admits, "I don't know any of those stories. Of course, I know the history of my own family, but it is too awful for words."

"We have no matches any more," she says suddenly. "We cannot make fires. They've forgotten about us."

She stares out. "This is my family." She points to the other tents. "The Fifth Brigade. Old men, me and my two daughters and their babies. The young men have gone. They've gone to the town looking for drink and sex. There is nobody left to tend the reindeer. Last week we lost 300 reindeer. We used to have 2000. They smell the wild mushrooms and run away from the herd. We have nobody to send to catch them again.

"I have two daughters, both of them good women. They drink only tea. Give a man a barrel of vodka and he'll drink it to the bottom. They get crazy drunk. They fight and even kill each other. They lose track of the herds. There is no future for our people any more."

Contrary to all instructions, the Russian helicopter crew has brought vodka to the encampment. All too soon the navigator lies sprawled in front of the tent in a stupor, and the pilot has returned to the cockpit with the bottle and a foolish grin.

"These people think they are God," says the old woman. "They come here with their vodka, and get the menfolk drunk. Then they shoot the reindeer and fly away with the meat. They never pay us, and there's nowhere for us to hide where they won't hunt us down."

She glances contemptuously at her husband as he shuffles drunk into the tent, on his backside. Saliva drips from his mouth and he babbles like a baby. Then she ignores him. "The prospectors never pay either. They say, 'You'll be dead anyway'. We have to try to protect ourselves." She looks again at her husband as he shuffles out, drooling.

"We live here summer and winter," she continues, "and these tents get so cold in the winter. There's a thick layer of ice on the inside of the canvas. No, I've never been frozen, but when I look at our men I can feel the chills down my spine.

"We've had no salaries from the sovchoze for months. We tend their herds for them, but they don't pay us. They don't even bring supplies any more. We have no bread, no eggs, no sugar and no tea."

I ask how much she earns. "I don't really know," she answers. "It's so long since we got paid. The leaders of the sovchoze are stealing our salaries. They fiddle the books. We are powerless. What are we supposed to do? And look at our men." She watches despondently as the old man wriggles back into the tent.

"There are no more fish in the river, no birds in the forest, no wild goats on the hillsides. The reindeer are weak. The prospectors have ravaged everything. I've had plenty of tragedy in my life." She pauses, while her husband tries to stand up and interrupt. "But I've never touched a drop of liquor.

What will happen to my daughters if I die? Who needs us? The men get drunk on vodka every day, trying to forget their problems. I only drink tea. I like it when my man is away; at least then there's peace. If it goes on like this, though, we'll lose all our livestock. How will we survive next winter then?" She stands to leave. "Now you know the story of my people, and my heart feels lighter."

Mass Graves
Russia paid a high price for the development of the Kolyma. Nobody really knows how high the death toll was, and very few seem to care.

Yuri Gorlov came to the goldfields in 1958 looking for adventure and riches. Now he lives in Ust Omchug, a mining village 120 miles north of Magadan along the only road that crosses the Kolyma. A thousand kilometres in length, it was built by prisoners in the 1930s. One day in the summer of 1972, Yuri - who was working as a bulldozer driver opening up new goldfields - uncovered a mass grave.

"The graves were unmarked. Just some wooden posts. The corpses were not deep in the ground. We were instructed to push the remains into the river. I don't know how many bodies there were. 2000? 2500? It took 10 or 12 bulldozers a whole day to do the job. Of course we didn't ask questions, not in those days. We just did as we were told. Gold is the only priority. People don't matter. It's gold that makes our country's leaders crazy."

Not long ago Yuri discovered a second mass grave, 50 kilometres down the road, in a valley known as Butugytshak.

The graves had been disturbed. Corpses had been left lying in the open and the tops of their skulls had been sawn off.

"In Stalin's time there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners in this valley," he explains. "There were tin and uranium mines. Butugytshak supplied the ore for the uranium in our first atomic bomb. When the Americans dropped their bombs on the Japanese we had to have a bomb too. Whatever the price. The strongest prisoners were sent to the uranium mine. They were properly dressed and well fed. Still they died quickly.

 

"Nobody ever survived the uranium mines. Nobody knew why. First their noses and ears started bleeding, and then they died. They didn't know about radiation, you see. Or at least nobody told them. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died here. Their bodies were thrown into the disused mineshafts. When these were nearly full, they dynamited the shafthead. And the NKVD would send new prisoners. Thousands of them. And all would die."

In a deserted factory in the valley, Yuri discovered dozens of barrels of uranium. They were leaking radioactivity. He warned the authorities, but nothing has been done.

"We've closed the valley off," says Vladimir Daniljuk, acting mayor of Ust Omchug. "We have the situation fully under control, but we don't have the time or money to clear up the uranium. We have more important things to do," he declares. "We have no time to worry about the past. The gold mines are threatened with closure. There is no food in the town, and no petrol. The post does not get collected. More than 15% of the population has already left. Nobody is interested in the relics of history."

Next day we visit the valley with Stefania Dmiterko, one of the few survivors of the prison camp.

"I never expected to be able to return here as a free citizen." she says as we enter the valley along a dried-out river bed.

Dmiterko was convicted in 1945, at the age of 20, and sentenced to ten years hard labour. She was transported to Kolyma and put to work in the tin mine at Butugytshak. She had been accused of being a member of an underground organisation dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Soviet state. She smiles the smile of a robust farmer's wife, and climbs the steep hills with ease. "They rounded up my whole village. We were Ukrainians. They said we were rich, because we had a farm with two cows. So they took them away from us, and sent us into exile."

She points to the area where the camps used to be, an endless list of names. The mountains close in around us; their high granite faces look oppressive even on this summer's day. The tin mine where Stefania worked is near the top of the mountain, the uranium mines lower down. She points out a trench: 30 metres wide and 20 deep, this monument to the labour of the prisoners stretches for miles across the hillside.

"Everything was done by hand," she explains. The main shaft, offering at least some protection against the murderously cold wind, has smaller side trenches which run up into the hillside. "The women had to bore the holes in the rock. Eighteen holes per day, each a metre deep. Then the men brought the explosives. After the blasting we had to throw the rocks into wagons and push them outside. We had to work all year round, even in winter with a 52 degree frost. If you didn't work, you didn't get fed."

She walks up to the mine entrance. The ground is covered by a thick layer of ice. The earth is permanently in the grip of permafrost, hundreds of metres deep. "We liked working in the mine. At least it used to be warm inside. The men were dropping like flies. They just gave up hope. Once they realised that there was no chance of escape, they just put their necks on the line.

"The women were different. We took care of ourselves. We washed. We repaired our clothes. Sometimes we even sang songs. We clung on to hope for all we were worth, and some - a few - of us survived."

She walks to the graveyard higher up the mountain. The graves are set in long rows across the bare hillside, each marked with a wooden post and an old food tin bearing the number of the interred. "They never called us by our names," she says. "Only by our prison number."

The graves are shallow, less than 50 centimetres. Some have been opened and defiled. She doesn't know why the tops of the skulls have been sawn off. She doesn't know much. She lived high up in the mountains and had no contact with the prisoners who worked in the uranium mines below. She leads us down the valley towards the factory where the uranium barrels are supposed to be stored.

"They're leaking," she says. "Nobody wants to do anything about it." She doesn't know what uranium is and she has never been told about radiation, nor given a medical check. We stop to measure the radioactivity in the brook which flows across the valley floor. It's twice the maximum permitted level. On the other bank it rises still further, to three times the maximum.

Stefania cannot understand why we are getting nervous. "There's nothing dangerous here now," she claims. "It's much worse inside, let me show you." As she heads into the factory we call her back. "Why are you frightened? I worked here for ten years and survived."

She shows us her certificate of rehabilitation. It is dated 31 July, 1991: a pre-printed form with no apology and no explanations. She never expected an apology. She has been given compensation of 600 roubles for the family farm which was taken from her ? "Just enough to buy a bucket of potatoes". She has also been given a telephone and a supplementary pension.

"Now I'm a foreigner," she announces. "I was officially born in the Ukraine, and the Ukraine has declared itself independent. The Soviet state has stopped paying my pension, and the Ukrainian government will only give me money if I return there. How can I do that? I have nowhere to live in the Ukraine. I'm too old to start building a house for myself and have no money to buy a home. I just don't know what's going to become of me..."

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