To our right, behind a broken barbed-wire fence, the ruin of a three-storey factory rears white walls above the white stream. It was the flotation plant for uranium, Yuri says, dangerous to enter still, where a work-shift could be dead after a few months. He accelerates grimly, and the walls drop behind us. ‘Even after they’d left, they died of it.’
A mile later the van flounders against impassable banks, and we walk up through a bright, cold silence. Sometimes the snow surges above our knees. Yuri tramps ahead, indifferent, with his hat tugged down to his neck. I follow in his footsteps, my heartbeat quickening, as if we are entering a cathedral or a morgue. Instead we reach a huddle of administrative buildings in yellow stone. They are all ruined, their roofs caved in, their doors unhinged or rotted away. The window-frames are snow-silvered rectangles of nothing. Steps lead up to a veranda and through a door to a 20-foot drop.
The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who survived this camp in the 1950s, described brutal maimings, accidents, internecine murders, desperate strikes. A prisoner had no name, no self. He could be addressed only by his number. Some were in chains. They climbed four miles before they reached the mines; and from their camp on the far side of the mountain, a squad of women convicts trudged eight miles every day to carry home cold rations.
The iron frame of the camp gates stands redundant in the debris of its towers. Beneath the snow our feet snag on objects we only guess at, and drag up barbed wire. Rusted machinery pokes above the surface. Beyond, we stumble through the wrecks of barracks and prison cells. In the roofless rooms the guards’ benches are still in place, with a range of hooks for their coats. The snow lies on their platform beds in hard, crystalline piles. A pair of boots is discarded by a stove. Everything emits a hand-to-mouth rusticity and squalor. Skeletal iron doors still swing on isolation cells a few feet square. The slots survive where the prisoners’ gruel was pushed through, and the barred windows remain intact, and the stove in the guards’ sauna.
The air seems thin. But Yuri’s cheeks are pink and burnished. He is kicking the snow from around a grid of notched stumps to uncover wood foundations. ‘That’s where the tents were,’ he says. ‘That’s where they slept.’
It was the same through much of Kolyma. The prisoners lived and died in tents. Despairingly they pressed insulating moss and peat between the twin layers of canvas, sprinkled them with sawdust, and stacked boards outside. Inside was a single cast-iron stove.
And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.
Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at me. ‘You know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.’
‘A joke?’
‘Yes. He was in charge of the village telephone, and one day he told somebody in passing: “By the way, Stalin’s on the phone to you!” So he ended up in the camps for five years. My parents must have suffered for that.’ He presses a wooden slat back with his boot. ‘People grew up in their parents’ silence.’
We climb to where he remembers the cemetery lay, but it is lost under snow. The opalescent light has intensified over the valley. Around us the trees and shrubs are laden and heavy, as if bearing white fruit. They shiver with tiny wagtails. I pick some dwarf-cedar needles, which prisoners used to boil in the futile hope of deflecting scurvy.
I say: ‘Whatever it’s like now, things are better than they were then.’
Yuri does not answer at first. Everything with him takes a long time. He has a slight stutter. He says: ‘Those were religious times, in a way. People believed things.’ He seems to envy that.
So suffering came down from the sky, as natural as rain or hail. There was no one to accuse. No one was near enough, embodied enough. Stalin’s empire, like Hitler’s Reich, was meant to last through all imaginable time. The past had been reorganised for ever, the future preordained.
I say, not knowing: ‘You’ll never go back to that.’
Yuri says: ‘We’re not the same as you in the West. Maybe we’re more like you were centuries ago. We’re late with our history here. With us, time still goes in circles.’
I don’t want to hear this, not here in the heart of darkness. I want him to call this place an atrocious mystery. I want him not to understand it. With his blond moustache and Tartar cheekbones, I have cast him as the quintessential Russian, the litmus test for the future. The mountain air has gone to my head.
But his hand, which was tracing a circle, now tentatively lifts. ‘Maybe we spiral a little,’ he says, ‘a little upwards.’ He looks across to where the cableways limp in ghastly procession over the heights. ‘I wish my grandfather had lived on. He loved a good joke, and people can joke about anything now. We’ve still got that. Jokes.’
I clasp his shoulder, but we are too fat in our quilted coats, and my hand slips from him. He smiles for the first time, on a mouthful of discoloured teeth, before turning back along the track.
And on that frozen hillside he starts to sing.
Searchable Terms
Abakan
Afghanistan: Russian war in
Aganbegyan, Abel
Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk
Alaska: sold to USA
Albazin
Aleksei (of Birobidzhan)
Aleksei Akilovich (Old Believer)
Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevich
Alexander I, Czar
Alexandra, Empress of Nicholas
Altai, Ice Princess of
Altai mountains
Altai republic
Amur river
Anfissa (of Tyumen)
Angara river
Association of the Tambour see Doongyr
Babel, Isaak
Baikal, Lake
Baikal–Amur Railway
Baikalskoe
Baptists: in Komsomolsk-na-Amur
Baraba steppe
Barguzin ranges
Barnaul
Belovodye (promised land)
Berezovka river
Bering, Vitus Jonassen
Birobidzhan
Blagoveshchensk
Boris Godunov, Czar
Boris (of Komsomolsk-na-Amur)
Botkin, Doctor
Bratsk High Dam
Brezhnev, Leonid
Buddhism: and shamanism
in Buryatia and
Christian missionaries
burial tombs see kurgans
Buryat people
Buryatia
London Missionary Society
station in
Butugychag
California
Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia
Cementny Zavod (punishment camp)
Charlemagne, Emperor
Chechnya
Chekhov, Anton
China: river Amur border with
Russia merchants in
Khabarovsk; trade with
Russia
Chita
Civil War (Russian, 1919–20)
Clara (of Birobidzhan)
Clinton, William Jefferson
coal mining: at Vorkuta
collectivisation
Conrad, Joseph
cosmic consciousness
Cossacks: in Siberia sack
Sibir (1582); found Irkutsk
at Albazin in
Manchu service; found
Yakutsk
Cowie, Martha see Yuille, Robert
and Martha
Dalai Lama
Dalselmash factory
Dalstroy (agency)
Darwin, Charles
Decembrists
diamonds: in Sakha
Dikson
Diring Yuriakh
Dolgans (people)
Doongyr (Association of the Tambour)
Doroskova, Ag
rippina
Dostoevsky, Fedor: exile in Omsk
and cosmic
consciousness
drugs (narcotic)
Dudinka
Dukhobors (‘Spirit-wrestlers’)
Dzhurma, SS
Ehrenburg, Ilya
Elgen(women’s labour camp)
Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duchess
Entsy people
Evenk people
Fedor (Magadan Jew)
Feodosy, Archbishop of Omsk
Galina (curator, Museum of Siberian Culture)
Galina (Old Believer wife)
Garanin (Dalstroy official)
Genghis Khan
Ginzburg, Yevgenia
gold: in Kara; in Sakha
in Kolyma
Golden Horde (Mongol)
Goose Lake
Gorbachev, Mikhail
Gorno-Altaisk
Gulag: memories of; at
Vorkuta
graves; at Severobaikalsk
acceptance of; in
Kolyma see also
labour camps
Haroun al-Rashid, Caliph
Hegel, G. W. F.
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Herodotus
Herzen, Alexander
Hitler, Adolf: 1939 pact with Stalin
Horse river
Huns
Igarka
Igor (Clara’s son)
Indigirka
Innokent, St
Irkutsk
Irtysh river
Ivan IV (the Terrible), Czar
Ivolginsk
Ixodes tick
Japan: investments in Far East
Jews: settlement in Birobidzhan
John Chrysostom St
Kamchatka: volcanoes
Kara gold fields
Karakorum (state)
Kashketin (camp commandant)
katorga death camps
Katun river
Ket people
KGB
Khabarov, Yerofey P.
Khabarovsk
Khlysti (sect)
Khor river
Khrushchev, Nikita S.
Kipling, Rudyard
Kitezh, City of (legendary)
Kolchak, Admiral Alexander Vasilievich
Kolyma
Komsomolsk-na-Amur
Kozyrev, N. A.
Krasnoyarsk
Krupskaya, Nadezhda Lenin’s wife)
Kuchum, Khan
kulaks
Kunga-Boo (shaman)
kurgans (tombs)
Kuytun
Kuzbas basin
Kyzyl
labour camps see also Gulag
Lavrentiev, M. A.
Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett
lemmings
Lena river
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: statues
exile
in Shushenskoe
death
London Missionary Society: in
Novoselenginsk
mafia (Russian)
Magadan
mammoths
man, origins of
Manchu dynasty
Mandelstam, Osip
Mangazeya Marfa (circus artist)
Mastrov (river steamer)
Melkite Church
Memorial (organisation)
mica
Mine 29 (Vorkuta)
Minusinsk
Misha (of Dudinka)
missionaries
Mochanov, Yuri
Mongolia: and Tuva
Christian missionaries in
mosquitoes
Mukhanov, Peter
mummies
Muraviev-Amursky, Count
Nikolai Nikolaevich
Museum of Siberian Culture
Nansen, Fridtjof
Natasha (of Khabarovsk)
Nerchinsk silver-mines
Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689)
Nicholas I, Czar
Nicholas II, Czar: murdered with
family and
Rasputin sees mammoth
skeleton
Nikolai (Potalovo doctor)
Nivkhi tribesmen
Norilsk
Novoselenginsk
Novosibirsk
nuclear power
Ob river
Ob Sea
oil fields
Oimyakon
Old Believers
Olga, Grand Duchess
Olga (Yekaterinburg pilgrim)
Olkhon island (Lake Baikal)
Omsk
Orotukuan
paganism: among Yakuts
Paris Universal Exhibition (1900)
Pasternak, Boris
Pavlov (Dalstroy official)
Pazyryk culture
Pechora river
Pepeliaev, V.
perestroika
permafrost
Peter I (the Great), Czar
Pivan Pokrovskoe
pollution
Potalovo
Primoriye
Proctor, Richard Anthony
Pushkin, Alexander
Rasputin, Grigory
Rasputin, Masha (pop star)
Rasputin, Valentin
Rechnoi state farm, Omsk
religion: practice and worship
churches
and monasteries revival
along Yenisei
see also Buddhism
missionaries; Old Believers
paganism
Revnovo village
Rezanov, Nikolai
Roerich, Elena
Roerich, Nikolai
Russian Academy of Sciences
sable
Sakha republic
Sakhalin
Sakharov, Andrei
Samoyed people
Sasha (Birobidzhan friend of Igor)
Sasha (of Novosibirsk)
Sayan mountains
science
Scythians
Selenga river (and valley)
Semyenov, Grigory
serfdom: abolished (1861)
Sergei, Grand Duke
Sergei (circus artist)
Sergei (Old Believer)
Serpentinka
Severobaikalsk
Seward, William
Shakhovskaya, Varvara
Shalamov, Varlam
shamans and shamanism
Shamil (of Severobaikalsk)
Shelikhov, Grigory
Shelikhova, Natalya
Shturmovoi
Shushenskoe
Siberia: extent migrants and
settlers in oil-fields
secession proposals
name; mystique
native peoples as
place of exile
religious dissenters in
Sibir
silver mines
Skoptsi (sect)
Skovorodino
Sokol
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
Stalin, Josef: repressions and
persecutions
popular appeal
pact with Hitler (1939)
death
paranoia; exiled
in Turukhansk; empire
Stalina (Vadim’s wife)
Stallybrass, Edward and Sarah
Steller, Georg
Stepan (Entsy man)
Stolypin, Piotr
Stone Tunguska river
Stroganov family
Stundists (sect)
Sverdlov, Yakov
Svetlana (Krasnoyarsk schoolteacher)
taiga
‘taiga madness’
Tania (Yakut woman)
Tannu Ola
Tarbagatai
Tartars
Tayshet
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
Therese (Khabarovsk prostitute)
throat-singing
Timireva, Anna
Tobol river
Tobolsk
Tolbuzin, Aleksei
Tolstoy, Count Lev
Trakt road
Trans-Manchurian Railway Trans-Siberian Railway: towns;
slowness carries
migrants; replicated at
1900 Paris Exhibition
gauge; bypasses Tobolsk
building of
branches at Tayshet
character of trains
Transbaikal
Trubetskaya, Princess Yekaterina
tundra
Tura river
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Turukhansk
Tuva
Tyumen
Udachny
Uglich: bell from
Ulan Ude
Union of Sovereign Northern
Republics: proposed
Ural mountains: character
Urchan
Ussuri river
Ust-Ulagan
Vadim (traveller on Yenisei)
Valentina (of Dudinka)
Vasil (of Vorkuta)
Viktor (of Pokrovskoe)
Vladivostok
Volkonskaya, Princess Maria
Volodya (station-worker)
Vorkuta
Vorkuta river
Vorogovo
Wagner, Moritz
women: in Soviet prison camps
status in
Siberia
Yagodnoe
Yakimova, Rima
Yakut people
Yakutsk
Yakutsk Academy of Sciences
Yekaterinburg
Yeltsin, Boris
Yenisei river: size; travel on
headwaters; contamination
confluence at Kyzyl; at
Krasnoyarsk
Yeniseisk
Yermak (Cossack leader)
Yuille, Robert and Martha (nee Cowie)
Yulia (Clara’s daughter)
Yuri (geologist)
Zarinsk
Zaslavskaya, Tatyana
Zhigulin, Anatoly
Zhirinovsky, Vladimir
Zhukov, Marshal Georgi
Znamensky Monastery, Irkutsk
About the Author
COLIN THUBRON is the award-winning author of several volumes of travel writing and fiction. Among the Russians is the first of a trilogy of books about the Russian land mass that also includes The Lost Heart of Asia and In Siberia. Colin Thubron lives in London.