Sibir (39 page)

Our pilot decided that Magadan weather was acceptable, and we broke through low clouds into a wide, sparsely wooded valley ringed with snow-dusted mountains. A large airport lay below us, but there was no city anywhere in sight.

We were met by a reception committee of stylishly dressed gentlemen who approached us, under the eyes of television cameramen and press photographers, almost as tentatively as they might have approached a visiting delegation from outer space. Our arrival was clearly a landmark in Magadan history. Our hosts seemed distinctly uneasy as we descended the ramp. They shied nervously away from John deVisser, who was wearing a bright
blue, highly ornamented knee-length parka with wolfskin trim, and a knitted blue and white French Canadian toque. They looked as if they were not quite sure whether or not he might open his red-bearded face and snap at them. With obvious relief they saw Yura, whom they knew. That imperturbable Chukchee gentleman took charge and we were all formally introduced, then escorted to a press conference in the airport building where I helped to ease the tension a little by giving a radio interview in which I confessed that the only things I really knew about Magadan were that it was reputed to have the best beer and the most gorgeous women in all Russia.

The city was forty miles away. We drove to it in a convoy of Volgas along a paved road which is the first lap of an all-weather highway leading into the interior through the Kolyma mountains and terminating at Yakutsk. I was accompanied by the Director of Culture for the Magadan District – shy, slight, youngish Nikolai Andreivich Ponomarenko, who understood English fairly well but was hesitant to speak it. Through an interpreter he told me all Magadan was waiting for us, and that my books had been sold out in the local stores. It was the kind of remark calculated to warm an author’s heart.

Our first view of Magadan was stunning. The road took us seaward down a broad valley with great, bleak peaks looming on both sides of us, then suddenly spilled over the lip of a pass to reveal the city almost filling a mountain-ringed amphitheatre below us.

I don’t quite know what I had been expecting – perhaps something like Yakutsk, which is a city of comparable size – but Magadan was unlike any northern city I had ever seen. The highway swooped down to become a broad tree-lined boulevard running between rows of handsome white apartment blocks and office buildings. Some of the architecture may have been a bit ornate, but the impression was of a clean, modern, and handsome city that had been designed, planned, and executed by people of imagination and taste. As in Leningrad, there were no
towering skyscrapers and no disfiguring industrial or commercial edifices. The city almost filled its bowl, and new buildings marched neatly up the slopes on all except the seaward side, where lay the harbour and Magadan Bay.

We were taken to the Central Hotel and given a luxury suite boasting television, a refrigerator full of beer, a cabinet full of cutlery and dishes, and a bathroom containing the most extraordinary tub. It was a product of one of Khrushchev’s early attempts to rationalize consumer goods production so there would be more for all. The thing was about four feet long and built step-fashion in two levels, one of them eight inches above the other. A contortionist or a five-year-old might have been able to take a bath in it. The sight of John trying to manoeuvre his bulk into its inhuman confines was a spectacle to rouse pity in the hardest heart.

While John agonized in the tub, I went to the window and looked out over the city, watching the lights come on. It was difficult to believe that in 1930 there had been nothing in this valley except scrub taiga and a few wild reindeer.

Magadan lies at about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, but has to endure a much more rigorous climate. Until the beginning of the 1930s the entire region was a virtually unexplored subarctic wilderness, inhabited by Evenk reindeer herders concentrated near the coast, some Yakut in the mountainous interior, and by a few thousand Old Russians, most of them living in little fishing villages on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk.

These Old Russians were mostly descendants of a Cossack wave which reached the region in the early eighteenth century. However, as early as 1649 one small group of these incredibly intrepid pioneers, probably impelled to it by a healthy fear of falling into the hands of the Imperial authorities, established a tiny community in the heart of an almost impenetrable mountain massif six hundred miles northwest of Magadan. There they lived in
almost complete isolation until well into the twentieth century. Markovo, as their village was called, still exists. Its older people still speak archaic Russian and cling to the Cossack customs of their ancestors. However, Markovo has now become the centre of a big collective farm for reindeer and fur breeding.

For Markovo, as for the entire region, the touchstone for change was gold. Gold was first discovered (or at least first became known) in the region in the middle 1920s, when a few of the wandering prospectors known as “the possessed” began panning small amounts of dust in some of the river valleys. They sold their gold, or traded it, to foreign vessels, mostly Japanese, which occasionally visited the fishing village of Ola just north of Magadan. When word of what was happening reached Moscow, which was then desperate for gold, an attempt was made to control or stop the trade, but without notable success. In 1929 a young Leningrad geologist (many of the most famous Russian geologists seem to have come from Leningrad) named Yuri Bilibin, was sent to Ola to see what was going on. Bilibin was nearly murdered by the possessed, who looked on him as an interloper, which, of course, he was. However, he managed to send a three-man party into the interior, and at a place called Susaman on the Nurv River these men found Eldorado. Gold in the river sands assayed as high as two hundred grams per cubic yard. Nearby was a quartz reef, ten miles long, whose gold content was twice as high as that of any reef previously discovered in the
U.S.S.R.

The rush was on, but it was now rigidly controlled. The possessed were driven out and the entire region became the concession of a newly formed trust known as Dalstroy. This name was to bring terror to many Russians. Given an absolutely free hand to produce the vitally needed gold, Dalstroy operated in a completely ruthless manner. When it needed labour – and it needed masses of labour – it took over many of the prisoners who, for one reason or another, had been sentenced to terms in
corrective labour camps all over the Soviet Union. Trainloads of these unfortunates rolled eastward in a manner reminiscent of the great flow of exiles into Siberia in Tsarist days.

In the beautiful natural bowl behind Magadan Bay a wooden town began to rise. Many of its buildings were prison barracks. From these barracks the prisoners were dispatched into the interior to work the placer beds that were being discovered by the scores. Dalstroy was not a notably efficient organization. Food often failed to reach the distant camps; winter clothing failed to arrive. Disease swept the barracks. Death took a heavy price for the gold that was being gathered.

Nobody in Siberia could give me an estimate of how many people died. “It is impossible to know,” a friend told me. “Probably Moscow itself never knew. What is certain is that thousands escaped the camps and blended into the Old Russian populations in the interior. And when the camps were closed and the inmates offered the chance to return home, a very large number decided to stay on in Siberia where opportunities were good … and authority not so strong. I know this is so. I was one of those who chose to stay.”

In 1940 the population of Magadan was only nine thousand and it was a squalid wooden mining town. After the war ended and even before Stalin’s grip was broken by death, the place had already begun to change. It had been realized that the productivity of prison labour was so low, and the costs so high, that it did not pay to use it. By 1950 the barracks were no longer occupied. Within a few years they had been torn down and now, where they once stood, white and gleaming apartment blocks march up the hill slopes of a different city. The new Magadan does not like to remember the dark days of its past. Those days
are
past, and the citizens believe they will never return again.

Many of the older people in Magadan today went there as prisoners. These men, and women, have a singular
quality about them, they have a greater hunger for freedom and a stronger desire to build a new world even than do the young immigrants who now far outnumber them. Perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn between them and the original English settlers of Australia who, too, were mostly prisoners, “criminals” according to the mores of their times. In both cases injustice and adversity produced a people of singular resilience – and intractibility. The Australian character was deeply influenced by its prisoner-pioneers and the same is true of Magadan. This new city so far from Moscow, facing east toward a bright and trackless ocean rather than west into the dark tunnel of human history, has the feel of a community which is becoming an independent entity, a city state in the making. By this I do not suggest that it is rebellious or that it wishes to separate itself from the main body of the Soviet Union. It simply feels itself to be different, and I suspect the differences which develop in Magadan will one day make themselves felt all the way west across the Ural Mountains into European Russia.

T
HE DECISION
to receive us in Magadan must have resulted in some hectic conferences about what to do with us when we arrived; meetings during which the communist instinct for organizing was given full rein.

The entire city had been alerted to our arrival by television, radio, and the press; and apparently every institution, with the possible exception of the local office of the
KGB
, had demanded a visit from us. For two days our convoy of cars shot up and down the broad avenues of the city with the frenetic impetuosity of a Mack Sennett comedy film. Zip – we would drive a block at fifty miles an hour, pile out, race into a school, library, Palace of Culture, Institute for Northern Science, newspaper office or … you name it … shake a score of hands, stare dazedly into masses of smiling faces, tour the building, listen to enthusiastic expositions of what was going on, dash out again, pile into the cars, and roar a few hundred yards to the next encounter.

Information rained upon us in a torrent and my absorptive faculties soon became saturated. Before noon of the first day I was longing to return to the easy-going pace of Yakutsk. By mid-afternoon I was in a state of mild shock. During one of the few moments of relative peace (as we shot from the School of Music to the Palace of Sport, which were blessedly separated by at least seven
blocks) I broke down and begged Nikolai Ponomarenko for mercy. He smiled sympathetically.

“It was the same when Yuri Gagarin came here. He said it was worse for him, a thousand times, than going into space. I am really sorry, but that is the way Magadanians are. If we miss one single place, the people there will never forgive us – particularly they won’t forgive me. And you can’t believe how difficult our people get when they have a grievance.” He sighed so feelingly that I decided, for his sake, to endure.

Being a kindly man, I do not intend to subject my readers to the Magadan Ordeal by attempting to detail all I saw and heard. Suffice it to say that Magadan is, despite the triple threats of perma-frost, seismic disturbances, and hurricane gales, as pleasant a city as any I have visited. It offers its people the best of everything in both the material and cultural realms. It lacks many of the major disadvantages of modern cities in that it is beautifully sited, spacious, relatively quiet, and free of obvious pollution. All in all I think it would be a good city in which to live – for anyone who likes cities and who can tolerate living amongst a people whose energy quotient has to be as close as makes no difference to the maximum reading. As with most Soviet northern cities, it is a young people’s community. The lone statistic which I shall record is that the average age in Magadan (excluding people under eighteen years of age) is twenty-nine.

We took many of our meals at a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. Rather pretentiously furnished in chrome and plastic modern, it was big and spacious
and it provided almost instant service
! I know of no other restaurant in the Soviet Union which can make this claim. Furthermore the food was good. There was only one drawback. The place boasted a jukebox, a multicoloured monster almost identical to its North American sisters. Made in Poland, it even had an English language name emblazoned on its glittering belly –
High-fie
.
However, it was not the menace it appeared. The volume control was always turned down low, and when its muted noises (mostly Russian pop songs, but some French ones, too) bothered a diner, he simply pulled out the power plug. Magadanians brook no nonsense from machines.

We were having lunch here one day with a mixed crowd of writers, journalists, and odd sods when someone casually mentioned that the Soviet Union had simultaneously lofted three manned space ships. Now I am not a wild aficionado of the space age, but I was curious and wanted details. To my surprise nobody else at the table seemed the least bit interested. Nobody proposed toasts to “our brave boys in space.” My requests for more information were either ignored or given casual answers. Finally I turned to a sandy-moustached young man who was, I think, a professor at the local university, and asked him to explain this strange lack of interest in his country’s most recent space spectacular.

“Don’t you care what’s happening up there? Or is something wrong with the flight that you don’t want to talk about?”