Copyright: Magnus Londen
Excerpt from the book “Till Världens ände. Resor i Sibirien” (To the end of the world: Travels in Siberia.), published 1997 in Finland by Söderströms & C:o.
Translated from the Swedish by Jason O'Neill.



The Bitterness Prevails

It’s two o’clock in the morning and right now Vitali is happy. He projects image after image on to the wall. They’re pictures from Vitali’s other home. Each picture represents a memory for him, the memories of a life that will probably never return. Memories from the tundra.
    When the slide projector light is reflected in Vitali’s eyes, I notice that he is somewhere else entirely. Right now, he is at a biological station based on an island in northeastern Siberia. He is studying the fauna. He picks up one of the windbeaten flowers. He sees sunsets over the Arctic Sea. He wants to jump on to those floating iceblocks in the middle of summer.
    Four o’clock in the morning we go to bed, although we’ve only seen a fraction of Vitali’s memories. At six o’clock he wakes
me up again.   
    
We go outside and cross a desolate backyard and I realise how long a distance Vitali travelled during the night. The distance between an urban Russian backyard and the Arctic tundra simply cannot be measured in kilometres.
    This particular backyard is in Magadan in north-eastern Siberia.
    The houses here were built in 1986. We are now in the year 1995. In less than ten years the small roundabouts, climbing frames, toys, swings, concrete, streetlights, and telephone booths have been turned into rustheaps and grotesque caricatures of what they once used to be. Only glass splinters, nails, scrap iron, and heaps of tin cans remain where the children used to gather to play in the sandbox. The dirt, which is eternally ingrained, is everywhere, on the walls, the ground, and the abandoned telephone booth. The doors of the staircases and their ramshackle hinges lie on the ground. Large water pools and an ice-cold darkness awaits the visitor who climbs up the staircases. The elevators are out of order; there’s dog crap on the third floor, vomit on the seventh and foulmouthed speech on the tenth.  
    Perhaps backyards are the most honest features of a city. In the backyards there is no censorship, no prettified tourist milieus, no luxury restaurants. Backyards are just back yards and are therefore the perfect yardstick by which to gauge a city.
    Vitali’s backyard has revealed Magadan.
    We bob up and down in a rubber dinghy and pull in flounder after flounder. They lie low at the bottom of the ocean and bite instantly. To fish for flounder on a day like this is as about as difficult as picking strawberries at a pick-your-own farm. Initially, I’m afraid to touch the struggling fish. Vitali’s left hand grabs a big flounder which is still trying to find its way back to its right element, but it’s too late as Vitali’s left hand pulls out the hook and the flounder is thrown into the sack, where it kicks for a while until its death twitches subside. Then a new one is thrown into the sack where it kicks for a while, twitches, and goes through the same cycle.       
    I count the rubber dinghies out at sea and stop at seventy. We eat radishes and bread. It’s Midsummer’s Day and rays of sunlight are reflected in the water. It’s difficult to comprehend that it can be as hot in Siberia as in a sauna in central Finland.
    Six hours later when we walk back, the main straps on our backpacks cut into our backs like breadknives. We are carrying three unbelievably heavy sacks full of flounder, while flies tickle our nostrils and eyebrows fail to protect us from the sweat, which is pouring down in floods. My irritation is growing. ‘How did I get myself into this?’ I wonder. First Maria and I flew in from Alaska. We set up a meeting with our travelmate Natasha in Magadan. A friend of a friend arranged for us to live with Vitali and his wife. The first evening consisted of the fantastic pictures from the tundra while the first morning consisted of the flounder. All of which is fine.  But the sacks and the scorching sun are too much and the distance to our second bus connection is too long. I hate the flounder, sun, and the sweat. Vitali doesn’t utter so much as a whisper until he turns around and says to me cheerfully: ‘And now Magnus thinks I’m crazy. ‘
    I go into spasms of laughter. I can’t stop. I drop all my bags and collapse on to the road.
    Vitali also sits down. He starts to roar with laughter. We’ve been bobbing up and down in the Sea of Okhotsk, pulling up flounder, while talking in an unusual mixture of Russian and English about the war in Chechnya. Serious and matter-of-fact political chit-chat in other words. That is until Vitali ponders his next exchange for twenty minutes, searches his memory for the right words in English, prepares himself and delivers the famous lines that relieve the tension.    
    There’s something about those words, which still makes me happy.
    Vitali and his wife Natalia are both biologists and researchers who love their jobs. They have dedicated their lives to exploring the tundra, examining environmental damage and understanding this peculiar ecosystem. They have spent all their summers at research stations on the Wrangel Island and the village of Pevek in North-eastern Siberia. Scientific work and research are obvious areas where cuts can be made in a Russia strapped for cash. The Station on Wrangel is closed and the one in Pevek will be closed in the autumn. Now Vitali and Natalia are forced to explore the tundraless tundra, i.e. an office in Magadan. They also have an apartment and kids in Magadan, but their real life lies in the tundra up north.  
    ’I actually don’t know what we’re going to do,’ says Vitali.
    There’s a story about a prominent Russian scientist who moved from the Russian Far East to Japan. His parting words to his colleagues were:
    ’If you get the chance, leave the country! There won’t be any science in Russia for a long time.’
    Frying smells spread out over the entire apartment. The Flounder aren’t jumping any longer as now they’re only sizzling in cooking fat. Natalia struggles gamely. She is constantly able to steal the free seconds required to slice the salad, tomatoes and cucumber. She is cooking buckwheat and sweating. She keeps her dark hair short and is perhaps thirty-five, but looks as if she’s fifty. Her laughter is cheerful, but her face bears the kind of tiredness that won’t fade after a night’s sleep. Her face shouldn’t be bearing wrinkles, but the wrinkles are there in the form of furrows traversing her face.       
    Maria, Natasha, and I pondered the wrinkles, and whether they were trying to tell us something. For you see Magadan isn’t just any Russian city.
    Magadan is Russia’s Auschwitz.
    ’Work is honorable, glorious, valiant, and heroic’ was the inscription on the gate to the camp, which the Russian author Varlam Shalamov walked through some fifty years ago. I read his book Kolyma Tales (1978) and feel the waves of dread come over me. The dread emanates from inside and embraces my body and soul in an iron grip that won’t give way. I start to feel nauseous and want to run away. Even if it’s only letters and sentences in a book or precisely because of that I can’t escape this feeling.
    Outside I hear the familiar strains of the Hare Krishna mantra. Magadanians stare with amused delight at the remarkable figures passing by, skipping and singing. ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare...’
    Shalamov writes in an unbearably slow tempo about his seventeen years as a convict in the most evil creation of the Soviet State, i.e., The Kolyma labour camp. Kolyma is the name of the river that flows across North-eastern Siberia, but also the designation of the entire region. Magadan is the capital of Kolyma. 
    At the end of the 1920s, gold mines were established in Kolyma. In the beginning this was achieved with a voluntary workforce until the Soviet state began to realise the immense extent of the riches in the region and utilised the one resource there was no shortage of in Russia; namely people.
    It was around the same time that Stalin’s campaign against the unruly landowners and farmers, who didn’t want to see their holdings collectivised, the so-called kulaks, was initiated. In the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin’s pogroms started and hundreds of thousands of ’Trotskyites’ were sent east to what was known as the Gulag Archipelago (Gulag is an acronym and stands for Glavnoje upravlenije ispravitelno-trudovych lagerej, i.e. Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps). ’Archipelago’ due to the fact that the camps, which were spread over the entire Siberian region, were seen as islands that were cut off from everyday life. The convicts called the outside world ’ the mainland’.  
      
‘Trotskyites’ was a general term for people who were convicted in accordance with article 58 of the Soviet penal code- for example those who were sentenced for ’anti-Soviet agitation’, ’admiration for the West’ or ’counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activity’. The term ’ Trotskyite’ comes from the name of Stalin’s chief rival in the power struggle after Stalin’s death, i.e. Lev Trotsky. That a minute fraction of the defendants were actually Trotskyites was of little consequence. Stalin only needed a pretext to condemn his own citizens to Hell.
    A well-known story relates how the innocent, those who by chance, fate or perhaps the accusations of a friend, people who hadn’t said a word about the rotten Soviet state, were condemned to ten years of hard labour. Those who actively opposed the Soviet state, or in other words criticised Stalin in public, could look forward to twenty years in Siberia, and in all probability a bullet in the head once their bodies could no longer bear the work in the mines.      
    In order to get the goldmines going a large number of ordinary criminals were also sent to Kolyma. They were always treated better than the ’political’ convicts and placed higher in the camp hierarchy than those who were convicted in accordance with Article 58.
    Varlam Shalamov’s muted stories depict everyday camp life. They’re about small things, survival and people who have lost everything. ‘All human emotions compassion, longing for fame, honesty
melted from our bodies during their long fasts,’ writes Shalamov in his book.
    
I had little warmth. Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for
bitterness. What remained with me till the very end? Bitterness. And I expected this
bitterness to stay with me till death. But death, just recently so near,
began to ease away little by little. Death was replaced not by life, but by
semiconsciousness, an existence which had no formula and could not be called
life.
    
It’s like a main thread running throughout the book. The bitterness.  As a reader one tries to search for the good, anything that would show that man isn’t wholly evil. But it doesn’t really make an appearance. This is perhaps why the book is so disturbing; there’s nothing to hold on to until it’s finished. There’s no friendship, no goodness, no love, not even that which we call ‘humanity’, only cruelty. That’s exactly how it is. In all its understatedness it’s a cruel book, cruel because it shows us how evil humans can be.
    One must read this book in order to comprehend the dread that the word ’Kolyma’ evokes in a Russian.   
    Natalia never eats with the rest of the family and us. She cooks and serves the food as well as washes the dishes. But we never see her eat. We try to alter this, but temporary guests cannot upset an age-old system.
    She toils for her two children, a shy teenaged boy and a daughter about the age of seven, who is the sweetest girl in Magadan. Anastacia’s laughter rings in our ears, she sings for us and teases us because we speak such poor Russian. She also draws pictures that she gives to us as gifts and wants to sleep in the same room as us. She blows soap bubbles on the balcony and runs to school with her rucksack on her back, runs home again and continues her infectious miniature riot. Her joy of living never seems to stop.
    Every chance she gets Natalia rushes off to her garden patch outside the city. She grows vegetables so that the children will receive the right vitamins. She can disappear at midnight and come home when Vitali, the kids and we have slept for a few hours. When we get up, she’s in full swing, brewing tea for the whole family, doing the laundry, and washing the dishes.
    But when she thinks that we’re not looking she goes for a cigarette break on the balcony. When she blows out the smoke she is also exhuming stress, anxiety and exhaustion. The sighs can be heard in the entire apartment, you can hear that they come from somewhere deep inside, somewhere far too deep inside her.
    Maria and Natalia become good friends. They go off on long walks through Magadan’s ’cultural’ park, the park where a statue of Stalin used to point towards the riches in the Kolyma mines. Natalia talks of yearning for her beloved research stations and her longing for her parents. But what’s the point in fantasising? The shortage of money crushes all her dreams. Today it costs the equivalent of six whole monthly salaries to fly to her parents in central Siberia. At the same time the food only gets more expensive.  
    The Magadan area has probably the most expensive food in the whole of Russia. When the centralised system collapsed there were no civil servants left in the realm to ensure that far-flung places such as Magadan were supplied with food. Instead the Magadanians buy American chicken, American macaroni and American soft drinks. The goods have to be transported by large cold storage ships across the sea from Alaska and are subject to American price levels as well as a generous surplus charge for the long transport distance.     
    Natalia sits with us as we eat the flounder, but doesn’t set a place for herself of course. It’s then that her wrinkles start to speak and tell the story of Magadan.
    ‘It wasn’t until 1988 that Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Jevgenija Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind were published in Magadan. When I read them I suffered the worst shock of my life. I bought more than ten copies of the books and sent them to all my friends,’ she says to us.
    The author Jevgenija Ginsburg was convicted as a ’Trotskyite’ and sent to the Kolyma labour camp, evidently because she refused to inform on a colleague who was accused of alleged anti-state activity. Ginzburg’s husband was executed during the most terrible year in Kolyma in 1937.
    Natalia had lived in Magadan for a long time, but had never realised how cruelly Kolyma had treated its victims. The lie of the system was impenetrable, sure there were rumours, but who wanted to believe that they lived in an area where approximately three million people, most of them Soviet citizens, had lost their lives. Who would want to believe that they were living on the site of a slave camp, gold mine and what amounted to a mass grave? This is what I get to hear as we stroll through the streets of Magadan with Natalia and Vitali.    
    ‘Look at this place. It’s only twenty metres from the house we live in. This used to be a women’s camp,’ she continues.
    I feel the bitterness, which Shalamov writes about in Natalia’s voice.
    The only thing that remains today is tarmac, a newly built and dilapidated concrete building, and the street where the Hare Krishnas walk past us singing.
    We drive down to the docks and the Bay of Nagaev and look at the scrap and rust. The reddish brown colour from more than a hundred fishing vessels has slowly flaked on to dry land, stinging one’s eyes. All the chimneys bear the hammer and sickle. The slaveships from Vanino and Vladivostok came here. These were slaveships with thousands of convicts, some of them alive and some dead on arrival. Sovietologist Robert Conquest talks of mutinies on board that were quelled by prison warders who sprayed ice cold water on to the lower decks. By the time the vessels arrived all the prisoners had frozen to death. This was winter in Kolyma.        
    
    Kolyma, Kolyma
    Beautiful planet:
    Twelve months winter,
    The rest is summer
     
This classic rhyme from the era of the camps still lives on today. It’s of course easy to assert that it’s exaggerated and that the short summer in Kolyma is hot and sunny, but in actuality Kolyma was an arctic prison, which effectively prevented any attempts at escape. When it was fifty or sometimes even minus sixty degrees Celsius, the camp commanders would decide that it was too cold to work in the goldmines so the convicts were allowed to stay inside instead. Inside there was a heating stove that met the needs of hundreds of prisoners, but seldom any firewood for it. The weak, those who couldn’t push their way towards the last remnants of heat from the stove, just froze and were carried away in the morning.   
    Shalamov writes that he woke up with his hair frozen to his bunk.
    Today the Bay of Nagaev consists of wooden barracks constructed from driftwood and left over lumber from refuse dumps. The buildings tilt and look tired; fencings are short of planks, while some houses have simply fallen down. Vitali tell us that those who lived by the docks were privileged.
    ‘They could choose the women they wanted when the slaveships arrived. It was something that also benefited the slaves. Anything was better than ending up in the mines,’ he says.
    
Those who lived in the wooden barracks at the time were usually former convicts who had served a ten or fifteen year sentence in the ’camps’ and now lived as ’free’ men in Magadan. There was no real freedom as the convicts were seldom allowed to leave the town. When Shalamov had served his first sentence he was interned for a month with a ration consisting of 300 grams of bread a day. He was accused of harbouring sympathies for the Nazi offensive against the Soviet Union.    
    ’I haven’t read a newspaper in six years and don’t know what offensive you’re talking about,’ replied Shalamov.
    In addition to this Shalamov had said that the Russian author and Nobel prizewinner Ivan Bunin was a great author.
    ‘Certainly, he’s a Great Russian author. Can I be sentenced for saying that?’ a demoralised Shalamov wonders.
    ‘Yes, you can. You’re an emigrant and an enemy,’ they reply.
    In June 1942 Shalamov was sentenced to an additional ten-year sentence with the help of evidence from four ’witnesses’.
    It was scant consolation for Shalamov that the ten-year sentence was an indirect admission of his innocence. The scale of sentencing was such in the harsh years of the 1930s.  We meet a woman in her forties in the Nagaev Bay. She has soft features and is wearing a dress with a flowery pattern as well as black slippers. She is carrying in coal and water from the street.
    ‘Once a week the municipal cars provide us with coal. We get water everyday,’ she explains to me.
    In our eyes the residential area looks like a slum, but Tania doesn’t complain. She’s lived here all her life. It’s her home. Besides, she says and smiles, I’d never be eligible to get an apartment in the high-rises.
    ‘The authorities say that I can’t get an apartment, because I’ve already got a house, she says,’ and smirks slightly.
    I look at her calm face. She probably knows what happened outside her house, she knows that the bones underneath her house are slowly decomposing. She also knows that the town she lives in was, to use an oft-used phrase, ’built on skeletons’. However, she also knows that the coal arrives once a week and the water every day. Who wouldn’t rather think of that? Life must prevail.
    Magadan was stricken with a heavy disease at the end of the 1980s. The disease was known as the Truth. The Truth spread over the entire town and all the party faithfuls, civil servants, scientists, everyone came down with it. The Truth spread and no one talked of anything else.  
    In a newspaper office we meet one of the first victims of the Truth. Editor-in-chief Antonia Lukina shows what her paper looked like at the end of the 80s. There are no features, news items or colourful sports pictures. What it does look like is meaningless lists of names.   
    ‘The victims of Kolyma, ‘she says grimly.
    In each issue of the newspaper the interminable list continues. Name, birthplace, date of birth, name, birthplace, date of birth, ad infinitum. The unease creeps up on me again, spreads and forces me to reflect on the list. I don’t really want to, everything would be much easier if I didn’t know, but I have to look. The small letters and the characteristically lousy Russian newsprint expose the lists and the gruesome truth of Kolyma. Behind each name lies the story of a Shalamov or Ginzburg. Or even the story of General Michael Solomon who was one day suddenly picked up by his compatriots and sent to Kolyma. He returned after seventeen years. Or the German Elinor Lippman who was smitten with the ’high idealism’ which characterised socialism, and set off for Moscow in order to experience it. One day she was arrested, sentenced, and sent to a women’s camp in Magadan. When she came home after eleven years she still believed in socialism but wrote that ’The Soviet Union is a rape of that ideology’
    There are approximately three million fates in Kolyma that we will never hear about. The only thing left for the relatives is a name on a list.  
    And that’s just the list for Kolyma. Somewhere perhaps an equivalent Gulag list is being drawn up for the camps around Belamoro-Baltiysky canal, i.e. the White Sea-Baltic Sea canal, the camps in Yakutia and western Siberia that Solhenitsyn wrote so extensively about. This is a list that retains ten or fifteen or even twenty million names. No one knows exactly how many victims were slaughtered up until Stalin’s death in 1953.
    Lukina is the chief editor of the largest newspaper in Magadan. She looks deep into our eyes as she says that she didn’t know and didn’t realise what had happened in Kolyma. She tells us of her childhood years in the countryside and how she picked mushrooms in the summertime.
    ‘We found skeletons in the forests, but never understood what they were. Now I understand…’ she says.
    But what does the word understand mean? Do I understand that three million people have died once I’ve seen the list? Does the editor-in-chief understand since she’s published the names of the victims? Does even Shalamov understand what he sees as he gazes upon the mass graves:

’... Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which
were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody
and eyes burning with a hungry gleam’?
    
The town was visited by a handful of brave and curious American tourists in the summer of 1992 when the air route from Anchorage, Alaska to Magadan began its service. Popular souvenirs were real skulls from Kolyma sculpted into ashtrays, bracelets or hood ornaments for motorcycles. Did the tourists really know what they were buying?
    Probably not. No one can understand. There may or may not be a truth, but no one will be able to understand three million corpses. No one can understand the extent of this systematic cruelty. Great men of state and brilliant thinkers are fond of saying that ’we must learn from history and never let this happen again.’    
    This must be the biggest and most accepted lie in the history of humanity.
    It goes on all the time, in new places, whether it’s China or Turkey, nonetheless it continues. When the international community exhumes mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and shocked observers say that this should never be repeated, we shake our heads in an outraged manner and say that ’no, this should never be allowed to happen again.’ We wish fervently that humanity has learnt its lesson and that it was just a horrible mistake, an isolated occurrence.
    But how many isolated occurrences are needed for it to no longer be seen as an isolated occurrence?
    I stuff a copy of the list in my bag.    
    After Stalin’s death in 1953 the camps were gradually closed down and Magadan was transformed into an elite town for geologists, biologists and other scientists. The inhabitants of the town already possessed an exceptionally high level of education as only a fraction of the former slaves, who were often leading intellectuals, were allowed to leave Magadan despite having served their sentences. Later the authorities tried to lure the top scientists in the country with promises of long vacations and big salaries. They succeeded and it became a privilege to come to Magadan and carry out research. Magadan was a completely enclosed town of scientists until 1987; it looked as if time would sweep away the traces of the dreaded camps. I ask Lukina if it’s true that the town is now being emptied of inhabitants.
    She ponders the question for a while, looks suspiciously towards the doorway, rises, and closes the door. Then she leans over us and says with a low voice:
    ‘No, not at all, Why would anyone want to leave Magadan?’
    ‘I think Magadan should become an enclosed city again. Now terrorists are flooding in, causing unrest in the city. It’s the Chechens,’ she hisses.
    She makes us feel uneasy. Why is everything in Magadan tinged with dread? There’s just no way of getting around it. In the next room there’s a birthday party. Someone is celebrating their birthday and champagne is being offered.  
    We share a polite toast but want to leave. I see that these middle-aged ’journalists’ have been the instruments of a lie. The Magadanians lived in an information vacuum, in which only rumours, underground publications and whispers relayed the stories from the camps. When the Truth finally hit Magadan at the end of the 1980s, the ’journalists’ were quick to jump on the bandwagon and in a remarkable about-face aligned themselves with the people and demanded complete disclosure. It’s easy to publish the names of the victims of Kolyma as long as one gets to keep one’s old job.
    
    
‘Why are you interested in the Kolyma prison camps? It’s not news anymore, find something else to write about,’ one of them says in an accusatory and annoyed tone.
    It seems strange to have to justify interest in Kolyma, but the reason is plain enough, none of these journalists really care about Kolyma. They care more about the sausages, champagne, and the official company car. After half an hour we make our excuses and slowly start to approach the front door. A corpulent and ashen man grabs my arm and says:
    ’There’s a lot about the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland which you know nothing about.’
    He insists on driving us where we want, which he also proceeds to do. During the car journey he only talks of how great things were when Magadan was an enclosed city and no one knew anything about the outside world. Not even Natasha who is a master of social skills bothers to keep up appearances, opting only to mumble in reply. As we step out of the car, the man grabs my arm again and says:
    ’I’m not a Communist.’    
    There’s a big market square in the centre of Magadan with dense cobblestones placed next to each other in long rows. Lenin winks at us. Behind Lenin there’s a grand and impressive high rise built of concrete. There are only empty, black, gaping holes where there once used to be windows. Where paint should be, there is only the cold greyness of the concrete. Where doors should be, there is only emptiness. The building is only a shell, a monstrous monument slap dash in the centre of Magadan. The shell was to be the new party headquarters in the beginning of the 1990s. But time ran out.
    I walk towards the fence that encompasses the shell and try to search for signs of life. Within the perimeter of the fence there are only abandoned wheelbarrows, old cement mixers, and a left behind crane. The wind howls through the planks. Nothing has happened here for years. I wonder about the last days of work here. Did the workers know that the door they were installing would be the last one? Did they know that the cement they were mixing would never be used? Did they know that their cigarette break would be the last one on that construction site? I only see the answer when I walk back towards Lenin. Someone has hung up a sign that says, ’No Entry’.   
    On another street we see a stylish brick house painted yellow. Maybe it’s on ’Proletariat street’ or ’Lenin street’ or ’Soviet street’, I don’t know. That’s how the streets are named here, confirming only that change comes slowly in Magadan. Nowadays, the house is a welfare office. Nothing indicates that there’s anything peculiar with the corridors, there’s the obligatory map on each floor and each door boasts a discrete nameplate. A cleaning lady sweeps the dust from one end of the corridor to the other; there are no chairs to sit on. Everything as it should be.
    But behind these doors, and perhaps even behind that door to the right, death sentences were handed down, sentenced were lengthened and hope discarded for despair.  Previously, the NKVD (The Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs) kept its main office for the Kolyma region in this building. Here we meet Galina, a trained geologist, although at the moment working as a social worker. She is talking with delight about the new computers that have arrived. The same euphoria is extended to the new photocopiers. But people’s fates have been decided in her room. How many death sentences have been handed down? Was it here that Shalamov received his additional time?
    
Galina does know where she works. But she also knows that she’s just received a new computer. And who wouldn’t rather think about that. Life must prevail. Life must go on.
    On the street outside the building there’s a fat lady with an almost equally fat poodle in tow. Suddenly the poodle disappears. It has fallen into a hole in the ground. The Lady and we shriek hysterically, but can only see darkness as we peer into the hole. Finally, a man comes along and jumps down into the hole and disappears into the darkness. Soon we can make out his arm, as a dizzy but uninjured poodle is handed over.     
    No one around us seems to care.
    Shouldn’t the hole be covered up, we wonder, but the poodle lady only answers with an indifferent shrug? No one else responds at all.
    There’s a museum about the labour camps in Magadan. A short man with a low voice gives us the tour. His speech rhythms reveal nothing of his emotions, as he rattles off a litany of facts that he’s recited many times before:
     In order to organise the gold mines and their administration, the governmental body Dalstroy was established. Dalstroy was responsible for the running of the entire region of 2.3 million square kilometres. This organisation carried out all the administrative tasks, such as the setting up of the camps and the extraction of ore, as well as the distribution of food etc. Dalstroy was essentially a state within a state, which Kolyma controlled with an iron hand. There were more than 140 camps in the Kolyma region. At its height there were more than 200, 000 slaves in Kolyma. But the turnover was considerable. Some only managed to hold out for a winter. New ones came to replace them.’
    He shows us blurry photographs and captions containing more facts. The matter-of-factness and the sterile attitude to what happened in Kolyma strike us. We see no feelings or empathy, only facts and figures, and dates of execution. This is a bureaucratic settlement with the past.
    We ask if there might not be survivors, someone we could meet. The man looks worried and worn out. There are two persons who have agreed to meet academics and journalists, but it’s not clear whether they have the strength left to do that any longer. He promises to call them and when we talk to him a few days later, he says that one of them is dying.
    The other one doesn’t want to tell his story to outsiders any longer. He has done it far too many times already. First he had to keep quiet for fifty years until everyone suddenly wanted to talk to him. Now he wants to spend his last days in solitude.
    We all feel bad. The anxiety, which is the main characteristic of Magadan, suppresses everything else. The leap from a picturesque and prosperous Alaska to this realm of death is just too much. We all try to suppress the anxiety in our own individual ways. Maria cries and wants to be left alone. I want to cry, but I keep up a stiff upper lip so as to not further dampen the mood. Natasha conceals her anxiety by being exaggeratedly social and in a state of constant overdrive. We all keep to ourselves for a day. But none of us manages to displace the anxiety.
    The flounder we prepare is burnt to a crisp.
    
    Copyright: Magnus Londen
    Excerpt from the book “Till Världens ände. Resor i Sibirien” (To the end of the world: Travels in Siberia.), published 1997 in Finland by Söderströms & C:o.