My birthday began in the tiny cabin in Myakit … Sherri presented me with a card and present. I had taken a tub of red caviar (salmon roe) with me from Magadan. So on the communal bench at Myakit my birthday breakfast was caviar on bread. I piled it on thick and ploughed in, while the locals opened the first beers of the day!
The main mission for my birthday was getting to a Gulag. Gulags were set up under Stalin’s regime to use political prisoners to mine the abundant gold and uranium deposits that had been discovered in the Kolyma region. The prisoners were treated appalingly, had to labour through winters of -50 C, slept in the most primitive of conditions, and not surprisingly, many died. When the needs of the state required more labour for the Gulags, the rate of political arrests was stepped up. A huge department was set up to administer the Kolyma Gulag system – Dalstroi. Magadan itself was built only in 1939 to serve as the port and logistics centre for the Dalstroi project. Into Magadan’s harbour went captive prisoners, and out came the valuable gold and uranium that was bought with prisoners lives.
The whole Dalstroi project was incredibly inhumane and estimates are that of the 3 million who went in, an incredible 700,000 people died – in the Kolyma Gulags alone (In the Soviet Union as a whole, up to 12 million people when though Stalin’s Gulags). When Stalin himself died in 1953, his successors, most of whom were appalled at Stalin’s barbarity, began closing down the Gulags. Most were closed in the 1950s, a few lingered on till the early 60s. Ultimately, any surviving mine sites were converted to towns, with paid labour doing the mining, under normal Soviet working conditions (actually they were paid up to 3 times what people made in Moscow, to encourage reluctant miners to move to such a remote region).
Our friends in Magadan had given us the GPS co-ordinates of a Gulag not too far from the main road. Generally information about Gulags in the region only comes by word of mouth. The local government in Magadan Region wants to move on from Dalstroi and the Gulag histories. A few locals who had set up tour businesses specialising in trips to Gulags have been shut down by local authorities. It’s a bit of a taboo subject. The handful of westerners who do make it to Magadan are usually either mad motorcyclists or geologists. Almost none take the time to seek out a Gulag. It was something that I had wanted to do last year, but had no location information. I didn’t know where to find a Gulag. They don’t have signs pointing to them. Most are down tracks that have hardly been used in 50 years. And now we had information about a Gulag and the condition of the track leading to it. The track was challenging in bits, but do-able by a loaded bike.
Sherri Jo knew the track to the Gulag would be tough for her, but for her as well as for me, a visit to a Gulag, the very reason everything exists in the Kolyma, was too much of a rarity – too much of a highlight to pass up.
Two hours down the Gulag track and we got there. Dneprovski. An abandoned tin mining Gulag, that had shut down in 1955.
Wild blueberries grew everywhere and made for a nice lunch.
The ride back was quicker. Sherri Jo was picking up the art of riding a loaded bike over this kind of terrain, and she listened to advice. She was handling most of the water crossing completely unaided now.
