Original subtitles

It's minus 55 Celsius outside, and this is Kalima. A land as beautiful as it

is harsh, with a terrible past and a complicated present.

For many years, Kalima was the citadel of Stalin's repressions, one of the most

horrifying periods in Russian history.

About a million prisoners went through this place, even though a lot of them

didn't commit.

Tens of thousands didn't come back home. Hundreds of thousands did, but with

broken bodies and lives.

Down here, Gulag's prisoners mined for gold, tin, uranium, and other valuable

resources. They also built the 2,000-kilometer-long Kalima Highway, one

of Russia's toughest and most dangerous highways.

We're now taking the Kalima Highway from Magadan to Yakutsk. On our journey,

we'll talk to people who live here.

The episode you're about to watch has two goals.

First one, to tell some and to remind to others about the horror our country went

through. Second one, to show that our planet has seemingly uninhabitable

places, but even in those places people can adapt, live, and find happiness.

I hope you're watching this indoors.

Let's go!

A young girl just out of school found a job selling ice cream.

She met some old classmates in the park with her ice cream cart.

And, happy to see her friends, she gave everyone a free ice cream, thinking she

would cover it later as she turns the day's earnings in.

And that evening she arrives at the warehouse to leave the product, but

before she has the chance to cover the free ice cream that she gave to her

classmates, The cart is getting sealed up, and she is accused of

embezzlement, and they sent her to Kolyma.

And this is a very well-documented story.

This is just one tiny episode.

And she wasn't even charged with any political crimes, just run-of-the-mill

felony. And they sent her to a camp on felony charges.

Hold on.

After all the rappers, comedians, actors, and directors, why in the world

are we engaging this complex and disturbing subject?

Two reasons.

Number one. In October 2018, ZOM published a survey that left us, well,

in a stupor.

Almost half of young people aged 18 to 24 have never heard of Stalin's

repressions. We saw it as a challenge and sought the right moment to accept

it. Reason number two.

I don't know about you, but all my life, I've been hearing my parents say, be

cautious, don't attract unnecessary attention.

don't stick out, and besides, we're simple people, we don't decide anything.

My parents are wonderful people, and I love them to death, but they've been

saying this for decades, even in situations where common sense is

obviously trampled, where injustice wins, and we're obviously right. I

always wondered, what's the origin of this fear in the older generation, of

this desire to coat everything in grey? Why are they afraid that the slightest

boldness will surely result in punishment?

My theory is that that the sphere was born in the first half of the 20th

century and reached us through generations.

One of the places where this fear originated is Kalima. For maximum

immersion, we traveled the entire Kalima Highway, 2,000 kilometers of brutal

road, 9 days of driving, and absolutely savage, ridiculous cold. How did people

live here back then, during the repressions? How did the prisoners and

the imprisoned live afterward?

We wanted and we needed to find out these things.

Everything we've learned, we're sharing with you.

Rust, are you as cold as I am?

I'm freaking freezing.

I can barely move my mouth.

And you're local?

Well… What is this place?

We're not far from the shore where, on July 4, 1928, the

first Kolyma geological expedition landed.

It was led by Yuri Bilibin. These people were sent to find gold here and report

back to Stalin in Moscow, is that right? Yeah, exactly.

Their main goal was to confirm that there was placer gold out here.

How did they find it?

First part of the expedition went to investigate the shores of the Sea of

Ohotsk, not far from Magadan, the spot where Magadan was eventually founded.

The second part went to the mouth of Srednikan River, where gold was already

discovered as early as… well, in early 20th century.

Yuri Bilibin wrote a memo about the work done here, sent it to Moscow, went with

the report himself.

He would later say that he was in awe of the numbers in his own estimate.

By very rough guesses, in 10 years this territory would have yielded 100 tons of

gold. Eventually, his words came true.

Because in 10 years, the territory yielded 80 tons of gold. They were here

in summer, not this time of year. Yeah, from the 4th of July onwards.

But it was still rough.

Sure it was.

They were starving.

At some point in the expedition, they even resorted to eating a fallen horse.

That's a real incident.

The conditions in general are... Plus, there were mosquitoes, right?

Impassable tiger, gnats, blood-sucking insects, mosquitoes, it was all there. I

mean, even now, with modern-day equipment, it's still nearly impossible

to retrace the route that... We still get intrepid daredevils who attempt to

retrace the route of the FKGE, but... It's really hard, it's really extreme,

and back then it was twice as extreme.

As of 2018, what numbers of Gulag prisoners and Gulag victims are

the closest to truth?

Well, 20 million people is the number of people who went through the camps from

1930s to 1956.

This number, I would say, is recognized today by all historians.

And I doubt it will get much bigger if we suddenly...

discover some new details.

How many of those 20 million died?

According to the data of those same researchers, it is 2 million people.

Today, Magadan is a 100,000-strong city, 8 hours of flight away from Moscow.

There are a few versions of the origins of this name, but the most believable

one is that it comes from the event keyword Mangdan, a windy place.

Magadan stands between two bays, and it's got more gusto than our title tune.

Main attraction is the monument called the Mask of Sorrow, designed by Ernst

Nieswiesny. All of Magadan's guests who want to solidify the city's connection

to the repressions climb this hill.

The first thing that surprises the guests are the foxes. One, with how

readily they approach people, and two, with their look. They look more like

stray dogs than they're graceful animals from children's stories.

In 2016, some vandals defaced the mask of sorrow. They wrote in red paint,

Stalin lives.

They usually put stars like this one on factory roofs.

The star itself was wrapped in red fabric, the sockets had light bulbs in

them. What was its purpose? If the prisoners met the quota on time, a set

production norm, the star lit up with red light in the evening.

When they didn't meet the quota, additional work hours were ordered, and

the star wouldn't light up. So the prisoners knew they had hours of work

ahead.

This is Stepan Garanin, head of SEV Vostlag from 1937-1938, he

was sentenced to 10 years of labor camps. He was the head of... That's

right. And became an inmate himself. Became an inmate himself, yeah. This is

his mugshot as a prisoner.

Paperwork says he went missing.

There was a breakout of four prisoners.

And apparently Stepan Garanin was designated as canned food.

This was a common practice. When planning a breakout, one escapee was

meant to be eaten in case... Three people agreed to bring a fourth one

along to eat them. Yes, that's right.

Rostislav actually has two jobs. One is giving tours in the local history

museum, the other is training kids.

He used to be the city's breakdancing champion.

Now he teaches the craft to boys and girls.

Rostislav is a full-time member of our expedition.

He'll accompany us all the way to Yakutsk and help us understand how

Kalima lived in the last century.

In addition to him, we're bringing along Artem Kovalev.

Simply put, he's Megadance's Ilya Verlamov.

He's involved in urban studies and is passionately concerned about people

leaving Magadan.

Which is happening.

And not just youths, but adults too. Artem will travel with us for most of

the road to help us understand how Kalima lives today.

We're in Nagaev's Bay, uh...

That is where ships unloaded the inmates, aka Zex. They were brought here

in their cargo holds. People were then sent to the so-called transitka, short

for transit labor camp, and from there, they were assigned to Kalima's many

camps.

Tell us, what did your father do to be sent to Kolyma? This is a rhetorical

question, right? What did he do? Nothing, right?

Nothing. He did nothing wrong.

My dad, minus eight in both his eyes, a simple accountant from Orsha, he wasn't

in a single political party, not even the Bund, being a Jew.

A family of ten people, they had to be fed, he was the eldest.

He worked from sunrise to sunset, trying to support his family.

On August 19th, 1938, somebody knocked. You know, sounds like a beginning

of a novel.

Somebody knocked. So he was reading... Well, this became a family meme, like a

household legend.

That night he was reading Anatole Francis' The Gods Are Thirst.

that tells the horrors of the French Revolution with all the guillotines and

the rivers of blood.

In a blind coincidence, it all started that night.

They yanked his glasses and the buttons off his trousers, he had to hold them

like that, and took him to Orsha prison that is still in a city center today,

only now it houses, how do you call it, a Jesuit school.

For real, Jesuits.

I paid them a visit once.

I've been to Orsha many a times and said, you should make a corner or

something in memory of the things that happened here. I mean, horrible things

happened.

Once, during a daytime interrogation, a doctor my dad knew jumped out of the

window. To his immediate death, obviously.

So, they started interrogating at night.

Interrogating at night is easier.

There was nothing to interrogate my dad about.

He was a completely apolitical person.

I mean, this was 1938.

How could somebody be political?

Fear has soaked the skin of the entire society.

This was, you know, one indiscreet word could, and my dad was a very careful

man, even at the age when I knew him.

So, I've nothing to answer the question, what did he do.

They went with the article 58, espionage for Poland. Poland? Yes.

Though he didn't even know a word in Polish.

Yefim Shefrin is a superstar of Anschlag, home of television comedy of

the 90s and early 10s.

Born in Megadan Oblast, his father, Zalman Shefrin, was among the first who

were sent to Kalima, but rehabilitated after Stalin's death.

Zalman Shefrin couldn't leave Kalima for almost 30 years.

Did the fact that he was Jewish play a role in it?

You want to know something horrible?

His first interrogator was Jewish.

The most cruel and ruthless of them all.

They later executed him too.

His last name was Ginzburg. Dad couldn't forget that last name because what he

did to him while interrogating... I... I too can't recall without tears.

They brutally beat him, tortured, trying to...

To uncover his ties with a Bund somehow.

That via the mother of some Bund fellow from Slonim, however you pronounce it,

he was sending some sort of spy intel to Poland.

What intel?

He was an accountant in a firm.

What kind of intel?

The country was obsessed with spy mania to the point of insanity.

Because after reading The Drummer's Fate, I started looking over my

shoulder. There was an era believed in spies.

The word spies has gone out of fashion. Today we have poacher and knicks,

liberals, enemies of the public or of the state.

Back then people were obsessed with spies.

We played spies outside.

Hat means spy.

All crime stories were about spies.

There was a Bulgarian film, The Golden Tooth. I couldn't sleep after watching

it because the film was... He was a spy.

All the books were about spies.

The Tarantula, Green Chain.

We binged on those books.

Spies were everywhere.

This was the momentum of 1938.

Everyone was somebody's spy. Meyerhold was a Japanese spy.

All the repressed ones were somebody's spies.

What were they spying on and how?

Like, in this age of technocracy,

Sure, you can steal a chip or send a tape, like in Fate of the Resident or

Mistake of the Resident, some kind of technology. What could a regular person

turn over to them?

Especially to Poland.

But everyone believed in that and…

suspected each other to be spies.

This famous quote from Dovlatov, who wrote all the denouncements? But these

were denouncements against spies, who else?

Against Underminers, against, you know... Do you think people wrote

denunciations hoping to shield themselves somehow?

Or was it just the craze?

I wouldn't understand the psychology of a snitch, because I don't know the

motives of the people who wrote denouncements.

At the same time, I was always curious.

I keep seeing this quote on Facebook so often that it's making me nauseous.

Everyone goes, Davlatov, Davlatov, Davlatov. Who wrote all the

denouncements? My question is, why were they investigated?

What judicial law, what legislation, what constitution said denouncements had

to be investigated?

Never mind the investigators.

The special troika. A new kind of adjudication.

Three guys said, you are done, and you are at the wall.

Shafrin was born in Nixican.

It's a settlement that no longer exists.

It'll take us several more days to reach Susuman, a town not far from it.

Meanwhile, here comes our first stop.

A guard tower right in the middle of residential housing.

Many can see this monument just looking outside.

This is how camp and everyday life are intertwined in Kalima.

Of the 200 camps spread around Kalima, a few were particularly bad.

Butuga Chag is one of those.

In Evanki, it means a cursed place.

Inmates mined uranium and tin here, some of the most radioactive minerals in the

world. without any radiation protection.

You can get to Butuga Chang's ruins during winter. Closest major settlement

is called Ust Omchuk. Is this real dinnerware?

Yes, this is real dinnerware found at old campsites.

Dinnerware made of tin cans.

So, they just recast tin cans? No, they just re-beated them together.

Any old... This is...

from basically chopped up salvage, like hoods of old broken old down

cars, they coated it with tin, you can see the word Magadan,

so it was made here.

This is a fork, inscription says Magadan Promkombinat.

Why did they create Gulag in the first place?

Two reasons.

First one, In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were actively persecuting anyone who was

unhappy with the new government.

Very soon all existing detention facilities became overpopulated, and

building new prisons required money they didn't have.

Then they remembered the practices of early revolutionary years, when they

isolated class and political opponents and put them in concentration camps.

Building and maintaining camps was a lot cheaper than building and maintaining

prisons.

Reason number two. In 1928, the first plan for the development of national

economy was adopted.

Completing it required a lot of manpower, which was in deficit.

At that point, the idea to use forced inmate labor was introduced.

In 1929, concentration camps were officially renamed to corrective labor

camps. The agency managing this whole shebang was called the Main

Administration of Camps and Jails, which abbreviates GULAG. Among GULAG's

inmates' missions were industrial and infrastructural construction and

development of remote territories.

70% of GULAG's facilities were located next to major cities, where inmate labor

built tens of hydroelectric power plants, dug out several reservoirs and

canals, including the Moscow Canal.

Among other things, inmates helped to build two of the Seven Sisters, the MSU

building and Kotelnicheske Embarkment Apartments. In remote regions, Glock's

inmates mined for ores, felled trees, built railways, roads, and entire cities

. So, in rough conditions and free

of charge, they did work that they would have been paid in normal life.

Did you ever cry while studying Gulag documents?

Yes, very often.

Very often.

More and more often you hear sentiments like, Gulag, so what?

They were mostly felons anyway.

Felons. There were basically no innocents there. This is what they say

now. Okay. What was the truth, though?

Well, the truth is that there were mostly felons. But that doesn't mean

that those felons were all that guilty.

They were mostly thieves.

But they were thieves convicted under the Criminal Code, Article 162, I

believe. And there were those who were...

convicted under articles of the Act.

There was the Act of 1932, there was the Act of 1932 and the Act of 1947.

This was right after our famine years, right? After the famine, there were acts

introduced punishments for stealing socialist property.

There were a lot of people convicted under them.

It's also known that the law of spiculates.

They were in for petty theft.

Born in 1923 from the village Poryabushki,

officially via mail informed the director of his regional department of

NKVD this August that his father, Shiglov Ivan Nikolaevich,

steals building materials from their sofhos.

He was arrested and a large stock of materials were found at this Shcheglov's

house. Pioneer Kolya Shcheglov, who understands what the Soviet government

is to him and to the people, after seeing that his own father is no father

to him because this father steals socialist property, he asked the NKVD to

eliminate his father as an enemy of the people. What incredible people we have,

comrades. What incredible pioneers we have. This is the host of our power. The

people.

If you take home 10 spiglets of wheat from the kolkhoz, you get 7

years of camps.

And you move from Belarus or Ukraine or any Black Earth region to... Yes, or 10

years. Under 1932 Act, you could only get 10 years. Under

1947 Act, you could get 7 to 10 years.

Whereas theft articles in the Criminal Code, 162nd and others, said

three to five years.

So, I rob an apartment and get three to five years. It was seven in rare cases.

I take ten spiclets from a kolkhoz, I get ten years. Yes, yes. It happened two

years. The point is, the punishment didn't match the crime.

The article that was called counter-revolutionary or political, it

was article 58 of corresponding articles of criminal codes or of

other republics. These accounted for about 25% of all inmates.

But that doesn't mean that they were all lily-whitey. There were people among

them who had worked with the Germans and did...

other bad things and some were put there for telling a joke.

If you don't believe that you could end up in a camp for nonsense, let's look at

the example of one of Kalima's most famous prisoners.

Even if you completely miss Soviet cinema, you definitely know Georgy

Zhonov. He played the kind patrol officer in the great comedy film Beware

of the Car and the captain in the disaster film Aircrew. In 1938, a 23

-year-old Zhonov was cast in the movie Komsomolsk. On the train, he made an

American diplomat heading for Vladivostok. Soviet cinema personnel

noticed Zhonov talking to the American.

Zhonov was arrested, charged with espionage, and sentenced to five years

in camps.

Let's repeat that, just in case. Five years of slave labor for talking to a

foreigner. In 1955, Zhonov was completely rehabilitated.

He made a fantastic career in cinema and lived a very long and eventful life. He

died in 2005, aged 90 years.

Am I right to say that Burachag was one of Kalima's worst camps? Yes. Not just

because in addition to tin they also mined uranium there, but also because

it's one of the wildest places in Magadan Oblast.

The number of days with blizzards down there is 107 days

per year.

In 1952 particularly, there were 140

-something days that year.

They would occasionally have blizzards in summer, and the snow was

compressed so densely that they had to saw it.

saw it or hacked it with an axe, because it was as hard as boards.

There was no water, the snow didn't melt in summer.

So, they just melted it and drank it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Here's what Georgy Zhanov writes in his short story Little Sledge. Men is the

most resilient creature on Earth. He has survived every adversary.

Famine, cold, illness, loneliness.

Beast dies, man lives.

Especially the Russian man.

He's felt the hands of political opportunists of every color.

The history of Russian people is just endless struggle for life, for survival.

Center, this is Zarya-1. Ignition. Roger that. Engaging ignition.

On April 12, 1961, man first flew to space.

This incredible project was spearheaded by the man holding the microphone,

Sergey Karlov, the main figure of Soviet space, the Elon Musk of his era, and one

of the progenitors of the technological marvels that you and I enjoy today.

Looking at the crowded streets, At the nationwide rejoicing, you can hardly

believe that 20 years prior to this flight, Sergey Korolev was sent to serve

time in correctional labor camps of Kalima.

The day, June 27, 1938, radically changed

my father's life and our families and all. On this day, the NKVD

arrested my father.

Of course, after they arrested Tukhachevsky and Adaman, followed by

Klimyanov, Langemak and Glushko, who worked in the Jet Institute with my

father, Klimyanov was the head of the Institute,

Langemak was the head engineer.

He held the petition after my father. His friend Glushko designed engines.

After their arrests, my father obviously expected that he could suffer the same

fate. But people always hope for the best, don't they?

They always do. My mother told me that on that day she was coming from

work at around 9 p.m.

Back then we lived in my father's first apartment, given by the state, on

Kunyushkovskaya Street.

It was in building 28.

This street is near the Moscow Zoo.

At the entrance, my mother saw two men.

They were smoking and surveying passerbys.

She told me that her heart sunk.

Rushed to the sixth floor.

We didn't have an elevator back then. We lived on the sixth floor.

It was a small apartment with two rooms. One was 12 square meters, the other 11.

Mother got to the sixth floor.

Father was at home.

She told him that she saw these people near the entrance.

He said, must be after me.

He said, I sold a bond today and bought a record.

Let's listen to it. I have this record in my home museum.

It's in there.

One side is glittered and I got a copy leader.

The other side is there stood a birch in the field. The record is of old format,

of course. They listened to these songs and...

They sat there without changing or turning the light on.

They sat until late in the night when at half to midnight there was a knock on

the door.

They asked who it was.

The answer was NKVD.

It was those two.

They brought the house manager as a witness.

They sat my parents on the sofa. I wasn't at home at the time because it

was June and I was at my grandma's dacha with my nanny Liza. They set my parents

on the sofa and said they can't get up. They showed a warrant for arrest and

search. They started taking things out from the wardrobe from everywhere.

They took out the dishes and even the medications.

My mother saw one of the NKVD guys pocket the...

malachite cufflinks that my mother's father, Maximilian Nikolaevich, gave to

my dad as a wedding gift. But she didn't dare to say a word.

This continued until 6 in the morning.

At 6 o'clock they told him to gather his things and they were taking him with

them. He looked at my mother and could barely recognize her. He said, you sure

did survive that night.

She wanted, she got him a pair of underwear, picked it up from the floor,

put it in the suitcase, toothbrush, tooth powder, as it was at that time.

She wanted to see him off. He put on his own clothes.

He said, you know that I did nothing wrong, right?

She wanted to walk him to the car, but they said it wasn't allowed.

They took him away.

She watched through the stairwell window as they put him in the car and drove

off.

After that, as mom told me, she couldn't even cry.

She just moaned.

She paced in the apartment and moaned.

Then she called her mother-in-law, Sergei Pavlovich's mother.

Maria Nikolaevna was always afraid that father could commit suicide because of

all the arrests of his friends from the institute.

He had a gun because it used to be a military institute.

She was really scared.

Mom said, Sergei is gone.

And hanged the phone.

Grandma grabbed grandpa and took a taxi to Konyushovskoe.

First thing she said was, is he alive?

Yes, he is, but he's gone.

They arrested him and took him away.

Grandma said, thank God.

Mom said, Maria Nikolaevna, you must have misunderstood.

They arrested him. How can you thank God after something so terrible?

No, because he's alive, we'll fight for him.

And she did start fighting for her only son, after all.

One day, a man showed up.

Average height, stocky.

Hello, little falcons, that's what he called all the pilots. He talked with us

for a very long time.

He told us about future space flights and said it's going to be very soon,

that next year we will fly on the Vostok ship.

We didn't believe him, that we would then have Soyuz ships, then orbital

stations and so on, and so on, so on.

It was really hard for us to even imagine all of that.

Obviously, her situation as the wife of an arrestee wasn't rosy, because...

We led a very poor life back then. Besides, mom constantly

feared getting arrested too, because sometimes they'd arrest the wives too.

She backed some things for this scenario.

She kept a small suitcase in the hallway.

And she got another job. In addition to working as a doctor at the Botkin

Hospital, she started working at the clinic.

She also worked ambulance night shifts.

She worked 13 to 15 shifts a month because she needed to provide

for the family and help out my father.

On the day of the arrest. They seized all the money, right? Yes, all the cash

money we had was seized.

There was also the matter of my nanny Lisa, because we had...

Absolutely no money to pay her.

The next day, Liza came back from our dacha.

Grandma sent her and Liza said she was Ukrainian, by the way, a young Ukrainian

girl. She was my nanny because my mom was away at work.

She said no. She said she wanted to stay and would get by on her money that she'd

earned working for us.

because she doesn't want to leave us, and because she loves our family very

much. That's how faithful a friend she was.

When we came back from Dacia, with the fall encroaching, because it had no

heating and it was getting cold there, The neighbor's boy, who I used to play

with, he lived across, he was four and I was three.

He suddenly told me, mom says I can't play with you because your dad's

arrested. I started crying and ran up to my mom and said, he doesn't want to play

with me. And mom said...

Mom got very upset about that. She said, don't go to play outside anymore.

Go to the zoo with your nanny. Go to the zoo with nanny and grandma.

Don't go outside and don't play with anyone.

She was certainly very upset about that.

Because people started avoiding her.

Even those who enjoyed her company.

She was very beautiful, very open, very charming.

My mom had Italian heritage.

Her maiden name was Vincitini. But people crossed to the other side of the

street because she was the wife of the arrested husband.

Some doctors even refused to assist her during surgeries.

She was a surgeon, a trauma orthopedist.

They refused to assist her because she was the wife of an arrested husband.

So great that was fear, this awful fear.

Gagarin's first flight paved the way for a true assault on space.

More and more cosmonauts came to train in the Star City.

that fly off, and the head engineer would always see them off and greet them

at the cosmodrome. We sent the first woman in the world into space, Valentina

Vladimirovna Tereshkova.

Korolev kept bringing new ideas to life.

Alexei Leonov was the first person to step outside the spacecraft in space.

During the mission, he became as if a living satellite to Earth.

He brought my father to Batyrskaya prison.

They gave him, he filled out the arrestee form.

The top corner of this form said, wreck her.

I have a copy of this form.

He was charged under Article 58, paragraphs 7 and 11, harming

the industry.

participation in the organization, Trotskyan

Wrecking Organization, like probably everyone else at the time.

He wrote in this form, well, he wrote, I plead guilty.

In his first interrogation statement, he wrote, I plead not guilty, I did no

wrong.

But the interrogators needed to get a guilty plea out of him, so they

used repressive measures, so to speak.

They beat him up, they broke his jaw, which made it impossible to insert an

endotracheal tube during his surgery.

On January 14, 1966, he died on the operating table.

He had two broken jaws.

But he wouldn't admit guilt.

Then the interrogator used a psychological trick.

He said, if you don't sign these charges, put against you today, tomorrow

we'll arrest your wife and your daughter will go to an orphanage.

So, my father conceded to these charges and signed them, planning to deny

everything in court.

The court hearing was September 27th, but what kind of hearing was it? The

Troika was proceeding, headed by Ulrich, the Troika. They accused my father

of being a member of a Trotskyan racking organization.

And his main charge was that he'd destroy a rocket aircraft that was

standing safe and sound in the Institute's courtyard.

He said, you can go there and see the aircraft right now. They said, no, you

signed the charges during your interrogation. Well, anyway, the

sentence with 10 years of correctional labor.

They didn't let my father say anything to defend himself and let him away.

Can you imagine? I imagined what he must have felt.

An innocent man who'd been serving his country and did everything to

improve the defenses of the country he loved.

He was a patriot.

They go ahead and charge him like that.

How many were imprisoned for a reason and how many were innocent?

In different years, 25-30% of prisoners are known to have been innocents, so on

average 600,000 people a year. Most convictions follow direct orders from

the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which ignored the Criminal Code and

often contradicted it. Historical documents of the repressions reveal that

arrests and executions were carried out within certain caps. The top sent down

plans to regions that they had to fulfill.

In response, regions developed countermeasures. requesting arrest and

death sentence quotas to be increased. Here's Anastas Mikoyan, we've already

shown him in the video.

He's requesting a larger quota for Armenia.

There's still a lot of people there who need to be punished.

Names for these plans were often taken from phone books and tenant registers.

Selected people weren't actually criminals, it was a sort of a lottery

with sinister consequences for its losers.

When we arrived at this settlement last night, it was minus 52 degrees Celsius.

It's morning now, and it's a lot warmer. It's minus 43 Celsius.

We wanted to show you what cold below minus 40 looks like. To do that, we'll

do an old trick, colloquially known as Yakutian fireworks.

We're not in Yakutia yet, by the way. This is still Magadan Oblast. And here

is what this firework looks like.

Artem, remind us, where were you born? In the settlement of Mianzha. Is it as

cold as where we're standing now? It's 700 km away from Magadan, and it's just

as cold. How do you live and grow up in a place where it's that cold for six

months a year?

When you live there, especially as a kid, I don't think you notice the cold

at all.

Though before going outside, you do have to wrap yourself properly.

For kids, only their eyes are peeking out, they've got scarves and hats on,

one hat, two hats.

You walk around like that, and when I was a kid, it was like you opened the

building door, living the warmth, and you imagine yourself walking in space or

something like that.

On the moon. Yeah, Mars, the moon, whatever.

You're in space, and you go to school like that.

Basically, we spent our entire childhoods outside.

The cold never really bothered us.

We were perfectly okay with it.

What can you say about Kolyma Highway?

Kolyma Highway does not forgive mistakes.

Oh yeah? If you're a fucking dolt, stay the fuck away.

That's my opinion.

If you didn't prepare your car.

Prepare how? What do you mean? The car has to be in good condition.

If it's winter, it has to be insulated.

You must be prepared for any scenario. Anything.

Like, warm clothes,

violin key.

an axe matches.

You keep engines running, right? Of course, cause it might not start again

at all.

So if we turn the key right now and the engine stops, it won't start again,

right? No, it will, but we've had situations when we'd make a stop in some

town, kill the engine, go get some tea or coffee, then you turn the key and it

will not start.

We're used to the fact that in the Far East, fruits and vegetables cost around

twice as much as in Russia's central regions. But getting used to prices of

fuel, which they certainly don't extract in Moscow, Krasnodar, or Tambov Oblast,

is impossible.

For those who don't drive, in Moscow, diesel fuel costs around 47 or 48 rubles

per liter.

On Kalima Highway, it costs 72 rubles, meaning 1.5 times more.

Winter fuel works up to minus 35.

It's minus 48 outside, so there you go.

Colima has got some hardcore truck drivers.

Even with heavy-duty vehicles, well, diesel leaves much to be desired,

doesn't it?

Isn't that risky what he's doing?

Won't it catch fire? I mean, or is it only gas that explodes and diesel

doesn't? Nah, there aren't any fumes. And even the full tank couldn't explode.

What causes the explosion?

It's because of the fumes, you know.

Okay. I've never even heard diesel too.

Even if you spill some on the asphalt and try to set it on fire, you won't be

able to. I mean, this is nuts, honestly. I feel bad for him to have this shit

happen when it's this cold. But then again, is the diesel quality at fault

here? It's not as winterized as it should be.

Or as its paperwork says.

I reckon there is no pure winter diesel as such in Magadan anyway, because they

mix it with summer type.

Like, you didn't sell all your summer diesel, what are you going to do with

it? No one's gonna pump it out of those gas station tanks.

Mixed in, winter grade, good shit, dudes, winter diesel, clear as tears,

gonna get you where you need to go.

Then to fucking get stuck like that, freeze your hands, freeze the truck,

fucking everything.

Fucking hell. I'd go back and burn the damn station.

I know it is wrong to say that.

But, you know, some people just don't understand that common working Joes toil

in such ungodly conditions out here. In this cold.

And in addition to paying 73 goddamn rubles per litre of diesel, they have to

fuck with their goddamn cars.

It's nonsense.

Once we were coming back from a business trip, on a winter as cold as this one,

and saw a car on the road that just stalled. It was obvious, because from up

close, when we saw that the windows were iced on the inside, a door opened and

the driver leapt out towards us. He was screaming, don't leave me here!

Don't leave me here.

It was obvious that the car died on him.

The closest settlement was 50 kilometers away.

I mean, it's a very scary situation.

In order to prevent situations like this, to help people survive if

something like that happens, we have these emergency call stations.

These are special containers, they are self-sufficient.

The person needs to reach it and press the button.

The door will open, it will automatically call the emergency

service, and a rescue team will be dispatched to this location.

In this container, the person... A heating system will turn on, you'll get

warm air. It has a medical kit, a MRE, a blanket, even a phone charger.

You also get cell signal here, and you can stay in this container for up to 24

hours, until help arrives.

We were driving along with a French group.

They were filming something about Gulag, and on the road, in the middle of

nowhere, nearest settlement was 100 km away both ways, and there was a cat

sitting on the side of the road.

It was like minus 40 outside.

We're driving past him, I go, whoa, a cat.

The French went up in arms, let's take him, let's take him, but we had a crazy

route ahead too.

We were going to Tapaliniye, Omiakon, then Magadan, and the cat went on this

trip with us.

They bought him cat food, a litter box.

And he rode with you in the back?

Yeah, he slept right here, on the dashboard.

On the dashboard, as you were driving? Yeah, yeah, he slept there.

When we got to Magadan, they got paperwork.

made for him, gave him the shots, and he went to live in France.

For good.

And he lives there now.

They send us pictures.

I mean, he was meant to die that day, but ended up in... you know... We even

have a joke. Fuck, it should've been me freezing on that road.

So they'd take me to France.

Would've been cool.

When you're driving across Kalima in winter, you can't help but wonder. All

members of our expedition were dressed roughly the same. Insulated thermal

socks, special boots, two, yes, two layers of thermal underwear for both

upper body and lower body, waterproof pants, a parka, a scarf or, in my case,

a buff, a hat, mittens, and a hood. This is a special set that would work even in

Antarctica. But in Kalima, even like this, we didn't want to stay outside for

more than 30 minutes.

So, I wonder, since it was tough for us even with the best modern gear

available, how did Gulag prisoners feel and work back in the day?

Their clothing was very different, but the cold was the same.

Father died in 1984.

Sadly, he was ill because it was tough out here.

It was...

Rough.

Sometimes he told, you got stuck with frozen hair in the barracks, you're

raising your head, but it's stuck, because during the night there was

melting, and your hair froze you to something.

Did you ask him about the technical matter of clothing?

I mean, we came with specialized gear, but... They were fatniks, pants.

Having an undergarment was... A bliss.

Valenki, if they were out, Valenki were a luxury.

Most wore shoes.

Not shoes, kurza boots and foot wraps. A hat?

Ushanka.

That's it. How can you survive and wear a dress like that when it's minus 50

outside? They survived.

They survived.

Barracks didn't have heating.

There was a bourgeois stove on the side of the barracks.

That was it.

He didn't reach the other side, hence the hair freezing shut to things.

First of all, prisoners lived in tents.

Tarp tents stretched over frames.

They measured 721 meters.

They were very... The only heating was a barrel, an iron barrel made into a

makeshift furnace.

They put... They didn't have any wire wood or coal at Moldiak.

So, they burned branches, dry tree branches, they slid them into the

barrel.

It was very cold.

There were these plea coats, these knee-long telegreikas, they also wore

valenki, cotton wool pants, and ushankas, but they were still

very cold, because in Koloma, cold struck a lot earlier than everywhere

else.

Also very tough because they gave the so-called political prisoners the

hardest jobs. They had to mine ore, the ore that they

tromel washed for gold.

They chipped off chunks of ore with pickaxes. Like this one, right?

This is the ore, yes.

They gave me this bit when I visited Moldiak.

You can see gold peppered inside it.

There's a little gold in there.

Can you see it?

To all requests and complaints, if they tried to talk to the management, the

camp management said, you're doing time, we're not responsible for you. If you

die, they'll bring others.

Varlam Shalamov, The Kalima Tales.

He didn't blame people for indifference.

He'd long since realized where these numbness and coldness of the soul came

from. The cold, the same cold that froze spit mid-flight, had reached the human

soul. If bones could freeze, the brain could freeze, and go numb, the soul

could freeze too.

You couldn't think about anything in the cold. It was simple.

Between cold and hunger, the brain wasn't properly supplied, brain cells

dried up, it was clearly a material process, and God only knows if this

process was reversible, as doctors say, like frostbite is, or if the degradation

was permanent.

Same with the soul, it froze through, shrunk, and maybe it would stay cold

forever.

Arter, it's minus 55 outside.

You're eating ice cream. Are you feeling alright?

The ice cream's from a freezer.

It's only minus 15.

I'm warming myself up.

You know?

He was sentenced to 10 years of camps and a permanent deportation to Dalstroi

without the right of correspondence for these 10 years.

His correspondence led to... After the ban had been lifted, it led to marriage

with my mother and my birth, because he met my mom via letters.

Where did she live?

In Orsha. In Orsha, in Belarus?

Yes. And...

People used to meet through letters, right?

Hang on, it was after the war.

Boys are gone, girls are gone. Everyone rushed to introduce people, to meet

people, to look for people. You needed to connect.

Somehow, Agnia Bartow's program, Find the Person, wasn't coming out yet, I

don't think.

So, after the war, everyone began looking for people and introducing

people. In the school in Orsha, my dad's brother and my mom's sister were

working.

Mum's sister taught Russian language and literature, dad's brother taught maths

and physics. And one day they were talking... two Jews talking, there will

be introductions.

And so... my dad came up.

At that point, everyone knew that there were innocent people toiling away in

Kolyma and beyond the Ural Mountains.

It was known in silence.

Nobody would... But everyone knew that they were there for nothing.

Nobody thought of them as criminals or recidivists. Political prisoners even

had a sort of... this kind of... even attractiveness to them of

sorts. Because they were mostly educated people.

And marrying one could have been quite a catch.

Sharp but oppressed.

Exactly. They got in touch.

Dad sent her his photo in his prison robe.

Mom evidently sent hers.

Mom was pretty, dad wasn't, and he was bald.

And he also took his photo without the glasses.

He had really poor eyesight.

You couldn't fall in love with that photo if you wanted to, but she did.

Because he had a way with his words. He knew several languages, and he was very

eloquent with Russian too, though at home we spoke Yiddish.

What does mom do?

In the spring of 1950, I think.

Today, you buy a plane ticket, right?

You board, get out in Magadan, transfer, and you're in Susuman.

Not back then.

So, it was a whole train to Vladivostok. It's like eight days, right?

Seven or eight. Seven or eight days. Then by sea.

No, then you need to get to Magadan.

By sea. Yes.

By sea.

Can you imagine those ferries, those motor ships of the time, sailboats or

whatever? They were packed like sardines in a can, only with people.

I mean, this was just... I mean, they didn't have a schedule like bus 314

arrives at 12.10 pm.

It arrives when it arrives.

I also pictured that train quite vividly, partially thanks to films of

which I've watched my full when I was little.

So, yeah, it was a super comfortable trip for her. Yeah, she was a bold woman

to go.

A little crazy, too, because mom was really daring.

Like, nothing could ever stop her.

So she went after this person.

A year later, they had a baby.

My older brother.

We grew up separately, unfortunately.

When he was two, they sent him to our grandmother in Orsha, because he was

born at a time when there was nothing for kids, nothing.

Then the following happened, and I'll stop there.

She got pregnant a second time, and to give birth, she had to go to, I don't

remember exactly, it's like 40 or 50 kilometers away from Susuman, because it

didn't have its own delivery ward, to the settlement Nexican.

The cockpit seat was taken by some mister going to Nexican on business. The

truck up there. Yeah. He had a briefcase.

Mum got to ride in the back of the truck.

The Coloma highway isn't as smooth as the highways between New York City and

Chicago. She jolted about in there.

The baby got strangled by the umbilical cord or something.

He was stillborn. They called him Marek and buried him.

there in the Mexican graveyard.

At the age of 41, she decided to have me.

So, in a way, I owe it to the life, I mean, I owe my life to this person's

death.

Marik, a guy named Marik, I never got to know. He would have probably grown up to

be a great guy.

But his lot is to lie in Mexican, which too is gone.

Literally everyone had scurvy because they didn't get any vitamins and the

food was scarce.

Sergei Pavlovich ended up with scurvy too.

He began to show he lost almost all of his teeth.

He later wrote that he lost 13 teeth in Kalima.

His legs started to cover with literal crust.

couldn't walk anymore, so eventually he was bound to his bed.

He couldn't, besides the chief prisoner, who was one of the criminals, he took my

father's ration, he literally took his ration and sent him to do the hardest

jobs, because he was mad about my father's attitude.

So, one day, Mikhail Alexandrovich Usachov arrived at the camp.

He was the director of the plant where they built the plane in which Chkalov

crashed in December of 1938.

So, obviously, they immediately arrested Usachov. Usachov was a boxing master of

sports and trained boxers.

He was very strong physically.

When he arrived at the camp, he realized that he needed to have a proper talk

with the chief prisoner using language he'd get.

He called the chief prisoner and said, show me your premises.

They got into the tent where my father was.

The chief prisoner said, and here we have the king, one of yours.

This one's not getting back up.

Suchov came up to his bed.

They had wooden bunk beds.

and saw my father, whom he knew from work, before the arrest, of course.

He saw my father lying in dirty rags.

He was in awful condition.

Mr. Chob was surprised.

How could he have gotten so bad?

He talked to the chief.

Probably punched his teeth in, because it was the chief who'd brought him to

that and demanded that they put my father in the infirmary, the medical

facility, and to give him more food, to have those criminals give him a part of

their ration.

And my father eventually got better, as much as he could have. At least he got

back up, because... would bring raw potatoes from home,

and they'd rub their gums with it. I mean the prisoners suffering from

scurvy. They'd bruise shrubs and pine cones.

They didn't have any other medicines, no vitamins or anything.

But it still helped to a degree.

They bandaged themselves with torn sheets.

Without proper bandages, they made makeshift ones to treat their legs, and

my father eventually managed to get up and come back.

Much later, when he was the chief engineer, he found this Usychev and made

him deputy chief engineer in his design bureau.

I heard Usychev wasn't the most disciplined worker in the bureau. In the

bureau, Usychev was, well, he enjoyed a drink. So, yeah, one day this

superior said, he complained to Sergei Pavlovich, but my father said, whatever

he does, you won't lay a finger on him because he saved my life.

Full stop.

I was terribly unlucky.

I woke up in the morning on this bunk bed.

Has the man on the right or on the left of me died?

One time it was both. I went to the medical office for some reason, I can't

remember, and they told me, one of yours was over.

Who?

They talked between themselves a little, and he goes, Korolev.

I heard about Korolev, but had never met him in person.

That's how we met.

I'll tell you how they escorted us to work.

The whole crowd gathers at the gate.

It was usually early, it was still dark.

There were three rows of barbed wire.

People make three-wide column.

The relief commander orders the sentries to take their places.

It means the following. One rifleman walks in front, another one in the back.

and a machine gunner further in the back still, and some sprinkles a little bit

further away, and two dogs on each side usually.

The loudspeaker on a pole always plays the same song.

I know of no other such country where a man can breathe so freely, and to these

very words we hear the command, a step to the left or to the right, will be

considered an escape attempt.

Sentries are to shoot without warning.

And they did.

A free, daring beauty.

Well, I thought she was very beautiful. I double-checked it.

I thought maybe I imagined it being her son and all. No, no.

When we were at mom's funeral and she was completely...

like there was no life in her, she was in a coffin. I was standing next to my

dad, and I thought, what is she going to say?

He touched my arm like that and said, look how beautiful she is. She was 77.

So, this impression of her beauty,

of her beauty, it lived with him even when you couldn't say it about her

anymore. She was a corpse.

And I was standing there crying my eyes out.

And my dad goes, look how beautiful she is.

While Sergey Korolev was in Kalima, his mom and his wife were desperately

fighting to free him. Among the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of USSR

It's something like State Duma today.

There were two aircraft test pilots, Valentina Grizadubova and Mikhail

Gromov. They supported the Korolev family and helped send the case to

retrial. Sergei Korolev was summoned from Moldyak camp to Moscow, back to

Butyrka prison.

He had to travel through Magadan and Vladivostok. He arrived in Magadan.

There, a group of prisoners were gathered to travel on SS Indigirka, set

to depart on December 8. Sergei Pavlovich would have made But they told

him there was no room because the roof was full.

So, no room, no way to get on the ship.

He was always upset about that, because it meant waiting for the next transport,

you know, what ship will travel next.

But it saved his life, because in Dagirka there was a storm in the Sea of

Hotsk, and in Dagirka hit rifts, and all the prisoners trapped in the holds

died.

They died suffering.

When was your father able to return?

They rehabilitated him in 1955.

Thus came up the matter of destination.

Where do you go?

First, you need money.

Well, what kind of money could a person who's been, you know, trampling ore mere

days ago have?

Second, where to?

He decided he couldn't go back to Orsha. Even though mum lived there, he said he

wouldn't be able to walk past...

You mean prison?

No, no, past the prison on the main street.

It stands in the center of Orsha to this day.

Well, nowadays it's all painted, all Catholic, all with the turrets. He

couldn't walk past it because he couldn't bear the thought of going back.

So we spent there ten more years because we needed to leave for somewhere.

Then all the Khrushchev concessions followed.

The thaw.

In those books about Stalin, you could cross him out like that, with a red

pencil, and not get punished.

All the books had Stalin and Lenin, Barry Leaves, on every page.

Stalin's childhood, Lenin's childhood.

Stalin's, you could tear them up. Did you do it? Of course.

First order of business slashed him with a red pencil. I also got in a fight with

another boy in the kindergarten.

I said that he was...

A traitor.

And he said, no, Stalin is good. And we jumped at each other. I wanted to, in

order to get him so mad that he'd have foam out of his mouth.

I ruined Stalin with a pencil. I remember that. That was my first deed in

life.

In order to raise the morale of imprisoned professionals, the heads of

NKVD allowed visitation for immediate family.

My mom received a card that said that the two of us could go see father in

Butyrka prison.

I didn't know my father was imprisoned.

I was five.

They told me my father was a pilot, that he was flying and he had an important

job, but he's violent. here and we can go and see him. And then he'll leave

again. We arrived at the Batyrka courtyard.

I remember that it was very small.

We got up on the second floor and entered the room. It had a table and

four chairs.

Mom and I sat in our chairs.

My father, accompanied by a guard, came in through another door.

I immediately asked, Daddy, how did you manage to land your airplane in such a

small courtyard?

Before he could reply, the guard did. He said, sweet child, landing here is easy.

Leaving is the hard part.

From 1940 until 1944, Korolev worked in prison-type design bureaus, first

in Moscow, later in Kazan.

Sergey Korolev was completely released from imprisonment in July of 1944.

Artur, who was the crazy guy going to Yakutsk in parallel with us on a

bicycle? Our girls sent out a message throughout WhatsApp groups, emergency,

everyone, if you know anyone in Karamkan, there's a cyclist riding from

either Italy or Spain, talking gibberish, it's minus 30 outside, it was

where they were, near Jagodnaya it was minus 55.

They found him on the pass, in his tent, he was sleeping, his bicycle was right

there, it was all frosted over.

They woke the poor guy up, got him out. The most recent information is that he's

en route to a hospital in Magadan.

Ewan McGregor's trip around the world? You saw him in Star Wars.

It went through Magadan, didn't it? Well, it was after his visit that

Magadan became a place of biker pilgrimage of sorts. He rode a bike, by

the way. He rode a bike, he wrote a book, and now every year we get regular

motorcycle rallies from Europe. Large groups of bikers gather together.

We held an international festival last year. People rode all the way from

China, Korea, Mongolia, London.

Bikers from America and Mexico came over.

And this cross-Russia trip is called the Road of Bones.

Well, I've lived in Magadan for seven years now, ended up here by accident.

A friend came over to the mainland to visit me, said, this place has great

skiing and snowboarding.

I told my superiors, yo, guys, I'mma go to Magadan.

They laughed, of course, said, are you nuts, mate?

There are other skiing spots, you know.

So I come down here, and the guy pulls a quick one of me with my money.

The money I sent him.

And I lived for a month in a rented apartment.

Eating noodles.

I looked at the newspaper.

Score! Car washer wanted.

I go, awesome, washing cars, that's easy, grab a rag, a mop, and get to it.

Got a job at a car wash, they paid 1000 rubles per shift, I realized I needed to

get to the next level.

So I duped them, said, I also did dry cleaning.

I didn't know a thing about it, but it worked out perfectly in the end.

Eventually, they started paying reasonable money, but I knew that plane

tickets were really expensive to fly.

After a while, I built a hell of a client base of people who wanted me to

wash their cars.

They liked the quality of my work.

Boss saw how many people I... And I was being paid a percentage, something like

25% of the profit I brought.

So... Come payday, he decided to shaft me. Instead of 80,000, he paid me just

30.

So I told him, arrivederci, Azazel, go fuck yourself.

I had the money I needed for the ticket, and then... Eventually, I crossed

paths with my current wife.

She drove in to get her car washed.

So, you know, we got to cracking jokes, having fun.

laughter jokes, festive mood.

She said, take the trip and come back, I'll be waiting.

Where were you flying?

I was about to fly to Ukraine.

So I came home, saw my folks, stayed there for a while. Two weeks later, I

got back to Magadan and started looking for a proper job.

This is Talay Resort. It's over 200 kilometers away from Magadan.

It's got a healing spring, mud baths, and people come here to improve health.

At some point in the past they discovered this spring that could heal

ailments. And meaning people drank this water, it improved their digestion,

basically it helped heal various ailments.

And in the Soviet times, they decided to build here, basically right in the

forest, because there's nothing else around.

They decided to build a resort and use this water to heal and help

people.

The Soviet Ritz has worn off a little. Unfortunately.

What can be done about that?

If I was designing the concept of this place, I would have focused on the idea

of a journey to the past.

In the sense that... It already is a journey to the past. We're not showing

our rooms so as not to offend anyone. But it is a journey to the past.

The key idea is...

There is no point in trying to compete with Turkey or Egypt. They... I'm sorry,

when it's minus 50 outside, it's especially funny. Well, I mean the

design and the overall approach.

I think it would be cool if you could come here and get like a proper quality

Soviet writ and be able to put on a record and take some old school photos.

A record like with Joseph?

Of course, any of that kind of music.

Main thing here is using records and basically having artifacts of the past

that you can interact with.

Take some film camera shots, get the pictures later by mail, you know, focus

on or read an actual book. This place has almost no internet or none at all.

It's an E.

It's an E down here, like in Yamal. So, yeah, a paper book.

A tape recorder or a record player to fill this place up with something...

Comrades. Yeah, yeah?

Stop the shouting, interviewers.

We'll be quiet. With your interviews.

Go to bed.

Oh, we're going in 10. Okay.

Artem Kovalov is an important member of Magadan's artistic intelligentsia. He

works at the local history museum, but believes his real mission is to explain

to everyone that Kolyma is more than just camps. In his blog, he writes about

ways to improve public spaces in the city, shoots videos to show the

country's summer splendor, invites us to one day visit the Jack London Lake, and

indeed, it is amazing.

And gift cars designed by his wife.

That's actually true about the hat.

Even in the history of camps, among horrible suffering, Artem looks for acts

of heroic, creative work.

One day I learned about the composer, Vsevolod Zadiratsky. I came to a

museum on the night of museums.

And I was just strolling around, looking at things, and he really piqued my

interest. He was a composer, he taught music to Cesarevich Alexei.

Music? Yes, he was his teacher.

Later events turned out in such a way that he ended up in Kolyma, and here, in

a camp, he composed a whole cycle of works for the piano, without any

instruments, just on bits of paper.

and they basically first played his music 50 years later.

He was writing this music for the eternity.

Sure, it's not simple music, it's probably not very accessible for regular

people. Without stepping away from the exhibit, I opened iTunes and typed

Sevolod Zadoradsky. I didn't have headphones with me, so I held a phone

like that and listened to it. I was utterly overwhelmed emotionally, because

that's really heavy.

If you bring a few books and download some TV shows, Tale Resort can

definitely make you forget the history of this place. Oh, and also if you're

clueless that there's an abandoned jail, a 15-minute walk away from it.

Initially, they sent some of the most dangerous criminals here, to this camp.

Why does it look like that? There was a major accident in 2005.

The 300 prisoners that were being held here were transferred to the south and

to Magadan. What kind of accident? There was an explosion.

The whole camp lost heating in a cold month. You can tell yourself, the cold

is savage here.

It was being built in the Gulag years.

It was put into operation after all the repressions, so it began to function

properly in late 50s. So they didn't detain anyone here in Stalin times? No,

no, they didn't. It was mostly for dangerous criminals, as I already

mentioned. But it's standard, right? Yes, it is standard.

They built these all over Kolyma.

Cells were basically the same everywhere.

They were all like those you can see here.

The settlement of Vyagodne, a birthplace of Yuri Shevchuk, leader of the band

DDT. His family was deported to Siberia in the 30s. Yuri Yulianovich lived here

until he was 7. Our backbone editor Zhenya and I couldn't resist the

temptation to get a picture in front of the house.

where one of the worthiest men in modern Russia once lived. Today, the

settlement's biggest celebrity is Ivan Panikharpov. He moved here for the Gold

Placers 37 years ago and stayed.

After meeting some of the Gulag survivors, he started to build a memory

museum. It's located in his very apartment.

One room for living, one for the museum.

This is just 20% of everything that I have collected.

I have a garage.

Thankfully, I don't have a car, and it's full.

I transferred part of it to the community center to work there. Part of

it is behind these doors.

It's my archive.

This is the purpose of my whole life.

I want to tell people the truth about thee.

about the negatives and about the positives.

It's custom to avoid the good parts.

Take the years 1937 through 1939.

These were ghastly times down here. True.

The entire history of Kalima boils down to those two years.

That's why they call Kalima a planet of death or a planet of bones.

There are all sorts of names on the Internet.

Now you rode, what, something about 600 kilometers, wasn't it? And you caught

the real winter with minus 50, right? Imagine, back then, there were no lights

or roads here.

You drove on the road, maybe stopped for fuel along the way.

There was nothing. How could you mine for gold here? So you're asking what's

more important, mining out the gold or using slave labor? Well, obviously,

slave labor is not a solution.

Then the answer is you couldn't.

Well, then the Americans would have probably long since owned us, though

they soon will anyway. Maybe someone else will. The thing is, we...

We did win the war, but Kolyma played a very big role in that.

During the war, they mined around 400 tons of gold in Kolyma.

Most of it was used to cover the land lease.

They moved planes here. We, our generation, are very good and very

smart. Yeah, yeah.

We dug these things up.

We know how they shot people and hanged them and starved them and froze them to

death. We know what bastards our fathers and grandfathers were, right?

But we are so good.

Visiting journalists, especially those from Europe, always recoil from

Panikharpov's blunt rhetoric.

But don't think that this man condones the gulag and adamantly defends the

means used to conquer Kalima. It's a lot more complicated.

Here's an example. There's a stereotype about Kalima that all of its camps were

human grinders. They drained all the prisoners' health, many died to

starvation and unendurable labor, but execution by shooting was used

sporadically, usually as punishment, though a few... These places were

basically offices of hell on earth, where people were sent specifically to

be killed. One of those camps, called Serpentinka, is a 30-minute ride away

from Jagodne. It's a ghastly place.

The horror of 1937 and 1938, when they arrested Eduard Petrovich

Berzin, he was the original head of DALSTROY. Their plan was to shoot 5000

of first category prisoners.

Second category meant up to 10 years. Yeah, 10 years.

They shot here in Serpentinka, in the Susuman region, at the

Moldyak gold field, and somewhere near Magadan.

In Serpentinka, nobody knows how many were shot there. In 1991,

that's right, I went with Sviatoslav Vladimirovich

Timchenko. God rest his soul, he worked for Severnaya Pravda newspaper, and I

worked at the building company, but we were bonded over this subject, and we…

Well, Svyatoslav found two former prisoners

of Serpentinka, the survivors, and so…

One of them came over, he told us where Serpentinka was located.

We went there and put a memorial stone there in May of 1991, despite the

district committee of the party and everyone else.

Yeah, we're not far from the glen where the so-called Serpentinka was located.

There were two ditches, one slightly above the other, another one lower.

They first lined people up in front of the first ditch.

The second ditch was being dug in parallel.

And the soil shifted in the process was then used to cover the bodies that fell

into the first ditch. A technology, if you will.

When the first ditch was full, they started shooting in front of the second

one. There was a settlement nearby, right? There was.

It was called Katynakh. At the time, it was the center...

of Northern Mining Administration.

It had geologists, independent contractors... So, free people who

just... Yes, free people who were, well, mining gold.

In most cases, by the way, they didn't even know what was going on here. For

the longest time, they didn't even suspect.

They'd start a tractor at night to... It's usually quiet at night, nobody's

working in a normal settlement.

In order to hide the screams and the gunshots, they'd start several tractors

and thus block the sound of the shootings.

What is the Great Terror?

This is the name given to the years of 1937 and 1938, the bloodiest portion of

the political repressions. In that span, 681,692 people were executed.

The term Great Terror was introduced in 1962 by the British historian Robert

Conquest. In our country, this period is usually called Yezhovshchina, after the

People's Commissar of the USSR Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov became the head of NKVD

in 1936, but only three years later he was arrested, charged with preparing a

coup, and executed.

Nikolai Yezhov wasn't rehabilitated.

What are these doors?

These are the doors from camps and prisons.

It's our collection of those doors.

This is the introductory exhibit to the Museum of Gulag History.

Some of these doors were brought from expeditions, others are gifts from

people from the Federal Penitentiary Service.

This door is from Nikolskaya Street 23 in Moscow.

This was the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. In 1937 and 38 it was

the key repression node of the Great Terror.

Military Collegium of the Supreme Court was the place where they passed

sentences.

Moreover,

It's called the shooting building, and there are actual documents of the

Military Collegium of the Supreme Court ruling that, say, supreme penalty to be

carried out immediately.

When it's said immediately, then, yeah, I've been to this building, I saw the

cellars, and the infrastructure there allowed carrying out the

shootings.

And this is the cellar door?

Yes, it's the cellar door from that building.

Is it actually called the shooting building?

Yeah, you can even google it, it will say the shooting building.

What's there today?

The building is currently privately owned, and we've heard fairly recently

that the owner of the building plans to turn it into a perfume shop.

Who is Blokhin?

This was a man who wasn't just involved with all of this, but

was a literal executioner.

It is said that he is responsible for thousands of executions performed

personally. Is this documented?

It is. There are even records of other execution agents

who said that

He had this special little suitcase that he'd bring to shootings.

In that suitcase he carried a special outfit,

a leather apron and cuffed gloves.

And this visage would shock even the other executioners.

That was his work attire.

These are recollections of his co-workers.

Not to get splattered on. Yeah.

We're in the city of Susuman.

This is a rare case when you can record a conversation on a city's main street,

because cars pass by once every several minutes. This is the Young Engineer

Center. Here school kids learn, they study.

They have clubs for plane modeling, rocket modeling.

In 1986, the head of the Young Engineer Center, Alexander Smirnov, convinced the

local authorities to allow the installation of this cockpit.

It was brought from Magadan, from 700 km away, and it stood there since 1986.

Can they enter it from the building?

Yes, yes, of course. It's a real cockpit.

You enter it from the building, you can sit in the pilot's seat, check

everything out, the buttons, it's all working.

20 years ago, Russia was hooked on heroin.

Here, it's modern version.

Loans.

Money for friends.

Bring friends, get loans.

Disaster and dismay.

The microloan ad is hanging next to Sussman's biggest trade center.

It's simple and compact.

The Gulag Museum is right at the lobby. Next door to it — a linoleum store.

One man manages both the store and the museum.

His name is Mikhail Shibisti.

I was told that you know Tumanov, who is known to have been friends with Vladimir

Vysotsky. Yes. And we cannot help but ask, what's your stance on the renaming

of the Magadan Airport to Vysotsky Airport?

Friends, do not rename it.

Sokol Airport is a great name.

People of Susuman are outraged. How can you rename it to that?

If you want to call the waterfront after Vysotsky, go ahead.

It's got his statue.

I think that it's enough.

He was only here for two days.

How did he come here? Do you know the story?

Well, yeah, he was visiting a friend.

It was like a short trip.

Well, rumor has it that he came here randomly. Yeah, he did. I mean, he saw

in the airport that the next flight was to Magadan, and he just went for it. Is

that true? Maybe that's how he came up with the lyrics.

I tire of waiting for a flight to Odessa, I'll go to Magadan instead.

Maybe, who knows.

We already mentioned that Susuman is the hometown of Yefim Shefrin. But buildings

like this one only started to appear when his family was already packing for

Latvia. Don't be surprised by the tiny legs. That's normal for permafrost

construction. First time I saw a bath was somewhere around 1965, a real one

used for bathing. You were nine. I was nine. It was the first proper apartment

building in Susuman.

My classmate Sasha Misaparyan wanted to show me their future apartment, and I

saw a bath for the first time.

And I thought, why are we moving? We'll probably have one too if we move in.

And it had both cold and hot water.

I'd never heard about hot water.

But kalima means mosquitoes.

They're fierce, like Stalin's bodyguards.

They're animals.

Those gnats are as big birds.

You know the joke. Nurse, get these birds off me. They're huge.

What's the medal for?

I came to Mionzha.

picked up a hockey team and drove them to Omsukchan.

They had a championship there for hockey teams. Like junior league?

Yeah, junior league.

So I drove them, they met us, got us settled, it was nice.

The coach was kind of wishy-washy, didn't have a core, you know, to, you

know, like to whack someone, to yell at the kids to prop up when they were

noodling.

I realized that, well, I needed to show the coach to the side and give the kids

a piece of my mind, you know, and some of my tuition.

I went to their changing room, picked up the goalie stick, I think, and went,

guys, if you lose this one, I'll whack you all stupid with this stick.

They started laughing.

I go, get your shit together, girls, cause I swear, your trip back to Mjolnir

is going to be a cold one.

No heaters for you, I'm gonna freeze your goddamn asses. They had a fight in

the team between the goalie and the players.

They all ganged up on the poor kid. I said, do you realize that if you bully

him before the match, you know, like morally, you didn't catch the puck,

you're shitting me the fuckers tiny.

Plus the speed it flies.

It's a motherfucker of an ask.

It's not a huge round ball that you blow up on the beach. Go deep. They even drop

those. And he's catching a fucking puck. Of course. Well, he got mad.

You know, he got offended.

I think.

I said, guys, let's put this behind us. Let's be a single powerful team.

I noticed the goalie kid perked up. Sort of found some confidence in him.

They got out on the ice, and the Ust Omchuk team, and I also cheered for

them.

You know, go guys, yeah, come on, hey, hooray. They ended up destroying the

other team.

It got them the second place.

And when it was time for the awards ceremony, first place winners, second

place winners, Mianja placed second, they called me onto the ice.

I came up to them, I go...

Give me the cup, I want a photo with the cup.

And when they were handing out medals, they gave me one too.

There it is.

They said, because you were like a second coach, here's a medal for you.

Did you get emotional?

Well, duh. I mean, the guys, it felt like I was so worried for them.

We really became buddies, like a family or something, you know?

It was awesome.

One of Kolyma's biggest attractions is the ghost town of Kadykchan. Almost 6

,000 people used to live and mine coal here.

In 1996, there was an explosion in the mine that killed several people. The

mine was closed, the state began to relocate people, and by 2010, the town

was completely empty.

People from all over the world come here to either check out the ruins or spend a

night in one of the abandoned buildings.

But we decided to check on Mjolnir.

The hometown of the hockey team so passionately coached by our driver

Antoha. Mianjie is 15 kilometers away from Kadikchana. And you can still

witness here how exactly life leaves Kolyma.

There are still people here. There are also abandoned streets like this one.

Is this your town?

Yes, it's my home. Why does this particular street have empty houses and

a community center in such a shape?

A lot of settlements become thinner by day. People are leaving, environment

gets rougher, nature retakes ground.

When I was leaving, there was a tree growing on the roof of one of the

buildings. When I was visiting this summer, there was a forest on the fifth

floor.

Your mom and sister moved to Gelendzhik, right? Yes. You stayed here, even though

your hometown is not doing well.

I'm not urging, I'm just asking.

Why do you stay?

Because despite all this post-apocalyptic look, I love the place

of my birth, I love this country, and I really want it to flourish instead of

what we see happening here now. Is there a chance it will flourish?

There is hope. I am hopeful.

There are no evident indicators.

Logical premises. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is no logic to the idea why it

will all suddenly become great.

But I have this hope that things will... things will change.

There are no restaurants in Mianjia, and we've got 320 km of road ahead, which

roughly translates to 5-6 hours with local speeds.

We didn't have a place to unpack our supplies and have a proper snack, so the

local sports center treated us the way you actually should treat travelers in a

scrape. They not only let us in, but also offered one of their offices, so we

could unpack our sausages and cheeses and whatnot and have a peaceful lunch

once in a while. Russian North.

Tell us where we are now.

We are in the Sports and Health Center.

It's not in this picture, right?

Yeah, it's… well, yeah, it's somewhere in the back there. It's probably the

best place in town.

It has a pool.

It has sports rooms, you can play football, basketball, it has a sauna, a

gym, table tennis and so on. It's our point of attraction.

Well, basically a place where you can escape the cold and boredom. Yes. When I

was a kid and went to school, at least every Friday we would come here to swim

and to play sports, then we would come out, hop on the bus in minus

50 and go home.

or in minus 40.

Those are some of my fondest childhood memories.

The Internet is slow, right? The Internet is slow.

Does anyone have Wi-Fi at home? I think some people do, but it's more about

whether the access is limited or unlimited.

The Internet is generally bad here. If we had fast and reasonably priced

Internet, life would've probably been more fun.

According to various sources, 5,000 to 8,000 people have left Kolyma.

5,000 to 8,000. In one year? Yes.

With overall population of 150,000. The city has 98,000, maybe even… And Kolyma

combined? Kolyma combined is around 146,000. These are huge numbers.

Huge. It's the high prices.

The prices with local salaries.

The average salary in Kolyma, well, in Magadan, is 30,000 rubles.

Tomatoes cost 550 rubles per kilo, even cucumbers.

All produce is really expensive.

Take any other city.

The average salary may be a little bit lower, but the groceries are a lot

cheaper. Life there is easy in that regard.

And if you are someone with two kids, own or rent a flat, pay utilities, you

are drained dry.

What are your plans?

Do you intend to live here your whole life?

No, I'm definitely not spending my life here, that's for sure.

Because, first of all, I can't see a future for my kids here.

I think we need to move somewhere warmer, like Krasnodar Krai.

First of all, if you move to live in Krasnodar, in a way, you live on a

vacation. You don't need to save up money for tickets to simply go to the

sea or even to go to something like Gelendzhik or elsewhere.

I can even name top three cities where people from Magadan moved to.

They are Belgorod, Krasnodar, and St.

Petersburg, probably.

There are a lot of immigrants from Magadan in those cities.

There is even a whole street of people from Magadan in Belgorod. Why Belgorod?

I think the atmosphere and the climate suit a lot of people.

It's true.

People are leaving Magadan.

Do you want to leave too? I plan to, yes.

I plan to... I'd even say that I want to move from Magadan. I think of going to

St. Petersburg.

It's clear as day. It's a beautiful, very beautiful city with a lot of

opportunities, where you find cool new things, and there's so much

to do on every corner.

When your pals hear about this, won't they say, like, boo, you're betraying

Magadan, you're betraying home?

Some will support me, some might say that.

I mean, you have to also consider the way they live. Some of my friends are

completely content.

He has a lot of mortgages, pays loans, stuff like that, no weekends, and he

likes living like that. Okay, fine.

He says, I love Magadan, I really like it, it's incredible.

I don't get that.

There are reasons to love this city.

But people mostly love this place for its nature. But we don't live in the

forest. Maybe 15 or 20% of people are hunters and fishermen.

The rest are your normal working folks.

I mean, so I don't get it when people say, this place is great, I wouldn't

change a thing, it's perfect.

I don't get these people.

I don't even want to hear their opinion.

And there are those who will say, dude, you got the right idea, bolt while

you're young.

Things should have been done earlier to keep the youth here.

Right now, I don't see any prospect that would make young people want to stay.

Do you plan to leave Kalima?

Not today.

What about tomorrow? Not tomorrow either. I don't rule out the

possibility.

I mean, time will tell. I might leave because of my parents.

I might leave with my kids in order to get them into college.

My son is 13 now, so he's going to be pretty soon.

What does he say? Does he want to go to Moscow or St. Petersburg, drop sick

rhymes and make vlogs?

Yes, he wants to. He's not comfortable here. He sees what life is like

elsewhere. It's different.

He's tired of the cold.

What do you think? Do people of Kalima feel separated from Russia?

I think so.

I mean, there is even an expression to go to the mainland.

We feel like we are on an island.

The only way off this quote-unquote island is by plane.

Of course, we feel separated.

Okay, not the only way. There is the highway, Kalima Highway, but in summer

it gets washed out.

You can barely drive on it.

Some do, but you risk to kill your chassis or, God forbid, get stuck

somewhere. So, very few drive themselves.

Most save up.

So, yeah, a lot of people feel that they're separated from normal life.

You go there on a vacation and you see...

Oh, this is convenient, this is very well developed, and you got that

building and this thing, and there's a quality service.

You come back to Magadan, and there is none of that, unfortunately.

I think we shouldn't abandon this place. A lot of people took offense and felt

left behind and decided to leave.

That's not my path, personally.

My mission, as I see it, is to work things out and do everything I can on my

level. When you abandon a place, this happens.

On that day, kolkhoz workers brought their entire families to the village

post office.

A short and simple address on the telegraph form.

Moscow, Kremlin, for Comrade Stalin.

From these lines, Joseph Vissarionovich will learn that the agronomist Malsev's

family also wishes him happiness, health, and a long life.

Threads not only of telegraph lines, but also invisible threads of spiritual

bonds stretch out from countries every corner to Moscow, to Kremlin, where

Stalin lives and works.

An endless flood of letters and telegrams is headed for Kremlin.

Put together, they become a tremendously insightful, beautiful and majestic

narrative poem about life, happiness,

the heroism of the Soviet people and their eternal love for their Vozhd.

He wrote a letter to Stalin. He wrote a detailed letter to Stalin from the

Novocherkassk prison, but obviously didn't reach him, most likely.

But he didn't believe that Stalin was involved in this situation.

He probably didn't believe it.

But you know that Stalin was aware of everything, right?

Of course Stalin was aware.

Stalin was definitely aware of everything.

But there was this mania about spies, a mania that there was a threat of spies,

that wreckers were everywhere, that there were counterrevolutionaries and so

on. It was terrible.

However, when Stalin died,

my father wrote these words. I mention them in my book.

Our comrade Stalin is dead.

He doesn't say dear or beloved, but plainly, our comrade Stalin is dead.

He took this loss very hard, very, very hard. Oh, so it wasn't ironic. It was

actually difficult for him. Our family took it very hard, too.

Everybody cried, literally. I remember this time very clearly.

In March of 1953, I was already studying at an institute.

We all wanted to go and bid our farewells to Stalin. Literally everyone

was crying. Every single person was crying.

Mom was crying. Grandma was crying. We were all crying.

We didn't know what would become of us because Stalin was a god, literally a

god at the time.

How do you feel about Joseph Stalin?

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

Despite the fact that my father was repressed and illegally imprisoned,

when it was his word, he taught us that Stalin was great, he won the

war. And when he and his friends gathered to drink, they'd drink,

and they'd always drink to Stalin.

There was always a toast to Stalin.

This was in the 70s and the 80s when he was alive.

How do you explain it? He caused him... He basically changed his whole life and

not necessarily for the better. Well, you know, my understanding is that it

wasn't Stalin.

I mean, there were a lot of people executing those orders.

It wasn't Stalin himself, but the people who, well, the others.

For some reason, he believed that Stalin was great.

Stalin won the war.

Stalin rebuilt the country.

Stalin probably was an idol.

And you see, nevertheless, people consider Stalin a winner and a hero.

Not a tyrant, not a...

Just to clarify, this is not just your father, you believe that too?

Yeah, yes.

I can say that this name was never uttered at our home.

Ever. It was, you know, it was like a swear word. We never said it. Because

Stalin… I grew up with a knowledge that he's a monster.

That he, that this man… You know what else played a role?

These books came out. I learned to read early.

And this green or blue book, document of the 20th and 22nd Congresses, I almost

worried out reading it because it was a crime novel.

Those were in Brezhnev's dry reports that you couldn't bear to read about

these… reports that everything's great, just boring nonsense, not

for kids.

This was the Count of Montecristo.

Because Khrushchev was exposing people.

There were names.

Lyosha Svanidze, his final words.

How Kirov was assassinated. It was cooler than the Count of Montecristo,

because it was about my dad.

I mean, my dad, he… I… I don't know if I could pronounce the

word rehabilitated at that time.

I probably learned it immediately.

This automatically made my dad like everyone else. And the whole settlement

was like that.

There were some free contractors too, though.

But, you know, regarding Stalin...

I still argue on Facebook sometimes with some stubborn people, but I realize it's

like talking about God with a religious person.

I don't possess the gift of the gab.

I'm an atheist.

Well, I think he was a tyrant of tyrants.

And my opinion about him is strictly negative.

I went on vacation this year and...

visited Rzhev.

They have a Stalin museum there,

a house museum.

I didn't even enter it for some reason.

I didn't want to even cross that threshold.

He's guilty of many things, but Stalin wore...

Kirza boot or box-carve boot and overcoat his whole life and never had a

vacation. I'm not saying it's a good thing. No. They say it's a myth about

Kirza boots.

He lived quite luxuriously. Well, God forbid he'd have lived like I do now.

But you mentioned Kirza boots.

Well, yeah. But now you agree that it wasn't so.

He lived in luxury.

Well, I won't respond to that, okay?

I don't support him, okay?

But if I start mentioning the good things at the memorial in Moscow, I

always end up arguing with people, always arguing. And you mention one good

thing, they go, oh, you approve of the past, you support Stalin.

No, no, without supporting, what are some of the good things that he did, in

your opinion?

I won't argue with you on that. It's hard off the top of my head. The bad

things are obvious.

We know them since childhood.

The gulag, the shootings, starving people.

But if I bluntly say that he won the war, well, he didn't win the war, the

people did.

Of course, it was the people, but the fact that going into battle people cried

for motherland, for Stalin, that's unimportant, right?

That doesn't count as an upside or what would you call it?

I don't know.

But you may respond that between the bad and the good that he did,

the bad outweighs. Of course, I agree with that.

But we shouldn't forget the good things as well.

But you do agree that the bad overweighs the good. Of course.

What do you, after all these years, think of Joseph Stalin?

You personally, not your father, you.

You know, it's very hard to tell, because to all of us, Stalin was

literally a god. Of course, after the 20th Congress of the party, where

Khrushchev revealed all the crimes that had been committed.

It's very hard to judge these things.

There were a lot of good things, of course, but the repressions were

obviously horrible.

It was horrible because so many people died.

Thank God my father wasn't one of them. It was an incredible fortune that fate

protected him, you know. But many people died, and it was horrible.

And I think...

Stalin must have known these things, but he did a lot of good things too.

For example, under Stalin, we had stronger discipline, more resilient,

better discipline.

Then the fact that Stalin didn't abandon Moscow when the enemies, the Nazis,

were literally behind Moscow's walls.

He even held a parade on the Red Square.

It's hard to judge.

I condemned him, of course I do, for those horrible repressions he could have

not known about them.

He absolutely knew.

But megalomania and persecutory delusion did follow him

everywhere.

What do people in your museum think of Joseph Stalin?

I'd say people are basically… divided into two camps in their opinions.

Some genuinely praise him because the man kind of won the war.

This is the first thing that they say and one I disagree with completely.

Why? Who won the war? The Soviet people won the war. People won the war. Some

support my viewpoint.

There are also those who say that...

Even, let's not discuss this, there are people way worse than Stalin.

Others even think like, why is it always Stalin, why it's not Beria or Yezhov?

Because Stalin was the supreme commander.

He is fully responsible for everyone who died there. That's it.

I heard that the president of the Academy of Sciences, Aleksandrov, once

said something during the celebration of Cosmonautics Day that left a great

impression on me. Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov was the president of the

Academy of Science after Keldysh. He said, if our rocket engineers and...

our military leaders hadn't been arrested, then there may have not been a

war at all.

At least, it would have not been as long as costly.

You see, these words shook me. Because, obviously, Sergei Pavlovich and other

arrested rocket engineers would have done much more to help their motherland

if they didn't waste so much time toiling in Kalima.

You know what Stalinists are at their core?

They're formalists.

They only care about numbers. They count and recount and dig.

They think that if they lower the number of victims to some acceptable threshold,

it's going to make it less scary. After all, some of them were criminals.

They were.

There probably were.

But what is a political criminal?

Is it bad enough for a prison?

You cannot convince them. But the numbers are huge regardless.

They're gonna appear on the screen now.

But they're huge.

They'll say they're incorrect.

Incorrect, huh? They'll say they're fabricated by the liberals.

They'll say that Yakovlev and the perestroika crowd made them up. They'll

say that it's all Jewish fairy tales.

They'll find what to reply with. But you cannot budge them. You can't push them

with all you've got, but he'll remain a Stalinist.

And on March the 5th, he'll go to his grave, not Prokofiev's, but to his, to

bring him his lousy flowers.

Well, the problem is, there were barbarians in the offices too.

And he didn't know. For example, does Vladimir Putin know what's going on in

Kalima? He says, we should open hospitals and villages, but the one in

Senegoria is closing down. How is it possible?

Who is guilty there?

Not him.

Not him, duh.

Who is then?

I don't know, I'm trying to find out.

Stalin organized literal genocide in our country.

We hate that word, but what else do you call it? When you consider 1938, 1948,

and right before he kicked the bucket in 1952 or whatever, those were

peaks of repressions. Do you think if this story could repeat?

What do you think? History gives immunity?

A rake can hide in the grass so well, you'll step on it once.

Twice. History only teaches that you have to learn to make it out, to see

that, but nobody does.

Cyrus, Xerxes, Peter I.

What about them?

They're figures etched into history as people who changed the world, you know?

Stalin changed the world, in a way.

First off, he halved it.

Okay, the number crowd will get mad. First off, he considerably reduced it.

Second, he changed the map of the world. Not Lenin.

All Lenin did was light up the flames of the world revolution,

while one-sixth of all land territory is Stalin's work.

He's the gatherer of lands.

You ask if it could happen again. At any moment, why not? History is very fickle.

Despite the letter to the Congress warning all the party members that this

person could not be put in charge of anything at all,

in 1922 Stalin eagerly began his experiments with the country.

When I hear effective manager and industrialization, my, you know, my

counterarguments dry up, because I immediately think of the price of it

all. The price.

I mean, you can build a factory one way, or you can build it by killing. They

say, what about Peter I? Peter I had no effect on my life at all. I got a 46

-year-old dad.

It hurt to lose him because at that age, people become grandpas. I wanted a young

dad.

Many prisoners and their relatives were certain Stalin didn't know what was

happening in the camps. Didn't he, though?

Stalin knew absolutely everything about the repression system as a whole and the

Gulag in particular, and personally signed execution lists. In fact, it was

Stalin himself who steered the evolution of the camp system.

For example, in 1939, on Stalin's proposal, Gulag cancelled its early

parole system.

As a result, prisoner conditions suddenly became a lot rougher.

On Stalin's orders, speculation offenders were forbidden amnesty

release. 20 years of Kotarga labor were introduced as punishment for escape from

places of forced settlement.

Here are some more documents signed by Stalin himself.

Where does the idea of overzealous subordinates come from that Stalin

didn't know?

It is not so much an opinion.

There was this myth that Stalin, when people were being arrested at that time,

there are recollections of them saying, like, please inform comrade Stalin,

Stalin doesn't know about it.

Even upon release, leaving camps, many were convinced that

Stalin didn't know about this business.

As someone who has a degree in psychology, I read this as the country

after the revolution and after the Great

Purge, after all the repressions, after the war, it was orphaned.

both literally and figuratively.

The literal part is that fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles went to

camps, to the front, were shot, the country was orphaned. And Stalin's

figure became a father figure who won the war and

facilitated... And propaganda played a huge role in that too.

and probably does to this day.

So, this kind of conceived this holy… Image. Image, yeah.

And the myth, I think that's where it comes from. The rest is excuses.

Things don't add up, so the mind comes up with explanations saying, no, it's

falsifications, or Stalin didn't know, and many other counterarguments and

forms of denial.

Less than half of Kalima Highway is located in Magadan Oblast. A larger

portion of this road is bound to the cold soil of Yakutia. To physically

experience the scale of our country, at least once in your life, you gotta visit

Yakutia specifically.

You may have seen this infographic showing which countries could fit on its

territory. To make it even clearer, Yakutia is larger than Kazakhstan,

larger than Argentina, almost as large as India.

If Yakutia was its own country, it would have been the 8th largest in the world

by territory.

In short, wow.

The food place that everyone in these parts knows.

At least one thing makes the wonderfully named Cafe Cuba famous.

For over 200 km that way and 200 km that way.

There's not a single opportunity to get warm and have a bite. But you have the

opportunity here.

Is it made up that Tom Hardy stopped by here? They were passing by, either

advertising cars or just traveling.

It was called a trip to Siberia or extreme or hardened by Siberia, can't

remember the exact name. But they were filming this thing. Did he try venison

goulash? Sure did.

They ate in a cafe. Were they amazed?

Didn't complain.

Did any of the visitors recognize them? I didn't even recognize him at first.

Tom Hardy, Tom Hardy, it's like...

It's a guy from across the ocean. Yeah, I knew his face from movies and stuff,

but I never really bothered to remember his name. But then I learned it.

Cool!

This is our anti-vandalism device.

They laid a new optical cable recently.

For the internet, right? Is that it running next to the highway?

Yeah, it runs from Yakut to Magadan.

It's a test cable.

And as you know, we've got our share of precious metal enthusiasts.

So we put up samples to show that it's just Kevlar and glass inside, no useful

metals. Simply to prevent people from stealing it and trying to sell it. So

you made this display?

Yeah. Yeah, to show to the interested people that if it stops 2 out of 10 of

them, then it's a win already.

But why is the cafe called Cuba? Well, there was a settlement nearby called

Cubame. People said, well, I reached Cuba, and so it was shortened to Cubame.

The village Cubame, and the place was called Cuba for short. What does Cubame

mean? There was something pretty... I don't know, Valley of Death or

something. Everyone translated differently.

Very pretty. I don't know exactly, but it doesn't mean something good. So there

you go. People said Cuba for short, then it turned out that Cuba means swan in

Yakut, so it's pretty in local tongue too. Anyway, it's a bunch of stuff

smashed together, and it works.

There's a lot of bears here.

In summer, yes.

The funniest thing was when we were driving the Poles.

On the stretch from Tomtor to Omyakon, there was a road construction.

And there was this Yakut driver from Tomtor on a bulldozer. He was spreading

the gravel dumped on the site.

And this bear would... He showed up...

And he liked the tractor, or maybe the tractor driver, so he would sit down on

his ass 10 meters away from the bulldozer and watch it work.

For real, he'd sit down just like a person.

Like a child. Yeah, he was just curious, so he'd stay and watch.

But it wasn't as fun for the bulldozer guy. No biggie if you want to piss, open

the door and piss standing on the tracks. But there are things more

serious and complicated in life than taking a leak.

They ended up evacuating the guy and just leaving the tractor there for a

while. In fact, they… well, they literally froze it. It stayed there for

the whole winter.

But this was a story that I'd heard, I didn't believe it. So, when we were

driving the Poles, we found the tractor.

And there was a fucking bear sitting and staring at the tractor.

I was blown away, like, holy crap, it's true!

He wasn't a big bear, an adolescent, maybe five years old.

A teenager.

Yeah, yeah, like a teenager.

They're curious about things.

Do you like living here? Yes.

I like living here.

Why? I was born and raised here.

I dig local freedom, nature, fishing.

I love it.

Though I could actually move abroad, because I have family abroad.

But you're German. I'm ethnically German, but I won't go there. I won't be

able to adapt.

Why?

I have a different kind of wit to me, I don't know.

They lack our Russian not giving a fuck, like, you know what I mean, right? They

got it all very strict, you see?

I love visiting and seeing my relatives, but going there to stay?

I know it's not for me. I won't even try.

I won't be able to live there.

Alright, we are in Omyakon, the coldest place in our country.

Minus 71.2 Celsius.

It's been this cold once, but today it's much warmer.

Let's enjoy it!

Just a minute, I forgot to take the earrings off.

It's cold outside.

They're metal. You can easily freeze your ears.

We, you could, women usually wear hats with ear covers in winter. Then you can

wear earrings. But this way, they'll quickly get cold and you can freeze your

ears. That's why a short hat means earrings stay at home. A lady from India

came last year to swim.

An Indian woman? Yes.

She's been swimming in... Unfrozen in Indigirka, yes. We have warm water

coming out from the earth and even minus 60 degrees ice can't close it. We have

open spots like that in Indigirka. You had Miss Vietnam over.

She was celebrating the New Year with her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend is a photographer from St. Petersburg. He invited her for New Year

and gave her as a sort of a present, a journey in the cold pool.

They celebrated the New Year here. There was another couple, they were older

people, and he proposed to her at the Stella.

Where were they from?

They were Austrians.

Austria? Yeah.

Did she say yes? She did.

They even later send a wedding invitation.

Yes. To you?

Yes.

There is the settlement of Tamtor, an hour ride away from Omyakon. This is

where Ryder Verlam Shalamov's deportation ended.

He spent 15 years in Kolyma and was one step away from death multiple times, but

caring doctors brought him back every time. When Shalamov was hospitalized for

the second time, they didn't just save him, but also trained him to be a

felsher. He began to work in different Kalima settlements.

Shalamov continued doing it for many years after the end of his sentence,

because he needed money to buy a ticket to the mainland.

The reasons he spent his last years in Tumtur specifically is because it had

the only post office for hundreds of miles away.

Correspondence with Boris Pasternak was his connection to the free world.

You know, they often ask me, especially the foreign journalist,

Was Sergei Pavlovich proud?

And how did he feel about his country after it treated him so

cruelly? He was a patriot of his country in every sense

of the word.

His pride wasn't about getting praised for something.

but rather to have the first satellite be ours, to have the first person in

space be a Russian, to have the first EVA performed by our cosmonaut.

Ours.

He was a patriot of his country, as proof of that.

I can tell you what he wrote when I was about to turn 18.

This was April 5th, 1953.

I was born on April 10th. He was at the Kapustin Yar launch site at the

time. On April 10th, 1953, I turned 18.

And he wrote like that, Natasha, in a few days, you will attain the age of

majority. You will have the full right to consider yourself an adult.

I wholeheartedly congratulate you on this day and wish you to become a worthy

citizen of our great motherland.

Despite all the hardships we endured in the previous years, our motherland

didn't stop caring for you even for a moment. No matter how hard it got, you

grew and you studied and your life was bright.

Always remember that and always love our people and the land you grew up on.

I wish you that in everything and for all time.

I told the same to my grandchildren when they turned 18.

Those were words of a true patriot.

He loved his country probably more than anyone.

We reached our final destination, Yakutsk.

after sundown, so we couldn't capture the greatest tragedy of this place

crossing the river Lena. But you can look up the pictures.

Yakutsk is a large, 300,000-strong city cut off from all Russian roads, most

importantly from Kalima Highway.

In winter, people cross it either in their own cars or in a hovercraft. In

summer, by ferry.

But when the ice is already too thin and the ferry isn't running yet, Yakutsk

lives in isolation.

In part, because all the attention Energy and money are put into the other

bridge, the Crimean one.

You said the country was soaked with fear back then. Do you see any legacy of

this fear in Russian people today?

By Russian people, I mean all the republics. No, your generation is

completely free of that fear.

I know that.

But in me, it's alive and kicking. How does it show?

In many ways. I worry.

That you'd get into trouble or blurt something out? Well...

Like, yesterday I said... No, not yesterday, the other day.

In some talk show, when they all started clamoring, the episode was about me, I

said, you're clamoring like we're in the Duma. Take turns, I can't make anything

out.

I said this and forgot.

This morning I came up to my director and went, hey, you know the thing I

said?

You're clamoring like you're in Duma, but they got this new law saying you

can't offend them or insult them.

He goes, what an insult it is, though. I went, well, they don't clamor anymore.

Can you imagine? Like, I don't have better things to think of.

No, fear is a sticky beast.

Sadly, we grew up in this fear.

Some of those who will watch our video to the end will say, Dude, what is it

with you and Stalin?

Why do you keep bringing him up?

Didn't someone tell you not that long ago that one of Russia's main problems

is that it lives in the past, that it's still busy discussing if Stalin was

right or wrong?

We travel the Kalima Highway not to discuss if Stalin was right or wrong.

You don't need us to give the right answer to that simple question.

We travel the Kalima Highway because it's not about our past, it's about our

present. Fair?

It's a sticky beast.

Fear is the greatest enemy of freedom.

Fearing nothing means missing screws and being stupid. But fearing a rustle, a

look, or worst of all, your own opinion, means never risking or exploring new

things or developing yourself, your community, and your country.

We travel the Kalima Highway to remind everyone two simple human values.

They're actually common, but our people often forget them. Don't be afraid.

Respect yourself.

Maybe then our country won't see any more times where people are treated

worse than animals.

And so, peace!