Travels in Siberia (63 page)

With Andrei Struchkov were his wife, Rosa Dmitrievna Struchkova, whom Galina identified as a
chumrobotnitsa
, a word whose meaning is like “housekeeper,” except the house in this case is a
chum
, a reindeer herder dwelling made of hide and resembling a tipi; their daughter, Varvara Andreyevna; and Varvara’s daughter, Regina, who was two years old and watched everything. Also there was a small boy of maybe nine or ten who was related to the driver and did not feel well. I missed his name.

Out of politeness to the foreigner, our hosts had me sit in the front seat. I was happy about this, because the driver, after a few friendly questions, seemed content not to talk, and I could sit and daydream without my usual language struggles or worries that we were about to fall through the ice or skid off the road. We proceeded along the wide, well-graded, straight gravel highway, and the younger Sleptsov drove both quickly and with care. I felt comfortable in the vehicle, too, because this kind of microbus—it’s called an RAF—which resembles the old dependable Volkswagen bus, is of a sound, wide-wheelbase, low-to-the-ground design, and is the only Russian-made passenger vehicle I’ve heard praised
by Russians themselves. A spell of thinking about nothing during this trouble-free ride revived me better than a nap.

Two officials—a hefty, pretty, middle-aged woman and a slim, smiling young man—met us in Tyoplyi Kliuch and led us to the Tyoplyi Kliuch Museum of the Magadan Highway. From our reception I assumed that this was an open-to-the-public attraction associated somehow with the local government. However, the museum, which commemorated the settlement’s history and the prison workers who built the road we were on, appeared to be entirely the work of its curator, Valentina Gerdun, who met us at the door. She was a short, well-dressed, soft-featured woman of seventy-four with a gold tooth in the lower right corner of her smile. She identified herself as a poet, and as she led us around, her passion for the museum she had made bordered on the ecstatic.

The Magadanskaya Trassa (as the highway we were on was called) had been built by prison labor in the 1930s to provide a land route to Magadan, capital of the Soviet slave-labor gold mines of the Kolyma Valley. Magadan is about nine hundred miles from Yakutsk, on the Pacific Ocean’s Sea of Okhotsk. The highway runs through the coldest inhabited places on earth—Oimyakon is in its vicinity—and during its early years of construction, workers on its Kolyma section north of Magadan almost all died before the road was done. At the peak of operation in the thirties and forties, the mines of Kolyma produced perhaps 50 percent of all the gold being mined at that time in the world. By comparing the number of deaths in the Kolyma mines with the corresponding output of gold, historians have estimated that each ton of Kolyma gold cost between seven hundred and a thousand lives, or about one life for every two pounds of gold. The gold, sometimes carried out of the hills in backpacks, began its journey to western Russia along this highway.

Valentina Gerdun’s museum displayed photographs of prisoners who worked on the road, along with short biographies of them, articles of clothing and other small mementos, and poems they had written. The museum’s general tone was not at all accusatory, however; rather, Valentina Gerdun celebrated the highway as a great achievement of the Russian people. As in many Russian museums, a lot of this one celebrated the country’s victory in the Great Patriotic War. The village—also known as Posyolok Dorozhnikov, or Roadbuilders’ Settlement—had been the site of an airfield on the Alaska–Siberia transfer route, a Lend-Lease
program that brought almost eight thousand fighter planes and light bombers from American factories to Russia’s Eastern Front, thereby helping to win the battles of Kursk, Kuban, Stalingrad, and the war itself. Four hundred and fifty prisoners, two hundred horses, and fifty trucks and other machines built the Posyolok Dorozhnikov landing strip during August, September, and October 1943, she said. For finishing this airstrip ahead of time, many NKVD officers and a few civilians received awards, although no awards were given to the prisoners.

This air-transfer arrangement was perhaps the greatest single work of collaboration between Russians and Americans in history. Congress had voted the Lend-Lease Act into law in March 1941 with the intention of providing war matériel to America’s allies, particularly England, for use against the Germans. After Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the United States and the Soviets signed a protocol whereby the Lend-Lease plan would be extended to that country as well. At the start of the war, the Soviet air force had a third fewer planes than the Luftwaffe, and many of those were prewar canvas relics. Attempts to ferry U.S. aircraft quickly to Russia by a North Sea route or from the south, via the Persian Gulf, did not work well, so Lend-Lease planners came up with the idea of sending the planes to the Eastern Front by going west, across North America and Asia. The idea irritated the Russians, apparently, and at first they presented bureaucratic obstacles, but by late in 1942 the route was in operation. American P-39 and A-20 fighter planes and A-29 light bombers began showing up in air combat on the Eastern Front in early 1943.

To cross the continents, the air-transfer route needed many primary and secondary airfields and hundreds of pilots. Disassembled planes went by freight car to northwest Montana, where local workers put them together and got them fully ready to fly. Young Montana women had the job of painting on the Red Star and other Soviet insignia. American pilots then flew the planes by stages into Canada and across the Canadian Northwest—to Edmonton, Dawson Creek, Fort Nelson, Wilson Lake, Whitehorse—ending at Fairbanks or Nome. In Alaska, Russian pilots took over and flew the planes, also by stages, the rest of the way. (American pilots sometimes accompanied the planes into Siberia and beyond for training purposes or as technical advisers.) Of the 7,994 aircraft that traveled the Alaska–Siberia route, 73 went down, with the loss of 114
men. The leg that crossed the coldest part of Siberia, from Chukotka to Yakutsk, was the most difficult and dangerous of the route. Although the planes America sent were not its most up-to-date, and the P-39 (called the Airacobra) was considered obsolete by 1943, Soviet pilots became skilled in flying them. In the Battle of Kuban, the pilot Aleksandr Ivanovich Pokryshkin scored twenty Luftwaffe kills in a P-39.

When the war was over, Soviet historians said little about the contributions of the Lend-Lease aircraft. The omission was understandable, considering the overall Russian sacrifices and the fact that Lend-Lease planes were just a fraction of those the USSR, with ramped-up production, was able to put in the sky by war’s end. But the planes from America, and other Lend-Lease goods and matériel, made an unforgettable impression on average Russians. Joseph Brodsky remembered treasuring empty tins that Lend-Lease Spam had come in, Kolyma prisoners marveled at the amazing American white bread “that produced no bowel movement worthy of the name,” and boys who saw Americans for the first time in the pilots who stopped at their Siberian transfer-point villages thought the yellow boots those pilots wore were about the coolest thing in the world.

Valentina Gerdun’s exhibits on the air-transfer route bore the heading “The Route of Courage,” and as she showed them to us she said she had written a poem about this subject, which she always recites. Then she set her feet, threw back her head, and declaimed:

      
Ty pomnish’, moi drug, svintsovoe nebo

      
I gorod pod nami, bagrovyi zakat,

      
Marshrut ot Alyaski do dal’nei Sibiri

      
S toboi nam doverila Rodina-mat’

      
I smelo veli po vozdushnomy morio

      
Rossiiskie sokoly—gordost strany

      
Kingscobry i Mitchely, Duglasy, Bostony:

      
Pobedu i slavu velikoi voiny.

      
Byvalo, byvalo, shto v skhvatke c prirodoi

      
Teryali my vernikh, otvazhnikh parnei.

      
Nedarom nazvanie “Muzhestva Trassa”

      
Potomki sevodnya prisvoili ei.

      
A nynche vzletaoit krylatye ptitsy

      
S Rossiskoi emblemoi drugikh obraztsov.

      
I v pamyat’ o proshlom slagaiotsya pesni

      
I pishutsya knigi o slave otsov.

      (You remember, my friend, the leaden sky,

      And the city below us, the crimson sunset,

      The route from Alaska to distant Siberia,

      Which our Motherland entrusted to us and to you.

      And bravely those Russian falcons—the nation’s pride—

      Through a sea of air they commanded

      Kingcobras and Mitchells, Douglases, Bostons:

      To victory and glory in the great war.

      It happened, it happened, that in struggle with nature

      We lost many devoted, faithful guys.

      Not without reason was the name “Route of Courage”;

      As their descendants have called it today.

      And now winged birds fly up

      With a Russian emblem of other kinds.

      And in memory of the past, songs are composed

      And books are written of our fathers’ glory.)

Valentina Gerdun paused for a moment to bow and receive our applause. “In August 1945, the Route of Courage ceases its operation,” she continued, “and in 1953 the leader of our people, Stalin, dies. In 1954 the gulag in this area is liquidated and Dalstroi is dismissed. All the settlements along the Magadan Highway go to ‘free existence.’ Many people come here to live in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.

“Here you can see the exhibit I made of this time—‘How Young We Were, How Sincerely We Loved, How We Trusted in Ourselves.’ This is about those people who came for a new life to Tyoplyi Kliuch. Some came to earn big money, some were assigned a job here, some came ‘for the fog’—for the romantics of it. Many of these have now been here essentially for all their lives and many, of course, are no longer living. But
the memory of them has remained in these photos, and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren still are here.

“Dear friends, our settlement certainly reached its peak, its apogee, in the nineteen eighties and nineties. That is indisputable. Almost two and a half thousand people lived here then. With perestroika, of course, we felt a recession here, as well as everywhere in our country. Now one thousand people live in our district. But I want to tell that last year we witnessed very positive events. Due to our regional president, Mr. Vyacheslav Anatolyevich Shtyrov, our new school was constructed. The school is remarkable, full of light, equipped according to European standard, and everything is at a modern level. In this connection, our village library has moved to a very good place there, and my museum has found larger accommodations in this present building also. Before, my museum was in the old school.

“A few of the original inhabitants remain in this community. For example, Irina Nikolaevna Yemelanova, arrested as a girl of thirteen and sent to work on the road for theft of frozen potatoes remaining in the field after harvesting. Also, we are proud of the fact that one of our village inhabitants, Klavdiya Nikolaevna Ilyna, was a firsthand participant in the ‘Route of Courage’ who worked at the meteorological station at Seymchan. From 1943 to 1945, she was the weather forecaster who gave the okay for the planes to start.

“Also, in this village is the department called DSU-4, road-building management, which is responsible for road and bridge construction, as well as the agency responsible for federal roads. And while I am finishing my talk, I want to say that no matter how political and social conditions will vary, our village of Posyolok Dorozhnikov was and will be, because the road operates, and the road is necessary for the state. There are such words in the song I wrote in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of settlement:

      
Doroga, doroga, taiga i morozhy,

      
Ty lentoi lozhish’sya po zhizni moei.

      
Doroga, doroga, liobov’ i trevoga;

      
Ty stala, doroga, moeio syd’boi.

      (Road, road, taiga and frosts,

      You are a ribbon lying along my life.

      
Road, road, love and anxiety;

      You, road, became my destiny.)

“And really, for many people who live in this village, for those who built the road, for those who provide its maintenance and even now are constructing it, this road really did become their destiny.”

Then we had tea and snacks and watched a short black-and-white film about the highway. Many of the images were of prisons—barbed wire, gates, barracks, grounds. Valentina Gerdun said that there had been a main
lager
(prison camp) at Tyoplyi Kliuch, and
lagers
every six miles along the road. On the screen appeared photos of road-worker prisoners taken at or around the time of their arrest, and clips of the same people as old men and women in more recent years. Other parts of the footage had been shot during construction, on bald tundra hills where the roadbed edged around curves with steep drop-offs beside them, and teams of workers pushed barrows up ramps, and a wrecked tractor-trailer lay on its side in a valley far below the roadway like a tiny, two-dimensional object. The film compared the highway to the Alcan Highway, the road that goes from Canada’s Yukon Territory to Fairbanks. Valentina Gerdun pointed out that the labor to build the Alcan Highway was expensive, while the labor to create this highway had cost nothing. When the film ended, she told Sergei and the assembled Eveny that the Magadan Highway should make them feel proud, because it tied their big country together and showed that its people were Russians above all.