Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair
The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today.
The prisoners, hacking their way through insect-infested summer swamps and winter ice fields, brought the road, and the road then brought yet more prisoners, delivering a torrent of slave labor to the gold mines and prison camps of Kolyma, the most frigid and deadly outpost of Stalin’s gulag.
Their path became known as the “road of bones,” a track of gravel, mud and, for much of the year, ice that stretches 1,260 miles west from the Russian port city of Magadan on the Pacific Ocean inland to Yakutsk, the capital of the Yakutia region in eastern Siberia. Snaking across the wilderness of the Russian Far East, it slithers through vistas of harsh, breathtaking beauty dotted with frozen, unmarked graves and the rapidly vanishing traces of labor camps.
There was little traffic when a photographer, Emile Ducke, and I drove last winter along what is now R504 Kolyma Highway, an upgraded version of the prisoner-built road. But a few long-distance trucks and cars still trundled through the barren landscape, oblivious to the remnants of past misery buried in the snow — wooden posts strung with rusty barbed wire, abandoned mine shafts and the broken bricks of former isolation cells.
Descendents of the victims try to keep their memory alive. But for many Russians, nostalgia and ignorance have blurred past horrors.
As evidence of the camps steadily crumbles, adoration of Stalin, even among some former prisoners, has risen to its highest level in decades.
More than a million prisoners traveled the road, both ordinary convicts and people convicted of political crimes. They included some of Russia’s finest minds — victims of Stalin’s Great Terror like Sergei Korolev, a rocket scientist who survived the ordeal and in 1961 helped put the first man in space. Or Varlam Shalamov, a poet who, after 15 years in the Kolyma camps, concluded, “There are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings.” His experiences, recorded in his book “Kolyma Tales,” convinced him that “a man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger and beatings.”
But for many Russians, including some former prisoners, the horrors of Stalin’s gulag are fading, blurred by the rosy mist of youthful memories and of Russia’s status as a feared superpower before the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Antonina Novosad, a 93-year-old who was arrested as a teenager in western Ukraine and sentenced to 10 years in Kolyma on trumped-up political charges, labored in a tin mine near the “road of bones.” She recalled vividly how a fellow prisoner was shot and killed by a guard for wandering off to pick berries just beyond the barbed wire. Prisoners buried her, Ms. Novosad said, but the corpse was then dragged away by a bear. “This was how we worked, how we lived. God forbid. A camp is a camp.”
Yet she bears Stalin no ill will, and also remembers how prisoners cried when, assembled outside in March 1953 to hear a special announcement, they learned that the tyrant was dead. “Stalin was God,” she said. “How to say it? Stalin wasn’t at fault at all. It was the party and all those people. Stalin just signed.”
The New York Times