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How many miners work there? "Enough to be profitable."
How much gold is extracted per ton of ore? "Enough."
Where is it processed? "In the central part of the country."
Where exactly? "At certain places."
The view from the air in winter evokes an old prisoner song: "Kolyma, , wonderful planet/ Twelve months winter, the rest summer." While that may not be literally true, the brief subarctic summer can be worse than the winter. When it arrives in July, thawed swamps release swarms of hungry arctic mosquitoes and tiny black biting flies that together make life miserable.
"August is the best time of year," said Oleg Kievsky, 50, an engineer at the Bilibino nuclear power station, the most northerly power reactor in the world. "The frosts of August kill the mosquitoes, but the weather is still beautiful. Everybody goes out camping, and we spend our days picking berries or mushrooms for the winter."
During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead on the ice.
Magadanians today seldom speak of their dark history. "I didn't live here then," snapped Party Leader Bogdanov when asked about the camps in Magadan. "That page of history is closed. There is no need to talk constantly about it."
Others were more forthcoming. "It is our tragedy, our pain," said Valentin Avdeyev, director of a power dam on the Kolyma River in the heart of the area where most of the camps were situated. "Newcomers always ask about them. There are none left, but we know where they were. When we are driving past, we point and say, 'There was a camp here.' "
Younger Magadanians seem more interested in their present and future careers than the area's sordid past. "That was a sad time, and we feel shame for it," said Galina Fedchenko, a reporter for the regional newspaper Magadanskaya Pravda. "But we don't talk about it very much. It's far in the past." She paused, and added with perhaps more confidence than justified by history, "We know it can never happen again."