I used to work with a guy who came from Magadan. He was short and strong and had a loud voice. People were intimidated by him for more reasons than his loud volume and aggressive manner.
Magadan was the oblast, or province, where the notorious and dreaded labor camp known as Kolyma was located. The province is rich in minerals, especially gold. Starting in the 30s, Stalin obtained much of his gold from the mines of Kolyma.
The climate there is sub-arctic and brutal. In the winter, the temperature can drop to fifty below zero. In that temperature, prisoners would mine gold and cut timber. A man at hard labor in the mines or in the forest, given a diet of perhaps 1400 calories a day, might take about two weeks to perish.
For some reason, I keep thinking about the man from Magadan. He represents for me the poisoned gift of history.
I came across a web site dedicated to the paintings of Nikolai Getman, one of the survivors of Kolyma.
Here is the web site:
http://www.artukraine.com/paintings/getman.htm
The paintings are powerful, and not for children or the overly sensitive.
How did Getman come to be at Kolyma?
According to William W. Geimer of the Jamestown Foundation:
“Getman’s “crime” was that he had been present in a cafe with several fellow artists, one of whom drew a caricature of Stalin on a cigarette paper. An informer told the authorities, and the entire group was arrested for “anti-Soviet behavior”. Getman spent eight years in Siberia at the Kolyma labor camps where he witnessed firsthand one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Although he survived the camps, the horrors of the GULAG seared into his memory. Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the GULAG which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.”
I’ve written a poem about Kolyma. It will be read aloud on my podcast web site beginning on Saturday, November 6:
Kolyma is pronounced ka-li-MAH, with the accent on the last syllable.
KOLYMA’
I met someone who came from Kolyma’
Where gold was mined at fifty deaths below,
Short and strong he was with angry shouts,
Men were felled in thousands of windrows
How strange the agriculture of the mind
Which cultivates such harvests in the cold,
Can it be that humans have gone blind?
And yet they shoveled corpses with the gold
I met someone who came from Kolyma’
But that was more than twenty years ago;
No winter wheat is planted in the ground,
The gathering takes centuries to grow
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