<grins>
Well, if it was a town of only a thousand residents then it could well be anywhere, my grasp of Russian geography doesn't quite extend to that level of detail!
Plus, Lugansk is indeed in the Ukraine ...
Then again, "a thousand miles from the next nearest community" doesn't sound like the Ukraine - whereas Magadan in the Far East would definitely fit that bill. And Magadan in the Far East (and the surrounding Kolyma) is indeed a centre of gold mining.
Why is this at all interesting? Because Magadan in the Far East is not just any town. It was the port to the Kolyma, perhaps the Gulag's most notorious concentration of forced labour/death camps, described in Varlam Shalamov's memoirs,
Kolyma Tales).
To quote Anne Applebaum's
Gulag - A History,
Quote:In the same way that Auschwitz has become, in popular memory, the camp which symbolizes all other Nazi camps, so too has the word "Kolyma" come to signify the greatest hardships of the Gulag. "Kolyma", wrote one historian, "is a river, a mountain range, a region and a metaphor." Rich in minerals - and above all rich in gold - the vast Kolyma region in the far north-eastern corner of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, may well be the most inhospitable part of Russia. Kolyma is cold [..] - temperatures there regularly fall to more than 49 degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter [..] To reach the camps of Kolyma, prisoners travelled by train across the entire length of the USSR - sometimes a three-month journey - to Vladiviostok. They made the rest of the trip by boat, travelling north past Japan, through the Sea of Ochotsk, to the port of Magadan, the gateway to the Kolyma River valley.
When Dalstroi, the huge trust that was to exploit the region's mineral assets through the Gulag prisoners' forced labour, was first set up, it was, typically, out of nothing:
Quote:the first years were fraught with the same chaos and disorganisation that prevailed elsewhere. By 1932, nearly 10,000 prisoners were at work [..] along with more than 3,000 voluntary "free workers" [..] The high numbers were accompanied by high death rates. Of the 16,000 prisoners who travelled to Kolyma in [the] first year, only 9,928 even reached Magadan alive. The rest were thrown, underclothed and underprotected, into the winter storms: survivors of the first year would later claim that only half of their number had lived.
Yet the first years that followed were still relatively benign. Prisoners got adequate food and warm clothing, three rest days a month, and didnt need to work "when the frost dipped below minus 60 degrees". Exiles still were allowed to keep books and papers, and exile families were not yet split up. (It's from such "favours" that one can tell how bad it was to become later.) It was the prisoners who built Magadan, "which contained 15,000 people by 1936". Applebaum quotes the writer Evgeniya Ginzburg:
Quote:How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride ... How it had grown, and how handsome had it become during my seven years' absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt [..] We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.
By 1934, some sort of order seemed in place. "Death rates dropped from their high of 1933 as famine across the country receded and camps became better organised." But "the relative calm was not to last. Abruptly, the system was to turn itself inside out, in a revolution that would destroy masters and slaves alike": the Great Terror. It would devour camp bosses as well as inmates, and Magadan's camp boss, Eduard Berzin, was one of the most prominent to fall.
Ordered back to Moscow, "Berzin left Vladivostok as a first-class passenger, [but] arrived a prisoner." Purges swept the Kolyma camps and "by the time it was over, hundreds of people who had been associated with Berzin, from geologists to bureaucrats to engineers, were either dead or had themselves become prisoners".
The camps themselves "once again overflowed with new" prisoners. About another Siberian camp it's noted that "lacking barracks, prisoners built zemlyanki, dugouts in the earth". Death rates doubled within a year and "are presumed to be much higher in those far northern camps - Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk - where political prisoners were sent in large numbers." NKVD orders appeared that "contained execution quotas for Gulag prisoners".
Meanwhile, Dalstroi still attempted to also attract free citizens to such places as Magadan, offering 20 percent higher wages, paid vacations and a generous pension. The propaganda press wrote glowingly of the city's appeal:
Quote:The sea of lights that is Magadan by night is a most stirring and alluring spectacle. This is a town which is alive and bustling every minute of the day and night. It swarms with people whose lives are regulated by a strict working schedule. Accuracy and promptness begets speed, and speed becomes easy and happy work ...
The reality: "One prisoner recalled having been sent, with a building brigade, 600 kilometres north of Magadan to build a bridge. Once they arrived, they realized that no one in the brigade had ever built a bridge before. One of the prisoners, an engineer, was put in charge of the project, although bridges were not his specialty. The bridge was built. It was also washed away in the first flood."
Officially, working days were extended to 11 hours, in practice many prisoners worked longer. When new camps were established, the prisoners first had to build them:
Quote:Janusz Sieminski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma after the war, was also once part of a team that constructed a new lagpunkt "from zero", in the depths of winter. "At night, prisoners slept on the ground. Many died, particularly those who lost the battle to sleep near the fire."
Hunger and cold permeated everything. In 1939, a Kolyma doctor pointed out "that prisoners were being made to eat their food outdoors, and that it froze while it was being eaten." Vladimir Petrov, a prisoner in Kolyma, recalls a period of five days without any food deliveries in his camp: "real famine set in at the mine. Five thousand men did not have a piece of bread." In winter, it was so cold that "touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin"; in summer, "the surface of the tundra turns to mud [..] and mosquitos appear to travel in gray clouds":
Quote:as you were eating your soup, the mosquitos would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood. The more you moved and waved them away, the more they attacked.
Worst of all was Dalstroi's punishment camp, Serpantinnaya, "located on the northern slope of the hills just above Magadan." A sentence there was equated with a sentence to death, and little is known about it because so few survived to tell the story. One survivor
Quote:described the barracks as so overcrowded that prisoners took turns sitting on the floor while everyone else remained standing. In the mornings, the door would open and the names of ten or twelve prisoners would be called. No one would answer. The first people that came to hand were then dragged out and shot.
Meanwhile, Berzins successor, Ivan Nikishov, lived in luxury, having equipped himself "with a large personal security force, luxury automobiles, sweeping offices and a magnificent dacha overlooking the Pacific Ocean", the latter equipped with oriental carpets and crystal chandeliers. Yet many of the ordinary guards were simply opting for the only available opportunity to earn a little more, secure a little better pension - or had been sent to the camps themselves on strict orders, without having been told where their next job would be.
Reading Applebaum's book, I get the sense that Dalstroi, with its own "inmate troupe", which performed in Magadan, "benefiting from the many well-known singers and dancers incarcerated in Kolyma", became an odd mix between the Holocaust and the Frontier, a concentration of death and cruelty and at the same time the place where the desperate and adventurous went to carve out a new life. No wonder that your friend, if it was indeed this Magadan she had lived in, demonstrated this contradictory mix of "objection to Soviet rule" and "Soviet pride" - she would not be the only one.
... This post with thanks to Anne Applebaum's astounding book, which I am now halfway in reading ...
My memory is probably worse than your geography. I'm certain that she grew up in a tiny Gold Mining town (if you can believe that) that existed for the sole purpose of that endeavor. Something like a thousand residents, a thousand miles from the next nearest community. The only time we got into specific detail is when we were translating her resume and school history. If there is a University in the Russian Magadan Region you reference, perhaps that's where I made my error. I also recall her spending time at Lugansk, formerly Voroshilovgrad, city in eastern Ukraine... and thought that was where she attended school. I've always thought that her first time in Mother Russia was in Moscow, in route to the United States... but I could be wrong. Perhaps I am just spelling Magadan Region wrong? Or just crossed two facts in my memory
I don't know. I looked up the 25 regions that make up Ukraine and it only confused me more. 
She really was wonderful
but the strict Russian Orthodox religion proved a bit much for me. 
