Chukotethnoexp. Part II. Magadan Region

March 10–16, 2012

The four Ethnographic expedition SUVs in one photo.

The SUVs are very comfortable to eat and sleep in. Why go outside for anything?

Just turn on the stove, heat up your dinner, make some tea—and sit back surfing the Internet via satellite.

The steering wheel on one of the Nissan Patrols got stuck, and it drove into a concrete barrier. Incredible luck. The steering could have gotten stuck anywhere along our 6000-kilometer route—on a winding mountain road, in the city, in front of a bridge. But it got stuck on a flat stretch of the road, a kilometer away from the Kadykchan coal mine’s auto depot.

We were allowed into the garage where the Belaz haul trucks park overnight and given a hand with our repairs.

There used to be a custom of commemorating drivers’ deaths on the road by putting up steles with their car’s steering wheel on them.

The Magadan region has its own unique sign to inform drivers about speed restrictions for different types of vehicles.

Attention! Speed limit

It’s beautiful here.

The Magadan region was once infamous for its prison camps, and today it has an abundance of ghost villages and towns. It’s easier and cheaper to just shut down a whole city than to support life in it.

Kadykchan

Kadykchan doesn’t exist.

The factories are shut.

The cars no longer run.

The streets are deserted.

The schools are empty.

Welcome to the world of knowledge

The children’s playgrounds are covered with snow.

The restaurant is out of business.

POLA_ _ESTAURANT

The city is no more.

That’s it.

2 South

Move on and forget about it.

Myaundzha

The city is on the verge of dying out, but still inhabited for the time being.

Nothing has changed here. Nor is there any point in changing anything.

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. March 4, 2012. Election of the President of the Russian Federation. Polling Station #72 Precinct Election Commission

Susuman

Northern beauty.

You can immediately tell where the windows don’t shut tightly enough.

Stalagmites growing on top of a heat pipeline.

The main street.

The Susuman hotline.

Susuman District Department of Internal Affairs Hotline

An unexpectedly beautiful old clothing store.

House of Clothing. Tomorrow belongs to us!

Post, telegraph, telephone. It’s practically Switzerland.

There will never be a war here.

A world without wars is our ideal!

Debin

There was once a working gas station here. Today, it’s a half-deserted village.

Only here did I find out that Kolyma isn’t simply a region in the east of the country to which everyone gets exiled, it’s just the name of a river. And here’s the river itself.

Sinegorye

Sinegorye (which means “blue mountains” in Russian) is indeed situated among some fairly blue-looking mountains.

The Kolyma Hydroelectric Power Plant is also located here. Local residents like to shoot bottles in front of its sign.

Kolyma HPP

The former airport site. You can easily add “former” in front of half the sites in the city.

Former site of Sinegorye Airport

People still live here, but they no longer need a café, a movie theater, a cultural center, or a bookstore.

Books

The city is half-deserted.

Homes stand abandoned.

Sometimes one half of a building has people living in it while the other half is already dead and empty.

There are lots of unfinished construction projects. It’s obviously impossible to sustain any kind of real estate market here. An apartment can be exchanged for a one-way ticket to Moscow.

Every other house is tagged with “Rusya T.” When cities die, they’re taken over by Rusya T.

Rusya T.

This is a new category for me: a living corpse of a city.

Magadan

Of all the cities in Russia, Magadan definitely got the short end of the stick terms of its image.

Magadan is, was and will be...

I was certain that it’s always dark and gloomy here, the streets are full of glowering ex-cons, and the expression “sunny Magadan” is used exclusively as a cynical joke.

But it turned out to be exactly the opposite. A surprisingly clean, peaceful, sunny city.

With cheerful bays.

With spacious courtyards.

With a baby Eiffel Tower.

With a palatial public toilet on its main street.

Municipal Public Toilets

With fighter plane lollipops.

With perky upturned canopies over building entrances.

With a wonderful sign directing traffic to the right lanes.

With trash dumpsters.

With fountains bundled up for the winter.

With gems of beauty of the walls.

With mysterious artifacts from the past.

With detailed bus schedules.

Bus station

And with building address signs (the same as the ones that existed in Saint Petersburg for about seven years and can still occasionally be found in Kazan) which hang at an absolutely inexplicable height.

* * *

On the way back, the same Patrol that lost control of its steering at the beginning of the page flew off the road at a sharp turn and fell over on its side. Fortunately, the only resulting damage was a slightly dented fender.