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Let them eat cake at Gulag city birthday party
Fri Aug 14, 2009 8:10pm EDT
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By Robin Paxton
MAGADAN, Russia (Reuters) - Yelena Zyuzka still doesn't understand why she was exiled to Magadan, but 62 years later she would happily share the enormous cake baked to celebrate the city's birthday.
The cream-filled slices were served up for the crowds that gathered in July to watch street performers, open-air concerts and a midnight firework display to mark the 70th year of Magadan, a city in Russia's Far East that was gateway to the most feared Gulags set up by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Too frail to walk on her own to the street party, the 85-year old shows cupboards stacked with biscuits, meat and vegetables. She is one of the few remaining survivors who chose to remain after the Gulags closed.
There was certainly no celebration by the first wave of settlers.
"Oh! How my mother cried when they came," said Zyuzka of the day when, aged 23 and living in Ukraine, she was taken to serve her sentence of 10 years' exile.
Stalin needed labor to unearth the abundant gold reserves in this region more than 6,000 km (3,750 miles) northeast of Moscow. For two decades, he sent hundreds of thousands of prisoners to his most feared Gulags.
Magadan today exists on its gold mines, fishing and trade in the goods that arrive across the Sea of Okhotsk from ports further south. Most of the cars on its sloping streets are made in Japan.
The spare room of the apartment where Zyuzka has lived since 1961 is decorated with wallpaper depicting Dumbo, Disney's flying elephant, just in case her great-grandson comes back to stay. Only three, he now lives on the Pacific island of Sakhalin.
"Age doesn't bring any joy," she said. "Before, I could feed myself on my pension and set a little aside. Now, everything -- food, medicine -- is so expensive."
About 800,000 people are estimated to have passed through the camps of Magadan between 1932 -- seven years before the city was officially founded -- and the mid-1950s.
Between 120,000 and 130,000 are thought to have died, said Vera Smirnova, director of the Vadim Kozin museum, named after a singer exiled to Magadan -- reputedly because he once said songs about Stalin were not suited for his tenor voice.
They all worked for Dalstroi, the organization set up by the Soviet NKVD -- forerunner of the KGB -- to build the gold mines and associated infrastructure in the region named Kolyma after a river that runs north to the Arctic.
ROAD OF BONES
Zyuzka, the youngest of seven children, left her family behind in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk in 1947. She still speaks with a Ukrainian accent.
Crammed into a train with other women, she crossed almost the entire breadth of the Soviet Union, reaching Magadan by boat from the far eastern port of Nakhodka. She says she wasn't a criminal -- her exile was just a sign of the times. Continued...
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