The “Maldyak” in Korolev’s life

Finally, my dream has come true… …It’s a frosty and clear morning. The Ataman of the stanitsa Cossack community “Susuman” Mykola Matviienko and I go to the former gold-mine “Maldyak” (which means “a place to go for wood” in the Even language). This was where the future “Chief Designer” of the Soviet aerospace program Sergei Korolev, born on January 12, 1907 in Zhytomyr and raised in what is now Ukraine, began serving his term. He was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp and deprived of voting rights for a further five by the Military Board of the USSR Supreme Court for “wrecking” the Soviet state on September 27, 1938.

He was in Kolyma from July 20 to December 23, 1939. This period of time can be assessed from different perspectives: he only spent five months there, or he held out for five months.

The reason for such controversial assessments is the following. During the time of Stalin’s repressions the territory of Kolyma was used for three main tasks, three strategic goals: firstly, to produce gold for the development of socialism and communism; secondly, to destroy the “public enemies” and finally, to intimidate people throughout the USSR with a horrible place from whence nobody ever returns.

To achieve these goals they introduced a 12- to 16-hour working day without days off, with extremely high rates of mandatory output, awful food and the absence of any medical services. In addition to this there were mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects there, as well as an exhausting summer heat and devastating winter frost. In such conditions, 30 prisoners died every day in “Maldyak” alone, despite the “Welcome!” sign above the iron gate to the camp zone. In his five months there, Korolev paid the following price: he lost fourteen teeth, his jaw was broken, he received a deep scar on his head and suffered from progressing scurvy and pellagra… Korolev almost died several times during those months, in particular, when he hit a foreman because the latter had pushed a sickly old man with his wheelbarrow from a high overpass. Instead of killing Korolev for his reckless act, the foreman, impressed by his strong character, took care of the man.

The winter of 1939 could have been the last for an exhausted Korolev if he hadn’t been included in a list of 150 developers of technical equipment for the Tupolev Construction Department, chosen according to Stalin’s personal orders from different GULAG concentration camps and brought to Moscow for future construction work. The war was approaching and Stalin realized that he would need not just the latest planes, but rockets as well.

Somewhere, in the depths of space was Korolev’s lucky star: for some reason the documents for the former “Maldyak” prisoner were delayed in Magadan and Korolev didn’t manage to get on the motor ship “Indigirka” that left for Vladivostok from Nagaev Bay on December 13, 1939. During a storm in the La Perouse Strait the ship strayed from its course, hit underwater rocks and got stuck near the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The water rushed into the broken holds, but the head of the prisoners’ convoy ordered not to open the hatches and in a couple of minutes the floating prison “Indigirka” turned into a mass grave for all its 1,064 prisoners. “Maldyak” prisoner Sergei Korolev was supposed to be the 1,065th in this list of the dead…

Later, recalling “Maldyak” as one of the “death factories” of the remote Kolyma, the chief designer wrote the following: “Our main principle is protecting people. Let God give us the strength and ability to always do it…”

I took the occasion to ask the former director of the gold mine, and present director of the gold-mining cooperative “Maldyak” Vasily Ridozubov, a few questions:

Is there any thing that survived from the time when Sergei Korolev served here its term?

“Only the frost, the sky and the earth… The thing is that at the place of the former village of Maldyak (the prisoners’ barracks, houses, utility premises, etc.) a goldfield was found and the village was demolished. Everything you can see is the rest of the buildings from the 1950s and 1960s. Previously, our village numbered about 2,000 people, we had a whole infrastructure, including a post office, a branch of a savings bank, a consumer services center, a club, a boiler house, a kindergarten and a ten-year secondary school… However, the deposits of gold were steadily exhausted and our village slowly depopulated, too. Now there are only two gold-mining cooperatives operating here: ours numbers 120 people, and the other one has 90 people.”

Could you please share some statistics concerning the gold?

“The gold mine ‘Maldyak’ was opened in 1937, and 120 tons of gold have been extracted since then. In Korolev’s time they sometimes produced up to 40 kilos of gold a day, and now the two cooperatives, with modern equipment, produce 1.5 to 2 kilos a day. We work 12 hours a day. In winter we have two-month vacations. We earn 20 to 35 thousand rubles a month. (5,500 to 9,500 hryvians. – Author). Our cooperative’s plan for 2004 [the year this interview was conducted – Ed.] was 220 kilos. We have already produced 416 kilos for today, October 12. One gram of gold costs 380.9 rubles. That’s what we have. By the way, in 1991 Sergei Korolev’s daughter Natalia Koroleva came to Maldyak. She lives in Moscow: she’s a professor, Ph.D. in medicine… Then we went up to the hill where in 1939 the prisoners spent their nights in tarpaulin tents despite temperatures of 50 degrees below zero. Natalia Koroleva took a handful of soil from that place for the museum in Moscow. We’ll make an excursion for you as well…”

The rests of the abandoned village remind one of an open-air museum. The empty houses had red slogans like “Workers of Maldyak! Increase the strength of our Motherland by your intensive work!” or “Kolyma is the currency department of the country!” written on them.

We also walked along the so-called Gagarin path. The prisoners condemned to death were taken from their barracks and brought to the ravine, where the colonel Gagarin, head of the Northeast Labor Camps Direction, would personally shoot them.

The author of the famous book Kolyma Stories, a former prisoner of Stalin’s concentration camps Varlam Shalamov wrote: “I saw Gagarin nearly fifty times. He was about forty-five, broad-shouldered, potbellied, with big dark eyes; he raced on the northern goldfields day and night in his black car ZIS-110. Gagarin was the head of the trio that shot the prisoners. He read the orders day and night and put the closing formula: “The order was executed, the head of the Northeast Labor Camps Direction, the Colonel Gagarin.”

Shooting the prisoners personally, Colonel Gagarin boasted that he also increased the strength of the Motherland by his “intensive work,” “ridding it of public enemies…”

“In 1993, if I’m not mistaken,” said Ridozubov during our excursion, “we were working on a new goldfield and found a prisoners’ grave at a depth of five meters next to the first source. There were about 20 people there. Their clothes and even their features were well preserved as they were in the permafrost. They had been shot. It was a trace of the Colonel Gagarin. We buried those people at our cemetery and erected a monument on their grave with the sign ‘To Kolyma prisoners.’”

We visited that mass grave and I thought, standing next to it: “Maybe the world-known mathematician, the scholar Mykhailo Kravchuk, whose students were the general constructor of rocket and space systems Sergei Korolev and the author of the first domestic turbojet engine, the scholar Arkhyp Liulka, is among these prisoners. Mykhailo Kravchuk was arrested on February 28, 1938, in Kyiv, charged with supporting ‘fascist hirelings,’ and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment and five years of voting rights deprivation. Here, in Maldyak, where the Evens once harvested wood, the member of the French, German and Italian Mathematical societies Kravchuk had to hack through half a ton of gold ore every day in an underground mine. It was then the required rate per prisoner, but none of them could hold out for long…”

Having finished my research in the Chukchi Peninsula at Cape Dezhnev I was coming back to Kyiv via Moscow. I called Natalia Koroleva, and when she heard that I had just came form “Maldyak,” she readily invited me to visit her. I gave her the presents from Kolyma, from Vasyl Ridozubov: a bottle of expensive cognac, a box of chocolates and a mug with two yellow sunflowers on the white enamel. The modern “Maldyak” miners drink their strong tea from such mugs.

Later, in Kyiv, I gave her my best photographs from Kolyma. During our first meeting in Moscow, after a long conversation and tea drinking from the Kolyma mugs, Koroleva gave me a tour of the Sergei Korolev Museum and wrote an entry dedicated to Ukrainians in a special notebook:

“The history of our family is closely related to Ukraine. Starting from the 17th century, several generations of our ancestors lived in the town of Nizhyn in Chernihiv district. My father, born in Zhytomyr on January 12, 1907, spent his childhood in the house of his grandparents Moskalenkos. His grandfather Mykola Moskalenko was a merchant and his grandmother became famous for growing, pickling and selling the famed Nizhyn cornichons…

“In August 1914, the grandparents of the future chief designer of rocket and space systems left Nizhyn and moved to Kyiv, bringing their grandson Sergei with them.

“My parents Sergei Korolev and Ksenia Vinzentini studied at the professional building school in Odesa, then my father spent two years studying at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and my mom studied at the Kharkiv Medical Institute. Both of them loved Crimea. My father went paragliding in Koktebel when he moved to Moscow from Kyiv and became a student of the high technical school.

“Later, when he lived in Moscow, Sergei Korolev several times visited Kharkiv, the Donbas and the Crimea, and came to Kyiv in the last years of his life. He always loved Ukraine. He liked the melodic Ukrainian language and sincere Ukrainian songs. My father always remembered that part of his life which he lived there fondly. There he made his first steps and flew his first kilometers in the sky, his first love was born there, and there he decided on his future way to Space…

“All of our family, my children and grandchildren love Ukraine and the people living there. Everything there is close to us. I have a special attitude to Ukraine. On the one hand, the life of all our family is linked to it and, probably, I hear the voice of my blood. On the other hand, this land deserves the love of everyone who has ever visited it, regardless of their origin. That is why every visit to Ukraine is a holiday for me…

“I believe that despite all the artificial borders, Russians and Ukrainians have always been together and, I think, will always be.

“I’d like to wish my compatriots health, happiness and peace.” 

The dramatic history of one person is the tragedy of a whole country, the history of maimed destinies and destroyed lives. Certainly, the intelligent Russian and Ukrainian people will always be together, as Natalia Koroleva wrote. However, unfortunately, they are still separated by the terrible phenomenon of “Stalinism” that tried to mercilessly destroy a person who, undoubtedly, was the pride of both nations.