We had only one day of light at our disposal. In early August, it is no longer so long. We did not have time to drive along the entire Tenkinskaya highway. That is why they limited themselves to Ust-Omchug and its environs. I decided that I would definitely go through the remaining unexplored part of the route next year. We left Ust-Omchug in the direction of Nelkobe. The Shkolnoye deposit is located there, where A. Sechkin worked as the head of the detachment for many years. We slipped past the ruins of the village of Zarechny. In the past, a large transit camp was located here. - Some of the towers, - Sasha explains, - were preserved for quite a long time. They were economically adapted to guard various warehouses and prospecting bases, which were located in abundance in this place. The main Gulag "visiting card" of the Tenkinsky district is, of course, the Butugychag camp with several mines, including uranium. Mount Butugychag is clearly visible from Ust-Omchug and from the highway. It stands out among the surrounding hills, not exceeding kilometer marks. The height of Butugychag is 1700 meters. Turn in the Butugychag tract - forty kilometers after the regional center. We passed the former pioneer camp "Taiga", located in a beautiful and cozy place where Omchug and Left Omchug merge. We moved a small pass, from which, if you look closely, there is an abandoned road to the village of Vetrenny through Butugychag and the Think Pass. Further, the route goes in a north-western direction to the place where the Razgulny stream flows into Terrasovy. From here, turning right, you can get to Butugychag. But the road is washed out, it is practically non-existent. And although the camp enrichment plant is only twelve kilometers from here, we decided not to test Sasha's Land Cruiser for strength. The Mariupol Greek Topalov Petr Georgievich was buried on the “Vetrennoye” and on the 205th kilometer of the Tenkinskaya highway Cherebai Ivan Savvich died of scurvy, who was born in Novaya Karakub, Donetsk region, but lived in Tashkent ... The Butugychag camp had three departments: Lower, Middle and Upper. Each of them was subdivided into separate camps. And "Middle Butugychag" became famous for the fact that it included the women's camp "Backhanka" and the enrichment factory "Carmen". The Mariupol Greek Kovalenko Vyacheslav Georgievich spent some time on the "Bacchante". In the vast majority of families repressed, the camp theme was taboo. returned from there never voluntarily reminisced. Almost nothing was told to her children by Natalia Anatolyevna Valsamaki, who was released ahead of schedule from the Kolyma camp. She, the mother of five children, the youngest of whom was not even a year old, ended up in Kolyma in 1944. N. Valsamaki worked as a store manager and was accused of robbing a store warehouse. In 1947, quite by accident, the true robbers became known. The case was reviewed, N. Valsamaki was released. By this time, her youngest son had died (he was with her in the camp), and four others were scattered in different orphanages. Son Vitaly, born after the return of his mother and named after his deceased brother, told me that his mother was sitting on the "Bacchante" ... In Magadan, after my interview on television in 2003, Vladimir Ivanovich found me (I, unfortunately, forgot his last name) . He was born on Butugychag. Vladimir Ivanovich said that there, in addition to the three named departments, there was one more - a penalty. He was at the top. Perhaps Vladimir Ivanovich had in mind the Gornyak camp. They mined cassiterite. From many I heard that on the "Gornyak" prisoners died from rarefied air, malnutrition and cold. The entire Butugychag camp complex was located in a narrow gorge. Cassiterite was mined on one side of it, and uranium was mined on the other. The uranium quarries were located in the camp, which had the code name of PO Box No. 14. It was located in a real gorge with sheer cliffs on the sides. (The uranium mines of Dalstroy were also located in Indigirka. In 1950, the entire 58th article with letters 1a and 1b was sent there). Those “distributed” to Butugychag were taken by car from Nagaevo Bay to Ust-Omchug, and from there to Nizhniy Butugychag. Then they drove on foot under escort to the "Middle Butugychag". As to Golgotha ​​- all the time up ... "Butugychag" is described in detail by A. Zhigulin in the story "Black Stones" and V. Shalamov in "Kolyma Tales". A twelve-kilometer-long cable car stretched along the hills. It was used to deliver cassiterite ore to the processing plant. According to some reports, twelve thousand people died on the Butugychag. They were buried at the camp cemetery, which was located behind the Sredny Butugychag camp site, not far from the ammonial warehouse. Until recently, hundreds of pegs with tin circles - the bottoms of cans - were preserved in the cemetery. Numbers were stamped on them: B-56, D-42 ... After the execution of L. Beria, in 1954, there was a real uprising in the camp. According to Vladimir Ivanovich, "criminals were crushed." And Sasha told me the following story: - A few years after the closure of Butugychag, someone ordered the empty buildings of the Lower Camp to be used as a poultry farm. But six months later, the chickens became bald, and this enterprise was hastily closed, and the buildings were burned. In almost every photo album dedicated to the Magadan Region, one can see (obviously staged) photographs with skulls collected at the Butugychag. Among them there are neatly opened skulls. Unverified fact: the well-known scientist Timofeev-Resovsky (Bison - in the novel of the same name by D. Granin) allegedly conducted his research here. Gornyak reminded me of the first Tenkino Greek I heard about in Magadan - Leonid Diogenovich Sidoropulo. Later, in the archives of "Memorial" in Moscow, I found his letter, from which I learned about another Greek, Victor Papafoma. In the "Golden Room" of the Magadan Geological Museum, where the largest of the nuggets discovered in Kolyma and other unique gold-bearing ores are stored, the well-known Magadan geologist and keeper of the "Golden Room" Mariy Evgenievich Gorodinsky told me about L. Sidoropulo. He told me that in the eighties L. Sidoropulo worked as the chief mechanic of the Anyui expedition, he was a wonderful, campaigning person. And soon the case of Victor Papafoma from Odessa turned out to be in my hands. From him I learned some details about his friend Leonid Sidoropulo, a native of Nikolaev, a student at the Odessa Water Institute. The Odessa Institute of Water Transport has been cleaned regularly since 1936. And, always in December. And there were always Greeks in the net. In 1936, the rector, a Greek by nationality, Mikhail Dmitrievich Demidov, was arrested. He received a term of 20 years and from May 1938 he stayed at different camps around Seimchan until he died of exhaustion at the Zolotisty mine. Several Greeks were taken at the institute to the Greek operation in December 1937. V. Papafoma and L. Sidoropulo came to Odessa together from Nikolaev. In December 1937, their fathers were arrested in Nikolaev, and in February 1938 they were shot. And now it's December again, and again a conspiracy is revealed at the institute. L.Sidiropulo and V.Papafoma were in their fifth year and were preparing for a diploma. Both were accused of hostility to the Soviet regime. (It was necessary, of course, to love her wholeheartedly for the fact that she deprived them of their fathers). That they, forming a group according to the community of counter-revolutionary views, carried out anti-Soviet agitation among the students of the institute. It was expressed in the fact that young people in the hostel slandered the foreign policy of the Soviet government, ridiculed the slogans of the party. Together with Viktor Papafoma and Leonid Sidoropoulo, on December 12, 1940, twelve more of their fellow students were arrested. The sons of the enemies of the people, no matter what the leader of the peoples said, also turned out to be enemies. True, they were treated much more “humanely”: young people were given camp terms. V. Papafoma - seven years, and L. Sidoropulo - eight. Everyone else was struck in the rights for 5 years. From the letter of L. Sidoropulo, I especially remember the phrase: “Several times I saw with my own eyes the Kolyma governor Nikishov and his guardsman Drabkin, the head of USVITL (Kolyma gods).” I must say that I had to hear a lot about the latter even during my student days. Even then it was felt that Drabkin's personality was strongly idealized and mythologized. Like Berzinskaya, it has acquired numerous legends about efficiency, statesmanship and other virtues. But ten such legends, even expressed by very authoritative mouths, eventually cease to mean less than one phrase from a letter from a Kolyma prisoner. V. Papafoma and L. Sidoropoulo could meet with their rector, under whom both entered the institute. But V. Papafom was assigned to "Gornyak", where he died of hypothermia on February 16, 1942 - two days after the death of his rector. Leonid Sidoropulo survived and remained in Kolyma, in the same place on Tenka. I do not know when he left the Magadan region, but in 1989 he already lived in Odessa. I briefly told A. Sechkin the story about L. Sidiropulo. It turned out that Sasha caught him in the first year of his stay on Tenka. But the sign was not close. On the "Butugychag" and its branches died: Ignatiadi Konstantin Ivanovich from Gelendzhik; Kovalenko Vyacheslav Georgievich from Mariupol; Nanaki Ivan Vasilievich from the Nikolaev region; Hart Pavel Georgievich, a native of Novaya Karakuba, Donetsk region, arrested at Beketovo station, Stalingrad region.

Gizi Georgy Petrovich from Odessa;

Pimenidi Fedor Konstantinovich, a native of the village of Beshkardash in Abkhazia;

Tambulidi Alexander Georgievich, who was born in the Uzbek Kokand, but lived in Tashkent;

Feofanidis Alexander Pavlovich, a native of the city of Surmen, a resident of Batumi;

Feohari Mark Alexandrovich, a native of Tbilisi and a resident of Moscow.

Further along the highway, towards the village of Omchak, many Greeks were serving a special settlement, who first spent ten years in camps, and then were left in Kolyma. Dalstroy was reluctant to part with acclimatized personnel. Among them are three natives of the Krasnodar Territory, whose families were deported to Kazakhstan in 1942:

Deliboranidi Konstantin Anastasovich from Adler;

Popandopulo Dmitry Feodosevich from the Crimean region and

Chikuridi Georgy Khristoforovich from the village of Lesnoye.

All survived and returned to their families in the mid-1950s.

Near the village of Omchak, at the mine named after Timoshenko, Panteley Panayotovich Karalefterov, born in 1924, a native of the village of Grekomaisky, Natukhaevsky district of the Krasnodar Territory, was serving a special settlement after the German camp. Behind him was assigned an agent from among the "colleagues" - special settlers, a certain Aleksandrov. He preserved for history some of P. Karalefterov's statements. So, on November 29, 1946, in the evening, P. Karalefterov sang a ditty in the barracks:

Now if we guys

Invite Stalin to visit ...

Then Panteley switched to prose: “Now, if he were here, and give him a dry crust, I would pull it out of him, and then he would know how people live in the world. And then I would have driven him to the hill for firewood and said: bastard, come on, otherwise I will quickly break your ribs!

Strange, but for this he had nothing. Indeed, they will not be sent further!

... This was not my last trip to Kolyma. That is why there is still a chance to thoroughly get acquainted with Nelkoba, and numerous mines around it, with the Matrosov mine, where the world's third largest ore deposit (about 2000 tons of gold) is registered. I set myself the task of visiting Omchak and Kulu without fail. And then it will be possible to say that I drove all over the Kolyma "Golden Ring".

A. Sechkin promised to give up everything and thoroughly drive around his favorite places.

I somehow felt in a special way now how dear these places are to me! - he admitted when we (almost wrote: "tired, but happy") returned to Magadan.

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Valery Yankovsky

The first days of truly hard labor are unforgettable. At 6 am, a light bulb burning all night flashes, on the street - like a hammer on the back of the head - blows to a rail suspended on a pole - rise! Running to the toilet, running to the dining room, breakfast - a scoop of gruel, half a ration, semi-sweet yellow tea - and divorce! ..
Two kilometers from the camp there is a working area in a cordon. A tool is dumped there: crowbars, shovels, pickles. For them - a fight: you need to choose what is more reliable - it will be easier to fulfill the damned norm. From the forge they are already moving without formation, the convoy has gone into a cordon.

Valery Yankovsky

Prisoner of Chaunlag in 1948-1952.
From the book "The Long Return":

On the slope, ore is mined in an open way. Each pick, shovel, wheelbarrow. It is necessary to caulk, load and roll by hand along narrow rickety ladders for a hundred and a half meters. There, dump the contents of the wheelbarrow into the bunker and drive it along parallel ladders back to the slaughter. The norm for a 12-hour shift, counting the road from the camp and lunch, is forty wheelbarrows. The first three days are guaranteed 600 grams of bread, and further from the production, up to 900. A prisoner who does not complete the task after three days becomes a penalty box, which means - 300 grams of bread. Most of these are doomed, because it is not at all possible for a hungry person to fulfill the norm.

Valery Yankovsky

Prisoner of Chaunlag in 1948-1952.
From the book "The Long Return":

They worked like horses in the mines. The rock blown up in the face was poured into iron barrels cut along the length on a sled, dragged a hundred or two meters to the exit, and overturned into a bunker for delivery to the mountain. The bottom of the drift was supposed to be sprinkled with snow from the ventilation pits, but this was often not done, and the horsemen, straining, dragged the sled loaded with ore along the rocky path. Yes, even with oil lamps - rarely spaced cans with a wick in diesel fuel. And the foreman's sixes - the most scum - are making a career, yelling, waving sticks: "Come on, move, bastards!" Those who snapped were "taught" en masse after work already in the barracks. And no one stood up. Such a regime was beneficial to the authorities, and was tacitly encouraged.

Valery Yankovsky

Prisoner of Chaunlag in 1948-1952.
From the book "The Long Return":

In the first winter in Chukotka, most ordinary convicts were shod in boot covers. These are sleeves from activated padded jackets, sewn to the trim of an old car tire, which all the time strove to crawl forward. It was necessary to live until tomorrow and, most importantly, something to eat. Infinitely and hopelessly the polar winter stretches in the camp. Especially for those who work underground. Four hours, but without the sun, the gray day breaks and fades imperceptibly. It’s good if you see an asterisk on a divorce or on the way after a shift. Basically - a cloudy, dark, mournful sky, from which fine, tedious snow is constantly pouring.

"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners. Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program.

It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.

The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Alexander Solzhenitsin also participated in a special TV show hosted live by the NHK of Japan (by phone).

"Valley of Death" is a rare piece of evidence that captures the true face of the Soviet government and its vanguard: VChK-NKVD-MGB-KGB.

Attention! This page shows photographs of a human brain autopsy. Please do not view this page if you are an easily excitable person, suffer from any form of mental disorder, if you are pregnant or under 18 years of age.

I have seen many concentration camps. Both old and new. I spent several years in one of them. Then I studied the history of the camps of the Soviet Union according to archival documents, but I ended up in the most terrible one a year before the moment when the KGB forced me to flee the country. This camp was called "Butugychag", which in translation from the language of Russian northern peoples means "Valley of Death".

* Butugychag, where they were not buried, but thrown off a cliff. There were pits dug. Oksana went there when she was free (see). What should be there to surprise a person who has served 10 years! I saw an old man there: he was walking behind the zone, crying. He served 15 years, does not return home, walks here, begging. Said this is your future.

(Nina Hagen-Thorn)

The place got its name when hunters and nomadic tribes of reindeer herders from the families of Egorovs, Dyachkovs and Krokhalevs, wandering along the Detrin River, came across a huge field dotted with human skulls and bones, and when the deer in the herd began to get sick with a strange disease - at first their wool fell out on legs, and then the animals lay down and could not get up. Mechanically, this name passed to the remains of the Beria camps of the 14th branch of the Gulag.

The zone is huge. It took me many hours to cross it from end to end. Buildings or their remains could be seen everywhere: along the main gorge, where the buildings of the enrichment factory stand; in many lateral mountain branches; behind neighboring hills, densely indented with scars of search pits and holes in adits. In the village of Ust-Omchug, closest to the zone, I was warned that it was not safe to walk along the local hills - at any moment you could fall into the old adit.

The well-traveled road ended in front of the uranium enrichment plant, gaping with black gaps in the windows. There is nothing around. The radiation killed every living thing. Only moss grows on black stones. The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was in this camp, said that at the furnaces, where water was evaporated from the uranium concentrate after washing on metal trays, the prisoners worked for one or two weeks, after which they died, and new slaves were driven to replace them. That was the level of radiation.

My Geiger counter came to life long before I got to the factory. In the building itself, it crackled without interruption. And when I approached the 23 metal barrels of concentrate that had been left against the outer wall, the danger signal became unbearably loud. Active construction went on here in the early 40s, when the question arose: who would be the first owner of atomic weapons.

* 380 thousand people found their death in Butugychag. This is more than the current population of the entire Magadan region. It was here that highly classified experiments were conducted on the brains of prisoners.

From the wooden gate, with handles polished to a shine by the palms of convicts, I pass to the cemetery. Rare sticks stuck between boulders, with plaques-tablets. However, the inscriptions are no longer readable. Bleached, erased their time and wind.

"Soviet Kolyma"

“Recently, two operations were carried out in the Magadan hospital, during a conditional “gas attack”. The doctors, the medical staff who helped them and the patients put on gas masks. The surgeons Pulleritz and Sveshnikov, nurse Antonova, orderlies Karpenyuk and Terekhina took part in the operation. The first operation was performed on one of the fighters of the border detachment, who had an enlargement of the veins of the spermatic cord. Patient K. had his appendix removed. Both operations, including preparation, took 65 minutes. The first experience of surgeons in gas masks in Kolyma was quite a success.”

Even if during the experiment a gas mask was also put on the patient, then what did the experimenters do with a hole open in the stomach?

So, moving from building to building, from the ruins of complexes obscure to me, concentrated at the bottom of the gorge, I climb to the very top of the ridge, to a solitary standing, intact camp. A piercingly cold wind drives low clouds. Latitude of Alaska. Summer is here, at most, two months a year. And in winter, the frost is such that if you pour water from the second floor, then ice falls to the ground.

Rusty tin cans rumbled underfoot near the soldier's tower. Picked up one. There is also an inscription in English. This is stew. From America for Red Army soldiers at the front. And for the Soviet "internal troops". Did Roosevelt know who he was feeding?

I go into one of the barracks, crowded with bunk beds. Only they are very small. Even crouched, they can not fit. Maybe they are for women? Yes, the size is too small for women. But now, a rubber galosh caught my eye. She lay forlornly under the corner bunks. My God! The galosh fits completely in the palm of my hand. So, these are bunk beds for children! So I went to the other side of the ridge. Here, right behind the "Butugychag", there was a large women's camp "Bacchante", which functioned at the same time.

Remains are everywhere. Here and there fragments, joints of tibia bones come across.

In the burnt ruins, I stumbled upon a chest bone. Among the ribs, a porcelain crucible caught my attention - I worked with such in the biological laboratories of the university. The incomparable, sugary smell of human ashes oozes from under the stones...

*“I am a geologist, and I know that the former zone is located in the area of ​​a powerful polymetallic ore cluster. Here, in the interfluve of Detrin and Tenka, reserves of gold, silver, and cassiterite are concentrated. But Butugychag is also known for the manifestation of radioactive rocks, in particular uranium-containing ones. Due to the nature of my work, I have had to visit these places more than once. The enormous force of the radioactive background is detrimental to all living things here. This is the reason for the tremendous mortality in the zone. Radiation at Butygychag is uneven. Somewhere it reaches a very high, extremely life-threatening level, but there are also places where the background is quite acceptable.

A. Rudnev. 1989

The day of research was over. I had to hurry down, where in the house of a modern power plant, at its caretaker, I found shelter for these days.

Victor, the owner of the house, was sitting on the porch when I wearily approached and sat down beside him.

Where were you, what did you see? he asked monosyllabically.

I told about the uranium factory, the children's camp, the mines.

Yes, don’t eat berries here and don’t drink water from the rivers, ”Victor interrupted and nodded at a barrel of imported water standing on car wheels.

And what are you looking for?

I narrowed my eyes, looked point-blank at the young master of the house.

Mine, under the letter "C" ...

You won't find. They used to know where it was, but after the war, when they began to close the camps, they blew everything up, and all Butugychag's plans disappeared from the geological department. Only the stories that the letter "C" was filled to the very top with the corpses of those who were shot remained.

He paused. - Yes, not in the mines, and not in the children's camps, the secret of "Butugychag". There's their secret, - Victor showed his hand in front of him. - Behind the river, you see. There was a laboratory complex. Strongly guarded.

What did they do in it?

And you go tomorrow to the upper cemetery. Look...

But before going to the mysterious cemetery, Victor and I examined the “laboratory complex”.

The area is tiny. It was made up of several houses. All of them are diligently destroyed. Blasted to the ground. Only one strong end wall remained standing. It's strange: out of the entire huge number of buildings in "Butugychag", only the "infirmary" was destroyed - it was burned to the ground, yes, this zone.

The first thing I saw were the remains of a powerful ventilation system with characteristic bells. Such systems are equipped with fume hoods in all chemical and biological laboratories. Four rows of barbed wire perimeter stretched around the foundations of the former buildings. It still survives in places. Inside the perimeter are poles with electrical insulators. It seems that a high voltage current was also used to protect the object.

Making my way among the ruins, I remembered the story of Sergei Nikolaev from the village of Ust-Omchug:

“Just before the entrance to the Butugychag, there was an Object No. 14. What they did there, we did not know. But this area was guarded especially carefully. We worked as civilians, as explosives in the mines, and had a pass to pass through the entire territory of Butygychag. But in order to get to object No. 14, one more was needed - a special pass, and with it it was necessary to go through nine checkpoints. Everywhere sentries with dogs. On the hills around - machine gunners: the mouse will not slip through. 06 served "Object No. 14" specially built nearby airfield.

Truly top secret.

Yes, the bombers knew their business. There is little left. True, the nearby prison building survived, or, as it is called in the documents of the Gulag, - "BUR" - a high-security barrack. It is composed of roughly hewn stone boulders, covered from the inside of the building with a thick layer of plaster. On the remains of the plaster in two chambers, we found the inscriptions scratched with a nail: “30.XI.1954. Evening”, “Kill me” and the inscription in Latin script, in one word: “Doctor”.

Horse skulls were an interesting find. I counted 11 of them. About five or six lay inside the foundation of one of the blown up buildings.

It is unlikely that horses were used here as a draft force. The same opinion is shared by those who went through the Kolyma camps.

“I personally visited many enterprises in those years and I know that even for the removal of timber from the hills, for all cases, not to mention mountain work, one type of labor was used - the manual labor of prisoners ...”

From the answer of the former constable F. Bezbabichev to the question of how horses were used in the economy of the camps.

Well, at the dawn of the nuclear age, they might well have been trying to get an anti-radiation serum. And this cause, since the time of Louis Pasteur, it was the horses that served faithfully.

How long ago was that? After all, the Butugychag complex has been well preserved. The bulk of the camps in Kolyma were closed after the "exposure" and execution of their godfather - Lavrenty Beria. In the weather station house, which stands above the children's camp, I managed to find an observation log. The last date stamped on it is May 1956.

Why are these ruins called a laboratory? I asked Victor.

Once a car with three passengers drove up, - he began to tell, clearing in the weeds, among the broken tiles, another horse skull. There was a woman with them. And although guests are rare here, they did not name themselves. They got out of the car at my house, looked around, and then, the woman, pointing to the ruins, said: “There was a laboratory here. And over there - the airport ... ".

They did not stay long, and they could not be asked about anything. But all three are aged, well dressed...

* A female doctor saved my life when I was imprisoned in one of the most terrible mines in Kolyma - Butugychag. Her name was Maria Antonovna, her last name was unknown to us ...

(From the memoirs of Fyodor Bezbabichev)

The Berlag camps were especially secret and is it any wonder that no official data on their prisoners can be obtained. But there are archives. The KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the party archives - lists of prisoners are stored somewhere. In the meantime, only scanty, fragmentary data suggest a carefully erased trail. Exploring the abandoned Kolyma camps, I looked through thousands of newspapers and archival references, getting closer and closer to the truth.

Writer Asir Sandler, author of Knots for Memory published in the USSR, told me that one of his readers was a prisoner of a mysterious sharashka, a scientific institution in which prisoners worked. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan...

The secret of the Butugychag complex was revealed the next day, when, with difficulty navigating the intricacies of the ridges, we climbed a mountain saddle. It was this secluded place that the camp administration chose for one of the cemeteries. The other two: "officer's" - for the camp staff and, possibly, for civilians, as well as a large "Zekov's" - are located below. The first is near the processing plant. The belonging of his dead to the administration is given out by wooden pedestals with stars. The second begins immediately outside the walls of the burnt infirmary, which is understandable. Why drag the dead over the mountains ... And here, from the central part, at least a mile. Yes, even up.

Slightly noticeable mounds. They can be mistaken for a natural relief, if they were not numbered. As soon as they sprinkled gravel on the dead man, they stuck a stick next to it with a number punched on the lid of a can of stew. But where do the convicts get canned food from? Two-digit numbers with a letter of the alphabet: Г45; B27; A50...

At first glance, the number of graves here is not so great. Ten and a half rows of crooked sticks with numbers. There are 50-60 graves in each row. This means that only about a thousand people found their last refuge here.

But, closer to the edge of the saddle, I find marks of a different type. There are no individual mounds here. On a flat area, the posts are dense, like the teeth of a comb. Ordinary short sticks - branches of chopped trees. Already without tin covers and numbers. Just mark the place.

Two swollen mounds indicate the pits where the dead were dumped in a heap. Most likely, this “ritual” was carried out in winter, when it was not possible to bury each one individually, in frozen and hard as concrete ground. The pits, in this case, were harvested from the summer.

And here's what Victor was talking about. Under the elfin bush, in a grave torn apart by animals or people, lies a half of a human skull. The upper part of the vault, half an inch above the brow ridges, is neatly and evenly cut. Clearly a surgical cut.

Among them are many other bones of the skeleton, but what attracts my attention is the upper cut off part of the skull with a bullet hole in the back of the head. This is a very important find, because it indicates that the opened skulls are not a medical examination to determine the cause of death. Who first puts a bullet in the back of the head, and then performs an anatomical autopsy to determine the cause of death?

We need to open one of the graves, - I say to my fellow traveler. - You need to make sure that this is not the "work" of today's vandals. Victor himself told about the raids on the camp cemeteries of the village punks: they take out skulls and make lamps out of them.

We choose the grave under the number "G47". Didn't have to dig. Literally five centimeters through the soil thawed over the summer, the sapper shovel hit something.

Carefully! Don't damage the bones.

Yes, there is a coffin, - the assistant answered.

Coffin?! I was amazed. A coffin for a convict is as unseen as if we stumbled upon the remains of an alien. This is truly an amazing cemetery.

Never, nowhere in the vast expanses of the Gulag, were prisoners buried in coffins. They threw them into adits, buried them in the ground, and in winter they simply buried them in the snow, drowned them in the sea, but so that coffins would be made for them?! .. Yes, it looks like this is a “sharashki” cemetery. Then the presence of coffins is understandable. After all, the convicts were buried by the convicts themselves. And they were not supposed to see the opened heads.

*In 1942, there was a stage in the Tenkinsky district, where I ended up. The road to Tenka began to be built somewhere in 1939, when Commissar 2nd rank Pavlov became the head of Dalstroy, and Colonel Garanin became the head of USVITL. Everyone who fell into the clutches of the NKVD was first of all fingerprinted. This was the beginning of the camp life of any person. This is how she ended. When a person died in a prison or camp, then he, already dead, went through exactly the same procedure. Fingerprints were taken from the deceased, they were compared with the original ones, and only after that he was buried, and the case was transferred to the archive.

(From the memoirs of s / c Vadim Kozin)

At the north end of the cemetery, the ground is littered with bones. Clavicles, ribs, tibia, vertebrae. All over the field, halves of skulls turn white. Straight cut over toothless jaws. Big, small, but equally restless, thrown out of the ground by an evil hand, they lie under the piercing blue sky of Kolyma. Is it possible that such a terrible fate dominated their owners that even the bones of these people are doomed to reproach? And it still pulls here with the stench of bloody years.

Again a series of questions: who needed the brains of these unfortunates? What years? By whose command? Who the hell are these "scientists" who, with ease, like a hare, put a bullet into a human head, and then, with devilish meticulousness, gutted the still smoking brains? And where are the archives? How many masks does it take to judge the Soviet system for the crime called genocide?

None of the well-known encyclopedias provides data on experiments on living human material, except to look in the materials of the Nuremberg trials. Only the following is obvious: it was precisely in those years when the Butugychag was functioning that the effect of radioactivity on the human body was intensively studied. There can be no talk of any autopsies of those who died in the camps for a medical report on the causes of death. None of the camps did this. A human life was worth negligibly cheap in Soviet Russia.

The trepanation of skulls could not be carried out on the initiative of local authorities. Lavrenty Beria and Igor Kurchatov were personally responsible for the nuclear weapons program and everything connected with it.

It remains to assume the existence of a successfully implemented state program, sanctioned at the level of the government of the USSR. For similar crimes against humanity, "Nazis" are being chased around Latin America to this day. But only in relation to domestic executioners and misanthropes, their native department shows enviable deafness and blindness. Is it because the sons of executioners are sitting in warm armchairs today?

Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, removed no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a “not clean” picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances appear in the brain tissues, released during pain and psychological shock.

Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs into it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.

I took with me two fragments from different skulls, for examination. Fortunately, there was a familiar prosecutor in the Khabarovsk Territory - Valentin Stepankov (later - the Prosecutor General of Russia).

You understand what it smells like, - the prosecutor of the region with the badge of a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the lapel of his jacket looked at me, lowering the sheet with my questions for the expert. - Yes, and according to the affiliation, the Magadan prosecutor's office, and not mine, should deal with this case ...

I was silent.

Okay, Stepankov nodded, - I also have a conscience. And he pressed the button on the table.

Prepare a decision to initiate a criminal case, - he turned to the newcomer. And again to me: - Otherwise, I can not send the bones for examination.

What's the deal? the assistant asked.

Pass it on to the people of Magadan...

*... I repeat, in Magadan live those responsible for the death of those prisoners who were sent under the numbers of the letter thousand "3-2", of which 36 people survived in one winter.

(P. Martynov, prisoner of the Kolyma camps No. 3-2-989)

The conclusion of the examination 221-FT, I received a month later. Here is his abridged summary:

“The right part of the skull, presented for research, belongs to the body of a young man, no more than 30 years old. The sutures of the skull between the bones are not closed. Anatomical and morphological features indicate that the bone belongs to a part of the male skull with characteristic features of the Caucasoid race.

The presence of multiple defects in the compact layer (multiple, deep cracks, areas of scarification), their complete fat-freeness, white color, fragility and brittleness, indicate the prescription of the death of the man who owned the skull, 35 years or more from the moment of the study.

The smooth upper edges of the frontal and temporal bones were formed from sawing them, as evidenced by the traces of sliding - tracks from the action of a sawing tool (for example, a saw). Given the location of the cut on the bones and its direction, I believe that this cut could have been formed during an anatomical examination of the skull and brain.

Part of the skull number 2, more likely belonged to a young woman. The even upper edge on the frontal bone was formed by cutting a sawing tool - a saw, as evidenced by step-like slip marks - routes.

Part of the skull No. 2, judging by the less altered bone tissue, was in the burial places for less time than part of the skull No. 1, given that both parts were in the same conditions (climatic, soil, etc.) ”

Forensic medical expert V. A. Kuzmin.

Khabarovsk Regional Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination.

My search didn't end there. I visited Butugychag two more times. More and more interesting materials fell into the hands. Witnesses appeared.

P. Martynov, a prisoner of the Kolyma camps under the number 3-2-989, points to the direct physical extermination of the Butugychag prisoners that took place: “Their remains were buried at the Shaitan pass. Despite the fact that in order to hide the traces of crimes, the place was from time to time cleared of the remains of animals pulled from the glacier at the pass, there are still found human bones on a huge area ... "

Perhaps there you need to look for an adit under the letter "C"?

We managed to get interesting information from the editorial office of the Leninskoye Znamya newspaper in Ust-Omchug (now the newspaper is called Tenka), where a large mining and processing plant is located - Tenkinsky GOK, to which Butugychag belonged.

The journalists handed me a note from Semyon Gromov, the former deputy director of the Mining and Processing Plant. The note touched upon a topic of interest to me. But, perhaps, the price of this information was Gromov's life.

Here is the text of this note:

“The daily “withdrawal” along the Tenlag was 300 convicts. The main reasons are hunger, illness, fights between prisoners and just "shooting the convoy." At the Tymoshenko mine, a OP was organized - a health center for those who had already “reached”. This point, of course, did not heal anyone, but some professor worked there with the prisoners: he went and drew circles on the robes of prisoners with a pencil - these will die tomorrow. By the way, on the other side of the track, on a small plateau, there is a strange cemetery. Strange because everyone buried there has sawn skulls. Isn't it related to the professor's work?

Semyon Gromov recorded this in the early 80s and soon died in a car accident.

I also got another document from the GOK - the results of radiological studies at the Butugychag facility, as well as measurements of the radioactivity of objects. All these documents were strictly confidential. When the US War Department, at my request, requested a geological map of the area, even the CIA denied the presence of uranium mining in these places. And I visited six special facilities of the uranium Gulag of the Magadan region, and one of the camps is located at the very edge of the Arctic Ocean, not far from the polar city of Pevek.

I found Khasana Niyazov already in 1989, when perestroika and glasnost relieved the fear of many. The 73-year-old woman was not afraid to give an hour-long interview in front of a TV camera.

From the recording of the interview with H. Niyazova:

H.N. - I have not been to Butugychag, God bless. We considered it a penal camp.

- How were the prisoners buried?

H.N. - No way. Sprinkled with earth or snow if he died in winter, and that's it.

- Were there coffins?

H.N. - Never. What coffins are there!

- Why are all convicts buried in coffins at one of the three cemeteries of "Butugychag" and their skulls have been sawn apart?

H.N. - It was opened by doctors ...

- For what purpose?

H.N. - We, among the prisoners, were talking: they were doing experiments. Learned something.

- Was it done only in Butugychag, or somewhere else?

H.N. - Not. Only in Butugychag.

- When did you learn about the experiments at Butugychag?

H.N. - It was around 1948-49, the conversations were fleeting, but we were all frightened by this ...

- Maybe it was sawed alive?

H.N. - And who knows... There was a very large medical unit. There were even professors ... "

I interviewed Hasan Niyazov after my second visit to Butugychag. Listening to the courageous woman, I looked at her hands with the camp number burned out.

It can't be! - then exclaim Jak Sheahan, - the chief of the CBS News bureau, peering at the screen and not believing his eyes. - I always thought that it was only in the fascist camps ...

I was looking for Shaitan Pass. Remember, Martynov, prisoner No. 3-2-989, wrote that after the experiments, the corpses were buried in a glacier at the pass. And the cemetery indicated by Victor was in a different place. There was no pass, no glacier. Perhaps there were several special cemeteries. Where is Satan, no one remembers. The name was known, heard before, but there are about two dozen passes in the Butugychag area.

On one of them, I stumbled upon an adit walled up with an ice plug. She would not have attracted attention in any way if it were not for the remnants of clothing frozen into the ice. These were Zekov's robes. I know them too well to be confused with something else. All this meant only one thing: the entrance was walled up on purpose when the camp was still working.

Finding a crowbar and a pickaxe was not difficult. They were scattered around the galleries in abundance.

The last blow of the crowbar broke through the ice wall. After opening a hole for the body to pass through, I slid down the rope off the giant stalactite blocking the way. Flicked the switch. The beam of the lantern played in some kind of gray atmosphere, sort of smoked by smokers. A cloyingly sweet smell tickled my throat. From the ceiling, a beam glided over an icy wall and…

I started. Before me was the road to hell. From the very bottom to the middle, the passage was littered with half-decomposed bodies of people. The rags of decayed clothes covered the bare bones, the skulls turned white under the tufts of hair...

Backing away, I left the dead place. No nerves are enough to spend considerable time here. I only managed to note the presence of things. Knapsacks, knapsacks, collapsed suitcases. And more ... bags. Seems to be female hair. Big, full, almost my height ...

The posters of my photo exhibition “Accusing the USSR of experiments on people” so excited the authorities of Khabarovsk that the head of the KGB department of the region and prosecutors of all ranks, not to mention party bosses, arrived at the opening. The officials present gritted their teeth, but could not do anything - in the hall were the operators of the Japanese NHK, headed by one of the directors of this powerful television company - my friend.

The prosecutor general of the region, Valentin Stepankov, added fuel to the fire. Having jumped on a black "Volga", he picked up a microphone and ... officially opened the exhibition.

Taking advantage of the moment, I asked the head of the KGB, Lieutenant General Pirozhnyak, to make inquiries about the Butugychag camps.

The answer came surprisingly quickly. The very next day, a man in civilian clothes appeared at the exhibition and said that the archives were in the information and computer center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB in Magadan, but they had not been dismantled.

To my request over the phone to work with the archives, the head of the Magadan KGB, laughing, answered:

Well, what are you! The archive is huge. You will take it apart, Seryozha, well ... for seven years ...

*Among the description of cruel torments, suddenly, as if by itself, comes a recollection of a cheerful, joyful - albeit extremely rare in the Butugychag hell. The soul, immersed in painful memories, seems to repel them and even among them finds goodness and warmth - two tomatoes of Hans. Oh how good they were! But it is not at all the taste and not the rarity of such exquisite food that comes first here. In the first place - Good, miraculously preserved in the human soul. If there is even a drop of Good, then there is Hope.

(A. Zhigulin)

On my third and last visit to Butugychag, my main goal was to film a special cemetery on videotape.

I go around the dug up graves, looking for a whole box. Here is a corner of the board peeking out from under the stones. I rake the rubble so that it does not fall into the coffin. The board is rotten, you have to lift it with care.

Under the arm, leaning his forehead against the side wall, a large male skull grins toothily. The upper part of it is evenly sawn. It fell away like the lid of a hideous box, revealing a sticky coating of the remains of a once-stolen brain. The bones of the skull are yellow, which have not seen the sun, on the eye sockets and cheekbones the hair is pulled up on the face of the scalp. This is the process of trepanation...

I carry into the coffin all the skulls picked up along the field.

“Sleep well,” is it possible to say so in this cemetery?

I'm already far from the graves, and the yellow skull - here it is, nearby. I see him lying in his coffin-box. How were you killed, unfortunate? Is it not that terrible death, for the "purity of the experiment"? And wasn’t a free-standing drill built for you a hundred meters from the blown-up laboratory?

And why are there words on its walls: "Kill me..."; "Doctor"?

Who are you, prisoner, what is your name? Isn't your mother still waiting for you?

“I am writing from a distant land... I am still waiting to meet my son. It so happened. 1942 Her husband and son were drafted into the army. I received a funeral for my husband, but there is still nothing for my son. I made a request wherever I could ... And in 1943 I received a letter. It is not known who the author is. He writes like this: your son, Mikhail Chalkov, did not return from work, we were together in the Magadan camp in the Omchug valley, if there is an opportunity, I will tell you. And that's it!

I still cannot understand why my son did not write a single letter and how did he get there?

Forgive my concern, but if you have children, you will believe how difficult it is for parents. I devoted all my youth to waiting, left alone with four children ...

Describe that camp. I'm still waiting, maybe he's there ... "

Karaganda region, Kazakh SSR,

Chalkova A. L.

In the death camp "Butugychag" died:

01. Maglich Foma Savvich - captain 1st rank, chairman of the commission for the acceptance of ships in Komsomolsk-on-Amur;

02. Sleptsov Petr Mikhailovich - Colonel who served with Rokossovsky;

03. Kazakov Vasily Markovich - senior lieutenant from the army of General Dovator;

04. Nazim Grigory Vladimirovich - chairman of the collective farm from the Chernihiv region;

05. Morozov Ivan Ivanovich - sailor of the Baltic Fleet;

06. Bondarenko Alexander Nikolaevich - a factory locksmith from Nikopol;

07. Rudenko Alexander Petrovich - senior lieutenant of aviation;

08. Belousov Yuri Afanasyevich - "penalty box" from the battalion on Malaya Zemlya;

09. Reshetov Mikhail Fedorovich - tanker;

10. Yankovsky - secretary of the Odessa regional committee of the Komsomol;

11. Ratkevich Vasily Bogdanovich - Belarusian teacher;

12. Star Pavel Trofimovich - senior lieutenant, tanker;

13. Ryabokon Nikolai Fedorovich - auditor from the Zhytomyr region;

330000. ...

330001. ...

I described the camp to you.

Forgive me, mother.

Sergey Melnikoff, Magadan region, 1989-90 original on the portal "GULAG - with a camera through the camps"

This place, located literally on the edge of the earth, in the Kolyma region, has long been called “Butugychag” by local reindeer herders, which means “Valley of Death”. When geologists first arrived here in the 40s of the last century, they were unpleasantly struck by the sight of some mountain valleys dotted with human and deer skeletons. It was in such valleys that scientists discovered a strange blue ore with a high concentration of uranium. And then many deer of the geological party developed a mysterious illness, the first sign of which was the loss of fur on their legs. Then the deer refused to walk, after which they lay down on the ground and quickly died.

New appointment

It was at the Butugychag mine that the very tons of uranium ore were mined, which then became the basis for the creation of the first Soviet atomic bomb. But even earlier, in August 1945, this new terrible weapon had already been used against the civilian population of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American "hawks" rubbed their hands in anticipation of an imminent nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. But they did not know that since 1943 Soviet physicists had also been working on their own atomic project, which was prepared by the all-powerful NKVD.

Although Lavrenty Beria personally headed this work, the main burden for the implementation of the project fell on the shoulders of his deputy, Lieutenant General Avraamy Pavlovich Zavenyagin (1901-1956). In the 1930s, he built the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, and then was transferred to the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. It was on him at the very height of the Great Patriotic War that the members of the Politburo fell, when practical work on the atomic bomb began in the USSR in deep secrecy.

This is how the new appointment of Zavenyagin is described in Yuri Elfimov's biographical book Marshal of Industry.

“At the very beginning of 1943, Zavenyagin was summoned to see Stalin ... Stalin asked without introduction:

Comrade Zavenyagin... Here you are a metallurgist and a miner. Do you know anything about the reserves of uranium and graphite?

Zavenyagin thought:

As far as I know, there is graphite in Siberia, on the Lower Tunguska, in the Kureika region. As for uranium ores... I can't say anything.

And it is necessary to find, - continued Stalin. - Necessarily. Both graphite and uranium. And start mining immediately. This is very important now... Obviously, you will have to work on an important government task together with Comrade Kurchatov... Don't you know each other? Meet...

A tall man with a large black beard approached Zavenyagin, smiled, and offered his hand.

The result of the meeting with Stalin was the top secret order of the State Defense Committee of February 11, 1943 on the creation of laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov. Even earlier, the GKO order of September 28, 1942 “On the organization of work on uranium” was adopted, but it “hung” for half a year without practical implementation, since all the forces of the country at that time were directed to repel the fascist attack on Stalingrad and the North Caucasus.

Strategic Raw Material

One of the very first tasks in the implementation of the Soviet nuclear project was the search for uranium ore occurrences on the territory of the USSR. In 1943, geologists were aware of five deposits of this metal in Siberia and the Far East with a total proven reserves of about 500 tons. For comparison, it must be said that at that time the world reserves of uranium were estimated at 12-15 thousand tons. In addition to Western Europe, its deposits were also located in Central and South Africa, and.

The most promising areas for the search for uranium ores were recognized as the Kolyma Territory and the east of Yakutia. Many repressed geologists who were serving their terms in the Gulag were attracted to these works. Among them were Vladimir Vereshchagin, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, Alexander Vologdin, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Felix Shakhov, Professor of the Tomsk Technological Institute, Yuri Sheinmann, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, and many other lower rank geologists. In total, during the period 1943-1945, at least 50 exploration groups headed by qualified geologists worked in Dalstroy, each of which, depending on the volume of excavation and mining, included from 20 to 250 prisoners.

By the time of the capitulation of the Nazis, more than 20 uranium ore deposits suitable for industrial development had been explored in Kolyma alone. The most promising of them was recognized as the Butugychag mine, located on a plateau with the same name. And in total, by the end of the 1940s, more than 50 uranium deposits with total reserves of 84,000 tons were registered with the USSR Ministry of Geology. Thus, a raw material base was created in our country for the implementation of the nuclear project.

While the construction of a uranium enrichment plant near Moscow, in the new city of Elektrostal, was proceeding at a record pace, the prisoners of the Dalstroy Kolyma camps were expanding their quarries in the places where blue uranium ore was found, which, as they were initially explained, would be used to produce mineral paints. Only many years later, the former camp inmates, who were lucky enough to stay alive, learned that at that time they had made an invaluable contribution to the creation of the nuclear shield of our country.

At the end of 1945, on orders from Moscow, about 60 thousand prisoners were gathered for excavation and mining at the Butugychag (later the Tenkinsky district of the Magadan region), Sugun (Yakutia) and Severnoye (Chukotka) deposits for excavation and mining. More than 70% of this labor force was soon concentrated at the first of these mines, since the local uranium raw materials were recognized by scientists as the most promising for processing.

The uranium containing ore mined in Butugychag was delivered in bags under heavy guard to Magadan. In the port, it was loaded onto a submarine, which went through the Tatar Strait to Vladivostok, where strategic raw materials were transferred to the plane and delivered to Moscow, and then to plant N212 in the city of Elektrostal. By 1950, the number of "atomic" prisoners in "Dal-Stroy" in total exceeded 70 thousand people. According to archival data, in total, about 150 tons of strategic raw materials were mined here during 1945-1956.

The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was serving his term in Butugychag under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, wrote the following lines about this camp in 1964:

I remember the Butugychag Mine and grief

In comrades in the eyes.

greedy joy,

Generous trouble And blue ringing ore.

I remember those

Who forever withered in the valley,

Where is the Butugychag mine...

I remember your thick uneven rumble.

You turned my life upside down.

Hello to you,

Destiny is my lever,

Butugychag uranium mine!

According to archival data, the Magadan historian Vitaly Zelyak managed to establish that in 1947 alone, 9175 people died for various reasons in uranium camps in Kolyma and Chukotka. In total, according to incomplete data, at least 40 thousand prisoners remained forever on Butugychag and Severny in the period from 1945 to 1956. The most commonly cited causes of death were pellagra (avitaminosis) and heart failure. But even doctors knew nothing about radiation sickness in those years. But even if they knew, they would never have entered it into official documents.

Our response to America

If the American atomic bomb "Baby", dropped on Hiroshima, was made on the basis of uranium-235, then the city of Nagasaki was wiped off the face of the earth by the plutonium bomb "Fat Man". Plutonium was the name given to a new chemical element discovered shortly before World War II that did not exist in nature. The explosion of such a charge with the same volume of substance is more powerful than on the basis of uranium. Therefore, Soviet scientists also decided to make their first bomb with a filling of plutonium.

To test it, it was urgent to create a special test site. The choice fell on a desert area located in, at the junction of Semipalatinsk, Pavlodar and Karaganda regions. In accordance with the secret decision of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of April 21, 1947, the construction of a complex of facilities began here, which was called "Training Ground No. 2 of the Ministry of the Armed Forces of the USSR (military unit 52605)".

It was here that on August 29, 1949 at four o'clock in the morning Moscow time, the first Soviet atomic bomb with a capacity of 22,000 tons of TNT was successfully detonated. Thus, our scientists eliminated the US nuclear monopoly, which took them not 10-15 years, as American politicians predicted, but only four years.

But at the same time, we must not forget that the creation of a nuclear shield required truly heroic efforts from our people and the mobilization of all resources. Among the victims were tens of thousands of lives of "atomic" prisoners, most of whom did not even suspect how important they played in strengthening the defense capability of their country.

"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners. Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program.

It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.

The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Alexander Solzhenitsin also participated in a special TV show hosted live by the NHK of Japan (by phone).

"Valley of Death" is a rare piece of evidence that captures the true face of the Soviet government and its vanguard: VChK-NKVD-MGB-KGB.

Attention! This page shows photographs of a human brain autopsy. Please do not view this page if you are an easily excitable person, suffer from any form of mental disorder, if you are pregnant or under 18 years of age.

I have seen many concentration camps. Both old and new. I spent several years in one of them. Then I studied the history of the camps of the Soviet Union according to archival documents, but I ended up in the most terrible one a year before the moment when the KGB forced me to flee the country. This camp was called "Butugychag", which in translation from the language of Russian northern peoples means "Valley of Death".

* Butugychag, where they were not buried, but thrown off a cliff. There were pits dug. Oksana went there when she was free (see). What should be there to surprise a person who has served 10 years! I saw an old man there: he was walking behind the zone, crying. He served 15 years, does not return home, walks here, begging. Said this is your future.

(Nina Hagen-Thorn)

The place got its name when hunters and nomadic tribes of reindeer herders from the families of Egorovs, Dyachkovs and Krokhalevs, wandering along the Detrin River, came across a huge field dotted with human skulls and bones, and when the deer in the herd began to get sick with a strange disease - at first their wool fell out on legs, and then the animals lay down and could not get up. Mechanically, this name passed to the remains of the Beria camps of the 14th branch of the Gulag.

The zone is huge. It took me many hours to cross it from end to end. Buildings or their remains could be seen everywhere: along the main gorge, where the buildings of the enrichment factory stand; in many lateral mountain branches; behind neighboring hills, densely indented with scars of search pits and holes in adits. In the village of Ust-Omchug, closest to the zone, I was warned that it was not safe to walk along the local hills - at any moment you could fall into the old adit.

The well-traveled road ended in front of the uranium enrichment plant, gaping with black gaps in the windows. There is nothing around. The radiation killed every living thing. Only moss grows on black stones. The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was in this camp, said that at the furnaces, where water was evaporated from the uranium concentrate after washing on metal trays, the prisoners worked for one or two weeks, after which they died, and new slaves were driven to replace them. That was the level of radiation.

My Geiger counter came to life long before I got to the factory. In the building itself, it crackled without interruption. And when I approached the 23 metal barrels of concentrate that had been left against the outer wall, the danger signal became unbearably loud. Active construction went on here in the early 40s, when the question arose: who would be the first owner of atomic weapons.

* 380 thousand people found their death in Butugychag. This is more than the current population of the entire Magadan region. It was here that highly classified experiments were conducted on the brains of prisoners.

From the wooden gate, with handles polished to a shine by the palms of convicts, I pass to the cemetery. Rare sticks stuck between boulders, with plaques-tablets. However, the inscriptions are no longer readable. Bleached, erased their time and wind.

"Soviet Kolyma"

“Recently, two operations were carried out in the Magadan hospital, during a conditional “gas attack”. The doctors, the medical staff who helped them and the patients put on gas masks. The surgeons Pulleritz and Sveshnikov, nurse Antonova, orderlies Karpenyuk and Terekhina took part in the operation. The first operation was performed on one of the fighters of the border detachment, who had an enlargement of the veins of the spermatic cord. Patient K. had his appendix removed. Both operations, including preparation, took 65 minutes. The first experience of surgeons in gas masks in Kolyma was quite a success.”

Even if during the experiment a gas mask was also put on the patient, then what did the experimenters do with a hole open in the stomach?

So, moving from building to building, from the ruins of complexes obscure to me, concentrated at the bottom of the gorge, I climb to the very top of the ridge, to a solitary standing, intact camp. A piercingly cold wind drives low clouds. Latitude of Alaska. Summer is here, at most, two months a year. And in winter, the frost is such that if you pour water from the second floor, then ice falls to the ground.

Rusty tin cans rumbled underfoot near the soldier's tower. Picked up one. There is also an inscription in English. This is stew. From America for Red Army soldiers at the front. And for the Soviet "internal troops". Did Roosevelt know who he was feeding?

I go into one of the barracks, crowded with bunk beds. Only they are very small. Even crouched, they can not fit. Maybe they are for women? Yes, the size is too small for women. But now, a rubber galosh caught my eye. She lay forlornly under the corner bunks. My God! The galosh fits completely in the palm of my hand. So, these are bunk beds for children! So I went to the other side of the ridge. Here, right behind the "Butugychag", there was a large women's camp "Bacchante", which functioned at the same time.

Remains are everywhere. Here and there fragments, joints of tibia bones come across.

In the burnt ruins, I stumbled upon a chest bone. Among the ribs, a porcelain crucible caught my attention - I worked with such in the biological laboratories of the university. The incomparable, sugary smell of human ashes oozes from under the stones...

*“I am a geologist, and I know that the former zone is located in the area of ​​a powerful polymetallic ore cluster. Here, in the interfluve of Detrin and Tenka, reserves of gold, silver, and cassiterite are concentrated. But Butugychag is also known for the manifestation of radioactive rocks, in particular uranium-containing ones. Due to the nature of my work, I have had to visit these places more than once. The enormous force of the radioactive background is detrimental to all living things here. This is the reason for the tremendous mortality in the zone. Radiation at Butygychag is uneven. Somewhere it reaches a very high, extremely life-threatening level, but there are also places where the background is quite acceptable.

A. Rudnev. 1989

The day of research was over. I had to hurry down, where in the house of a modern power plant, at its caretaker, I found shelter for these days.

Victor, the owner of the house, was sitting on the porch when I wearily approached and sat down beside him.

Where were you, what did you see? he asked monosyllabically.

I told about the uranium factory, the children's camp, the mines.

Yes, don’t eat berries here and don’t drink water from the rivers, ”Victor interrupted and nodded at a barrel of imported water standing on car wheels.

And what are you looking for?

I narrowed my eyes, looked point-blank at the young master of the house.

Mine, under the letter "C" ...

You won't find. They used to know where it was, but after the war, when they began to close the camps, they blew everything up, and all Butugychag's plans disappeared from the geological department. Only the stories that the letter "C" was filled to the very top with the corpses of those who were shot remained.

He paused. - Yes, not in the mines, and not in the children's camps, the secret of "Butugychag". There's their secret, - Victor showed his hand in front of him. - Behind the river, you see. There was a laboratory complex. Strongly guarded.

What did they do in it?

And you go tomorrow to the upper cemetery. Look...

But before going to the mysterious cemetery, Victor and I examined the “laboratory complex”.

The area is tiny. It was made up of several houses. All of them are diligently destroyed. Blasted to the ground. Only one strong end wall remained standing. It's strange: out of the entire huge number of buildings in "Butugychag", only the "infirmary" was destroyed - it was burned to the ground, yes, this zone.

The first thing I saw were the remains of a powerful ventilation system with characteristic bells. Such systems are equipped with fume hoods in all chemical and biological laboratories. Four rows of barbed wire perimeter stretched around the foundations of the former buildings. It still survives in places. Inside the perimeter are poles with electrical insulators. It seems that a high voltage current was also used to protect the object.

Making my way among the ruins, I remembered the story of Sergei Nikolaev from the village of Ust-Omchug:

“Just before the entrance to the Butugychag, there was an Object No. 14. What they did there, we did not know. But this area was guarded especially carefully. We worked as civilians, as explosives in the mines, and had a pass to pass through the entire territory of Butygychag. But in order to get to object No. 14, one more was needed - a special pass, and with it it was necessary to go through nine checkpoints. Everywhere sentries with dogs. On the hills around - machine gunners: the mouse will not slip through. 06 served "Object No. 14" specially built nearby airfield.

Truly top secret.

Yes, the bombers knew their business. There is little left. True, the nearby prison building survived, or, as it is called in the documents of the Gulag, - "BUR" - a high-security barrack. It is composed of roughly hewn stone boulders, covered from the inside of the building with a thick layer of plaster. On the remains of the plaster in two chambers, we found the inscriptions scratched with a nail: “30.XI.1954. Evening”, “Kill me” and the inscription in Latin script, in one word: “Doctor”.

Horse skulls were an interesting find. I counted 11 of them. About five or six lay inside the foundation of one of the blown up buildings.

It is unlikely that horses were used here as a draft force. The same opinion is shared by those who went through the Kolyma camps.