We set off at daybreak, critically low on supplies for the 1,000km drive across uninhabited territory. Vladimir had a smallish piece of lard and half a stale loaf of black bread. I had two Coca-Colas, a litre of Fanta and a box of Twiglets. "Aida was wrong to worry you. The bears are sleeping," he complained. An hour beyond Khandygea we began to pass the occasional small cross. "Those are not for the Gulag. They're for guys whose cars break in snowstorms and get frozen to death." The road began to slope. I tried to imagine one dead zek for every metre, but began to feel carsick and stopped.

Everything was blue. It is the colour of the ice, the sky and the mountains. "The other planet," as Stalin's slaves would say. "Why did he do this?" I mumbled. Vladimir knew exactly what he thought. "Before Stalin ruled, he was a common thief. He was greedy. Djugashvili, Saakashvili, he was a Caucasian king of thieves." He was almost shouting now. "Hitler and Stalin emptied Russia. They say 30 million died in the war. They say Stalin killed 20 million. There would be maybe 300 million Russians by now if they hadn't ever been born."

 Every 30 or so kilometres, empty square clearings flashed by. "Camps," Vladimir said. It was dusk when we reached the Gulag which Aida had suggested. The sky had turned a bruised purple and it was falling below -35°C. My hands stung, my nose was numb. A barracks half devoured by the taiga sat by the roadside. Vladimir sat in the car, announcing matter-of-factly how "in the summer, you can see bones. The animals dig them up." I pushed the door open. Solzhenitsyn declared these lands would be sacred to Russians, but the dank planks felt forsaken by any God.

"Some say there are ghosts on the road, but I don't believe them," Vladimir mused. The road sloped and bent. Still more than 12 hours from the nearest town, we had reached a place of broad valleys, some of the coldest lands outside Antarctica. In 1926, as the Gulag was growing, Soviet scientists calculated that the tiny settlement of Oimyakon had touched -72°C, with nearby valleys at -82°C. These are the valleys Solzhenitsyn called "the pole of cold and suffering of the archipelago". The other great author from the archipelago, Varlam Shalamov, who wrote graphic stories of hunger and cannibalism, had been imprisoned here. As I sat shivering in the front seat that long night, one of Shalamov's passages kept dancing in my head:

"The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies."

We reached the settlement of Ust-Nera at 6am. I said goodbye to Vladimir and fell asleep in a truckers' hostel where a long bloodstain adorned the ceiling. The next day, I was told nobody would drive to Magadan until tomorrow. Or the next day. Growing desperate, I asked an official, the governor of a district the size of Germany, to help me. "We don't have cars either, this isn't the mainland," he replied politely. "I'm sorry. Find a gold miner, they might be able to help."