That evening, I met Victor. Bald and with a smile crooked from harelip surgery, the 40-year-old semi-legal miner gave me a lift in his truck. He swore constantly, speaking in the prison slang that's almost a language of its own. "I'm just going to drive straight," he said. "It's 35 hours. No stops." 

He drank five Red Bulls in succession. Perhaps because of this, he monologued all the way to Magadan. "It isn't like Germans and Jews. Russians don't have the victim complex. My grandmother was on the road. I think of her sometimes when I'm driving." I asked him if he felt anger at the Stalinists. "No, Granny was a Bolshevik from Yekaterinburg. She always believed. My grandfather was an NKVD guard. They met on the road." Abandoned settlements lined the final 1,000km. Victor's running commentary did not abate. "You see decay, but I see my first kiss, my childhood, my motherland. That's why I stay in Kolyma."

When I finally reached Magadan, I hunted for days for a survivor. "I'm sorry, they are all dead," was the refrain. With male life-expectancy in Russia a mere 58, I should not have been surprised, but I was devastated. Only hours before my flight back to Moscow, I called Miron Etlis, the rector of the local university. With an unmistakable Yiddish accent, he croaked: "The survivors are almost all dead-but I was in the Gulag. I can try and explain." I rushed round. He was little and 80. His eyes were dark-brown pools. This was my last chance. He pointed at a photocopied picture of himself embracing Solzhenitsyn. "I was in the same camp as him. I was in 555, between 1953 and 1956. He described the camp perfectly in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. That was my life."

Like many survivors, the energy that pulled him through had yet to burn out. "I had good friends there, in the Gulag, only now are we dying. I was arrested on the day Stalin died. Ironically, people were crying for him but I felt resigned. I was accused of ‘Jewish Terrorism against Soviet Power'." He chuckled. "I was transported by train, and left, like many of my generation, with a belief that a universal morality exists, but also with a deep fatalism." He drifted off into a discourse on Jewish intellectualism and his friends in Alaska. I pulled him back. "You see...I think about it, but I can't every day. I can't live like that, even now." I pushed him to talk, asking a question I would never dare ask my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor: "How does it feel, knowing that you were a slave?" He averted his eyes, went quiet. I had gone too far. An angel passed. "Mr Etlis...?" 

He was no longer really talking to me. "It will pass...It will not be forever. It will pass away, pass away." His face tensed, a quiver almost of anger. "But the most dramatic moment in the camp was not what you'd expect. The camp was full of Germans, of Nazis, and I worked every day next to one. He asked me, ‘Why don't you come to the West and speak of this horror?' At that moment I wanted to destroy him. I hated him. I would never betray my country — the Soviet Union — my country that defeated fascism at the cost of 28 million. The German was in rags. Not everyone in that camp was innocent. He then began to shout, ‘We have bases in the Andes and the Amazon, Hitler is in Argentina. We will return to annihilate you, maybe in ten, maybe in 50 years.'" Etlis smiled. He felt I had understood how a Gulag victim could be proud of the USSR.

I struggled for synthesis on the long flight back to Moscow. But for me, as for every Russian, there were no easy conclusions, only lasting shock. The Kremlin is the insurgent power in a global poker game, skilfully playing a weak hand with a touch of vengeance. Yet we should never forget that in the courtyards of that "magic mountain" of power lie those two absurd symbols of Russia: the world's largest bell, that was never rung, and the world's largest cannon, that was never fired. Behind the bravado of the secret police and the oil magnates, Russia is a pained
nation. Not at peace with itself.