The Architect

Igor Nikiliovich, the man who befriended us on the train and took me in, slipped into a somber drunk that, after a few days, rendered him with no more capacity than a young child. At first he took care of us, but in the end we took care of him.

Before Igor Nikiliovich launched himself into an epic “zapoi” he put us in contact with Mamanov, a man of some importance in the local mining interests. Mamanov in turn put us in contact with another man of even greater importance in the local mining industry, who then put us in contact with Troshin, the architect.

Vitaliy Alexseivich Troshin is a man of small stature, long arms, and a composer’s head of hair. Having trained at the prestigious St. Petersburg Institute of Circus Pedagogy, he entered a profession which suited his joie de vivre and natural sense for the dramatic, clowning.

However, a deeper purpose called to his attention a love for creation, and he quit the circus to become an architect. Through a long and circuitous route of endless Soviet and Post-Soviet bureaucracy, he finally became the City Architect of Vorkuta.

Troshin’s major contribution to the city of Vorkuta is a number of monuments memorializing the city’s history as a former site of a major Gulag prison.

Having been trained in the Soviet school of brutalist architecture, Troshin is an adept at social realism. In other words, highly stylized works of public propaganda.

Additionally, Troshin is a member of Memorial, a type of NGO which preserves and archives Gulag materials. I could not have met a better person to help start my own journey into the Gulag country.

By studying Troshin’s paintings, scale models, and hand-made maps, I began to understand Vorkuta presently, and as a former penal colony. 

Not only in a an abstract sense, but geographically, physically, viscerally. I had no idea until those first meeting with Troshin what I was dealing with. With no point of reference, and only a few details, the gulag country was a dim conception in my mind.

However, Troshin shed a light of creativity upon this dim country, and for the first time in my life, I saw its face. And indeed, the Gulag did have a face.  

Map painting by V. Troshin

The Vorkuta Gulag was not a single prison, but an extensive network of labor camps which serviced dozens of coalmines. Since the 1930’s Vorkuta coal fueled heavy industry in the USSR, and now The Russian Federation and factories across Europe and China.

Troshin noted that the placement of the coal mines, the roads, and the prisons, formed a face in side-profile. For the gulag, which was hidden and intentionally kept anonymous for so many years, to develop a face in this way, a de facto identity in this manner, was intriguing and moving. Was it possible that the gulag workers, even my own great-grandfather, a builder himself, had intentionally build the Vorkuta Gulag in this manner?

I will never know. However, as I studied this face, it called to me. It wanted me to walk its contours, circumnavigate its cranium, summit its nose, and wade through its boggy eyes.