好英语网逃离马加丹，逃离极寒和古拉格的阴影
MAGADAN, Russia — Like many young people in Magadan, a frigid northern Russian city more than 3,600 miles from Moscow, Dinat Yur is fed up with living in a place where winters drag on for six months and the average annual temperature is below freezing.
俄罗斯马加丹——这座天寒地冻的俄罗斯北部城市距离莫斯科3600多英里。和马加丹的许多年轻人一样，迪纳特·尤尔(Dinat Yur)也厌倦了生活在这样一个地方：冬季长达六个月，年平均气温低于冰点。
“I really dream of leaving this place,” said Mr. Yur, a 29-year-old cook. “I can’t wait.”
“我真的很想离开这个地方，”29岁的厨师尤尔说。“我等不及了。”
俯瞰俄罗斯马加丹市和纳加耶夫湾。
Born and raised in a city proud of its resilience against climatic and all other odds, Mr. Yur has for the moment found his calling in a defiantly contrarian occupation for a place so cold: He makes ice cream.
尤尔出生并成长在一个以抵御恶劣气候和其他种种不利因素为荣的城市，如今，他的使命是在一个这么冷的地方从事一项一反常规的事业：制作冰淇淋。
As the temperature in Magadan dipped the other week to well below freezing — on its way to minus 50 Celsius (minus 58 Fahrenheit) once winter really sets in — he was hard at work mixing milk, sugar and a raspberry mush imported from Italy to produce a summery swirl of frozen gelato.
马加丹的气温降到零度以下的那个星期——一到冬天，这里的温度就降到零下50摄氏度——尤尔在辛勤地劳作着，把牛奶、糖和意大利进口的覆盆子糊做成一个充满夏日风情的意式冰激凌漩涡。
Eating his confections outside during winter, Mr. Yur conceded, is not a good idea — they quickly turn to teeth-cracking chunks of ice — but “everyone here likes to sit at home in front of the TV with some ice cream.”
尤尔承认，冬天在室外吃他的甜品不是什么好主意——它们很快就会变成能崩碎牙齿的大冰块——但是“这里的人都喜欢坐在家里的电视机前吃冰淇淋。”
Russia’s curious love affair with ice cream has long been a subject of theorizing about how a country plagued by such terrible weather and other miserable conditions manages to keep going, prevailing over seemingly unsurmountable hurdles.
长期以来，人们一直在试图理解，一个如此饱受恶劣天气和其他恶劣条件折磨的国家，是怎么克服看似无法逾越的障碍努力前行的，而其国民对冰激凌的热爱就是课题之一。
Particularly popular in Russia is a story, probably apocryphal, about a visit to Moscow in the winter of 1944 by Winston Churchill that has Britain’s wartime leader noticing Muscovites eating ice cream on a snowy street from his car window and declaring “such a people will never be conquered.”
在俄罗斯流行着一个可能是杜撰的故事，1944年冬天温斯顿·丘吉尔(Winston Churchill)访问莫斯科时，这位英国战时领导人透过车窗看到莫斯科人吃着冰淇淋走在积雪的街头，于是宣告，“这样一个民族永远不会被征服。”
Moscow, however, has winters that usually hover in the 20s Fahrenheit — meaning that Magadan is pushing the limits of this against-the-odds spirit.
然而，莫斯科的冬天通常在零下六摄氏度左右徘徊——这意味着马加丹是在挑战这种不畏困难精神的极限。
Burdened by its Stalin-era beginnings as the gateway to a string of brutal labor camps in nearby Kolyma — where tens of thousands were executed and more than 100,000 died from disease and hunger — the city is trying to rebrand itself cheerily as the “golden heart of Russia,” a reference to vast reserves of gold buried in nearby mountains.
在斯大林时期，马加丹是通往附近科累马河一连串残酷的劳改营的入口，在那里，数万人被处决，十万多人死于疾病和饥饿。在这样的历史负累之下，如今这座城市正努力快乐地将自己重塑为“俄罗斯的黄金之心”，指的是附近山区里的大量黄金矿藏。
Built on an icy bay overlooking the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan, Magadan is Russia’s version of Dawson City, the Canadian town created by the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century. Only Russians never rushed to Magadan; they were dragged there.
马加丹位于日本以北一个俯瞰鄂霍次克海的冰封海湾上，是俄罗斯版的道森城——19世纪末克朗代克淘金热中兴建的加拿大小镇。只是俄罗斯人并不是涌向马加丹，而是被拖到那里去的。
The only recent rush has been to the exit.
最近，那里唯一的热潮是人们竞相离开的浪潮。
Young people particularly are making a run for it, a stampede that the city’s mayor, Yuri Grishin, has been working to slow. He points to a new sports complex now under construction, a rash of restaurant openings and fresh licks of paint for buildings in the center of town as possible encouragement for people to stay put.
年轻人尤其心急，市长尤里·格里辛(Yuri Grishin)一直在努力减缓这股浪潮。他指出，正在建设中的新体育中心、大量新开业的餐馆和市中心建筑的重新粉刷都可能鼓励人们留在本地。
After years of dramatic decline that slashed the population by more than 40 percent, the mayor said the number of residents has now “more or less stabilized” at around 91,000.
几年来，这里的人口锐减了40%，如今市长说现在的居民“差不多稳定在”9.1万人。
But among those who have moved away are the mayor’s own three grown children. One now lives in Moscow.
但是搬走的人当中就有市长自己的三个成年子女。其中一人现居莫斯科。
The mayor doesn’t understand. Why would anyone trade Magadan for the capital, where “they will live in a tiny apartment and spend three hours a day in traffic jams,” he asked.
市长想不明白。他问道，怎么会有人为首都而离开马加丹，“在那里他们将住在一个狭小的公寓里，每天还要有三个小时堵在路上。”
Aside from its bleak weather and even bleaker history, Magadan is, if truth be told, no worse — and in some respects better — than many provincial Russian towns. It has the same crumbling concrete apartment blocks, the same colonnaded theater building, the same central square formerly named after Lenin and the same street slogans celebrating victory in the Great Patriotic War, as Russia refers to World War II.
说实话，除了荒凉的天气和更荒凉的历史，马加丹不比许多俄罗斯地方城镇差，并且在某些方面还更好。它拥有同样破败的混凝土公寓楼，相同的柱廊剧院建筑，相同的以列宁命名的中央广场和相同的街头口号，庆祝伟大的卫国战争的胜利——卫国战争是俄罗斯对二战的称呼。
It also has three movie houses, two indoor public swimming pools, a well-deserved reputation for camaraderie and a huge new Orthodox cathedral with glittering golden domes, an indispensable feature of urban planning in the age of President Vladimir V. Putin.
它还有三座电影院、两个室内公共游泳池，有着名至实归的友爱热情，和一座有闪闪发光的金色圆顶的巨大新东正教大教堂，这是弗拉基米尔·V·普京总统时代的城市规划中不可或缺的特征。
Another plus is climate change, which is making winters somewhat milder. It did not start snowing heavily this year until late November.
还有个加分项是气候变化让这里的冬天稍微没那么可怕了。今年直到11月下旬才开始下大雪。
But thoughts of escaping, either by eating Italian gelato or getting on a plane, are so ever-present that a local sociologist diagnosed Magadan as suffering from “delayed life syndrome” — a psychological condition that detaches inhabitants’ hopes and ambitions from their current life and punts them into the future.
但是，逃离的想法无处不在，无论是以吃意大利冰淇淋还是坐飞机的方式，以至于当地的社会学家诊断马加丹患有“生活搁置症”，这种心理状况导致居民把自己的希望和追求与当前的生活分离开，留待未来再去面对。
“People think they are just here temporarily and that they will only live fully once they leave,” said Andrei Grishan, 31, the founder and editor of an online local news portal, Vesma Today. Recently married, he and his new wife both said they want to leave at some point.
“人们认为他们只是暂时住在这里，只有离开这里才能尽情地生活，”当地在线新闻门户网站Vesma Today的创办者和编辑、31岁的安德烈·格里山(Andrei Grishan)说。最近新婚的他和妻子都说他们想在某个时刻离开。
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Magadan had 155,000 people. They were a mix of locally born residents — many of them descendants of former gulag prisoners, guards or administrators — and outsiders attracted by salaries that had for years been far higher than in the rest of the country. That was thanks to the “northern bonus,” a Soviet-era premium offered to anyone willing to work there.
1991年苏联解体时，马加丹州人口为15.5万。其中混合了当地居民和外来者，当地居民中许多人是前古拉格囚犯、警卫或管理人员的后代，而外来者则是被多年来始终远远高于该国其他地区的薪水吸引而来。那是得益于“北方红利”，即苏联时期的津贴，提供给任何愿意在那里工作的人。
But for many people in Magadan, the end of the Soviet Union meant economic ruin. The slashing of Soviet-era subsidies sent Magadan salaries tumbling. As factories closed and services withered, some free-market zealots in Moscow suggested that the city be put out of its misery and shut down.
但是对于马加丹州的许多人来说，苏联的解体意味着经济的崩溃。苏联时期的补贴被大幅削减，使马加丹的薪水大跌。随着工厂关闭和服务萎靡，莫斯科的一些自由市场狂热者建议关闭城市以结束悲惨困境。
Mr. Putin, though, has done the opposite, stressing the importance of keeping remote northern outposts alive, no matter the cost. His calculations include security, patriotic pride in Russia’s reach, and economics: Most of Russia’s natural resources lie beneath the ice and snow of places like Magadan and the nearby wilds.
不过，普京却做了相反的事情，他强调不计代价保住这个偏远的北部居住地的活力。他的筹算包括安全，对俄罗斯的爱国自豪感和经济因素：俄罗斯的大部分自然资源都位于马加丹和附近野外的冰雪覆盖下。
The federal government subsidizes daily flights to and from Moscow and is funding new roads, the new sports complex and high-speed internet lines. Government subsidies also help keep the interest rate on mortgages in town much lower than in warmer parts of Russia.
联邦政府为往返莫斯科的每日航班提供补贴，并出资兴建新道路、新体育中心和高速互联网线路。政府补贴还有助于使当地城镇抵押贷款的利率保持在远低于俄罗斯温暖地区的水平。
Since 2016, Moscow has been offering free land in Magadan and other sparsely populated regions of the Russian Far East. Four hundred people have taken up the offer in the Magadan region, but nearly all are locals, not would-be settlers from the outside as the Kremlin had hoped.
自2016年以来，莫斯科一直在马加丹和俄罗斯远东其他人口稀少的地区提供免费土地。马加丹地区有400人接受了赠予，但几乎都是当地人，而不是克里姆林宫所希望的来自外部的定居者。
While Magadan is blessed with rich supplies of gold, silver and other natural resources, conditions are so harsh that some economists still question whether it makes sense to keep it as a city rather than just a transit center for contract workers heading for the mines.
尽管马加丹拥有丰富的黄金、银和其他自然资源，但条件如此恶劣，以至于一些经济学家仍在质疑，将其保留为城市而不是一个外包工人前往矿山的中转站意义何在。
But giving up on Magadan as a functioning urban center would effectively return it to its original role when it was founded in 1929 — a grim seaport through which geologists and then gulag laborers passed on their way to the gold mines of Kolyma. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” described this particular outpost of the gulag as “the pole of cold and cruelty.”
但是如果放弃马加丹作为一个全功能城市中心，它实际上将恢复为1929年成立时的原始角色——一个阴森的海港，地质学家和古拉格工人都通过该海港前往科利马金矿。《古拉格群岛》的作者亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴(Alexander Solzhenitsyn)将古拉格的这一前哨描述为“冷漠与残酷的极点”。
When Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 after years of exile in Vermont, he made Magadan his first stop, explaining upon his arrival from Alaska that he had “come to bow to the land where many hundreds of thousands of our countrymen, who were executed, are buried.”
1994年，在佛蒙特州度过多年流亡生活的索尔仁尼琴返回俄罗斯，他从阿拉斯加出发，将马加丹作为他的第一站，抵达后他解释说他“是来向这片成千上万同胞被处决、埋葬的土地鞠躬致敬”。
Even today, residents still refer to the rest of Russia as “the mainland,” a sign of how isolated the city feels. To lift flagging spirits, municipal buses are emblazoned with a defiant statement of the city’s will to survive: “Magadan was, is and will be.”
即使在今天，居民仍然将俄罗斯其他地区称为“大陆”，说明这座城市感到多么地孤立。为了振作精神，公交车上醒目地展示着对城市生存意愿的抗争声明：“马加丹有曾经，有现在，也有未来。”
The phrase borrows, inauspiciously, from a less-than-successful Soviet-era slogan once plastered across the country: “Lenin lived, lives and will live!”
这句话不太吉利地借用了曾经在全国范围宣传的、不太成功的苏联时代口号：“列宁活在过去，活在现在，也将永远活在未来！”
Because of the flight of young people, Magadan now has a severe shortage of able-bodied workers. The mayor said the city needed 20,000 more people to do construction and other work and is making do in the meantime by bringing in workers on short-term contracts.
由于年轻人的逃离，马加丹现在严重缺乏体格强健的工人。市长说，该市需要2万多人从事建筑和其他工作，目前正在通过雇用短期合同工来凑数。
“It upsets me that people have this stereotype of Magadan as a big prison camp,” the mayor said. The city, he added, is “repositioning itself as a bright, colorful and happy place.”
“令我感到难过的是，人们把马加丹定位为一个大型的监狱营地。”市长说。他还说，这座城市“正在将自己重新定位为一个明亮，多彩和幸福的地方。”
Mr. Yur, the ice-cream maker, is not convinced. He tries to take a holiday each summer somewhere in Asia, which is much closer than Europe and most of Russia. But returning home to Magadan is always a trial.
做冰淇淋的尤尔对此并不信服。他试图每年夏天去亚洲某个地方度假，那里相比欧洲和俄罗斯大部分地区更近。但是回到马加丹总感觉像是去受苦。
“When I come back here,” he said, “I slip into a deep depression.”
“当我回到这里时，”他说，“我就陷入深深的抑郁。”