Recently, some media outlets and bloggers have written about the embossed panel of the Magadan Airport Terminal, which has been familiar to many residents of the region since childhood. A new terminal building has recently opened, and local residents have called for the transfer of the embossed panel to a new location.  This is how the governor of the Magadan region, Sergey Nosov, reacted:

“When creating new things, we need to take care of history. In February, work will begin on transferring the embossed panel with a map of the Soviet Union and the main achievements of the workers of the Far North from the old terminal to the new terminal complex. It will be placed behind the check-in counters so that all passengers can see the unique work of the craftsmen.”

But in all these messages, no one remembered who the very masters who created this “unique work” were.

Here’s what Vadim Gorbatov said about his work:

– It was a long time ago, about fifty years ago. My friend and classmate in Stroganovka, Yuli Bobyl, who worked in the field of monumental art, invited me to take part in the interior design of the airport terminal under construction in Magadan at that time. Yulia himself and his wife Lyuda Litvinova had to do the main work – huge mosaics in the interiors of the building, and I had to make two decorative panels with images of Aeroflot routes on the map of the USSR and on the map of the Kolyma Region. According to the authors of the project, these panels were to be made of metal. It could be stamping, forging, welding, in general, something metallic. I liked embossed metal , and I did a lot of it in Stroganovka. But by the time I started working on the project, I got carried away with a new technique that I came up with myself. At home, we had a lot of thin aluminum sheets that were used for rotary printing. (This is a low-volume printing based on transferring text from aluminum sheets to paper). If you squeeze out a drawing on such a sheet on one side with a pen or a wooden pressing machine, the foil crumples, and a convex image forms on the other side. And if you squeeze it a few times like that, the height of the relief will increase. For even more volume, you can walk through the pattern from the front, applying the metal in the opposite direction. The result is a three-dimensional image on an aluminum sheet. And to make it durable on the reverse side, all this extruded relief was filled with epoxy resin and carefully glued to a rigid base. While the epoxy resin has not solidified, you can refine the relief on the front side by refining and making more subtle graphic elements. It turned out to be interesting, but the sheen of aluminum interfered with perception. The traditional methods of tinting metals were not suitable here, and I tinted them with concentrated mascara. When the mascara was dry, I wiped the surface so that the black color remained in the hollows. And all this was then varnished in several layers. The image became voluminous and graphic. That’s how I had the technology worked out by that time, and there were a lot of finished works done in this technique. The arrangement of the panels in the passage did not imply mechanical loads on it, and the technology, as it seemed to me, was supposed to ensure safety.

We started working in the summer, apparently it was 1973. At first, as a worker, I helped make mosaics (because mosaics were the main object), crushed glass in rollers, sifted through sieves and did a lot of other work. Back in the winter, I tried to make sketches for mosaics with Julius. But, as usual, I painted realistically, and mosaics are decorative, largely abstract, related to the architecture of the building itself, and my naturalism did not work well here. And we eventually abandoned my sketches.

That’s how we did mosaics all summer, and in the fall and winter I took up the panels. There were two of them: the airline charts on the map of the USSR and on the map of the Kolyma Region. But I wasn’t interested in just making airline diagrams, as the project suggested. I wanted to show on metal not only the destinations where the planes flew, but most importantly the nature of those places: hills, taiga, sea, birds, animals, hunters, fishermen, reindeer herders and the equipment itself: all kinds of dynamic aircraft things with airplanes, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles.

The amount of work was large, and I invited my friend Boris Voronov from Stroganovka to help me with this work. At that time, he was the chief artist of the Kurchatov Institute. I did all the nature, people, animals and some of the equipment, and Borka mostly did the inscriptions, buildings and equipment … All the work was done in Moscow, at Borya’s house, so that on the spot in Magadan it would only be necessary to mount the panels. By the way, in many places on the panel there are brass pins indicating airport points (Borka sharpened them at the factory), so the strings were supposed to be stretched on them – flight routes. I haven’t seen these strings in the photo right now, and to be honest, I don’t even remember if I mounted them then or not.…

When we finished work in Moscow, I flew alone, without Borka, to mount it. I think it was the winter from 73rd to 74th. I lived in a flight dispensary. In order to mount the relief panel, it was necessary to fix a wooden frame on the wall, on which all parts of the panel were then attached. I was given a “shooter” with a pistol. He fired, and it often turned out that either the rail flew apart, or the dowel did not fully fit into the concrete…. He was shooting into the smoke, and I was covering my ears. Anyway, we’re done, I’ve assembled the panels and attached these brass things for the string routes…. I remember when I finished my job, I couldn’t fly to Moscow for another week. A snowstorm began.

I recently watched a video on the Internet about this panel.… Oh, the mascara has worn off in some places. They’re probably wiping it with something… I think it would be possible to remove the varnish and shade it with mascara again.…

It’s been so long… more than half a century! How many things have changed and gone forever… There is no Soviet Union, the map of which we see on the panel, there are almost none of my friends with whom I worked at that time, there are no planes, cars and all-terrain vehicles, but such a seemingly useless thing in practical terms is still alive and, surprisingly, pleases people.

***

I remembered another interesting case when the work was just beginning, and I helped create a mosaic….The glass we worked with had rich colors – yellow, red, green, and there were almost no neutral grayish shades. And we went to the rivers, where we collected pebbles of the right shades on the shallows. One day we went to the river near the village… I don’t remember… I think it was called a “Tent”… They took us there by car, and we collected the stones in the right shades.  But the car that was supposed to pick us up never arrived. It looks like they just forgot about us. And that was about fifty kilometers from here. We decided that we would walk, and then someone would give us a lift. Cars passed very rarely, no one stopped…. Summer.  We walk, we talk. The highway runs along the hills, somewhere higher, somewhere lower, and suddenly we see in the distance, on the horizon, a group of people. They’re heading towards us. We have all kinds of speculation and jokes…. When we get closer, there is something unusual and unnatural about these people. The scale is unclear, the trees are far away, the hills are on the horizon. We got closer and saw that they were dwarfs! Five or seven people. As we approached, they suddenly pounced on each other with whooping, grimacing and whistling and formed a magnificent pyramid! And the extreme ones spread their arms and legs to the sides, as on Red Square at sports parades in front of the mausoleum of the leader of the proletariat. That’s how they greeted us!  We started talking. We’re forgotten artists, and they’re from some kind of philharmonic society. It turns out that they were also forgotten about. They wandered around somewhere, gave concerts, staged plays, showed sports numbers.  We talked and talked, and each went his own way, we went south, towards Magadan, and they went north along the Kolyma highway. After a while, another car pulled up to us, but there wasn’t much room in it. Lucy and I were the only ones who could fit in. When I returned, I had to remind them that they had forgotten about us, and that we still had fifty kilometers to go. I arrived, went to the control room and started swearing loudly, brazenly, in a commanding tone, which was completely unlike me.:

“How so?” They were sent there and abandoned, forgotten! There is no car! Would they really have to walk fifty kilometers?! I’m going to Pogorelov’s now, and Pogorelov was in charge there.…

The tired woman looked up at me:

– If you hadn’t started scaring me with Pogorelov, I would have sent the car right away, and so get out of here.

That’s how it turns out – when you behave unnaturally, you don’t understand either the situation or the people.  A normal person would have negotiated first, done the deed, and only then would have started swearing. But, nevertheless, she sent the car. And after a while, they brought all our people.

Retold by Andrei Gorbatov

Photos by Il’ya Kovyakin (https://goblinid.livejournal.com/142811.html)

 

A surprisingly detailed account of the embossed panel, written by a local resident back in 2015.

Video about the panel, starting at 7 minutes.

About the transfer of the embossed panel to the new airport building.