What was Magadan like in the late 1930s?

In the late 1930s, Magadan was a kind of a gulag boomtown. The town was short on barracks and ports for the slave ships that arrived every few days from Vladivostok. When the ice was so thick that the steamers could not make it to the docks, barefoot prisoners would walk on the ice the last mile to shore. Five or six thousand men and women in rags would be marched from the ships and onto the shore to the barracks. The guards would beat the prisoners in the street and shoot them if necessary.