[10] The town sits on the M56 Kolyma Highway, an unsealed track often known as the "Road of Bones", which connects Yakutsk with Magadan.

[citation needed] In 1938, the settlement was greatly expanded to become a center of gold mining in the western part of what is now Magadan Oblast under the control of Dalstroy.

From 1949 until 1956, Susuman was the base for one of the Soviet Union's largest corrective labor camps, the Zaplag of the Dalstroy program.

[citation needed] In the post-Soviet period, the population dropped significantly, from a high of around 18,000 inhabitants in 1991, down to 4,439 as of the 2021 Census.

Susuman and its nearby Dalstroy goldmine is portrayed in the prizewinning documentary on the Gulag in the far east of Siberia GOLD Lost in Siberia (VPRO/The Netherlands 1994) YouTube: [1] www.imdb.com [2] by a Dutch filmteam, led by author Gerard Jacobs and filmmaker Theo Uittenbogaard