Gulag - A journey into the darkness of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps
“We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months - after that we don’t need him anymore.” Camp commander Naftaly Frenkel, The Gulag Archipelago
18 million people were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, often political prisoners, imprisoned without a trial. Over 1.5 million died. In the winter of 1991, during the end of Gorbachev’s glasnost, I travelled with a writer and translator across the USSR from Moscow to Eastern Siberia, interviewing survivors of Stalin’s prison camps. The story was published in a German magazine. Thirty years later, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his rewriting of Soviet history, echoing Stalin, with critics sent to camps or simply murdered, I started to use the new online sources to research into the prison camps and their history. I was helped on the story by the organization ‘Memorial’, a group of survivors dedicated to revealing facts about the Gulag. In 2021, they were outlawed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation.
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The city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk was the port of arrival for prisoners transported during Stalin's “Great Terror."
Statue of a guard overlooking the city of magadan on the roof of the The Maxim Gorky Musical-Dramatic Theater. The theatre, built by prisoners was opened in 1941 and during the "great terror."
Housing estate in the port city of Magadan, transportation hub for Russia’s Far East, originally the administration centre for the Kolyma Gulag camps.
Galina Ivan Levinson, ex political prisoner from the Soviet Gulags working from her apartment in Moscow for "Memorial', an organisation investigating lives in the camps. 1991.
Azir Sandler, in the entrance to his old cell, holding his original arrest papers, from 50 years earlier. He remembers what he weighed: 70 kilos when he was arrested, 42 kilos three months later.
During his 11 years in prison Azir documented his experiences by tying knots on string in a secret code since writing materials in the camp were forbidden.
The Kolyma Highway, a 2000 km road into the central Siberia was built by the thousands of political prisoners who were exiled to the region’s camps from the 1930s to the 1950s.
The unpaved Kolyma Highway leads from Magadan to the rich gold-mining region of the upper Kolyma River.
The Kolyma Highway, commonly known as the “Road of Bones” was named after the thousands of Gulag prisoners who died during its construction, many of their bodies are buried just beneath its surface.
Following the Kolyma highway we discovered that many inhabitants of the mining towns along the route were descendents of the original Gulag guards or prisoners.
Active gold dredging 16 hours per day in a lake 200K north of Magadan using an old US paddle steamer.
Statue of Lenin overlooking the mining town of Ust-Omchug, on the Kolyma highway northwest of Magadan.
Either a wolf or huge feral dog scavenging bins in Ust’-Omchug.
The mining town of Ust-Omchug, on the Kolyma highway northwest of Magadan. With sub-zero temperatures 8 months of the year the population has decreased by 75% since the fall of the USSR.
Young men hanging out on their Jupiter motorbikes and sidecars below 10ºC, in the mining town of Ust-Omchug.
Winter darkness arrives early in the town of Ust-Omchug.
We stayed at Camp AW261/4, Uptar, one of Russia’s 1000 prison camps. Since 1970 most of the prisoners were criminals. This has, however, changed since the invasion of Ukraine with the return of political prisoners.
Prison guards lining up at start of duty. "If some prison guards beat inmates, that doesn't mean it is the legacy of the gulag. It means that such guards have no brains...no desire to work, no patience."
Camp AW261/4, prisoners roll call before the start of daily work. Forced labour has evolved as a branch pf the national economy.
The work in Camp AW261/4, was brutal, pouring concrete outside at temperatures of down to -30° C, and escape impossible.
Guard checking on prisoner working in the engineering workshop, Uptar Prison.
With the governor watching, on a prisoner showed us severe burns he received in prison.
Prisoner in a sick bay cell.
Black bread and soup for the prison lunch. All prisoners and cutlery were inspected during meals.
Ruins of the Butugychag Corrective Labour Camp, high in the Kolyma mountains. It is one of a small number of camps where prisoners mined and processed uranium without any protective gear the camp took the lives of thousands of inmates.
Graves marked with old sardine cans are the only memorial to the thousands who died in the The Butugychag Corrective Labor Camp. To this day the radiation in the area is way above normal.