Kolyma

An approximate location of the Kolyma region

Kolyma region, arctic northeast Siberia

The Kolyma (pronounced kah-lee-MAH) region (Russian: Колыма) is located in the far northeastern area of Siberia. It is bounded by the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The extremely remote region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered until 1926. Today the region consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.

The area has a subarctic climate with very cold winters lasting up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region. Average winter temperatures range from -19°C to -38°C (and even lower in the interior), and average summer temperatures, from +3°C to +16°C. There are rich reserves of gold, silver, tin, tungsten, mercury, copper, antimony, coal, oil, and peat. Twenty-nine zones of possible oil and gas accumulation have been identified on the Okhotsk shelf. Total reserves are estimated at 3.5 billion tons of equivalent fuel, including 1.2 billion tons of oil and 1.5 billion m3 of gas.

The principal town, Magadan, with a population of 150,000 and an area of 18,000 hectares, is the largest port of northeastern Russia. It has a large fishing fleet and remains open year-round with the help of icebreakers. There is also a major Airport nearby. There are many public and private farming enterprises. Gold mining works, pasta and sausage plants, fishing companies, and a distillery form the city's industrial base.

History

Under Joseph Stalin's rule, Kolyma became the most notorious region for the Gulag labor camps. A million or more people may have died en route to the area or in the Kolyma's series of gold mining, road building, lumbering, and other camps between 1932 and 1954. It was Kolyma's reputation that caused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, to characterize it as the "pole of cold and cruelty" in the Gulag system. The Mask of Sorrow monument in Magaden (see photograph below) commemorates all those who died in the Kolyma forced-labour camps.

Emergence of the Gulag camps

Gold and platinum were discovered in the region in the early 20th century. During the time of the USSR's industrialization (beginning with Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932) the need for capital to finance economic development was great. The abundant gold resources of the area seemed tailor-made to provide this capital. A government agency Dalstroy (Russian: Дальстроя) (the Russian acronym for the Far Northern Construction Administration) was formed to organize the exploitation of the area. Prisoners were being drawn into the Soviet penal system in large numbers during the initial period of Kolyma's development, most notably from the so-called anti-Kulak campaign and the government's internal war to force collectivization on the USSR's peasantry. These prisoners formed a readily available workforce.

File:Butugycheg.jpg

Butugycheg Tin Mine - A Gulag camp in the Kolyma area

The initial efforts to develop the region began in 1932, with the building of the town of Magadan by forced labor. (Many projects in the USSR were already using forced labor, most notably the White Sea-Baltic Canal.) After a grueling train ride (the longest in the USSR), prisoners were disembarked at one of several transit camps (such as Nakhodka and later Vanino) and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to the natural harbor chosen for Magadan's construction. Conditions aboard the ships were harsh.

In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the contruction of what was to be known as the Road of Bones. Eventually, as many as 80 different camps dotted the region. The camps, located out in the middle of uninhabited taiga forests, were carefully selected. They were situated in sheltered areas between boulders and hills where it was easy to catch anyone trying to escape. The original director of the Kolyma camps was Eduard Berzin, a Chekist. Berzin was later removed (1937) and shot during the period of the Great Purges in the USSR.

In 1937, at the height of the Purges, Stalin ordered an intensification of the hardships prisoners were forced to endure. Indeed, in this connection Alexander Solzhenitsyn quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore." The system of hard labor and minimal food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" (dokhodyaga, in Russian).

Robert Conquest, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Anne Applebaum and others (see bibliography) describe the Kolyma camps in some detail. The suffering of the prisoners was exacerbated by the inclusion in the prisoner population of career criminals who terrorized the "political" prisoners mercilessly. Death in the Kolyma camps came in many forms: overwork, starvation, malnutrition, mining accidents, exposure, murder at the hands of criminals, and beatings at the hands of guards. A director of the Sevvostlag complex of camps, colonel Sergey Garanin is said to personally shoot whole brigades of prisoners for not fulfilling their daily quotas in the late 1930s. Escape was difficult, owing to the climate and physical isolation of the region, but some still attempted it. Escapees, if caught, were often torn to shreds by camp guard dogs. The use of torture as punishment was also common. Russian dissident historian Roy Medvedev has aptly compared the Kolyma camps to Auschwitz.

Prisoners at a Kolyma goldmine

Many of the prisoners in Kolyma were academics or intellectuals. Among them was Mikhail Kravchuk or Krawtschuk, a Ukrainian mathematician who by the early 1930s had received considerable acclaim in the west. After a summary trial, apparently for not being willing to take part in the accusations of some of his colleagues, he was sent to Kolyma where he died in 1942. "Hard work in the Soviet labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health, and last but not least, accusations and abandonment by most of his colleagues, took their toll. Krawtchouk perished in Magadan in Eastern Siberia, about 4,000 thousand miles (6,000 km) from the place where he was born. Krawtchouk's last article had appeared soon after his arrest in 1938. However, after this publication, Krawtchouk's name was literally stricken from books and journals."

There were, however, some exceptions. Léon Theremin, an inventor, who had been seized by Soviet agents in the United States and forced to return to the Soviet Union was, on Joseph Stalin's order, imprisoned at Butyrka and later sent to work in the Kolyma gold mines. Although rumors of his execution were widely circulated, Theremin was, in fact, put to work in a sharashka or secret research laboratory, together with Andrei Tupolev, Sergei Korolev, and other well-known scientists and engineers. The Soviet Union rehabilitated him in 1956.

The Kolyma camps were converted to (mostly) free labor after 1954, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered a general amnesty that freed many prisoners. In an article entitled Marxist Dreams, Ralph Raico, professor of history at the State University College at Buffalo, writes: "The most notorious of the camps was Kolyma, in eastern Siberia - in actuality, a system of camps four times the size of France. There the death rate may have been as high as 50 percent per year and the number of deaths was probably on the order of 3,000,000." There does not appear to be any real evidence to justify such a high figure but it seems reasonable to suppose there could have been between 500,000 and one million deaths at Kolyma.

File:Magadan, 09.06 019.jpg

The Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan commemorating those who died in the Kolyma camps

Dalstroy officials

In the words of prisoner Ayyub Baghirov, "The entire administration of the Dalstroy - economic, administrative, physical and political - was in the hands of one person who was invested with many rights and privileges." The officials in charge of Dalstroy, i.e. the Kolyma Gulag camps were:

• Eduard Petrovich Berzin, Head of Dalstroy 1932-1937. The deputy head was Valentin Aleksandrovich Tsaregradskiy.
• Karp Aleksandrovich Pavlov (Head of Dalstroy and Kolyma camp 1937-40)
• Ivan Fedorovich Nikishev (Head of Dalstroy 1940-1946). There are some reports he remained until 1948.

Calendar of historical events

A detailed calendar of events is presented at the Polish internet site, Forum. Of particular interest are:

• 1928-1929: Gold mines established in the Kolyma River region. Commencement of regular mining operations
• 13 November 1931: Establishment of Dalstroy
• 4 February 1932: Eduard Berzin, Manager of Dalstroy, arrives with the first 10 prisoners.
• 1934: The headcount increases to 30,000 inmates.
• 1937: The number of inmates increases to over 70.000; 51,500 kg of gold mined
• June 1937: Stalin reprimands the Kolyma commandants for their undue leniency towards toward the inmates.
• December 1937: Berzin is charged with espionage and subsequently shot in August of 1938.
• March 4, 1938: Dalstroy is put under the jurisdiction of NKVD, USSR.
• December 1938: Osip Mandelstam, an eminent Russian poet, dies in Magadan en route to the Kolyma camps.
• 1939: Number of inmates now 138,200.
• 11 October 1939: Commandants Pavlov (Kolyma) and Garanin (Sevvostlag) sacked from their posts. Garanin subsequently shot.
• 1941: Headcount of inmates reaches 190,000. Also some 3,700 Dalstroy contract workers.
• October 1945: Camp for the Japanese prisoners of war is established in Magadan, to provide extra labour.
• 1952: 199,726 inmates, the highest ever in the history of the Kolyma camps and Dalstroy.
• May 1952: According to commandant Mitrakov, Sevvoslag is dissolved, Dalstroy transformed into the General Board of Labour Camps
• March 1953: Dalstroy transferred into the fold of the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, camp units come under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Ministry of Justice.
• September 1953: Dalstroy camp units taken over by the newly established Management Board of the North-Eastern Corrective Labour Camps. Harsh camp regime gradually relaxed.
• 1954-1955: Mass releases of the camp inmates starts. Some camp closures begin.

There does not appear to be a precise date at which the Kolyma labour-camp operations finally ended. Many of the former prisoners continued to work in the mines with a modified status and a few new prisoners arrived, at least until the early 1970s. It is however reported that Dalstroy itself was finally abolished in 1957. Dalstroy's territory had been increased until it covered all of North East Siberia, some 926,640 square miles.

Post-Dalstroy developments

The Chukot Autonomous Okrug site provides details of developments after the official closure of the camps. In 1953, the Magadan region (Oblast) was established. Dalstroy was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to that of the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy.

Industrial and economic evolution

Industrial gold-mining started in 1958 leading to the development of mining settlements, industrial enterprises, power plants, hydro-electric dams, power transmission lines and improved roads. By the 1960s, the region's population exceeded 100,000. With the dissolution of Dalstroy, the Soviets adopted new labor policies. While the prison labor was still important, it mainly consisted of common criminals. New manpower was recruited from all Soviet nationalities on a voluntary basis, to make up for the sudden lack of political prisoners. Young men and women were lured to the frontier land of Kolyma with the promise of high earnings and better living. But many decided to leave. The region's prosperity suffered under Soviet policies in the 1980s and 1990s with a considerable reduction in population, apparently by 40% in Magadan. A U.S. report from the late 1990s gives details of the region's economic shortfall citing outdated equipment, bankruptcies of local companies and lack of central support. It does however report substantial investments from the United States and the governor's optimism for future prosperity based on revival of the mining industries.

Last political prisoners

Dalstroy and the camps did not close down completely. The Kolyma authority, which was reorganised in 1958/59 (31 December 1958), finally closed in 1968. However the mining activities did not stop. Indeed, government structures still exist today uner the Ministry of Natural Resources. In some cases, the same individuals seem to have stayed on over the years under new management. There are indications that the political prisoners were gradually phased out right up until 1991 but it appears to have been under Yeltsin's far reaching reforms that the very last prisoners were released from Kolyma. The Russian author Andrei Amalrik appears to have been one of the last high-profile polital prisoners to be sent to Kolyma. In 1970, he published two reactionary books: Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? and Involuntary Journey to Siberia. As a result, he was arrested for defaming the Soviet state in November 1970 and sentenced to hard labour, apparently in Kolyma, for what turned out to be a total of almost five years.

Accounts of the Kolyma Gulag

During and after the Second World War the region saw major influxes of Polish, German, Japanese, and Korean prisoners. There is a particularly memorable account written by a Romanian survivor, Michael Solomon, in his book Magadan (see Bibliography below) which gives us a vivid picture of both the transit camps leading to the Kolyma and the region itself. The Hungarian, George Bien, author of the Lost Years, also recounts the horrors of Kolyma. His story has also led to a film.

In Bitter Days of Kolyma, Ayyub Baghirov, an Azerbaijani accountant who was finally rehabilitated, provides details of his arrest, tourture and sentencing to eight (finally to become 18) years emprisonment in a labour camp for refusing to incriminate a fellow official for financial irregularities. Describing the train journey to Siberia, he writes: "The terrible heat, the lack of fresh air, the unbearable overcrowded conditions all exhausted us. We were all half starved. Some of the elderly prisoners, who had become so weak and emaciated, died along the way. Their corpses were left abandoned alongside the railroad tracks."

A detailed description of conditions in the camps is provided by Varlam Shalamov in Dry Rations from his Kolyma Tales: "Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. All human emotions—love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty — had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies..."

A vivid account of the conditions in Kolyma is that of Brother Gene Thompson of Kiev's Faith Mission. He recounts how he met Vyacheslav Palman, a prisoner who survived because he knew how to grow cabbages. Palman spoke of how guards read out the names of those to be shot every evening. On one occasion a group of 169 men were shot and thrown into a pit. Their fully clothed bodies were found after the ice melted in 1998.

Finally, Ukrainian prisoner Nikolai Getman who spent the years 1945-1953 in Kolyma, records his testimony in pictures rather than words. But he does have a plea: "Some may say that the Gulag is a forgotten part of history and that we do not need to be reminded. But I have witnessed monstrous crimes. It is not too late to talk about them and reveal them. It is essential to do so. Some have expressed fear on seeing some of my paintings that I might end up in Kolyma again - this time for good. But the people must be reminded... of one of the harshest acts of political repression in the Soviet Union. My paintings may help achieve this."

Lack of historical evidence

While comparatively complete lists of the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps have survived, the amount of hard evidence in regard to Kolyma is extremely limited. Unfortunately, no reliable archives exist about the total number of victims of Stalinism; all numbers are estimates. In his book, Stalin (1966), Edvard Radzinsky explains how Stalin, while systematically destroying his comrades-in-arms "at once obliterated every trace of them in history. He personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives." That practice continued to exist after the death of the dictator.

In an account of a visit to Magadan by Harry Wu of Standford University in 1999, there is a reference to the efforts of Alexander Biryukov, a Magadan lawyer to document the terror. He is said to have compiled a book listing every one of the 11,000 people documented to have been shot in Kolyma camps by the state security organ, the NKVD. Biryukov, whose father was in the gulag at the time he was born, has begun researching the location of graves. Some of the bodies are still partially preserved in the permafrost, he said.

It is therefore difficult to provide any definitive figures on the number of victims who died in Kolyma. In his article Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century, Matthew White estimates the number of those who died in Kolyma at 500,000, putting it in fourth place after Auschwitz, Treblinka, Leningrad and Belzec. In recent years, since Magadan was opened to visitors, there have been a number of attempts at consolidating the facts.

One of the most thorough investigations in recent years (2203) has been carried out by Anne Applebaum, a journalist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. She has spent considerable time and effort examining available archives and visiting Gulag camps and museums. However, as she explained in a lecture in 2003, it is extremely difficult not only to document the facts given the extent of the cover-up but to bring the truth home. "If we do not study the history of the Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted," she stated. There are indications other researchers are continuing to investigate.

Key online resources

Istvan Toth, a Hungarian, as a result of his father's 11 years as a prisoner in a Gulag camp, has put together an extensive list of resources about the Gulag, including many about Kolyma.

Bibliography

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.
• Bardach, Janusz / Gleeson, Kathleen Man Is Wolf to Man : Surviving the Gulag, University of California Press, c1998, 392 p., ISBN 0520213521
• Bollinger, Martin J., Stalin’s slave ships : Kolyma, the Gulag fleet, and the role of the West, Praeger, 2003, 217 p., ISBN: 0275981002
• Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. 1968.
• Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505580-2; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0-19-507132-8
• Conquest, Robert: Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Viking Press, 1978, 254 p. ISBN 0670414999
• Getman, Nikolai: The Gulag Collection: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System, The Jamestown Foundation, 2001, 131 p., ISBN 0967500915
• Ginzburg, Eugenia, Journey into the whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, 432 pp., ISBN 0156027518.
• Ginzburg, Eugenia, Within the Whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 1982, 448 pp., ISBN 0156976498.
• Kizny, Tomasz, Gulag, Firefly Books, 2004, 495 p. ISBN 1552979644
• Khlevniuk, Oleg, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, c2004, 418 p., ISBN 0300092849
• Radzinsky Edvard, Stalin: the first in-depth biography based on explosive new documents from Russia's secret archives, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, 594 p., ISBN 0340606193
• Medvedev, Roy: Let History Judge: the origins and consequences of Stalinism, New York, Vintage Books 1973, c1971, ISBN 039471928X
• Shalamov, Varlam, Kolyma Tales, Penguin Books, 1995, 528 pp., ISBN 0-14-018695-6.
• Solomon, Michel, Magadan, Princeton, Auerbach Publishers, 1971, 243 p. ISBN 0877690855

External links

• Kolyma; the Land of Gold and Death A personal on-line account in nine chapters by Stanislaw J. Kowalski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma, with numerous references
• The Soviet Gulag Era in Pictures, 1927-1953 Photographs, several of Kolyma, collected by James Duncan
• Crimes of Soviet Communists Wide collection of sources and links about GULAG also in Kolyma
• Article by Jens Alstrup entitled Kolyma, en russisk Tragedie (Kolyma, a Russian tragedy) after a cycle tour to Kolyma in 1997
• Kolyma, Mikhail Mikheev's 1995 documentary film winner of both the Amsterdam and Berlin film festivals
• Work in the Gulag from the Stalin's Gulag section of the Online Gulag Museum with a short description and images of Kolyma
• GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
• Virtual Gulag Museum The Saint-Petersburg Research and Information Centre “Memorial” linking to museums in Russia, eastern Europe and Asia on the history of Soviet Terror, the Gulag and the resistance
• Gulag prisoners at work, 1936-1937 Photoalbum at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery
• Kolyma - Off to the Unknown - Stalin's Notorious Prison Camps in Siberia by Ayyub Baghirov (1906-1973)
• Italian-American artist Thomas Sgovio (1916–1997) created a series of drawings and paintings, based on his life as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag

• Russian-language history of Dalstroy from Kolyma.ru

Links to Maps

• Detailed Russian map of the Kolyma Gulag from the site Jewish Community in Magadan
• Rusian Map of the Gulag camps across the Soviet Union from the Memorial site