�

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

Stalin’s Arctic death camps

Copyright © 2007 Jens Alstrup

Reproduction of material from this publication without prior consent of Jens Alstrup and the holders of the licences of the shown pictorial material will be forbidden.

�

can be no doubt that Kolyma was Stalin’s most deadly camp complex, the largest of them all. Compared to Auschwitz, Kolyma was certainly much bigger in terms of the total number of prisoners although we still do not know how it compares in the number of fatalities. It is pos-sible that more people died in Kol-yma than in Auschwitz. But then you should remember that Kolyma existed as a camp complex over a period of about 30 years in contrast to some five years for Auschwitz. It was said that if you were a prisoner at Auschwitz you were dead, but if you were in Kolyma you had a chance to save your life.

Terror at all levels

Mass terror is not something pat-ented by Osama bin Laden. The number of victims during the Soviet Union’s regime is far from clear but today the “Memorial” organisation puts the figure as high as 70 million people. To appreciate such a mon-strous number you can try calculat-ing along the following lines: The number of unfortunate people who perished on 11 September 2001 was

“only” the average of those who died each day over all 70 years of its ex-istence. No single terror group could ever match State-induced numbers like these, even if Memorial’s fig-ures seem to be on the high side.

Some explain Stalin’s terror and the GULAG Empire in terms of economics, but along with a number of researchers, I am convinced eco-nomic considerations did not play a decisive role. The contribution of economics, welcome though it was, was of secondary importance. No, the real goal was absolute control of all the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. Stalin even wanted to con-trol what went on in people’s minds. The mere thought of resistance had to be destroyed.

Terror was exercised at every level. Even the NKVD secret po-lice (which had been known as the

“Cheka” or OGPU and later became KGB) underwent two extensive purges. The Communist Party was purged, as were the army, indus-try and agriculture. No one could escape the purges, not even those ranking highest in the system. Two, if not three, NKVD leaders were

The picture on the top of the opposite page: The author on his way through “The Golden Ring”, the road through the Kolyma’s gold di-strict, 1,100 km long. The picture is from May 1997 and was the beginning of a sporting feat and the author’s interest in Russia as such and Kolyma in particular.

Of course it was not possible to research the history of Kolyma on a biking expedition.

Frontpage: Barbed wire around Perm 36, a reconstructed GULAG museum camp. In Ko-lyma you can still find uninhabited camps only partially damaged by the harsh climate.

By Jens Alstrup: The GULAG was Stalin’s empire of camps which extended right across the Soviet Union, not just through Siberia as many believe. Even in the very centre of Moscow, sites for the construction of metro stations and the city’s central waterworks were used as work camps. The worst of all of the camp systems, the final destination of fanaticism, was the Kolyma complex or, to give it its proper name, Dalstroi.

Kolyma: Stalin’s Auschwitz

Kolyma is situated at the east-ern end of Russia’s Far East, far north-east of Japan, up beyond the Kamchatka Peninsula. Even most Russians think that this is Siberia but Kolyma actually lies to the east of geographical Siberia. Here the Soviet Union established the town of Magadan that became the centre of the biggest and meanest complex of labour camps. The camps en-gulfed an area larger than the whole of France. Its official name was

“Dalstroi” (which can be translated as “The Far-Eastern Construction Trust”) but it was and still is better as “Kolyma” named after the river that runs through the region some 400 km north of Magadan.

Our knowledge of Kolyma is regrettably inadequate but there

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

�

murdered on Stalin’s orders (Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died “suddenly” and was perhaps the third). Foreign secretary Molo-tov had to look on passively when his own wife was sent to the camps. Stalin demanded blind obedience and he got it.

The Russians do not possess a “special gene” that biologically makes them feel comfortable to have despots as leaders. Stalin’s methods could work anywhere on earth. You should understand that no sanction was so monstrous that it would not be carried out if there was any kind of opposition, how-ever slight.

Of course there was opposition to Stalin but just a few years after he came to power, his opponents were either dead or exiled. The “soft” op-portunists were already inside the camps and the majority of those who might have been expected to

offer some resistance were also sent to the camps. Even those least sus-pected of opposition were among those sent to the camps. So it was obvious for everyone that the threat was serious. In such a system you either had to submit or die.

Arctic gold: establishing Kolyma

During the 1918-1922 Russian civil war, one of the White officers fled to the north east after the White army had been defeated in Siberia. He hid near the Kolyma River and accord-ing to reports, found large lumps of gold and platinum. Especially the lumps of platinum indicated the existence of huge gold deposits. In 1923, he took some of the lumps with him to Yakutsk where he gave himself up to the Reds. He hoped that his find would secure him am-nesty. We do not know whether or

not he was successful.

Gold mining began in 1927-29 with individual fortune hunters and in 1928 the regime in Moscow was able to map the finds. An expedition consisting of a few steamships and an icebreaker were sent to the Bay of Nagaevo which was recognised by local fishermen as a good natu-ral harbour. Over the years, they had used it to shelter from stormy weather. The expedition, consist-ing of geologists and cartographers, was to prepare for the establishment of Dalstroi. There was no mention of prisoners.

On 1 December 1931 (date of the written order), it was officially decided in Moscow that the town of Magadan was to be constructed and that a gigantic gold exploitation project was to be implemented. Ed-uard Petrovits Berzin, a high-rank-ing officer in the NKVD, Stalin’s

Arc

tic C

ircle

Arctic Circle

Magad

anKoly

ma

Vladivo

stok

Irkut

sk

Jaku

tsk

Krasn

ojarsk

Novos

ibirsk

PermMos

kva

Skt. P

etersb

org

Vanin

o

1.000 km

�

Prison cells in the GULAG museum, Perm 36, a former secret town situated some 80 km from Perm in the Urals. Also Kovalev, Russia’s ombudsman for many years, who was once jailed in these cells. Conditions here were far better than in Kolyma.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

�

secret police and elite corps, was appointed leader of the Dalstroi trust. He was given currency to purchase ships in the West. Rumour has it that he personally travelled to both the Netherlands and England to buy them. Apart from ships, Berzin had all the prisoners he needed to build new towns and mines. He used gold as barter for mining equip-ment imported directly from the USA.

It is said that in the earliest days the prisoners were mainly Ukrainian peas-ant boys purged during the forced collectivisation of farms that was taking place at the time. In addition, a large number of crimi-nal convicts were used as auxiliary guards, just as the Germans had used “Kapos” a few years later. A number of volun-teers such as those from the Komsomolsk (young communists) youth or-ganisation came along too.

The plans led to death and chaos during the first year. Berzin had to make a ring road through the gold area as well as a road up to Seim-chan. Mining was to start within a year. The roads would go through some of the world’s most difficult country all the way to Seimchan, some 1,000 km from Magadan. In Kolyma the summer, lasting only two to four months, is a loathsome experience in itself with the bot-tomless swamps of the taiga and billions of mosquitoes. Bread ra-tions were minimal and there was no modern equipment. Enormous factories, houses, bridges, dams, indeed everything, had to be built with the available timber.

One of the best known tales told

by the prisoners is certainly the one about Seimchan. To speed up work, a team of prisoners and guards was sent out as an advance party to es-tablish the mining town of Seim-chan. The following spring, the road

would reach the town and fresh supplies would arrive. There is somewhere a reference to

the involvement of 3,000 men. There were delays in the road building and from central Kolyma a team was

sent out to contact the ad-vance guard. When they

finally arrived, they found that no one had survived the

winter, not even the guards or the officers. It should be possible to check this story out but I am not aware of any attempts to do so.

In any case, it is quite cer-tain that the founda-tions of Kolyma were more or less buried in corpses. All available resources were assigned to road building. Only the NKVD had houses of timber in newly es-tablished Magadan. That first winter, the prison-

ers had to make do with tents. They died like flies and rumour has it that only half of them survived. Winter temperatures in Kolyma nor-mally go down to minus 60 degrees Celsius and there are terrible winds.

The Early Years

In the summer of 1933, Dalstroi was ready to excavate gold from the mines around the village of Jagodnoe. Along the small tribu-taries of the mighty Kolyma gold was panned the old-fashioned way. Fist-sized lumps of pure gold were not uncommon. To this day, in the armoury of the Kremlin in Moscow,

some of the biggest nuggets are still on display. The first year produced 500 kg of pure gold. Later, produc-tion increased to more than 60 tons a year.

Agricultural development was also encouraged. The harvest is not so rich in this extreme climate but at least it provided a supplement to the provisions from the “mainland” as the rest of the Soviet Union was called. These were times of starva-tion across the Soviet Union as a direct result of Stalin’s anti-Kulak campaigns.

Berzin was an efficient leader. There is ample evidence he had no concern for human life but he under-stood that hungry prisoners did not make gold in the quantities Moscow demanded. He therefore made sure that the prisoners had proper boots, warm coats and far better bread ra-tions than in the rest of the GULAG empire. The prisoners even received money they could use for extra food and clothing. From a death trap the first year, Kolyma became one of the places where there were good chances of survival – that is if we are to believe the stories told and assume the prisoners did not simply contrasting this period to what was to happen later.

The Great Terror

In 1938, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Soviet Union’s NKVD, was purged. His successor was Nikolai Yezhov. The purge continued as Sta-lin saw enemies everywhere: within the party, the army and among com-mon people. Berzin too was purged but according to stories told by the prisoners, they did not dare to arrest him in the ordinary way as he was in total command of the area. The completion of the road to Seimchan in 1938 was used as an excuse for presenting him the Order of Lenin

�

in recognition for his contributions to socialism. A plane was sent to Magadan to take him to Moscow. It was said that Stalin himself was to present the award. Rumour has it that he was shot by the NKVD of-ficials from Moscow even before he boarded the plane but a more relia-ble source says that he was shot half a year later in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

Kolyma’s command was split up after Berzin’s depareture. The new leader of the troops and camps was Colonel Garanin and Karp Aleksan-drovich Pavlov became the leader of Dalstroi itself with responsibilities for the production of gold. Yezhov appointed both of them. Colonel Garanin was unusually bad news for the prisoners. His appointment coincided with one of Stalin’s great speeches when he said sloppiness to-wards the enemies of the people had to stop. The warm coats and sturdy boots were withdrawn. Rations of bread were reduced to levels used in camps elsewhere. There was no more money for the prisoners, no more camp shops. And to top it all, the weather was worse that ever in the winter of 1938-39.

The prisoners died in astounding numbers. Gold production was on the brink of collapse and Garanin exploded. Everywhere he saw en-emies and saboteurs. The story of one of the prisoners deserves to be told in full:

“Late at night there was a roll call much earlier than normal. At the muster, some of us were called by name. We were to get into some lor-ries that stood waiting. It was in the middle of the winter.

When we came to our destina-tion we were once more mustered and Colonel Garanin received us and proclaimed: “You have been found guilty for hiding gold and for

Pictures kindly lent by Memorial

Top opposite page: Birthday card painted and cut by a prisoner for an officer in one of the camps. Please notice that there is barbed wire on the fence even though it is a birthday card.

Bottom, opposite page: a tin used by a priso-ner as pot and mug. During the Second World War tinned food was sent to Magadan by the USA.

Top left: Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD when Dalstroi was established.

Top right: Eduard Petrovich Berzin, the fou-nder of Dalstroi.

Middle left: Nikolai Yezhov, commander of the

NKVD during The Great Terror. Pavlov and Ga-ranin were leaders of Dalstroi under Yezhov.

Centre right: Karp Aleksandrovich Pavlov, head of Dalstroi during The Great Terror.

Down left: Lavrenty Beria, head of NKVD 1939-54. Beria was executed 1954 for presumably the only crime he had not committed: High treason.

Top right: Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov, head of Dalstroi 1939-48. Appointed Hero of the So-viet Union and buried in a cemetery for heroes in Moscow. He had thousands of lives on his conscience.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

�

keeping and later hijacking a plane and bringing the gold to Trotsky in Mexico. Therefore you are to be ex-ecuted by shooting.” I cried, “I have not yet pleaded guilty to your accu-sations but this one is so foolish that I am prepared to admit it because nobody will believe in it!”

We were shepherded to a hut and there we were standing so close that the weakest of us died from lack of oxygen. The dead kept standing as there was no room to fall. One by one we were called out and shot. My name was called too but my in-credible luck was that I had found out that my name had been spelled wrongly on the list and I managed to convince the soldier that it was not I. He said, “It does not matter because we shall only take you a lit-tle later”.

When the day was drawing to its end, we were only a very few pris-oners left. Garanin went in to us and said, “The norm for executions has been met and you will be led back to your camp.”

“Normality” sets in

Stalin was perhaps the most suc-cessful dictator in world history. He understood when things were going too far and in 1939 the entire Soviet Union was on its knees as a result of the widespread purges within the army, the party (which administra-tively governed the country), spe-cialists, etc. One of the proofs was the humiliating defeat of the huge Red Army against Finland in the Winter War of 1939-40. Stalin put the blame on Yezhov and many po-litical prisoners, measured in num-bers but not in percentages, were rehabilitated and sent back to their former positions.

Yezhov was executed and La-vrenty Beria became the new com-mander of the NKVD. In Kolyma, it

�

Above: A few books, not very many were writ-ten about Kolyma during The Cold War. Those shown were published from 1948 to 1977. Only Wallace’s book is idealistic. Ginzburg was a convinced Communist and therefore cannot be accused of having been a “Cold Warrior”. If people did not hear about the So-viet Union and Kolyma, it was because things were kept quiet . The books all contain many inaccuracies due to the very difficult access to sources.

Opposite page: Yuri Lvovich Fidelgolts when arrested in 1948. He was 21 years old at the time and therefore among the youngest witnesses from the Stalin era in Kolyma. He was arrested because of remarks in his diary and sent to Kolyma. See also the photo of Fi-delgolts when released six years later.

Today Fidelgolts, now a pensioner, is a mem-ber of Memorial, He has written several books and poems about his experiences in the camps.

Opposite page below, from the GULAG mu-seum in Moscow: Interrogation after detention. Torture was widespread.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

�0

was business as usual. Garanin was executed shortly after his superior had been shot. Pavlov escaped pun-ishment but was transferred. Pavlov died in 1957 as an honourable citi-zen with full official appreciation. Details of Garanin’s death are not known.

Beria appointed the new leader who once again was in command of the army, the NKVD and the camps in the area. Brigadier Ivan Fedorov-ich Nikishev was the leader and at his death in 1958 he was lieutenant general of NKVD.

You cannot say that conditions improved markedly, especially when the Soviet Union was dragged into the war against Nazi Germany. But it was better than it had been during Garanin’s regime.

From detention to Kolyma

Arrests took place in a kind of deep

secrecy. NKVD arrested its unfor-tunate victims in the middle of the night in vehicles camouflaged as bread or meat vans. It was a kind of pseudo-secrecy as the extent of ar-rests was so massive that everybody knew of relatives, colleagues or friends who suddenly disappeared. The objective was naked terror. By keeping things secret, the “free” population was kept in an iron grip. If you spoke openly about things everyone knew, you risked being be sent off to the camps yourself.

There were many reasons why you could be detained. Perhaps you had been cited in a letter from Trotsky, and that would mean death. Perhaps your father had been an of-ficer in the Czar’s army, an arrested neighbour had perhaps mentioned your name during torture, or a neighbour might want your flat and would therefore name you. The file did not have run to more than six or

seven short lines, in large handwrit-ing on a small form.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn de-scribes how a newly educated artist had been sent to a kolkhoz or col-lective farm after completing his studies. At the kolkhoz the artist painted the harvest as it had to be depicted. The farmers were happy healthy people surrounded by red flags and of course they had a red tractor. Reality was rather differ-ent so the artist had to paint from memory. Unfortunately he painted an old Ford tractor at a time when the Soviet Union had itself begun producing newer tractors of its own. So he had shown the Soviet Union was lagging behind and he got five years for anti Soviet propaganda.

Many of the prisoners’ statements describe how far the NKVD went to squeeze confessions out of the pris-oners. The best known method was the “conveyor belt” when a number of NKVD officers each interrogated and tortured the detainees one at a time until they signed the most un-believable “confessions”, such as attempts to kill Stalin or working for Trotsky and Nazi Germany at the same time.

The court could be a real one run by the regular judicial system even if it did not have much to do with

“justice”. The ill-famed “troikas” judged most of the prisoners and here three judges tried the prisoners as if they were working on an as-sembly line. “Special courts” tried other prisoners and in this case two judges without counsel for the de-fence or prosecution were to man-age the cases so fast that only ten days elapsed from detention until the prisoner was either sent off to a camp or executed.

The prisoners went through tran-sit jails and reception camps after judgment and then they were sent out on train journeys lasting weeks

��

under terrible conditions. Heat and thirst in the summer, cold and ice in the winter. No one was told where he was going.

Dalstroi’s slave ships

Kolyma is isolated by wild moun-tain ranges and as far as I know, until 1944 there were no road connec-tions to the rest of the Soviet Union. A road was finally built during the Second World War in order to bring American Lend-Lease Act supplies to Yakutsk through Magadan. It was not and still is not suitable for large trucks. So everything, even the pris-oners, had to be sent by ship first from Vladivostok, then starting in 1939 from Vanino to the harbour of Nagaevo, only a few hundred me-tres from Magadan.

The prisoners arrived by train and went to transit camps beside the harbour. The transit camps in Vladi-

vostok had a capacity of no less than 15,000 prisoners held in two sepa-rate compounds. In the area where one of the compounds used to stand, as if by the irony of fate, there is now a children’s amusement park and a market place. Housing has been built on top of the other one. Only the railway loading platforms remain.

Dalstroi’s ships were cargo steamers, never intended for trans-porting passengers. Several were put into regular service with prison-ers for Kolyma. The ship “Djurma” was notorious as the worst of them all as well as one of the biggest.

“Djurma” was equipped with three wooden decks in the holds which each had three layers of berths for the prisoners. Former sailors tell how on some of the transports there were so many prisoners that many of them had to stand between the berths during their journey. It is said

that on one of its voyages, Djurma as many as 12,000 prisoners on board. The majority of the prison-ers had never seen the sea before and had no idea what it was like to travel by ship. This made a terrible experience even worse. On one of its voyages, “Djurma” arrived too early in the year and all the prison-ers had to be set down on the ice. The prisoners had to walk across the frozen sea to Magadan. This was a

Picture kindly made available by the shipping company FESCO. The “Djurma” was the se-cond largest vessel in Dalstroi’s fleet and the biggest slave ship. Typically it would transport 5-6,000 prisoners who were interned in four holds in its three wooden decks. Each deck was divided into three shelves where the pri-soners lay side by side.

Opposite page: Anonymous former priso-ner’s drawing of a Stolypin wagon, the com-mon name for prison cars in Czarist times. Usually, cattle trucks were used which were even worse. The journey could last for several months before the train arrived at Vladivostock or Vanino.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

�2

walk stretching many kilometres. The escort of NKVD soldiers would shoot those lagging behind. On an-other voyage the timbering in one of

“Djurma’s” holds collapsed in poor weather. The prisoners below were crushed to death. On yet another oc-casion, some prisoners had tried to make hot water for tea in the bot-tom of the ship with the result that the timbering caught fire. The crew extinguished blaze by sealing the deck so the fire went out for lack of air. Later prisoners on the “Djurma” spoke of the sickly smell of burned human flesh.

Unfortunately, the historians have apparently made no attempt to talk to the sailors who manned the ships. There are only sporadic ac-counts of prisoners’ individual ex-periences and each prisoner can of course tell us no more than what he experienced on a single voyage.

Assigning prisoners to the camps

On arrival at Nagaevo, the prison-ers were sent to the transit camps in the centre of Magadan. From here they were divided up on the basis of qualifications or more often than not, simply by chance. Most were assigned to the gold mines, con-siderably reducing their chances of survival.

Most of the camps were for the gold mines but there were other categories too: farming, lumbering, coal, tungsten, uranium, transporta-tion, factories, etc. There were also special camps for construction work and road building. Best known was the then top secret site “D2”, a huge structure for a hydroelectric plant in the middle of Kolyma.

Other camps were more special-ised. Ivan Nikishov, head of Dal-stroi 1939-48, was very interested

in fine art and so all lists of prison-ers were scanned for famous actors, singers, musicians or ballet dancers. They were sent to a special camp in the town of Magadan near a large new theatre Nikishov had had built. Nikishov’s wife was also especial-ly interested in arts and crafts and looked for women who could pro-duce fine embroidery and the like. It was something of a cottage industry and for the prisoners it meant sur-vival.

Between life and death

Where you were placed in the camp often meant the difference between life and death. Jobs in the kitchen, looking after horses (where you could steal a handful of oats), theatre, propaganda brigades, hospitals, etc. raised your chances of survival. By contrast, the uranium mines meant almost certain death after just a few years. The gold mines also reduced your chances of survival.

In comparison to Kolyma’s enor-mous number of prisoners, there were actually very few who were sent to the camps along the Chukchi coast in the far north though their numbers still run in the thousands. Those who went there, typically to the towns of Pevek and Ambatjik, could not count on returning. Often they would not even survive the trip.

The prisoners actually had some rights if they fell ill, unlike those in the Nazi camps. But certain norms had to be met. They had to be suf-fering from a contagious disease or have a temperature before they could be admitted to hospital. It is reported there were harsh punish-ments (in 1954) for those who tried to simulate illness to get into the hospitals. Secondly, the hospitals had very little to offer in the form of treatment apart from rather better

��

bread rations and exemption from work. To be dying of starvation was not considered a “norm” for admis-sion. You simply had to take care of yourself or die unless, of course, you were sentenced to death for “sabo-tage” because you could not fulfil at least 50% of the work required.

Regime of the criminals

The number of guards was five to one according to Memorial. It is not clear whether this was always the case but the number of guards was low. Criminal convicts were there-fore used to govern the political prisoners, just as in the Nazi camps. The ideological explanation was that the criminals were “socially closely related with the exploited classes” and thus they were victims of the capitalist system. Once com-munism had been instated crime would stop, or so it was said.

The criminals did not like tak-ing jobs in the mines. As they often distributed the work themselves it was easy to leave the worst jobs to the “political” prisoners. In July 2006 a former political prisoner told me “the criminals laughed at us and called us “balalaikas” because we always played the tune the NKVD forced us to play”.

Among “the honest thieves”, dis-cipline was iron-hard and extremely violent. The codex for “the honest thieves” still exists among prison-ers in Russia. For instance, they are not permitted to do anything which could assist the authorities. The

“other” prisoners among the crimi-nals are the “Sukis” or bitches that have debased themselves. The hon-est thieves can do whatever they want with the sukis and can demand services (work, sex, etc). If the su-kis failed to meet expectations, or even worse, if they complained to

the NKVD about their fellow crimi-nal prisoners, they would be put to death.

The regime of the criminals was terminated in 1948, resulting in huge improvements for the political prisoners. The reason for this, or at least part of it, was that after 1945 many of the political prisoners like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were sol-diers who, with their experience of combat in the Second World War,

Above: U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace vi-siting Magadan in 1944, with Dalstroi’s head, Ivan Nikishov. Wallace wrote in his totally uncri-tical book about the trip that the USA could learn a lot from Nikishov.

Opposite page: kindly lent by Memorial: Work in the Kolyma’s open-surface gold mines.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

��

were in certainly not afraid of the criminals. Up to 1948, many of the criminals had therefore asked the NKVD to be separated from the political prisoners. In 1948 it was decided for all camps in all of the Soviet Union that the criminal and political prisoners had to be kept apart.

A story of happiness and sorrow

There is much in common between the concentration camps of the Na-zis and the GULAG but there is one very big difference: GULAG was not designed as an industrial-ised slaughterhouse for the prison-ers. The rate of survival was after all rather high and a prisoner could last out for many years in contrast to the way prisoners were often sent straight to the gas chambers in the Nazi camps. There were, then, both ups and downs for the prisoners of Kolyma as in this story told in 2006 by former prisoner, Fidelgolts at a dinner in Moscow about some of his experiences in Kolyma:

“At Ust Nera (1951-54) I met some Banderists (adherents of Ukrainian independence and sup-porters of the rebel leader Bandera) with whom I became good friends. They sang many of their national songs and in time I learned them and sang together with them.

One evening a young girl heard me singing. She was young and beautiful and she belonged to the free workers from town. She liked the sight of me and I liked her too. She asked me if I was a Ukrainian. She was surprised to hear that I was not. She asked why I sang Bandera songs if I were Russian. I told her that I did it because they were my fellow prisoners and friends.

I did not think that I would see more of her but one day she brought me some loaves of bread. One of them contained a sausage (sosiski) and it tasted heavenly. The rest I shared with my friends. I could not hide it anyway as my fellow prison-ers otherwise would steal it at once.

I never saw her again, but later I heard that some criminals from a transport brigade had taken her up. They raped her in their lorry and threw her out on the roadside in a desolate place where she died from cold. I shall never forget her.”

The role of the guards

It is said that most of the guards were youths from villages in Sibe-ria. They were uninformed, poorly educated and heavily influenced by what we would now consider to be very primitive propaganda. For them the political prisoners were true life-and-death opponents to So-viet power.

Often it did not take long before many of the ordinary prison guards realised that the “political” prisoners just were unfortunate people who in no way had participated in any kind of opposition. Some prisoners have said that to avoid any sympathy for the prisoners on the part of the young guards, the NKVD system-atically transferred guards from one camp to another in rotation. Howev-er, a retired director of all camps in the region of Vladivostok (Primor-

sky Krai) said that this was not true. He put it like this, “Every guard had to answer for his own conscience. It is true that many guards helped the prisoners as far as they could, but if it was discovered it resulted in im-mediate transfer and heavy discipli-nary punishment”. Thus the guards were only transferred if they were caught being too friendly.

I have met two different accounts both about how a young guard shot himself in the head with his own ri-fle when he saw his own father was one of the newly arrived prisoners. I have not been able to verify the accounts and there is a sad and al-most complete lack of interest in the guards’ place in history.

The Lend-Lease Agreement

When the USA joined the Second World War, Dalstroi received provi-sions and other deliveries from the Lend-Lease Agreement with the USA. Japan was at war with the USA but as a consequence of their defeat in the war between the Soviet Union and Japan in 1939 the Japa-nese were very cautious about the convoys. All convoys to Vladivos-tok and Magadan were cleared with the Japanese embassy in Moscow so the Japanese fleet would not at-tack them.

The prisoners from the time speak of the white wheat bread baked with American flour as a deli-cacy sent from heaven. They also supplied tinned food and here the tins were used as pans, mugs and food bowls by the prisoners. The lids from the tins were used to mark prisoners’ graves. The prisoner’s number was written with dots or holes in the lids and fastened with a nail to the wooden stick that was knocked into the soil on top of the grave. Stars for Communists, Cres-cents for Muslims and Crosses for

Opposite page, kindly lent by the Jamestown Foundation: A self-portrait of the artist, Nikolai Getman, showing him receiving rehabilitation. It meant he return and continue to work as an artist. Getman died in 2004 and chose not to leave Siberia although he did leave Kolyma.

His collection of GULAG paintings was given to the Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC, USA, to prevent its destruction as no Rus-sian museum showed any interest. The pic-tures present scenes of day-to-day life in the Kolyma camps.

��

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

��

Christians were strictly forbidden to honour “enemies of the people”. So they continued to be harassed even after their deaths.

The USA also delivered two Cat-apiller bulldozers. It has been said that one of their first assignments was to dig mass graves for prison-ers. The prisoners ate the lubricating oil for the bulldozers.

Rebellion

As Stalin grew old and affable, there are strong indications he was plan-ning a new wave of terror aimed at physicians, Jews, and the NKVD. Punishments for crimes that were often fabricated were increased to “quarters” and “halves”, which meant 25 and 50 years. Prisoners who had been released were once again brought in for interrogation and given new sentences. In the camps they introduced the “Khator-ga” regime, a set of punitive meas-ures dating back to Czarist times. The Czarist system would have been an improvement, but the pris-oners got the worst of both systems. The prisoners had to put up with the Soviet system based on bread for work norms as well as the fetters from the time of the Czars. Prison-ers were no longer called by name but only by number.

With such long terms of punish-ment, there was little hope for the prisoners. There was no life at the end of the tunnel. There was only darkness, starvation and horror for the rest of their lives even for the youngest prisoners. Everywhere in GULAG the prisoners rebelled. In Kolyma, there was a big rebellion at the mines near Ust Nera in the far north.

In his novel “The GULAG Ar-chipelago” Solzhenitsyn wrote that the leadership of NKVD was gripped by panic in fear of HIM

��

knowing and thus they would them-selves soon meet their unnaturally fast destiny. It is an assumption, not an established fact, but it is feasible that Stalin knew and therefore pre-pared the new purges. Beria’s name was suddenly mentioned in several confessions at the processes in Mos-cow.

The rebellions led to improve-ments. They were not significant, but they could be felt. What indi-vidual rebellions achieved differs from place to place, and it was not until Khrushchev times that real improvements occurred. Not until 1956 was there any systematic at-tempt to grant amnesty to the po-litical prisoners, three years after Stalin’s death.

Free without freedom

Many of the released prisoners were not allowed to leave Kolyma. They were “free” but forced to remain in the area.

Others were allowed to leave Kolyma but they were not allowed to live in provincial capitals or in Moscow. Others were freed but sent into internal forced exile. For some prisoners, this meant that they had to stay beside the camps just on the other side of the barbed wire in the villages.

Amnesty is only to “forgive” and not to apologize. The prisoners were still “enemies of the people” after their release. They got poor jobs and their children could not receive the best schooling just as the children were excluded from holding posi-tions in strategic areas. Membership of the Communist Party was out of the question, and that was a special punishment for many of the com-munists purged during The Great Terror who, however unbelievable it may seem, were in many cases faithful communists even after their

time in the camps.This explains why it was so im-

portant for the former prisoners to be rehabilitated with a pardon from the State. Even today rehabilitation is an important factor as former president Yeltsin decided that reha-bilitated political prisoners should be allocated flats before everybody else in the housing queue.

The most important thing for the surviving prisoners is that they should have access to good medi-cal treatment. Many of them suffer from the long years they spent in the camps and need more care and treatment than others of same age. There ought to be enough petrodol-lars for the few survivors. It is a disgrace they have problems with healthcare especially when you find that former NKVD officials receive double the normal pension.

Dalstroi’s closure

It is stated in several sources that Dalstroi was closed in 1954 and that Ivan Nikishov left Kolyma and went to Khabarovsk. This is not true. Ap-parently, according to a biography by the NKVD, Nikishov left Dal-stroi in 1948. Furthermore, Dalstroi was reorganised in either 1959 or 1960 with the result that army and navy units were reassigned from Dalstroi to the normal armed forces. Dalstroi’s ships were handed over to Dobroflot and all of the civil admin-istration was transferred to the nor-mal Soviet regional administration. But the camps, the political prison-ers and the goldmines remained un-der Dalstroi for approximately eight years more. From the Danish and English-language literature, it is impossible to see who replaced Ni-kishov in “1954” which is not even the right year anyway.

Not until the end of the 1960s did the presence of the NKVD/KGB

end partially in Kolyma. All the mining activities and with them the last of the political prisoners were handed over to the Ministry of Nat-ural Resources in a special depart-ment for gold. All the old NKVD people followed, as did the rest of the prisoners. This organisation still exists though there are no longer any political prisoners.

In the time leading up to the fi-nal closure of Dalstroi more and more prisoners received amnesty and were freed. Many of them had to stay in Magadan as they were prohibited to travel elsewhere in the Soviet Union. So they were not prisoners but they were certainly not free either and more prisoners continued to arrive. For instance, the author, Andrei Amalrik, was sent to Kolyma in 1971. It has to be stressed that though Kolyma al-ways has been an abominable place, conditions gradually improved and the number of political prisoners was gradually reduced after Stalin’s death and up to 1991 when condi-tions could no longer be compared to those in Stalin’s death camps.

It was only in 1991 that the last political prisoner left Kolyma. In 1995 the internal passport was abolished, allowing the citizens of Kolyma finally to choose their residence themselves without ob-taining permission from the authori-ties. The population was more than

Opposite page, above: The tungsten mine where Fidelgolts spent the last years of his time in Kolyma.

Opposite page, below: Yuri Lvovich Fidelgolts on his release from the camp beside a tung-sten mine at Ust Nera in northern Kolyma. His health was ruined for ever and he had only just survived. Disease was the reason for his early release in 1954. Not until 1962 was he rehabi-litated allowing his to hold positions of trust in the Soviet Union. Many never came that far.

Fanaticism’s Final Destination

��

halved within few years and even when I travelled through the area in 1996 and 1997, many of the old vil-lages were totally deserted by their former inhabitants. Emigration has not stopped but the goldmines have been reorganized and more of the mining towns have reached a size more suited to their economic and employment potential.

Big flaws in our knowledge of Kolyma

As this article explains, we know something about Kolyma today af-ter, during the Yeltsin years at least, Russia opened its archives. But there are still enormous gaps in our knowledge.

As far as I know I am the only one who has tried to talk to some of the old sailors from Dalstroi’s fleet of slave ships. Nothing has been done about talking to the old camp guards, even less with the former NKVD officers.

The history of Kolyma must be made more widely known. We owe this both to ourselves and to the victims. Time is short because the last eyewitnesses are old and they will not be with us for very much longer.

If I succeed in obtaining finan-cial support, I plan to spend a full

year in Kolyma with two Russian students of history as assistants. The objective is to collect mate-rial in the area, to find old prisoners, sailors, guards and criminals, and to interview them. In the course of this assignment, living conditions in Kolyma will be documented as stills and video throughout all the sea-sons of the year. It will culminate in a book about this dark chapter in re-cent history, contributing to second-ary-school education and to evening courses. The book will be translated into and published in Russian in co-operation with Memorial.

A prerequisite is that I am spon-sored and/or funded through grants. Two years work together with two assistants, the first year being spent in Kolyma, is more than I can afford myself.

Using my own resources, I have nevertheless managed to prepare the assignment by visiting people and organisations in Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok, and I have all the agreements needed to carry through my plans successfully. Eve-rything is planned and ready.

Now I am looking for assistance from someone who realises that democracy is a cornerstone for so-ciety.

Above, kindly lent by Memorial: Movie projec-tor on its way to one of the camps in Kolyma. Even the most remote camps were shown newsreels with all the regime’s propaganda.

It must have been strange to watch ”The prosperous new society” as a prisoner in the camps but the newsreels were welcome breaks in a merciless life.

��

Above: North Korean camp administration in Siberia, 1997. After the Korea War, North Korea received lumber concessions in Siberia. The agreement was prolonged by Putin in 2004. These are work camps but not penal camps. Conditions are pitiful, but perhaps better than in the home country. Apparently, North Korea is a regime with which Putin may enter into an agreement.

Left: the author of this article.

An ongoing storyThe history of Kolyma is unfor-tunately still an issue both in Rus-sia and in Denmark. Much has improved but it would be wrong to assume democracy is here to stay.

Today, there are major prob-lems for democracy in Russia as far as human rights are concerned. A publisher was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for support-ing the Chechnyans. Since 1991, 211 journalists have been killed or are supposed killed in Russia and the opposition is under attack. The West protests but without the kind of impact that would occur if Ger-many had been under the leadership of an Abwehr officer nine years af-ter the Second World War or if an officer faithful to Saddam were to be chosen in Iraq as leader six years from now. Russia’s President Putin is a former KGB officer and he was elected nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Presumably Berufsverbot (limi-tations to political activities for pub-lic employees in trusted positions in Germany) was undemocratic but it was and is a safeguard for human rights. I would like this to apply to KGB employees in Russia.

Denmark has her challenges too. Some Danish citizens favour a caliphate, others join extreme na-tionalistic groups or belong to Trot-skyite or Communist parties.

It is not only the madmen among us who support extremist policies in Denmark. We have a member of our parliament who defines Islam as being specially open to extrem-ism while at the same time defining Christianity as free of extremism without any reservations or excep-tions. In France, the “Front Na-

tional” enjoy even more support than the Danish party in question, although Front National is more ex-treme. The picture is much the same all over Europe.

In Russia there are still groups who are working for democracy. We should provide them with support. It is obviously in Europe’s interest to have a peaceful, democratic and economically robust Russia as our neighbour.

It is to be hoped there will be a more active debate on freedom of rights in Denmark as well as in the rest of Europe with the European Parliament in the lead. Can we re-ally afford to be so indifferent about our democratic rights?

See more on www.gulag.eu

Jens AlstrupFaelledvej 15 st.th., 4000 Roskilde,DenmarkTel. 46 32 28 26Email info@siberia.dk

www.gulag.eu