Kolyma

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The Kolyma (pronounced kah-lee-MAH) region is located in the far northeastern area of Russia. It is bounded by the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range that run through it. (It is so remote that parts of its mountain range were not discovered until 1926). Other than Antarctica, its climate is perhaps the most severe in the world. Under Joseph Stalin's rule, it became the most notorious region of the GULAG (the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of the Corrective Labor Camps). According to research done by Robert Conquest, more than three million people may have died en route to the area or in the Kolyma's series of gold mining, lumbering, road building, and other camps between 1932 and 1954. It was Kolyma's reputation that caused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to characterize it as the "pole of cold and cruelty" in the GULAG system.

Butugycheg Tin Mine - A Gulag camp in the Kolyma area

Gold and platinum were discovered in the region in the early twentieth 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 known as DALSTROY (the Russian acronym for the Far Northern Construction Trust) 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.

The initial efforts to develop the region began in 1932, with the building of Magadan by slave labor. (Many projects in the USSR were already using slave 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, with the ship Dzhurma being particularly notorious.

In 1932 expeditions also pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma. Eventually, as many as 80 different camps dotted the region. The original director of the Koylma camps was Eduard Berzin. 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. The system of hard labor and minimal food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" (dokhodyaga, in Russian). In 1943, in the wake of the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad, Stalin decreed a new level of punishment, katorga, the hardest labor combined with the lowest rations.

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, which gives us a vivid picture of both the transit camps leading to the Kolyma and the region itself.

The suffering of the prisoners was exacerbated by the inclusion in the prisoner population of career criminals ("thieves" in Russian parlance) who terrorized the "political" prisoners mercilessly. Death in the Kolyma camps came in many forms: overwork, starvation, malnutrition, mining or lumbering accidents, exposure, murder at the hands of criminals, and beatings at the hands of guards. One particularly sadistic NKVD official, S. N. Garanin, is said to have personally shot as many as 10,000 prisoners 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 compared the Kolyma camps to Auschwitz.

Estimates of the dead in the region vary widely, with many recent estimates ranging from 250,000 to more than one million. The Kolyma camps were converted to (mostly) free labor after 1954, and in 1956 Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered a general amnesty that freed many prisoners.