Kolyma

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This is an article about the region commonly known as Kolyma. For river it is named after, see Kolyma River
An approximate location of the Kolyma region
An approximate location of the Kolyma region
Kolyma region, arctic northeast Siberia
Kolyma region, arctic northeast Siberia

The Kolyma (pronounced kah-lee-MAH) region (Russian: Колыма) is located in the far northeastern area of Russia in what is commonly known as Siberia but is actually part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and 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, part of which is within the Arctic Circle, 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 (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 Sea of 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[1].

The principal town, Magadan, with a population of 99,399 and an area of 18 square kilometers, is the largest port of northeastern Russia. It has a large fishing fleet and remains open year-round with the help of icebreakers. Magadan is served by the nearby Sokol Airport. 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[2].

Contents

[edit] 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 construction 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 Magadan (see photograph below) commemorates all those who died in the Kolyma forced-labour camps and the recently dedicated Church of the Nativity remembers the victims in its icons and Stations of the Camps.

[edit] 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, acronym for 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.

Butugycheg Tin Mine - A Gulag camp in the Kolyma area
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[3]. (Many projects in the USSR were already using forced labor, most notably the White Sea-Baltic Canal.) After a grueling train ride (on the Trans-Siberian Railway, 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[4].

In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the construction 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[5]. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new 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."[6] 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 criminal convicts 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 personally to shoot whole brigades of prisoners for not fulfilling their daily quotas in the late 1930s[7]. 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 conditions in the Kolyma camps to Auschwitz. It should however be emphasized that while the principal purpose of the Nazi concentration camps was to exterminate the Jews and other non-Aryans, the Gulag camps were intended primarily to put prisoners to work, particularly in order to develop the far north and exploit its resources.

Prisoners at a Kolyma goldmine
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."[8]

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 other scientists and engineers, including aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and rocket scientist Sergei Korolev (also a Kolyma inmate). The Soviet Union rehabilitated Theremin 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[9], 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.

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

[edit] Dalstroy officials

Dalstroy (Russian acronym for the Far Northern Construction Trust) was the agency created to manage exploitation of the Kolyma area, based principally on the use of forced labour.

In the words of Azerbaijani 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, 1932-1938
  • Karp Aleksandrovich Pavlov, 1937-1939.
  • Ivan Fedorovich Nikishev, 1940-1948.
  • Ivan Grigorevich Petrenko, 1948-1950.
  • I.L. Mitrakov, from 1950 until Dalstroy was taken over by the Ministry of Metallurgy on 18 March 1953[10].

[edit] Calendar of historical events

A detailed calendar of events is presented at the Polish internet site, Forum[11]. 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 tried and shot in August 1938.
  • March 4, 1938: Dalstroy is put under the jurisdiction of NKVD, USSR.
  • December 1938: Osip Mandelstam, an eminent Russian poet, dies in a transit camp en route to Kolyma.
  • 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: After Stalin's death, Dalstroy transferred to the Ministry of 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 the Far North East, some three million square kilometers.

[edit] Post-Dalstroy developments

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

[edit] 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[12]. 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[13].

[edit] 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 under 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 over the years but it was only as a result of Yeltsin's far reaching reforms in the 1990s that the very last prisoners were released from Kolyma. The Russian author Andrei Amalrik appears to have been one of the last high-profile political prisoners to be sent to Kolyma. In 1970, he published two 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.[14]

[edit] 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[15]. His story has also led to a film[16].

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 his Kolyma Tales. In Dry Rations he writes: "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[17].

One of the most famous political prisoners in Kolyma was Vadim Kozin, possibly Russia's most popular romantic tenor, who was sent to the camps in February 1945, apparently for refusing to write a song about Stalin. Although he was initially freed in 1950 and could return to his singing career, he was soon framed by his enemies on charges of homosexuality and sent back to the camps. Though released once again several years later, he was never officially rehabilitated and remained in exile in Magadan where he died in 1994. Speaking to journalists in 1982, he explained how he had been forced to tour the camps: "The Polit bureau formed brigades which would, under surveillance, go on tours of the concentration camps and perform for the prisoners and the guards, including those of the highest rank."[18]

Finally, Ukrainian prisoner Nikolai Getman who spent the years 1945-1953 in Kolyma, records his testimony in pictures rather than words[19]. 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." The Jamestown Foundation provides access to all 50 of Getman's paintings together with explanations of their significance[20].

[edit] Estimating the number of victims

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 Stanford University in 1999[21], 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. He believed some of the bodies were still partially preserved in the permafrost.

It is therefore impossible to provide final figures on the number of victims who died in Kolyma. Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, now admits that his original estimate of three million victims was far too high. In his article Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century, Matthew White estimates the number of those who died at 500,000, putting Kolyma in fifth place after Auschwitz, Treblinka, Leningrad and Belzec. In Stalin's Slave Ships, Martin Bollinger undertakes a careful analysis of the number of prisoners who could have been transported by ship to Magadan between 1932 and 1953 (some 900,000) and the probable number of deaths each year (averaging 27%). This produces figures significantly below earlier estimates but, as the author emphasizes, his calculations are by no means definitive. In addition to the number of deaths, the dreadful conditions of the camps and the hardships experienced by the prisoners over the years need to be taken into account.

One of the most thorough investigations 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[22]. "If we do not study the history of the Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted," she stated.

[edit] Key online resources

Istvan Toth, a Hungarian, as a result of his father's 11 years as a prisoner in a Gulag camp[23], has put together an extensive list of resources about the Gulag, including many about Kolyma.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

[edit] Links to Maps


[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Magadan Region from Kommersant, Russia's Daily Online. Retrieved 22 January 2007.
  2. ^ Magadan Region from Kommersant, Russia's Daily Online. Retrieved 22 January 2007.
  3. ^ Ludwik Kowalski: Alaska notes on StalinismRetrieved 18 January 2007.
  4. ^ According to a 1987 article in Time Magazine: "During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead on the ice." It turns out that this incident, widely reported since it was first mentioned in a book published in 1947, could not have happened as the ship Dzhurma was not in Soviet hands until mid 1935. A detailed analysis of this legend can be found in the book Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West (Praeger, 2003). James O. Jackson on a visit to Magadan, Time Magazine, April 20, 1987, article entitled Soviet Union. Retrieved 18 January 2007.
  5. ^ Case Study: Stalin's Purges from Genderside Watch. Retrieved 19 January 2007.
  6. ^ Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.
  7. ^ Campo di detenzione speciale "La Kolyma" 1931 – 1955 Alexander Langer Foundation (in Italian). Retrieved 17 January 2007.
  8. ^ Krawtchouk story : How a scientist received a job offer from the American Mathematical Society, was accused of being a foreign spy, and sent to GULAG by Ivan Katchanovski, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
  9. ^ Ralph Raico: Marxist Dreams and Soviet Reality, Cato Institute, May 1998. Retrieved 18 January 2007.
  10. ^ (Russian) История Дальстроя (Histroy of Dalstroy) from the kolyma.ru website. Retrieved 14 February 2007.
  11. ^ Why Ausschwitz, Kolyma, Kosova? From Forum, a Polish internet site. Retrieved 20 January 2007.
  12. ^ Yakutia ASSR and the Sakha Republic from Cosmic Elk. Retrieved 23 January 2007.
  13. ^ Magadan Region Update by Bisnis Vladivostok Representative Svetlana Kuzmichenko, 1998, U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service and U.S. Department of State. Retrieved 23 January 2007.
  14. ^ John Keep: Andrei Amalrik and "1984", Russian Review, Vol. 30, No.4. (Oct., 1971), pp. 335-345. Retrieved 21 January 2007.
  15. ^ George Bien, Gulag Survivor in the Boston Globe, June 22, 2005
  16. ^ Documentary film Walk on Gulagland Kolyma by Zoltan Szalkai. Retrieved 17 January 2007.
  17. ^ Br. Gene Thompson: The Road to Death- Retrieved 17 January 2007
  18. ^ Vadim Kozin, One Way Trip from Petersburg to Magadan from the Little Russia in US site. Retrieved 13 February 2007.
  19. ^ The Gulag Collecton: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System by Former Prisoner Nilolau Getman
  20. ^ Nikolai Getman: The Gulag collection. Retrieved 13 February 2007.
  21. ^ Chinese crusader visits former gulag prison from the Free Republic site. Retrieved 23 January 2007.
  22. ^ Gulag: Understanding the Magnitude of What Happened, 16 October 2003. Retrieved 23 January 2007.
  23. ^ Gulag camps in the USSR. Retrieved 18 January 2007
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