Kolyma


Kolyma or Kolyma Krai is a historical region in the Russian Far East that includes the basin of Kolyma River and the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the Kolyma Mountains. It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Kolyma Krai was never formally defined and over time it was split among various administrative units., it consists roughly of the Magadan Oblast, north-eastern areas of Yakutia, and the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
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 , and average summer temperatures, from. 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 in 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.
The principal town Magadan has nearly 100,000 inhabitants and is the largest port in north-eastern Siberia. It has a large fishing fleet and remains open year-round because of icebreakers. Magadan is served by the nearby Sokol Airport. There are many public and private farming enterprises. Gold mines, pasta and sausage factories, fishing companies, and a distillery form the city's industrial base.

Prehistory

During archaeological investigations of Paleolithic sites on the Angara, in 1936 the unique Stone Age site of Buret’ was discovered which yielded an anthropomorphic sculpture, skulls of rhinoceroses, and surface and semisubterranean dwellings. The houses were analogous, on one hand, to Paleolithic European houses and, on the other, to ethnographically studied houses of the Eskimos, Chukchi and Koryaks.
The indigenous peoples of this region include the Evens, Koryaks, Yupiks, Chukchis, Orochs, Chuvans and Itelmens, who traditionally lived from fishing along the Sea of Okhotsk coast or from reindeer herding in the River Kolyma valley.

History

Under Joseph Stalin's rule, The Kolyma Gulag became the most notorious region for the Gulag labor camps. Tens of thousands or more people 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 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.

Emergence of the Gulag camps

and platinum were discovered in the region in the early 20th century. During the time of the USSR's industrialization 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 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 the town of Magadan by forced labor. After a gruelling train ride in unheated boxcars on the Trans-Siberian Railway, prisoners were disembarked at one of several transit camps and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to the natural harbor chosen for Magadan's construction. Conditions aboard the ships were harsh. 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. Within the crowded prison ships thousands died during transportation. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship SS 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.
In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the construction of the Kolyma Highway, which was to become known as the Road of Bones. Eventually, about 80 different camps dotted the region of the uninhabited taiga.
The original director of the Kolyma camps was Eduard Berzin, a Cheka officer. Berzin was later removed and shot during the period of the Great Purges in the USSR.

The Arctic camps

At the height of the Purges, around 1937, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account imagines 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." But there is no documentary evidence of this beyond Solzhenitsyn's speculation. The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners". Conditions varied depending on the state of the country.
Many of the prisoners in Kolyma were academics or intellectuals. They included Mikhail Kravchuk, a Ukrainian mathematician who by the early 1930s had received considerable acclaim in the West. After a summary trial, apparently for reluctance 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 labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health as well as accusations and abandonment by most of his colleagues, took their toll. Kravchuk perished in Magadan in Eastern Siberia, about 4,000 miles from the place where he was born. Kravchuk's last article had appeared soon after his arrest in 1938. However, after this publication, Kravchuk's name was stricken from books and journals.
The prisoner population of Kolyma increased substantially in 1946 with the arrival of thousands of former Soviet POWs liberated by Western Allied forces or the Red Army at the close of World War II.
Those judged guilty of collaboration with the enemy frequently received ten or twenty-five year prison sentences to the gulag, including Kolyma.
There were, however, some exceptions. Rumor suggested that Soviet agents seized Léon Theremin, an inventor, in the United States and forced him to return to the Soviet Union; he actually returned voluntarily. Joseph Stalin had Theremin imprisoned at the Butyrka in Moscow; he later came to work in the Kolyma gold mines. Although rumors of his execution circulated widely, Theremin was, in fact, put to work in a sharashka, together with other scientists and engineers, including aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and rocket scientist Sergei Korolyov. The Soviet Union rehabilitated Theremin in 1956.
The Kolyma camps switched to using free labor after 1954, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered a general amnesty that freed many prisoners. Various estimates have put the Kolyma death-toll from 1930 to the mid-1950s between 250,000 and over a million people.

Dalstroy officials

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, 1932–1937
  • 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.

    Calendar of historical events

Calendar of events:
  • 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 the inmates.
  • December 1937: Berzin is charged with espionage and subsequently tried and shot in August 1938.
  • 4 March 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 and sacked from their posts. Garanin subsequently shot.
  • 1941: Headcount of inmates reaches 190,000. Also some 3,700 Dalstroy contract workers.
  • 23 May 1944: US Vice President Henry A. Wallace arrives for a NKVD-hosted 25-day tour of Magadan, Kolyma, and the Russian Far East.
  • 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.
  • 1953–1956: Period of mass amnesties and the release of most political prisoners. Some camp closures begin.
  • 1957: Dalstroy liquidated. 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.