NGO Memorial: our exclusive photos of the gulags of Kolyma, in eastern Siberia

Nicolas Tonev, edited by Gauthier Delomez 12:41 p.m., December 28, 2021

REPORTING

Located 6,000 kilometers east of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, the Kolyma was for more than 30 years, between 1930 and 1953, the most terrible zone of deportation of the Stalinist gulags. It is the symbol of the violence of the Soviet camp system with its millions of deportees and dead. A dark period that the Russians are struggling to accept and recognize, the power in place even less.

More than 80 years after the closure of the camps, they disappear and with them the possibility of maintaining the memory on the ground.

Only the NGO Memorial, the most powerful and the oldest Russian NGO, has tried to fulfill this mission since its creation in 1989, among others by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov.

The defense of the memory of the camps is intimately linked to that of current dissent and human rights in Russia.

Europe 1 offers you a trip to Kolyma.

Kolyma, an isolated territory

Magadan Bay, gateway to the Kolyma. A few kilometers by car to go down to the port. It is a color that sets the tone. Grey. All over. And without nuance. A dark, invasive, uniform gray. The sky, the buildings, even the waves of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk are dressed in it, as in a costume announcing what this territory is.

For lack of a land route to break the isolation of the region, it was by boats from Vladivostok, 2,000 kilometers further south, that the administration of the gulags "unloaded" its cargo of "zeks", "the zaklioutchionirs" or detainees. in Russian.

Five days at sea which was added to the weeks of trains for those transferred from the west of the country.

To account for the remoteness, distances and duration of transport, the detainees evoke the continent or the mainland to speak of Russia, in opposition to the isolation of Kolyma.

Silence, a virtue

On the quays, a lonely man with a white mane. He looks at the sea, without moving, without speaking. Curiosity wins. I approach him ... That someone tries to talk to him surprises him, it is not a habit here. Silence seems to be a virtue for him, he lets you understand why. He says he arrived as a prisoner here, precisely by this jetty. 82 years old, he says his age now, arrived after the war to have displeased the regime. His gaze says more than he does.

A late authorization to leave Kolyma after his time in camp, but not the means to return to the mainland, so after leaving the gulag, his life is spent here between a room, a pension granted by the State and this sea ​​which will never give him a return ticket.

First ghost of the Kolyma gulags.

She keeps her prisoners for life, alive or dead.

It is enough to cross the city to be convinced of it.

A monument to preserve memory

North of Magadan, on the outskirts of the city, the mask of sadness, a striking representation of the mass elimination in tears.

The sculptor's parents were themselves deported.

The iron and concrete monument was erected in 1996, when the rough construction of democracy in Russia allowed memory to be preserved.

At that time, recognition of dissidents in the midst of upheaval was no longer a dirty word, and not yet unhealthy intentions towards power.

The mask honors the dead known or not, takes upon itself all the suffering inflicted here.

Funny place: a bit like a giant road sign, it signals the entrance to a territory where humanity disappeared during the Stalinist period.

The legend of the "bone" route

A few kilometers further, the beginning of the bone road, the hundreds of kilometers of track that go north, to Yakutia. Route des bones because when it was built by the first prisoners, legend or history has it that the bodies of men too weak to survive or slaughtered by the guards were mixed with the coating. Save time and materials… No one has checked.

525 kilometers to reach the village of Yagodnoye and our Memorial contact, Ivan Panikarov. The driver has provided provisions, water, food, enough to repair the car, to last a few days in the event of a problem. We quickly understand why: 460,000 square kilometers, or about 100,000 less than mainland France, and only 140,000 inhabitants (67 million in France) including 90,000 in Magadan, which we have just left, it is therefore an empty and grandiose territory that welcomes us: forests, stones, mysterious lake, mountains, plains and hills torn by the Kolyma river, powerful and its 2,000 kilometers long.

No hamlets, houses, signs of permanent human presence.

With my cameraman, through the lenses of the camera and the camera, we are looking for a way to capture the vastness and emptiness felt.

The results disappoint us terribly.

The Kolyma is overflowing with videos and photos as it overflows from the eye so much it fills it.

And we are free, well fed, willing to be here.

What impressions could she inflict on haggard and starving prisoners?

Varlam Chalamov, writer and author of the

,

 : excerpt

Discovery of Kolyma by the prisoners

The mountains were covered with marshy vegetation and only the baldness of their bare summits sparkled, bare limestone, polished by storms and winds.

The feet sank into a muddy moss;

it was rare to have dry feet in summer.

In winter everything froze.

The mountains were one and the same, sinister and hostile.

Revive the "ghosts" of Kolyma

Twelve hours later, Iagodnoe, a typically ex-Soviet capital: concrete, five-story buildings, a small Orthodox church, many abandoned sheds, a few shops without window, muddy parking lots ... hard to believe that the name of the village is taken from the name of "berries" in Russian, an abundance of wild fruits which surprised the creators of the place during the construction of the first camps.

The one who will help us find the ghosts is here.

Ivan Panikarov, a life dedicated to the victims of Stalinist madness, one of those characters like Russia produces, disconcerting calm, overflowing kindness, nourished by his convictions, and whose eyes and voice reveal determination and courage.

In one play, he has been working for decades to revive, for some, people erased from history, for others, to rehabilitate "traitors", to provide information to families in search of relatives, to reconstruct files for dozens of nationalities because Stalin was casting a wide net.

Avoid the disappearance of the physical traces of the camps

In short, to prove that men have existed, that the system has not been able to erase them despite the efforts of a disproportionate administration. Do the dissidents of the past, present and future disappear to better liquidate this idea of ​​dissent precisely? Fortunately, dictatorships and strong powers like administrative order and therefore documents, a strength when the dictatorship is in place, a weakness over time throughout history because the conservation of files, reports, in turn testifies ultimately against its creator. Ivan succeeded in building a museum dedicated to the victims. As long as it is alive, as long as a Memorial exists, these memories are saved.

But there is a disappearance against which Ivan can do nothing in Kolyma, it is the physical trace of the camps.

He wants to take us to this territory he despairs of being able to save.

We leave for the "serpentinka", one of the worst gulags in the region.

Serpentinka, as the Russians call the small winding mountain roads, one of the reasons for the hardness of this camp, its valleys, its hills, this ruthless minerality in this deadly climate.

A point of reference, this meager monument obtained with a great struggle by Ivan.

Varlam Chalamov,

Winter

We did not show the thermometer to the workers: it was moreover perfectly

useless: we had to get out whatever the temperature was. In addition, the ancients did without a

thermometer: if there is fog, it is forty degrees below

zero; if one breathes without too much difficulty, but the air exhales noisily, that means that

it is minus forty-five; if the breathing is noisy and is accompanied by

visible shortness

of

breath, it is minus fifty. Below minus fifty, a sputum

freezes on the fly. The sputum had been freezing in flight for two weeks already.

Here, the prisoners, cut, crush, dig the pebble… Iron and muscles of the tools and zeks against tin, gold, manganese.

And to fix what is the scum of Soviet society, the most badly treated are the "politicians", the "common rights" have less difficult jobs, sometimes leading inside camps and barracks.

The slightest weakness is ruthlessly punished.

Varlam Chalamov,

 :

Ruthless

Dougaiev remembered perfectly the northern saying, the three commandments of the

prisoners: "do not believe anything, do not fear anything, do not ask anything".

(…) Dugayev sat down on the ground. He was already tired to the point of welcoming with

total indifference whatever fate had in store for him. (…)

Come here said the overseer to Dugayev. This is your place.

He measured the waistline and placed a mark, a piece of quartz. (…)

It is nobody's business if Dougayev is unable to endure a

sixteen-hour working

day

. Dugayev did nothing but roll, draw, pour and roll, draw,

pour. (…) The supervisor returned in the evening. He unrolled his decameter and measured what

Dugayev

had

done.

- Twenty five percent!

he said, and he looked at Dugayev.

Twenty five percent, you hear?

- I hear, replied Dougayev.

This figure surprised him, the work was so painful.

(…) The figure of twenty-five percent of the

norm seemed very high to him.

(…) The next day he worked again in the team with

Baranov and, during the night, the soldiers made him pass behind the stable… (…) they

took him into the forest by a small path… ( …) And when he understood what it

was all about, Dougayev regretted having worked, having suffered so much in vain that day, that

last day.

Doors open to nothing

So this is what Ivan wanted to show us. His despair. On hundreds of hectares, devoured by erosion and nature, where a camp, barracks by the dozen, mines, fences stood, there are only a few vestiges left to imagine hell, plunged into a thick fog, and that hellish Kolyma gray. Silhouettes stand out between bushes and water vapor, the ghosts of Kolyma… Here, doors open to nothing.

Ivan tells how each year something disappears for good, the silhouette of an old line of wagons, a mine entrance covered by landslides and which will undoubtedly never answer this question which haunts him and those who escaped the camps: on closing, some claim that the wounded and sick were crammed inside before the tunnel was blasted. Who will go and check when the traces are gone?

A building permanently eaten away by nature and the climate, and a question for Ivan: how to bear witness to a space that has disappeared?

How to prove to the skeptics, to those who deny this story that it cannot be twisted and manipulated since these places really existed, when they will no longer exist?

What do the deportees' files relate to?

Will someone end up saying that it was all a fabrication?

Varlam Chalamov,

:

Survive

All human feelings: love, friendship, jealousy, love of neighbor,

charity, thirst for glory, honesty, all these feelings had left us at the same

time as the flesh we had lost during our prolonged famine.

In that

insignificant layer of muscle that still remained on our bones… (…) there was only

room for rage, the most vivid of human feelings.

(…)

When we are in need, we only measure our own strength of soul and the valor of our

body, we see the limits of our capacities, of our physical endurance and

of our moral vigor.

We understood that we could only survive by chance

A prisoner's child who became mayor

Serpentinkis are not the only ghosts of the Kolyma gulags. Dozens of kilometers away - an hour and a half by car -, like a passing neighbor in the Kolyma, we reach Elgen, "death" in the Yakut language. Denis welcomes us. Mayor of the village, after having been the prisoner with his mother. Explanation: Elgen was a camp, a kind of gulag-farm. Denis was born there to a prisoner mother. Luckily, he survived, which many don't.

One of Denis's first reflexes: to show us the children's cemetery, a few steps behind buildings that remain from the time.

Nature eats away at the graves.

The little ones who didn't survive were hastily buried here.

I find it difficult to move forward in the forest to photograph, as if the graves were crying out for sacrilege.

Denis is on the verge of tears.

In this forest, the guards also eliminated the recalcitrant: by the cold winter, the fastest season to die attached to a tree, eaten by insects, hunger and thirst in summer, a long and painful end.

Of activity, of passage after the Stalinist period

Yevgeny Ginzburg, a great Russian writer, was detained here for ten years. Released in 1947, she is the author of

. When Stalin died in 1953, when she heard the news on the radio, she had her words: "So I collapsed, both arms on the table, and burst into violent sobs. They shook my whole body. . It wasn't just the release of the nervous tension of the past few months awaiting a third arrest. It was the tears of 20 years. In a minute, everything passed before my eyes. All the torture. and all the cells. All the rows of executed people and the countless crowds of martyred beings. And my life, my life, reduced to nothing by the diabolical will of this man. "

Denis was lucky.

He survived Elgen, grew up and went through history: closure of the camp, the camp which administratively becomes a village and Denis, from child to adult, who becomes its mayor!

Ephemeral survival.

Paradoxical of history, the camps created activity, certainly forced, but activity, passage, forced, a forced administrative life.

But living free here is a form of aberration.

Hellish cold in winter, mosquitoes, devouring flies during the few summer months in a stifling heat ... So, finally, Elgen dies.

Only Stalin's madness could decide to bring life to this isolated and ruthless plain, so far from everything.

The wooden barracks disappear, the survivors die, the living flee.

Elgen has not been inhabited since last year.

One more ghost in Kolyma.

Gold diggers indifferent to the past

The gulags give way to a few authorized or illegal gold diggers.

Officials, they ravage the prospecting areas with bulldozers.

Clandestine, they snatch nugget by nugget of meager wealth in Kolyma.

The gulags don't concern them, they don't think about it.

It is the victory of time and of the regime.

The gulag is anchored in the Russian subconscious, the refusal to talk about it is expressed as a form of negation where one comes from, the refusal to recognize past savagery.

With the dissolution of the NGO Memorial by the Russian Supreme Court, millions of dead awaiting rehabilitation will disappear like the ghosts of the gulags.

And the founders of the NGO fear that the defense of human rights in Russia will be annihilated at the same time.

Only 1% of Gulag cemeteries listed, according to the NGO

In Kolyma, and throughout Russia, thousands of work camps were created in the Soviet Union, grouped into nearly 500 complexes, mainly in the most difficult regions and those furthest from large urban centers.

The Soviet archives were opened in 1989: from ten to 18 million people were deported between 1921 and 1953 - the date of Stalin's death -, hundreds of thousands of people executed, more than 700,000 and in total up to four millions of deaths from exhaustion, disease ...

In 2004, Memorial published, after ten years of research, a CD-ROM containing the names of 1.3 million victims of Stalinist repression.

Elena Jemkova, the executive director of the organization, estimates that there have been at least ten times as many victims, and that to finish the job it would take more than a century.

According to Memorial, only 1% of the Gulag cemeteries spread over the vast Russian territory have been listed.

Photos from summer 2000 and late spring 2008. Ivan Panikarov was awarded for his work in 2020. We have not heard from Denis.

Elgen, which has become a village, has closed, and Iagodnoe continues to lose inhabitants.

The village now has less than 3,000.