“The Norilsk camps were not the worst in the Gulag system,” says local journalist Stanislav Stryuchkov. “Prisoners in Norilsk were always seen as vital work tools, a means to fulfill the plan.

You will work in the camp’s theater.” Although Khachatryan had no formal experience as a performer, for more than five years until her release in 1953, she was partly occupied playing an ...

Today, there is also the “Vorkuta Circle of Mines” tourist trail, which traces the footsteps of prisoners at work and ... The Dnieper camp and a mine in the Magadan region Gulag History ...

These gulag camps — which are separate from the country ... They are assigned brutally punishing work, such as coal mining without proper equipment or ventilation. Women and girls are subject ...

workers are still working as serfs in the Gulag, paying off North Korea's $3.8 billion Cold War debt. Kim Sung Chol came to work at a North Korean Logging Camp in Siberia on a three-year 'contract'.

I was able to work in archives in Moscow and Karelia ... where prisoners ran nuclear power plants; fishing camps on the Pacific coast. The Gulag photo albums in the Russian State Archive are ...

With strikes breaking out in other camps, Vorkuta joined at the end of July. The first strike committee that had declared a strike (at the number 1 mineshaft) was immediately arrested. However, work ...

Published 50 years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Soviet Union’s barbaric system of forced labor camps is arguably the 20th century’s greatest work of nonfiction.

Although individual forced labor camps existed in Russia before 1922–23, Solzhenitsyn and most scholars pinpoint the Gulag’s birth to the transformation of the Orthodox monastery on the ...

Gulag camps were an integral part of this history ... Others were drafted, or at least found that work in the Gulag system under the security police was an offer they couldn’t refuse. Yan Pullerits ...