All the Russians know this song of the Gulag, developed by the prisoners: “Be cursed, o you, Kolyma, Known as our planet! There, one loses necessarily the head, as here there is no return…”
mining resources unlimited, a territory that is isolated and desolate, the arctic climate and temperatures of ultra-negative: the criteria perfect to transform the Kolyma, a region cursed by the Far East siberian camps of forced labour and in open-air prison. And decided that comrade Stalin in 1932, when he decreed that it would be the island and lighthouse of the”Gulag Archipelago”. For a quarter of a century, hundreds of thousands of prisoners (including the magnificent writer Varlam Chalamov, author of Tales of Kolyma ) were relegated to minimum sentences of ten years ; 130.000 none of them came back ever. Citizens are arbitrarily arrested by the NKVD (political police, the precursor to the KGB) and sentenced as “enemies of the people”.
“in The Winter twelve months. All the rest is summer”
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