Início » ‘Bone road’ in Russia hides relics of suffering and despair from Stalin’s gulag

‘Bone road’ in Russia hides relics of suffering and despair from Stalin’s gulag

Andrew Higgins

Ruins are still visible where tens of thousands died in Soviet forced labor camps

The prisoners, making their way through insect-infested swamps in the summer and icy fields in the winter, brought the road, and then the road brought even more prisoners, taking a torrent of slave labor to the gold mines and Kolimá prison camps, the outpost. coldest and deadliest stranger in the [concentration camp system] gulag by Josef Stálin [1878-1953].

Its route became known as the “road of bones”, a trail of gravel, mud and, for most of the year, ice that extends for 2,000 kilometers west of the Russian port city of Magadan, in the Pacific Ocean, until Iakutsk, in the inland, capital of the Iakutia region in eastern Siberia.

Snaking through the pristine nature of the Russian Far East, it traverses landscapes of harsh and striking beauty, dotted with unmarked frozen tombs and remnants of rapidly disappearing work fields.

Read more in Folha de S. Paulo

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