Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps

by Robert Conquest

Book Overview

Basically, the frightfulness of Kolyma was due not to geographical or climatic reasons, but to conscious decisions taken in Moscow. For a few years before 1937, in fact, it was well administered and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192850911
• ISBN13: 9780192850911
• Release Date: April 1980
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Gulags Approaching, and Even Reaching, Equivalence to the Nazi Extermination Camps

Kolyma, located across, and north of, the Bering Strait, was called the "Soviet Alaska". Gold was found in the surficial layers (for panning) as well as in deep mines. The similarity ends there. Inmates had to work in -50 C with inadequate clothing, food, etc., under conditions of avitominosis, beatings, rapes, endless lice and typhus, machine-gunning of rebels, and shootings of those who couldn't keep up with the arduous 12-16 hour-day labor. Polish inmates kept alive through faith in the eventual survival of Poland, if not of themselves. (p. 96). "Then there were the Christians. These religious prisoners were the firmest and most unbreakable." (p. 93). One method of coping was tufta, which recounted the later adage of "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" under Communism. Examples of tufta (pp. 166-167) included the sawing off of the ends of old logs to make them look freshly-felled, and piling of a few logs on brush to resemble a large, solid, stack of logs. Sometimes, though, it backfired. There has been a curious western silence about the Gulags. (p. 200). Also, Communist apologists have claimed that Gulag deaths were caused largely by passive negligence, Soviet-system inefficiencies, wartime disruptions and privations, etc. This is nonsense. To illustrate: "The dogs--wolfhounds--were a constant presence in Kolyma...Their rations were extremely good, better than that of the guards let alone the prisoners. Not only the dogs but also the horses enjoyed better conditions than the prisoners." (pp. 102-103). Unlike most other nationalities, the Poles were nearly all relegated to the hardest labor (p. 96), with a predictable outcome: "In all, of 10,000-12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940-1941, 583 survived to return under the amnesty, between October 1941 and June 1942." (p. 219). Hardly anyone incarcerated earlier (1937-1938) was still alive in 1941. (p. 217). Kolyma wasn't the worst. Some have argued that there was no Gulag equivalent to the Nazi death camps--no camps to which admission absolutely guaranteed death. In fact, there were: "...the lead mines of the Chukhotsk peninsula. These were operated without safety measures (at least in 1940-1941) and all prisoners eventually died of lead poisoning. This applied, for example, to 3,000 Poles sent there in August 1940, about whom no action had to be taken when the amnesty for Polish citizens came into force at the end of the following year, since none of them was left alive." (p. 110). Also: "There seem, indeed, to have been camps on the Arctic Islands of Nova Zemlya from which no one returned at all; but of these practically nothing is known, and they were certainly on a smaller scale. In Kolyma, millions died..." (pp. 13-14. The estimate, based largely on records of ship arrivals, is at least 3,000,000 Kolyma deaths in 1938-1953: pp. 227-228).