Kolyma

: "This is an article about the region commonly known as Kolyma. For river it is named after, see Kolyma River"

The Kolyma (pronounced koh-lee-MAH) region ( _ru. Колыма) is located in the far north-eastern area of Russia in what is commonly known as Siberia but is actually part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The extremely remote region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered until 1926. Today the region consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.

The area, part of which is within the Arctic Circle, has a subarctic climate with very cold winters lasting up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region. Average winter temperatures range from -19°C to -38°C (even lower in the interior), and average summer temperatures, from +3°C to +16°C. There are rich reserves of gold, silver, tin, tungsten, mercury, copper, antimony, coal, oil, and peat. Twenty-nine zones of possible oil and gas accumulation have been identified on the Sea of Okhotsk shelf. Total reserves are estimated at 3.5 billion tons of equivalent fuel, including 1.2 billion tons of oil and 1.5 billion m3 of gas. [ [http://www.kommersant.com/p-52/r_396/Magadan_Region/ Magadan Region from Kommersant, Russia's Daily Online] . Retrieved 22 January 2007.]

The principal town, Magadan, with a population of 99,399 and an area of 18 square kilometers, is the largest port of north-eastern Russia. It has a large fishing fleet and remains open year-round with the help of icebreakers. Magadan is served by the nearby Sokol Airport. There are many public and private farming enterprises. Gold mining works, pasta and sausage plants, fishing companies, and a distillery form the city's industrial base. [ [http://www.kommersant.com/p-52/r_396/Magadan_Region/ Magadan Region from Kommersant, Russia's Daily Online] . Retrieved 22 January 2007.]

History

Under Joseph Stalin's rule, Kolyma became the most notorious region for the Gulag labor camps. A million or more people may have died en route to the area or in the Kolyma's series of gold mining, road building, lumbering, and construction camps between 1932 and 1954. It was Kolyma's reputation that caused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of "The Gulag Archipelago", to characterize it as the "pole of cold and cruelty" in the Gulag system. The Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan (see photograph below) commemorates all those who died in the Kolyma forced-labour camps and the recently dedicated Church of the Nativity remembers the victims in its [http://www.magadancatholic.org/englishpages/Icon.html icons] and [http://www.magadancatholic.org/englishpages/Stations.html Stations of the Camps] .

Emergence of the Gulag camps

Gold and platinum were discovered in the region in the early 20th century. During the time of the USSR's industrialization (beginning with Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932) the need for capital to finance economic development was great. The abundant gold resources of the area seemed tailor-made to provide this capital. A government agency Dalstroy ( _ru. Дальстрой, acronym for "Far North Construction Trust") was formed to organize the exploitation of the area. Prisoners were being drawn into the Soviet penal system in large numbers during the initial period of Kolyma's development, most notably from the so-called anti-Kulak campaign and the government's internal war to force collectivization on the USSR's peasantry. These prisoners formed a readily available workforce.

The initial efforts to develop the region began in 1932, with the building of the town of Magadan by forced labor. [ [http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/marek/marek.html Ludwik Kowalski: Alaska notes on Stalinism] Retrieved 18 January 2007.] (Many projects in the USSR were already using forced labor, most notably the White Sea-Baltic Canal.) After a gruelling train ride (on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest in the USSR), prisoners were disembarked at one of several transit camps (such as Nakhodka and later Vanino) and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to the natural harbor chosen for Magadan's construction. Conditions aboard the ships were harsh. [According to a 1987 article in "Time Magazine": "During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hell-holes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship "Dzhurma" was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead on the ice." It turns out that this incident, widely reported since it was first mentioned in a book published in 1947, could not have happened as the ship "Dzhurma" was not in Soviet hands until mid 1935. A detailed analysis of this legend can be found in the book Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West (Praeger, 2003). [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,964077,00.html James O. Jackson on a visit to Magadan, Time Magazine, April 20, 1987, article entitled Soviet Union] . Retrieved 18 January 2007.]

In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the construction of the Kolyma Highway, which was to become known as the Road of Bones. Eventually, about 80 different camps dotted the region of the uninhabited taiga.

The original director of the Kolyma camps was Eduard Berzin, a Chekist. Berzin was later removed (1937) and shot during the period of the Great Purges in the USSR.

In 1937, at the height of the Purges, Stalin ordered an intensification of the hardships prisoners were forced to endure. [ [http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html Case Study: Stalin's Purges from Genderside Watch] . Retrieved 19 January 2007.] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months — after that we don't need him anymore." [Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.] The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" ("dokhodyaga", in Russian).

Robert Conquest, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Anne Applebaum and others (see bibliography) describe the Kolyma camps in some detail. The suffering of the prisoners was exacerbated by the presence of ordinary criminals, who terrorized the "political" prisoners. Death in the Kolyma camps came in many forms, including: overwork, starvation, malnutrition, mining accidents, exposure, murder at the hands of criminals, and beatings at the hands of guards. A director of the Sevvostlag complex of camps, colonel Sergey Garanin is said personally to shoot whole brigades of prisoners for not fulfilling their daily quotas in the late 1930s. [ [http://www.alexanderlanger.org/cms/index.php?r=227&k=326&id=1567. Campo di detenzione speciale "La Kolyma" 1931 – 1955 Alexander Langer Foundation] (in Italian). Retrieved 17 January 2007.] Escape was difficult, owing to the climate and physical isolation of the region, but some still attempted it. Escapees, if caught, were often torn to shreds by camp guard dogs. The use of torture as punishment was also common. Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev has compared the conditions in the Kolyma camps to Auschwitz.

Many of the prisoners in Kolyma were academics or intellectuals. Among them was Mikhail Kravchuk (Krawtschuk), a Ukrainian mathematician who by the early 1930s had received considerable acclaim in the West. After a summary trial, apparently for not being willing to take part in the accusations of some of his colleagues, he was sent to Kolyma where he died in 1942. "Hard work in the Soviet labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health, and last but not least, accusations and abandonment by most of his colleagues, took their toll. Krawtchouk perished in Magadan in Eastern Siberia, about 4,000 miles (6,000 km) from the place where he was born. Krawtchouk's last article had appeared soon after his arrest in 1938. However, after this publication, Krawtchouk's name was literally stricken from books and journals." [ [http://www.iso.gmu.edu/~ikatcha1/Krawtchouk.html Krawtchouk story : How a scientist received a job offer from the American Mathematical Society, was accused of being a foreign spy, and sent to GULAG] by Ivan Katchanovski, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia]

There were, however, some exceptions. Léon Theremin, an inventor, who had been seized by Soviet agents in the United States and forced to return to the Soviet Union was, on Joseph Stalin's order, imprisoned at Butyrka and later sent to work in the Kolyma gold mines. Although rumors of his execution were widely circulated, Theremin was, in fact, put to work in a sharashka or secret research laboratory, together with other scientists and engineers, including aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and rocket scientist Sergei Korolev (also a Kolyma inmate). The Soviet Union rehabilitated Theremin in 1956.

The Kolyma camps were converted to (mostly) free labor after 1954, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered a general amnesty that freed many prisoners.

Dalstroy officials

Dalstroy (Russian acronym for the "Far Northern Construction Trust") was the agency created to manage exploitation of the Kolyma area, based principally on the use of forced labour.

In the words of Azerbaijani prisoner Ayyub Baghirov, "The entire administration of the Dalstroy - economic, administrative, physical and political — was in the hands of one person who was invested with many rights and privileges." The officials in charge of Dalstroy, i.e. the Kolyma Gulag camps were:
* Eduard Petrovich Berzin, 1932-1937
* Karp Aleksandrovich Pavlov, 1937-1939.
* Ivan Fedorovich Nikishev, 1940-1948.
* Ivan Grigorevich Petrenko, 1948-1950.
* I.L. Mitrakov, from 1950 until Dalstroy was taken over by the Ministry of Metallurgy on 18 March 1953. [ [http://www.kolyma.ru/magadan/history/dalstroi.shtml ru icon История Дальстроя (History of Dalstroy) from the kolyma.ru website] . Retrieved 14 February 2007.]

Calendar of historical events

A detailed calendar of events is presented at the Polish internet site, Forum. [ [http://www.3pytania.pl/english/calendar.html Why Auschwitz, Kolyma, Kosova?] From Forum, a Polish internet site. Retrieved 20 January 2007.] Of particular interest are:

*1928-1929: Gold mines established in the Kolyma River region. Commencement of regular mining operations
*13 November 1931: Establishment of Dalstroy
*4 February 1932: Eduard Berzin, Manager of Dalstroy, arrives with the first 10 prisoners.
*1934: The headcount increases to 30,000 inmates.
*1937: The number of inmates increases to over 70.000; 51,500 kg of gold mined
*June 1937: Stalin reprimands the Kolyma commandants for their undue leniency towards toward the inmates.
*December 1937: Berzin is charged with espionage and subsequently tried and shot in August 1938.
*March 4, 1938: Dalstroy is put under the jurisdiction of NKVD, USSR.
*December 1938: Osip Mandelstam, an eminent Russian poet, dies in a transit camp en route to Kolyma.
*1939: Number of inmates now 138,200.
*11 October 1939: Commandants Pavlov (Dalstroy) and Garanin (Sevvostlag) sacked from their posts. Garanin subsequently shot.
*1941: Headcount of inmates reaches 190,000. Also some 3,700 Dalstroy contract workers.
*October 1945: Camp for the Japanese prisoners of war is established in Magadan, to provide extra labour.
*1952: 199,726 inmates, the highest ever in the history of the Kolyma camps and Dalstroy.
*May 1952: According to commandant Mitrakov, Sevvoslag is dissolved, Dalstroy transformed into the General Board of Labour Camps
*March 1953: After Stalin's death, Dalstroy transferred to the Ministry of Metallurgy, camp units come under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Ministry of Justice.
*September 1953: Dalstroy camp units taken over by the newly established Management Board of the North-Eastern Corrective Labour Camps. Harsh camp regime gradually relaxed.
*1953-1956: Period of mass amnesties and the release of most political prisoners. Some camp closures begin.
*1957: Dalstroy liquidated. Many of the former prisoners continued to work in the mines with a modified status and a few new prisoners arrived, at least until the early 1970s.

Post-Dalstroy developments

The [http://www.chukotka.org/history/soviet/magadan/?lang=en Chukot Autonomous Okrug] site provides details of developments after the official closure of the camps. In 1953, the Magadan Oblast (or region) was established. Dalstroy was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Metallurgy and later to the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy.

Industrial and economic evolution

Industrial gold-mining started in 1958 leading to the development of mining settlements, industrial enterprises, power plants, hydro-electric dams, power transmission lines and improved roads. By the 1960s, the region's population exceeded 100,000.With the dissolution of Dalstroy, the Soviets adopted new labor policies. While the prison labor was still important, it mainly consisted of common criminals. New manpower was recruited from all Soviet nationalities on a voluntary basis, to make up for the sudden lack of political prisoners. Young men and women were lured to the frontier land of Kolyma with the promise of high earnings and better living. But many decided to leave.The region's prosperity suffered under Soviet liberal policies in the end of the 1980s and 1990s with a considerable reduction in population, apparently by 40% in Magadan. [ [http://www.cosmicelk.co.uk/1917on.htm Yakutia ASSR and the Sakha Republic from Cosmic Elk] . Retrieved 23 January 2007.] A U.S. report from the late 1990s gives details of the region's economic shortfall citing outdated equipment, bankruptcies of local companies and lack of central support. It does however report substantial investments from the United States and the governor's optimism for future prosperity based on revival of the mining industries. [ [http://www.russiancouncil.org/reports/magadanupdate.html Magadan Region Update by Bisnis Vladivostok Representative Svetlana Kuzmichenko, 1998] , U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service and U.S. Department of State. Retrieved 23 January 2007.]

Last political prisoners

Dalstroy and the camps did not close down completely. The Kolyma authority, which was reorganised in 1958/59 (31 December 1958), finally closed in 1968. However the mining activities did not stop. Indeed, government structures still exist today under the Ministry of Natural Resources. In some cases, the same individuals seem to have stayed on over the years under new management.There are indications that the political prisoners were gradually phased out over the years but it was only as a result of Yeltsin's far reaching reforms in the 1990s that the very last prisoners were released from Kolyma.The Russian author Andrei Amalrik appears to have been one of the last high-profile political prisoners to be sent to Kolyma. In 1970, he published two books: "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" and "Involuntary Journey to Siberia". As a result, he was arrested for "defaming the Soviet state" in November 1970 and sentenced to hard labour, apparently in Kolyma, for what turned out to be a total of almost five years. [ [http://bailey83221.livejournal.com/80307.html John Keep: Andrei Amalrik and "1984", Russian Review, Vol. 30, No.4. (Oct., 1971), pp. 335-345] . Retrieved 21 January 2007.]

Accounts of the Kolyma Gulag

During and after the Second World War the region saw major influxes of Polish, German, Japanese, and Korean prisoners. There is a particularly memorable account written by a Romanian survivor, Michael Solomon, in his book "Magadan" (see Bibliography below) which gives us a vivid picture of both the transit camps leading to the Kolyma and the region itself. The Hungarian, George Bien, author of the "Lost Years", also recounts the horrors of Kolyma. [ [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2005/06/22/george_bien_gulag_survivor/ George Bien, Gulag Survivor] in the "Boston Globe", June 22, 2005] His story has also led to a film. [ [http://www.gulag.hu/szalkai.htm Documentary film "Walk on Gulagland Kolyma"] by Zoltan Szalkai. Retrieved 17 January 2007.]

In "Bitter Days of Kolyma", Ayyub Baghirov, an Azerbaijani accountant who was finally rehabilitated, provides details of his arrest, torture and sentencing to eight (finally to become 18) years imprisonment in a labour camp for refusing to incriminate a fellow official for financial irregularities. Describing the train journey to Siberia, he writes: "The terrible heat, the lack of fresh air, the unbearable overcrowded conditions all exhausted us. We were all half starved. Some of the elderly prisoners, who had become so weak and emaciated, died along the way. Their corpses were left abandoned alongside the railroad tracks."

A detailed description of conditions in the camps is provided by Varlam Shalamov in his "Kolyma Tales". In "Dry Rations" he writes: "Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. All human emotions—love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty — had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies..."

A vivid account of the conditions in Kolyma is that of Brother Gene Thompson of Kiev's Faith Mission. He recounts how he met Vyacheslav Palman, a prisoner who survived because he knew how to grow cabbages. Palman spoke of how guards read out the names of those to be shot every evening. On one occasion a group of 169 men were shot and thrown into a pit. Their fully clothed bodies were found after the ice melted in 1998. [ [http://www.missionreporter.org/road_of_death.htm Br. Gene Thompson: The Road to Death] - Retrieved 17 January 2007]

One of the most famous political prisoners in Kolyma was Vadim Kozin, possibly Russia's most popular romantic tenor, who was sent to the camps in February 1945, apparently for refusing to write a song about Stalin. Although he was initially freed in 1950 and could return to his singing career, he was soon framed by his enemies on charges of homosexuality and sent back to the camps. Though released once again several years later, he was never officially rehabilitated and remained in exile in Magadan where he died in 1994. Speaking to journalists in 1982, he explained how he had been forced to tour the camps: "The Polit bureau formed brigades which would, under surveillance, go on tours of the concentration camps and perform for the prisoners and the guards, including those of the highest rank." [ [http://russia-in-us.com/Music/Romance/Kozin/ Vadim Kozin, One Way Trip from Petersburg to Magadan] from the Little Russia in US site. Retrieved 13 February 2007.]

Finally, Ukrainian prisoner Nikolai Getman who spent the years 1945-1953 in Kolyma, records his testimony in pictures rather than words. [ [http://www.artukraine.com/paintings/getman.htm The Gulag Collecton: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System by Former Prisoner Nilolau Getman] ] But he does have a plea: "Some may say that the Gulag is a forgotten part of history and that we do not need to be reminded. But I have witnessed monstrous crimes. It is not too late to talk about them and reveal them. It is essential to do so. Some have expressed fear on seeing some of my paintings that I might end up in Kolyma again — this time for good. But the people must be reminded... of one of the harshest acts of political repression in the Soviet Union. My paintings may help achieve this." The Jamestown Foundation provides access to all 50 of Getman's paintings together with explanations of their significance. [ [http://www.jamestown.org/getman_paintings.php?painting_id=1 Nikolai Getman: The Gulag collection] . Retrieved 13 February 2007.]

Estimating the number of victims

While comparatively complete lists of the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps have survived, the amount of hard evidence in regard to Kolyma is extremely limited. Unfortunately, no reliable archives exist about the total number of victims of Stalinism; all numbers are estimates. In his book, "Stalin" (1966), Edvard Radzinsky explains how Stalin, while systematically destroying his comrades-in-arms "at once obliterated every trace of them in history. He personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives." That practice continued to exist after the death of the dictator.

In an account of a visit to Magadan by Harry Wu of Stanford University in 1999, there is a reference to the efforts of Alexander Biryukov, a Magadan lawyer to document the terror. He is said to have compiled a book listing every one of the 11,000 people documented to have been shot in Kolyma camps by the state security organ, the NKVD. Biryukov, whose father was in the Gulag at the time he was born, has begun researching the location of graves. He believed some of the bodies were still partially preserved in the permafrost.

It is therefore impossible to provide final figures on the number of victims who died in Kolyma. Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror", now admits that his original estimate of three million victims was far too high. In his article [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/battles.htm "Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century"] , Matthew White estimates the number of those who died at 500,000, putting Kolyma in fifth place after Auschwitz, Treblinka, Leningrad and Belzec. In "Stalin's Slave Ships", Martin Bollinger undertakes a careful analysis of the number of prisoners who could have been transported by ship to Magadan between 1932 and 1953 (some 900,000) and the probable number of deaths each year (averaging 27%). This produces figures significantly below earlier estimates but, as the author emphasizes, his calculations are by no means definitive. In addition to the number of deaths, the dreadful conditions of the camps and the hardships experienced by the prisoners over the years need to be taken into account. In his review [Norman Polmar [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_cold_war_studies/v009/9.3polmar.html "Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West (review)"] , "Journal of Cold War Studies", vol. 9, no. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 180-182] of Bollinger's book, Norman Polmar estimates there were more than 3 million victims who died at Kolyma, this number is also estimated by the last survivors.

Ivan Panikarov, director of the "Pamyat Kolymy" or Memory of Kolyma museum in Magadan, has collected thousands of documents, photographs and artifacts which record the history of the Kolyma camps. He hopes that his collection will assist researchers in documenting the authentic record of the prison camps.

One of the most thorough investigations has been carried out by Anne Applebaum, a journalist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. She has spent considerable time and effort examining available archives and visiting Gulag camps and museums. However, as she explained in a lecture in 2003, it is extremely difficult not only to document the facts given the extent of the cover-up but to bring the truth home. [ [http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/HL-800.cfm Gulag: Understanding the Magnitude of What Happened] , 16 October 2003. Retrieved 23 January 2007.] "If we do not study the history of the Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted," she stated.

Key online resources

Istvan Toth, a Hungarian, as a result of his father's 11 years as a prisoner in a Gulag camp, [ [http://www.gulag.hu/index_eng.htm Gulag camps in the USSR] . Retrieved 18 January 2007] has put together an extensive list of resources about the Gulag, including many about Kolyma.

Bibliography

* Applebaum, Anne, "", Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.
* Bardach, Janusz / Gleeson, Kathleen "Man Is Wolf to Man : Surviving the Gulag", University of California Press, c1998, 392 p., ISBN 0520213521
* Bollinger, Martin J., "Stalin’s slave ships : Kolyma, the Gulag fleet, and the role of the West", Praeger, 2003, 217 p., ISBN 0275981002
* Conquest, Robert: "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties". 1968.
* Conquest, Robert: "The Great Terror: A Reassessment", Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505580-2; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0-19-507132-8
* Conquest, Robert: "Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps", Viking Press, 1978, 254 p. ISBN 0670414999
* Getman, Nikolai: "The Gulag Collection: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System", The Jamestown Foundation, 2001, 131 p., ISBN 0967500915
* Ginzburg, Eugenia, "Journey into the whirlwind", Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, 432 pp., ISBN 0156027518.
* Ginzburg, Eugenia, "Within the Whirlwind", Harvest/HBJ Book, 1982, 448 pp., ISBN 0156976498.
* Kizny, Tomasz, "Gulag", Firefly Books, 2004, 495 p. ISBN 1552979644
* Khlevniuk, Oleg, "The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror", Yale University Press, c2004, 418 p., ISBN 0300092849
* MacCannon, John: Red Arctic: Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0195114361
* Radzinsky Edvard, Stalin: the first in-depth biography based on explosive new documents from Russia's secret archives, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, 594 p., ISBN 0340606193
* OstEuropa, various authors (in German): Das Lager schreiben, Varlam Šalamov und die Aufarbeitung des Gulag. Berlin (BWV) 2007 (= Osteuropa 6/2007), 440 p., ISBN 978-3-8305-1219-6
* Medvedev, Roy: "Let History Judge: the origins and consequences of Stalinism", New York, Vintage Books 1973, c1971, ISBN 039471928X
* Shalamov, Varlam, "Kolyma Tales", Penguin Books, 1995, 528 pp., ISBN 0-14-018695-6.
* Solomon, Michel, "Magadan", Princeton, Auerbach Publishers, 1971, 243 p. ISBN 0877690855

External links

* [http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/sjk/kolyma.html Kolyma; the Land of Gold and Death] A personal on-line account in nine chapters by Stanislaw J. Kowalski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma, with numerous references
* [http://www.okay.com/dunc/gulag.htm The Soviet Gulag Era in Pictures, 1927-1953] Photographs, several of Kolyma, collected by James Duncan
* [http://www.angelfire.com/de/Cerskus/english/links1.html Crimes of Soviet Communists] Wide collection of sources and links about GULAG also in Kolyma
* [http://www.gulag.eu/ The White Crematorium] Background information on the Gulag and the Kolyma camps by Jens Alstrup who cycled across Russia to Magadan in 1997 and has frequently returned to continue his research. Retrieved 26 February 2008.
* [http://www.artistic-license-inc.com/products/russia/kolyma.htm Kolyma, Mikhail Mikheev's 1995 documentary film] winner of both the Amsterdam and Berlin film festivals
* [http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/work.php Work in the Gulag] from the Stalin's Gulag section of the Online Gulag Museum with a short description and images of Kolyma
* [http://gulaghistory.org GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University]
* [http://www.gulagmuseum.org/index_eng.htm Virtual Gulag Museum] The Saint-Petersburg Research and Information Centre “Memorial” linking to museums in Russia, eastern Europe and Asia on the history of Soviet Terror, the Gulag and the resistance
* [http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?parent_id=288285&word= Gulag prisoners at work, 1936-1937] Photoalbum at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery
* [http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_kolyma.html Kolyma - Off to the Unknown - Stalin's Notorious Prison Camps in Siberia by Ayyub Baghirov (1906-1973)]
* [http://www.sgovio.com/ Italian-American artist Thomas Sgovio (1916–1997) created a series of drawings and paintings, based on his life as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag]
* [http://www.kolyma.ru/magadan/history/dalstroi.shtml Russian-language history of Dalstroy from Kolyma.ru ]

Links to Maps

* [http://www.kolyma.ru/gulag/map/map_gulag.gifDetailed Russian map of the Kolyma Gulag from the site Jewish Community in Magadan]
* [http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/maps/ussri.htm Russian Map of the Gulag camps across the Soviet Union from the Memorial site] dark fantasy novel involving details from camp life

Footnotes