JRL NEWSWATCH: “Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair” – New York Times/ Andrew Higgins

“The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today.”

“… [P]risoners, hacking … through insect-infested summer swamps and winter ice fields, brought the road … [which] then brought yet more prisoners … a torrent of slave labor to … gold mines and prison camps of Kolyma, the most frigid and deadly outpost of Stalin’s gulag. … the ‘road of bones,’ a track of gravel, mud and, for much of the year, ice … 1,260 miles … from … Russian [Pacific] port city … Magadan … inland to Yakutsk … capital of the Yakutia region in eastern Siberia[,] [s]naking across … [wilderness] vistas of harsh, breathtaking beauty dotted with frozen, unmarked graves and … rapidly vanishing traces of labor camps. … [R]emnants of past misery buried in the snow [][include] wooden posts strung with rusty barbed wire, abandoned mine shafts and the broken bricks of former isolation cells. …”

Click here for: “Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair; The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today.” – New York Times/ Andrew Higgins



Comment