Ivan Panikarov has spent the past two decades living with the Gulag: his small two-room apartment in the town of Yagodnoye is filled with artefacts from the camps. Rusting tools, handcuffs and photographs of prisoners cover the walls of his living room, while stacks of boxes in the hallway contain transcripts of interrogations taken down in meticulous purple handwriting.

Yagodnoye feels like the end of the earth, and in many ways it is. In the heart of the Kolyma region, one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet, it is an eight-hour drive from the regional centre of Magadan, which itself is a seven-hour flight from Moscow.

There was almost nothing here before the 1930s, when geological surveys showed extraordinary deposits of gold and other metals in the area, and Joseph Stalin ordered it conquered, mainly using the labour of prisoners, sent there in their thousands. Kolyma was the harshest island of the Soviet Union’s Gulag archipelago, and the region became a byword for the horrors of the Gulag camp system. Even by conservative estimates, more than 100,000 people died while working, and 11,000 were shot in Kolyma alone.

Svetlana Alexievich: 'Stalin and the Gulag are not history' Read more

In today’s Russia it is not fashionable to delve too deeply into Gulag history, and 60-year-old Panikarov’s collection is one of just two museums devoted entirely to the Gulag in the whole country. Indeed, even Panikarov himself has a somewhat surprising view of the Gulag system.

“We should not have one-sided evaluations. People fell in love in the camps, people got pregnant; it wasn’t all bad,” he says, attributing negative information about the camps to a western campaign against Russia. “It was fashionable to say bad things about the USSR. Now it is again fashionable to insult Russia. We have sanctions against us. The west looks for negative things.”

Panikarov’s views on the Gulag are part of a larger trend. With the Soviet victory in the second world war elevated to a national rallying point under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the forced labour camps, through which millions of Soviet citizens passed, are seen by many as an unfortunate but necessary by-product. In many museums and in much public discourse, the Gulag is not ignored completely, but is “contextualised” in a way that plays down the horror and pairs it with the war, suggesting the two come as a package.

Panikarov’s fascination with the Gulag began when he moved to Kolyma in 1981 to work at a goldmine, and started hearing stories from former prisoners, even though public discussion of the Gulag was then forbidden.

In 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika unleashed a wave of interest in the darker pages of the Soviet past, Panikarov managed to persuade the local KGB chief to lend him a map giving the locations of the hundreds of Stalin-era camps in the region, information that was still classified as top secret. In return, he agreed to investigate the fate of the KGB chief’s grandfather, who had been in the camps.

After he got the map, he began to drive to old Gulag sites and pick up things he found: prisoners’ clothes, working implements, occasionally stacks of documents. Over time, his horror has turned to acceptance.

“It was a cruel system, but if you think about it, how else would you get this gold out of the land?” he asks, surveying the ruins of Elgen, a labour camp for women, where the barracks and barbed wire are still visible, but which bears no monument or plaque detailing its past. “If we hadn’t mined all the gold during the war years, maybe we would not have defeated the Nazis.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivan Panikarov by the ruins of the Elgen labour camp for women. Photograph: Shaun Walker

As well as petty criminals, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to the Gulag for political offences, often minor or imagined. After the war, there were mass deportations from the newly conquered territory in the Baltics and western Ukraine.

Evgenia Ginzburg, a Bolshevik party member from Kazan, was sentenced to hard labour in the region and spent several years at Elgen. She wrote of miserable work during the freezing winters, and of summers plagued with the merciless Kolyma mosquitoes, which she described as “bloated, repulsive insects that reminded one of small bats”.

Olga Gureyeva, from a village in western Ukraine, was arrested at the end of 1945 after the Soviets took back the region from the Nazis. Aged 16 at the time, she was arrested with her family for supposed Nazi collaboration and, after repeated beatings during interrogation, sentenced to 20 years of hard labour. After being crammed into cattle trucks and moved between various Siberian camps, she was sent by boat from Vladivostok to Magadan in 1948, a 10-day journey with hundreds of prisoners squeezed in the hold.



Now 87, and living in a small apartment in Magadan, Gureyeva is stooped, almost blind, and unable to say what happened to her without tears. Her stories are a litany of horrors: the filthy clothes, the clouds of midges, the permanent chill in the barracks, eating grass to stave off hunger, and the perverted guards who would line the women up naked in the washroom and inspect them.

“My best friend died chopping wood in the cold one day. I remember: she was next to me, she lifted up the axe, it stayed in the air for a minute, and then she just collapsed, dead,” she says.

Few Russians know of such stories. In Magadan, Larisa, a 40-year-old history teacher who did not want to give her surname, says she believes the Gulag was a necessary side-effect of a difficult period of Soviet history. “Was there a military threat from Germany? There was. Were there spies in the country? There were. There was no time to decide who was guilty and who wasn’t. We should remember the innocent victims but I think it was all necessary.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winter in the Magadan region in the 1950s. Olga Gureyeva remembers: ‘My best friend died chopping wood in the cold one day.’ Photograph: Foto Soyuz/Getty Images

Larisa says she teaches her students one lesson about the Gulag, in which she typically divides the blackboard into two parts. On one side she puts the “military and industrial achievements” of the Stalin period, and on the other, the “unfortunate side-effects”, and lets the students decide for themselves whether the repression was justified.

The theme is not completely ignored. On Thursday, a trickle of Muscovites came to a small monument close to the Lubyanka, the former headquarters of the NKVD and still home to modern Russia’s FSB security services, to take part in an annual ritual, reading out the names of those who were shot in the city. A new monument is planned to victims of political repression in the capital.

Galina Ivanova, deputy director of a new Gulag museum that will opens in Moscow on Friday, says how the Gulag is remembered in different cities is largely down to individual museum directors. “You can either put up a big portrait of Stalin and note goldmining achievements, or you can put up death rates and haggard faces. Unfortunately, more often it’s the former.”

In Magadan, a large monument in the style of an Easter Island head, the Mask of Sorrow, was unveiled in the 1990s outside the city centre, but elsewhere in the town, clues as to the city’s traumatic past are well hidden.



The regional governor’s office is inside the former NKVD headquarters; the regional parliament is the former prison and interrogation centre. Neither is marked with any kind of plaque, while at Nagayev Bay, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners disembarked ships before being dispatched to various camps, there is a monument that reads simply: “This is where the construction of the city of Magadan began in 1929.”

One of the region’s few Gulag memorials is an obelisk of roughly hewn stone in an unmarked clearing off a side road, close to an execution site where the NKVD secret police executed hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people in 1937 and 1938. Someone has recently adorned the monument with Victory Day flags, a touch that appears to turn them from tragic victims to heroic martyrs.

People get angry when you raise the Gulag theme. The increase in nationalism has made this more pronounced Sergei Raizman, Magadan Memorial

In Magadan, a region heavily subsidised by Moscow during communist rule but wrecked by the market economy, part of the reason for whitewashing the Gulag is a general nostalgia for the Soviet period. In the new reality, the population of Magadan region has dropped by more than half, and many settlements turned into ghost towns as they became economically unfeasible. Elgen, the modern settlement adjoining the Gulag ruins, housed more than 2,000 people at the end of the 1980s. Now, it is inhabited by one couple who run a meteorological station.

“There are not many people left who remember the Gulag period, but there are plenty of people who remember the 1970s, and remember that things were a lot better than they are now,” says Sergei Raizman, head of Magadan Memorial, which promotes memory of the Gulag.

The desire to forget the dark past is strong. “People find it very hard to deal with,’ says Raizman. “They don’t want to think about it. It’s normal if your grandfather fought at the front, or if your grandfather was a hero of Soviet labour. It’s not normal if they were in the camps. People get angry when you raise the Gulag theme, and in the past two years, the events in Ukraine and the increase in nationalism have only made this aggression more pronounced.”

The former Soviet Gulag The former Soviet Gulag

When Gureyeva was released in the mid-1950s, she was advised never to speak about her ordeal. Even her son did not know she had been a prisoner. He found out when he was banned from travelling to East Germany during his military service because his mother had been an “enemy of the people”. It was only in the 1990s that she began to speak about her camp years, but now, again, people have little interest in revisiting the horrors of the past.

“Young people need to hear about it, you need to tell them the truth,” she says. “But people don’t want to remember now.”