On the “Road of Bones”, paved with the bodies of Gulag prisoners

By Isabelle Mandraud

Posted today at 5:43 a.m., updated at 6:24 a.m.

The itinerary followed by German photographers Maximilian Mann and Ingmar Björn Nolting immerses us in the frozen universe of a territory located at the north-eastern end of Russia, where temperatures drop below -50°C during the endless winter. An icy desert that takes its name, the Kolyma, from the eponymous river over 2,000 kilometers long which flows from south to north.

Dangerous, although renovated since 2015, the road that follows its course requires nerves of steel to cross passes like the Chornyy Prizhim, the “black prism”. Sometimes called the “Road of Bones”, it was built by gulag prisoners, zeks, sent to this region which has become synonymous with the largest Soviet concentration camp system of the 20thand century. Most of them paid with their lives for its construction.

The ghosts of 900,000 captives

The pictures of Road of Bones, the series by Ingmar Björn Nolting and Maximilian Mann forcefully evokes the ghosts of the 900,000 Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic captives who were held there between 1932 and 1953, the date of Stalin’s death. German photographers tell the story of this region, this past, and what remains of it.

More than 200,000 of them perished there from starvation, cold and mistreatment, according to gulag historian Nicolas Werth, who also made the trip (The Kolyma Road, Belin, 2012). “An archeology of disaster, he remembers. There are less and less vestiges. Only ghost towns remain, remnants of disused factories or thermal power stations, stone structures which were not in the majority at the time.. »

Igor Gabydullin, 52, smokes in his hovel in Kyubume, Yakutia.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the workers who built the roads have left, and he lives there alone, without electricity, more than 150 kilometers from the nearest village.

The wooden huts of zeks disappeared. Sometimes, buildings remain, often built by those who, freed from the camps, were to remain in “relegation” in the region. This is the case of the small town of Kadykchan. Now emptied of its population, the city seems lost in the white immensity. The collapse of the Soviet Union precipitated the movement. The few current inhabitants, in the villages, live as hermits, deprived of access to everything. The isolation is such that even today the rest of Russia is referred to as a “mainland” difficult to reach.

Controlling the national narrative

Inhospitable, Kolyma was even more so in the first half of the 20th centuryand century. Transported by the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostock, tens of thousands of prisoners then had to be transported by boat to Magadan, the capital of the region, in appalling conditions, in order to be used as labor in the mines. After the discovery of gold deposits, Kolyma, placed under direct control of Moscow, and dependent on Dalstroi, the organization created in November 1931 in charge of its exploitation, became the first destination of the victims of the purges. Many did not even arrive at their destination, such as Ossip Mandelstam, one of the most famous Russian poets who died while in transit in Vladisvostock in 1938.

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