Where the Russian Gulag Once Thrived, Life Remains Isolated

I spent 10 days traveling through the remains of Stalin’s slave-labor system — and the towns and cities that sprung up around it 

   Owen Matthews Owen Matthews was Newsweek Magazine’s Moscow Bureau Chief from 2006-16

The antique Soviet Tu-134 touched down at Salekhard airport in a slicing crosswind, bunny-hopped twice, then juddered to a halt in front of the terminal with a macho squeeze of brakes. Outside the airport taxi drivers waited in their vehicles, waiting in a head-lit swirl of exhaust to close in on the single emerging foreign passenger. From the usual post-Soviet police lineup of grinning crooks, I chose the only one who hadn’t bothered to get out of his car. He was a mash-faced octogenarian with a bulbous alcoholic’s nose who introduced himself as “Ivanych” — short for Alexander Ivanovich. The sky was deep black and sprinkled with stars of extraordinary brightness. It was 4 p.m.

Flying across the Russian Arctic at night, in winter, I experienced an eerie sense of having flown off the edge of the world. As the plane lurched northward, the spots of light that marked towns and roads dwindled to black. North of the 65th parallel nothing was visible but a dreamscape of snowbound, moonlit forest stretching unbroken not just to the horizon but beyond, apparently forever.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn named the network of prison camps that stretched across the Soviet Union the Gulag Archipelago. But in truth, all of Russia is like an archipelago, a string of isolated islands of warmth and light strung out in a hostile sea of emptiness. I wanted to know what traces of the once-vast empire of the Gulag had survived. Salekhard, the western railhead of one of Joseph Stalin’s most maniacal and deadly slave-labor projects, seemed as good a place as any to begin my search..........To Read More....