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Road of Bones

Way to Russia Talk Lounge Forum Index -> The Rest of Russia

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Paul Holmes
Lounge Wizard

Joined: 12 Apr 2005
Posts: 1073

Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 9:47 pm Post subject: Road of Bones

For those who stay, summer is trying enough. Those out on the highway built by Stalin's prisoners from Magadan, the nearest port, 400 miles away, are baked by the heat, covered with dust and attacked by huge mosquitoes.

Winter is worse. The last one was severe even by local standards, with temperatures hitting -76F. A sprinkling of hilltop snow in July was a reminder that the hot weather was already on the wane.

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Under Stalin hundreds of thousands of prisoners endured those extremes and more. Kolyma, the river which lent its name to the whole region, was, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "a pole of cold and cruelty".

Armed only with pickaxes and wheelbarrows, prisoners, among them the founder of the Soviet space programme, generals and intellectuals side by side with common criminals, hacked and hewed at permafrost in the hunt for gold.

After the tyrant's death the camps were disbanded and most prisoners returned to "the mainland".

Quote:

Northeastern Siberia has major permafrost problems. Due to the extreme cold, the ground will actually freeze into a solid block to depths of four feet or more. Where this occurs, it is literally impossible to dig through the permafrost. Thus we come to the road of bones.

While building the road of bones, thousand upon thousands of gulag prisoners died. Because of the permafrost, they could not be buried. Instead, their bodies were simply left on the side of the road or actually put in the foundation of the road. Thus, the road of bones came to be.

A Russian cliché suggests there is one dead Russian per every meter of road. Considering the road is 2,000 kilometers long, this means there are roughly 2 million dead Russians in the road. The road of bones in Siberia is a true horror of horrors.

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