To the Women's Camp (GULAG photo)

“Have you thought about, for example, how the women in the camp took care of their hair or coped with their periods? For many, menstruation simply stopped, the body switched from reproduction mode to survival mode. Many people talk about this independently of each other, including Efrosinya Kersnovskaya.

Hair for a woman is not just hair, it is an element of self-perception (especially good, beautiful hair). A woman with unkempt hair ceases to feel like a woman. But metal combs were banned in the camp, bone combs quickly broke, and how to comb hair? With long hair in the camp there were torments (neither washed nor combed). Some, like the already mentioned Rau, simply cut their hair "to zero", all the rest had their hair cut quite short, and were combed with homemade combs made from split thin boards. These are very important details, they give much more than documents for understanding that time .... "

Alexey Babiy, " Life"

“There were three mothers. We were given a small room in the barracks. Bedbugs here fell from the ceiling and walls like sand. All night long we robbed them from the children. food for the children. Nevertheless, Volovich writes, for a whole year I stood by the child’s bed at night, picked out bedbugs and prayed. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for at least a hundred years, but not separate me from my daughter. released from prison with her. So that I could, crawling at the feet of people and begging, raise and educate her. But God did not answer my prayers. As soon as the child began to walk, as soon as I heard from him the first, caressing the ear, such wonderful words - “mother”, “mother”, like us in the winter cold, dressed in rags, they put us in a wagon and took us to the “mom” camp, where my angel-like plump woman with golden curls.

Khava Volovich " mommy camp"

Friends, today there will be a difficult and terrible post about what was actually done to people in Stalin's times in the dungeons of the OGPU-NKVD, as well as in the camps of the Gulag system, about which, for example, former prisoners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov wrote a lot.

Ordinary Soviet citizens of those years, from among those who go to work every day as some kind of office workers, for the most part did not know what exactly was happening somewhere nearby, and what terrible mechanisms the Soviet system hides behind the facade. People only watched how one or another acquaintance suddenly disappeared, they were afraid of black cars, the night light of headlights in the yard and the creak of car brakes, but they preferred to remain silent - fearing this dark unknown.

What actually happened in the Gulag became known much later, including from the drawings of those who saw all these things with their own eyes. These are very scary drawings, but you need to look at them - to remember and never repeat.

Under the cut, the continuation and the same drawings from the Gulag.

First, a little about who drew all this. The name of the author of drawings and captions to them is Danzig Baldaev- and unlike most other artists of the Gulag, Danzig was "on the other side of the bars" - that is, he was not a prisoner, but a real warden, and saw a little more than ordinary prisoners.

Danzig Baldaev was born in 1925 in the family of a Buryat folklorist and ethnographer Sergei Petrovich Baldaev and a peasant woman Stepanida Yegorovna. Danzig was left without a mother early - she died when the boy was only 10 years old. In 1938, his father was arrested on a denunciation, and Danzig ended up in an orphanage for the children of "enemies of the people." As Danzig later said, there were 156 children of the commanding staff of the Red Army, nobles and intellectuals in the house - many were fluent in several European languages.

After serving in the army on the border with Manchuria, Danzig Baldaev falls into the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - he works as a guard in a prison and begins to collect prison folklore and tattoos, as well as make sketches. During the years of service, Danzig visited dozens of Stalin's camps in the Gulag system, was in Central Asia, Ukraine, in the North and in the Baltics.

As Danzig said after the fall of the USSR - during the years of Stalinism, not only his father was arrested, but also 58 people from among his relatives - they all died in the dungeons of the OGPU-NKVD, according to Baldaev - they were all literate people - land surveyors, doctors, technicians, machine operators, teachers... Perhaps this is what made Danzig Baldaev draw in detail and in detail all the horrors of the Gulag. As he would later write in his autobiography, "It's a pity, I'm already over seventy, but at the same time it's good that I managed to scoop up a part of the ridge from our irrevocably leaving slave past and put it in all its glory for future generations".

Now let's look at the pictures.

02. Interrogation in the OGPU-NKVD. That's about the same things they did to people before they were sent to the execution chamber or to the Gulag camps. In the Stalinist planned economy, there was a “plan”, including for spies - a person could be arrested “for espionage” on a denunciation, if, for example, in the kitchen in the closet he has not cheap margarine, but butter - well, obviously financed from Japanese intelligence ! Such a denunciation was written by the neighbors in the communal apartment themselves, and after the arrest of the "spy" they received full possession of his room and property.

Not avoided the arrest and delusional charges, including celebrities with a worldwide reputation. Vsevolod Meyerhold, the famous theater director was arrested on June 20, 1939 - he was accused of "collaborating with German, Japanese, Latvian and other intelligence services." The sick 65-year-old Meyerhold was laid face down on the floor and beaten with a rubber tourniquet on his legs, heels on his back, beaten in the face with a swing from a height. Meyerhold was tortured for a total of seven months, after which he was shot as a spy and organizer of the "Trotskyist group."

03. Interrogation of "enemies of the people". People were interrogated for several days without sleep, water, food and rest. A man who had fallen to the floor was doused with water, beaten and then lifted to his feet again. For their "zeal" the executioners were awarded orders and honorably retired in the fifties and sixties.

04. The use of ancient torture during interrogations - hanging people on the rack.

05. The procedure for the execution by the NKVD of party cadres from the national republics of the USSR. As Danzig Baldaev writes, such "procedures" were carried out periodically during the Stalin years in order to prevent the emergence of a national sense of justice in the Union republics.

06. A very scary drawing called "9 grams - the ticket of the CPSU to a" happy childhood. orphanages were overcrowded, plus the Soviet authorities considered such children as their potential enemies in the future ...

07. Torture of a prisoner by binding with a "swallow". Such things were used as a "punishment" for some misdeeds, and as a means to knock out confessions (most often in what a person did not commit).

08. Interrogation of women was often conducted like this. In general, Danzig Baldaev has a lot of drawings with torture, including women, I won’t give them all here - they are too scary.

09. Later, women who ended up in the camp with their children often had their children taken away. Varlam Shalamov in one of his "Kolyma stories" described a notebook with drawings of such a child from the Gulag - the fabulous Ivan Tsarevich was dressed in a padded jacket, earflaps and had a PPSh on his shoulder, and barbed wire was stretched around the perimeter of the "kingdom" and there were towers with machine gunners. ..

10. The privileged position of criminals in the Gulag camps. The OGPU-NKVD often very easily found a common language with real criminals, so that they pressed and suppressed the "political" in every possible way. Such cases are repeatedly described by Varlam Shalamov - "political" thieves' criminals declared - "you are an enemy of the people, and I am a friend of the people!"

11. Camp relations between criminals in the Gulag. Losing cards was one of the formal reasons for reprisals against political ones - at first the criminals forced (under the threat of beating or death) to sit down to play cards with them, and after a predictable loss, they dealt with the loser, allegedly having a "formal reason" for that. According to the internal camp articles, such "showdowns" took place under the guise of "these criminals again did not divide something among themselves."

12. The massacre of the "enemy of the people", who did not want to write off his production norms on criminals (without which, by the way, it was often impossible to get even the most elementary ration). Such murders were not uncommon in the Gulag, the camp administration forgave everything to the criminals, writing off such incidents as "accidents."

13. Another type of "camp self-government" in Stalin's camps is the exemplary execution of "objectionable" people by the criminals themselves. If in the Nazi camps the prisoners tried to stick together and somehow support each other, then in the Stalinist dungeons society was divided into "castes and classes" even in the camp.

14. The drawing is called "Sending blind people to a settlement in the Arctic Ocean", thus in the Gulag they often got rid of corpses - in winter the bodies were thrown into an ice hole, in summer they were buried in long trenches, which were later covered with earth and planted with turf.

15. The criminal kills the "bull", which he lured into the company to escape. Such cases are repeatedly described in the literature about the Gulag, including Varlam Shalamov - one of the people who were sitting in the camp, whom the thieves suddenly began to feed, suspected that he was being prepared for the role of a "bull".

16. The “enemies of the people” killed during the escape were brought back to the camp like this - they were usually killed by the special group of the NKVD-MVD, and the prisoners themselves carried them to the camp.

17. GULAG "joke" for newcomers to the zone in the winter:

18. People who could not stand the torment sometimes simply rushed into the restricted area under the bullets of machine gunners ...

Yes, I forgot to say - even at that time there was very tasty ice cream.

Write in the comments what you think about this.

Quite recently, a site of photo and film documents "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" has appeared. This is the first online resource that contains photographic materials from the archives of the repressive bodies of Soviet power. The basis of the site will be archival materials of the NKVD and KGB: 12 ​​tons of folders in two containers. So over time it may become the largest informative resource-archive of camp photographs and documents in the world.
http://www.gulag.ipvnews.org/

The author of the project is former member board of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, and now the famous American photographer Sergei Melnikoff. He himself served a long term in the political camps of the USSR - for free-thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for a trial of the CPSU.

The love of climbing behind fences with a sign "Forbidden Zone" led to the fact that the Soviet dissident, along with "native" special agencies, was also wanted by the North Korean regime for unauthorized filming inside the concentration camps of this country.

Immediately with the beginning of Gorbachev's glasnost, Melnikoff organized a photo-documentary exhibition, unprecedented even in today's times, "Accusing the USSR of experiments on people." Japan, South Korea The United States immediately recognized the uniqueness of the material presented and arranged a world tour for the exhibition. The Soviet press spoke of the exhibition through clenched teeth, mostly slinging mud at its author.

A year later, Sergei and his family were forced to flee from the USSR through Mongolia to China, illegally, at night crossing state border with a one year old daughter in her arms.

In China, they were hidden for a long time by the American CBS News. The same powerful television corporation achieved for the fugitives, directly from the UN, the status of political refugees (the third case in the entire history of Soviet dissidence). The family, which the KGB was already looking for, was transported by the US government and the UN to Thailand, and then was able to immigrate to the US, where Sergei founded his own non-profit television company, IPV News USA. In the last decade and a half, he continues to go on endless expeditions to all six continents of the Earth. Even signed up for a flight into space ...

And so, "GULAG - with a camera through the camps" appeared on the network. The new resource is a collection of unique photographs made from negatives that fell into the hands of Sergei as a result of a dozen trips to the Stalinist camps preserved in the wilderness, and as a result of a suddenly awakened commercial interest among people who previously served faithfully and faithfully "the country of October". These people with "warm hearts, cold heads and clean hands" helped Sergei become the owners of priceless photographic documents. Well, who else besides them could have evidence of crimes against their own people?! ..

Specialists from numerous camps, strewn with a map of Russia, like black dots of an old lampshade covered with flies, not only began to sell everything they could, but, smelling the smell of money, like many of their Lubyanka "colleagues", began to run across to where the smell was coming from. Many of them settled in the newly created tax inspectorates. Then, as we know, their appetites increased immeasurably.

What is shown in the photographs amazes even seasoned connoisseurs of the "charms" of the Soviet regime. And they were filmed by one of those who did all this. Like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, they looked again and again at the evidence of their atrocities.

Because of this unnatural hobby for normal people, today we have the opportunity to look into this terrible world. Their world. A world in which there are no such concepts as philanthropy, spirituality, compassion, decency, friendliness, intelligence, selflessness, generosity of the soul.

The photographs are accompanied by such terrible force of texts that they leave no stone unturned from the myth that today's successors of the "Iron Felix" case - the real moral monster and the real executioner of Russia - Dzerzhinsky, continue to hammer into the heads of Russians. The myth of supposedly wise, just and disinterested "knights without fear or reproach". Moreover, the current, irremovable despite continuous failures, the chief Chekist agreed to the point that his subordinates are "... modern-minded, educated people ..., modern" non-gentry "...

Well, "nobles"!.. "Nobles" who once a year - in December - celebrate the founding of their office not since the beginning of the 90s, but since 1918! That is, they consider themselves the successors of the cause of the people's executioners Dzerzhinsky, Peters, Menzhinsky, Yegoda, Yezhov, Beria ...

In addition to the photo galleries "Butugychag" and "Prickly Truth", the site contains articles that are deadly in their power, for example - "Death Valley", "Marble Gorge", "Georgy Zhzhenov's stage", " The highest measure Punishment", "Letter from a Scoundrel", "Children's Gulag", "Kill Stalin" and "Dedicated to Bitches from the KGB". us.

That's what the mentioned monsters in human form and their henchmen were doing and the story is being told on the pages of Sergey Melnikoff's project. The narrative becomes even more terrible from the fact that it is accompanied by "visual aids" - evidence of the deepest fall of the knights of fear and reproach. Reproaches, which they have not yet really heard from a society tired of reforms. But this does not mean that they will never hear them. Sergey Melnikoff's project brings these days closer.

We look forward to new articles, as well as photo galleries of this enthusiastic, wonderful person and a true citizen of our Fatherland and only part-time Citizen of the World - Sergey Melnikoff!

In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of Sergei himself: "... Human memory does not contain such a force of grief, such a scale of tragedy that the people got Russian Empire from the Bolsheviks. That is why the executioners easily avoid retribution, and the next generation is already doomed to repeats. We are obliged to bring to justice the criminals, old and new, so that every next ruler knows what threatens him with the implanted despotism ... "

"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners. Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program.

It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.

The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. In a special TV show hosted by live NHK of Japan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn also participated with the author (by phone).

"Valley of Death" is a rare piece of evidence that captures the true face of the Soviet government and its vanguard: VChK-NKVD-MGB-KGB.

Attention! This page shows photographs of a human brain autopsy. Please do not view this page if you are an easily excitable person, suffer from any form of mental disorder, if you are pregnant or under 18 years of age.

I have seen many concentration camps. Both old and new. I spent several years in one of them. Then I studied the history of the camps Soviet Union on archival documents, but I got into the worst one a year before the moment when the KGB forced me to flee the country. This camp was called "Butugychag", which in translation from the language of Russian northern peoples means "Valley of Death".

* Butugychag, where they were not buried, but thrown off a cliff. There were pits dug. Oksana went there when she was free (see). What should be there to surprise a person who has served 10 years! I saw an old man there: he was walking behind the zone, crying. He served 15 years, does not return home, walks here, begging. Said this is your future.

(Nina Hagen-Thorn)

The place got its name when hunters and nomadic tribes of reindeer herders from the families of Egorovs, Dyachkovs and Krokhalevs, wandering along the Detrin River, came across a huge field dotted with human skulls and bones, and when the deer in the herd began to get sick with a strange disease - at first their wool fell out on legs, and then the animals lay down and could not get up. Mechanically, this name passed to the remains of the Beria camps of the 14th branch of the Gulag.

The zone is huge. It took me many hours to cross it from end to end. Buildings or their remains could be seen everywhere: along the main gorge, where the buildings of the enrichment factory stand; in many lateral mountain branches; behind neighboring hills, densely indented with scars of search pits and holes in adits. In the village of Ust-Omchug, closest to the zone, I was warned that it was not safe to walk along the local hills - at any moment you could fall into the old adit.

The well-traveled road ended in front of the uranium enrichment plant, gaping with black gaps in the windows. There is nothing around. The radiation killed every living thing. Only moss grows on black stones. The poet Anatoly Zhigulin, who was sitting in this camp, said that at the furnaces, where water was evaporated from the uranium concentrate after washing on metal trays, the prisoners worked for one to two weeks, after which they died, and new slaves were driven to replace them. That was the level of radiation.

My Geiger counter came to life long before I got to the factory. In the building itself, it crackled without interruption. And when I approached the 23 metal barrels of concentrate that had been left against the outer wall, the danger signal became unbearably loud. Active construction went on here in the early 40s, when the question arose: who would be the first owner of atomic weapons.

* 380 thousand people found their death in Butugychag. This is more than the current population of the entire Magadan region. It was here that highly classified experiments were conducted on the brains of prisoners.

From the wooden gate, with handles polished to a shine by the palms of convicts, I pass to the cemetery. Rare sticks stuck between boulders, with plaques-tablets. However, the inscriptions are no longer readable. Bleached, erased their time and wind.

"Soviet Kolyma"

“Recently, two operations were carried out in the Magadan hospital, during a conditional “gas attack”. The doctors, the medical staff who helped them and the patients put on gas masks. The surgeons Pulleritz and Sveshnikov, nurse Antonova, orderlies Karpenyuk and Terekhina took part in the operation. The first operation was performed on one of the fighters of the border detachment, who had an enlargement of the veins of the spermatic cord. Patient K. had his appendix removed. Both operations, including preparation, took 65 minutes. The first experience of surgeons in gas masks in Kolyma was quite a success.”

Even if during the experiment a gas mask was also put on the patient, then what did the experimenters do with a hole open in the stomach?

So, moving from building to building, from the ruins of complexes obscure to me, concentrated at the bottom of the gorge, I climb to the very top of the ridge, to a solitary standing, intact camp. A piercingly cold wind drives low clouds. Latitude of Alaska. Summer is here, at most, two months a year. And in winter, the frost is such that if you pour water from the second floor, then ice falls to the ground.

Rusty tin cans rumbled underfoot near the soldier's tower. Picked up one. There is also an inscription in English. This is stew. From America for Red Army soldiers at the front. And for the Soviet internal troops". Did Roosevelt know who he was feeding?

I go into one of the barracks, crowded with bunk beds. Only they are very small. Even crouched, they can not fit. Maybe they are for women? Yes, the size is too small for women. But now, a rubber galosh caught my eye. She lay forlornly under the corner bunks. My God! The galosh fits completely in the palm of my hand. So, these are bunk beds for children! So I went to the other side of the ridge. Here, right behind the "Butugychag", there was a large women's camp "Bacchante", which functioned at the same time.

Remains are everywhere. Here and there fragments, joints of tibia bones come across.

In the burnt ruins, I stumbled upon a chest bone. Among the ribs, a porcelain crucible caught my attention - I worked with such in the biological laboratories of the university. The incomparable, sugary smell of human ashes oozes from under the stones...

*“I am a geologist, and I know that the former zone is located in the area of ​​a powerful polymetallic ore cluster. Here, in the interfluve of Detrin and Tenka, reserves of gold, silver, and cassiterite are concentrated. But Butugychag is also known for the manifestation of radioactive rocks, in particular uranium-containing ones. Due to the nature of my work, I have had to visit these places more than once. The enormous force of the radioactive background is detrimental to all living things here. This is the reason for the tremendous mortality in the zone. Radiation at Butygychag is uneven. Somewhere it reaches a very high, extremely life-threatening level, but there are also places where the background is quite acceptable.

A. Rudnev. 1989

The day of research was over. I had to hurry down, where in the house of a modern power plant, at its caretaker, I found shelter for these days.

Victor, the owner of the house, was sitting on the porch when I wearily approached and sat down beside him.

Where were you, what did you see? he asked monosyllabically.

I told about the uranium factory, the children's camp, the mines.

Yes, don’t eat berries here and don’t drink water from the rivers, ”Victor interrupted and nodded at a barrel of imported water standing on car wheels.

And what are you looking for?

I narrowed my eyes, looked point-blank at the young master of the house.

Mine, under the letter "C" ...

You won't find. They used to know where it was, but after the war, when they began to close the camps, they blew everything up, and all Butugychag's plans disappeared from the geological department. Only the stories that the letter "C" was filled to the very top with the corpses of those who were shot remained.

He paused. - Yes, not in the mines, and not in the children's camps, the secret of "Butugychag". There's their secret, - Victor showed his hand in front of him. - Behind the river, you see. There was a laboratory complex. Strongly guarded.

What did they do in it?

And you go tomorrow to the upper cemetery. Look...

But before going to the mysterious cemetery, Victor and I examined the “laboratory complex”.

The area is tiny. It was made up of several houses. All of them are diligently destroyed. Blasted to the ground. Only one strong end wall remained standing. It's strange: out of the entire huge number of buildings in "Butugychag", only the "infirmary" was destroyed - it was burned to the ground, yes, this zone.

The first thing I saw were the remains of a powerful ventilation system with characteristic bells. Such systems are equipped with fume hoods in all chemical and biological laboratories. Four rows of barbed wire perimeter stretched around the foundations of the former buildings. It still survives in places. Inside the perimeter are poles with electrical insulators. It seems that a high voltage current was also used to protect the object.

Making my way among the ruins, I remembered the story of Sergei Nikolaev from the village of Ust-Omchug:

“Just before the entrance to the Butugychag, there was an Object No. 14. What they did there, we did not know. But this area was guarded especially carefully. We worked as civilians, as explosives in the mines, and had a pass to pass through the entire territory of Butygychag. But in order to get to object No. 14, one more was needed - a special pass, and with it it was necessary to go through nine checkpoints. Everywhere sentries with dogs. On the hills around - machine gunners: the mouse will not slip through. 06 served "Object No. 14" specially built nearby airfield.

Truly top secret.

Yes, the bombers knew their business. There is little left. True, the nearby prison building survived, or, as it is called in the documents of the Gulag, - "BUR" - a high-security barrack. It is composed of roughly hewn stone boulders, covered from the inside of the building with a thick layer of plaster. On the remains of the plaster in two chambers, we found the inscriptions scratched with a nail: “30.XI.1954. Evening”, “Kill me” and the inscription in Latin script, in one word: “Doctor”.

Horse skulls were an interesting find. I counted 11 of them. About five or six lay inside the foundation of one of the blown up buildings.

It is unlikely that horses were used here as a draft force. The same opinion is shared by those who went through the Kolyma camps.

“I personally visited many enterprises in those years and I know that even for the removal of timber from the hills, for all cases, not to mention mountain work, one type of labor was used - the manual labor of prisoners ...”

From the answer of the former constable F. Bezbabichev to the question of how horses were used in the economy of the camps.

Well, at the dawn of the nuclear age, they might well have been trying to get an anti-radiation serum. And this cause, since the time of Louis Pasteur, it was the horses that served faithfully.

How long ago was that? After all, the Butugychag complex has been well preserved. The bulk of the camps in Kolyma were closed after the "exposure" and execution of their godfather - Lavrenty Beria. In the weather station house, which stands above the children's camp, I managed to find an observation log. The last date stamped on it is May 1956.

Why are these ruins called a laboratory? I asked Victor.

Once a car with three passengers drove up, - he began to tell, clearing in the weeds, among the broken tiles, another horse skull. There was a woman with them. And although guests are rare here, they did not name themselves. They got out of the car at my house, looked around, and then, the woman, pointing to the ruins, said: “There was a laboratory here. And over there - the airport ... ".

They did not stay long, and they could not be asked about anything. But all three are aged, well dressed...

* A female doctor saved my life when I was imprisoned in one of the most terrible mines in Kolyma - Butugychag. Her name was Maria Antonovna, her last name was unknown to us ...

(From the memoirs of Fyodor Bezbabichev)

The Berlag camps were especially secret and is it any wonder that no official data on their prisoners can be obtained. But there are archives. The KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the party archives - lists of prisoners are stored somewhere. In the meantime, only scanty, fragmentary data suggest a carefully erased trace. Exploring the abandoned Kolyma camps, I looked through thousands of newspapers and archival references, getting closer and closer to the truth.

The writer Asir Sandler, the author of "Knots for Memory" published in the USSR, told me that one of his readers was a prisoner of a mysterious sharashka - scientific institution where the prisoners worked. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan...

The secret of the Butugychag complex was revealed the next day, when, with difficulty navigating the intricacies of the ridges, we climbed a mountain saddle. It was this secluded place that the camp administration chose for one of the cemeteries. The other two: "officer's" - for the camp staff and, possibly, for civilians, as well as a large "Zekov's" - are located below. The first is near the processing plant. The belonging of his dead to the administration is given out by wooden pedestals with stars. The second begins immediately outside the walls of the burnt infirmary, which is understandable. Why drag the dead over the mountains ... And here, from the central part, at least a mile. Yes, even up.

Slightly noticeable mounds. They can be mistaken for a natural relief, if they were not numbered. As soon as they sprinkled gravel on the dead man, they stuck a stick next to it with a number punched on the lid of a can of stew. But where do the convicts get canned food from? Two-digit numbers with a letter of the alphabet: Г45; B27; A50...

At first glance, the number of graves here is not so great. Ten and a half rows of crooked sticks with numbers. There are 50-60 graves in each row. This means that only about a thousand people found their last refuge here.

But, closer to the edge of the saddle, I find marks of a different type. There are no individual mounds here. On a flat area, the posts are dense, like the teeth of a comb. Ordinary short sticks - branches of chopped trees. Already without tin covers and numbers. Just mark the place.

Two swollen mounds indicate the pits where the dead were dumped in a heap. Most likely, this “ritual” was carried out in winter, when it was not possible to bury each one individually, in frozen and hard as concrete soil. The pits, in this case, were harvested from the summer.

And here's what Victor was talking about. Under the elfin bush, in a grave torn apart by animals or people, lies a half of a human skull. The upper part of the vault, half an inch above the brow ridges, is neatly and evenly cut. Clearly a surgical cut.

Among them are many other bones of the skeleton, but what attracts my attention is the upper cut off part of the skull with a bullet hole in the back of the head. This is a very important find, because it indicates that the opened skulls are not a medical examination to determine the cause of death. Who first puts a bullet in the back of the head, and then performs an anatomical autopsy to determine the cause of death?

We need to open one of the graves, - I say to my fellow traveler. - You need to make sure that this is not the "work" of today's vandals. Victor himself told about the raids on the camp cemeteries of the village punks: they take out skulls and make lamps out of them.

We choose the grave under the number "G47". Didn't have to dig. Literally five centimeters through the soil thawed over the summer, the sapper shovel hit something.

Carefully! Don't damage the bones.

Yes, there is a coffin, - the assistant answered.

Coffin?! I was amazed. A coffin for a convict is as unseen as if we stumbled upon the remains of an alien. This is truly an amazing cemetery.

Never, nowhere in the vast expanses of the Gulag, were prisoners buried in coffins. They threw them into the adits, buried them in the ground, and in winter they simply buried them in the snow, drowned them in the sea, but so that coffins would be made for them?! .. Yes, it looks like this is a “sharashka” cemetery. Then the presence of coffins is understandable. After all, the convicts were buried by the convicts themselves. And they were not supposed to see the opened heads.

*In 1942, there was a stage in the Tenkinsky district, where I ended up. The road to Tenka began to be built sometime in 1939, when Commissar 2nd Rank Pavlov became the head of Dalstroy, and Colonel Garanin became the head of USVITL. Everyone who fell into the clutches of the NKVD was first of all fingerprinted. This was the beginning of the camp life of any person. This is how she ended. When a person died in a prison or camp, then he, already dead, went through exactly the same procedure. Fingerprints were taken from the deceased, they were compared with the original ones, and only after that he was buried, and the case was transferred to the archive.

(From the memoirs of s / c Vadim Kozin)

At the north end of the cemetery, the ground is littered with bones. Clavicles, ribs, tibia, vertebrae. All over the field, halves of skulls turn white. Straight cut over toothless jaws. Big, small, but equally restless, thrown out of the ground by an evil hand, they lie under the piercing blue sky of Kolyma. Is it possible that such a terrible fate dominated their owners that even the bones of these people are doomed to reproach? And it still pulls here with the stench of bloody years.

Again a series of questions: who needed the brains of these unfortunates? What years? By whose command? Who the hell are these "scientists" who, with ease, like a hare, put a bullet into a human head, and then, with devilish meticulousness, gutted the still smoking brains? And where are the archives? How many masks does it take to judge the Soviet system for the crime called genocide?

None of the well-known encyclopedias provides data on experiments on living human material, except to look in the materials of the Nuremberg trials. Only the following is obvious: it was in those years when the Butugychag was functioning that the effect of radioactivity on the human body was intensively studied. There can be no talk of any autopsies of those who died in the camps for a medical report on the causes of death. None of the camps did this. A human life was worth negligibly cheap in Soviet Russia.

The trepanation of skulls could not be carried out on the initiative of local authorities. per program nuclear weapons and everything that was connected with it, Lavrenty Beria and Igor Kurchatov were personally responsible.

It remains to assume the existence of a successfully implemented state program, sanctioned at the level of the government of the USSR. For similar crimes against humanity, "Nazis" are being chased around Latin America to this day. But only in relation to domestic executioners and misanthropes, their native department shows enviable deafness and blindness. Is it because the sons of executioners are sitting in warm armchairs today?

Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, extracted no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a “not clean” picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances that are released during pain and psychological shock appear in the brain tissues.

Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.

I took with me two fragments from different skulls, for examination. Fortunately, there was a familiar prosecutor in the Khabarovsk Territory - Valentin Stepankov (later - the Prosecutor General of Russia).

You understand what it smells like, - the prosecutor of the region with the badge of a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the lapel of his jacket looked at me, lowering the sheet with my questions for the expert. - Yes, and according to the affiliation, the Magadan prosecutor's office, and not mine, should deal with this case ...

I was silent.

Okay, Stepankov nodded, - I also have a conscience. And he pressed the button on the table.

Prepare a decision to initiate a criminal case, - he turned to the newcomer. And again to me: - Otherwise, I can not send the bones for examination.

What's the deal? the assistant asked.

Pass it on to the people of Magadan...

*... I repeat, in Magadan live those responsible for the death of those prisoners who were sent under the numbers of the letter thousand "3-2", of which 36 people survived in one winter.

(P. Martynov, prisoner of the Kolyma camps No. 3-2-989)

The conclusion of the examination 221-FT, I received a month later. Here is his abridged summary:

“The right part of the skull, presented for research, belongs to the body of a young man, no more than 30 years old. The sutures of the skull between the bones are not closed. Anatomical and morphological features indicate that the bone belongs to the part of the male skull with characteristic features European race.

The presence of multiple defects in the compact layer (multiple, deep cracks, areas of scarification), their complete fatlessness, white color, fragility and brittleness, indicate the prescription of the death of the man who owned the skull, 35 years or more from the moment of the study.

The smooth upper edges of the frontal and temporal bones were formed from sawing them, as evidenced by the traces of sliding - tracks from the action of a sawing tool (for example, a saw). Given the location of the cut on the bones and its direction, I believe that this cut could have been formed during an anatomical examination of the skull and brain.

Part of the skull number 2, more likely belonged to a young woman. The even upper edge on the frontal bone was formed by cutting a sawing tool - a saw, as evidenced by step-like slip marks - routes.

Part of the skull No. 2, judging by the less altered bone tissue, was in the burial places for less time than part of the skull No. 1, given that both parts were in the same conditions (climatic, soil, etc.) ”

Forensic medical expert V. A. Kuzmin.

Khabarovsk Regional Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination.

My search didn't end there. I visited Butugychag two more times. More and more interesting materials fell into the hands. Witnesses appeared.

P. Martynov, a prisoner of the Kolyma camps under the number 3-2-989, points to the direct physical extermination of the Butugychag prisoners that took place: “Their remains were buried at the Shaitan pass. Despite the fact that in order to hide the traces of crimes, the place was from time to time cleared of the remains pulled by animals from the glacier on the pass, and today there are human bones on a huge area ... "

Perhaps there you need to look for an adit under the letter "C"?

We managed to get interesting information from the editorial office of the Leninskoye Znamya newspaper in Ust-Omchug (now the newspaper is called Tenka), where a large mining and processing plant is located - Tenkinsky GOK, to which Butugychag belonged.

The journalists handed me a note from Semyon Gromov, the former deputy director of the Mining and Processing Plant. The note touched upon a topic of interest to me. But, perhaps, the price of this information was Gromov's life.

Here is the text of this note:

“The daily “withdrawal” along the Tenlag was 300 convicts. The main reasons are hunger, illness, fights between prisoners and just "shooting the convoy." At the Tymoshenko mine, a OP was organized - a health center for those who had already “reached”. This point, of course, did not heal anyone, but some professor worked there with the prisoners: he went and drew circles on the robes of prisoners with a pencil - these will die tomorrow. By the way, on the other side of the track, on a small plateau, there is a strange cemetery. Strange because everyone buried there has sawn skulls. Isn't it related to the professor's work?

Semyon Gromov recorded this in the early 80s and soon died in a car accident.

I also got another document from the GOK - the results of radiological studies at the Butugychag facility, as well as measurements of the radioactivity of objects. All these documents were strictly confidential. When the US War Department, at my request, requested geological map this area, even the CIA denied the presence of uranium mining in these places. And I visited six special facilities of the uranium Gulag of the Magadan region, and one of the camps is located at the very edge of the Arctic Ocean, not far from the polar city of Pevek.

I found Khasana Niyazov already in 1989, when perestroika and glasnost relieved the fear of many. The 73-year-old woman was not afraid to give an hour-long interview in front of a TV camera.

From the recording of the interview with H. Niyazova:

H.N. - I have not been to Butugychag, God bless. We considered it a penal camp.

- How were the prisoners buried?

H.N. - No way. Sprinkled with earth or snow if he died in winter, and that's it.

- Were there coffins?

H.N. - Never. What coffins are there!

- Why are all convicts buried in coffins at one of the three cemeteries of "Butugychag" and their skulls have been sawn apart?

H.N. - It was opened by doctors ...

- For what purpose?

H.N. - We, among the prisoners, were talking: they were doing experiments. Learned something.

- Was it done only in Butugychag, or somewhere else?

H.N. - Not. Only in Butugychag.

- When did you learn about the experiments at Butugychag?

H.N. - It was around 1948-49, the conversations were fleeting, but we were all frightened by this ...

- Maybe it was sawed alive?

H.N. - And who knows... There was a very large medical unit. There were even professors ... "

I interviewed Hasan Niyazov after my second visit to Butugychag. Listening to the courageous woman, I looked at her hands with the camp number burned out.

It can't be! - then exclaim Jak Sheahan, - the chief of the CBS News bureau, peering at the screen and not believing his eyes. - I always thought that it was only in the fascist camps ...

I was looking for Shaitan Pass. Remember, Martynov, prisoner No. 3-2-989, wrote that after the experiments, the corpses were buried in a glacier at the pass. And the cemetery indicated by Victor was in a different place. There was no pass, no glacier. Perhaps there were several special cemeteries. Where is Satan, no one remembers. The name was known, heard before, but there are about two dozen passes in the Butugychag area.

On one of them, I stumbled upon an adit walled up with an ice plug. She would not have attracted attention in any way if it were not for the remnants of clothing frozen into the ice. These were Zekov's robes. I know them too well to be confused with something else. All this meant only one thing: the entrance was walled up on purpose when the camp was still working.

Finding a crowbar and a pickaxe was not difficult. They were scattered around the galleries in abundance.

The last blow of the crowbar broke through the ice wall. After opening a hole for the body to pass through, I slid down the rope off the giant stalactite blocking the way. Flicked the switch. The beam of the lantern played in some kind of gray atmosphere, sort of smoked by smokers. A cloyingly sweet smell tickled my throat. From the ceiling, a beam glided over an icy wall and…

I started. Before me was the road to hell. From the very bottom to the middle, the passage was littered with half-decomposed bodies of people. The rags of decayed clothes covered the bare bones, the skulls turned white under the tufts of hair...

Backing away, I left the dead place. No nerves are enough to spend considerable time here. I only managed to note the presence of things. Knapsacks, knapsacks, collapsed suitcases. And more ... bags. Seems to be female hair. Big, full, almost my height ...

The posters of my photo exhibition “The accusation of the USSR in experiments on people” so excited the authorities of Khabarovsk that both the head of the KGB department of the region and prosecutors of all ranks, not to mention party bosses, arrived at the opening. The officials present gritted their teeth, but could not do anything - in the hall were the operators of the Japanese NHK, headed by one of the directors of this powerful television company - my friend.

The prosecutor general of the region, Valentin Stepankov, added fuel to the fire. Having jumped on a black "Volga", he picked up a microphone and ... officially opened the exhibition.

Taking advantage of the moment, I asked the head of the KGB, Lieutenant General Pirozhnyak, to make inquiries about the Butugychag camps.

The answer came surprisingly quickly. The very next day, a man in civilian clothes appeared at the exhibition and said that the archives were in the information and computer center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB in Magadan, but they had not been dismantled.

To my request over the phone to work with the archives, the head of the Magadan KGB, laughing, answered:

Well, what are you! The archive is huge. You will take it apart, Seryozha, well ... for seven years ...

*Among the description of cruel torments, suddenly, as if by itself, comes a recollection of a cheerful, joyful - albeit extremely rare in the Butugychag hell. The soul, immersed in painful memories, seems to repel them and even among them finds goodness and warmth - two tomatoes of Hans. Oh how good they were! But it is not at all the taste and not the rarity of such exquisite food that comes first here. In the first place - Good, miraculously preserved in the human soul. If there is even a drop of Good, then there is Hope.

(A. Zhigulin)

On my third and last visit to Butugychag, my main goal was to film a special cemetery on videotape.

I go around the dug up graves, looking for a whole box. Here is a corner of the board peeking out from under the stones. I rake the rubble so that it does not fall into the coffin. The board is rotten, you have to lift it with care.

Under the arm, leaning his forehead against the side wall, a large male skull grins toothily. The upper part of it is evenly sawn. It fell away like the lid of a hideous box, revealing a sticky coating of the remains of a once-stolen brain. The bones of the skull are yellow, which have not seen the sun, on the eye sockets and cheekbones the hair is pulled up on the face of the scalp. This is the process of trepanation...

I carry into the coffin all the skulls picked up along the field.

“Sleep well,” is it possible to say so in this cemetery?

I'm already far from the graves, and the yellow skull - here it is, nearby. I see him lying in his coffin-box. How were you killed, unfortunate? Isn't that terrible death, for the "purity of the experiment"? And wasn’t a free-standing drill built for you a hundred meters from the blown-up laboratory?

And why are there words on its walls: "Kill me..."; "Doctor"?

Who are you, prisoner, what is your name? Isn't your mother still waiting for you?

“I am writing from a distant land... I am still waiting to meet my son. It so happened. 1942 Her husband and son were drafted into the army. I received a funeral for my husband, but there is still nothing for my son. I made a request wherever I could ... And in 1943 I received a letter. It is not known who the author is. He writes like this: your son, Mikhail Chalkov, did not return from work, we were together in the Magadan camp in the Omchug valley, if there is an opportunity, I will tell you. And that's it!

I still cannot understand why my son did not write a single letter and how did he get there?

Forgive my concern, but if you have children, you will believe how difficult it is for parents. I devoted all my youth to waiting, left alone with four children ...

Describe that camp. I'm still waiting, maybe he's there ... "

Karaganda region, Kazakh SSR,

Chalkova A. L.

In the death camp "Butugychag" died:

01. Maglich Foma Savvich - captain 1st rank, chairman of the commission for the acceptance of ships in Komsomolsk-on-Amur;

02. Sleptsov Petr Mikhailovich - Colonel who served with Rokossovsky;

03. Kazakov Vasily Markovich - senior lieutenant from the army of General Dovator;

04. Nazim Grigory Vladimirovich - chairman of the collective farm from the Chernihiv region;

05. Morozov Ivan Ivanovich - sailor of the Baltic Fleet;

06. Bondarenko Alexander Nikolaevich - a factory locksmith from Nikopol;

07. Rudenko Alexander Petrovich - senior lieutenant of aviation;

08. Belousov Yuri Afanasyevich - "penalty box" from the battalion on Malaya Zemlya;

09. Reshetov Mikhail Fedorovich - tanker;

10. Yankovsky - secretary of the Odessa regional committee of the Komsomol;

11. Ratkevich Vasily Bogdanovich - Belarusian teacher;

12. Star Pavel Trofimovich - senior lieutenant, tanker;

13. Ryabokon Nikolai Fedorovich - auditor from the Zhytomyr region;

330000. ...

330001. ...

I described the camp to you.

Forgive me, mother.

Sergey Melnikoff, Magadan region, 1989-90 original on the portal "GULAG - with a camera through the camps"

The second quarter of the 20th century was one of the most difficult periods in the history of our country. This time is marked not only by the Great Patriotic War but also mass repressions. During the existence of the Gulag (1930-1956), according to various sources, from 6 to 30 million people visited the labor camps dispersed throughout the republics.

After Stalin's death, the camps began to be abolished, people tried to leave these places as soon as possible, many projects that had been given thousands of lives fell into decay. However, evidence of that dark era is still alive.

"Perm-36"

A strict regime labor colony in the village of Kuchino, Perm Region, existed until 1988. In the days of the Gulag, convicted law enforcement officers were sent here, and after that - the so-called political ones. unofficial name"Perm-36" appeared in the 70s, when the institution was given the designation BC-389/36.

Six years after the closure, the Perm-36 Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repressions was opened on the site of the former colony. The crumbling barracks were restored and museum exhibits were placed in them. Lost fences, towers, signal and warning structures, engineering communications were recreated. In 2004, the World Monuments Fund included "Perm-36" in the list of 100 specially protected monuments of world culture. However, now the museum is on the verge of closing - due to insufficient funding and the protests of the communist forces.

Mine "Dneprovsky"

Quite a few wooden buildings have been preserved on the Kolyma River, 300 kilometers from Magadan. This is the former Dneprovsky hard labor camp. In the 1920s, a large tin deposit was discovered here, and especially dangerous criminals were sent to work. In addition to Soviet citizens, Finns, Japanese, Greeks, Hungarians and Serbs atoned for their guilt at the mine. You can imagine the conditions in which they had to work: in summer it can be up to 40 degrees of heat, and in winter - up to minus 60.

From the memoirs of prisoner Pepelyaev: “We worked in two shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch was brought to work. Lunch is 0.5 liters of soup (water with black cabbage), 200 grams of oatmeal and 300 grams of bread. Working during the day is certainly easier. From the night shift, until you get to the zone, until you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep - it’s already lunch, you lie down - check, and then dinner, and - to work.

Road on the bones

The infamous 1,600-kilometer abandoned highway leading from Magadan to Yakutsk. The road began to be built in 1932. Tens of thousands of people who participated in the laying of the route and died there were buried right under the roadway. At least 25 people died every day during construction. For this reason, the tract was called the road on the bones.

The camps along the route were named after kilometer marks. In total, about 800 thousand people passed through the "road of bones". With the construction of the Kolyma federal highway, the old Kolyma highway fell into disrepair. To this day, human remains are found along it.

Karlag

The Karaganda forced labor camp in Kazakhstan, which operated from 1930 to 1959, occupied a huge area: about 300 kilometers from north to south and 200 from east to west. All locals were deported in advance and allowed to land uncultivated by the state farm only in the early 50s. According to reports, they actively assisted in the search for and detention of the fugitives.

There were seven separate settlements on the territory of the camp, in which more than 20 thousand prisoners lived in total. The camp administration was based in the village of Dolinka. Several years ago, a museum in memory of the victims of political repressions was opened in that building, and a monument was erected in front of it.

Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp

The monastery prison on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands appeared in early XVIII century. Priests, heretics and sectarians who were disobedient to the sovereign's will were kept in isolation here. In 1923, when the State Political Directorate under the NKVD decided to expand the network of northern special purpose camps (SLON), one of the largest correctional institutions in the USSR appeared on Solovki.

The number of prisoners (mostly those convicted of serious crimes) increased many times every year. From 2.5 thousand in 1923 to more than 71 thousand by 1930. All the property of the Solovetsky Monastery was transferred to the use of the camp. But already in 1933 it was disbanded. Today, there is only a restored monastery here.