Serpantinka
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Serpantinka
Serpantinka is the informal name for the place of detention and execution at the times of Stalinism. Though never officially found by any expedition it is believed to be located somewhere in the Kolyma region. It was under control of Sevvostlag (a directorate of the Gulag), and the local NKVD troika used it as the second major place for the enforcement of their death sentences during the Great Terror. The few survivors recall "Serpantinka" as one of the most brutal sites, even among Stalin's camps in the Kolyma area. Background In the early thirties, the Soviet leadership decided to start accelerated development of the Kolyma River basin in a very remote and sparsely populated region in the north-east of the USSR, where rich deposits of gold and tin were found. To accomplish this task, a "special type industrial complex" was created, known under the abbreviation "Dalstroy". An important role in these plans was played by the so-called Corrective labor camps, where prisoners had to ...
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Mask Of Sorrow
The Mask of Sorrow (russian: Маска скорби, ''Maska skorbi'') is a monument located on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It consists of a large concrete statue of a face, with tears coming from the left eye in the form of small masks. The right eye is in the form of a barred window. The back side portrays a weeping young woman and a man on a cross with his head hanging backwards. Inside is a replication of a typical Stalin-era prison cell. Below the Mask of Sorrow are stone markers bearing the names of many of the forced-labor camps of the Kolyma, as well as others designating the various religions and political systems of those who suffered there. The statue was unveiled on June 12, 1996 with the help of the Russian government and financial contributions from seven Russian cities, including Magadan. The design was ...
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Extermination Camp
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps also used extermination through labour in order to kill their prisoners. The idea of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities, to which the victims were taken by train, was the result of earlier Nazi experimentation with chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Aktion T4 euthanasia programme against hospital patients with mental and physical disabilities. The technology was adapted, expanded, and applied in wartime ...
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Orotukan
Orotukan (russian: Оротука́н) is an urban locality (an urban-type settlement) in Yagodninsky District of Magadan Oblast, Russia, located in the Kolyma region about north of Magadan, on the right bank of the Orotukan River (a tributary of the Kolyma). Its population has declined since the fall of the Soviet Union: History In 1931, as geologists found gold reserves in the valleys of the Kolyma region, they built a camp on the river close to present location of Orotukan. Shortly thereafter the construction of the Kolyma Highway (also known as the ''Road of Bones'') began. The settlement was founded on its present site in the mid-1930s. It received its name from the river, whose name came from the Yakut word ''өртөөһүн (örtööhün)'' meaning ''small burnt meadow or forest area''. From 1935, a camp in the regional section of the gulag system operated by Dalstroy was located here. In the 1940s, a repair work and factory for mining equipment were established. Oro ...
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Sandarmokh
Sandarmokh (russian: Сандармох; krl, Sandarmoh) is a forest massif from Medvezhyegorsk in the Republic of Karelia where possibly thousands of victims of Stalin's Great Terror were executed. More than 58 nationalities were shot and buried there by the NKVD in 236 communal pits over a 14-month period in 1937 and 1938. A thousand of the victims were from the Solovki special prison in the White Sea. It was long thought that the barges carrying them were deliberately sunk on the way to the mainland, drowning all the prisoners on board. Others were rounded up during the Great Terror in Karelia, in accordance with quotas for prisoners, 'enemies of the regime', and a variety of "national operations". According to available documentation at least 6,000 were shot and buried at Sandarmokh."Half those shot ...
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Stalinism
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev thaw, de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin’s ideology begin to wane in the USSR. The second wave of de-Stalinization started during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Glasnost. Stalin's regime forcibly purged society of what it saw as threats to itself and its brand of communism (so-called "enemies of the people"), which included ...
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Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (russian: Варла́м Ти́хонович Шала́мов; 18 June 1907 – 17 January 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent much of the period from 1937 to 1951 imprisoned in forced-labor camps in the Arctic region of Kolyma, due in part to his support of Leon Trotsky and praise of writer Ivan Bunin. In 1946, near death, he became a medical assistant while still a prisoner. He remained in that role for the duration of his sentence, then for another two years after being released, until 1953. From 1954 to 1978, he wrote a set of short stories about his experiences in the labor camps, which were collected and published in six volumes, collectively known as ''Kolyma Tales''. These books were initially published in the West, in English translation, starting in the 1960s; they were eventually published in the original Russian, but only became officially available in the Soviet Union in 1987 ...
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Political Repression In The Soviet Union
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Origins and early Soviet times Secret police had a long history in Tsarist Russia. Ivan the Terrible used the Oprichina, while more recently the Third Section and Okrhana existed. Early on, the Leninist view of the class conflict and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat provided the theoretical basis of the repressions. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of Russian SFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republics. At times, th ...
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Kolyma Highway
The R504 Kolyma Highway (russian: Федеральная автомобильная дорога «Колыма», ''Federal'naya Avtomobil'naya Doroga «Kolyma»,'' "Federal Automobile Highway 'Kolyma'"), part of the M56 route, is a road through the Russian Far East. It connects Magadan with the town of Nizhny Bestyakh, located on the eastern bank of Lena River, opposite of Yakutsk. At Nizhny Bestyakh the Kolyma Highway connects to the Lena Highway. The Kolyma Highway is colloquially known as the Road of Bones (Russian: Дорога Костей, transliteration: ''Doróga Kostyéy''), in reference to the hundreds of thousands of forced laborers who were interred in the pavement after dying during its construction. Locally, the road is known as the Kolyma Route (Russian: Колымская трасса, transliteration: ''Kolýmskaya trássa''). History The Dalstroy construction directorate built the Kolyma Highway during the Soviet Union's Stalinist era. Inmates of th ...
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Fragment Of The "Mask Of Sorrow" Monument - Serpantinka Camp
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Gulag Archipelago
''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner. Following its publication, the book initially circulated in ''samizdat'' underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal ''Novy Mir'' in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ''The Gulag Archipelago'' has been officially published in Russia. Structure As structur ...
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Magadan
Magadan ( rus, Магадан, p=məɡɐˈdan) is a port town and the administrative center of Magadan Oblast, Russia, located on the Sea of Okhotsk in Nagayev Bay (within Taui Bay) and serving as a gateway to the Kolyma region. History Magadan was founded in 1930 in the Ola (river) valley,Vazhenin, p. 4 near the settlement of Nagayevo. During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit center for political prisoners sent to forced labour camps. From 1932 to 1953, it was the administrative centre of the Dalstroy organisation—a vast forced-labour gold-mining operation and forced-labour camp system. The first director of Dalstroy was Eduard Berzin, who between 1932 and 1937 established the infrastructure of the forced labour camps in Magadan. Berzin was executed in 1938 by Stalin, towards the end of the Great Purge. The town later served as a port for exporting gold and other metals mined in the Kolyma region. Its size and population grew quickly as facilities were ra ...
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Eduard Berzin
Eduard Petrovich Berzin (russian: Эдуа́рд Петро́вич Бе́рзин, lv, Eduards Bērziņš; 19 February 1894 – 1 August 1938) was a Soviet Union, Soviet soldier، Chekism, Chekist and NKVD officer that set up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of Slavery, slave-labor camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, one of the most brutal Gulag regions, where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died or were murdered in subsequent decades. Biography Early life Before World War I Berzin studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts, Royal Academy of the Arts in Berlin where he met his wife, Elza Mittenberga, also an artist, from Riga. In 1915 he joined the Russian army and fought in the First World War, where he was awarded the Cross of St. George and became an officer. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917, he joined the communists. In 1918 Berzin became a commander of the First Artillery Division of the Red Latvian Riflemen with speci ...
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