Campbell: On the frozen Siberian plain, closer to the North Pole than to Moscow, there is a grim city called Vorkuta. It’s not the cold that makes it grim, though the days are often 35 below.
And it’s not the coal dust, though it’s thick enough to turn the snow black.
It’s because Vorkuta is built on a Gulag.
Pavel: When I first got into a concentration camp it was like hell for me.
I was not a Komsomol member or atheist then — I am not much of a believer now — but I thought that if I went to hell after I died I wouldn’t be scared because I had seen hell on earth.
Music
Campbell: Pavel Ivanovich Negretov spent 10 years in the Vorkuta Gulag for anti-Soviet activities. He feels an anger that four decades have failed to heal and a fear the past could return.
Pavel: All our people have to wander in the desert for forty years just like Moses and the Jews so the we get rid of the slave psychology. The whole generation must die. Only in forty years will we enter democracy.
Campbell: It was here in the Arctic waste of northern Siberia that thousands of political prisoners were sent as slave labourers to build the coal mines.
If anywhere in Russia has a reason to hate the communists, it’s here. Yet it’s here that communists are making a comeback.
Man: I have this pack here of portraits signed by Gennady Adreevich Zyuganov and saying “Thank you for the support during the elections.” I’d like to hand them to Vasily Ilyich.
Campbell: In a town weighed down by pessimism, Vorkuta’s communists are brimming with confidence.
Last December their party won parliamentary elections. Now they’re campaigning to win the real power base — the Presidency.
Just four years after their party was briefly banned, they are once again the area’s biggest, best organised political force.
New members are joining every week.
Man: I am sure that the Communist Party will have many allies now. The people who are in power now are bureaucrats who call themselves democrats and don’t even know what democracy is.
Campbell: Five years ago, the coal miners of Vorkuta led a national strike in support of Boris Yeltsin. Even today, there is little regard here for communism or its discredited propaganda.
Yet communists are gaining their support, simply because Boris Yeltsin has become even more despised than they were.
Campbell: Under Yeltsin, the miners’ lives have become as uncertain and unremitting as their work. We joined them as they began their daily descent into the mine.
Campbell: After plunging down 250 metres, we were ushered into a small steel train, and the pitch black darkness of the shaft.
Campbell: For 10 kilometres it screeched and raced deeper into the mine.
Campbell: Well, it’s now taken us an hour and a half just to get to the point where the men are about to start working. For the next six hours they’ll be down here doing back-breaking physical work. It is claustrophobic, it’s filthy, and it’s very, very dangerous. And these days, most of the workers aren’t even getting paid.
Vladimir: We have to wait for months. We wait for two months because our mine is all right.
Vladimir: At other mines people haven’t been paid since last year.
Campbell: How do they survive?
Vladimir: Different mines pay their workers on different days, and we borrow money from each other. We got to our friends to borrow money — that’s how we live.
Campbell: Vladimir Miller’s father and grandfather were sent here as forced labourers in the Second World War. Their crime was having a German surname dating back to the 18th century.
Vladimir was once a fervent support of Boris Yeltsin, but the past five years have driven him to the communists.
Before the free market, miners like Vladimir were well off by Soviet standards. They received higher pay for the danger and isolation. They could save money and travel south.
But under Yeltsin the government has cut the mine’s subsidies, while hyper-inflation has eaten their savings. They have once again become prisoners of the north.
Vladimir: I can’t say how all the miners will vote but most of them will be supporting Communists. They are promising better — and we lived better under Communism than now.
Campbell: Vladimir lives in a village next to the mine with his wife Nadyezhda, his daughter Natasha and his son Zheyn, who has also become a miner.
To win back the support of families like this, the Yeltsin government has been frantically trying to raise money to pay back wages. The Millers have just received two months pay. But in this household at least, they’re not persuaded by the attempt to buy their votes. They believe things will be even worse if Yeltsin wins.
Vladimir: Yeltsin didn’t keep his promises. He promised us golden mountains. He said we’d live better — we’d get higher wages — but none of this happened.
Wife: At least you got paid at the mine — but the retired people struggle to make ends meet. In any shop you’ll see old women begging for money. How else can they survive?
Vladimir: Zyuganov promises to raise the salaries and the pensions and in general raise the level of life in Russia. There is no trust in Yeltsin now that’s why we decided to support Zyuganov.
Campbell: The man with the task of defending Yeltsin’s reforms is Fyador Dominin. He’s the local representative of the government party, Our Home Is Russia.
Fyador: It is convenient for enterprise bosses — I mean mine directors — to blame Yeltsin for their own commercial mistakes and debts. It is totally wrong.
Campbell: It was not long ago that Vorkuta agreed with him. This building was once the headquarters of the Yeltsin support group. Visiting it today, I found a very different scene — a hunger strike against Yeltsin.
All these men became invalids after mine accidents. They have been waiting months to get their pensions. It is almost two weeks since most of them ate.
While they remain strongly anti-communist, they say they will not support Boris Yeltsin, even at the risk of the Communist Party winning by default.
Polishny: Eighty-six percent of the current administration members of the bureaucratic apparatus are former members of the Communist Party. The smartest of the meanest people have come to power.
Campbell: So who are you going to vote for?
Polishny: If Zyuganov and Yeltsin compete in the second round of elections I will vote against both of them. I will cross out both of them.
Campbell: As we were talking, the man himself appeared on screen, promising to end the war in Chechnya.
Polishny: At least he’s not drunk today but what he’s saying is just rubbish.
Campbell: Before Yeltsin could win any voters in this room, they’d turned him off in disgust.
Polishny: He drinks — and we don’t even eat, let alone drink! Why should we listen to a drunk man?
Campbell: Saturday is wedding day in Vorkuta, a time to forget about present troubles and start new lives. Today a young miner named Igor Yavokenko is marrying his sweetheart, Yelena.
It’s a hurried affair, with wedding parties queuing behind them.
Few can afford a wedding video, the tape is enjoyed immediately after.
On this day, Igor and Yelena are feeling hope.
Igor: If there’s love, you are not afraid of anything. We will hope for the better — that the country will change for the better.
Campbell: But love will have much to conquer. Unlike his father, Igor is unlikely to be able to spend his life in the mine. He and his groomsmen will probably lose their jobs.
Campbell: The World Bank has concluded that a third of Russia’s coal mines will never be viable. It says the industry should cut its work force of 900,000 people by half.
The real problem for these mines, like most industry across Russia, is that they weren’t set up for the market, but under the whims of central planning. There are simply too many mines too far away to ever make a profit. Now simple economics says close them down. The descendants of the Gulag say, “What else could we do?”
Vorkutans are desperate for their mines to stay open, even if they can’t make a profit. The local communist organiser, Vladislav Asadev, says they’ll be happy to oblige.
Asadev: We will restore the popular economy which means we’ll restore mines, collective farms and everything else we used to have. The coal industry will be subsidised and people will get paid.
Campbell: The Yeltsin camp responds to such bland assurances with increasingly shrill warnings of the perils of a Red return.
Fyador: .Ultimately they would centralise the economy and declare a monopoly on ideology, a monopoly on decisions and on everything else. Those who disagree will be sent to concentration camps, or shot. That is the ideology of communism.
Campbell: Cutbacks are also blamed for costing lives.
Over the past three years, the accident rate in the mines has more than doubled. Here, under the shadow of Lenin, workers remember five mates killed in a gas explosion.
Man: A year has passed but it feels like it just happened recently and unfortunately people are still dying in the mines. Sometimes it’s their own fault but the State is to blame too because it doesn’t do all it can to prevent deaths.
Campbell: But among the mourners is a man who remembers it’s not just accidents that have filled the mines’ cemeteries.
Pavel: After Stalin’s death there were strikes at all Vorkuta mines.
Pavel: The Interior troops opened fire — just as Solzhenitsin writes. The first to die were those who were ready to go to work and those who were holding them back. There are different numbers for the casualties. In reality, there were dozens of dead and wounded. More died in hospitals later. They are buried here.
Campbell: In the past, communism persecuted its opponents. This city was built on a Gulag. How will the Party be different now?
Asadev: It will be different. You mentioned gulags — it’s a serious inheritance we have to live with — but look at Vorkuta and Russia as a whole. Don’t we live in a Gulag now? It’s different, but it’s a Gulag. There are iron bars on every ground floor window. Every house has an iron door. People are being killed. Yes, Stalin sent people to prisons — Vorkuta was built by political prisoners — but people came here to build, and today blood is being spilt everywhere. Is it not a Gulag? It’s a Gulag too. Only now it’s in the 90s and not the 40s.
Music
Campbell: On June 16th, a thousand towns like Vorkuta will face a poisoned choice.
The party they blame for destroying their past, or the president they blame for destroying the present.
Their future could be as bleak as the land itself.
And it’s not the coal dust, though it’s thick enough to turn the snow black.
It’s because Vorkuta is built on a Gulag.
Pavel: When I first got into a concentration camp it was like hell for me.
I was not a Komsomol member or atheist then — I am not much of a believer now — but I thought that if I went to hell after I died I wouldn’t be scared because I had seen hell on earth.
Music
Campbell: Pavel Ivanovich Negretov spent 10 years in the Vorkuta Gulag for anti-Soviet activities. He feels an anger that four decades have failed to heal and a fear the past could return.
Pavel: All our people have to wander in the desert for forty years just like Moses and the Jews so the we get rid of the slave psychology. The whole generation must die. Only in forty years will we enter democracy.
Campbell: It was here in the Arctic waste of northern Siberia that thousands of political prisoners were sent as slave labourers to build the coal mines.
If anywhere in Russia has a reason to hate the communists, it’s here. Yet it’s here that communists are making a comeback.
Man: I have this pack here of portraits signed by Gennady Adreevich Zyuganov and saying “Thank you for the support during the elections.” I’d like to hand them to Vasily Ilyich.
Campbell: In a town weighed down by pessimism, Vorkuta’s communists are brimming with confidence.
Last December their party won parliamentary elections. Now they’re campaigning to win the real power base — the Presidency.
Just four years after their party was briefly banned, they are once again the area’s biggest, best organised political force.
New members are joining every week.
Man: I am sure that the Communist Party will have many allies now. The people who are in power now are bureaucrats who call themselves democrats and don’t even know what democracy is.
Campbell: Five years ago, the coal miners of Vorkuta led a national strike in support of Boris Yeltsin. Even today, there is little regard here for communism or its discredited propaganda.
Yet communists are gaining their support, simply because Boris Yeltsin has become even more despised than they were.
Campbell: Under Yeltsin, the miners’ lives have become as uncertain and unremitting as their work. We joined them as they began their daily descent into the mine.
Campbell: After plunging down 250 metres, we were ushered into a small steel train, and the pitch black darkness of the shaft.
Campbell: For 10 kilometres it screeched and raced deeper into the mine.
Campbell: Well, it’s now taken us an hour and a half just to get to the point where the men are about to start working. For the next six hours they’ll be down here doing back-breaking physical work. It is claustrophobic, it’s filthy, and it’s very, very dangerous. And these days, most of the workers aren’t even getting paid.
Vladimir: We have to wait for months. We wait for two months because our mine is all right.
Vladimir: At other mines people haven’t been paid since last year.
Campbell: How do they survive?
Vladimir: Different mines pay their workers on different days, and we borrow money from each other. We got to our friends to borrow money — that’s how we live.
Campbell: Vladimir Miller’s father and grandfather were sent here as forced labourers in the Second World War. Their crime was having a German surname dating back to the 18th century.
Vladimir was once a fervent support of Boris Yeltsin, but the past five years have driven him to the communists.
Before the free market, miners like Vladimir were well off by Soviet standards. They received higher pay for the danger and isolation. They could save money and travel south.
But under Yeltsin the government has cut the mine’s subsidies, while hyper-inflation has eaten their savings. They have once again become prisoners of the north.
Vladimir: I can’t say how all the miners will vote but most of them will be supporting Communists. They are promising better — and we lived better under Communism than now.
Campbell: Vladimir lives in a village next to the mine with his wife Nadyezhda, his daughter Natasha and his son Zheyn, who has also become a miner.
To win back the support of families like this, the Yeltsin government has been frantically trying to raise money to pay back wages. The Millers have just received two months pay. But in this household at least, they’re not persuaded by the attempt to buy their votes. They believe things will be even worse if Yeltsin wins.
Vladimir: Yeltsin didn’t keep his promises. He promised us golden mountains. He said we’d live better — we’d get higher wages — but none of this happened.
Wife: At least you got paid at the mine — but the retired people struggle to make ends meet. In any shop you’ll see old women begging for money. How else can they survive?
Vladimir: Zyuganov promises to raise the salaries and the pensions and in general raise the level of life in Russia. There is no trust in Yeltsin now that’s why we decided to support Zyuganov.
Campbell: The man with the task of defending Yeltsin’s reforms is Fyador Dominin. He’s the local representative of the government party, Our Home Is Russia.
Fyador: It is convenient for enterprise bosses — I mean mine directors — to blame Yeltsin for their own commercial mistakes and debts. It is totally wrong.
Campbell: It was not long ago that Vorkuta agreed with him. This building was once the headquarters of the Yeltsin support group. Visiting it today, I found a very different scene — a hunger strike against Yeltsin.
All these men became invalids after mine accidents. They have been waiting months to get their pensions. It is almost two weeks since most of them ate.
While they remain strongly anti-communist, they say they will not support Boris Yeltsin, even at the risk of the Communist Party winning by default.
Polishny: Eighty-six percent of the current administration members of the bureaucratic apparatus are former members of the Communist Party. The smartest of the meanest people have come to power.
Campbell: So who are you going to vote for?
Polishny: If Zyuganov and Yeltsin compete in the second round of elections I will vote against both of them. I will cross out both of them.
Campbell: As we were talking, the man himself appeared on screen, promising to end the war in Chechnya.
Polishny: At least he’s not drunk today but what he’s saying is just rubbish.
Campbell: Before Yeltsin could win any voters in this room, they’d turned him off in disgust.
Polishny: He drinks — and we don’t even eat, let alone drink! Why should we listen to a drunk man?
Campbell: Saturday is wedding day in Vorkuta, a time to forget about present troubles and start new lives. Today a young miner named Igor Yavokenko is marrying his sweetheart, Yelena.
It’s a hurried affair, with wedding parties queuing behind them.
Few can afford a wedding video, the tape is enjoyed immediately after.
On this day, Igor and Yelena are feeling hope.
Igor: If there’s love, you are not afraid of anything. We will hope for the better — that the country will change for the better.
Campbell: But love will have much to conquer. Unlike his father, Igor is unlikely to be able to spend his life in the mine. He and his groomsmen will probably lose their jobs.
Campbell: The World Bank has concluded that a third of Russia’s coal mines will never be viable. It says the industry should cut its work force of 900,000 people by half.
The real problem for these mines, like most industry across Russia, is that they weren’t set up for the market, but under the whims of central planning. There are simply too many mines too far away to ever make a profit. Now simple economics says close them down. The descendants of the Gulag say, “What else could we do?”
Vorkutans are desperate for their mines to stay open, even if they can’t make a profit. The local communist organiser, Vladislav Asadev, says they’ll be happy to oblige.
Asadev: We will restore the popular economy which means we’ll restore mines, collective farms and everything else we used to have. The coal industry will be subsidised and people will get paid.
Campbell: The Yeltsin camp responds to such bland assurances with increasingly shrill warnings of the perils of a Red return.
Fyador: .Ultimately they would centralise the economy and declare a monopoly on ideology, a monopoly on decisions and on everything else. Those who disagree will be sent to concentration camps, or shot. That is the ideology of communism.
Campbell: Cutbacks are also blamed for costing lives.
Over the past three years, the accident rate in the mines has more than doubled. Here, under the shadow of Lenin, workers remember five mates killed in a gas explosion.
Man: A year has passed but it feels like it just happened recently and unfortunately people are still dying in the mines. Sometimes it’s their own fault but the State is to blame too because it doesn’t do all it can to prevent deaths.
Campbell: But among the mourners is a man who remembers it’s not just accidents that have filled the mines’ cemeteries.
Pavel: After Stalin’s death there were strikes at all Vorkuta mines.
Pavel: The Interior troops opened fire — just as Solzhenitsin writes. The first to die were those who were ready to go to work and those who were holding them back. There are different numbers for the casualties. In reality, there were dozens of dead and wounded. More died in hospitals later. They are buried here.
Campbell: In the past, communism persecuted its opponents. This city was built on a Gulag. How will the Party be different now?
Asadev: It will be different. You mentioned gulags — it’s a serious inheritance we have to live with — but look at Vorkuta and Russia as a whole. Don’t we live in a Gulag now? It’s different, but it’s a Gulag. There are iron bars on every ground floor window. Every house has an iron door. People are being killed. Yes, Stalin sent people to prisons — Vorkuta was built by political prisoners — but people came here to build, and today blood is being spilt everywhere. Is it not a Gulag? It’s a Gulag too. Only now it’s in the 90s and not the 40s.
Music
Campbell: On June 16th, a thousand towns like Vorkuta will face a poisoned choice.
The party they blame for destroying their past, or the president they blame for destroying the present.
Their future could be as bleak as the land itself.