- Fist steps.
- The soil here is firmly in the grip of a deep
layer of permafrost.
- The construction of the road
was a bitter…battle with nature.
- The Kolyma road…
More than 1,000 kilometres north of Magadan.
On both sides of the road are dozens of wrecked Stalinist
concentration camps and abandoned settlements of Soviet Klondike.
5. Nikolai Chuprov is the last inhabitant of this deserted
settlement. The walls of his shanty are hung with
photographs from other people’s family albums
and old thrown-away magazines.
- For the construction of a new region,
people are born again.
- The construction of the Nogayevo-Kolyma road
8. was the work of inmates of the north-eastern
corrective labour camps
9. of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
10. In Stalin’s day the whole country was in the grip of a
dictatorship of fear and lawlessness. These ruins still
exude the atmosphere of the camps.
- The most productive workers
are put forward for training
12. by the cultural and educational section of the camps.
13. After attending the camp driving school,
- they will drive vehicles on the road they have built.
- Battalion… Right dress!
- Quick march!
- The abandoned settlement of Miakit.|
One of the former provincial capitals of Stalin’s GULAG.
- The morning will probably be OK
19. A railway connected
Magadan with the logging area
20 After Stalin’s death Nikolai Chuprov, like so many other inhabitants,
moved away from here. But many years later he returned,
seemingly for ever.
21. Right. They nailed it on damned well.
22. Dammit!
23. Putting something together and
taking it apart is not the same thing.
24. It’s a heavy beggar.
25. Didn’t shave properly, eh?
26. Brezhnev, Kosygin. Climbing out of a plane…
27. Partisans in the Briansk forests …
I should read that…
28. another familiar face…
29. Hey, here’s something new.
Lenin…
30. What is Soviet Power?
31. “What is the essence
of this new power
32. that the majority of countries are still unwilling
or unable to understand?
33. The essence lies in its attracting
the workers of every land.
34. Previously the state was
in one way or another governed
35. by the rich and capitalists…
36. … who are therefore invincible.”
37. Oho! That’s rich. Invincible.
Soviet power was… Lenin…
38. The amount he wrote,
that Lenin.
39. We should probably
gather it all up
40. and take it back to him
in the mausoleum.
41. Let him read it.
42. In 1932 the mountainous
Kolyma region became “Dalstroy”
43. When Sorge was shouting
“There’ll be war!”,
44. Stalin didn’t believe him,
it seems.
45. When it had already started,
then he believed.
46 Why did Nikolai Chuprov return to these accursed places?
He does not know himself. The past will not loosen its hold on him.
No act of cruelty is without its consequences.
Lenin
47 Stalin and Prokofiev died the same day.
Everybody remembers funeral ceremony
Of the tyrant, but nobody remembers funeral of the genious.