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Julius Strauss in Vorkuta, Russia
Telegraph, telegraph.co.uk, London, UK
Saturday, January 3, 2004
More than 50 years after they were deported by Stalin, hundreds of
freed inmates remain trapped in the frozen north, writes Julius
Strauss in Vorkuta.
When Lidya Wittman was 20 years old she was loaded into a railway
goods wagon in central Russia and shipped to a gulag in the Arctic.
It was 1943, the Soviet Union was locked in a fight to the death with
Hitler's army, and her crime was to be an ethnic German.
Vorkuta was the last of Stalin's infamous gulags and its name still
resonates with menace for older Russians.
Women such as Mrs Wittman were treated like slaves, laying railway
lines and toiling without wages in mines and factories. The camp
closed in 1962, but decades later thousands of former inmates are
still marooned in the decrepit northern settlement.
To get to where she lives from the nearest shop or bus stop in
Vorkuta, Mrs Wittman, now 80, must hobble for more than half an hour
down a frozen, rutted road. The temperature is minus 10C and a biting
wind whips up the snow. "I've been here for 60 years," she said. "I'd
leave tomorrow if I could."
After their release, most of the women tried to return to their homes
in Ukraine, the Baltic States and central Russia. But the harsh
Soviet registration system meant that as former "enemies of the
state" they were barred from migrating.
Their only option was to stay and find work, sometimes in the very
mines and factories they had been slaving in before their release.
When communism fell, the restrictions were gradually lifted. But by
then hyperinflation had wiped out the former inmates' life savings,
making an expensive move south all but impossible.
Today there are 40,000 pensioners in Vorkuta. Memorial, a Russian
charity that compiles statistics on the Stalinist era, estimates that
as many as four out of five are trapped former gulag inmates, or
their descendants.
Even in the context of the times, the suffering at the Vorkuta camps
was extreme. In the winter, temperatures on the tundra can drop to
minus 50C.
Inmates were provided with ill-fitting, poor quality clothes and
forced to work 12 or 14 hours a day on a starvation ration. During
the 1940s and 1950s a million prisoners passed through the Vorkuta
gulags, according to Memorial.
At least 100,000, perhaps many more, died. They were buried in the
rock-hard permafrost or simply left by the roadside to be covered by
snow.
"For 15 years I shovelled coal into the furnaces," said Mrs Wittman,
who still speaks faultless German, but poor Russian.
"At night we used to sleep on hard wooden shelves. So many people
died of hunger and cold."
When she was released, like thousands of others she was barred from
leaving Vorkuta. Eventually she got a job as a cleaner in a mine.
Later she married another former gulag inmate, also an ethnic German,
and they lived together until he died 17 years ago. Today she lives
with her son. "This is what Stalin did to me," she said. "I know I
can't undo the past, but I'd move to the south if only I had the
money."
Yaroslav Volagodsky, 73, a Ukrainian, is another former gulag inmate
trapped in Vorkuta. He was charged with "anti-Soviet activities" as a
young man and given a 10-year sentence.
"You can't imagine what it was like," he said, tears running down his
face. "We had no proper winter clothes, our boots were full of holes
and to eat we had crushed, salted fish and a small, frozen potato a
day. All my teeth fell out because of lack of vitamins.
"They made us work 14 hours a day in the mines and many men simply
died. At night we slept with our clothes on, on a mattress stuffed
with wood chips."
Mine 29, where Mr Volagodsky was interned, was notorious for its
brutality. When in the summer of 1953 a wave of strikes swept the
Soviet gulags, the inmates of Mine 29 joined in.
Four days later, on Aug 1, hundreds of troops surrounded the camp and
opened fire, killing at least 53, and injuring hundreds.
Mr Volagodsky was hit in the leg and the ear, but survived.
Afterwards he was forced to build coffins and dig graves for his dead
colleagues.
Today there is little left of Mine 29. Only some broken brickwork
around the shaft entrance marks where it once stood.
A memorial has been put up nearby by relatives of Lithuanians who
died there. But the camp itself is unmarked, a mass of broken wooden
beams not far from an old railway line.
When, in 1957, Mr Volagodsky was finally released he was refused
permission to return home. Later he was told that he could return,
but his wife, also a Ukrainian former gulag inmate, could not, so he
remained.
"For 50 years this place has been like a coffin for me," he said. "I
have no money to go and the local authorities tell me I don't qualify
for help."
Yevgenia Khaidarova of Memorial said: "These people would all leave
tomorrow if they could. But they haven't the means.
"For years Vorkuta was a political gulag. Today it has become an
economic gulag."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/03/wgulag03.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/03/ixworld.html
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