page_title: Kolyma
section_title: The Arctic camps
hierarchical_section_title: Kolyma / History / Emergence of the Gulag camps / The Arctic camps
caption_attribution_description: Goldmine at Kolyma Gulag, Siberia
context_page_description: Kolyma is a region located in the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered by Russians until 1926. Today the region consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.
  The area, part of which is within the Arctic Circle, has a subarctic climate with very cold winters lasting up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region. Average winter temperatures range from −19 °C to −38 °C, and average summer temperatures, from +3 °C to +16 °C. There are rich reserves of gold, silver, tin, tungsten, mercury, copper, antimony, coal, oil, and peat. Twenty-nine zones of possible oil and gas accumulation have been identified in the Sea of Okhotsk shelf. Total reserves are estimated at 3.5 billion tons of equivalent fuel, including 1.2 billion tons of oil and 1.5 billion m³ of gas.
  The principal town Magadan has nearly 100,000 inhabitants and is the largest port in north-eastern Russia.
context_section_description: At the height of the Purges, around 1937, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months—after that we don't need him anymore." The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" (dokhodyaga, in Russian). Conditions varied depending on the state of the country.
  Many of the prisoners in Kolyma were academics or intellectuals. They included Mikhail Kravchuk (Krawtschuk), a Ukrainian mathematician who by the early 1930s had received considerable acclaim in the West. After a summary trial, apparently for reluctance to take part in the accusations of some of his colleagues, he was sent to Kolyma where he died in 1942. Hard work in the labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health as well as accusations and abandonment by most of his colleagues, took their toll. Kravchuk perished in Magadan in Eastern Siberia, about 4,000 miles (6,000 km) from the place where he was born. Kravchuk's last article had appeared soon after his arrest in 1938. However, after this publication, Kravchuk's name was stricken from books and journals.
  The prisoner population of Kolyma increased substantially in 1946 with the arrival of thousands of former Soviet POWs liberated by Western Allied forces or the Red Army at the close of World War II.
  Those judged guilty of collaboration with the enemy frequently received ten or twenty-five year prison sentences to the gulag, including Kolyma.
  There were, however, some exceptions. Rumor suggested that Soviet agents seized Léon Theremin, an inventor, in the United States and forced him to return to the Soviet Union; he actually returned voluntarily. Joseph Stalin had Theremin imprisoned at the Butyrka in Moscow; he later came to work in the Kolyma gold mines. Although rumors of his execution circulated widely, Theremin was, in fact, put to work in a sharashka (a secret research-laboratory), together with other scientists and engineers, including aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and rocket scientist Sergei Korolyov (also a Kolyma inmate). The Soviet Union rehabilitated Theremin in 1956.
  The Kolyma camps switched to using (mostly) free labor after 1954, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered a general amnesty that freed many prisoners. Various estimates have put the Kolyma death-toll from 1930 to the mid 1950s between 250,000 and over a million people.
caption: Prisoners at a Kolyma gold mine
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