Word: gulags
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...much of the Gorbachev phenomenon is words. Andrei Gromyko, the longtime Foreign Minister who two years ago became the country's largely ceremonial President, used to say there is a big difference between words and deeds. Yet in a country where one can be sent to the Gulag for saying the wrong thing, words are deeds. In a closed, hidebound dictatorship, Gorbachev's slogans of openness, restructuring and democratization are either particularly cynical or particularly significant. It is not yet clear which...
Magadan. It is a name that turns Soviet hearts to ice and evokes memories of the long ago midnight knock on the door. The port of entry to the most deadly archipelago of the Gulag system, it became a synonym for the terror Joseph Stalin visited upon the land. At least 2 million prisoners were worked to death in its gold mines and timber forests and on its road projects. Since then, with few exceptions, the city of Magadan and the vast region around it have been closed to foreigners. When the Soviets permitted a small group to visit Magadan...
During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. The prison ships were crowded hellholes in which thousands died. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River. When it reached port the following spring, it carried only crew and guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead...
About 300 political prisoners have been released from the Gulag; thousands remain...
...other play is "Soup," set in a Russian gulag where a group of Polish prisoners try to deal with life under the oppressive Soviet regime; both were written by Stewart Thomsen...