Word: kolyma
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...physician father and I were taken by the Soviet NKVD (more recently the KGB) from our home in Budapest, Hungary, and, though innocent, accused of espionage. (After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the charges were dropped.) We were shipped to the labor camps (Gulag) of the dreaded Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia, where I spent eight years between life and death. At one point, I weighed 85 lbs., and only a miracle saved me from joining those wooden crosses. My father's body is buried there, and it is quite possible that one of those crosses marks his grave...
...live in two cities. The rest of the peninsula has less than one person per 4 sq. km. But still, people are leaving. The peninsula has lost 40,000 people, nearly 10% of its population, since 1985. In Yakutia, the Arctic city of Cherski, near the mouth of the Kolyma River above the Arctic Circle, has lost nearly half its population in just the past two years. (Recently, though, it has had a reported influx of Russian mafia hit men who use the town as a "riverbed"--slang for a hiding place--to cool off between assassinations...
...newspaper and now at greater length in Lenin's Tomb. His book provides both an intellectual history of the fall of the U.S.S.R. and a travelogue through its terminal illnesses, from corruption in the Kremlin to the deadly pollution of the Urals and the haunted desolation of Kolyma, center of the Siberian gulags. The book's powerful sense of place and its clarity about events that confused many of the participants will shame those who dismiss books written by reporters as "mere journalism...
...stepson visited our apartment, disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a book that had been concealed under his clothing: The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a shattering experience, evoking a somber world of gray camps surrounded by barbed wire, investigators' offices and torture chambers, icy mines in Kolyma and Norilsk...
Others were more forthcoming. "It is our tragedy, our pain," said Valentin Avdeyev, director of a power dam on the Kolyma River in the heart of the area where most of the camps were situated. "Newcomers always ask about them. There are none left, but we know where they were. When we are driving past, we point and say, 'There was a camp here...