Word: kolyma
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...another day of killing slave labor. There are no memorials, no cemeteries dedicated to Stalin's victims. Some of the camp names that dot the pages of prisoner memoirs are ordinary towns now: Shturmovoy, Elgen, Yagodnoye, Mylga, Magadan itself. "When you go to Magadan and stand upon the Kolyma highway," a Muscovite advised, "you must look down at the earth beneath your feet and think of all the bones buried there...
...figurative sense. Survivors of the highway construction said the dead could not be buried in the permanently frozen earth and were dumped instead in riverside snowbanks. Their corpses were washed away with the spring runoff and finally came to rest on the gold- rich bed of the Kolyma River...
...area nearly twice the size of Texas, tucked into the farthest corner of the Soviet Far East, between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Straits. Temperatures in some parts of the region fall to -95 degrees F in winter, and even in late March the central Kolyma basin recorded -35 degrees F on a crystal-clear...
...view from the air in winter evokes an old prisoner song: "Kolyma, , wonderful planet/ Twelve months winter, the rest summer." While that may not be literally true, the brief subarctic summer can be worse than the winter. When it arrives in July, thawed swamps release swarms of hungry arctic mosquitoes and tiny black biting flies that together make life miserable...
...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...