A journey inside Stalin's Siberian prison camps

In win­ter 1991, British pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bar­ry Lewis set forth on a jour­ney to the Gulag. The trip to Josef Stalin’s noto­ri­ous Siber­ian prison camps is one which few had returned from. As the Sovi­et Union bar­relled towards its demise that Decem­ber, the spir­it of glas­nost (open­ness and trans­paren­cy) pre­vailed as the dark heart of the USSR was final­ly laid open for all the world to see.

On assign­ment for Geo mag­a­zine, Lewis was tak­en inside the noto­ri­ous slave labour camps that housed con­victs and polit­i­cal dis­si­dents. Pris­on­ers there were often impris­oned with­out tri­al, with some 18 mil­lion cit­i­zens dis­ap­peared at their peak between 1930 and 1953. 

Buried in this far flung cor­ner of the Sovi­et empire lay untold wealth of ura­ni­um and gold. Pris­on­ers were forced to work in inhos­pitable con­di­tions at tem­per­a­tures of ‑30° C to say noth­ing of radi­a­tion poi­son­ing. Some two mil­lion pris­on­ers per­ished while in prison, while sur­vivors set­tled into the town of Mag­a­dan hav­ing nowhere else to go. While the most dan­ger­ous camps had closed by 1991 some remained oper­a­tional, and Lewis was per­mit­ted to doc­u­ment it all.

Now Lewis looks back on this extra­or­di­nary project in the new book, Gulag: A jour­ney into the dark­ness of Stal­in’s Siber­ian prison camps (Fist­ful of Books). Gulag opens with Lewis’ omi­nous arrival on bleak shores of this dis­tant world, evok­ing a har­row­ing feel­ing that one has reached the point of no return. The book unfolds like Dante’s Infer­no, lead­ing us into deep­er cir­cles of hell.

“The writer, Peter-Matth­eas Gaede and I decid­ed to make the jour­ney from the port to the infa­mous mines and camps of the Koly­ma Hills, fol­low­ing the path thou­sands of pris­on­ers had tak­en from 1930s to the 50s,” says Lewis. ​“I par­tic­u­lar­ly want­ed to do this jour­ney in mid-win­ter to echo the pain of the prisoner’s march north along the Road of Bones.”

As a British cit­i­zen, Lewis was afford­ed pro­tec­tion on his jour­ney, a priv­i­lege he read­i­ly under­stood as he faced the fore­bod­ing truth of the Gulag. ​“I was orig­i­nal­ly a chemist and knew the dan­gers of our final des­ti­na­tion: the ruins of the Butu­gy­chag camp, not even list­ed in the doc­u­men­ta­tion of aban­doned camps, where pris­on­ers mined and processed ura­ni­um,” he says.

Sit­u­at­ed high in the Koly­ma moun­tains, Butu­gy­chag camp was aban­doned after Stalin’s death in 1954, but it still posed great dan­ger to all who dared to enter. Inside the aban­doned set­tle­ment, the rock-built cells con­tin­ued to emit dead­ly lev­els of radioactivity.

“Iron­i­cal­ly the place I was most ner­vous of, Camp AV261/4, an active prison work camp out­side the set­tle­ment of Uptar, proved to be warm and inter­est­ing,” he says. ​“I was giv­en per­mis­sion to wan­der freely (with an armed guard!) amongst the inmates who showed curios­i­ty more than hostility.”

Ulti­mate­ly Gulag is a sto­ry of his­to­ries untold, erased, and lost — par­tic­u­lar­ly those who sur­vived to tell the tale. ​“These old peo­ple all had sto­ries of a his­to­ry that the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment want­ed to for­get and, despite per­e­stroi­ka, were hop­ing would dis­ap­pear with their deaths,” Lewis says.

“They had a qui­et dig­ni­ty, their pain and loss, meta­mor­phosed into a frag­ile radi­ance, the anger trans­formed into a tired kind­ness, but always need­ing to tell their story.”

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on X and Insta­gram.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.