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Vorkuta to Perm - PDF - / Send As Email
Russia's Concentration-Camp Museums and My Father's Story
by Jon Basil Utley
In The Freeman/Ideas on Liberty, July 2005, pp. 8-12 - Previous Article / Next Article

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Uncorrected Raw Text
Vorkuta to Perm: Russia's Concentration-
Camp Museums and My Father s Story
My father, Arcadi Berdichevsky was executed at
Vorkuta on the Arctic Circle in the Soviet
Union on March 30, 1938. Last October I
visited the former concentration-camp town. Copies of
files detailing his arrest, indictment, and execution order
were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia's noto­
rious KGB (formerly OGPU secret police). Incredibly, it
still has detailed records of political prisoners and will­
ingly provides information and help to searchers like
me. It also gave me three photos of my
father from the file, taken at the time of
his arrest in 1936. They are in better con­
dition than any that my mother had pre­
served. In Moscow's FSB library, I held
the files of his interrogation.
Thanks to research obtained by my
friend and guide Vladislav "George"
Krasnov, an early defector and former
professor of Russian studies, we went on
by land to Ukhta, which was the admin­
istrative capital for all the camps in
Komi, a state as large as France. (Krasnov is now a State
Department contract interpreter.) Then we continued
by road and train to Syktyvkar and Perm in the Ural
Mountains to visit the only real concentration-camp
museum in Russia.
Twenty million people are estimated to have died in
these camps, but they are almost forgotten. There are
hardly any museums or exhibits of communist camps.
Many emptied ones were burned down at the time of
Nikita Khrushchev, but mostly they were scavenged by
poor peasants for anything usable, and then the remains,
built of wood and cheap brick, just rotted into the for­
est or tundra. They were poorly built by unskilled
BY JON BASIL UTLEY
0*
Arcadi Berdichevsky
THE FREEMAN: Ideas on Liberty 8
prison labor, and many were temporary and moved
when timber or easily mined minerals were depleted
from nearby.
Perm's camp museum (see below) came from a newer
permanent camp. It is the best and only remaining
example of a "modern" camp. At Vorkuta the camps
were first occupied by prisoners arriving from the Arc­
tic Sea, pulling barges up the Pechora River, along the
mosquito-infested banks in 1929. Then they built a rail­
road and started shallow coal mining. Rus­
sia's rivers were the historic means of
communication, and you need to see them
to comprehend their extensiveness. During
the winter, daylight is less than three hours
long and temperatures go to 40 degrees
below zero. (Fahrenheit and centigrade
converge at that point.) Vorkuta mainly had
coal mines. In the city square sits the old
steam engine that delivered Vorkuta coal to
Leningrad to help save it during the Ger­
man blockade in World War II.
Conditions in the camps finally improved during the
war, after the disastrous winter of 1942, when food
deliveries were badly disrupted. So many Russians had
died that labor became scarce and many camps were
emptied out. Then women prisoners were also shipped
to the labor-hungry camps, even for the "crime" of sim­
ply being late to work. Later, German POW's arrived
and had more value as bargaining chips, so some effort
was made to keep them alive.


Jon Basil Utley (jbutley@earthlink.net) is the Robert A. Toft Fellon> at the
Ludwig von Mises Institute and a former correspondent for Knight-Ridder
in South America. Copyright © 2005, Jon Basil Utley. All rights reserved.
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