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Taken in 1991, during the glasnost era, these extraordinary photographs are a powerful reminder of one of the darkest periods in Soviet history“We Russians have always had a sadomasochistic relationship with our country.” This is a reflection by Galina Ivan Levinson, an elderly survivor of the Gulag, Stalin’s gigantic empire of labour camps. Barry Lewis’s often utterly heartbreaking photographs are the illustration to Galina’s words. In a rare, probably unrepeatable period of change – the last months of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule and of his short-lived policy of glasnost (openness) – Lewis was allowed to visit the Gulag regions of north-eastern Siberia. It was 1991. The archaeology of the gulags was still lying in the snow: the wreckage of huts and fences, wooden stakes and rusted barbed wire, an old boot stiff in the permafrost. Starting in the port of Magadan, he travelled north along the “Road of Bones”, the 2,000km (1,240 miles) Kolyma Highway, to the gold and uranium mines built by slave labour at the cost of uncounted lives.Lewis was able to explore the aftermath as well as the past. An unimaginable total of 18 million people experienced the Gulag system from the 1920s to 1953, the year that saw the end of mass political arrests, deportations and executions after Stalin’s death. But huge numbers of survivors stayed in the region after the end of their sentences. Some were condemned to further exile, but many – just as in the tsarist times – chose to remain and settle in ramshackle villages near their old sites of suffering. Their former camp guards, now elderly pensioners, often became their neighbours. It’s often said that warders are as much in prison as their convicts. Continue reading...