Russian language

Gulag with a camera through the camps.

explosions for the reign! Vorkuta camp. Northern penal servitude

To the Women's camp (GULAG photo)

“Have you ever thought about, for example, how women in the camp took care of their hair or dealt with menstruation? For many, menstruation simply stopped, the body switched from reproduction mode to survival mode. Many people talk about this independently of each other, including Efrosinya Kersnovskaya. Hair for a woman is not just hair, it is an element of self-awareness (especially good, beautiful hair). A woman with unkempt hair ceases to feel like a woman. But metal combs were prohibited in the camp, bone combs quickly broke, and what should you use to comb your hair? Having long hair in the camp was a struggle (neither washing nor combing). Some, like the already mentioned Rau, simply cut their hair “to zero”; all the rest had their hair cut quite short, and combed their hair with homemade combs made from split thin boards. These are very important details, they give much more to understanding that time than documents....""

Alexey Babiy, " Life“There were three of us mothers. We were given a small room in the barracks. Bed bugs fell from the ceiling and from the walls like sand. All night long we robbed them from the children. And during the day we went to work, entrusting the kids to some activated old woman who ate the leftovers. food for the children. Nevertheless, Volovich writes,

whole year I stood by the child’s bed at night, picked out bedbugs and prayed. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for at least a hundred years, but not separate me from my daughter. So that, be it a beggar or a cripple, he would release her from prison with her. So that I could, crawling at people’s feet and begging for alms, raise and educate her. But God did not answer my prayers. As soon as the child began to walk, as soon as I heard from him the first, caressing words, such wonderful words - “mama”, “mama”, when in the winter cold, dressed in rags, we were put in a heated vehicle and taken to the “mama” camp, where is my angelic fatty with golden curls?"

Chava Volovich"
Mommy camp "Valley of Death" is a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners. in the genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, implemented an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus, that Hitler’s special brigades underwent training and gained experience in the mid-30s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also participated in a special television program broadcast live by NHK Japan, along with the author (by telephone).

In the process of reading the material, the following is striking: firstly, all the photographs presented are either macro photography or shooting of individual objects or buildings; There are no photographs that would allow us to assess the scope of the camp as a whole (except for two in which nothing is visible). Moreover, all photographs are extremely small in size, making them difficult to adequate assessment. Secondly, the text is replete with eyewitness statements, mentions of some archives and names, some statistics, but there is not a single specific scan or photograph of any document.

According to information from the article, in the said camp they were engaged in three things: they mined uranium ore, enriched it and carried out some experiments.

Production uranium ore was carried out by hand, and again enriched by hand on pallets in primitive-looking ovens. To confirm this, a photograph of the insides of some abandoned building is shown. In the foreground is a series of partitions made of an unknown material. Apparently it is implied that coal was burning below or whatever it was, and that same pan was being held on top. It is not clear why it was impossible to build an ordinary stove, and what these, judging by the photograph, rather thin partitions are made of. In general, there are only guesses about the course of the technical process, and the direction of these guesses is extremely one-sided. It is alleged that the workers employed in this work had a catastrophically short life expectancy.
In general, the picture is not surprising. At that time, little was known about radioactive materials. The extraction of uranium ore by the hands of prisoners is also not such a shocking event, because it is quite logical under the conditions of that time to send prisoners to this work. The only thing that raises questions is the technical process of enrichment, which in the form described is dangerous not so much for the prisoners, but for the administration, civilians and security. Judging by the photograph, the building is quite low in height. This means that there is no talk about the guards walking with machine guns along the perimeter of the hall above the heads of the prisoners (and no remains of these structures are visible, while the fastenings for the pipes under the ceiling have been preserved). Apparently, the guards were present directly in the hall and received the same dose of radiation as the workers. Moreover, the same guard could easily become a victim - a desperate prisoner could easily throw a pan in her direction. This arrangement is very strange, given the fact that since time immemorial, as far as I know, a rule has been formed - the security of a prisoner should be carried out in such a way that the guard has a clear and undeniable advantage. Thus, the topic of uranium enrichment has not been addressed.

Finally, let's get to the fun part. The author provides a number of information indicating the presence in this camp of a certain mega-secret laboratory in which scientists, among whom “there were even professors,” carried out no less secret experiments. Looking ahead, I note that the topic of these experiments was also not disclosed.
The author has two versions - experiments on the influence of radiation on human body and experiments on the brain of s/k. Judging by the materials presented, he prefers the second version - which, it must be noted, looks much more terrible than the first. Experiments on the influence of radiation in the conditions of its extraction by hand are a banal and quite logical matter. Similar experiments were also carried out in the stronghold of democracy - with the exception that the subjects were ordinary citizens who came to look at the atomic mushroom (I read somewhere that some VIP seats were almost sold for money). And it was clearly not white collar workers who mined uranium ore for the United States. As a result, the topic of experiments on radiation exposure was silenced by mention of the unfortunate fate of the guinea pigs, whose bones were discovered in one of the barracks.

But with brains everything is more complicated. As evidence, photographs of several individual skulls with trepanation are provided and only assurances that there are many such corpses there. However, the author could well be shocked by what he saw and forget about his camera for a while; although, judging by his words, he had been there more than once - which means there were opportunities.

A small touch. Histological studies are carried out on brains removed no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, on a living organism. Any method of killing gives a “not clean” picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances released during pain and psychological shock appears in the brain tissue.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by euthanizing the experimental animal or administering psychotropic drugs to it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off the animal's head from the body.

To confirm the words about the existence of experiments on people, a fragment of an interview with a certain lady, allegedly a former prisoner of that camp, is given. The lady indirectly confirms the fact of the experiments, but when asked a leading question about performing trepanation on a living test subject, she honestly admits that she is not in the know.
Finally, the author saved several photos that were given to him by a certain “ another boss with big stars on uniform", and it is specified that " for a substantial dollar bribe, he agreed to rummage through the archives of Butugychag" This case is very interesting. Isn’t it a familiar picture from various films, and indeed similar stories in general - a certain citizen in civilian clothes, whose conscience is bothering him, transfers mega-secret data to expose his superiors. Even somewhere like that... hmm... the funny Edward Radzinsky had something similar - “one railway worker told me...” Nonsense? In relation to the clerk from the office “Horns and Hooves” - not necessarily. In relation to “citizens in civilian clothes” - more than likely. In fact, the author did not even consider it necessary to take a critical look at the current situation, naively believing that “ for a hefty dollar bribe”, popularly known as a bribe, anyone will give him anything. In this situation, systems thinking outlines at least three options: first, everything was as it was, they conveyed what was needed; second - it was part of a special operation, they handed over a screw-up; third - " another boss“I tritely decided to make some money from a naive whistleblower, pretended to be an ally and sold outright bullshit.
The first option is unrealistic because it presupposes that the boss has some ideological principles for which he is ready not only to sacrifice his career, a comfortable chair, a stable income for the sake of some lover of revelations, but to commit an act of treason in the eyes of his colleagues and superiors. A simple “fight for truth” is not enough here; a powerful and strong ideology is needed, which, in fact, neither the author nor his sponsors offer.
The second option is unrealistic because there is no particular point in carrying out such special operations - all these diggers are already in plain sight, and you can add the necessary photos in another way.
The third option, I think, looks the most reliable. Why? To find out, let’s try to carefully examine the transferred “secret materials.”

So, the first photo in the “18+” category contains a number of interesting fragments, some of which I highlighted with a frame and adjusted the brightness/contrast in order to try to make the image more informative:

We are shown a table on which craniotomy is performed. The body of a man is clearly lying on the table, not secured in any way, which suggests that the procedure is being carried out on a corpse. Some damage is clearly visible in the area of ​​the skull cleared from the scalp. Upon closer examination, we can assume that we are dealing with a wound inflicted by a sharp object:

The body lies on white sheets, which for some reason... are dry. There are no visible stains of blood or fluid from the skull. Moreover, the scalp was tucked under the head, and also did not leave a single stain on the sheet. There are several possible explanations here - either the blood and fluid were previously pumped out of the skull, or the removal of the scalp and trephination of the occipital part was carried out in a different place (with a different set of sheets), or we are dealing with installation.
In the background we see several corpses or their parts, as well as a fragment of a gurney. It is surprising that such a model of gurney can be found in some hospitals - was it really the same even in 1947 or 1952?
Another thing that is puzzling is this. If we are talking about experiments, it is extremely doubtful that they were carried out in the same room as the storage of corpses. It is also clear that the corpses are lying rather carelessly - most likely, they were recently delivered.

Now the second photo in the “18+” category, or rather a collage. There are also no significant wet spots visible on any of the fragments. But best of all they show the room itself where the trepanation is performed:

We see tiles on the walls. It’s strange, isn’t it, to import scarce building material to a very remote area? Moreover, it does not hurt and is needed in in this case- painting the walls with light paint is enough. However, the room is apparently lined with it to the ceiling - isn’t it, a very strange luxury, in the conditions of a recently ended war, albeit for a mega-secret laboratory, but located not in Moscow, or even in Arkhangelsk.
Also quite surprising is the central heating battery. It seems completely normal to have a boiler room for heating the laboratory and administration buildings, and there probably was one. However, this battery has a very strange shape... As far as I know, batteries with sections of this shape began to be installed in the late 60s - early 70s of the last century, when this camp, as we know from the article, no longer existed. A characteristic feature is the wider section shape with edging. The battery sections that were installed previously were narrower, and when photographed from this distance, the tops would appear sharper, rather than blunt as they are here (see photo below). Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a photo of such an old battery (they can’t be found anywhere anymore), I’ll take it as soon as possible.

The image, apparently a tattoo, on the chest of the body also raises questions. It is very strange that it depicts a profile reminiscent of Lenin. It’s like - a prisoner, in a fit of fanatical Leninism, ordered such a tattoo in the zone? Or was it the bloody KGB that pricked everyone as an edification (why, exactly?).

I forwarded questions regarding damage to the skull and tattoo to a competent person. If he can clarify anything, I will update it.

So, what kind of photo were they shown to us? In my opinion, this looks more like a photo from the anatomy department of some medical university, where students are shown the process of trepanation on an ownerless corpse. The bodies in the background are material for further work. Citizens who are frightened by such cynicism should understand that it is a necessary component of the profession of a doctor, pathologist or pharmacist, simply because it helps to maintain a more or less healthy psyche.
It is also possible that we are talking about an autopsy of a person who was wounded in the head with a sharp object, in order to determine in more detail the nature of the injury and the level of damage to the brain.
In any case, in my opinion, there is no reason to claim that these photos were taken in that particular camp during the “experience.” Thus, the version of selling outright bullshit to a naive human rights activist for a bunch of green presidents takes on a very real form... Moreover, one can hardly doubt that such a “citizen in civilian clothes” has great opportunities to supply such “secret photographs” wholesale and retail to everyone for those who wish.

I would still like to note that if trepanned skulls were actually found in those burials, such operations could well have been performed there. Whether they were done, and for what purpose, and what actually happened in that camp should be shown by normal research aimed at establishing the truth, and not adjusting the evidence to fit an existing and generously funded thesis.

This article is an attempt at a summary analysis of falsifications on the website “GULAG - with a camera in the camps” by the notorious Sergei Melnikoff. The first revelations were made by historian Alexander Dyukov immediately after the appearance of this site in 2006. His initiative was continued by Bair Irincheev, Nikolai Anichkin, LJ users leorer, maxwallah, etc. During all this time, Melnikov not only did not remove the fakes, but also continued to fill the site with everything new and new lies. Below is an analysis of the 20 most obvious cases of forgery, distortion and outright lies. And it must be said that this analysis is by no means exhaustive.

1. "12 tons of documents"

The lies begin already in the announcement of the site. As Melnikoff states, “the basis of the archive is 12 tons of materials former USSR, classified as highly secret, marked “Keep forever” and “Not subject to declassification.” All these thousands of folders were purchased from officials of the modern Kremlin brigade.” Elsewhere, he adds to this photographs taken by himself in the colony: “For three years I had a miniature camera with me in prison. This is a photo story about how I used it, hid it from the ever-present informers and security guards, where I developed the film and how I transferred the material to the public.” It sounds promising, but it’s safe to say that Melnikoff has none of this. The website “GULAG - with a camera in the camps” has existed for six years, but no “specially secret” materials have appeared on it. Everything that is on the site is taken from the Internet and other publicly available sources. In fact, this is a garbage dump where they drag any garbage, as long as it is Russophobic, without thinking about such “little things” as authenticity.

2. Armenian boy

The story with the Armenian boy was one of the loudest. The article “Children's Gulag” is illustrated with a photograph of an emaciated child with the caption: “Hundreds of thousands of children of the peoples of the Caucasus died of starvation together with their evicted parents. Entire villages and districts perished.” The children of the evicted peoples of the Caucasus could not die in hundreds of thousands, if only because the number of all those evicted only slightly exceeded 500 thousand. And no matter how difficult the Kazakh exile was, it did not reach the level of exhaustion that the boy in the photograph had.

With the source of the photo, everything turned out to be even more interesting. In fact, this is evidence of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, filmed in the Ter-Zor desert. After the exposure, Melnikoff urgently added an “honest” link to Armenian at the bottom National Institute. Only this made the photograph no longer related to the GULAG, and if you hover your cursor over it, you will still see the “Children of Soviet GULAG” sign.

3. Klooga

This “secret” photograph was published several times in the Soviet Union. True, it does not depict victims of the NKVD at all, but the corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in the Klooga concentration camp (44 km from Tallinn) prepared for burning. This photograph is stored in State Archives Russian Federation in the emergency fund state commission to investigate the crimes of the Nazi occupiers. The photograph was published in a collection of materials from the Nuremberg trials (Moscow, 1959. Vol. 4. Paste between pages 336 and 337). Pictures from other angles were published in collections of documents “Criminal Goals - Criminal Means” (M., 1968. P. 104) and “Neither Prescription, nor Oblivion” (M., 1983. P. 171).

After the exposure, Melnikov hastily provided the photo with the comment: “Always Soviet propaganda passed it off as evidence of Nazi atrocities. We believe that these are the consequences of collectivization in the countryside. Take a close look at the fighters standing in the background. The caps and budenovkas are clearly visible on them.” Later, he even began to pass her off as Solovki. Unfortunately for the liar, filming and photography in Klooga was carried out, as noted above, from different angles. You can see budenovka on one of the people only with a lot of imagination (note that on the website the photo is shown in extremely poor quality; no budenovka is visible in normal resolution).

4. "Executions"

A collage with mixed archival footage and photographs from Chechnya gives a vivid idea of ​​the biased and propaganda nature of the site. The historical part of the collage again has nothing to do with the stated topic. In the photo in the upper left corner, the dead are wearing Red Army boots with iron horseshoes; at a distance lies a Soviet helmet and a rifle. This photograph is dated September 1941. In fact, these are dead Red Army soldiers who were trying to escape the encirclement near Kiev. A small photograph with a sitting corpse does not belong to the Gulag in any way. It's very famous Finnish photography a Red Army soldier who died from cold in one of the encirclements during the Soviet-Finnish war. In the central part of the collage there are again no signs of the Gulag. People have characteristic white bands on their sleeves - distinctive sign policemen in the occupied territory.

5. “The Pain of Ukraine: Holodomor”

Here Melnikoff is also not original. Illustrate “the genocide of Ukrainians in 1933” photographs of the 1921 famine taken by F. Nansen’s commission are a long-standing bad tradition.

The photo under the inscription “Russian Fascism” really has a direct relation to fascism - it comes from the Nazi propaganda book “Und du Siehst die Sowjets Richtig” by Dr.-Ing. A. Laubenheimer. Nibelungen-Verlag. (Berlin-Leipzig, 1935). Where and when the picture was taken is unknown.

But the photograph below it with two children does not raise any questions. This is a photograph of the 1921 famine, which was repeatedly published on charity cards. The caption was as follows: “Famine in Russia III. TWO STAGES OF HUNGER. These children are skinny and bone thin, with swollen bellies (caused by grass, husks, worms and soil). These children cannot be saved, it is too late. In order to save them, it was necessary to feed them until this stage of exhaustion occurred.”

Then again and again we see photographs of Nansen on the page, incl. and the notorious “cemetery in Kharkov 1933”, about which everyone already knows that this year is not 1933, but the 21st, and the cemetery is not in Kharkov, but in Buzuluk, Orenburg province. This is the “pain of Ukraine”.

6. "Children's Gulag"

In addition to the Armenian boy, there are two more blatant forgeries on the “Children’s Gulag” page. The medical examination of children does not take place in the Gulag, but in besieged Leningrad in 1942; this photograph is well-known and published many times. And just below are these pictures with the caption “Nobody needed photographs of little slaves. Only by chance could a person with a camera (even in an NKVD uniform) get to where the Soviet government spread rot on tens of thousands of children of its own people. But still, several such photographs remained in the archives.” Judging by the pathos, we are finally seeing a sample of those “12 tons of documents”? Alas! Before us is the famine of 1921-23 again. On the left is the photograph “Starving children in Gulyai-Polye”. It is not stored in the secret archives of the KGB, but in the cantonal archive of Geneva, in the fund of the International Union for Children's Aid (Union international de secours aux enfants). This is photo No. 14, received on May 5, 1922 from the Red Cross mission in Ukraine. No camps, little slaves and NKVD.

7. “The NKVD shows: public executions in the USSR”

First, let's define what a record is. The death penalty by hanging was introduced into the USSR on April 19, 1943 for traitors and war criminals (thus, all Melnikoff’s fabrications regarding “collectivization” are nonsense). The video features a montage of filming of two different executions. In the first case, policemen are hanged, and where the names of the convicts are visible on the signs - the execution of murderers from the Sonderkommando SS-10-A in Krasnodar in 1943.

“Closed, glossed over, buried topic” is a lie. Just open the popular collection “Inevitable Retribution. Based on materials trials over traitors to the Motherland, fascist executioners and agents of imperialist intelligence services,” published in 1984 in a hundred thousand copies. An article about the Krasnodar trial reports: “The sentence against fascist accomplices was carried out on July 18, 1943 at 13.00 in the city square of Krasnodar, where about 50 thousand people were present.”

The description of the execution at the Gigant cinema (German war criminals were hanged there on January 5, 1946) is fantastic. There were no traces of any cables with loops, which is easy to verify by looking newsreel.

As for “acts of medieval obscurantism,” for example, in France, Article 26 of the Criminal Code stated “The sentence is carried out in one of the public squares of the area specified in the verdict of guilty,” and only according to the law of 1939, executions began to be carried out in prison in the presence of a narrow circle of officials.

8. “Burial of villagers shot by security officers in one of the Ukrainian farms recaptured by the White Army”

This video is assembled from three unrelated fragments. The first is a chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, the execution of a traitor in a partisan detachment. The second, with a crying woman, is a farewell to the front of the militia divisions. And only the third part is directly related to the name. True, frames with equal chances can be classified as civil war, and to the First World War (a bandage with a red cross on the sleeve is visible), and the bodies may belong to both those shot and those killed in battle.

9. Butovo training ground

Since no filming was carried out in Butovo in 1937, both photographs of “mass executions” are a deliberate forgery. So far only the second photo has been identified. It is taken from the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission, and was published in a collection of documents from the Nuremberg trials. It depicts the corpses of Soviet people after one of the mass executions near the city of Zolochev, photographed by the Nazis before burial (German photograph. Discovered by the Gestapo in the city of Zolochev in July 1944).

10. NKVD in 1941

The photograph illustrating the article is quite common on the Internet, but its origin is unknown. However, it can be argued that this is a more recent dramatization of the Second World War. This is evidenced by the theatrical pose of the “executioner”, and the symmetrical figures of the “victims”, and modern-style underwear. It is impossible to determine the nationality of the officer (he was taken from the back and the insignia is not visible), although the authors of the staged photo were clearly guided by German uniform. This does not interfere with a number of anti-communist sites of Eastern Europe, and after them to Melnikov, passing off the photograph as “NKVD atrocities.”

11. Medical experiments in the Gulag

One of Melnikov’s largest-scale falsifications, about medical experiments allegedly carried out on living people in the Gulag, deserves consideration in a separate article. For now you can familiarize yourself with its contents. Pay attention to the boorish anonymous comments - this is Melnikoff giving himself away again.

12. General agreement between the NKVD and the Gestapo

13. “Bitches of Russia”

At the top there is a video from YouTube - a clip from the German documentary film review “Deutsche Wochenschau” with footage of the Brest broadcast Soviet troops. Note that the video was poorly edited - in fact, the events took place not on October 27, but on September 22, 1939. The paragraph below it, in italics, is much more interesting. This is a quote from “Genocide in East Prussia” by Peter Hedruck, a source no less trashy than the “GULAG” itself.

Rate Order Supreme High Command No. 0428 of November 17, 1941 is well known and has been published more than once. It orders “in the event of a forced withdrawal of our units in one area or another, to take the Soviet population with us and be sure to destroy everyone without exception.” settlements so that the enemy cannot use them." Stored in TsAMO, f. 208, op. 2524, d. 1, l. 257-258. It does not talk about any disguises or killings of civilians. Detailed analysis you can read this fake.

14. “March of the Cheka Slaves”

Under such a loud name on the “GULAG” there is a clip of Seva Novgorodtsev’s radio broadcast dated August 26, 1983, about the similarity he discovered between the famous song “Everything Above” (“Air March”) with the German “Berliner Jungarbeiterlied” (which Seva mistakenly calls “Horst Wessel "). Melnikov is silent about the fact that priority has long been recognized specifically for the Soviet song. You can also familiarize yourself with this fascinating musical detective story.

The visuals that accompany the recording deserve special consideration. This is an incoherent collection of Nansen-like photographs of the famine, caricatures of Putin, German posters, Russophobic pictures and a “Hitler icon.” And it’s quite unexpected to come across here the notorious photograph of children killed by a crazy gypsy woman, from a Polish textbook on psychiatry. It was repeatedly attributed as a crime of the UPA, but to illustrate the song for it...

15. “Our democratic scribblers and oppositionists are throwing mud at our country...”

And again Melnikoff drags all kinds of garbage from the Internet onto his website. A selection of quotes allegedly from Goebbels, widely distributed on the RuNet, goes back to the forum of the Belarusian tabloid newspaper “Secret Research,” which does not deserve the slightest trust.

Goebbels did not write or say anything like this; at least, on March 12, 1933, he did not speak anywhere. A quick look at other speeches also did not reveal similar maxims.

Explosions for the reign!

Translation into Russian of the original scandalous article from GQ magazine, banned for distribution in Russia, about how the FSB blew up houses in Moscow and other Russian cities to ensure the rating of the rat ruler.

The Russians don't care. But for readers who have a head on their shoulders and not a pumpkin, it is extremely useful to read.

Perhaps our officials will shun the “weather-eyed” for fear of getting dirty!

Maitre's favorite Asian dish is “Russian” lamb baked in a tandoor...

Vladimir Putin's sinister rise to power

The first explosion occurred in the barracks of the Buinaksk garrison, where Russian military personnel and their families lived. An unremarkable five-story building, located on the outskirts of the city, was blown up at the end of September 1999 by a truck filled with explosives. The explosion caused the interfloor ceilings to collapse on top of each other, so that the building turned into a pile of burning ruins. Under these rubble were the bodies of sixty-four people - men, women and children.

On September 13th last year, at dawn, I left my Moscow hotel and headed to a working-class district located on the southern outskirts of the city. I haven't been to Moscow for twelve years. During this time, the city was overgrown with skyscrapers made of glass and steel, the Moscow skyline was generously dotted with construction cranes, and even at four in the morning life in the bright casinos on Pushkin Square was in full swing, and Tverskaya was filled with jeeps and BMWs of the latest models. This trip through Moscow at night gave me a glimpse of the petrodollar-fueled colossal changes that have taken place in Russia during Vladimir Putin's nine years in power.

However, my path that morning lay in the “former” Moscow, in a small park where a nondescript nine-story building once stood at Kashirskoe Highway 6/3. At 5:03 on September 19, 1999, exactly nine years before my arrival, the house at Kashirskoye Shosse 6/3 was blown to pieces by a bomb hidden in the basement; One hundred and twenty-one residents of this house died in their sleep. This explosion, which occurred nine days after the Buinaksk explosion, was the third of four apartment bombings that occurred over a twelve-day period that September. The explosions killed about 300 people and plunged the country into a state of panic; this series of terrorist attacks was among the deadliest worldwide to occur before the fall of the Twin Towers in the United States.

Newly elected Prime Minister Putin blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists and ordered scorched-earth tactics in a new offensive against the rebel region. Thanks to the success of this offensive, the previously unknown Putin became national hero and soon gained complete control over the power structures of Russia. Putin continues to exercise this control to this day.

At the site of the house on Kashirskoe Highway there are now neat flower beds. Flowerbeds surround a stone monument with the names of the victims, topped with an Orthodox cross. On the ninth anniversary of the attack, three or four local journalists came to the monument, watched by two policemen in a patrol car; however, there were no special occupations for either one or the other. Shortly after five in the morning, a group of two dozen people, most of them young, presumably relatives of the victims, approached the monument. They lit candles at the monument and laid red carnations - and left as quickly as they came. Besides them, only two elderly men appeared at the monument that day, eyewitnesses of the explosion, who obediently told television cameras how terrible it was, such a shock. I noticed that one of these men looked very upset while standing at the monument - he was crying and continuously wiping tears from his cheeks. Several times he began to decisively walk away, as if forcing himself to leave this place, but each time he hesitated on the outskirts of the park, turned around and slowly returned back. I decided to approach him.

“I lived nearby,” he said. “I woke up from the roar and ran here.” A large man, a former sailor, he waved his hands helplessly around the flower beds. “And nothing. Nothing. They pulled out only one boy and his dog. That’s all. Everyone else was already dead.”

As I later found out, the old man had a personal tragedy that day. His daughter, son-in-law and grandson lived in a house on Kashirskoe Highway - and they also died that morning. He led me to the monument, pointed to their names carved in stone, and again began desperately rubbing his eyes. And then he whispered furiously: “They say that the Chechens did it, but it’s all a lie. These were Putin’s people. Everyone knows this. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everyone knows about it.”

The mystery of these explosions has not yet been solved; this riddle is embedded in the very foundation of modern Russian state. What happened in those terrible September days of 1999? Perhaps Russia has found in Putin its avenging angel, the notorious man of action, who crushed the enemies who attacked the country and led his people out of the crisis? Or maybe the crisis was fabricated by the Russian secret services in order to bring their man to power? The answers to these questions are important because if the explosions of 1999 and the events that followed had not happened, it would be difficult to imagine an alternative scenario for Putin’s rise to the place he currently occupies - a player on the world stage, the head of one of most powerful countries in the world.

It is strange that so few people outside Russia want to get an answer to this question. Several intelligence agencies are believed to have conducted their own investigations, but the results of the investigations have not been made public. Very few American lawmakers have shown interest in the matter. In 2003, John McCain told Congress that “there is credible information that the Russian FSB was involved in the bombings.” However, neither the United States government nor the American media showed any interest in investigating the bombings.

This lack of interest is now observed in Russia. Immediately after the explosions, various representatives of Russian society expressed doubts about the official version of what happened. One by one these voices fell silent. IN last years a number of journalists investigating the incident were either killed or died under suspicious circumstances - as were two Duma members who participated in the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. On this moment Almost everyone who has expressed a different position on this issue in the past either refuses to comment, has publicly retracted their words, or is dead.

During my last year's visit to Russia, I addressed a number of people who were in one way or another connected with the investigation of the events of those days - journalists, lawyers, human rights activists. Many refused to talk to me. Some limited themselves to listing well-known inconsistencies in this case, but refused to express their point of view, limiting themselves to the remark that the issue remains “controversial.” Even the old man from Kashirskoe Highway ultimately turned out to be a living illustration of the atmosphere of uncertainty that hangs over this topic. He readily agreed to a repeat meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to the relatives of the victims, who, like him, doubt the official version of events. However, he later changed his mind.

"I can't," he told me during a telephone conversation a few days after we met. "I talked to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet you, I'm done for." I wanted to find out what he meant by this, but I didn’t have time - the old sailor hung up.

There is no doubt that part of this reticence is due to memories of the fate of Alexander Litvinenko, a man who devoted his entire life to proving that there was an intelligence conspiracy in the house bombing case. From his London exile, Litvinenko, the fugitive KGB officer, launched an active campaign to discredit the Putin regime, accusing the latter of a wide variety of crimes, but especially of organizing bombings of residential buildings. In November 2006, the world community was shocked by the news of Litvinenko's poisoning - it is assumed that he received a lethal dose of poison during a meeting with two former agents KGB in one of the London bars. Before his death (which occurred only after twenty-three painful days), Litvinenko signed a statement in which he directly blamed Putin for his death.

However, Litvinenko was not the only one working on the bombings case. Several years before his death, he invited another ex-KGB agent, Mikhail Trepashkin, to participate in the investigation. In the past, relations between the partners were quite complicated; it is said that in the 90s, one of them received an order to liquidate the other. However, it was Trepashkin, while in Russia, who was able to obtain most of the disturbing facts in the case of the explosions.

Trepashkin, among other things, came into conflict with the authorities. In 2003, he was sent to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years. However, by the time of my visit to Moscow last year, he was already free.

Through my intermediary, I learned that Trepashkin has two small daughters and a wife who passionately wants her husband to stay out of politics. Taking into account this, as well as the fact of his recent imprisonment and the murder of a colleague, I had no doubt that our communication with him would not work out in the same way as my attempts to communicate with other former dissenters.

“Oh, he will talk,” the intermediary assured me. "The only thing they can do to silence Trepashkin is kill him."

On September 9, five days after the explosion in Buinaksk, terrorists struck Moscow. This time their target was an eight-story building on Guryanov Street, in a working-class area in the southeast of the city. Instead of a truck with explosives, the terrorists planted a bomb in the basement, but the result was almost the same - all eight floors of the building collapsed, burying ninety-four residents of the house under the rubble.

It was after the explosion that the general alarm sounded on Guryanov. During the first hours after the terrorist attack, several officials immediately announced that Chechen militants were involved in the explosion, and a special situation was introduced in the country. Thousands of workers law enforcement were sent to the streets to question, and in hundreds of cases arrest, people with Chechen appearance, residents of cities and villages organized people's squads and patrolled courtyards. Representatives of various political movements began to call for revenge.

At Trepashkin’s request, our first meeting took place in a crowded cafe in the center of Moscow. First one of his assistants came, and twenty minutes later Mikhail himself came with someone like a bodyguard - a young man with short hair and a blank look.

Trepashkin, although small in stature, was powerfully built - evidence of years of martial arts training - and, at 51, still handsome. His most attractive feature was the half-surprised smile that never left his face. This gave him a certain aura of friendliness and general pleasantness, although the person sitting opposite him in the role of the interrogated person would probably get on his nerves with such a smile.

We spoke for some time common topics- about the unusually cold weather in Moscow, about the changes that have taken place in the city since my last visit - and I felt that Trepashkin was internally assessing me, deciding how much he could tell me.

He then began to talk about his career in the KGB. He spent most of his time investigating cases of antiques smuggling. In those days, Mikhail was absolutely devoted Soviet power and especially the KGB. His devotion was so great that he even took part in an attempt to prevent Boris Yeltsin from coming to power in order to preserve the existing system.

“I understood that this would be the end of the Soviet Union,” Trepashkin explained. “Moreover, what will happen to the Committee, to all those who made work in the KGB their lives? I only saw an approaching catastrophe.”

And the disaster happened. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic and social chaos. One of the most devastating aspects of this chaos was the transition of KGB agents to work in the private sector. Some started their own businesses or joined the mafia they once fought. Others became “advisers” to the new oligarchs or old apparatchiks, who were desperately trying to grab everything more or less valuable for themselves, while verbally expressing support for Boris Yeltsin’s “democratic reforms.”

Trepashkin was familiar with all this firsthand. While continuing to work for the successor to the FSB, Trepashkin discovered that the line between criminality and state power increasingly vague.

“In case after case there was a kind of confusion,” he said. "First you find the mafia working with terrorist groups. Then the trail goes to a business group or a ministry. And then what - is it still a criminal case or has it already been officially sanctioned covert operation? And what exactly does “officially sanctioned” mean—who makes the decisions anyway?”

Ultimately, in the summer of 1995, Trepashkin became involved in a case that would change his life forever. This case led to a conflict between him and the top leadership of the FSB, one of whose members, according to Mikhail, even planned his murder. Like many similar cases investigating corruption in post-Soviet Russia, this one was tied to the breakaway region of Chechnya. By December 1995, the militants, who had been fighting for the independence of Chechnya for a whole year, had put the Russian army in a bloody and shameful stalemate. However, the success of the Chechens was not due to superior training alone. Already in Soviet times Chechens controlled most of the criminal groups in the Union, so the criminalization of Russian society only benefited the Chechen militants. The uninterrupted supply of modern Russian weapons was ensured by corrupt officers Russian army who had access to such weapons, and the Chechen crime bosses, who had spread their network throughout the country, paid for them.

How high did this close collaboration go? Mikhail Trepashkin received the answer to this question on the night of December 1, when a group of armed FSB officers burst into the Moscow branch of Soldi Bank.

The raid was the culmination of a complex operation that Trepashkin had helped plan. The operation was aimed at neutralizing a notorious group of bank extortionists associated with Salman Raduev, one of the leaders of Chechen terrorists. The raid was an unprecedented success - two dozen criminals ended up in the hands of the FSB, including two FSB officers and an army general.

Inside the bank, FSB officers found something else. To protect themselves from a possible trap, the extortionists placed electronic bugs throughout the building, which were controlled from a minibus parked near the bank. And although this precaution turned out to be ineffective, the question arose about the origin of the listening equipment.

“All such devices have serial numbers,” Trepashkin explained to me, sitting in a Moscow cafe. "We traced these numbers and found that they belonged to either the FSB or the Ministry of Defense."

The conclusion that emerged from this discovery was stunning. Since few people had access to such equipment, it became clear that high-ranking intelligence officers and the army could be involved in the case - in a case that was not just criminal, but one whose goal was to raise funds for the war with Russia. By the standards of any country, this was not just a fact of corruption, but treason.

However, before Trepashkin could begin the investigation, he was removed from the Soldi-Bank case by Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB's own security department. Moreover, Trepashkin says, no charges were brought against the FSB officers detained during the raid, and almost all the other detainees were soon quietly released. By the end of the investigation, which lasted almost two years, a turning point came in Trepashkin’s life. In May 1997 he wrote open letter Boris Yeltsin, in which he described his participation in the case, and also accused most of the FSB leadership of a number of crimes, including collaboration with the mafia and even hiring members of criminal groups to work in the FSB.

“I thought that if the president found out about what was happening,” Trepashkin said, “he would take some action. I was wrong.”

Exactly. As it turned out later, Boris Yeltsin was also corrupt and Trepashkin’s letter warned the leadership of the FSB that a dissenter had crept into their ranks. A month later, Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, unable to withstand, in his words, the pressure that began to be put on him. However, this did not mean that Trepashkin was going to quietly disappear into the fog. That same summer, he filed a lawsuit against the leadership of the FSB, including the director of the Service. He seemed to hope that the honor of the Office could still be saved, that some hitherto unknown reformer could take upon himself the responsibility for rebuilding the agency. Instead, his persistence appears to have convinced someone in the FSB leadership that the Trepashkin problem must be solved once and for all. One of the people they turned to for a solution was Alexander Litvinenko.

In theory, Litvinenko seemed a suitable candidate for such a task. After returning from a difficult business trip to Chechnya, where he served in counterintelligence, Litvinenko was sent to a new, secret division of the FSB - the Directorate for the Development and Suppression of Activities of Criminal Associations (URPO). Alexander did not know at the time that the department was created for the purpose of carrying out secret liquidations. As Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, write in their book “Death of a Dissident,” Alexander found out about this when the head of the department summoned him in October 1997. “There is this Trepashkin,” the boss allegedly told him, “This is your new object. Take his file and get acquainted.”

During the familiarization process, Litvinenko learned about Mikhail’s participation in the Soldi Bank case, as well as about his legal battle with the leadership of the FSB. Alexander did not understand what he should do about Trepashkin.

“Well, this is a sensitive matter,” according to Litvinenko, his boss told him. “He summons the director of the FSB to court and gives out interviews. We must shut him up - this is the director’s personal order.”

Soon after, Litvinenko said the list of potential victims included Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch with connections to the Kremlin, whose death someone in power appeared to want. Litvinenko was playing for time, coming up with numerous excuses as to why the liquidation orders had not yet been carried out.

According to Trepashkin, at that time there were two attempts on his life - one from an ambush on a deserted stretch of Moscow highway, the other from a sniper on a roof who failed to make a aimed shot. In other cases, Trepashkin claims, he received warnings from friends who were still working in the Office.

In November 1998, Litvinenko and four of his colleagues from URPO spoke at a press conference in Moscow about the existence of a conspiracy to kill Trepashkin and Berezovsky and their role in it. Mikhail himself was present at the press conference.

At this point, without much fanfare, everything died down. Litvinenko, as the leader of a group of dissident officers, was dismissed from the FSB, but the punishment then was limited to that. As for Trepashkin, oddly enough, he won a lawsuit against the FSB, married again and got a job in the tax service, where he intended to quietly serve until retirement.

But then, in September 1999, apartment bombings shook the foundations of the Russian state. These explosions again threw Litvinenko and Trepashkin into the shadow world of conspiracies, this time united by a common goal. In the midst of the panic that gripped Moscow after the Guryanov bombing, in the early morning of September 13, 1999, the police received a call about suspicious activity in an apartment building on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The police checked the signal, which revealed nothing, and left house 6/3 on Kashirskoe Highway at two o’clock in the morning. At 5:03 a.m. the building was destroyed by a powerful explosion, killing 121 people. Three days later, the target was a house in Volgodonsk, southern city, where seventeen people became victims of a bomb planted in a truck.

We are sitting in a Moscow cafe, Trepashkin frowns, which doesn’t look like him at all, and looks into the distance for a long time.

“It was impossible to believe,” he finally says. “That was my first thought. There is panic in the country, volunteer squads are stopping people on the street, there are police checkpoints everywhere. How did it happen that the terrorists moved freely and had enough time to plan and carry out such complex terrorist attacks? It seemed incredible.”

Another aspect that raised questions for Trepashkin was the motives for the explosions.

“Usually the motive for a crime is obvious,” he explains. "It's either money, or hatred, or envy. But in this case, what were the motives of the Chechens? Very few people thought about it."

From one country, this is easy to understand. Dislike for Chechens is firmly rooted in Russian society, especially after their war of independence. During the war, both sides committed unspeakable cruelties against each other. The Chechens endured without hesitation fighting into Russian territory, their targets were often civilians. But the war ended in 1997, with Yeltsin signing a peace treaty that gave Chechnya broad autonomy.

“Then why?” asks Trapeshkin. "Why should the Chechens provoke the Russian government if they have already received everything they fought for?"

And one more thing made the former investigator think - the composition of the new Russian government.

In early August 1999, President Yeltsin appointed his third prime minister in three months. He was a thin, dry man, virtually unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.

The main reason for his obscurity was that just a few years before his appointment to high office, Putin was only one of many mid-level officers in the KGB/FSB. In 1996, Putin received a position in the economic department of the presidential administration, an important post in the Yeltsin hierarchy, which allowed him to gain leverage over internal Kremlin politics. Apparently, he made good use of his time in this post - over the next three years, Putin was promoted to deputy head of the presidential administration, then appointed director of the FSB, and then prime minister.

But despite the fact that Putin was a relative stranger to the Russian public in September 1999, Trepashkin had a good idea of ​​the man. Putin was director of the FSB when the URPO scandal broke and it was he who fired Litvinenko. "The reason I fired Litvinenko," he told a reporter, "is that FSB officers should not call press conferences... and they should not make internal scandals public."

No less troubling for Trepashkin was the appointment of Putin's successor as director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev. It was Patrushev, being the head of the FSB’s own security department, who removed Trepashkin from the Soldi Bank case, and it was he who was among the most ardent supporters of the version of the “Chechen trace” in the case of explosions of residential buildings.

“That is, we observed such a turn of events,” says Trepashkin. “They told us: ‘The Chechens are to blame for the explosions, so we need to deal with them.’”

But then something very strange happened. This happened in sleepy provincial Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

In an atmosphere of super-vigilance that gripped the country's population, several residents of house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street in Ryazan noticed a suspicious white Zhiguli parked next to their house on the evening of September 22nd. Their suspicions turned to panic when they noticed the car's occupants carrying several large bags into the basement of the building and then driving away. Residents called the police.

Three 50-kilogram bags were found in the basement, connected using a timer to the detonator. The building was evacuated, and an explosives technician from the local FSB was invited to the basement, who determined that the bags contained hexogen - explosive, which would be enough to completely destroy this building. At the same time, all roads from Ryazan were blocked by checkpoints, and a real hunt was launched for the white Zhiguli cars and their passengers.

The next morning, news of the Ryazan incident spread throughout the country. Prime Minister Putin praised the residents of Ryazan for their vigilance, and the Minister of Internal Affairs boasted of successes in the work of law enforcement agencies, “such as preventing an explosion in a residential building in Ryazan.”

This could have been the end of it if two suspects suspected of planning a terrorist attack had not been detained that same night. To the amazement of the police, both detainees presented their FSB identification cards. Soon a call came from the Moscow headquarters of the FSB demanding the release of the detainees.

The next morning, the FSB director appeared on television with absolutely new version events in Ryazan. According to him, the incident in house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was not a prevented terrorist attack, but an FSB exercise aimed at testing public vigilance; the bags in the basement did not contain hexogen, but ordinary sugar.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in this statement. How can we compare the FSB version about bags of sugar with the conclusion of a local FSB expert that there was hexogen in the bags? If this really was an exercise, why did the local FSB branch know nothing about it and why did Patrushev himself remain silent for a day and a half since the incident was reported? Why did the explosions of residential buildings stop after the incident in Ryazan? If the terrorist attacks were the work of Chechen militants, why didn’t they continue their dirty deed with even greater zeal after the failure in Ryazan for the FSB from a PR point of view? But the time for all these questions has already been lost. While Prime Minister Putin was delivering his speech on September 23, praising the vigilance of Ryazan residents, military planes had already begun massive bombing of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Over the next few days, Russian troops, which had previously been massed on the border, entered the breakaway republic, marking the beginning of the Second Chechen War.

After this, events developed rapidly. In his 1999 New Year's address, Boris Yeltsin stunned the Russian people with the announcement of his immediate resignation. The move made Putin acting president until the next elections were held. Instead of the planned summer, the election date was set just ten weeks after Yeltsin's resignation, leaving little time for the remaining candidates to prepare.

During a public opinion poll conducted in August 1999, less than two percent of respondents were in favor of electing Putin as president. However, in March 2000, Putin, riding a wave of popularity caused by the policy of total war in Chechnya, was elected with 53 percent of voters. The Putin era has begun, changing Russia irrevocably.

Trepashkin scheduled our next meeting in his apartment. I was surprised - I was told that for security reasons Mikhail rarely invited guests to his home, although I understood that he was aware that his enemies knew where he lived.

His apartment, located on the first floor of a high-rise building in the south of Moscow, made a good impression, although it was furnished in a spartan manner. Trepashkin showed me his home and I noted that the only place where there was some disorder was a small room filled with papers - a built-in closet converted into an office. One of his daughters was at home during my visit, and she brought us tea as we sat in the living room.

Smiling embarrassedly, Trepashkin said that there is another reason why he rarely invites work-related guests - his wife. “She wants me not to be involved in politics anymore, but since she is not at home right now...” His smile faded. “This is because of the searches, of course. One day they broke into the apartment,” he waves his hand towards the front door, “with weapons, shouting orders; the children were very scared. This had a strong effect on my wife then, she is always afraid that it will happen again."

The first of these searches took place in January 2002. One late evening, a group of FSB agents invaded the apartment and turned everything upside down. Trepashkin claims that they found nothing, but were able to plant enough evidence - secret documents and live ammunition so that the prosecutor's office could open a criminal case against him on three counts.

“This was a signal that they had taken me for a pencil,” says Trepashkin, “that if I don’t come to my senses, they will take me seriously.”

Trepashkin guessed what caused such attention from the FSB - a few days before the search, he began receiving calls from a man whom the Putin regime considered one of the main traitors - Alexander Litvinenko. Lieutenant Colonel Litvinenko quickly fell into disgrace. After a press conference in 1998 at which he accused the URPO of plotting murders, he spent nine months in prison on charges of “abuse of authority” before being forced to leave the country while prosecutors prepared new charges against him. Litvinenko and his family, with the support of the exiled oligarch Berezovsky, settled in England, where Alexander began a joint campaign with Boris to expose what they called the crimes of the Putin regime. The main focus of the campaign was to investigate the facts about a series of explosions in residential buildings.

That’s why Litvinenko called him, Trepashkin explained. Litvinenko, for obvious reasons, could not come to his homeland, and they needed someone who could conduct an investigation in Russia.

It was easy only in words, since by 2002 Russia had changed a lot. During Putin's two years in power, independent media have virtually ceased to exist, and the political opposition has been marginalized to the point of playing no role.

One of the indicators of these changes was the review of all aspects of the weakest FSB case - the case of the “exercises” in Ryazan. By 2002, the head of the Ryazan FSB, who led the hunt for “terrorists,” officially supported the version of the exercises. A local explosives specialist, who had claimed in front of television cameras that there were explosives in the Ryazan bags, suddenly fell silent and disappeared from view. Even some residents of the house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street, who starred in documentary film 6 months after the events and desperately protesting against the official version, they now refuse to talk to anyone, limiting themselves to statements that perhaps they were mistaken.

“I told Litvinenko that I could only help in the investigation if I was officially involved in the case,” Trepashkin explained to me, sitting in his living room. “If I start to look into it on my own, the authorities will immediately turn against me.”

Trepashkin's official role was arranged during a meeting organized by Berezovsky in his London office in early March 2002. One of those present at the meeting, State Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, agreed to organize a special commission to investigate the circumstances of the explosions, Trepashkin was invited to this commission as one of the investigators. Tatiana Morozova, a 35-year-old Russian emigrant living in Milwaukee, attended the meeting. Tatyana's mother was among those killed in the explosion on Guryanov Street - under Russian law, this gave her the right to access official records of the investigation. Since Trepashkin had recently received a lawyer's license, Morozova had to appoint him as her attorney and send a request to the court asking for access to the materials of the explosion case.

“I agreed with both proposals,” Trepashkin told me, “but the question remained where to start. Many of the reports could not be trusted, many people changed the original testimony, so I decided to turn to physical evidence.”

Easy to say, hard to do. The authorities' reaction to the explosions was remarkable for the excessive haste with which the site of the terrorist attack was cleared. Americans dug into the ruins of the World Trade Center for six months after its fall, treating the site as a crime scene. Russian authorities cleared away the rubble at the site of the explosion on Guryanov Street within a few days, and all the debris was sent to the city landfill. Whatever evidence remained - and it was unclear whether it existed in nature - was all presumably in FSB warehouses.

This is the “Dneprovsky” mine - one of Stalin’s camps in Kolyma. On July 11, 1929, a decree “On the use of labor of criminal prisoners” was adopted for those sentenced to a term of 3 years or more; this decree became the starting point for the creation of forced labor camps throughout Soviet Union. During a trip to Magadan, I visited one of the most accessible and well-preserved Gulag camps, Dneprovsky, a six-hour drive from Magadan. A very difficult place, especially listening to stories about the life of prisoners and imagining their work in the difficult climate here.

In 1928, the richest gold deposits were found in Kolyma. By 1931, the authorities decided to develop these deposits using prisoners. In the fall of 1931, the first group of prisoners, about 200 people, was sent to Kolyma. It would probably be wrong to assume that there were only political prisoners here; there were also those convicted under other articles of the criminal code. In this report I want to show photographs of the camp and supplement them with quotes from the memoirs of former prisoners who were here.

“Dnieper” received its name from the spring - one of the tributaries of the Nerega. Officially, “Dneprovsky” was called a mine, although the bulk of its production came from ore areas where tin was mined. A large camp area lies at the foot of a very high hill.

From Magadan to Dneprovsky it’s a 6-hour drive, along an excellent road, the last 30-40 km of which look something like this:

It was my first time driving a Kamaz shift vehicle and I was absolutely delighted. There will be a separate article about this car, it even has the function of inflating the wheels directly from the cabin, in general it’s cool.

However, getting here to Kamaz trucks at the beginning of the 20th century was something like this:

The Dneprovsky mine and processing plant was subordinated to the Coastal Camp (Berlag, Special Camp No. 5, Special Camp No. 5, Special Blag of Dalstroy) Ext. ITL Dalstroy and the GULAG

The Dneprovsky mine was organized in the summer of 1941, worked intermittently until 1955 and extracted tin. The main labor force of Dneprovsky were prisoners. Convicted under various articles of the criminal code of the RSFSR and other republics of the Soviet Union.

Among them were also those illegally repressed under so-called political charges, who have now been rehabilitated or are being rehabilitated

All the years of Dneprovsky's activity, the main tools of labor here were a pick, a shovel, a crowbar and a wheelbarrow. However, some of the most difficult production processes were mechanized, including with American equipment from the Denver company, supplied from the USA during the Great Patriotic War. Patriotic War under Lend Lease. Later it was dismantled and taken to other production facilities, so it was not preserved at Dneprovsky.

» The Studebaker drives into a deep and narrow valley, squeezed by very steep hills. At the foot of one of them we notice an old adit with superstructures, rails and a large embankment - a dump. Below, the bulldozer has already begun to mutilate the earth, turning over all the greenery, roots, stone blocks and leaving behind a wide black stripe. Soon a town of tents and several large wooden houses appears in front of us, but we don’t go there, but turn right and go up to the camp guardhouse.

The watch is old, the gates are wide open, the fence is made of liquid barbed wire on shaky, rickety, weathered posts. Only the tower with the machine gun looks new - the pillars are white and smell of pine needles. We disembark and enter the camp without any ceremony.” (P. Demant)

Pay attention to the hill - its entire surface is covered with geological exploration furrows, from where the prisoners rolled wheelbarrows with rock. The norm is 80 wheelbarrows per day. Up and down. In any weather - both hot summer and -50 in winter.

This is a steam generator that was used to defrost the soil, because here permafrost and digging several meters below ground level simply won’t work. This is the 30s, there was no mechanization then, all work was done manually.

All furniture and household items, all metal products were produced on site by the hands of prisoners:

Carpenters made a bunker, overpass, trays, and our team installed motors, mechanisms, and conveyors. In total, we launched six such industrial devices. As each one was launched, our mechanics remained to work on it - on the main motor, on the pump. I was left at the last device by the mechanic. (V. Pepelyaev)

We worked in two shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch was brought to work. Lunch is 0.5 liters of soup (water with black cabbage), 200 grams of oatmeal and 300 grams of bread. My job is to turn on the drum, the tape and sit and watch that everything spins and the rock moves along the tape, and that’s it. But sometimes something breaks - the tape may break, a stone may get stuck in the hopper, a pump may fail, or something else. Then come on, come on! 10 days during the day, ten at night. During the day, of course, it’s easier. From the night shift, you get to the zone by the time you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep, it’s already lunch, when you go to bed, there’s a check, and then there’s dinner, and then it’s off to work. (V. Pepelyaev)

In the second period of the camp's work in post-war period there was electricity here:

“The Dnieper received its name from the spring - one of the tributaries of the Nerega. Officially, “Dneprovsky” is called a mine, although the bulk of its production comes from ore areas where tin is mined. A large camp area lies at the foot of a very high hill. Between the few old barracks there are long green tents, and a little higher up are the white frames of new buildings. Behind the medical unit, several prisoners in blue overalls are digging impressive holes for an insulator. The dining room was located in a half-rotten barracks that had sunk into the ground. We were accommodated in the second barracks, located above the others, not far from the old tower. I settle down on the through upper bunks, opposite the window. For the view from here of mountains with rocky peaks, a green valley and a river with a waterfall, you would have to pay exorbitant prices somewhere in Switzerland. But here we get this pleasure for free, or so it seems to us. We don’t yet know that, contrary to the generally accepted camp rule, the reward for our work will be gruel and a ladle of porridge - everything we earn will be taken away by the management of the Coastal camps” (P. Demant)

In the zone, all the barracks are old, slightly renovated, but there is already a medical unit, a BUR. A team of carpenters is building a new large barracks, a canteen and new towers around the zone. On the second day I was already taken to work. The foreman put us three people in the pit. This is a pit, above it there is a gate like on a well. Two are working on the gate, pulling out and unloading the tub - a large bucket made of thick iron (it weighs 60 kilograms), the third below is loading what was blown up. Before lunch I worked on the gate, and we completely cleared the bottom of the pit. They came from lunch, and then there was an explosion - we had to pull them out again. I volunteered to load it myself, sat down on the tub and the guys slowly lowered me down 6-8 meters. I loaded the bucket with stones, the guys lifted it, and suddenly I felt bad, dizzy, weak, and the shovel fell from my hands. And I sat down in the tub and somehow shouted: “Come on!” Fortunately, I realized in time that I had been poisoned by the gases left after the explosion in the ground, under the stones. Having rested in the clean Kolyma air, I said to myself: “I won’t climb again!” Started to think how in conditions Far North, with severely limited nutrition and a complete lack of freedom to survive and remain human? Even during this most difficult time of hunger for me (more than a year of constant malnutrition had already passed), I was confident that I would survive, I just needed to study the situation well, weigh my options, and think through my actions. I remembered the words of Confucius: “Man has three paths: reflection, imitation and experience. The first is the most noble, but also difficult. The second is light, and the third is bitter.”

I have no one to imitate, I have no experience, which means I have to think, relying only on myself. I decided to immediately start looking for people from whom I could get smart advice. In the evening I met a young Japanese man I knew from the Magadan transit. He told me that he works as a mechanic in a team of machine operators (in a mechanical shop), and that they are recruiting mechanics there - there is a lot of work to be done on the construction of industrial devices. He promised to talk about me with the foreman. (V. Pepelyaev)

There is almost no night here. The sun will just set and in a few minutes it will be almost there, and the mosquitoes and midges are something terrible. While you are drinking tea or soup, several pieces are sure to fly into the bowl. They gave us mosquito nets - these are bags with a mesh in front that are pulled over the head. But they don't help much. (V. Pepelyaev)

Just imagine - all these hills of rock in the center of the frame were formed by prisoners in the process of work. Almost everything was done by hand!

The entire hill opposite the office was covered with waste rock extracted from the depths. It was as if the mountain had been turned inside out, from the inside it was brown, made of sharp rubble, the dumps did not fit into the surrounding greenery of the elfin forest, which covered the slopes for thousands of years and was destroyed in one fell swoop for the sake of mining the gray, heavy metal, without which not a single wheel can spin - tin. Everywhere on the dumps, near the rails stretched along the slope, near the compressor room, small figures in blue work overalls with numbers on the back, above the right knee and on the cap were scurrying around. Everyone who could tried to get out of the cold adit; the sun was especially warm today - it was the beginning of June, the brightest summer. (P. Demant)

In the 50s, labor mechanization was already at a fairly high level. These are the remains of the railway along which ore was lowered down from the hill on trolleys. The design is called "Bremsberg":

And this design is an “elevator” for lowering and lifting ore, which was subsequently unloaded onto dump trucks and transported to processing factories:

There were eight flushing devices operating in the valley. They were installed quickly, only the last, eighth, began to operate only before the end of the season. At the opened landfill, a bulldozer pushed the “sands” into a deep bunker, from there they rose along a conveyor belt to a scrubber - a large iron rotating barrel with many holes and thick pins inside to grind the incoming mixture of stones, dirt, water and metal. Large stones flew into the dump - a growing hill of washed pebbles, and small particles with the flow of water supplied by the pump fell into a long inclined block, paved with grate bars, under which lay strips of cloth. Tin stone and sand settled on the cloth, and earth and pebbles flew out of the block behind. Then the settled concentrates were collected and washed again - cassiterite was mined according to the gold mining scheme, but, naturally, in terms of the amount of tin, disproportionately more was found. (P. Demant)

Security towers were located on the tops of the hills. What was it like for the staff guarding the camp in the fifty-degree frost and piercing wind?!

Cabin of the legendary "Lorry":

March 1953 arrived. The mournful all-Union whistle found me at work. I left the room, took off my hat and prayed to God, thanking for the deliverance of the Motherland from the tyrant. They say that someone was worried and cried. We didn’t have anything like this, I didn’t see it. If before Stalin’s death those whose numbers were removed were punished, now it was the other way around - those who had not had their numbers removed were not allowed into the camp from work.

Changes have begun. They removed the bars from the windows and did not lock the barracks at night: walk around the zone wherever you want. In the dining room they began to serve bread without quota; take as much as was cut on the tables. A large barrel of red fish - chum salmon - was placed there, the kitchen began baking donuts (for money), butter and sugar appeared in the stall.

There was a rumor that our camp would be mothballed and closed. And, indeed, soon a reduction in production began, and then - according to small lists - stages. Many of our people, including myself, ended up in Chelbanya. It is very close to the big center - Susuman. (V. Pepelyaev)