The remains of Stalin’s Dead Road. Photograph: Amos Chapple/RFE/RLIn Russia’s Arctic wilderness, the remnants of one of the Soviet Union’s most notorious gulag projects lie largely forgotten
by Amos Chapple/RFE/RLFrom 1947 until 1953, tens of thousands of prisoners, many of them “politicals” convicted for “anti-Soviet acts”, were shipped to northern Russia to lay a railroad through some of the harshest terrain on Earth.
The railroad would have connected Russia’s Arctic waters with its western railway network.
Most records relating to the gulags, the brutal network of forced-labour camps for dissenters, criminals, and other perceived threats, remain secret. But it is likely that Stalin, spooked by the incursion of Nazi submarines into the Arctic during the second world war, wanted the railway in place as a means of supplying a planned naval port. The railway also would have connected northern nickel mines to Soviet factories in the west.
But just days after Stalin’s death in 1953, the project was cancelled amid the subsequent Soviet “thaw”. Since then, the railway’s gulag camps have lain abandoned, sinking further into the forest under the weight of each winter’s snow. Getting to the camps today is difficult outside of winter, with most lying beyond terrain that would bog a tank.
Only specialised vehicles, like this balloon-tyred Trekol in which Chapple travelled, are able to move through the swampy region where the railroad was laid.
A hunter who roams the backcountry between Salekhard and Nadym led Chapple to several of the camps.
A barbed-wire perimeter fence marking the edge of a camp.
A survivor recalls the despair, with no hope of escape. “Where to run, there were just swamps and midges. [Escapees] were cruelly punished: They were caught, stripped naked, and tied up until the gnats bit them to death within two to three hours.”
But the biggest threat to survival, according to another former prisoner, came from the brutal winters, which frequently dropped below -40C (-40F).
A memorial in Salekhard to victims of the doomed railway project.
It is nearly impossible to say how many forced labourers died in the effort. A witness recalls seeing a cemetery for prisoners that stretched “almost to the taiga [boreal forest]. They didn’t put crosses on their graves, just small pegs with camp numbers.”
Prisoners were kept divided in gendered barracks. One survivor, Alexandr Snovsky, says the men would throw letters into the female zone to communicate in secret.
Some remains, such as this shack that probably housed guards, have been maintained and are regularly used by hunters.
Inside, the communist star of a Stalin-era coal range stays sizzling hot through autumn nights.
Most engineers engaged on the railway were free workers, while the heavy labour was carried out by prisoners.
Most of the railway, as evidenced by this old signal marker, has fallen into ruin.
For Snovsky, who now lives with his wife near St Petersburg, the biggest tragedy was the project’s futility: “Tens of thousands of human lives for nothing. For me, the saddest thing was that it was for nothing.”
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