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READ THIS, why did this get only a tiny blurb instead of a massive photo essay?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht
Thousands still in Stalin's gulags
By Charles Clover
(Filed: 04/01/2002)
TENS of thousands of Russians are still incarcerated in Siberian labour camps that have been continuously occupied since Stalin's gulag, the conference heard.
On a field trip to the Vishera valley in Perm' oblast in the Urals, Judith Pallot, a geography lecturer and fellow of Christchurch, Oxford, found 17 "correctional colonies", containing 10,000 people, in operation.
The colonies, all part of a single labour camp, were in a region known for its labour camps and where rich peasants, or kulaks, ethnic Germans and dissidents from the Baltic republics, had been sent from the 1930s.
There was a total of 122 "forest camps" in the Russian prison system, which is estimated to house about three quarters of a million people.
Temperatures in the Urals average 31F (-1C) over the year and in winter, which lasts from September to May, plunge to -30 or -40C. Mosquitoes and gadflies are found in swarms.
Dr Pallot told the conference: "Though we tend to think there was an amnesty after Stalin, I was surprised to find that there were still whole regions to which the Russians were still sending people, continuously occupied since Stalin's time.
Dr Pallot added: "Nobody writes about forest camps. They're in the wrong place. I suspect they are inhuman and degrading. I think they are unacceptable."
