Stalin's 'Railway to Nowhere'.

[Adrian]

Found this article and thought I would post it for interest:

Joseph Stalin's deadly railway to nowhere.

[Woolgar]

A Fascinating article ! The Soviet version of the Burma 'Death Railway' but with an extreme in climate !

Nadezhda was a pretty young girl , how sad that she experienced that horror

Nick

[Cameron Stockton]

Hi

Very intresting but incredibly sad.

Thanks for showing Adrian!

Thanks

Cameron

[Bigsieuk]

For those interested in the Gulags and the human nature to survive in these conditions, I'd highly recommend Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov. The book opens with an introduction stating the envy one has with those starting to read the book and I wholly agree. Its one of those books that will enlighten and stay with you.

Regards

John

[Evgeni M]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has also some very nice books about this horrible topic. For those of you who can understand Russian there are audio books available on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmtStcHtg0

[don_kihotis7]

Found this article and thought I would post it for interest:

Joseph Stalin's deadly railway to nowhere.

Thanks for sharing this Adrian.
I will send the link to some communist friends who claim that Hitler was a devil but Stalin was a good person.

[Wagriff]

Unfortunately, the railroad project was virtually nothing, when compared to the infamous Belomar /White Sea Canal project...it's claimed that close to a million may well have died constructing the worthless thing. Like the Great Wall of China, the bones of the dead were simply tossed in to add to the fill of the construction.

[Evgeni M]

The tragedy and hardship of the White Sea channel is beyond any doubt but lot of numbers are exaggerated after the death of Stalin. The statistics of this construction shows the following number of prisoners present at and around the site:
1931 — 64 100;
1932 — 99 095, by 12.1932 — 107 900;
1933 — 84 504;
1934 — 62 211, by 01.01.1934 — 70 373;
1935 — 78 248, by 01.01.1935 — 66 418;
1936 — 57 969, by 01.01.1936 — 90 290;
01.01.1937 — 58 965;
01.07.1938 — 77 278 (3 946 women)
01.01.1939 — 86 567;
01.01.1941 — 71 269;
15.06.1941 — 67 928;

As a usual sentence for the political prisoners in that time was 10 years and major repressions just started in that period, it is not likely that these prisoners were transferred (rare occasions that happened only to highly educated scientists or engineers). Hence to reach really high estimate, all workers had to be dead (even several time for the real high estimates). An official NKVD record lists about 12 000 names (really dramatic!), other estimates put the death rate at 9%, which is definitely higher than average for the same period of time at other GULAG camps. Most casualties were attributed to the hunger year of 1933 (NKVD claim of 8000).

[Wagriff]

Figuring an accurate death toll for the Belomar Canal is something akin to an exact holocaust casualty figure. Every study and every estimate you find is radically different from the last. Wikipedia, for example lists the figure at 100,000. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was, of course, no friend of Josef Stalin, gives an educated estimate of a quarter of a million or more. And so it goes. At the very least, if an armed Battle had produced a minimum of 100,000 deaths, it would have appalled even the most icy blooded of warlords, but to Work such a number to death is something beyond the scope of imagination. I agree that many post-war figures for dramatic incidences that a group or person wishes to draw attention to is, quite often, enormously exaggerated and over blown, but for the sheer cost in mortality, the White Sea Canal will always be ranked as one of the most costly in human lives construction project known to man-right up there with the Great Wall of China and the Burma Railway. Sadly, the true and exact cost of the canal will, in all likelihood, never be known.

[Evgeni M]

Figuring an accurate death toll for the Belomar Canal is something akin to an exact holocaust casualty figure. Every study and every estimate you find is radically different from the last. Wikipedia, for example lists the figure at 100,000. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was, of course, no friend of Josef Stalin, gives an educated estimate of a quarter of a million or more. And so it goes. At the very least, if an armed Battle had produced a minimum of 100,000 deaths, it would have appalled even the most icy blooded of warlords, but to Work such a number to death is something beyond the scope of imagination. I agree that many post-war figures for dramatic incidences that a group or person wishes to draw attention to is, quite often, enormously exaggerated and over blown, but for the sheer cost in mortality, the White Sea Canal will always be ranked as one of the most costly in human lives construction project known to man-right up there with the Great Wall of China and the Burma Railway. Sadly, the true and exact cost of the canal will, in all likelihood, never be known.

That is exactly how it is, these sad events should not be forgotten for the sake of the people who lost their lives there.