Photo Stories
A new book of photographs by Barry Lewis journeys into the darkness of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps. Peter Dench finds out more
‘We paid the KGB to be able to go into a prison. It was a lot then. I think about £700 but well worth it. We had a bit of paper and a receipt for the bribe so we could claim it on expenses,’ says photographer Barry Lewis. In 1991, he and writer Peter-Matthias Gaede arrived in Moscow on assignment for German GEO magazine. It was the last days of glasnost, a period of openness and transparency in government institutions and activities of the Soviet Union.
They planned to interview and photograph survivors of the Gulag, the system of Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that housed the political prisoners and criminals. Of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million people perished as a result of their detention. Founded in Moscow in 1989, the Memorial organisation had begun building up a database of the victims and helped find them survivors.
Moscow was the start of their journey; the destination was Butugychag Corrective Labour Camp, high in the Kolyma mountains. They discovered the camp (which closed in 1955), marked on the map as agricultural buildings, was in fact a secret uranium mine. ‘The idea was we’d follow the path of the original prisoners,’ says Barry. ‘They were shipped into Magadan and started building a road up to the mines. There were ways up, but it was unexplored. There were some indigenous people, hunters, prospectors. In the 1930s they started building the Road of Bones. They used prisoners and a lot of them died. You couldn’t bury them in the permafrost so they’d just put the road over them. We thought we’d follow this 2000km road as far as Butugychag 300km along.’
The journey
Leaving Moscow was arguably the most dangerous part of the journey. An internal Aeroflot flight to the bleak, cold, isolated port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. Aeroflot’s safety record wasn’t first class.
Boarding the flight, staff warned against eating the boiled chicken feet. In Magadan, Barry photographed Asir Sandler, arrested at the age of 30, transported and sentenced to death for treason in 1941 for carrying a book of forbidden poems. His death sentence was commuted to 25 years in the camps, his wife divorced him, and he never saw his son, who was later executed for manslaughter. After 11 years he was freed prematurely and returned to Magadan.
Barry recalls, ‘We were going to the old prison which was now just a storage place and he said, “Do you want to come along?” We found that his old cell was being used to store
