1998: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: An agonizing return to Perm Camp 36 (12/27/98)

1998: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

An agonizing return to Perm Camp 36

The last remaining and most severe political concentration camps of the former USSR were located in the village of Kuchyno, Chusovskyi raion, Perm Oblast, located in the Ural Mountains of the Russian SFSR. The camps were dismantled on December 9, 1987. It is on this last site, a grim reminder of a repressive system, that the human rights group Memorial and Perm Oblast officials have decided to build a museum, The Memorial Museum Perm 36, so that in the future people could understand what was meant by the Gulag Archipelago.

On August 29 of this year two former political prisoners and inmates of Perm Camp 36, Ukrainian human and national rights activists Lev Lukianenko and Yevhen Sverstiuk, returned to witness the museum's founding.

Human rights activists in the USSR were sentenced for various forms of "anti-Soviet" activity and were sent to the same prison camps as were rapists, murderers and other dangerous criminals. The term "zek" refers to the inmates of these camps, at the root of which is the slang term in Russian for prisoner.

According to Mr. Sverstiuk, going back to Perm Camp 36 was "going back to hell, where demons of various ranks waited for you at the entrance."

In an account of his return to Perm he wrote:

"In the first two months they tried to find out your most vulnerable pressure points. KGB agents used systematic pressure to morally break an individual so he was forced to bend to the system. To break down was to turn against friends and go over to the side of the police. The individual who didn't break was beaten daily ... punished in other degrading ways.

"... I gasped when I walked down the corridor that led to the cell in which Vasyl Stus was incarcerated and died. [Stus was sentenced in 1980 to 10 years of strict-regime labor camp and five years of exile. He died on September 4, 1985, at Camp 36.] How dark and cold it seemed. I felt as if I were touching the tools of murder.

"... In the Gulag Archipelago this (museum) is the only testament to past crimes, to the half million graves in Semipalatinsk, to the graves in Norilsk, Vorkuta and Komsomolsk. Almost all of the construction in the north [of the Russian SFSR] is built (with forced labor) on the bones of zeks. ...Western journalists look for traces of these camps and find only rotting barracks among tall weeds. Western human rights activists have decided to help the Russians preserve their history ... are appropriating funds to aid Memorial. Only two zones are left to represent the colossal empire of the gulag. In the early '90s there was an attempt to destroy even these last traces.

"Young people also are taking part in establishing the museum in Perm. Student volunteers are reconstructing the barbed wire around the camp.

"Why do Western Europeans come to Perm to initiate a memorial museum? Why do the Japanese go to the graves of their ancestors? Why do the Germans continue to look for the graves of their soldiers? Perhaps they want to bring peace to their souls, to their consciences. Perhaps they feel a responsibility for a historical process. Man begins from this. Otherwise we will never cut the cord of past terror and inhumanity. Each individual must cultivate peace in his soul. Otherwise, weeds will grow there."

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