“In the gulag, in order to become a dochodiaga – a shadow of a human being, a young, healthy man beginning his career in the pits in the “clean air” needs no less than twenty to thirty days at sixteen-hour work with no days off, with constant hunger, torn clothing and nights in holey tarpaulin tents in sixty-degree frost; Beating tithe officers, beating criminals, beating escorts – accelerate the process somewhat”.

This is how Varlam Shalamov, a penetrating observer of human nature in inhuman conditions, the author of ‘Kolyma Tales’, a writer counted among the leading representatives of Kolyma literature, who experienced the realities of the camp three times, wrote about his own camp experience in ‘Kolyma Tales’.

He was first sent to a gulag near Visher in the northern Urals in 1929, where he spent three years. Then, in 1937, he was sent to Kolyma, to the ‘white crematorium’, where he spent the next five years of his life. By 1946, he was already a dochodiaga emaciated man, who had lost all desire to continue living…

Although he was released in 1951, he only managed to leave Kolyma two years later.  Rehabilitated in 1956, he struggled with health problems, living on an invalidity pension. In 1979, he was placed in an old people’s home. In the early 1980s, a medical commission concluded that he was mentally ill. On 15 January Shalamov was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he died after two days.