Many Russians regard the horrors of the forced labour camps as a necessary evil during a difficult period of Soviet historyIvan Panikarov has spent the past two decades living with the Gulag: his small two-room apartment in the town of Yagodnoye is filled with artefacts from the camps. Rusting tools,handcuffs and photographs of prisoners cover the walls of his living room, while stacks of boxes in the hallway contain transcripts of interrogations taken down in meticulous (extremely careful about details) purple handwriting.
Yagodnoye feels like the halt of the soil, or in many ways it is. In the heart of the Kolyma region,one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet, it is an eight-hour drive from the regional centre of Magadan, and which itself is a seven-hour flight from Moscow.
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Source: theguardian.com