KarLag

HQ

Where is this building? The climate is evident because the trees look a bit short of water, and the building is whiter than you'd expect to find in Europe; I think it looks too imperial and permenant to be in Africa but I've never been to Africa. But the real give away is, of course, the red star. This is the administration building of a vast network of Soviet labour camps covering an area supposedly the size of France and named 'Karlag' to reflect its location near the city of Karaganda.

There is a depressingly short article about Karlag on the English Wikipedia (a mighty 2 lines long!), though there is more on the Russian version. The administrative building, pictured here, has been converted into a museum and we visited there at the weekend.

The museum is really well done: carefully composed rooms with appropriate art, props and general atmosphere; and lots and lots of carefully referenced statistics (for example, the remarkable reduction in camel population in Kazakhstan from over a million to just 416. Frightening statistics lose their impact if you hear too many of them; but these statistics were so frightening that it took a while for them to lose their impact.

In Kazakhstan (among other places) millions of people were starved by man-made disasters, millions of people were detained as enemies of the state often with the most shockingly tenuous of reasons, and were kept in terrible, terrible conditions. The list of forms of terror continues which explains why the majority of the Kazakh population emigrated over the middle of the 20th century.

Just as it wouldn't be possible to visit 'France' in a day, so it isn't possible to visit the Karlag in a day, but a few hours at the museum gives a lot of insight.

The lack of humanity, the frightening statistics, the winter barrels for children's bodies - due to the ground being too hard and the bodies not burning well - and the stories of personal terror and indiscriminate shooting, are representative of the early and middle Soviet era, and perhaps of many other regimes in the world at various times. It's difficult to comprehend and, perhaps because of our desire for optimism, difficult to accept as being real.