Kolyma: Land of Gold and Gulags
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- The place I am describing is one of the Easternmost regions of Russia and was almost entirely uninhabited until the start of the 20th Century, when prospectors first found precious metal. In any other place, or at any other time, it could have become a land of plenty and opportunity; instead, it became a sprawling region of despair and meaningless death, home to hundreds of thousands of slaves, forced to toil in labour camps.
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Source/Further reading:
What Shalamov saw and learned in Kolyma: shalamov.ru/en...
www.gulag.eu
gulaghistory.or...
www.rbth.com/m...
www.rbth.com/h...
www.rbth.com/h...
www.nps.gov/ma...
www.telegraph....
www.theparisre...
shalamov.ru/en...
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You probably won’t see this comment, but THANK YOU for educating us on these horrible periods of History. We don’t get it in schools, and even though horrible and inexplicable, it should be made well known. Those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it.
I absolutely love your content and just became an avid subscriber.
333
I'm catching up on all your videos hahaha love the content brother. Be cool if Bald and Bankrupt could go to places you desire. Investigate and collaborate. He was just in Siberia
I'm Russian and know quite a lot about Gulag, after all, some members of my family were there. You've done a great job, thanks! That's not only a dark page in Russian history but also in the history of mankind
Definitely a dark page of our human history! I do believe Stalin was worse than Hitler. It amazing how cruel and evil people can get for power/money.
@@mariobastidas3102 Interestingly Stalin didn't really care about money or power. He lived in a simple home and didn't have any expensive trappings. He just ruled with an iron fist in what he thought the union required to secede at any cost...
@@nismo4x4n the fact is that no one cares
@@sverre4311 I'm more getting at he didn't need to worry about power or wealth to do such evil things. He just did them of his own volition.
I'm sorry for your families trials and know my admiration goes to their indomitable spirit and deep dedication to making a brighter way for you. Well at least I hope... are you typing from a gulag?
A mate of mine’s dad grew up in Odessa, survived the Holodomor , fought bravely against the Nazis, was captured, survived appalling conditions as a “Russian” POW, was liberated and on hearing about Stalin’s free Club Gulag holidays decided that the west is the best. Even after changing his name and moving half way across the world he never felt safe from the KGB until the wall came down .
Your human story is compelling, yet we still have those in this comment section apologising for a system that killed millions.
Nazis were amateurs compared to the Left fascist Bolos. Marxists were worse than the Nazis and got away with it.
Amazing
I had the privilege to interview a surviving Russian POW who did go back to the USSR, and then was sent to the GULAG (Norilsk). He said, that of the two type of camps, he preferred the German ones. Well, that depends on many things, for example weather or not you were a Jew, but still food for thought! Your father's mate made a good choice and he was lucky that he was not handed over by force to "Uncle Joe", as the vast majority of the Soviet POWs were.
@@jensalstrup8060 I had a similar experience, but with a locksmith who had been a POW of the Germans only. He'd been commandeered into service as a mechanic, fixing vehicles for the Wehrmacht. After the war he was supposed to be returned to the Bolshevik fascists, but the Germans liked him and forged him papers so he could masquerade as a German national instead. He later immigrated to the US. To his dying day he claimed that Eisenhower was a communist.
I struggle to imagine being a soldier fighting hell in WWII, then coming home and being arrested and sent to the next level of hell .
@@alanywalany6460 it did, and was well documented in countless memoir and history books by various russian and non russian authors.
Alany Walany Are you also a flat earther or just another tiresome troll?
Alany Walany Anne Appelbaum has a chapter that covers the Plennies ending up in the Gulag in her book
Alany Walany the burden of proof is on you for saying it didn't happen, explain yourself.
texasdee slinglead The movie “The Way Back” paints a good picture of this kind of hell.
My great grandfather was deported from Estonia to Kolyma, 6000 km away. He worked a few years in gold mines, until developing lung cancer. He worked for a few more years at easier jobs, but died just a year before his release. My grandfather has no memories of his father. The rest of the family was deported to Central Siberia a few years after him, but they returned after Stalin's death. The children were 8 when deported in a cattle wagon.
Some gaps in your story bud
@@SimonVanliew26 Like demographic gaps in our country's history or what?
God bless. Prayers from Texas.
Same thing happened to one of my family members. He was sent to a gulag when he was helping people escape from Estonia. He almost died and just barely managed to live. After he was set free from the gulag he wasn't allowed to return home, so he stayed in Ukraine until Estonia regained its independence.
@@adomasak2325 Died a year before his promised release date.
The Soviet union was one of the largest slave owning countries in human history, so much for being a worker's paradise.
"Paradise" only in the way that everyone is naked, barefoot, and you're punished for stealing an apple
@@FGS-yk3vc you will be sent to the gulag for being alleged of stealing an apple
juhotuho10 And then the cop who arrested you will be denounced, purged and get the same.
rkb100100 thin air really thin air can you back it up, not that I defend the reds the disproportional allocation of wealth human rights etc... was the reason for the revolution. The fact that the reds made a nightmare out of it does not change that fact
@@mkoschier the revolution did exactly what they intended it to do. The millions of useful, uneducated idiots helped facilitate their own demise.
The scum reds hated Russian people, Christ's Church, and like children blamed their failures on everyone and everything outside of their own ineptitude.
Death to commies.
What amazes me is that after almost half an hour of this man explaining the terrors of the Gulag system (I'm from Eastern Europe too, check Google for the Pitesti experiment from my home country), there are still morons in the comment section who actually draw comparisons to American prisons. It's offensive as hell.
Maybe it'll make you feel better to know that people are also using this as an opportunity to say the holocaust was fake. The comment section in this video is almost entirely offensive.
Another thing-
The comparison they're making is not based on the horrors, but on the numbers. Which is fair, because in this video, the fact is made that there were more prisoners in the USSR than anywhere on earth at the time, and in the USA, we currently have the highest population of prisoners per capita. It kind of seems like you're just looking for a reason to be mad about something involving America, especially since this comment section is disgustingly rife with awful, vile, evil, disgusting and nauseating lies and propaganda meant to fit ideology based around fascism and hate.
Have you been to an American prison?
What do you know about American prisons? Have you ever heard of the Santa Fe Prison Riot of 1980? America's prison industry is designed to cultivate crime to make a show of justifying more tax funding for more prisons and more police and materiel, etc. The American gulag system is just warmer, and the Soviets didn't have the advantage of being accepted as a capitalist phenomenon like in America's "private" prisons, er, I mean gulags. Offended yet, moron?
Yeah, but do they force you the eat bologna and cheese sandwiches for lunch in gulags?
The name Kolyma alone sends shivers down my spine. I can tell this is going to be an interesting episode...
It's good that you are doing an episode about it because it doesn't seem like it's a well-known topic in the "West".
I just knew gulag = Russia
Nathan Guenther that’s like saying Germany is Auschwitz-Birkenau both statements are Nonsens apart from the fact that at that time the state was the UdSSR. Russia as state does not exist
Sometimes I forget how massive and cold Russia is, absolutely terrifying
Yo Simon do a video on Mount Yamantau: Russias Area 51.
Yes
This should be taught in schools.
Why is'nt it?
Leftists controll the education system.
At what age exactly do you tell humans that we are at any given moment a couple of weeks away from turning into murder-rapists? 12? 15?
@@ducusoare my father was conscripted to fight the guatemalan communist guerillas hiding in the mountains at 16-17 , that seems about right.
Thats the age where young men start to care about their future.
Because lefitists have control of the American education system now.
Because of the KGB commie subversion of the United States academia and media
My family left Ukraine in 1913 took them 5 years to get to America. When they got to the US my grandfather ran into a friend from the village and asked why when he sent letters to his village no one replied. He said the communist came into the village and murdered everyone those who survived they where sent to a gulag.
😢 we can't understand the trauma these poor people dealt with
Loving Geographics SO MUCH. Especially the videos you've made about the Soviet Union. I'd love to see more videos on the Central Asian states under the Soviet Union because I feel like it's a really under-represented topic in videos like these! Thanks for the amazing content as always.
@Ben Siener Islam is just like any other religion or supernatural belief: It's silly. Fundamentalist Islam is just as dangerous as fundamentalist Christianity or Judaism. Like religion, political ideological fundamentalism is dangerous too. When you're not allowed to criticize a belief or ideology you're part of a fundamentalist belief system. Fundamentalism is the real enemy.
@@dats3 I challange you to find a fundamentalist Jainist who has done anyone much harm.
Well done !
I read somewhere that : "Evil is the drive to control, dominate and consume. The condition comes from tunnel vision so narrow as to include only the person and his desires."
Over and over in the history of the world we see evil men succeeding because good people do nothing, or do too little too late.
Germany lost the war, so the world was made aware of the atrocities and they reacted fiercely and immediately.
Justice was seen to be done.
The USSR was on the winning side, and none of the other countries was prepared to raise too much stink about the atrocities committed there,
so everybody looked the other way, and justice was, sadly, never seen to be done.
Invading the USSR broke the back of the legendary German 8th army. World leaders couldn't run a back-to-back war with USSR knowing (a) how well armed USSR had become and (b) how little regard Stalin had for the lives of his own citizens & troops.
USSR had momentum (how quickly Eastern Europe was occupied), the rest of the world was exhausted.
@@thedepartmentofredundancyd5160 Soviet had about 500 000 troops more than the post ww2 West, excluding German soldiers at the time. Most of Soviet Unions materials to run their war machine came from USA. In short, the US could have beaten the Soviets. It wasnt a one sided thing just because ww2 movies and such have made it seem like Russia had endless troop numbers. For example when the German Operation Barbarossa started. The German soldiers outnumbered the Russians by close to 1 million troops.
@@Lobos222 They should have just carpet nuked russia instead of being so weak. They had the chance and watched it slip through their grasp.
When you remove all hope and despair is the norm, death must have looked very appealing.
This was kinda hard to watch.. it's hard to imagine human life being so cheap
Cheaper than you know.
Nazi Germany: Hold my beer
@@acepilot1 It's not a joke
@@acepilot1 Not really, mate. Not really.
@acepilot1
Stalin hated his own people.
As someone who is fairly uneducated except in the technical field, later in life I discovered The Gulag Archipelago. It was the first book of it's kind I read all the way through. It was bone chilling to say the least. My grandparents feared an invasion of our homeland (US) and it helped me understand why. I have yet to fully recover from that book. Im so amazed that humans can do those things to one another. The fact the Solzhenitsyn reached deep inside and persevered through all those horrors is mind blowing. Thanks for this masterpiece of a video man! TH-cam has been my go to for learning world history later in life! Keep it up!
Fantastic presentation of a horrific episode in our history.
Also - I'm pleased you slowed it down. 😁
I read the gulag archipelago by Solzhenitsyn and it is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read, was hard to put down. To me sending a man like Solzhenitsyn to a gulag is akin to forcing a man with perfect vision to stare directly into the sun, a model of pure evil.
There is a better book on the Gulags called the 'Kolyma Tales' by Varlam Shalamov
What is the tone of the book? I really liked the satirical almost comical tone of the archipelago, the way Solzhenitsyn was mocking communism was savage.
Great video. I have been to Kolyma many times for work, it is a very eery and tough region. The remnants of the Gulags are everywhere
Tell me more
@@2bitmarketanarchist337 Driving from the Magadan airport for about 300km, every small town is a former Gulag. Past that, you have territory where there was no more gold deposits to be found at the time and thus there were no more Gulags, it becomes very desolate. It's actually impossible to see any remnants of the Gulags there now as the NKVD (predecessor to KGB) made sure that all the former prisoner camps got levelled to the ground and hidden once Khrushchev released all the prisoners in 1956.
I also got close to the old Uranium mine and the processing plant, where uranium for the first Russian nuclear bomb was produced. Couldn't get anywhere near it as the Geiger counter went off the charts.
Magadan itself isn't too bad of a city other than the shocking climate. There is a lot of industrialised gold mining there now, so there is money around in the region, but it all seems to go to Magadan. All other towns in Kolyma are extremely depressing
@@AK-74K Damn sounds like a rough place to live and raise a family
"Thus the woods actually become huge swamps infested by clouds of midgets." at 3:14
**clouds of midgets have entered the chat**
Midges. Biting flies.
@@WarrenFahyAuthor Oops. My bad. LOL
I really don't like that, we should be saying "clouds of little people" C'mon man, don't offend my snowflake sensibilities!
If it really was the “ultimate distortion of socialist ideals”, why do similar labour camps keep appearing in all the other communist/socialist states? In fact it seems to happen quite consistently, almost every time implementing socialism is attempted.
Name a capitalist country without a prison system.
Michael Grosvenor name a capitalist prison system that doesn’t have trial by jury of their peers. People sent to Gulags were never able to prove their innocence. They can’t quite be compared the same way...
@@akbrooks70 France. Popped into my head in less than a second. But if you want to Google a full list of democracies without trial by jury, you'll find that it's the majority
Red Warlord
Posting from Scandinavia?
It's not socialism per se. Norway and Sweden are socialist. It's the crazy communisty leninist insanity that was done. It has nothing to do with the ideology and everything to do with evil men of low origin doing horrible things when they gained power. Socialism was the lie they told. They were just mafia autocrats.
Geographics, Biographics, you are an excellent narrator! Your comment at the end- "I'm not going to ask you if you enjoyed-".... Your respect for the topics you speak of is exemplary and appreciated. Glad I found this channel, I'm now subscribed. 😊
I had a distant relative who was imprisoned in one of the gulags, the basterds would just beat you into a cripple for having dirty nails (in a work camp none the less)
ezhov was sentenced for "anti-soviet homosexuality"
tsartomato opposed to the desired revolutionary homosexuality
Can we get Simon to narrate the whole internet? For such a dark topic, he really does a great job.
1:00 - Chapter 1 - Whiteout
7:50 - Chapter 2 - 3 lbs or rye & 23 years of hell
12:45 - Chapter 3 - Lenin's bodyguard
16:25 - Chapter 4 - Digging the grave
21:15 - Chapter 5 - The end of the gulags
23:15 - Chapter 6 - The teachings of kolyma
Russian Socialist gold rush
Vs
American capitalist gold rush
The way both of these situations were handled shows which one is the better government system..
(even though capitalism is far from perfect)
Capitalism has murdered way more people.
@@ClannCholmain yea you're probably right because capitalist greed created wars for resources but every form of government does that one way or another. Capitalism is still better for the average person than the average person living in a communist government.
John Coleman you’re an idiot if you actually believe that. Between Mao, USSR, Pol Pot, North Korea, Che Guavara, Cuba, Venezuela, even Germany (national SOCIALISTS). Those account for more deaths than anything else even before the 20th Century. You could maybe make an argument for those who died since the 1600’s under chattel slavery, but that doesn’t come close to those who died under the regimes listed above. The thing is, nobody’s operated under a capitalistic economy that long. You can’t sit here and act like fiefdom or monarchy is in some way apart of capitalism. The hard facts about it is that Capitalism’s been around max 400 years. Communism’s been around 200 years. Between the two communism/socialism has destroyed every country it’s touched. Capitalism has managed to improve the lives of the citizens of every nation its been tried in. That’s basic history. Hate to break it to you.
@akbrooks70, I’m Irish, millions of my fellow countrymen where abused and died under British capitalism, they were deliberately impoverished and forced to be slaves in their own land. Millions more people were deliberately staved to death in India by the British.
I’m proud to be called an idiot by an idiot like you. You will have to do way better than that.
Let me explain, all human rights are by definition social democractic, including worker’s rights.
They are, by definition, anti-capitalist.
Children worked for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, got no sick pay, if they got injured at work and couldn’t work again as adults, that was their problem.
If you’re not by now too ashamed to say, where are you from?
akbrooks70
SOCIALISTS.
Don’t visit Scandinavia. It will break your heart.
I enjoy the way Simon presents history. While the subjects are not always enjoyable we can't just sweep unpleasant history under the rug either. As they say those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it.
This one was really heavy. Thank You for this.
I learned of Kolyma from Eugenia Ginsberg in her book "Into the Whirlwind," which tells of her story as a communist official whom was sent through the gulag system until she eventually ended up in Kolyma. It's not as well-known as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, but worth a read.
What a way to reward your war veterans.
Not defending the uusr, but many vetetrans are treated really badly, to this day, in the US.. many are homeless, no healthcare etc it's just as shameful as war itself..
In similar way was built Norilsk. City on far north on River Jenisej.
I love that there is suggested reading! You should totally include biographies and such to find out more in your videos, Simon!
Wow-what a nightmare to be a prisoner in a gulag.
Given the size and scope of the Soviet Union, it makes the atrocities committed against the ordinary citizen that much more horrific, imo. A Russian friend of mine once told me that the concept of Democracy - true democracy - could never take hold in his country or its surrounding former Soviet republics. The histories of those little countries and the "mama" country have always been steeped in brutality, oppression, resistance, conquest, and despair. On the one hand, it's a fascinating world so different from the rest of Europe, for example; on the other, it's a tragedy that has been continuing for centuries and seems destined to continue. I've both Russian and non-Russian but Central/Eastern European friends who've had family members imprisoned, killed, tortured and maimed in the gulags and other labour camps. The human capacity for cruelty and savagery knows no bounds, whether as the dictator or authoritarian figure or as the prisoner or slave. And whilst we may cringe and condemn the actions of the former Soviet Union's murderous governmental leaders and their minions, we mustn't forget that such atrocities and crimes are still being committed against various groups of people all over the world. Humankind has never changed and never will.
You are one of the best channels for topics such as this and I cannot thank you enough for your dedication and perfect articulation of just how evil our species can be.
Wouldn't mind seeing a video about that Stockholm place. Seems very well built for being so far north...
Must be hard maintaining such lavish architecture in such a bitter cold environment.
Or honestly, it isn't that cold. The golf stream does a good job keeping both Sweden and Norway nice and warm.
And the Golf stream is also the reason why New York has a similar climate as Stockholm, despite being on the same Latitude as Madrid.
Yeah.. It's currently 6°c here and we're a little more than an hour from midnight
But sometimes we get those nice winters with -30°c too
No kidding. If/when the golf stream fails or ceases, northern europe is screwed.
Elijs Dima
No more opportunities for a hole-in-one.
Simon, you've taught me too much about gold rushes for me to believe it could have been a land of plenty and opportunity.
“Send the _Kulak_ to the _Gulag.”_
- Stalin (most probably)
That's only if they survived the dekulakization
This was a very enlightening video, especially as I know two people from Bulgaria that were sent to work camps and ended up married. Luckily, they both came out alive and saw Bulgaria become free from Russia.
My relative was at Kolyma.
Many people are surprised why I'm so anti-communist.
Sadly there are idiots in the world who still think communism is a good idea.
@@oneeye3625 "X wasn't real communism; Y will be."
But:
y = x
As they are correlated, regardless of other inputs.
Evil Atheist Communist .... Still A Horror .. College Professors ; SJW etc. !! NEO- Marxist !! I Am A Political Refugee From ' So Called Communist Cuba....Still Run By Raul Castro ..... Thanks Obozo For ' given In...
My father's side of the family was forced to flee Europe because of the Russian revolution. Those who stayed disappeared. I will never not hate Communists for what they have done.
@@joemitchell877 yeah okay...your name is Joe Mitchell lol....Joey the refugee from Cuba. Nice right wing buzzwords. Why are you capitalizing every word? Next time just use caps lock lmao.
My spine shivers from the name KOLIMA(after readind Arcipelag GULAG you know why is that) and Simon, you made me cry in the last sentence from Varlam Shalamov. Sad.. but great work geographic team.
Thank you for bringing this period of history to light. Also, thanks for bringing up the atrocities of the Holodamor.
I see this and then I look at videos of socialists in the US glorifying the gulag system and it makes me wanna throw up
No one ever has glorified these atrocities. Certainly not a socialist. Infact most of the people who stopped this sort of thing in Russia were socialist.
Targon of Assad it’s not a lie
@@Bikeadelic They were socialists. but they were also communists. socialism is an economic system communism is an ideology, they often go hand in hand.
Arnold Thomsen who said they were? They did? You did? The west? The labels have been redefined so many times and attributed to so many things that don’t even for the definition of the person who attributed the label that it’s become completely invalid.
As far as I’m concerned a socialist is someone who does not support what are essentially concentration camps. They support a state that is by the many for the many not by the many for the few which is currently how every single country on the planet is run. You can day china is communist and america is capitalist and you can say capitalism is a type of economy and communism isn’t or whatever you like. But at the end of the day everyone in america works for the benefit of a fee at the top and so does china.
@@arnoldthomsen6571 Communism is basically hardcore socialism, socialism in its most complete and intense form.
3:45 you forgot to mention Uranium, the majority of USSR early nuclear weapons and atomic energy was made with slave labor that manually mined radioactive ore containing Uranium and its fission products on a incredible scale - the ammount of normal uranium needed for a single bomb is worth shiploads of ore - the ammount needed for a nuclear reactor is hundrets of shiploads
Those are the exact same sort of temperatures where I live. In fact it’s -30 right now. Ah Canada.
Amazing work and research!! Thank you for your time and effort you put in to your videos. Amazing content. Keep it up!!
Also, burying the slave labor under the road was a common practice, there is a road just like that near Tallinn, Estonia.
You should read
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
It’s a eye opener ...
I was just thinking the same thing, as I read it in Literature class in the early 1980's.
I also highly suggest Kolyma Tales by Shalamov. It's a much more approachable read than something like The Gulag Archipelago, but really gives you a good insight into the camp.
“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”
The 1970 film is also really great.
Further I think it could become a great school play since there are relativley few settings. The entire budget will be used on black telogreika jackets and old soviet winter uniforms for the guards.
Simon man I love history and geography and you give me my fix for both of them. And I like how real you are. Love you guys and keep up the good work!!
Here's a potential Top Tenz list: Top 10 reasons why the Soviet Union was the worst country that ever existed.
to be fair to it, it did win the second world war
@@connorp4928 well you know what they say about bad clocks...
@@justinpaul3110 ahahah fair play man
@@connorp4928 and they had lots of help. Germany vs Soviet Union 1 on 1 would be a clear German victory. It was a team effort to win WWII
@@bellicose4653 yeah that's also v fair- America/Britain paid for it cash, soviets in blood and France was also there
My goodness, you are the busy bee with all your entertaining and informative videos. Thanks for all the work you do x
Bernie Sanders staffer 2020 - “Gulags aren’t nearly as bad as the CIA has told us you were paid a living wage in gulags you were allowed Conjugal visits”
I could go on but I promise it just gets worse.
2/28 It did get worse.
Well told. Thank you. We need to remember this.
People need to here about the atrocities that have been committed in the name of communism
There was a story on 60 Minutes years ago about a Russian Uranium processing plant that the US was looking for, for years. We never could find it, until one day a satellite photo of Siberia in winter showed that one river wasn't frozen and water was flowing. Come to find out it was the plant that was built inside a mountain and was dug out by Soviet political prisoners. Took years to build it, i'm sure that was a horror show too.
Frozen Kolyma, hell for victims of a hellish man with a frozen heart: Joseph Stalin. My prayers to the unfortunate victims of the most atrocious regime on Earth: the Soviet Union!!
I'd very much be interested in a Yagoda entry over on Biographics
Bro talking about -30C like it's the Antarctic, meanwhile that's normal winter temperatures where I live 😂😢
Had family here. Great video. But reading the comments on this video is making me sick. People find it so easy to discard the fact that actual people died in these events. Real life, true, living human beings. People who were loved. People who were innocent. People who were persecuted for being who they were, not for what they had done. Their lives were trivialized by the brutal hands of dictators and despots, and any true appreciator of history should know to never look at a number of lives and discount a single one of those, as they all had meaning and their loss is what creates significance. Yet lately, I see a ton of people claiming to "love history" and they flock to articles and videos on yet. Then they cherry pick the pieces which best fit the narrative they have been fed and cling to like it's their identity. They then use these facts and pieces to mock current mentality and ideals, trivializing the deaths of so many and dooming us to repeat the catastrophic and destructive cycles we refuse to learn, but claim we know.
I'm honestly feeling kind of sick right now.
Of _course_ FDR’s VP bought the gulag potemkin inspection. He was a fellow traveler.
Anyone would think there was a us election coming up...
3:18 “Infested by clouds of midgets” lol had to laugh but still a great video.
“While, around the world, communism is seen as a roaring lion, in the Soviet Union is seen as a dead dog” -A.S.
Thank you, Simon, this was lovely.
Your videos are crazy informative but you can take a lot because its so well structured. Amazing work
2:27 that actually looks scenic as hell
*casually jots it down the bucket list of places to visit*
If there is one thing one can do for those who had suffered on the hands of others, it is learning and sharing, what happened to them.
You guys make amazing vids. Thank you for that!
Love the discovery of this channel so far! When you get time, you should do a piece on the Florida Everglades.
Great job as always Simon. Thank you for telling this story
Fascinating. Thank you for such an interesting and informative video, as always!
Excellent video as always, Simon!
i still haven't figured out what simon says when he says is what i think is 'clouds of midgets." 3 : 17 (clouds of midgets would be a great band name)
cloud of midges, Midges are small flies that bite humans, they hang around bodies of water in huge clouds.
@@Duncan23 Nah, he's totally talking bout midgets bro. You know those Russian forest midgets, they'll get ya
@Tropic Lightning No, they're larger than those. The midges we have on Lake Erie don't bite, but there are billions of them.
I know, he should have said "clouds of little people". He was very non-PC.
Tiny, almost invisible mosquitoes.
All I can think of is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. "Kali ma! Kali ma!
Great story. This is becoming my favorite channel.
My dads sisters husband got taken to one he was 6'4 250 he came back 100 and was 6'1 worked the mf so hard he shattered a few vertabre
How long was he there?
He was one of the lucky ones, he came back
I love this channel so much.
Stalin made Hitler look like a Care Bear
And the 'allies' couldn't of won the war without them.
How many channels do you have? I keep ignoring your channels yet you keep coming back with a different one
Interesting. This story filled out a large background of one of the bad guys in "Reacher", Zek. He gave a very brief passing description of his imprisonment, but nothing memorable. Thank you for the story.
Very good historical video! Information is spot on! Narration is professional grade!
One of my grandfathers spent 4 years in forced labor camp but instead of telling lots of stories - he just shrugged and said:"I had good training in WW I. fighting in trenches of Doberdo..."ELSE: Today Kupol and about 3-4 other big goldmines are mined by Kinross Gold Mine /Toronto/...but goldpanners bring much gold nuggets from rivers, creeks to Magadan regularly.OTHER: Until Khruschev allowed civilian air traffic-no roads or railroads could be used for personal transport to/from Magadan. Ships brought prisoners and carried back mined materials. Now railroad exists but road???-Well not quite...!
Okay, just wanting to be sure I heard this right 3:16 did he say. “ They became huge swamps infested with clouds of midgets.”?
Thank you. Your videos are always wonderful.
You make me want to go back to college and become a history teacher. I dropped out to work construction but have been longing to re enroll.
I love these Gulag videos. Beautifully morbid.
"Distortion of Socialist Ideals"? I get some of the aspects of Socialism that meant to protect the labourer but no, the fundamentals of the Socialism is essentially that, to be equally miserable at the expense of the few "engineers" of society.
@Tropic Lightning, you never heard of the Native American Holocaust?
@Tropic Lightning they have to get through some lead before that happens.
Apparently socialism works, we just havnt had true socialism yet. What a joke
EarthForces
Posting from Scandinavia?
@@g0679 Scandinavia isn't Socialist. Just ask Denmark.
Kolyma was only one of the regions up north where gulags flourished... here it was gold and silver... in the others it was coal and steel... but mosquitos in summer and extreme cold in winter are common things
This made me think of that abandoned town in Rise of the Tomb Raider.
@22:56, Helping? No.
You're however paying respect to the millions of victims of Kolyma, and in a decidingly tasteful manner.
For that, I thank you.
The video: the weather gets as cold as 2°F
me in alaska, where it's been -25°F for about a month: 😯
"An American in the Gulag" by Alexander Dulgan is also an excellent work.
Can you do a documentary for the Pechora Ukhta Gulag as well please?
My boss at IBM sent me to do a software installation at the USA equivalent of Kolyma (weather only) FARGO, North Dakota---I spent 3 weeks there in December and the temp never got above 5 deg F. And the people there reminded me of those in the movie of the same name...
I dig your presentation Brotha.
I'm reading Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales right now so this video is an excellent source of information.
The concentration camps started after the revolution first, then the gulags. They retconed the earlier camps into gulags later.
The escaped german soldiers from WW1 described these camps to the NS and well... There you are.
I saw this when it premiered. I was re-organizing a bookshelf last night, and stumbled on a book about this. That I’ve owned for quite a while, apparently. Guess what moved to the top of my To Read pile.