Leonid Levko Dohovich
Born in 1935, for political protests he was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag in 1950 at the age of 14. After attempting to escape, he was senten...
The Vorkuta Uprising: "Human blood flowed down the ditches"
In July 1953, one of the largest uprisings in the Gulag broke out in Vorkuta
"When I ran to the guardhouse, I froze in terror. There was a mountain of corpses lying there, still breathing and making a wheezing sound. It still haunts me," recalls Miron Zachariya of the suppression of the prisoners' revolt in Vorkuta. The uprising broke out in July 1953 and culminated exactly 71 years ago, on July 22, 1953, when 1,500 prisoners refused to go to work.
City beyond the Arctic Circle
Vorkuta lies 160 kilometres beyond the Arctic Circle, plunging into dark night for three months in winter, during which temperatures drop below -60℃. The largest coal mines in the Soviet Union were opened here in the first half of the 1930's. Workers from all over the Soviet Union began to come to the town in search of better earnings. However, most of the work was already carried out by Gulag prisoners who were forced to work in the mines under a camp administration called the Vorkutlag. In addition to coal mining, they also built industrial and civilian buildings in the mines. In the appalling climatic and living conditions, the annual death rate of prisoners before 1944 was as high as 15.5% out of a total of up to 70,000 prisoners.
