In the carpentry shop, they primarily produced equipment and furnishings for the needs of the camp itself and most probably for surrounding camps as well. (We did not discover a carpentry workshop in the other camps.) Besides an unfinished barrel, we can also see stored window frames as well as parts of prison bunks here.

Other similar huts were located in the camp area. These could also have housed sewing rooms, shops, or a storeroom for provisions or prisoners’ personal items.

“Our camp was involved in the building of houses,” said Sergo Lominadze when describing his experience of the construction of the Dead Road. “Besides this, some of the prisoners worked on pulling wood and beams out of the Yenisei River, where they cut them up into other material. Some of the prisoners laboured in various workshops. In camp no. 6, there were central repair shops. There was a large number of different camps there, even women’s camps. And all of them were camps of Gulag Railway constructions.”

Knife and sharpener

In the workshops, prisoners also secretly produced items that were otherwise prohibited. For example, there was great demand for knives. In one of the huts we found a fragment of one such prison knife as well as part of a sharpening stone.