Soviet time

A new book of photographs by Barry Lewis journeys into the darkness of Stalin's Siberian prison camps. Peter Dench finds out more

- 

We paid the KGB to be able to go into a prison. It was a lot then. I think about £700 but well worth it. We had a bit of paper and a receipt for the bribe so we could claim it on expenses,' says photographer Barry Lewis. In 1991, he and writer Peter-Matthias Gaede arrived in Moscow on assignment for German GEO magazine. It was the last days of glasnost, a period of openness and transparency in government institutions and activities of the Soviet Union.

They planned to interview and photograph survivors of the Gulag, the system of Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that housed the political prisoners and criminals. Of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million people perished as a result of their detention.

Founded in Moscow in 1989, the Memorial organisation had begun building up a database of the victims and helped find them survivors.

Moscow was the start of their journey; the destination was Butugychag Corrective Labour Camp, high in the Kolyma mountains.

They discovered the camp (which closed in 1955), marked on the map as agricultural buildings, was in fact a secret uranium mine.

'The idea was we'd follow the path of the original prisoners,' says Barry. 'They were shipped into Magadan and started building a road up to the mines. There were ways up, but it was unexplored. There were some indigenous people, hunters, prospectors. In the 1930s they started building the Road of Bones. They used prisoners and a lot of them died. You couldn't bury them in the permafrost so they'd just put the road over them. We thought we'd follow this 2000km road as far as Butugychag 300km along."