Nuclear weapons defeated the Gulag

The Dead Road, also known as the Transpolar Railway, is the Chum-Salekhard-Igarka railway, the construction of which was carried out in 1947-1953 and was abandoned unfinished. One of the largest and perhaps the most ineffective of the Gulag construction projects.

This was not hard labor, the purpose of which is to torture and destroy people. It was a construction project, the most important state project - in the Egyptian sense, as it was understood then.

The meaning of this construction, like other great Stalinist projects, was mainly defensive: the threat from the north was quite real, the Second World War was also going on in polar waters. Nazi submarines appeared in the Novaya Zemlya area, and in the summer of 1942, the German cruiser Admiral Speer attacked the port of Dikson on the Kara Sea, intending to capture it and cut the Northern Sea Route. Dixon managed to fight back, but it became clear that it was impossible to leave the northern borders of the country unprotected in the middle of the twentieth century. The transpolar railway was supposed to ensure the rapid transport of troops in the Far North and create conditions for the functioning of naval bases on the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

To do this, it was necessary to build 1263 kilometers of railway tracks through streams and swamps, across permafrost just 200 km south of the Arctic Circle. This could only be done by one agency, which, in fact, was created to ensure the implementation of such “great construction projects” - the GULAG.

Two construction projects - 501st and 503rd - pulled the railway track towards each other. At different times, from 80 to 100 thousand prisoners worked there. For working in the hellish conditions of the Far North, they were paid wages and had shorter terms, and many from other regions sought to get to these construction sites, hoping for them as salvation. The country, which did not have time to recover from the recent terrible war, invested more than 40 billion rubles in this project. There is no exact figure for human losses, but the number is in the thousands.

They say that generals are always preparing for the last war. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Transpolar Railway.

Construction stopped immediately after Stalin's death. The new era rapidly changed the agenda and military doctrine. A new threat, more terrible than all those familiar from World War II, faced the country, and all efforts were devoted to preparing an adequate response to it. From now on, the line of defense of the USSR passed through the secret KB-11 in the closed city of Arzamas-16, where several dozen theoretical physicists, engineers and technicians worked on the creation of nuclear weapons.

The mass amnesty of 1953 bled the Gulag dry. Formally, it ceased to exist only in 1960, but the time of great construction projects, the time of the Gulag, has passed. In the new world, the number and power of warheads and the flight range of missiles were much more important than the high-speed transfer of troops across the tundra.

The transpolar highway turned into the Dead Road. Today, several of its isolated fragments are functioning. The rest consists of melted embankments, rails bent by permafrost, forests growing through the tracks, collapsed bridges, petrified rusty locomotives and long-abandoned camps and prisoners' cemeteries on the sides. Metal hunters stole everything that could be taken away. The remaining objects, which have the status of historical monuments, are protected from looters by local historians and local historians. Keepers of the memory of the epic of the Transpolar Railway have created the Internet museum "GULAG. Construction No. 501 " (http://doroga501.ru/news.php).

The administration of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug is perplexed what to do with such historical memory.

At the next meeting within the framework of the “Exhibition of One Exhibit” project at the Sakharov Center, the report and materials of the research expedition along the route of the Dead Road led by Alexander Nikolsky, held in 1981, stored in the collections of the Museum of the Sakharov Center, was presented, and a screening of the documentary film “The Dead Road” took place ( TV channel "Russia-1", 2012) and a meeting with the author of the script for this film, Viktor Khokhlov, and director Viktor Saprynsky.

The recording of this meeting can be viewed on the GOGOL.TV website; the film is easily available online. Look. This is a must see.

...Today the Dead Road comes to life again. Now it is called "Northern Latitudinal Railway". The reasons for the construction of a railway across permafrost are now no longer military, but economic - reliable all-season transport is needed to ensure the industrial development of the Subpolar Urals, but even today, as in the distant Stalin years, the country feels a frightening emptiness on its northern borders. Weak economic development, desolation, ineffective exploitation of gigantic territories are the geopolitical problems of modern Russia. And the railway is again called upon to solve them. Only this is a completely different story. Today's.