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For the first time, a country where a repressive Soviet regime operated for decades is opening up to comprehensive archaeological research into the Gulag. A research team is currently working in Kazakhstan, documenting the remains of one of the Steplag camps, which between 1948 and 1956 held more than 20,000 predominantly political prisoners from Ukraine, the Baltic states and other countries, including around two dozen Czechoslovaks. Archaeologists from the Department of Archaeology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia (UWB) are working on the expedition in the village of Terekty near Zhezkazgan in cooperation with Gulag.cz, an organisation that has been documenting Soviet forced labour camps for 15 years. The expedition builds on its 2021 fieldwork and marks the first-ever archaeological research into the Gulag.

According to experts, the camp near Terekty is exceptional and particularly suitable for research because traces of the entire prison complex have survived. “We have found the remains of a women’s camp, a men’s camp with archaeological artefacts as well as standing structures, an entire settlement for guards and a command headquarters, which was later occupied by people from a nearby village that has since disappeared. The remains of an economic zone have also survived, where imprisoned men and women were forced to perform slave labour, as well as a forgotten cemetery for the victims,” said lead archaeologist Pavel Vařeka from the UWB Faculty of Arts.

The camp also appears, based on the team’s new findings, to have operated for considerably longer than previously believed. “All specialist historical publications state that Steplag ended in 1956. However, we found glass bottles at the site dating from between 1959 and 1961,” said Štěpán Černoušek, chairman of Gulag.cz.

In addition to their archaeological work, the researchers can verify their findings with local historians and eyewitnesses. They managed to interview the village’s oldest resident, 78-year-old Mizambaj Bralin, who moved to Terekty in 1959. According to him, a women’s camp full of prisoners from the Baltic states was still standing there at the time. This suggests that although archival documents show that Steplag was officially dissolved by order from Moscow in 1956 as an administrative structure under that name, not all prisoners were released and many camps most likely continued operating for several more years under a different administration. This chapter, however, did not make it into historical accounts based solely on Moscow archives, which were in many cases written by the perpetrators themselves, Černoušek added. According to the experts, this also demonstrates the importance of fieldwork at a site that had previously received no archaeological attention.

The brutal security measures at the camps are evidenced by spent cartridges found at the site. “They kept those women there like animals. I cannot imagine how any man could ever shoot at a woman,” Mizambaj Bralin told the researchers. “If we had not found this last eyewitness, we would have had no choice but to speculate about many aspects of the camp. The initial discoveries and the survey of the distribution of the individual remains of the camp buildings raised a whole range of questions. He helped us clarify many of them, as well as our understanding of what life in the camp was like,” Pavel Vařeka added. According to him, the current research offers new insights into the form and character of the very final phase of the Stalinist Gulag system.

The expedition has attracted considerable interest in Kazakhstan’s academic community. It also involves Kazakh historians from Zhezkazgan and Buketov University in Karaganda, as well as archaeologists from the Margulan Institute of Archaeology, which provides the necessary authorisation for archaeological research. “Similar research would currently be impossible in Russia. Putin’s regime is trying to erase the history of the Gulag and Soviet repression from public memory and public space, while at the same time defending many Soviet crimes. Kazakhstan is becoming increasingly open to this kind of research, and we are encountering a great deal of support and understanding here,” said Štěpán Černoušek.

“In the Czech Republic, we have studied the remains of communist penal labour camps and forced labour camps in the Jáchymov region. Now we have ventured into the environment of the Soviet Gulag. It is a unique opportunity because we can compare the original with its copy,” Pavel Vařeka concluded.

The expedition is part of the Zdivočelá země project. While UWB archaeologists are focusing on the academic research, Gulag.cz is documenting the expedition, among other things, for a forthcoming documentary film and to make the results accessible through the virtual Gulag Online museum.

Complete link to the photogallery and a video. (Source: Gulag.cz)