Gulag
Barry Lewis
£40.00
In 1991, in the dying days of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), now the Russian Federation, I was commissioned by Geo Magazine to visit the Gulag of Siberia.
Travelling in 1991 to the Siberian Gulag would have been impossible had it not been for the reforms, in... Read More
In 1991, in the dying days of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), now the Russian Federation, I was commissioned by Geo Magazine to visit the Gulag of Siberia.
Travelling in 1991 to the Siberian Gulag would have been impossible had it not been for the reforms, in the mid 1980s, of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Leader of the Soviet Union, with his drive for political and economic restructuring (perestroika) and his call for a new era of transparency and openness (glasnost). These five years were full of a heady hope for a new future for the old empire, as the reforms revealed some of the horrors and inefficiencies of its Soviet past. The speed and ensuing chaos of the changes offered an opportunity to both ask people questions and find them willing to answer: this would have been out of the question a few years earlier, or indeed far more difficult just a year later, after Gorbachev had resigned and the Soviet Union had fallen.
I was lucky to benefit from this short period of openness.