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Rare witness to horror of Stalin’s Gulag prisons dies
A rare survivor of the harshest Stalin-era labour camps has died aged 89 in Russia’s far east.
- BBC
Vasily Kovalyov had survived icy punishment cells and beatings in the USSR’s notorious Gulag prison system.
During an escape attempt in 1954 he spent five months hiding in a freezing mine with two other prisoners.
Kovalyov’s story was featured in Vesma, a news site based in Magadan. The communist regime shipped thousands of “enemies” to prison camps via Magadan.
In 1950 Kovalyov, aged 20, was found guilty of anti-Soviet sabotage – one among the…