“We Russians have always had a sadomasochistic relationship with our country.” This is a reflection by Galina Ivan Levinson, an elderly survivor of the Gulag, Stalin’s gigantic empire of labour camps. Barry Lewis’s often utterly heartbreaking photographs are the illustration to Galina’s words. In a rare, probably unrepeatable period of change – the last months of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule and of his short-lived policy of glasnost (openness) – Lewis was allowed to visit the Gulag regions of north-eastern Siberia. It was 1991. The archaeology of the gulags was still lying in the snow: the wreckage of huts and fences, wooden stakes and rusted barbed wire, an old boot stiff in the permafrost. Starting in the port of Magadan, he travelled north along the “Road of Bones”, the 2,000km (1,240 miles) Kolyma Highway, to the gold and uranium mines built by slave labour at the cost of uncounted lives.
