Camp hospital graveyard
The former graveyard of Gulag inmates in Susuman, small town in remote arctic region of Russia, seems to have turned into a graveyard of cars. But under the rubble & ruins one can find the small, rotten crosses in the graves of the prisoners who were buried here. During 1930s, when the Kolyma Highway reached these frozen hinterlands, many lagpunkts of labour camps were operating around the town. In Susuman there was a hospital for sick prisoners. As “sick” in Gulag meant that one was more or less dead, the cemetery of the hospital was in active use. After the Gulag system was dismantled during 1950s and 1960s, the hospital was taken in civilian use. When the Soviet Union collapsed, two-thirds of the population of Susuman moved closer to civilization, and the hospital was abandoned, and so was the cemetery. Apart from the rotten markers on the graves, there is now a new memorial cross, standing lonely in the taiga.
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