In August 2016, we made another expedition to abandoned Gulag camps in Siberia. This time, we headed to the Kodar Mountains in the Chita Oblast, where Gulag prisoners mined uranium for the first Soviet atomic bombs. We documented three camps, which came under the administration of the Borsky corrective labour camp (Борский ИТЛ).
Our main objective, however, was the Marble Gorge, which is situated on one of the side slopes at a height of 1,800-2150 metres above sea level, around 30 kilometres from Chara. The journey took us four days by foot thanks to heavily overflowing rivers. In this location, you can find the remarkably preserved remains of the “Marble Key” (Mramorny Klyuch) camp, which is where the actual extraction of uranium took place. We spent several days in the Marble Gorge documenting the remnants of the camp in detail as well as the mining itself. The expedition was planned and logistically arranged by Štěpán Černoušek (who was banned from entering the territory of the Russian Federation at that time), while field research on site for the purposes of Gulag.cz was provided by Radek Světlík and Lukáš Holata.
