Deluded and abandoned

Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small piece of the gulag where the prisoners had been British. Or so the story went. Allegedly, a railwayman had once found the remnants of a British uniform on the site of the former barracks there, but no one was quite sure what had happened to it. Supposedly, some of the locals had once heard the prisoners singing English songs.

Later, in Moscow, I tried to find a mention of the ‘English colony’, or something like it, in the Russian archives, but I could not. And that, unfortunately, is the fate of many such stories. Rumours of American or British or other foreign prisoners in the Soviet gulag have been around for as long as the gulag itself, but they have always been hard to substantiate.