Rosja - Magadan - Noor Images

Russia, Magadan Region, Yagodnoye, July 2015 Artifacts are seen on the wall of Ivan Panikarov's apartment. Rusting tools, handcuffs and photographs of prisoners cover the walls of his living room, while stacks of boxes in the hallway contain transcripts of interrogations taken down in meticulous purple handwriting. He turned it in to a Gulag-museum. For over 30 years, Panikarov independently researches the dark history of the Soviet prison-camps in the region. Ivan Panikarov, a former plumber from the southern Russian town of Rostov, has set up a gulag museum in Yagodnoye, a town of 8,000 that once housed the regional gulag headquarters. He came in the 1970s to Kolyma, where he learned the grim history of the camps and began visiting their remains, collecting prisoners??? clothes, tools and tableware. In 1994, after many failed attempts to get support from the local administration, he bought a two-room apartment in Yagodnoye and put the exhibits on display. Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR