Stalin's trainset.

[pfx]

Saw this and thought it might be of intersest to some.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18116112

 

[oknotsen]

The tracks sank back into the tundra. The railway to nowhere, with its huge cost in human lives, became known as the Dead Road.

For decades nobody talked much about the ghostly barracks or the rusting rolling stock and rails.

That was an interesting read. Thanks for posting.

 

[sawyer811]

I think the this thread is misnamed: there should be a "from hell" added to the end...

 

[wholbr]

Hi Pfx and Everybody
I had seen the appalling story of the building of that railroad in a book I read many years ago of the life story of Stalin. It was not only the building on railways that this tyrant used slave labour for, it was used for the entire industrialisation of Russia pre-Second World War and in the 1950s when many who where sent to the gulags had previously fought so bravely in his army that defeated the other tyrannical regime of the time, Nazism in Germany.

However, we should not forget arguably the most infamous railway built using slave labour, that being British and Commonwealth prisoners of war on the Burma railway. Built by the extreme right wing Japanese wartime government it surpassed in its brutality towards those prisoners anything that even Stalin was capable of.

When it comes to brutality there is little difference between the extreme left and the extreme right. As the specter of these organisations raises its head again during these troubled times in Europe and other places around the world it would do us all well to remember what has gone before.

Thank you for the posting Pfx
Bill

 

[rjhowie]

The Gulags were a horrible thing and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own people as one the cruellest dictators. We in the West haven by and large tended to overlook them due not not having over-run them or such and therefor no access to info until the fall of the USSR. We knew they were there but many were in the dark still. That railway link was fascinating even if brutal and that there are now plans in the new Russia to have a railway there is even if unintentionally (maybe not?) an acknowledgemnt to those legions of the damned years ago.

 

[Euphod]

Quite a bracing article, thanks for posting the link. It's of the utmost importance to never let ourselves forget these inhuman events.

 

[sawyer811]

It's the same thing Harry Truman said long ago, 'If you do not study and learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it...'

Coincidentally, That's probably why Hitler failed; didn't he ever read about how Napoleon's invasion of Russia ended up?

 

[rjhowie]

Oh yes Adolph knew okay and he very nearly succeeded and could have. Thanks to us sending the Merchant Navy and others on the Artic Convoys losing many brave sailors in a heroic effort with supplies. The alternative would have been the collapse of the USSR a long time earlier than it eventually did!