Jón Ólafsson

Moldavia? No Mordovia. No one has ever heard of Mordovia. Even Moscovites get confused. Mordovia, when they finally get it, smells of camps. It’s in Siberia, right? No. Not right. It’s right here. Closer to home than Piter. Almost.

But the smell is right. It is famous for camps. Therefore the association. There still is a camp area there and it is still quite important.

Piotr Pavlovich, a retired lieutenant colonel worked his whole career in the prison camp system. He ended as an assistant director of one of the camps. The Gulag, he asks me, that wasn’t here. The Gulag, that’s Siberia, right? No. wrong. The Gulag was also here. This was the Gulag. From 1931 to 1960. It was just as much the Gulag as Siberia.

Mordovsky les. Mordovian woods. Forests. Iavas.

From Pot’ma to Iavas there used to be a local railway, around 50 kilometers. The camps were built along the railway line. The Mordovian forests supplied Moscow with most of its firewood. Later it supplied all kinds of timber for various purposes.

The prison camps were a vital part of that production with their crowds of prisoners assigned to do socialist work for some number of years, expecting to be transformed themselves in the process.

Mordovia also played a role in the transformation of dissidents in the sixties. A local museum displays some items related to a few well known dissidents who spent time in the camps.

Valentina Fiodorovna is proud of the museum. Our camp was founded in 1931, she says. Look at how it has changed. Elaborate models show a typical camp site from the thirties. Another shows a recent unit. Here is the industrial part. And here are the living quartiers, she points out.

It’s an interesting space to find oneself in. It’s the Gulag, still being run pretty much the old way, by people, proudly oblivious of its past or, at least, about the meaning of its past. The long successful life of the camps is a source of satisfaction for them, with the possible exception of certain fates in the sixties. The sixties were “difficult”.

The Moscovite smells something, but the feeling is evasive. Mordovia slips and fades.