A. I. Shirokov, Dal’stroi v sotsial’no-ekonomicheskom razvitii Severo-Vostoka SSSR (1930–1950‑e gg.) (Moscow: Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2014).

Anatolii Ivanovich Shirokov is a member of the Federation Council from Magadan Oblast, before this appointment he was the rector of the North-Eastern State University. He is a member of United Russia Party, so his views became rather anti-Western in recent years, but his monograph about Dal’stroi is quite academic and free of any kind of political propaganda.

Dal’stroi was an infamous Soviet state agency in 1930s—1950s that functioned at the same time as an industrial enterprise and as an extraordinary local government in the north-eastern part of the USSR. Shirokov’s research covers the whole period of its existence, from establishment till liquidation. The book has three chapters corresponding to the main parts of the history of Dal’stroi: prewar period, World War II, the crisis of 1946–57.

The research is based on documents of central party and state organs, archival collections of Dal’stroi itself, statistic data, mass media publications of the period under review and a huge amount of memoirs including accounts both of the former GULAG prisoners and of scientists who took part in investigation of the Soviet North-East. According to the author, the texts of the latter group belong to a mixed genre of half-memoirs and half-research papers that makes them especially important.

Dal’stroi was established in 1931 as a state trust for industrial and road construction in Kolyma basin (Dal’stroi is the shortened name composed of Dal’nii—‘Far’, meaning the Far East, and stroitel’stvo—‘construction’), but its real functions were not limited to the pure economical activity. It was subordinated directly to the Council of Labour and Defense, later to the Council of People’s Commissars and gained the right for privileged supply and administrative control over the territory of its activities. The whole region was thus transformed into an internal colony with an extraordinary administration system. From the very beginning Dal’stroi widely used the labour of prisoners of the North-East Corrective Labour Camp of the OGPU (Sevvostlag, or SVITL—Severo-Vostochnyi ispravitel’no-trudovoi lager’) that was established in 1932 and was actually subordinated to the trust, although formally was a part of the GULAG. In 1938 Dal’stroi was transformed into the NKVD Main Administration for Construction in the Far North, but retained both its shortened name and privileged position, including administrative autonomy.

The main task of Dal’stroi was extraction of mineral resources, first of all gold, after World War II—also uranium. Volumes of extraction of gold increased up to 80 tons in 1940 that made Dal’stroi one of the biggest gold suppliers in the world and produced a mistaken impression of its great economic effectiveness. The real price for that were the heavy forced labour of prisoners and depletion of region’s resources which not only led to demise of ecological systems on vast territories and caused a serious damage to indigenous peoples, but also provided a basis for the further crisis of Dal’stroi itself.

In pursuit to achieve the biggest extraction volume, the administration of the trust did not pay enough attention to the development of other branches of local economy that completely depended on supplies from the ‘mainland’. Only placer accumulations were exploited, not primary deposits that made up to 70 percent of the region’s mineral resources. As a result, workers lived mostly in temporary settlements with poor living conditions and overflow of males which complicated family formation so that people did not often settle in the region permanently. When the placer accumulations were depleted, production costs rose sharply. The crisis became already obvious in late 1940s. In 1953, Dal’stroi was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry of the Soviet Union and the most part of its labour camps—to the Ministry of Justice. In December 1953 the Magadan Oblast was established; Dal’stroi thus lost its administrative functions and became a purely economic organization. A sharp deficit of workforce has added to other difficulties, as the number of prisoners declined considerably after Stalin’s death, and the population began to leave Kolyma when former restrictions on choice of domicile were dismantled. In such conditions, the authorities had to recognize an inefficiency of Stalinist methods of economic development in the Far East, and in 1957 Dal’stroi was liquidated. Overcoming the negative consequences of its activity ‘required huge administrative efforts and material resources in 1950s—1960s’ (p. 653).