Hester den Boer

Sandarmokh Memorial Complex – In 1997 more than nine thousand bodies were discovered in the woods near the White Sea Canal. Members of Memorial established a memorial cemetery on the site. In 2016 the local authorities for the first time where not

The remains of the transition camp to the island Solovki, where the first Gulag camp was opened in 1923

Rehabilitation card. This card people receive when they are officially rehabilitated from the crimes they were accused of under the Stalinist regime.

An abandoned former mining town in the Perm region

Ust-Omchug, a town in Kolyma. Here the biggest Gulag complex of the Russian Far East was build.

The Norhern mining town Vorkuta. Vorkuta is build of the biggest gulag complexes in the North of Russia. Because of the climate and the location the area was always considered unfit for living, but Stalin gave orders for eploitaition of the area any

A mass grave close to Vorkuta. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners where forced to work in the coal mines and on the contructions of a railroadtrack through the the permafrost. Many of them died.

Vorkuta is located above the polar cirlcle. In winter there is only a few hours of sun.

Antonia Novosad served as a political prisoner a 10 year sentence in a gulag camp in Kolyma. Her brother and fiancee were executed. After her release she returned to her family in the Ukraine, but she couldn’t settle here anymore. She decided to ret

Gulag

During Stalin’s reign 18 million people were killed, exiled or imprisoned. The gulag camps where spread all over the Soviet Union. After Stalin is was forbidden to talk about the atrocities and the Russian society has never dealt with this dark history. All over Russia there are undiscovered mass graves and there is almost no family untouched by the Stalinist terror.

Lately, under the repressive regime of Putin, Stalin became more popular. At the same time the memory of the years of the Stalinist repression is becoming a taboo.

According to a recent poll 45 percent of the Russians think positive of Stalin. Two years earlier this was only 25 percent. In the new schoolbooks Stalin is described as a great leader and an effective manager. The Stalinist repression was necessary to win the second world war and to protect the country against enemies and spies. Just as this is necessary today.

Hester den Boer

Hester den Boer is a photographer and investigative journalist from The Netherlands. She publishes in several Dutch magazines, under which De Groene Amsterdamm. She is specialized in Russia and the Stalinist past, on which she did research in the archives of Memorial in Sint Petersburg for six months in 2009.

Since 2010 she goes on a regular basis on long journalistic trips to Russia, mostly to Siberia and the far North. She founded the online platform ‘Mother Russia, small stories from a big country’ (www.moederrusland.nl) on which she publishes photo stories on the daily live in the outskirts of Russia. During her travels she mostly stays at peoples houses, which enables her to portray them in an intimate way.

Since two years she is completely focused on the significance of the Stalinist past in the current day Russia. She is working on a book on his subject which will be published in 2017.

One of her research projects was nominated for the European Press Prize 2015.