Kolyma

Why

Kolyma is the region in Russia’s far north-east where the largest Gulag camps stood. Everyone in Russia knows the name; almost no one knows what the place is like today, or how people there live with its history. V Lesakh, an independent media outlet, wanted a podcast that would tell both stories — the past and the present — and it had never been done in Russian as a narrative series.

What I did

I ran the production from concept to release: put together the team, managed the budget and deadlines, wrote the scripts, briefed the composer and the sound designer, and handled distribution once the episodes were out. Six people worked on the show, plus a team of volunteers who researched historical sources.

The two hosts were journalists on opposite sides of the world: Ivan Makridin, in New York, and Dmitry Andreev, a publisher who lives in Kolyma. That gave the show its shape — one voice looking in from outside, one from inside.

The hardest part was the material. We worked through a huge mass of primary sources: old radio broadcasts, Soviet and American documentaries, documents on the repressions, the archives of Memorial. On top of that we recorded more than twenty interviews with historians, culture scholars and people who live in the region. The job was to turn all of it into nine episodes a listener could follow without a history degree.

What came out

Nine episodes, released between June and December 2023. The podcast won the Redkollegia prize, Russia’s main award for independent journalism.