Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, The Gulag Fleet, And the Role of the West

Nearly fifty years after the death of former communist leader Joseph Stalin, Booz Allen Hamilton Senior Vice President Marty Bollinger unravels the mystery surrounding the use of U.S.-built cargo ships to transport one million Soviet-era prisoners to the infamous Kolyma Gulag located along the Arctic Circle in far northeastern Siberia. Thousands of prisoners died during these journeys, and hundreds of thousands perished in the harsh weather conditions in Kolyma before completing their sentences.

Marty Bollinger

According to Bollinger, the United States and Europe were unwitting accomplices in this dark period of Soviet-era history. In the 1930s, U.S. shipyards built most of the Gulag fleet, and the U.S. government sold many of the ships used in the transport directly to an agent of the Soviet Union. In some cases, free ships provided to the Soviet Union under the Lend Lease military assistance program were diverted into Gulag transport duties. Some of these ships may even have carried U.S. military servicemen to the Gulag. The Gulag fleet was even overhauled and upgraded free of charge by the U.S. as part of the Lend Lease operation.

The book Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West details this tragic tale using both Soviet and U.S. archival records, supplemented with first-hand testimony from those involved in the operation.