Eduard Petrovich Berzin (Russian: Эдуа́рд Петро́вич Бе́рзин, Latvian: Eduards Bērziņš; 19 February 1894 – 1 August 1938) was a Soviet soldier, Chekist and NKVD officer that set up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of slave-labor camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, one of the most brutal Gulag regions, where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died or were murdered in subsequent decades.

[1] Before World War I, Berzin studied painting at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Berlin, where he met his wife, Elza Mittenberga, who was also an artist, from Riga.

In 1926, Joseph Stalin gave Berzin the task of setting up the Vishera complex of labour camps in the Urals known as Vishlag where cellulose and paper were to be produced.

on the basis of this success that in 1931, Stalin appointed him head of Dalstroy, the authority which was to develop Kolyma, making use essentially of forced labour consisting of some convicted criminals, but mainly political prisoners.

From the very start, however, the lack of proper preparations combined with an exceptionally hard winter in 1932 and 1933 led to tremendous hardship, particularly for the prisoners sent up into the River Kolyma valley to build roads and mine gold, very many of whom perished in the cold.

Berzin, clad in a bearskin coat, would spend the days travelling around the camps in the Rolls-Royce that used to be Lenin's car to personally oversee the work in progress.

He enjoyed music, listened to gramophone records of Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Edvard Grieg (which he had bought on an official visit to Philadelphia in 1930), and encouraged the children to perform in the school theatre under the guidance of artistic prisoners.

Nevertheless, under pressure from Stalin, he drove his workforce to impossible levels of hardship which inevitably resulted in illness, starvation, and death in even higher proportions.