It was under control of Sevvostlag (a directorate of the Gulag), and the local NKVD troika used it as the second major place for the enforcement of their death sentences during the Great Terror.

In the early thirties, the Soviet leadership decided to start accelerated development of the Kolyma River basin in a very remote and sparsely populated region in the north-east of the USSR, where rich deposits of gold and tin were found.

An important role in these plans was played by the so-called Corrective labor camps, where prisoners had to work in extremely severe conditions.

[8] One of the testimonies, that Robert Conquest cites, claims that on the site of the future camp there were a few barracks, called Serpantinnaya, in which the road-building unit had been located.

Trying to describe the incredible tightness in the barracks, they use such images as "a man was dying and could not fall", "people could not free their hand to take pieces of ice (they were given instead of water) and caught them with their mouths" and the like.

My comrades got into this punitive confinement and ended their days there.Very few documents have survived concerning the organization of the Great Terror at low levels.

Then follows a list of 30 names, sent to the head of the regional department of the NKVD for the Northern Mining Administration which was also located in the village of Khatynnakh.

[5] The Russian historian Navasardov found out that there were two "troikas" of the NKVD, who considered the cases of prisoners at Dalstroy in pursuance of order No.

Then the leadership of Dalstroy under the head of Eduard Berzin was arrested and mostly executed, and a new team sent from Moscow took up the proceeding of the prisoners' cases in December 1937.

The historian points out that these death sentences were carried out both in Magadan and Serpantinka, but does not give the number of those executed in the second case.

[11] The Mask of Sorrow monument located in the city of Magadan contains 11 concrete blocks with the names of the GULAG camps in Kolyma, including Serpantinka.

Thus, he wrote:[19] The documents of our past have been destroyed, the watchtowers taken down, the barracks razed to the ground, the rusty barbed wire wound up and taken away somewhere else.