The minutely calibrated deceptions would continue through the length of the visit as the American vice president was walked through a charade designed to conceal the true nature of what was taking place around him. Like a moving stage set, everything in Kolyma had been carefully managed for Wallace’s willing eyes. No beguiling detail was left untouched in the Soviet effort to convince Wallace that what lay before him was a vision of pioneers at work, not the reality of a network of death camps. The NKVD guards with their baying dogs had vanished, along with the skeletal prisoners. The
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