Even after the Bolsheviks took control of the region, there was no peace, only a series of increasingly savage repressions by the victors. Some of Russia’s most notorious gulags, including the Kolyma gold fields, were located in the Far East and throughout the 1920s and 1930s their populations swelled steadily, as did their cemeteries. Already battered by what Alec Nove, an expert on the Soviet economy, described as “the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history,” Russian citizens in the late 1930s were now being arrested and executed on a quota system.
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