Filming conditions in Kolyma, far in Russia's northeast: -55C outside. Photo: Yuri Dud's YouTube channel, screencapped by Runet Echo. Yuri Dud seems an unlikely figure to rekindle Russia’s conscience about the darker chapters in its history. The former sports reporter now runs his own YouTube interview show where he interviews celebrities and other public figures. Each interview generates millions of views, making Dud a serious competitor even to state-owned TV. Although Dud has interviewed activists and politicians such as Alexey Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner, he is considered more of a society columnist than a “serious” reporter. That's why the subject of Dud’s latest show shocked his both 5 million and the general public: a two-hour documentary about the Kolyma region, in Russia’s far northeast, that is almost synonymous with Stalin-era repressions. This frozen, mostly impassable Arctic wasteland was home to the most notorious camps of the Gulag, the Soviet network of forced labor compounds into which thousands of petty criminals and political prisoners disappeared. It’s hard to tell exactly how many people perished from extreme cold (temperatures in winter routinely drop below -50C), or of hunger and toil in the mines, but even conservative official estimates put the number at 150 thousand victims in just one of the biggest Kolyma camps from 1932 to 1957. Dud is aware of the contrast between his usual subject matter and the sensitive theme of his latest episode. As he explains in the opening sequence: А почему вообще после рэперов, юмористов, музыкантов, актеров и режиссеров мы двинулись к такой сложной и тревожной теме? Причины две. Первая: в октябре 2018 года ВЦИОМ опубликовал социологическое исследование, которое привело нас в ступор. Почти половина молодых людей в возрасте от 18 до 24 лет никогда не слышала о сталинских репрессиях. Мы восприняли это как вызов и ждали момента, чтобы этот вызов принять. After all the rappers, comedians, musicians, actors, and directors, why in the world are we engaging this complex and disturbing subject? Two reasons. Number one: In October 2018, VTsIOM [Russian Public Opinion Research Center] published a survey that left us in a stupor. Almost half of young people aged 18-24 have never heard of Stalin’s repressions. We've treated that as a challenge and awaited the right moment to tackle it. Dud adds that his parents have always warned him: “Don’t attract unnecessary attention. Don’t stand out. We’re simple people, we don’t decide anything,” even in circumstances of obvious injustice. He says how he has always wondered about the origins of this fear among older Russians and concludes that “it was born in the first half of the 20th century and reached us through generations.” Kolyma, Dud says, is “the birthplace of our fear.” Dud’s words have struck a chord with exactly the audience he was aiming for: younger Russians oblivious or only barely aware of their country’s brutal recent history. Смотрю выпуск #дудь по репресси, мне папа и дедушка рассказывали как все плохо было, но я даже не думал что на столько. — Aleksei Korotkov ⭕️ (@theonephobos) 24 апреля 2019 г. Watching the #dud episode about repressions, my dad and grandpa told me it was bad, but I’ve never realized how bad. The film is structured as a travelogue: Dud’s crew travels two thousand kilometers along the Kolyma highway, a mostly unpaved road between two regional capitals, Magadan and Yakutsk. So many prisoners died during its construction in the 1930s that the highway is colloquially known as “the road of bones.” Along the road, Dud reaches or nearly reaches the sites of some of the deadliest camps, including Butugychag where inmates were forced to mine uranium ore without protective gear. He meets local activists fighting to preserve the memories of the victims from the forces of public indifference and unforgiving nature. Dud also interviews descendants of Gulag inmates such as Natalia Korolyova, the daughter of Sergey Korolyov, father of the Soviet space program. Korolyov was arrested in 1938, spent several months in a labor camp in Kolyma and, nearing death from starvation and exhaustion, was transferred to a prison-like facility for researchers in Moscow until his release in 1944. Korolyov survived, but was not fully exonerated until 1957. Korolyov’s daughter struggles to hold back tears as she describes the torture he suffered at the hands of his interrogators. Yet Dud is stunned by Korolyova’s opinion of Joseph Stalin. Her answers provide an insight into how complicated the issue of Stalin-era repressions is in modern Russia, even for people acutely aware of the horrors they inflicted on millions.