Svobodny
Description
Svobodny is a town in Amur Oblast, Russia, located on the right bank of the Zeya River, 167 kilometers north of Blagoveshchensk, the administrative center of the oblast. Population: 58,778 (2010).
History
It was founded in 1912 in conjunction with the construction of the Amur Railway (the Trans-Siberian Railway's "bypass" route, which was to provide a railway connection from European Russia to the Pacific entirely over the Russian soil, without crossing the north-eastern China). It was originally named Alexeyevsk, in honor of the then crown prince Alexey. In 1917, the town was renamed Svobodny, Russian for free.
During the Stalin era, the BAMLag prison camp was built in Svobodny, with the intention of providing forced labor for the planned construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. The camp became one of the largest in the gulag system, with ca. 190,300 convicts in October 1935. The camp claimed the lives of thousands of political and clerical prisoners.
