Thousands of Russian prisoners are still suffering in Gulag Archipelago

Russia's Gulag Archipelago of prison camps in the far north is still functioning, with prisoners enduring "unacceptable" conditions of winter cold and summer insect bites, the conference was told.

More than 120 "forest colonies" of remote labour camps dating from the Stalin era of political persecution are being used to house tens of thousands of criminals, said Judith Pallot, a geography lecturer at Oxford University.

Reporting on two valleys in the Perm region of the northern Ural mountains, the Kolva and the Berezovaya, Dr Pallot said they containedcompounds ringed by watchtowers on the edge of the forest, They had held prisoners since the Thirties, although the inmates were now typically murderers rather than political dissidents.

The average temperature for the region over the whole year was minus 1C, and during the long winter, from October to May, it fell as low as minus 40C, while in the summer insect bites were "absolute hell", Dr Pallot said. The inmates had been regularly marched into the forest to cut timber before the recent collapse of the local timber market. There were believed to be about 10,000 prisoners in the two valleys.

The common perception was that the Gulag Archipelago of camps, made famous by the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had been swept away after Joseph Stalin's death, and certainly by the present day. There were tourist trips to the former camps on the Solovietski islands in the Arctic Ocean, Dr Pallot said, similar to those run to the Robben Island prison off the South African coast that once held Nelson Mandela.

"But we were surprised to find that there are still whole regions of northern Russia where prisoners are serving out their sentences perhaps thousands of miles from where they committed their offences," she said. "These camps are entirely in the wrong place and it is not acceptable."

There were known to be 122 remaining "forest colonies" of prisoners in remote areas, she said. Conditions in them were thought to be particularly bad because in the Russian prison system camps were expected to cover their own costs, but often could not do so.

The Russian government was aware of the problem but was struggling to cope with a severely overcrowded prison system, Dr Pallot said. In January 2001 the prison population was 924,000, including 200,000 awaiting trial. With 729 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, Russia had one of the world's highest rates of incarceration.

The problem was that people were given custodial sentences for relatively trivial offences, Dr Pallot said. "What they need is a good probation service and the idea of community service for minor theft."

Dr Pallot also reported on a neighbouring valley in the Perm region, the Vishera, where a labour camp was abolished in 1990. Many of the former inhabitants, political detainees from the Soviet era or their descendants, had decided to remain in the area. They had reverted to a subsistence economy, growing potatoes, gathering berries and mushrooms and killing game in the forest.