\nConfronting Amnesia: Frozen Memories of the Russian Gulag (2009)
\nINTRODUCTION<\/strong>
\nThe Russian Gulag, developed by Josef Stalin at the height of the Soviet Union,
\nwas one of the gravest human rights violations of the Twentieth Century. This sprawling
\nsystem of penal colonies and forced labor camps consisted of an estimated 500 distinct
\ncomplexes that spanned twelve time zones. At the time of Stalin\u2019s death in 1953, about
\n18 million people had passed through this penal system, roughly 15% of the Soviet
\npopulation. Yet, despite the closing of the last camps by Gorbachev in 1987, the rehabili-
\ntation of all victims of political repression in 1992, and denunciations of Stalin\u2019s despo-
\ntism, the legacy of the Gulag is virtually invisible in Russia\u2019s collective consciousness.<\/p>\n
Confronting Amnesia: Frozen Memories of the Russian Gulag addresses these difficult themes. Using interviews with scholars, historians, human rights activists, and survivors Confronting Amnesia serves an important purpose in an era when many in Russia Above all, however, Confronting Amnesia examines the question of collective SCRIPT<\/strong> Anne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian) Narrator<\/strong>: Anne Applebaum is the author of the definitive work on the history of the Gulag. Nina Khrushcheva<\/strong> (The New School) Narrator<\/strong>: The intrigues were endless; usually beginning with a whisper, a suspicion, Yuri Fidelgolts<\/strong> (Poet and Survivor of Kolyma) Mikhail Rogachev<\/strong> (Repentance) Anne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian) government import-export organization, and they were investigating for some Marshall Goldman<\/strong> (Senior Scholar, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center) CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS<\/strong> FILMOGRAPHY<\/strong> BIBLIOGRAPHY<\/strong> WEBSITES<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NOTE: This material is printed with permission of the author: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28212,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28196\/revisions\/28212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/gulag-1.png\")
<\/a>
\nIn fact, attempts to educate the public\u2014and a new generation\u2014about the Gulag and human rights
\nin general have been met with open enmity from the government. In light of the fact that, in the words
\nof Marshall Goldman, the Senior Scholar at Harvard\u2019s Davis Center, \u201calmost every family had some
\nrelative or some acquaintance who had been imprisoned or sent to the Gulag or executed,\u201d Russia\u2019s
\nindifference to the atrocities of a system that endured for more than half a century is staggering.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cSomehow,\u201d said Co-Producer John Michalczyk in a 2009 interview with
\nthe Boston Herald, \u201cthe enormity of the evil perpetrated in the Gulag has generally
\neluded the collective consciousness of Americans and Western societies.\u201d An important
\ncontribution to a vital dialogue on human rights, this film explores the history of the
\nGulag and its legacy in Russia today in an attempt to combat this Western \u201cblindness.\u201d
\nWhile the first camps were founded by Lenin and Trotsky in 1918, the Gulag flour-
\nished under Stalin who, believing it could play an important function in the Soviet econ-
\nomy, launched the first industrialization of the camp system in 1929. His initial intent
\nwas to use prisoners to develop resources such as timber, to open up mining districts,
\nand to build roads and railroads, among other projects. After he consolidated power,
\nhowever, particularly from the mid-1930s on, Stalin began to send political prisoners,
\nany person that displayed a shred of dissent, to the Gulag, where they were executed
\nimmediately or worked to death.<\/p>\n
\nand their families, Confronting Amnesia presents a grim view of life in the Soviet Union
\nduring Stalin\u2019s Reign of Terror. These accounts explore the tactics used by the \u201cMinistry
\nof Fear\u201d to control the population through intimidation, from the knock on the door in
\nthe middle of the night, to the fa\u00e7ade of legality of trials that frequently lasted no more
\nthan thirty seconds. The film goes on to detail the unspeakable horrors of the two-week
\nlong journey to the camps, during which prisoners were locked inside cattle cars, and
\nthe abominable conditions of the camps themselves, such as Kolyma, located in a region
\nwhere temperatures reached -70\u00b0 Fahrenheit (-57\u00b0 Celsius). One of the film\u2019s major
\nstrengths is in its delicate balance between testimonies from experts in the field with the
\nindividual experiences of those like Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. and Arkady Berdichevsky,
\namong other victims of the Gulag.<\/p>\n
\nchoose to overlook such atrocities. While introducing groups like Memorial and the Perm-
\n36 labor camp, dedicated to remembering those who suffered in an effort to prevent further
\nhuman rights abuses, the documentary also highlights the government\u2019s attempts to erase
\n\u201cthe Unmanageable Past\u201d from Russia\u2019s collective consciousness. The amnesia succeeds,
\ndue in large part to a certain nostalgia for the glory days of Russia, including for Stalin,
\ncredited with making the Soviet Union a world power.<\/p>\n
\nidentity and the need to address the tragedies of the past in order to move into the future.
\nWhile given in the context of the Russian Gulag, the lessons offered here speak to uni-
\nversal themes that are indispensible for the global advancement of human rights, making
\nit an excellent resource for scholars, activists or simply those looking to explore one of
\nthe greatest atrocities of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nPutin is trying to nurture a sense of nostalgia for that period and overlook the
\nmore negative aspects of that period. So even when we marked the 50th
\nAnniversary of Stalin\u2019s death in 2003, there was no official statement about the
\nvictims of Stalin.<\/p>\n
\nBut I think there\u2019s also a question of pride. Many feel, \u201cWell we used to be
\na great country. Now we\u2019re not a great country. But we don\u2019t want to hear
\nanything bad about when we were a great country. We\u2019d like to maintain the
\nillusion that it was a good system.\u201d They don\u2019t want to disturb that image, and
\nthey don\u2019t want to disturb that memory.
\nNarrator:<\/strong> This impenetrable land\u2026This \u201criddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enig-
\nma,\u201d as Churchill famously categorized it\u2026This extraordinary state of mind, equally
\nunconquerable and inexplicable\u2026. This is Mother Russia on the brink of a new era in
\nthe twenty-first century. Will she, however, ever acknowledge her dark past?
\nRussia, late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, has recently passed through
\nanother revolution following the openness to change in glasnost and perestroika in the
\n1990s. It was all about making sure it would never happen again. It was edifying to some
\nfor a time, but did the Russian government ever really sign on?
\nFear grows that the current government now would prefer to see a certain \u201cmoral amne-
\nsia\u201d re-imposed on Russia\u2019s collective memory, shunting aside lingering remorse over
\nsuch painful experiences as the infamous persecutions of the fifty-year Gulag experi-
\nence. It would be a matter of convenience\u2026better for business\u2026better for the political
\norder\u2026better for those who find guilt cumbersome\u2026better for the determined drive to
\nmake glorious Mother Russia again what she rightfully ought be, a giant among nations.
\nThat has been the government agenda. There is neither time nor place for remorse, for
\nany return to the Gulag era.
\nA Russian history scholar, Joshua Rubenstein, is Regional Director of Amnesty Interna-
\ntional in Boston.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nStalin\u2019s forced labor camps system, the Gulag, was one of the worst examples
\nof human rights violations of the twentieth century. First in scale, that it en-
\ngulfed millions of people, that it was a significant part of the Soviet economy,
\nthat it left a terrible legacy that took decades and decades to overcome.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Professor Mark Kramer, specialist in Cold War Studies at Harvard\u2019s Davis
\nCenter, lost twenty-seven members of his family from Riga, Latvia and knows the power
\nof the Gulag to engulf the citizens of Russia and its satellites.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nGulag is a combination contraction and acronym of the Russian term. It\u2019s
\nGlavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel\u2019no-Trudovykh Lagerei i kolonii. Forced labor
\ncamps would have been perhaps more accurate, but this term became equiva-
\nlent over a time with the whole penal system, this whole enormous sprawling
\nsystem of camps and colonies in which both criminals and political prisoners
\nwere incarcerated.<\/p>\n
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nThere were camps\u2014there were Gulag camps really from the very beginning
\nof the Soviet Union. Lenin and Trotsky founded the first camps in 1918. And
\nthey were a very important part of Soviet policy in the 1920s. But in 1929, Sta-
\nlin launched the first real industrialization of the camp system. In other words,
\nhe began to see that the Gulag could play an important function in the Soviet
\neconomy, and he expanded their numbers, and he expanded what they did, so
\nthey were no longer just a few little logging camps. They were chemical fac-
\ntories, they used prisoners to open up mining districts, and they used prisoners
\nto build roads and railroads and so on. And this system of mass forced labor,
\nthrough which millions of people passed, lasted from about 1929 until Stalin\u2019s
\ndeath in 1953. And, at that point, it really was not ended, but it was dismantled
\nas a production system.
\nNarrator:<\/strong> Marshall Goldman, senior scholar at Harvard\u2019s Davis Center, has studied
\nclosely the economic development of Russia.
\nMarshall Goldman<\/strong> (Senior Scholar, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nWell, for a time, Stalin, when he particularly began to promote and increase
\nthe Gulag camps, he was doing it in part for economic reasons because he was
\nsending people up into the far North; places, up until then, were not attract-
\ning workers. So, for a while, he was developing metals, industry and timber,
\nand they thought that this would pay for itself. Other subsequent calculations
\nhad found that financially it was not a profit-making operation. But, in the
\nbeginning, for sure there was the notion that we could use this free labor to
\ndevelop resources, which would have a value for industry and even for the
\nexport sector.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: The camps, later focusing on punitive measures, then extended into Eastern
\nEurope during the Iron Curtain era after World War II. They were re-invented as work
\nfarms and as detention centers for political dissenters in the 1960s and 1970s like Ana-
\ntoly Sharansky and Nobel Peace Prize activist Andrei Sakharov.
\nAnd the camps lingered in dwindling numbers and intensity until Mikhail Gorbachev,
\nthe grandson of an egregiously wronged Gulag victim, pardoned the last political dis-
\nsenters and closed the remaining penal colonies in 1987.
\nWhile the camp gates have closed, the history annals are opening. Yet, throughout this
\ntragic period, as is the case with all of the Gulag\u2019s vital statistics, there is no official
\ncount. But it is believed there were close to 500 distinct camp complexes in the Soviet
\nUnion alone consisting of thousands of individual stations, pockets of despair scattered
\nin Russia\u2019s most forlorn wastes.
\nNina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, notes the irrelevance
\nof the individual in a larger collective enterprise like the Soviet state.<\/p>\n
\nForced labor was an important thing. Stalin was a great leader for the Soviet
\nUnion at the time because he made it a great nation, and so, yes, well, you
\nknow a couple of millions got killed in the process, but so what? Since the
\nRussian system, or the Kremlin or whatever the power structure is, has never
\nany respect for an individual human life. I mean, we really do count people
\nby the millions. So a million here, a million there didn\u2019t really make much of
\na difference.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: But during Stalin\u2019s reign, in short order, the all-powerful dictator twisted
\nthe concept of economic reform to make it serve his own soaring paranoia, obliterating
\nevery shred of dissent. So the camps proliferated in the mid-thirties, bulging with politi-
\ncal prisoners and the merely luckless, and soon multiplied twelve-fold. And then came
\n\u201cthe Great Terror\u201d of 1937-38, when one of every twenty people in the Soviet Union
\nwas arrested. Those who were not executed were condemned to a hellish existence in
\nthe Gulag. Besides the starvation and exhausting labor that accounted for the deaths,
\ncountless prisoners were executed.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nIn the period of just 1937-1938 alone, there are over seven hundred thousand
\nshot in that one year. One year. You think about that, that was in the lead up to
\nWorld War II and they need people to be able to help defend the country and
\ninstead they kill close to a million of them. The total number shot during the
\nStalin period was probably about one and a half million.
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nIt\u2019s very difficult to talk about precise numbers. We know that between 1929
\nwhen Stalin first started to expand the camps and 1953 when Stalin died that
\nabout 18 million people passed through them, which was about fifteen percent
\nof the Soviet population.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nIt took on massive scales after Stalin consolidated power, so it was an ex-
\ntraordinary quarter century of violence and persecution. And the fact it en-
\ngulfed whole categories of people, not only the obvious political opponents of
\nthe regime within the Communist movement or political movements per se,
\nbut religious believers, writers, people accused of undermining the economy,
\npeople accused of subversion\u2026 often falsely accused, of course.
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nThe Gulag went through different phases. You know, there were phases when
\nthe commanders were more interested in economic production and, because
\nthey were interested in that, they tried to treat prisoners relatively well in order
\nto get them to produce more. There were also phases\u2014notably at the height
\nof the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938\u2014when the Gulag became harsher and
\ncrueler and the commanders became less interested in production and minded
\nless when more people died.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Millions were sent into exile, consigned to Eastern European camps after
\nWorld War II or were simply executed. Most historians regard the accepted semi-official
\n\u201cnumbers\u201d as mere minimums while Alexander Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to eight years
\nof hard labor, put a human face on the tragedy for the West in his personal and collective
\nhistory, Gulag Archipelago.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nRelatively little was known about the Gulag outside the Soviet Union; even
\nwithin the Soviet Union the term Gulag was almost never used. That changed
\nin 1961 with the publication of One Day in the Life of the Ivan Denisovich,
\nwhich was published with official permission in the Soviet Union.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nThis took the country by storm and it opened the floodgate of manuscripts
\ncoming in to publishing houses. Very few, if any, were actually published of-
\nficially in the Soviet Union. And, pretty soon the regime grew weary and ap-
\nprehensive of this kind of literature, and it wasn\u2019t permitted. His subsequent
\nbooks about the Gulags, and his novels\u2014The Cancer Ward and The First
\nCircle – were not published in the Soviet Union.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies at Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nSo his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in the West in
\nthe mid 1970s, came out strictly in the outside world not within the Soviet Union.
\nThe impact of this book is hard to overstate because there were still illusions in
\nthe West at that time that somehow the Soviet Union may have had a bad period
\nduring the Stalin era, but it was basically moving in the right direction.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nBut there\u2019s no question that Solzhenitsyn played a principal role in initiating
\nthis type of literature in the Soviet Union even if it couldn\u2019t be circulated
\nfreely, but also alerting the West to the scale of this repression.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: The West was thus awakened in the 70s to the continuing horrors of the
\ncamps. Into this litany of statistics and collective tragedies comes the individual. The
\ncruelty and crime visited upon Russian citizens was monumental. In his monstrous para-
\nnoia, Stalin grimly cast a dark shadow over his own people.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International in Boston)
\nThere seemed to have been a quota at different times, that the police in dif-
\nferent communities had to arrest so many people. And so, this was not only a
\nform of intimidation of the population, which I think was its primary purpose,
\nbut it also reflected a certain paranoia on the part of Stalin, that if he knew
\nthere were certain obvious opponents in a city or community, he would arrest
\na hundred to make sure he got those three people.<\/p>\n
\nan errant comment, a note, a touch of treachery, even a foolish prank leading suddenly
\nto an arrest.
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nAlmost anybody at any time knew there could be a knock on the door in the
\nmiddle of the night and they could be taken away, and, in fact, at the height of
\ncertain waves of terror in the late thirties and again in 1948, there were many
\npeople who feared arrest, who simply kept a little packed bag by their beds be-
\ncause they knew that, you know, if somebody came to the door to take them to
\nprison, they would want to have certain things with them. They would want to
\nhave a change of clothes. They would want to have a little bit of money. They
\nwould want to have some soap. Things like that. It was a very prevalent fear.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Anyone and everyone could be snared in this dragnet\u2026a clergyman, a poli-
\ntician, a businessman, or thief, a na\u00efve student carried away with his own bombast, a
\npathetic peasant of absolutely no power or no influence. Everyone was vulnerable. The
\ngovernment was truly a \u201cMinistry of Fear.\u201d
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nThe appearance of legality was terribly important to the Russian state. There
\nwere trials held, even if they were one minute trials or thirty second trials.
\nEvery prisoner had a trial and every prisoner was sentenced. This was part of
\nthe way the Gulag was justified to the people who were charged with carrying
\nit out. Every guard was told, \u2018these prisoners are criminals. They\u2019ve had their
\ntrial. They\u2019re enemies of the people; its been proved!\u2019
\nNarrator<\/strong>: And then came what may have been the worst ordeal of the entire experi-
\nence: the transport by train to one\u2019s penal destination \u2026from Moscow to the Arctic
\nCircle, or some parched Siberian wasteland, or barren Khazakstan, or the Far, Far East,
\nten times zones distant, in the remote corner of the Soviet Union. The experience getting
\nthere was usually horrific.
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\nPrisoners were put into cattle cars, often with nothing, it would just simply be
\nan empty car, handed a loaf of bread and effectively told that\u2019s all they were
\ngoing to get for a week, or two weeks. The doors were shut and the guards
\nwould have no further communication with the prisoners during the trip. So
\nthese trains became terrible death traps. In the summer they were incredibly
\nhot. In the winter, they were incredibly cold. Prisoners literally died of thirst.
\nThey fought with one another. They murdered one another inside these cars.
\nThere were no toilets obviously, so the stench was unbearable.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: The gold mines of Kolyma are silent now. Called \u201cThe Land of White
\nDeath,\u201d the ruins of Kolyma cannot recount the damage done to millions of Russian
\nsouls and bodies. It could be called the \u201cAuschwitz of the Soviet Union.\u201d Stalin\u2019s inter-
\nest in the region was keen. Production was monitored closely. Conditions were horrible.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nThe worst place of all, at least both in reputation among Gulag prisoners, as
\nwell as in general by those who had escaped from the Gulag, was Kolyma,
\nwhich is in the area now known as Magadan. It\u2019s one of the coldest areas in
\nwhich people have ever lived, but the people who were brought there were not
\nliving there voluntarily. No one would endure those types of temperatures\u2014
\nyou\u2019re talking about sixty below zero, seventy below zero at times\u2014and the
\nidea of putting the camp there was in part to be able to exploit the gold, min-
\neral and other resources in that area.
\nNarrato<\/strong>r: So high was the attrition, a highway built by the laborers at Kolyma became
\nknown as the \u201cRoad of Bones.\u201d A poet and survivor of Kolyma, Yuri Lvovich Fidelgolts
\ntalks about the harshness of these conditions at Kolyma and other locales in the remote
\narea of Magadan.<\/p>\n
\nAfter Ozerlag, they transferred me to Kolyma. I met there a doctor, who man-
\naged to stay there at a medical station, avoiding transportation further up north.
\n<\/a>
\nThe doctor saved my life, taking me as an assistant, although I had no medical education at all. I
\nspent about two or three months at the transfer camp in Magadan. Magadan was a deadly place,
\na most scary place for me. All works there were hard, manual labor and, considering prisoners\u2019
\nweak health condition, it was impossible to fulfill our daily job quotas. I got thin very quickly,
\nor, using the camp slang, turned into a dokhodyaga, \u201cone walking the last steps to the end.\u201d I was not able to
\ndo anything at all. Death was waiting for me. However, I preferred to die at the
\npunishment block, rather than die at work as a slave. That is why I refused to
\nwork. That is how I became an otkazchik, a prisoner refusing to work.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Eventually Fidelgolts was freed and returned to Moscow, afflicted with a
\nserious case of tuberculosis, brought on by his physical ordeals in the frigid regions of
\nMagadan. It was in the Gulag short story collection, Kolyma Tales that poet- survivor
\nVarlam Shalamov fittingly states, \u201cA human being survives by his ability to forget.\u201d
\nMikhail Rogachev works for Repentance, a Russian organization which researches re-
\ncords and documents the fate of prisoners particularly in Kolyma.<\/p>\n
\nThe prisoners were not tortured on purpose, but they were subject to constant
\ncold, hunger and hazing by the guards. It was completely permissible to kill a
\nprisoner with no punishment for it, just by claiming he was trying to escape.
\nYou could put them in cold incarceration, and this was not considered torture.
\nThis is a room with a concrete floor, concrete walls, and no heating. And this
\nis where the temperatures reach thirty or forty below Celsius. That is torture.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: The fabled White Sea Canal Project, dearest of all to Stalin\u2019s black heart,
\nwas its own type of Death Camps. Slave laborers worked with primitive tools in abomi-
\nnable conditions to construct 141 miles of waterways with 19 locks. It was to have been
\nStalin\u2019s masterpiece.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nThere had been proposals to build a canal from the White Sea to connect to the
\nBaltic Sea for many, many years. This went back far before the Soviet regime,
\nalmost to the time of Peter the Great. What was different in the early 1930s
\nwhen this was done is that Stalin was willing to commit the resources and the
\nhuman lives to do it. So, this canal was completed in 1933, using prisoners
\nfrom the newly formed Gulag. You\u2019re talking at the height there were more
\nthan a hundred thousand prisoners working on this canal.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: But it didn\u2019t work, which surprised few experts. It was insufficiently deep
\nand was frozen over for six months of the year. At least 25,000 workers died on the
\nproject, which, in the end, proved to be nothing more than a colossal waste of time and
\nespecially of lives.
\nEvgenia Khayarova works on human rights issues in the region of Komi.
\nEvgenia Khayarova<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nWork went throughout the daylight hours. In the morning they ate balanda, a
\ntype of gruel, and, if they had fulfilled their quota, they received 400 grams of
\nbread. They weren\u2019t fed any dinner, so they would drink the gruel or stash the
\nbread or divide it and keep a part of it for dinner. And for supper, after they had
\nworked twelve to fourteen hours, there was again a thin gruel.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: It was a matter of luck where you landed, but, no matter where you were or
\nwhen, if you resisted or protested or fought back you were in trouble. Solitary confine-
\nment was the least of the censures, and it was none too pleasant.
\nVladimir Osipov, a Gulag survivor, knew this first hand.
\nVladimir Osipov<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nThere were concrete walls, essentially concrete floors, covered only with
\nplanks. It was horribly cold. You\u2019d be in your underwear and undershirt. There
\nwas nowhere to take shelter. You\u2019d tremble from the cold. That was the way
\nthe KGB and bosses of the camp would act.<\/p>\n
\nVery early on, the Soviet secret police made a decision to mix criminal and po-
\nlitical prisoners. That meant that the camps were, in effect, run by the criminal
\nprisoners. You know, there would be a kind of Mafia boss of the camp and he
\nwould have people who did his bidding and, sometimes literally by murder or
\nrape, they would control the other prisoners.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Leonid Borodin found himself in several prisons and camps because he saw
\nthe light following Stalin\u2019s death.
\nLeonid Borodin<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nBecoming a dissenter, I didn\u2019t recognize it until it happened. Our reality in
\nthose times, the sixties and late fifties, it gave a lot of reasons to ponder and
\nto doubt, and the deciding factor here was the Twentieth Party Congress with
\nits denouncement of the cult of personality. I grew up surrounded by love for
\nStalin. I was a loyal and dedicated \u201cPioneer\u201d and member of the Komsomol. I
\nbelieved myself to be living in the happiest country in the world, and the most
\njust country, where injustice did not exist and where everyone got exactly
\nwhat they deserve. The Twentieth Party Congress, with the denouncement of
\nStalin, the idol of my childhood, came as a great shock to me. It forced me to
\nreevaluate my reality, and that re-evaluation propelled me into dissent.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Some unfortunate individuals found themselves in some remote camps for
\ntheir religious beliefs alone. Josef Stalin and his government wanted no competition, be
\nit from God or any internationally connected religion.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nIn Stalin\u2019s mind and in the ideology he was promoting, religion was the opiate
\nof the people, to echo Marx\u2019s famous phrase. And it perhaps served as an alter-
\nnate ideology to the State and it gave the people an alternate sense of loyalty to
\nsomething beyond the state and, of course, religion at its best nurtures a sort of
\npersonal conscience. And the regime was trying to destroy that, to squash that.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: In Stalin\u2019s world, all religions were enemies of the State\u2014with the Christian
\nOrthodox at the top of their list. Right behind, surprisingly, were the Jehovah\u2019s Wit-
\nnesses, a relatively new sect hardly steeped in power. The Witnesses nonetheless gave
\nthe regime major concern with their staunch allegiance to their beliefs and dignified
\nacceptance of the consequences.
\nOne would not realize this history of severe persecution in the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses
\npastoral center outside of St. Petersburg, yet Vassily Kalin and Nikolay Dubovinsky can
\ntestify to the hardship they suffered for their faith. The family of Vasili Kalin was offered
\namnesty if they would renounce their faith. They refused.
\nVassily Kalin<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nOf course, at this point, there was nothing else to do but carry out the orders.
\nThey were given two hours to gather their things. It was a thorough search.
\nThey took away all our literature and like all the others we ended up in Siberia.
\nNikolay Dubovinsky<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nFor six months, they investigated me. They questioned me and everything.
\nThe materials I had with me they brought into evidence and, in August of
\n1957, I was put on trial. I was sentenced to execution. There were two of us
\n\u2014no, four of us\u2014who were sentenced to capital punishment, and then it was
\ncommuted to twenty-five years.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: All of that for declining to renounce one\u2019s faith. Viktor Chevyaku, now liv-
\ning in Vancouver, British Columbia, managed to escape this pressure on the Jehovah\u2019s
\nWitnesses. He relived the persecution of his family while visiting the Gulag Exhibition
\nat Boston University.
\nViktor Chevyakuv<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nThere was nothing not to like about them as a people, because they were hard
\nworking, honest people. They got along with their neighbors well. But, the
\nSoviet Government had an intention to establish the worldwide Communism,
\nand Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses were preaching about worldwide kingdom of God,
\nheavenly kingdom, and the idea of heavenly kingdom did not fit the Soviet
\nideology. Therefore, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses unwillingly became ideological en-
\nemies of the Soviet regime.
\nNarrato<\/strong>r: On the other end of the religious spectrum was a Roman Catholic priest.
\nFather Walter Ciszek was a Jesuit missionary arrested in Russia in 1941 as a Vatican Spy.
\nHe was imprisoned and tortured for five years in the infamous Lubyanka Prision, where
\nRussians sarcastically joked that Lubyanka had the best view in Moscow, since, from it
\nyou can see all the way to Siberia.
\nFr. Richard Blake is a Jesuit from the New York province where Fr. Ciszek sent his last
\ntwo decades of freedom before his death in 1984.
\nRichard Blake, S.J. (Boston College)
\nHis mission in 1937 was to find out the condition of the Catholics who were
\nfurther into the Soviet Union, in the Ukrainian Soviet Union, but that was
\nenough for the government to give him a sixteen-year jail sentence in the
\nGulags, the work camps.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: In the camps near the Artic Circle, Fr. Ciszek continued his ministry, living
\nwith threats all the time.
\n(Voice-Over) Father Ciszek<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nI was in a place where I was always threatened, they did not have to threaten
\nme, I was wounded. It was such a place that, at any moment, they would call
\nyou out and shoot you. And I thought I was going to be shot. I mean, I was
\nunder that impression; that\u2019s what they insinuated.
\nRichard Blake, S.J.<\/strong> (Boston College)
\nWhile he was an ordinary laboring man, he worked in the labor camps\u2014that
\nwas part of his disguise, that he was just an ordinary worker\u2014but he had some
\nextraordinary adventures in trying to minister to people in terrible conditions,
\ntrying to serve and minister to the people that were there. The story was that
\nhe would never be allowed to leave the country because he knew too much
\nabout the prison camps and interrogation techniques. The Soviet government
\nreleased a statement that he had died, and it was only later that he was able to
\nsmuggle some documents out that the family realized that he was still alive
\nand the United States government went to work on it to try to get an exchange
\nof prisoners, which they did in 1963. So two convicted Soviet spies in the US
\nwere sent back to Russia and Father Ciszek was sent back to the United States.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Secular or religious, ideological or politically na\u00efve, all fell victim to a
\nheartless regime that continued on for years during the Cold War.
\nThere is little accounting and no role call for the \u201clegion of the lost\u201d\u2019 in the failed and
\ndiscredited Soviet Union\u2019s wretched Gulag experience. And so, the massive scale of the
\nhuman suffering has almost been lost to history. But some can speak for the many de-
\nparted. Arkady Berdichevsky is such a man. His saga survives over the years because of
\nthe persistence of a loving wife, and the dedication of the admiring son he hardly knew.
\nAt the age of 72, Jon Utley embarked on a journey to discover the fate of his father, lost
\nto the Gulag, which would lead him to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Jon Utley was born
\nin Moscow in 1934. His father, Arkady Berdichevsky, was a distinguished man of af-
\nfairs; a Russian diplomat and former member of the government\u2019s Arcos Trade Mission
\nin London. Jon\u2019s mother, Freda Utley, was London-born and educated, an accomplished
\nscholar and writer steeped in Russian economics and fired by the idealism that character-
\nized the young British Communists of the period. Her experiences are vividly set down
\nin her memoir The Lost Illusion.
\nJon Utley<\/strong> (Son of Gulag Victim)
\nMy mother was active in the Socialist Party and was the chairman of the So-
\ncialist Party at London University. And she met my father who was with the
\nRussian trade delegation in Russia, and they fell in love.
\nNarrato<\/strong>r: On April 10th, 1936, at two o\u2019clock in the morning, there was a knock at the
\ndoor of Arkady and Freda\u2019s small Moscow apartment. Russian Secret Police officers en-
\ntered without explanation, arrested Arkady, and led him off into the interminable night.
\nFreda and Jon would never see him again.
\nJon Utley<\/strong> (Son of Gulag Victim)
\nThe police had been investigating his boss, my father was the \u2013 of what would
\ntoday be called the chief financial officer of a group called Promex Board, the<\/p>\n
\nexports that should not have been done.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Arkady\u2019s arrest brought him to the infamous Lubyanka Prison, where he
\nwas interrogated and finally accused of subversive Trotskyite activities and sentenced to
\nfive years imprisonment. Still holding a British passport, Freda was able to escape with
\nher son. Back in London, she worked feverishly to free her husband, or at least give him
\nthe chance to defend himself.
\nJon Utley<\/strong> (Son of Gulag Victim)
\nSo when my father was arrested, she had managed to get a letter sent to Stalin
\nsigned by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, many of the top English
\nleftists at the time.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Their letters to Stalin only resulted in silence. Following his mother\u2019s death,
\nJon Utley continued his quest. He later gained the help of George Krasnow, a Russian
\neducator and early defector, who petitioned the FSB, successor to the notorious KGB se-
\ncret police, for documents on his behalf. The new information finally led Jon and George
\nKrasnow to Komi, a desolate region in northern-most Russia the size of France, much of
\nit sprawling within the Arctic Circle.
\nMikhail Rogachev<\/strong> (Repentance)
\nAt the time, the Komi Republic was chosen by the Soviet government as one
\nof the principal regions where the camps were to be located. This is first of all
\nbecause it is a huge territory and sparsely settled. In the thirties, the population
\ntotaled not more than 300,000 people. And this territory is very rich in natural
\nresources. There is timber here, there is coal, oil, natural gas here. But there
\nare no roads and no major cities. And it was decided that the populating of the
\nterritory was to be accomplished through the work of prisoners.
\nNarrator: To this god-forsaken extremity of the imagination, the remote city of Ukhta,
\nJon Utley unearthed the raw details of his father\u2019s bitter fate.
\nEvgenia Zelenskaya<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nI am Evgenia Zerenskaya, the chair of the Ukhto-Pechorsk organization Me-
\nmorial. We are here in the city of Ukhta. This is where the Gulag began. From
\nhere scores of prisoners were sent to Vorkuta, to Umta, to the Baibozh region.
\nThe center of it all was here until 1938. The history of our city could not have
\nhappened without the labor of the prisoners. The prisoners created all of the
\nindustry of the city, in our region, in our republic. Since 2001, Jon Utley is the
\nonly American who came here and searched for his father.
\nJon Utley<\/strong> (Son of Gulag Victim)
\nThis is the building where I was given the file of my father\u2014they showed me
\nthe card, a five-by-seven card, showing his history in the camps and finally
\nthat he was transferred to the third department which was a euphemism for
\nexecution in Russia.
\nMikhail Rogachev<\/strong> (Repentance)
\nJon, I would like to show you the seventh volume published by us. These are
\nthe lists of prisoners of the camps from Stalin\u2019s time and among them you
\nwill find a familiar surname\u2014Bedreshevsky, Arkady Yakolevich, a prisoner of
\nthe Ukhta-Pechorsk Camp of the NKVD. Your father was executed by firing
\nsquad on the 30th
\nof March 1938 in Vorkuta.
\nNarrator:<\/strong> And so it was that Jon Basil Utley was finally able to close the book on
\nhis father, a senseless victim of Gulag atrocity some seventy years earlier. On that day,
\nhundreds upon hundreds alleged enemies of the State were executed with the sound of
\ngunfire reverberating in the relentless cold.
\nThe new Russia will have to deal with confronting the ghosts of its past. Those who are
\nreluctant to do so are fiercely challenged by those who insist it is crucial to act now. Irina
\nFlige from the human rights group Memorial in St. Petersburg works hard to restore the
\ncollective memory of the Russian people. Her colleagues have helped to excavate the
\nremains of 30,000 people killed in the Stalinist purges.
\nIrina Flige<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nThere is a legacy of the Gulag, but there is no memory of the Gulag in the
\nnational consciousness. This paradox informs the current problem with soci-
\nety\u2019s dialogue with the past. The Soviet Terror, which accompanied almost the
\nentire history of the twentieth century, was directed toward the destruction of
\npeople and the erasure of the memory of people.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: The forces brought to bear in that mad endeavor were awesome. But, in the
\nend, they failed because memory resisted.
\nIrina Flige<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nThis memory was preserved for years, for decades. This memory was realized
\nin manuscripts written for the drawer, in the miracle of preserved photographs.
\nThis memory was personal. This was memory without a voice \u2013 a whisper.
\nSuch a secret memory was the basic form of resistance to the Terror.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: And when the Terror eased gradually in the 1960s and 1970s, and then
\nfinally passed with the collapse of the old Communist order in the late 1980s, new hope
\nrose from the ashes. What resulted was a citizen crusade called Memorial.
\nAlexander Kalmykov<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nThe Memorial is a movement which appeared among those repressed and
\nthose who knew about it and those who sympathized. Their goal was to pre-
\nserve and to transmit to future generations the memory of those events, of
\nthose people.
\nJoshua Rubenstein<\/strong> (Regional Director of Amnesty International, Boston)
\nThe Memorial Society was created in the Gorbachev years. Andrei Sakharov
\nwhile he was still alive was its first honorary chairman. So, it was meant to
\nbe both a research institution and to create branches throughout the country
\nwhere survivors of the Gulag could meet, could collect their testimonies, and
\nthey had in mind to create monuments.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: In October, citizens annually recall the victims at the Solvesky stone in front
\nof the Lubyanka Prison, with Memorial in the front ranks. Memorial was to become the
\nchampion of human rights in the new order. Its first objective was to connect the \u201cold\u201d
\nwith the \u2018new\u2019, thus preserving the memory of those who had so long endured the Terror
\nin a moving triumph of the human spirit.
\nAlexander Kalmykov<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nI feel responsibility for the connection. Much was suffered. I can imagine how
\nthose people walked and how they were mocked and now I don\u2019t want that
\nconnection to be broken. People must know. People must bring closure to all
\nthat happened here.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: As part of the new educational mandate of the Liberals, the PERM-36 labor
\ncamp stands as one of the few surviving mementos of the Gulag era. Viktor Shmyrov
\nrecounts the abuses of human rights via the history of Perm:
\nViktor Shmyrov<\/strong> (Director, PERM-36)
\nIn the history of the camp, there were three periods: the Gulag period, the period
\nof the zone for convicted workers of the security organs and its time as a politi-
\ncal camp. PERM-36 was a political camp. As for the generation that\u2019s growing
\nup now, it\u2019s not that they don\u2019t have information about this history. The books
\naren\u2019t forbidden\u2014be my guest, read the books, they\u2019re in the library. But this
\nreading is in no way encouraged. In the history textbooks, the word \u201cGulag,\u201d
\nin the most recent textbook, was mentioned twice. Therefore, children simply
\ndon\u2019t have the knowledge. But when they end up here, when they spend time
\nhere, the high school students always experience exactly that feeling. They feel
\nashamed and it causes them pain that this happened. In Germany, also, a new
\ngeneration came of age and admitted the criminality of Nazism.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies , Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nThe Gulag itself, even though there are heroic groups like Memorial and oth-
\ners that are doing their best to keep alive memories of what happened then,
\nthere are also many including some in Putin\u2019s entourage and in the govern-
\nment that succeeded Putin who want to do their best to whitewash that or
\nairbrush it from Soviet history.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: With the new liberalism of Glasnost came a \u201cMoral Cleansing,\u201d which inevi-
\ntably sparked unsettling questions about the past, then unrest, and ultimately fear. All lib-
\neral causes swiftly were discredited. The reformers and dissidents had drifted too far out in
\nfront of the great mass of the Russian body politic, which has always moved very slowly.<\/p>\n
\nThey weren\u2019t comfortable with that\u2026too much uncertainty, too much chaos,
\ntoo much unruliness, too much disorder. And, then again, we\u2019ve got to tighten
\nup the ship. We can\u2019t have people on the extremes. We\u2019ve got to conform
\nand behave. And anyone who is making too much noise, who\u2019s making too
\nmany waves, we\u2019ve got to put them in their place. Under the latter half of
\nGorbachev, the society began to unravel. Under Yeltsin, it unraveled. It opened
\nthe door for someone to come along and say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to restore order.\u201d
\nAnd that\u2019s where Putin, of course, excels.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: In retrospect, now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the rugged, iron-willed
\nex-KGB man, seems to have been born for a major role in Russian politics, even if
\nbriefly the American President warmly proclaimed him to be \u201ca man the West can do
\nbusiness with.\u201d That was never where Putin\u2019s heart was.
\nMarshall Goldman<\/strong> (Senior Scholar, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nPutin wants very much to restore Russia\u2019s role as a superpower. I\u2019ve heard him
\nspeak about this several times. And there is a sense that nobody paid attention
\nto us before. And we were a superpower. It was our great disgrace, our great
\nhumiliation that we lost that status when the Soviet Union fell apart and we
\nwant to build it up again.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: In building it up again, one has to gloss over the past.
\nMarc Kramer<\/strong> (Specialist in Cold War Studies, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nAfter Vladimir Putin came to power, there has been a steady\u2026 not full-scale
\nrehabilitation of Stalin, but certainly a revival of many official favorable refer-
\nences to Stalin. In addition, the Communist Party in Russia has always admired
\nStalin, and has never made any pretense otherwise. It has remained unabashedly
\nadmiring of Stalin.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Russia has changed. It is a different country. It is richer for its oil sup-
\nply and steeped in consumer options to please a stronger middle-class\u2026more finan-
\ncially stable and more secure than she\u2019s ever been in her entire history\u2026much freer
\nand more open, too, though hardly the Democracy some had hoped for. The strong-
\narmed tactics of the old days appeared neither desirable nor necessary. Yet, the Russian
\nmilitary show of force in South Ossetia in the summer of 2008 challenges that notion.
\nMarshall Goldman<\/strong> (Senior Scholar at Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nThe Governor of St. Petersburg gave this great speech in which he said, \u201cPeo-
\nple laughed at us, disregarded what we had to say, paid no attention to us. Now
\nwe are strong again and they have to listen to what we say and they have to
\npay attention.\u201d
\nAnne Applebaum <\/strong>(Historian)
\nIt seems to me that it\u2019s very, very important for the Russians to understand
\ntheir past, and to discuss it and to keep the discussion of it going. Because
\nif they don\u2019t, there is a danger that the past could, if not repeat itself exactly,
\nbecause that\u2019s not going to happen, there are certainly elements of the police
\nstate that could come back again and are beginning to come back again now.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: So, in effect, it became a battle of memories; the nostalgia for lost power
\nand glory held by some against the loathing for that same regime\u2019s gruesome excesses
\nheld by others. In the end, nostalgia appears to have won. If you agitate too much or too
\nloudly about human rights abuses, you can find yourself in deep trouble.
\nIrina Flige<\/strong> (Memorial)
\nToday one must speak of almost open opposition and open enmity. That mild
\nmalevolence of the recent past has become open hostility, enmity, on the part
\nof the government toward Memorial.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: This open enmity was displayed to chilling effect on December 4, 2008
\nwhen elements of security forces stormed the Memorial offices in St. Petersburg. In a
\nraid lasting seven hours, these masked officers cut the phone lines and seized computers
\nand archival materials.
\nRussia today is at the crossroads and Memorial has helped significantly in pointing out di-
\nrections. As for the guilty, however, those who were the merchants of the Terror, the heart-
\nless abusers of human rights, are still around in significant numbers, yet they walk freely.
\nVladimir Osipov<\/strong> (Gulag Survivor)
\nAs for punishment, there is no one to punish. The entire government is made
\nup of those very people. They aren\u2019t going to punish themselves. There is no
\none to punish.
\nNina Khrushcheva<\/strong> (The New School)
\nI don\u2019t think that Putin\u2019s government, I don\u2019t know about Medvedev, but Pu-
\ntin\u2019s government doesn\u2019t think there\u2019s a problem with human rights, because
\nhe truly believes, like a lot of despots in fact, that, whatever they do, they do
\nfor the good of the nation. And they are the only ones who know what the good
\nof the nation is.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: Russia will bear on. She always has. But some wonder how this nation can
\nmanage all the inherent contradictions she tolerates with that lingering stoicism shaped
\nby her painful history. Might, in the end, the illusion fail to suppress the reality?
\nMarshall Goldman<\/strong> (Senior Scholar, Harvard\u2019s Davis Center)
\nI can\u2019t understand how you can live next door to someone who may have
\ndenounced you, and come back and just go about life without some kind of
\npunishment, without some kind of retribution. Almost every family had some
\nrelative or some acquaintance who had been imprisoned or sent to the Gulag
\nor executed, so it wasn\u2019t exactly that it was a big secret that nobody knew
\nabout. And how people can live with this kind of thing is something that I just
\ncan\u2019t understand.
\nNarrator<\/strong>: And yet they can and do. The Russians evoke and discard what has been
\noften called \u201cThe Unmanageable Past\u201d for the sake of the future. Yet, they can be com-
\nfortable with their somber history. Vigilance and moral conscience provided by human
\nrights groups like Memorial may eventually thaw out the iced-over memories.
\nIn 2003, at the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of Stalin\u2019s death, Anne Applebaum wrote about the need
\nto uncover the truth about the Gulag:
\nAnne Applebaum<\/strong> (Historian)
\n[TEXT]: We need to know why\u2014and each story, each memoir, each document is
\na piece of the puzzle. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that
\nwe do not know who we are.<\/p>\n
\n1917 \u2013 October Revolution brings Bolsheviks to power.
\n1918 \u2013 \u201cRed Terror:\u201d Lenin orders wealthy peasants (\u201cKulaks\u201d), priests, industrialists,
\nand anti-Soviets to be incarcerated and detained in concentration camps.
\n1920 \u2013 107 registered concentration camps.
\n1924 \u2013 Lenin dies, Trotsky is pushed aside and Stalin rises to power, gaining full
\npower by 1928.
\n1925 \u2013 Soviet government decides to use camps for economic means; forced labor on
\nlarge construction projects begins.
\n1929 \u2013 Government decides to create mass camp system (Gulag) to industrialize the country
\nas part of the first Five-Year Plan.
\n1930-1933 \u2013 Two million Kulaks exiled to regions such as Siberia and Kazakhstan.
\n1932-1933 \u2013 White Sea Canal Project begins to build a waterway connecting Moscow
\nand the White Sea; a specific camp is set up to support this effort.
\n1937-1938 \u2013 The Great Terror: one in twenty people in the Soviet Union arrested;
\n1,888,571 in camps, with many more people executed.
\n1939 \u2013 Camps in every time zone in Soviet Union; WWII breaks out and Berlin-Moscow
\nPact signed promising non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union.
\n1941 \u2013 Germany invades Russia in Operation Barbarossa, breaking the Berlin-Moscow Pact.
\n1941-1944 \u2013 975,000 prisoners granted amnesty and released into the Red Army.
\n1945 \u2013 Red Army captures Berlin, ending WWII.
\n1946 \u2013 The Cold War officially begins with Winston Churchill\u2019s \u201cIron Curtain\u201d speech.
\n1950 \u2013 The height of the Gulag population with 2,525,146 people registered in prison camps.
\n1953 \u2013 Stalin dies; months later, amnesty granted to prisoners with less than five year
\nsentences, pregnant women, women with children, and those under eighteen.
\n1,000,000 people released.
\n1956 \u2013 Nikita Khrushchev denounces the excesses of Stalin during the Twentieth Congress.
\n1950s \u2013 Continued arrests of dissidents; some are sent to camps, some to psychiatric hospitals.
\n1973 \u2013 Western world learns about the Gulag system through Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s
\nbook, Gulag Archipelago.
\n1978 \u2013 Solzhenitsyn\u2019s speech at Harvard University, criticizing both the United States
\nand the Soviet Union for creating political tension in the world.
\n1986 \u2013 Gorbachev issues a general pardon for political prisoners and shuts down the
\ncamps in the Gulag system as a part of his new policy of glasnost.
\n1989 \u2013 Memorial Society founded to honor the memory of Gulag victims, educate oth-
\ners about the truths of the system, and to form a national consciousness based on
\ndemocracy and law to promote human rights.
\n1989-1990 \u2013 Collapse of Communism; Warsaw Pact countries are liberated from Soviet control.
\n1995 \u2013 Gulag museum set up at site of PERM-36 prison camp.<\/p>\n
\nOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970). Dir. Capsar Wrede. The daily escapades
\nof a resourceful Gulag prisoner.
\nStalin: Man and Image (1978). Dir. Don Thompson. Traces Stalin\u2019s rise to power.
\nRepentance (1984). Dir. Tengiz Abuladze. Semi-allegorical critique of Stalinism.
\nGulag (1985). Dir. Roger Young. A made-for-TV thriller about a sportscaster who was
\nthrown into a prison camp after being set up, and his daring escape.
\nThe Solovky Power (1987). Dir. Marina Goldovskaya. Tells story of chain of forced
\nlabor camps from 1923 to 1939.
\nCold Summer of 1953 (1988). Dir. Alexander Proshkin. Political prisoners defend
\nvillage from bandits.
\nPast Seems but a Dream (1990). Dir. Myiz Igarki. Prod. Glasnost Film Festival. A 50-
\nyear reunion of former residents of Igarka reveals a time that was a painful nightmare,
\nand the complicated attitudes of people towards Stalin.
\nStalin (1990). Prod. PBS. A three-part series that takes an in-depth look at Josef Stalin
\nand his lasting effects on Russia.
\nInside Gorbachev\u2019s USSR: Comfortable Lies, Bitter Truths (1990). Prod. Glasnost Film
\nFestival. Stalinist prison execution segment.
\nRed Empire (1990, 1992). Prod. Mike Dormer, Gwyneth Hughes, and Jill Mar-
\nshall. Survivors Series.
\nBurnt by the Sun (1994). Dir. Nikita Mikhalkov. Drama about the atmosphere of life under Stalin.
\nKolyma (1999). Dir. Mikhail Mikheev. Documentary film on BBC Films network.
\nRed Flag: Communism in Russia (2000). Dir. Agnus MacQueen. Series: People\u2019s Century.
\nHitler and Stalin: Roots of Evil (2003). Prod. History Channel. Special on lives of Stalin and Hitler.
\nJoseph Stalin: Red Terror (2004). Prod. A&E Home Video. Biography of Joseph Stalin.
\nWalk on Gulagland Kolyma (2007). Dir. Zoltan Szalkai. Introduces labor camps in Koly-
\nma region fifty years after Gulag.<\/p>\n
\nAndreev-Khomiakov, Gennady. Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin\u2019s Russia. Boul-
\nder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. An in-depth account of life in Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union
\nin the 1930s that reveals how the system worked and how shrewd workers managed
\nto outwit it.
\nApplebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Full-scale history of
\nthe Soviet Gulag and exploration of why the Gulag is so little remembered in both
\nRussia and the West.
\nChapman, Derek. Stalin: Man of Steel. Longman, 1987. Biography of Stalin, detailing
\nthe rise of Bolshevism that describes the tenets of socialist thought and shows Sta-
\nlin\u2019s role in the creation of a totalitarian state.
\nChapman, Michael E. Historian\u2019s Companion: Chronologies, Glossaries, Readings,
\nStyle Guide. Reading, Massachusetts: Trebarwyth Press, 2008. Contains a concise
\nchronology and collection of important documents essential to understanding the
\nSoviet Union.
\nChukovskaya, Lydia. The Deserted House. Belmont, Massachusetts: Nordland, 1967.
\nTragic tale of the life of Sophia Petrovna during the time of Stalin\u2019s Great Purges.
\nDeutscher, Isaac and David King. The Great Purges. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1994.
\nAn account of the Great Terror, focusing on the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky.
\nDolgun, Alexander. Alexander Dolgun\u2019s Story: An American in the Gulag. New York:
\nBallantine, 1975. Recounts the experience of prisoners being transported to and
\nbetween prisons, their interactions and friendships with other prisoners, and the
\nday-to-day drudgery of trying to survive under horrendous conditions.
\nFitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Oxford
\nU. Press, 1999. A depiction of life under Stalin.
\nGinzburg, Evgenia. Journey Into the Whirlwind. Harvest\/HBJ, 1975. A courageous
\nwoman tells the story of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through Russia\u2019s
\nprisons and labor camps.
\nGlenny, Michael and Norma Stone. The Other Russia: The Experience of Exile. New
\nYork: Viking, 1991. An anthology of recollections of twentieth century Russian
\n\u00e9migr\u00e9s taken from interviews, manuscripts, and little-known published sources.
\nGraham, Loren. The Ghost of The Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the
\nSoviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1993. Explores the relationship
\nbetween technology and society, and presents an account of the life and work of a
\nRussian engineer, with an analysis of the failures of Soviet engineering projects.
\nHoobler, Dorothy and Thomas. Joseph Stalin (World Leaders Past and Present). New
\nYork: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. The story of Joseph Stalin, the revolution-
\nary who became leader of Communist Russia.
\nHosford, David, Pamela Kachurin and Thomas Lamont. Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps
\nand their Legacy. A Project of the National Park Service and the National Resource
\nCenter for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Harvard University.
\nThis forty-two page curriculum unit provides an excellent overview of the Gulag,
\nfrom the rise of the penal camp system to modern day.
\nKhlevniuk, Oleg and David Nordlander. History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the
\nGreat Terror. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2005. Over 100 documents showing an in-
\ncredibly detailed depiction of the Soviet prison camp system in the twentieth century.
\nKizny, Tomasz. Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps. Buffalo,
\nNY: Firefly Books Ltd., 2004. The widest ranging and most complete album of
\nGulag photographs ever published.
\nLarina, Anna. This I Cannot Forget: Memoirs of Bukharin\u2019s Widow. New York: Norton,
\n1991. An important source on the original Soviet ruling elite \u2013 the memoirs of a
\nBolsehvik leader\u2019s widow who spent two decades in the Gulag.
\nMedvedev, Roy. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New
\nYork: Vintage, 1973. A comprehensive and revealing investigation of Stalinism and
\npolitical developments in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.
\nSaranin, Alexander. Child of the Kulaks. St. Lucia: U. Queensland Press, 2002. A de-
\nscription of the first \u201clost generation\u201d of Soviet Russia\u2014millions of children lost
\ntheir parents into the Civil War, collectivization and other Soviet human mills\u2014and
\nit\u2019s aftermath.
\nShalamov, Varlam. Graphite. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. An account of experiences
\nin Russian concentration camps that takes the form of a series of short stories writ-
\nten as mental journal entries.
\n___________. Kolyma Tales. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980. This collection vividly cap-
\ntures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances of the Gulag.
\nSolzhenitsyn, Alexander. Cancer Ward. Bantam, 1969. Examines the relationship of a
\ngroup of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955.
\n___________. Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation.
\nBooks 1-3. NY: Perennial, 1975. Explores Russian history, Soviet thinking and
\npolicies, and the situation inside the Gulags.
\n___________. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. New York: Bantam, 1970. The
\nstory of a typical, grueling day in the life of a prisoner in a labor camp in Siberia.
\nTaubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
\n2003. A full length biography of Nikita Khrushchev.
\nVilensky, Simeon. Till My Tale is Told: Women\u2019s Memoirs of the Gulag. Bloomington:
\nIndiana U. Press, 1999. The women of Russia on the horrific times of the Gulag.
\nVladimov, Georgi. Faithful Ruslan: The Story of a Guard Dog. Simon and Schuster,
\n1978. The end of Stalin\u2019s system of forced labor camp as seen through the eyes of
\nforced labor guard dog.<\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.anneapplebaum.com\/gulag-a-history\/<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/gulaghistory.org\/nps\/onlineexhibit\/stalin\/<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.gulagmuseum.ru\/eng\/<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.memo.ru\/eng\/index.htm<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.osaarchivum.org\/gulag\/<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.sitesofconscience.org\/sites\/gulag-museum\/en\/<\/a><\/p>\n