Gulags - Stories and studies from the Russian camps for the political prisoners.
Latest hand-picked WWII news.
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Gulag survivor recalls the appalling conditions Leonid Finkelstein (11-minute audio)
Millions of people were sent to brutal labour camps in the Soviet Union during the communist rule of Joseph Stalin. Over a million prisoners died of disease, starvation, or exhaustion. Leonid Finkelstein was imprisoned in the Gulag camps for five-and-a-half years, but survived. He recounts the appalling conditions of Stalin`s forced labour camps.
(bbc.co.uk)
The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin by Stephen F. Cohen (book review)
"The Victims Return" - based on interviews with Gulag survivors - aspires to fix the imbalance that we know quite a lot about people who survived Nazi Holocaust, but very little is known about the 20 million people who survived Stalin`s Terror.
(huffingtonpost.com)
German Gulag prisoners recall their postwar horrors in the Stali`s labor camps
Thousands of Germans were forced to toil in Stalin`s labor camps after the Second World War. 15-18 million people were held in Soviet gulags between the 1920s and the 1950s. Several thousand of them were German exiles who fled to the Soviet Union from the Nazis, but tens of thousands of them were POWs as well as opposition activists from the Soviet occupation zones after the war ended. When they were finally released, Germany had been divided into east and west - and no one was interested in their fate. The compensation offered to the innocent detainees by West Germany was disgraceful: less than 1e/hour for forced labor.
(spiegel.de)
Russian history professor arrested after researching Stalin era Arctic gulags
A Russian historian researching the Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during WW2 has been arrested, in the latest crackdown on historical study into the Stalin era. Mikhail Suprun - facing up to 4 years in jail - was seized by security officers, who also carried off his entire archive. Suprun`s study covered German POWs captured by the Red Army as well as ethnic Germans. "What we are seeing is the rebirth of control over history. The majority of Russians don`t have any idea of the scale of Stalin`s repression. Those in power are from the KGB. They don`t want people to know what their KGB predecessors were doing, or its huge scope," explained Rauf Gabidullin.
(guardian.co.uk)
Innocent wives, mothers, sisters and daughters Stalin sent to a Gulag camp in Kazakhstan
The women`s faces gaze down from the walls, some sad, some confused. These women, from all over the Soviet Union, had been sent to gulag although they were not even suspected of anything. Their crime? Being married to an enemy of the state, for which they were sent to this prison in Kazakhstan. This link in "The Gulag Archipelago" was called Alzhir, an acronym for the Akmola Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. It was not only wives who were sent here, but mothers, sisters and daughters. There were also kids in Alzhir, and not just the offspring of "enemies of the people." 1937-1953 the camp saw 1,507 births by prisoners violated by guards.
(eurasianet.org)
Nazi uniforms and memories of Gulag in House of Terror (Budapest, Hungary)
During the 20th Century, the Hungarian people were victims to two regimes which wrote their history in blood. The first was the Nazi regime, and the other one was the Communist regime. The link between them is a building at 60 Andrassy Boulevard. This is the address of a beautiful building in which awful crimes took place under the star and the Swastika. In 2002 it was turned into the "House of Terror" (Terror Haza). The tour of the museum starts on the second floor, where Nazi uniforms are on display. Almost all of the rooms have screens showing films, in which the victims tell of the horrific fate that they endured in both regimes.
(javno.com)
Medicine in the Gulag Archipelago to be studied
Dan Healey has got a grant of 101,000 pounds to study the history of medicine in Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin`s concentration camps. He is hoping to show how doctors and medicine were built-in to the labour camps from the 1930s to the 1950s. The Gulag was the network of camps, located in the most outback areas of the Soviet Union. 20 million people passed through the camps and countless died. The 3-year-project will also focus on the accounts by Gulag survivors, including memoirs by doctors and nurses, to tell the story of how inmates received (and failed to receive) medical care in the camps.
(bbc.co.uk)
The story of Stalin`s persecution of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century
Gulags, mass murders, wars, starvation: The history of the Soviet Union is not short of tragedies. But the Bolshevik Revolution also put down culture, literature, art and science in ways that are not simple to list and count. Though it is also the story of a man who was physically destroyed by Stalin`s secret police, "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" by Peter Pringle, is mainly an account of these subtler forms of damage. Nikolai Vavilov - on the cutting edge of the then-new science of genetics - was one of the greatest of all Russian scientists. Yet even before his death in a KGB prison in 1943, he had been mentally ruined by a twisted scientific establishment.
(washingtonpost.com)