The Gulag, acronym of Main Administration of Camps) was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labour camp-system that ...
The Gulag, acronym of Main Administration of Camps) was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labour camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin.
Photos of Gulag concentration camps are almost gone - only occasionally people with cameras managed to get there. Of course, they did not photograph the most horrible things - photographing only what was allowed.
Here is a selection of Gulag photos that were banned in the USSR.
Photo:Prisoners of the Gulag on the construction of Belomorkanal. Photo of 1932. All of Stalin's "economic miracles" were done by the hard labor of the labour camp slaves - legally the USSR rolled two thousand years - except that in the USSR slaves were not captive barbarians but their own citizens. According to official data during the construction of Belomorkanal 12800 people died, unofficial sources quote much higher figures.
If you look at the map of shock-work construction sites of the first five-year plans, you will see that this map exactly matches the map of the Gulag Stalinist concentration camps.
Of course, in the Soviet years they were silent about this - telling tales about "millions of Komsomol volunteers" who travel to distant northern places to die there with a pickaxe in their hands. Until 1956, they could be sent to the same camp for the truth about the Stalinist concentration camps, and after 1956 (when the cult of Stalin’s personality was debunked), this became an uncomfortable truth, which the Soviets tried to hide in every possible way — but periodically here and there in the places of the “Stalin five-year plans” "people find mountains of frozen skeletons with the remains of camp numbers on decayed quilted jackets.
Nobody really took these burials into account in those years, and is in no hurry to investigate and take into account even now.
Photo: inside of the camp barrack.
The construction of the Trans-Polar Railway - another crazy project of the USSR, nowadays a ghost road - for every few kilometers of which there is one abandoned Stalinist concentration camp, and for every ten meters - one corpse. The work was carried out without design estimates by 300,000 Gulag prisoners, tens of thousands of whom died - mainly on the so-called "Construction 501" and "Construction 503". There is still no exact data on the dead people.
Winter work of prisoners.
Summer work of prisoners in quarries.
Prisoners at the construction of the Yun-Yaga mine, 1937.
Construction of one of the camp barracks. As a rule, barracks were built by the prisoners themselves from wood. Inside there were long rows of wooden plank beds, on which sometimes two or three people slept.
Inside one of the camp barracks. The Soviet Bolsheviks put pennants with the inscription "Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory" near the prisoners' bunks - which can be read at the pennant closest to the shooting point.
In winter, because of the cold, people often went to sleep in their work clothing.
Vorkutlag (Vorkuta camp) gate with the inscription "Labor in the USSR is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism!"
Camp line up. In the background you can see the tower, on which the guard of the local perimeter of the shooter with a PPSh, machine gun or gun usually stayed.
Another line-up.
The picture was taken from behind the perimeter, and in the frame you can see a mesh fence woven from barbed wire. There was so much barbed wire in the USSR that in 1986, after the Chernobyl accident, they were able to quickly and seamlessly cut off the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone hundreds of kilometers long.
On the territory of a concentration camp. A stone building made of bricks that were a tight supply to the right of the tower is most likely a punishment cell, into which especially rebellious prisoners who did not want to put up with concentration camps were sent on water and 200-300 grams of bread per day. A 1-2-week life in a punishment cell was guaranteed to provide a serious illness like pneumonia, and a month was a guaranteed death.
The prisoners of the Stalinist concentration camps wore robes with numbers sewn on them - in the picture you can see a prisoner of Vorkutlag (Vorkuta camp) with a sewn number on his hat, on his trousers and on his back. Most often, the number consisted of letters and numbers.
More prisoners of Vorkutlag, a man and a woman, with concentration camp numbers sewn on clothes.
Women's barrack. Besides getting sent into camp for something of their own, many women were tried, arrested and sent to camps because they were "members of the family of an enemy of the people."
Inside of the women's barrack.
Women-prisoners at work.
Work in the quarries.
Besides the women, there were also children in the camps.
They were the children of the enemies of the people and underage criminals. Stalin signed a decree that allowed to shoot children starting from 12 years old as "enemies of the people."
Children of the enemies of the people spent time in special camps and orphanages for the children of the enemies of the people. The stuff spied on them and if they "displayed anti-Soviet tendencies", such children were sent to Gulag camps once they reached 15.
The writing on the photo says:
"Thanks to comrade Stalin for our happy childhood."
Sometimes, people got out of the camps only to find out that their children died in a camp. The former Gulag prisoner M.K. Sandratskaya recollected:
"My daughter Svetlana died. When I asked about the cause of death, the doctor said: “Your daughter was seriously ill. The functions of brain and nervous activity were impaired. She didn’t eat food. Left for you. All the time she asked: “Where is mom, was there a letter from her? Where's dad? ”She was dying quietly. Only she called: "Mom, mom ..."
These are lucky people - after they died, they got a grave and their prison number on it. Less lucky were buried in a mass grave.
Why didn’t people escape from the Gulag? Firstly, there was nowhere to run, most often there were empty steppes and forests with almost eternal winter. Secondly, the Soviets, gave people false hope - they say, work some years and everything will be fine. In reality, when it got close to the release, they invented some pretext and added more years to the sentence.
The Gulag system tried to never let go of a person who at least once fell into its clutches.
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