Search Results for: Gulag
Ethnic POW Gulags in Russia, 1915
From The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands, by Alexander Watson (Basic Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 250-251: The prisoners were driven by knout-wielding Cossacks “like cattle” on long marches to rail stations. Most entrained at … Continue reading
Born and Bred in the NK Gulag
From Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden (Penguin, 2012), Kindle Loc. 119-134: In stories of concentration camp survival, there is a conventional narrative arc. Security forces steal … Continue reading
The Gulag Economy’s Peace Dividend
From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 467-468: Forced labour played an increasingly important part in the post-war Soviet economy, according to a policy dictated by Stalin and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers. … Continue reading
Gulag Returnees Meet Their Accusers
From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 583-587: ‘Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent these people to the … Continue reading
Gulag Epilogue: Memory and Human Understanding
Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance … Continue reading
Filed under USSR
Bitter Taste of Freedom from the Gulag
Release [from the Gulag], whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction: I imagined that I would be dancing instead … Continue reading
Filed under USSR
Polish Diaspora from the Gulag
On July 30, 1941, a month after the launch of [Hitler’s Operation] Barbarossa, General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in London, and Ambassador Maisky, the Soviet envoy to Great Britain, signed a truce. The Sikorski-Maisky Pact, as the … Continue reading
Escaping the Gulag with a "Walking Supply"
Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways [from the Gulag] were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the “green prosecutor” (as in “Vasya was released by … Continue reading
Filed under USSR
Collaboration, a Gulag Survival Strategy
Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in … Continue reading
Filed under USSR
Gulag Guards
In recent years, it has become fashionable to point out that, contrary to their postwar protestations, few Germans were ever forced to work in concentration camps or killing squads. One scholar recently claimed that most had done so voluntarily–a view … Continue reading
Filed under USSR
Far Outliers 