Many Russians regard the horrors
of the forced labour camps as a necessary evil during a difficult period of
Soviet history
Ivan Panikarov has
spent the past two decades living with the Gulag: his small two-room apartment
in the town of Yagodnoye is filled with artefacts from the camps. Rusting
tools, handcuffs and photographs of prisoners cover the walls of his living
room, while stacks of boxes in the hallway contain transcripts of
interrogations taken down in meticulous purple handwriting.
Yagodnoye feels like the end of the earth, and in many
ways it is. In the heart of the Kolyma region, one of the coldest inhabited
places on the planet, it is an eight-hour drive from the regional centre of
Magadan, which itself is a seven-hour flight from Moscow.
There was almost nothing here before the 1930s, when
geological surveys showed extraordinary deposits of gold and other metals in
the area, and Joseph Stalin ordered it conquered, mainly using the labour of
prisoners, sent there in their thousands. Kolyma was the harshest island of the
Soviet Union’s Gulag archipelago, and the region became a byword for the
horrors of the Gulag camp system. Even by conservative estimates, more than
100,000 people died while working, and 11,000 were shot in Kolyma alone.
In today’s Russia it is not fashionable to delve too deeply into Gulag
history, and 60-year-old Panikarov’s collection is one of just two museums
devoted entirely to the Gulag in the whole country. Indeed, even Panikarov
himself has a somewhat surprising view of the Gulag system.
“We should not have one-sided evaluations. People fell
in love in the camps, people got pregnant; it wasn’t all bad,” he says,
attributing negative information about the camps to a western campaign against
Russia. “It was fashionable to say bad things about the USSR. Now it is again
fashionable to insult Russia. We havesanctions against us. The west looks for negative
things.”
Panikarov’s views on the Gulag are part of a larger
trend. With the Soviet victory in the second world war elevated to a national
rallying point under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the forced labour camps,
through which millions of Soviet citizens passed, are seen by many as an
unfortunate but necessary by-product. In many museums and in much public
discourse, the Gulag is not ignored completely, but is “contextualised” in a
way that plays down the horror and pairs it with the war, suggesting the two
come as a package.
Panikarov’s fascination with the Gulag began when he
moved to Kolyma in 1981 to work at a goldmine, and started hearing stories from
former prisoners, even though public discussion of the Gulag was then
forbidden.
In 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika
unleashed a wave of interest in the darker pages of the Soviet past, Panikarov
managed to persuade the local KGB chief to lend him a map giving the locations
of the hundreds of Stalin-era camps in the region, information that was still
classified as top secret. In return, he agreed to investigate the fate of the
KGB chief’s grandfather, who had been in the camps.
After he got the map, he began to drive to old Gulag
sites and pick up things he found: prisoners’ clothes, working implements, occasionally
stacks of documents. Over time, his horror has turned to acceptance.
“It was a cruel system, but if you think about it, how
else would you get this gold out of the land?” he asks, surveying the ruins of
Elgen, a labour camp for women, where the barracks and barbed wire are still
visible, but which bears no monument or plaque detailing its past. “If we
hadn’t mined all the gold during the war years, maybe we would not have
defeated the Nazis.”
As well as petty criminals,
hundreds of thousands of people were sent to the Gulag for political offences,
often minor or imagined. After the war, there were mass deportations from the
newly conquered territory in the Baltics and western Ukraine.
Evgenia Ginzburg, a Bolshevik
party member from Kazan, was sentenced to hard labour in the region and spent
several years at Elgen. She wrote of miserable work during the freezing
winters, and of summers plagued with the merciless Kolyma mosquitoes, which she
described as “bloated, repulsive insects that reminded one of small bats”.
Olga Gureyeva, from a village
in western Ukraine, was arrested at the end of 1945 after the Soviets took back
the region from the Nazis. Aged 16 at the time, she was arrested with her
family for supposed Nazi collaboration and, after repeated beatings during
interrogation, sentenced to 20 years of hard labour. After being crammed into
cattle trucks and moved between various Siberian camps, she was sent by boat
from Vladivostok to Magadan in 1948, a 10-day journey with hundreds of
prisoners squeezed in the hold.
Now 87, and living in a small
apartment in Magadan, Gureyeva is stooped, almost blind, and unable to say what
happened to her without tears. Her stories are a litany of horrors: the filthy
clothes, the clouds of midges, the permanent chill in the barracks, eating
grass to stave off hunger, and the perverted guards who would line the women up
naked in the washroom and inspect them.
“My best friend died chopping
wood in the cold one day. I remember: she was next to me, she lifted up the
axe, it stayed in the air for a minute, and then she just collapsed, dead,” she
says.
Few Russians know of such
stories. In Magadan, Larisa, a 40-year-old history teacher who did not want to
give her surname, says she believes the Gulag was a necessary side-effect of a
difficult period of Soviet history.
“Was there a military threat from Germany?
There was. Were there spies in the country? There were. There was no time to
decide who was guilty and who wasn’t. We should remember the innocent victims
but I think it was all necessary.”
Larisa says she teaches her
students one lesson about the Gulag, in which she typically divides the
blackboard into two parts. On one side she puts the “military and industrial
achievements” of the Stalin period, and on the other, the “unfortunate
side-effects”, and lets the students decide for themselves whether the
repression was justified.
The theme is not completely
ignored. On Thursday, a trickle of Muscovites came to a small monument close to
the Lubyanka, the former headquarters of the NKVD and still home to modern
Russia’s FSB security services, to take part in an annual ritual, reading out
the names of those who were shot in the city. A new monument is planned to
victims of political repression in the capital.
Galina Ivanova, deputy
director of a new Gulag museum that will opens in Moscow on Friday, says how
the Gulag is remembered in different cities is largely down to individual
museum directors. “You can either put up a big portrait of Stalin and note
goldmining achievements, or you can put up death rates and haggard faces.
Unfortunately, more often it’s the former.”
In Magadan, a large monument
in the style of an Easter Island head, the Mask of Sorrow, was unveiled in the
1990s outside the city centre, but elsewhere in the town, clues as to the
city’s traumatic past are well hidden.
The regional governor’s office
is inside the former NKVD headquarters; the regional parliament is the former prison and
interrogation centre. Neither is marked with any kind of plaque, while at
Nagayev Bay, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners disembarked ships before
being dispatched to various camps, there is a monument that reads simply: “This
is where the construction of the city of Magadan began in 1929.”
One of the region’s few Gulag
memorials is an obelisk of roughly hewn stone in an unmarked clearing off a
side road, close to an execution site where the NKVD secret police executed
hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people in 1937 and 1938. Someone has
recently adorned the monument with Victory Day flags, a touch that appears to
turn them from tragic victims to heroic martyrs.
In Magadan, a region heavily
subsidised by Moscow during communist rule but wrecked by the market economy,
part of the reason for whitewashing the Gulag is a general nostalgia for the
Soviet period. In the new reality, the population of Magadan region has dropped
by more than half, and many settlements turned into ghost towns as they became
economically unfeasible. Elgen, the modern settlement adjoining the Gulag
ruins, housed more than 2,000 people at the end of the 1980s. Now, it is
inhabited by one couple who run a meteorological station.
“There are not many people
left who remember the Gulag period, but there are plenty of people who remember
the 1970s, and remember that things were a lot better than they are now,” says
Sergei Raizman, head of Magadan Memorial, which promotes memory of the Gulag.
The desire to forget the dark
past is strong. “People find it very hard to deal with,’ says Raizman. “They
don’t want to think about it. It’s normal if your grandfather fought at the
front, or if your grandfather was a hero of Soviet labour. It’s not normal if
they were in the camps. People get angry when you raise the Gulag theme, and in
the past two years, the events in Ukraine and the increase in nationalism have
only made this aggression more pronounced.”
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