Original subtitles

The Gulag, a repressive and criminal system,

whose sheer size and longevity are unusual,

is a major historical phenomenon of the 20th century.

These Soviet camps were created in 1918

and reached their peak during the 1950s.

Around 500 concentration camp-like facilities

have locked up in total 20 million people over 40 years.

Innocents made guilty.

One adult out of six has been in a camp or deported.

The Gulag Archipelago, as it was named by author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

used to spread over thousands of kilometers from the White Sea to the Black Sea,

from Moscow to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Circle to Central Asia.

For decades, the Soviet Concentration Camp System has been hidden,

concealed, ignored, denied.

The gulag was like a country within a country,

a lost continent,

an independent civilization difficult to see and to this day,

still unknown and misunderstood.

GULAG: THE STORY

THE TESTIMONIES USED IN THIS FILM HAVE BEEN GATHERED BETWEEN 1988 AND 2014,

MOSTLY BY "MEMORIAL", A RUSSIAN NON-GOVERNMENTAL ASSOCIATION

EPISODE 1: ORIGINS (1917-1933)

In the aftermath of the revolution of October 17th,

the Orthodox monastery of the Solovki Islands in the White Sea

is emptied of its monks.

This holy place has been chosen to experiment the principles of the gulag.

A locked area far away, isolated, and with a harsh weather.

Starting in 1923,

the Solovki Islands become the first concentration camp

where political opponents deemed dangerous by the Bolshevik regime are sent.

In June, 1923, I disembarked in Solovki.

Andrei Roschine is 18 when he reaches the Solovki Islands to serve his sentence.

On the boat with me were several political prisoners.

Mensheviks, revolutionary socialists and anarchists.

There was also a group of clergymen and many common criminals.

Alexander Nogtev, the first commander of the camp,

welcomes the newcomers with these words.

You can forget all the rights he once had.

For here, we have our own rules.

Dmitri Likhatchev is arrested when he's 22,

because he belong to an illegal group of students.

When reaching the Solovki Islands,

his group is welcomed by the head of the camp like this:

Here there's no Soviet power.

Here there's Solovki's power.

Here the prosecutor never comes.

No late comer will be allowed in the convoy.

A step to the left or the right will be deemed an attempt to escape.

The Solovki lure means that absolute arbitrariness has become the rule.

The punishments the watchmen inflict upon the prisoners in this prison

are on the edge of sadism.

At the center of the circle of hell the Solovki Islands represent

lies Mount Sekirnaya

and, on top of it, the Church of the Lord's Ascension,

a place the prisoners call the Hill of the Axe.

It is turned into a disciplinary isolation chamber where executions are carried out.

The victims are attached to a heavyweight

and thrown off the top of a 375 steps staircase.

The watchmen are usually former criminals and display unrestricted violence.

Women represent about 10% of the prisoners,

but their fate is particularly awful.

In a world without any rights,

they are but sexual slaves for the prison guards.

As the months go by,

new inmates keep coming to the Solovki Islands.

There were around 200 in 1923,

but three years later,

as the repression against anyone not fitting the Bolshevik model hardens,

there are almost 20 thousand.

The dictatorship started right after Lenin's companions took power

in October 1917.

The Bolsheviks are a minority in such a huge country

and so they begin early on to use violence and coercion

to strengthen their domination.

Lenin believes that power can't be shared.

The repression is based on the conviction

that the new regime has the right to remove mercilessly all its opponents,

called enemies of the people.

In order to implement such terror,

the Bolshevik government created in December 1917 the Cheka.

The Cheka, which means extraordinary commission,

is the party's sword and shield and exists and acts beyond the law.

Lenin places Felix Dzerzhinsky as the head of the Cheka.

He's 40 years old and has spent 11 years in prison or exiled.

Among all of us, Felix has spent the most time in the tzarist prisons.

He knows his job.

That was Lenin's comment to justify his choice.

Felix Dzerzhinsky has the full support of Lenin

and in less than a year, he puts together

an incredible repressive machinery above all laws

and sometimes even above the party.

It's a state within the state,

with its own network of informers, special troops, and intelligence services.

In short, a political police of more than 200,000 people.

Following an attack against Lenin on the 30th of August 1918 by an anarchist,

Dzerzhinsky sets off the repression.

The Cheka is in charge of implementing the "Red Terror".

The number of victims of the Red Terror of autumn 1918

is estimated to be between 10,000 and 15,000 people.

LONG LIVE THE RED TERROR!

During the summer of 1918,

the first concentration camps called Konzlager,

a name derived from German are created.

They are here to protect the Soviet Republic against its so-called enemies.

The concentration camps are managed by the Cheka

and gather people that have been arbitrarily arrested

because they belong to a category the regime didn't like.

Upper class, nobles, social dangerous elements.

Along with these camps targeting political opponents,

the Bolshevik regime is experimenting with corrective labor camps.

Camps that gather people sentenced by a court usually for ordinary crimes.

Corrective labor camps were intended to replace jail by re-education through labor.

But the border between concentration camp and labor camp remains blurry.

Many camps gather both political, opponents locked up without a trial,

and sentenced criminals.

In the autumn of 1921, there are 120,000 prisoners in about 200 camps.

However, the number of opponents and malcontents keeps growing.

In 1922, the revolutionary socialists party,

at once brother and rival of the Bolsheviks, is eliminated.

Its leaders are pilloried during a spectacular trial and presented as traitors.

Eight of them are sentenced to death,

but the reactions of the international community commute the sentence.

Clergymen also fall victim to the repression

In spring 1922, the campaign of seizure of everything that belongs to the church

leads to the arrest of thousands of priests and monks.

Several major public trials of clergymen are held in Moscow and Petrograd.

Hundreds of them are sentenced to capital punishment.

Thousands are deported to camps.

Choosing a monastery as the location of the testing lab

for a Soviet concentration camp-like system

is not a random choice.

In the middle of the 1920s,

the Bolsheviks wanted Solovki Island to become a model of re-education through labor.

The OGPU, the new name of the Cheka,

assigns to the camp an ambitious plan of exploitation of both the forests and peat deposits.

The new internal rules plan for 12 hour work days,

one day of rest every 10 days, and high rates of felling.

Oleg Volkov refused to become an informer of the GPU.

He was sentenced to just three years in a camp,

but ended up spending 27 years there, a major part of it in Solovki.

The jail regime was very strict, especially in the logging.

Those who hadn't completed their task could be shot.

That's what happened if you didn't respect the quotas.

A former prisoner, Naftaly Frenkel, becomes head of the economy.

His motto: "we must put maximum pressure on a prisoner during their first three months".

After that, they're useless.

Frenkel decides that the food ration will be proportional to the amount of work done.

This practice will be at the core of the whole Soviet concentration camp system.

The life and working conditions in Solovki become harsher and harsher,

especially during winter, when the temperatures drop.

Later on, I saw with my own two eyes people being brought outside in their underwear.

Whereas everything was frozen.

They've been locked in an empty hangar.

I, myself, had to spend the winter in a cell that wasn't heated.

A Georgian officer who had managed to escape Solovki

publishes in London in 1926 a book that narrates

the atrocious living conditions in the camp.

The same information is then published in 1927

by a French jurist named Raymond Duguet in his book

"A Prison in Red Russia, Solovki",

the first book in French dealing with the camps in the USSR.

Almost from its birth, the gulag is known and denounced in the west.

MORE THAN FIFTEEN THOUSAND UNHAPPY, INNOCENT FOR THE MOST, ARE AWAITING DEATH.

The Soviet government answers in 1928 by ordering from the OGPU a movie about Solovki

in order to show that this hell is actually heaven.

A cinema team comes to Moscow to film a nice summer camp.

Cute white table cloths, smoking rooms, games of chess, bathing,

Even some shows with music.

The guided tour of Solovki of the then popular author Maxim Gorky in 1929,

also aims at falsifying information and hiding the true horror of the camp.

We suspected he had come to Solovki for a purpose.

To write that nothing horrible was happening there.

In exchange he had been promised that the living conditions of the prisoners would soften.

Before he arrived, every patient in the hospital had been removed

and the bedsheets had been replaced by clean ones.

When he came in the hospital and saw the nurses with their white uniforms, he said:

I'm quoting with absolute precision.

I don't like theater.

And he left.

He didn't visit the patients.

When he reached Mount Sekirnaya,

the place where the worst was taking place,

with the dungeons and where people were tortured.

He found a table with newspapers on it.

The inmates in that cell was supposed to read the newspapers

to show that they were being reeducated.

However, they held the newspapers upside down on purpose.

Gorky realised it.

Put one of the newspapers back correctly and then left.

Showing that he had understood the message.

Despite some reluctance,

the author ends up writing a long article showing the benefits of Solovki.

Camps such as Solovki are necessary.

It is through them that the state will quickly reach one of its goals,

putting an end to prisons.

Gorky supports the system and sings the birth of a new man regenerated through labor.

Four months after the visit of Maxim Gorky,

the camp's leaders order the most extensive mass execution in the camp up till that point.

They were shot in the neck.

There were 300 shots, more perhaps.

I think there was only one bullet per person.

They couldn't aim well enough to kill with one shot

and would just throw the bodies in a pit.

The day following the executions, there were still people moving in the pit.

300 inmates are shot without any form of trial,

with the excuse that they tried to organize a mass breakout.

Lenin dies in January 1924, after several months of illness.

Stalin supervises the funeral.

Stalin had been the General Secretary of the Central Committee since 1922.

This allowed him to supervise all promotions and transfers of high-ranking party officials.

This power was a key element in the battle among the Bolshevik leaders

to decide who would take over Lenin's place.

In July 1926, during the funeral of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka,

the Bolshevik leaders are all here side by side, Stalin and Trotsky.

Yet their brotherhood is but a facade.

Stalin is moving in secret to isolate his most dangerous political opponent, Trotsky.

In 1927, weakened, he is exiled.

Stalin becomes Lenin's heir and carries on his cult.

He relies on the support of a tight group of followers,

including Molotov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov.

As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power,

the dictatorship of the party replaced the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat,

but now begins the dictatorship of the General Secretary over the party.

In 1928, Stalin begins, with much fanfare, the first five years plan,

whose main goal is to accelerate the country's industrialization.

The objective of increasing production by 20% every year is unrealistic.

Thus, they need to find people guilty of the mistakes and delays.

A trial of the Industrial Party opens in 1930.

The accused are engineers and technicians charged with sabotaging production.

Vyshinsky is the president of the court

and leads the process according to a ritual that will become a standard for all Stalinist trials.

The Supreme Court is about to examine

the case against the counter-revolutionary organization, the Union of Engineers' Organizations,

also known as the Industrial Party.

The accused have been tortured, and confess imaginary crimes.

I am guilty of having joined the counter-revolutionary organization, the Engineers' Center,

later called the Industrial Party.

I acknowledge doing sabotage

in collaboration with the French government and groups of white Russian émigrés.

I fully acknowledge my responsibility and plead guilty to these crimes.

The goal was to destroy Soviet power

by provoking an industrial crisis.

The trial is mentioned in all Soviet newspapers

and highlights the myth of "the saboteur for a foreign power".

A myth that can explain the regime's economic failures.

Death to the saboteurs!

Demonstrations asking for punishment take place.

WE DEMAND THE DEATH PENALTY!

I will now read the judgment in the case against the Industrial Party.

The Supreme Court of the USSR has decided

Vyshinsky, a kind of a Bolshevik Torquemada, declares:

Under articles 58.3, 58.4, 58.6 and 58.11

and, as a measure of social protection, the sentence is death by firing squad with confiscation of assets.

The verdict is final and irrevocable.

Five of the accused are sentenced to death, three are sent to camps.

On top of forced industrialization,

Stalin's economic strategy includes the collectivization of the lands.

In a country where 80% of the population lives in the countryside,

the money needed for industrialization

can only be found through massive purchase of farming goods at an extremely low price.

The purpose of collectivization is to gather farmers by force

into state-owned farms called Kolkhozes.

Maria Mikliaeva is deported along with her family when she's eight.

Collectivization began.

Our village became a Kolkhoz.

And they started to get rid of the most wealthy people.

The Soviets decide to expropriate kulaks,

farmers that are supposedly wealthy yet often turn out to have a scant income.

These kulaks are generally against the collectivization of the land.

The leaders called them kulaks

and decided to evict them from their lands.

So as to enable the villagers to build their new lives.

My family was part of that category.

Brigades requisition the harvests and cattle.

They moved from house to house and took everything up to the last seed.

And they did the same for us. They took everything.

They forced our family to certain starvation.

Kulaks are used as scapegoats.

Within a very short time, tens of millions of farmers are forced to leave their lands.

I remember it. It was a beautiful sunny day.

A man wearing bloomers and carrying a book or a newspaper came to our home

and told us to get ready to leave.

My mother asked, where to? Deportation.

My mother started to scream at my sister to cry and I grabbed the shelf with my dolls.

I was 6 years old.

They didn't even tell my mother where they took her.

They just took her without even giving her time to change her clothes.

She told me I was sitting next to the stove and they took me dressed like that.

She didn't take anything with her

and they brought her to Kulay.

It was in March and they threw her in the snow, in the middle of the forest.

My parents were very sad to see all the convoys with entire families on board.

Going away while keeping their dead.

One day, my mother and her friend had just milked the cows

and decided to go to the road with a pot of milk

to give some to those who still had young children.

Then someone threw her a package and said: pretend it's yours.

She didn't know what was in the package.

Once home, my mother opened the package and discovered a dead baby.

Its mother had probably given birth during transfer

and wrapped the baby in a rag in the hope of giving it to someone to save it.

The Bolshevik regime tries to convince farmers of the benefits of collectivization.

My father found a spot where he could, stood on his tractor and gave a speech.

He said that our lives would change,

that there would be more equipment every year.

That physical labor would decrease.

There would be more machines and we'd control them.

That the roads would be asphalted,

there would be electricity in the village,

houses would be built in bricks,

there would be new schools, a hospital,

people were really happy.

After labor by hand,

comes the time of the machines and of beautiful modern innovation.

These tractors filmed by Eisenstein

paved the way towards the socialism of the twentieth century.

ONWARD TO SOCIALISM!

In truth though,

chaos in the harvest caused by collectivization and forced requisition

creates famine.

Between 1932 and 1934, 6 to 7 million farmers die, mostly in Ukraine.

The most terrible night was when they took my father.

I cried a lot and I still cry when I think about it. Excuse me.

And also when I remember the face of my friends at school and my family who died of starvation.

The removal of kulaks as a social class

causes 300,000 people to be sent to camps in three years

along with the deportation of more than 2 million men, women and children in special settlement camps

where they are under house arrest.

In 1930, every inmate in prison is sent to labor camps.

The management of these camps is the OGPU's job.

The OGPU creates a central direction of the camps,

whose acronym in Russian is written Gulag.

This reform and the creation of the Gulag have an economic goal.

During the 1930s, while Stalin launches Russia into an industrialization frenzy,

deported people become a key economic element.

This is no longer about assigning a couple of thousand inmates to logging like they did in Solovki.

This is about using cheap labor on a bigger scale for massive infrastructure work.

The first major work of the communists carried out by Gulag prisoners begins in 1931.

It's the construction of the canal connecting the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, the BBK.

120,000 prisoners guarded by thousands of watchmen

work for 18 months to build a 227 kilometer long canal,

including 39 kilometers carved in rocks, 19 locks, and 64 dams.

Naftaly Frenkel,

the man who had implemented the food for work rationing system in Solovki is leading the work.

Digging the canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea

is the first step in gigantic infrastructure projects.

Railways, canals, roads, airports, hydroelectric plants,

projects on which hundreds of thousands of prisoners will break their backs.

The word Zek, short for prisoner of the canal,

first appears on the BBK site before designating every Gulag prisoner.

The use of labor that can be exploited at will overtakes the use of machines.

We were carrying metal cables with our bare hands.

Most of these cables, all of them actually were old and sharp.

They were made of barbed wire.

Our hands were wounded, blood was flowing, people often fell.

There were many wounded.

Nothing was adapted.

And of course, work in prison was incredibly difficult.

Indeed, the technology is archaic.

Very few machines, few trucks, almost every tool is made on the spot.

Wooden cranes, wheelbarrow wheels.

The inmates muscle strength compensates for the absence of power hammers.

Such methods dating from the Middle Ages turned the prisoners into slaves.

The workers are exhausted and sick.

12,000 of them die on the site, 10% of the total workforce.

The corpses are left behind, in the snow.

As spring drew closer and the snow started to melt,

we could see hands, arms, and heads popping up next to us,

150 meters away, we saw all of this.

It stuck out from under the snow and the soil.

And flocks of crows flew over the frozen corpses.

Still fresh after pecking them.

The regime's propaganda intends to show

that the inmates are contributing to the construction of socialism as well.

Their labor is a way to redemption.

More than 30 authors led by Gorky, him again,

pay a visit to the BBK and celebrate the rebirth of the prisoners through labor

in a book dedicated to Stalin.

Shows are organized all along the canal for propaganda

and orchestras play music to support the workers.

But the weariness on every face crushes all propaganda efforts.

In May 1933, Stalin, Yagoda, leader of the GPU and in charge of the project and Kirov

inaugurate the canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea.

The event is celebrated as a great communist victory.

However, in practice, the BBK is less wide and less deep than anticipated

and can only be used by ships with a shallow draft.

The canal will rarely be used.

A waste paid for in blood.

A staging to give the illusion that the goal has been reached,

that the party is always right.

A bluff, also called tufta in the language of the Gulag.

But it doesn't matter for Stalin.

The BBK is a fantastic and huge display of Soviet willingness in terms of production.

The gulag's labor allows this country, as vast as a continent,

to develop key infrastructure,

to colonize giant hostile geographic expanses

and to search for resources, energy, and awe.

In April 1933, the gulag numbers almost 500,000 prisoners

and gigantic projects keep coming.

At the same time as the BBK,

the GPU starts a massive construction site in the far east of the country,

in a region of Siberia that reaches minus 50 degrees centigrade

and is home to just a few reindeer farmers.

The project is to start exploiting the huge gold deposits of the Kolyma,

a lost territory almost unexplored of 2 million square kilometers.

The Kolyma has no road connection with the rest of the country,

so the inmates must be brought to Vladivostok by train,

a two-month journey, and then embark on a boat for 2 weeks to the Nagaev Bay.

My boat was called Kulu.

And it's on that boat that we were brought to the Nagayev Bay.

To Magadan.

Mikhail Tamarine is a student when he is arrested in 1937 and sent to the Kolyma.

When we disembarked, we all had civilian clothes.

We were freezing.

It was the 25th of December.

And by the time everyone had disembarked,

many of us had their nose or ears frozen.

Sometimes even fingers and toes. It was awful.

We start walking and snow is falling.

In some places, it was five meters high.

It was blizzard. I remember that terrible night.

In 1932, several thousand prisoners arrive.

First, they are tasked with building the harbor and the town of Magadan.

From a small village of fishermen, it becomes a true city.

Then the inmates trace the 1 thousand kilometer road leading to the gold deposits.

Eduard Berzin, one of the leaders of the GPU,

is tasked with organizing the giant Kolyma complex

spreading over several thousand kilometers.

This picturesque character was like the tzar of Kolyma.

He moved around with a sidecar with his wife

or in a Rolls-Royce that belonged to Lenin's wife

and was given to him by Stalin.

10,000 kilometers away from Moscow, his power is unlimited.

80,000 prisoners living in dreadful conditions dig the ground looking for gold.

During the winter, life is horrendous.

A famous song known all over the USSR says:

Kolyma, Kolyma, enchanted planet,

winter has 12 months, everything else is summer.

Iouri Fidelgoltz will serve ten years in the hellish camps of Kolyma.

One thing is sure, I was forced to dig by hand.

Can you imagine what it means to dig by hand?

When it's -50ºC.

Dig the ground with a spike.

The norm was to dig 10 holes a day

and each had to be 60 or 70 centimeters deep at least.

And that was in a permafrost area.

Frozen land.

It was awful.

Berzin is obsessed by rationalization and results.

He designs a new wheelbarrow,

whose capacity is four times bigger than the wheelbarrow previously used by the gold diggers.

In 1933, the daily rate of extraction of soil is one cubic meter.

The following year, it becomes two cubic meters.

In 1937, for the same quantity of bread,

Berzin wants 4 to 6 six cubic meters per day depending on the deposit.

I stayed exactly five years in this camp.

I was working nights mostly.

We were forced to work a lot of course.

The guards changed.

We had to stay until we had filled the quotas.

And if we didn't, we weren't allowed to go back to the camp.

When it comes to our tools, we only had spikes, shovels, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows.

That was it.

Among the prisoners of the Kolyma,

A Zek will become the writer of anything related to the Gulag, Varlam Shalamov.

He is arrested once in 1929,

due to "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities"

and sentenced to five years in a camp.

In 1937, he is arrested a second time and sent to the Kolyma.

Shalamov faces the most arduous labor

with working days of 16 hours or more in the gold mines.

He's starving and beaten up by common criminals and guards and wishes for death.

He will narrate his ordeal in the "Tales of the Kolyma"

where he'll stay 17 years.

Amid terrifying living conditions,

the slaves extract up to 52 tons of gold per year,

half of the Soviet production.

Within five years,

the Kolyma becomes the most important currency reserve in the USSR.

The gulag is the territory of all those exiled from the Soviet society.

They no longer have families, belongings, rights, or dignity.

They have nothing left. They are nothing.

Slaves of the Gulag went from 5000 to 500,000 within 10 years.

They're nothing but labor that can be exploited until exhaustion and death.

The prisoners literally work themselves to death.

Such pre-arranged death

matches the Soviet regime's goal of social, political, and ethnic purge.

In order to maintain the production,

hundreds of thousands of other more healthy people are sent to the camp each year.

These massive waves of people,

this continuous supply of labor supervised by the GPU,

keep on feeding the productive machine of the gulag

like an endless murderous process.

The Zeks work until exhaustion,

but the workforce itself is never ending.

The mortality rate in the Kolyma reaches 10% per year during 1937-38.

Later on, the prisoners called the Kolyma the "white crematory".

The road of the Kolyma, nicknamed "the road of bones",

is like a furrow of pain across the frozen expanse.