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.

Created as early as 1918,

the Soviet camps became a centralized and organized concentration camp system

in the beginning of the 1930s.

The collectivization of the land

sent hundreds of thousands of farmers to the gulag.

Such forced labor was used to build the massive infrastructure of the USSR.

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 2: PROPAGATION (1934-1945)

On the 26th of January 1934,

the delegates of the Communist Party's 17th Congress arrived at the Kremlin.

The party's dignitaries arrived by car, like Kirov and Molotov.

Others gathered near the entrance.

This congress symbolized Stalin's final triumph.

He is on the tribune surrounded by his personal guard.

Speakers follow one another,

all proclaiming Stalin's merits, unrivaled genius of our time,

or quite simply, the greatest man of all time and of all people.

Amid the never ending flow of praise,

no one questioned the decisions of 1929 to 1930.

Decisions that led to catastrophic results.

Agriculture production dropped by 40%.

Starvation, purchasing power dropped by 50%.

Political repression exploded. Forced labor expanded.

Sergei Kirov calls this congress "Congress of the Winners"

under the watchful eye of Nikita Khrushchev,

who's in charge of the party in Moscow.

Stalin explains the difficulties encountered

during the process of building socialism.

The political goal is correct and the party cannot be wrong.

Therefore, problems and delays are obviously a mismatch between what was decided

and what was done.

The five-year plan couldn't be carried out because of sabotage.

The conspiracy theory helps explain the major difference

between what was promised and what was done,

between speeches and reality.

11 months later, on the 1st of December, 1934,

Sergei Kirov, member of the Politburo and First Secretary of the Leningrad Party,

is murdered by Leonid Nikolaev, a young communist.

Kirov was the lover of Nikolaev's wife.

Kirov's assassination, an isolated action by a jealous husband,

is a blessing for Stalin.

He uses Kirov's murder to trigger the repression.

Within three weeks, the NKVD, the new GPU,

pretends to discover that the crime has been committed

by a certain center of Leningrad.

Members of this center are convicted in closed hearing and executed.

This is a pretext to attack Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves,

Lenin's companions.

They are arrested and convicted on the basis of ideological connivance

with Kirov's assassins.

The repressive machinery is getting out of hand.

The 17th Congress of the Communist Party had officially announced

that socialism had been successfully implemented in the USSR.

To quote the pompous words used,

"this was the beginning of an era of unprecedented abundance

in the history of mankind."

As official propaganda claimed it, life has become better.

Life has become happier.

These words were taken from one of Stalin's speeches

and are displayed in all public areas

and even on the entrance gates to the labor camps.

Propaganda movies show happy Soviets enjoying some kind of "dolce vita".

The parties and states officials

are part of a privileged social class called Nomenklatura.

And while waiting for abundance to benefit everyone,

it certainly benefits a few thousand Apparatchiks,

who are able to enjoy material advantages such as comfortable apartments,

special shops, and vacations near the Black Sea.

While the Nomenklatura is having fun,

the number of prisoners of the gulag

crosses for the first time the threshold of one million in 1935.

One million prisoners and another million outcasts called specially displaced.

People deported to settlement villages,

usually located in the same hostile regions as the Gulag's camps.

After the construction of the canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea,

after extracting gold in the Kolyma,

Politburo tasks the NKVD with carrying out another gigantic project.

Building a canal connecting the Moskva with the Volga.

In 1933, as soon as the construction of the canal

between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea is completed,

part of the BBK's labor is moved to the massive Dmitlag construction site,

which got its name from the camp in charge of the work

on the Moskva-Volga Canal.

Citizens, your attention, please!

Instructed by our government and our party,

on the initiative of our beloved guide, Comrade Stalin,

we are now beginning the construction of the greatest canal in the world,

connecting the Moskva River to the Volga

Citizens, you came here as criminals.

But we welcome you as people

taking part in this most important government project.

Through honest work and an honest attitude toward your work,

you will regain the right to rejoin the family of workers.

Once more, the regime's propaganda

shows how such tremendous work is being carried out to music.

Trucks and machines are starting to appear,

but despite them, the Zeks continue to dig, to suffer and to die.

During its apex,

almost 200,000 prisoners work on the project, 30,000 of them die there.

In 1936, during the final construction phase of the canal,

which must be ready by October 1937 for the 20th anniversary of the revolution,

the workday is extended to 12 or even 14 hours.

Teams working shifts day and night in the cold and the wind.

Horrendous conditions.

Stalin himself pays a visit to the site.

Images show us the Zeks happily greeting the little father of the people,

who sent them to hell.

Yet another huge construction is launched,

using the forced labor of the gulag.

The track for a second Trans-Siberian called BAM, Baikalo-Amurskaya Magistral.

The building of this strategic railway of more than 1,500 kilometers

begins in 1933 and continues until the middle of the 1940s.

At the end of the 1930s, almost 200,000 prisoners toil on the site

and 10,000 of them die there.

One death every 150 meters.

In the vast area of the Ukhta and Pechora north of the polar circle,

the ground is full of oil and coal.

In the beginning of the 1930s, the gulag slaves are sent in mass there

to exploit a region infested with mosquitoes.

100,000 Zeks are digging shafts to extract the ore.

Soon there will be 20 coal mines.

In winter, the temperatures drop to -60ºC.

The night lasts 3 months.

Here in this frozen catacomb,

the prisoners will create from nothing the town of Vorkuta,

which will become the capital of one of the greatest coal areas in the USSR.

The NKVD sends to Vorkuta the most dangerous political criminals,

as they call them.

The construction of a railway,

blocked during most of the year by snow and ice, starts in 1936.

In the middle of the 1930s,

the Gulag has become a giant administration

that uses the workforce of all prisoners in the USSR.

The gulag industry becomes an essential cog of the Soviet economy.

The camp's locations coincide with a number of major projects.

200,000 prisoners are digging the canal

connecting the Moskva to the Volga, in the Dmitlag.

70,000 prisoners handle the maintenance work of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal

in the Belbaltlag.

100,000 prisoners work in the oil and coal deposits of the Ukhta and Pechora region

and build the town of Vorkuta in the Ukhtpechlag.

30,000 prisoners are extracting resources

from the virgin lands of Kazakhstan in the Karlag.

60,000 prisoners work in the coal mines of Kuzbass in the Siblag.

70,000 prisoners build the railway and the roads

in the Khabarovsk region in the Dallag.

200,000 prisoners build the railway

connecting the Baikal Lake to the Amur River in the Bamlag.

80,000 prisoners extract gold of the Kolyma in the Dalstroi.

Concentration camp-like facilities appear everywhere like metastasis.

The Trotskyists and Bukharinists, comrade judges,

this so-called Trotskyist right-wing block

whose leaders are here among the accused,

are not a political party.

They're not a political movement.

They're a group of criminals.

And not just common criminals,

but criminals who sold themselves to enemy intelligence services.

Criminals who are considered under common law to be the lowest of the low,

the most contemptible, the worst of the worst.

During the three made-up Moscow trials in August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938,

the highest figures of the old Leninist guard

suffer torture and publicly confess so-called crimes of treason, sabotage and terrorism.

Stalin executes his old companions Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin without batting an eye.

10 years before, he was hugging them.

Comrades!

The Trostskyists and Zinovievists,

who are the direct enemies of the working class and the workers,

have now banded together to ally with the fascists,

with all the vermin that act against the first Soviet State,

where work and the working class rule,

along with all the workers of our Soviet Union.

A major campaign is launched in the whole country to stigmatize the accused.

The goal is to lead people to accept that the revolutionary heroes of yesterday

have become the traitors and spies.

I think, comrades,

that I speak in the name of everyone here,

and of the proletariat in our country as a whole,

when I say that these swine must be shot.

No mercy for the enemies!

We must shoot them all, no exceptions, like rabid dogs!

Death to the traitors of the motherland!

Public meetings in factories and kolkhozes

position the fallen leaders as scapegoats,

responsible for the difficulties encountered while building socialism.

The Moscow trials reflect the great terror.

They attract attention from all over the world

while hiding the purge happening in the prisons and inside the NKVD's office.

The execution of the old Bolsheviks

masks the sheer size of the repression that strikes the everyday man.

Indeed, within a couple of months,

120,000 communist officials are arrested and convicted.

Half of them receive the death penalty.

Alexander Prokhorov was an engineer and a member of the Communist Party.

He was arrested in 1937.

Three people came around midnight.

One stood by the door while the others started their search.

I woke up my son. They were looking for counter-revolutionary texts.

But they didn't find any.

Yet I ended up Lubyanka.

The Lubyanka in Moscow is the headquarters of the NKVD.

It's a prison where people are tortured and shot.

Olga Adamova-Sliozberg was a communist activist too

and she was arrested at home.

We were arrested on the basis of having joined the plot to kill Kaganovich.

I'd never even seen Kaganovich.

My six-year-old son was sitting in his bedroom.

Came in and I said: "Don't cry, darling. I'm going on a mission."

And he answers:

"Dad is on a mission, now you too.

If the nanny also goes on a mission, who shall we stay with?"

On Stalin's direct order,

family members of the fallen communist leaders are tracked down and arrested,

especially their wives.

On this document, Stalin added with a blue pen

that the families of the traitors should be systematically sentenced

to 8 years in labor camps instead of 5 as it was initially planned.

And while members of the party are purged,

the same thing happens to thousands of NKVD leaders such as Mikhail Polyachek's father.

He came home.

He dropped his suitcase and hugged me.

And then NKVD's agents knocked on the door.

We didn't know what was going on.

Later on, we were told that he'd been sentenced to 10 years without mail rights.

Without mail right means execution.

Mom died in 1938, in a way.

Everything inside her disappeared.

The shock was so strong.

She was still a young woman. She was 38.

But she died inside.

The gulag's camp leaders also faced the purge.

Among many others, there's Eduard Berzin,

the man with the Rolls-Royce, who had led the camp in the Kolyma.

He is shot in the basement of the Lubyanka.

Or Alexander Nogtev, first commander of the Solovki camp,

who was arrested and deported in 1938 to the Gulag.

Then comes the turn of the army.

Marshall Tukhachevsky,

a man who kept warning about the danger Hitler represented,

is accused of being a spy working for the Gestapo.

He is executed in June 1937.

Along with him,

40,000 high-ranking officials, including most of the generals are eliminated.

The Red Army has lost its head.

The goal of the purge of political, economic, military, and police related elites

is to replace leaders of the Leninist revolution period by a younger generation,

more obedient and that can more easily be manipulated politically and ideologically.

A generation shaped by the Stalin spirit,

and thus, a new collection of leaders arises,

whose amazing careers are owed to Stalin to guide,

a person they will be completely devoted to.

The revolution is eating up those who created it.

The purge of the communist officials is impressive,

yet mass executions reach much further than the communists.

They are but one tenth of the victims.

In 1936, Yagoda, head of the NKVD since 1934

and responsible for the Gulag's expansion is arrested.

He is shot in 1938, as a right-wing Trotskyist.

To lead the NKVD, the Party has chosen its loyal son,

a friend and brother-in-arms of Comrade Stalin,

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.

Yezhov received the nickname of Bloodthirsty Midget.

He's barely more than 1.5 meters high, and as head of the NKVD,

he'll carry out the greatest state massacre to ever take place in Europe during peace time.

Within 16 months, from August 1937 to November 1938,

around 750,000 Soviet citizens are killed

after being sentenced to death by a special court following a series of sham trials.

That's almost 50,000 executions per month.

1,600 per day.

During the Great Terror,

one adult Soviet out of 100 is killed in secret with a bullet in the neck.

One example among hundreds of thousands of others, Gavriil Bogdanov.

This former kulak, who escaped exile in Siberia

is arrested on August the 8th 1937.

Photographed on the 12th, accused with encouraging counter-revolutionary actions,

interrogated on the 15th of August,

sentenced to death on the 19th and shot on the 20th,

as can be seen on the execution order.

The starting point of this murderous mass purge

is a note written by Stalin on the 2nd of July 1937.

The red dictator asks that the most hostile criminals be immediately arrested and shot.

In order to carry out the order,

Nikolai Yezhov publishes on the 30th of July 1937

the NKVD operational order Nº 00447,

sent to all regional NKVD leaders.

This incredible document,

the cause behind the death of hundreds of thousands of people,

stipulates that home security agencies

have the mission to eradicate in the most ferocious manner,

all anti-soviet elements

and to end once and for all the threat represented

by those who undermine the very foundations of the Soviet state.

Suspects are divided into two categories.

The first one means execution.

The second means the gulag for 10 years.

Order Nº 00447 then goes on to list quotas of people to arrest per region.

In the first column are the executions to perform.

In the second, people to send to the gulag.

The operation starts in August 1937

and is supposed to last 4 months.

It'll last 15 instead.

Yezhov clearly sets the tone on the eve of the first day of the Great Terror.

If we end up shooting a thousand people more than expected

during this operation, this is fine.

The operations are secret, planned, and centralized

and decided at the highest level within the party by Stalin and Yezhov,

along with Stalin's closest allies, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan.

The purpose of these secret mass operations is to remove for good any threat

in order to purify the Soviet society.

Terror becomes part of everyday life.

Soviet citizens are paralyzed and live in the fear of being arrested.

At 3am they arrived and knocked on our door.

He opened.

There were three NKVD officials.

They come in and ask "who's living here with you?"

He answers "my wife and my two children".

Line up against the wall, all four of you.

Then they continued to search the house,

but they didn't find anything, yet they took dad away.

We went to the prison.

There were a lot of people there making written complaints.

We did the same with mom.

Someone told us "ah, these are political prisoners".

They've been sent to Siberia last night in a freight train.

He's no longer here.

You won't hear from him for the next 20 years.

You won't have access to mail.

One of the characteristics of this massive purge is secrecy.

Secrecy of the judgment usually done behind closed doors.

Secrecy of the execution that takes place in unknown locations.

Families of those sentenced to death are never informed.

They just kept tormenting them there.

When my father ended up there,

and they started to interrogate him,

he refused to sign the deposition.

He was a lightweight boxer.

He could lift a man by the throat

and hold him against the wall.

He didn't sign.

He threw them all out of the office.

Where were they brought?

They close the back of the truck and that's it.

It wasn't a closed vehicle but a truck to carry merchandise.

That's the last time I saw my father.

How can you forget?

It haunts you forever.

I was there when they arrested my mother.

It happened at midnight.

I was already in my bed.

NKVD agents came into my bedroom.

And I could hear the sounds of their boots.

My mother kissed me before leaving.

But I remained silent. Huddled up. And afraid.

My fear was both mental and physical.

And I didn't move.

When my mother left,

I couldn't even see clearly because of my tears.

I don't know in what circumstances they arrested my father.

But I never saw my parents again.

The Great Terror leads to an unprecedented influx of prisoners in the camps.

Within 2 years, almost 1.5 million people,

the ones from category 2, who escaped execution by Yezhov's minions,

are sent to the gulag.

In January 1939, there's almost two million prisoners,

including 43% of political prisoners

who were sentenced based on article 58 of the penal code

for counter-revolutionary crimes.

Such a percentage will never be reached again during Stalin's time.

The Great Terror ends suddenly on November the 17th 1938,

following a decision by Stalin.

Executions are stopped and Yezhov is held responsible.

He resigns from all his functions.

In 1940, the "Bloodthirsty Midget" turned alcoholic is executed.

"Tell Stalin that I'll die with his name on my lips" are his last words before being shot.

In 1938, Lavrentiy Beria becomes head of the NKVD.

He is one of Stalin's closest friends.

Beria is a professional killer who gathered experience in Georgia.

One of his first tasks is to deeply reorganize the gulag

in order to make it more profitable from an economic point of view.

A vast inspection of the camps begins in early 1939

and concludes that the Zeks are in a catastrophic state and can no longer work.

The whole internal organization of the gulag is revamped.

The giant groups of camps are decentralized and divided into smaller units

organized around economic branches.

The productive function of the gulag is obvious

when looking at the new internal structure.

Indeed the division is no longer made based on geography but based on the economy.

Direction of hydroelectrical constructions,

direction of railway constructions,

direction of non-ferrous metals, etc.

As the war draws closer,

the government sends more and more strategic orders to the NKVD.

The prisoners are to build or renovate more than 200 military airports.

August the 23rd 1939,

Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Third Reich, flies off to Moscow.

To everyone's surprise, the USSR and Nazi Germany sign a non-aggression agreement.

One clause of the secret protocol added to the agreement

plans for the division of Poland.

The Red Army invades Poland on the 17th of September,

17 days after the Wehrmacht attacked.

Soon, the Nazi officers and the Soviets are splitting the country between themselves.

As soon as they reach the Polish territory under the control of the Red Army,

the NKVD gets to work.

About 25,000 Polish citizens belonging to the country's military, civil, and economic elite,

are executed in April 1940 as sworn enemies of the Soviet system.

Thousands of officers are executed with a bullet through their neck

and buried in mass graves in Katyn and elsewhere.

Additionally, between September 1939 and June 1941,

around 110,000 Polish citizens are arrested

and sentenced to forced labor in the Gulag's camps by the NKVD special courts.

Among them are many Jews who escaped West Poland after the Germans invaded it.

Then within 18 months,

about 320,000 Polish citizens

are deported to the settlement villages bordering the Gulag's camps in the North of Russia,

in Siberia, and in Kazakhstan.

After Poland, the Red Army invades the Baltic States.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are being converted to the Soviet way of life.

And here too, the NKVD is working, controlling the population.

While the political police organizes spontaneous parades,

it also supervises arrests and deportations in the shadows.

Ioanna Murejkene's father is arrested at home.

I came into our bedroom.

My sister is screaming and crying while my mother is sitting on a chair,

her gaze drifting away.

I asked right away "what happened?"

And my sister answers "they took dad. They arrested dad".

In the spring of 1941, the NKVD organizes major roundups in the newly conquered territories.

Tens of thousands of people from the area in Poland, occupied by the Soviets,

from Moldavia, conquered by the USSR in 1940,

and from the Baltic States, are deported to camps in Siberia or the Great North.

On June the 22nd 1941, the Wehrmacht attacks the USSR.

The German pushes incredibly quick and leads to hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners.

Cities and villages are destroyed and burnt down.

The German advance during the first couple of months of the war

forces the NKVD to evacuate its prisons and camps located in the western part of the USSR.

From July to December 1941,

more than 700,000 prisoners are transferred to the east.

Means of transportation are lacking, since most of them are needed for the war,

and many prisoners are evacuated on foot, having to walk several hundreds of kilometers.

These evacuations often turn into death marches amid complete chaos.

When time is lacking to organize the transfer,

the prisoners are simply killed.

In Lvov alone, 7,000 inmates are shot.

When the Nazis reached the place, they unearthed the bodies

and used them for their propaganda.

The Gulag's administration freezes the possibility of release for political prisoners

from the first day of the German invasion.

However, almost 600,000 convicts, sentenced for minor crimes,

are freed before having served their time and added to the army.

During the years of war,

in total more than 1 million common criminals are released in advance

and sent from the gulag to the front.

In the Gulag's camps, life conditions drastically deteriorate.

The evacuation to the east of hundreds of thousands of prisoners

worsens the overpopulation problem in the camps.

The standard level of calories in 1942

had dropped by 60% compared to what it was before the war.

The prisoners face foul conditions and starvation.

During winter 1941 to 1942,

25% of the gulag population starves to death.

In 1942, typhus and cholera appear once more in various camps.

In the beginning we were so happy.

Happy to be finally free from such tough work.

But then we started to have fever and hallucinations.

Some women were delirious and agitated.

They were taken away but we didn't know where.

They never came back. But we made it.

We weren't given anything. No medicine. Nothing. We just survived.

Everybody knows that the most deadly year in the Gulag was 1942.

Winter of 1941-42 took many lives mercilessly.

People died of hunger, cold, and exhaustion.

There were many dead people in this camp.

This was the only camp where you truly saw corpses.

People died because of dystrophy, hunger.

Because of the awful food.

Lice, dirtiness, and everything else.

Only sick people, whose hopelessness we could see in their souls, in their eyes.

Everywhere people who can't do anything anymore,

who don't want to do anything anymore,

who think that everything is over.

A huge mortality rate.

We climb down off your bedstead and you shut the woman in charge:

"Hey, there are two more who don't move here."

"Fine, we'll take them away. Alright."

A camp where there's no longer any life,

any awareness of the fact these are human beings with desires.

And they were piled up.

They were unrecognizable.

They were no longer people, not monkeys either.

Just hairy and dirty beings.

Nothing but skin and bones and tatters.

It was impossible to tell if these were human beings or God knows what.

We piled up the bodies like wood.

Each corpse had a small wooden board attached to its leg,

that listed the name, birthdate, reason for conviction, and punishment.

During summer 1943,

the progress of the Red Army freeze certain regions conquered by the Wehrmacht.

The Soviet soldiers are happily welcomed

by populations who suffered from the German occupation,

but the NKVD resumes its arrests right away.

The sole fact of having continued to work during the occupation is enough to be arrested

and charged with treason towards the motherland.

Elena Markova's father was shot

and she was arrested in 1943 when she was 20.

Because I worked as an interpreter at the Labor Council.

Something I never hid. I always said that I worked there.

I was sentenced to 15 years in the penal colony.

A new category of camps is created in 1943 for the so-called traitors,

penal colonies with particularly harsh life conditions.

In 1944 to 1945,

the number of prisoners rises sharply as the Red Army moves towards the west.

Penal colonies, especially in 1944 to 1945,

the places inhabited by many so-called fascist prisoners

and officials thought they should just die.

That's why penal colonies were known for their high mortality rate.

In the end, almost 4 million war prisoners,

most of them German,

are captured and forced to work to rebuild the USSR

in camps managed by the NKVD.

These camps are similar to the gulag.

Propaganda films shot in 1944,

show a camp in Kazakhstan, where German prisoners are treated with respect

In practice though,

several hundreds of thousands of German war prisoners die in these camps

due to illness, hunger, cold, or persecution.

In April 1945, the Red Army takes over Berlin.

The end of the war could mark the beginning of better tomorrows for the Soviets.

But it's not the case.

The Gulag Archipelago continues its unstoppable propagation.