All language subtitles for GULAG - The Story - 2 - Documentary (2019)

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.