Original subtitles

The Gulag, a repressive and criminal system,

whose sheer size and longevity are unprecedented,

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 Gulag is a penitentiary industry

and an essential part of the Soviet economy.

Right before the war,

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

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 3: PEAK & DEATH (1945-1957)

In Moscow, the 9th of May 1945 is unforgettable.

2 to 3 million people flood the Red Square and the banks of the Moskva.

This is an incredible event never before seen in the USSR capital city.

People dance, sing in the streets, and kiss every soldier and officer.

On this memorable day, the author Ilya Ehrenburg writes in his journal:

"The past cannot repeat itself, cannot come back.

People have suffered too much. Something must happen."

The Soviets want a better life,

want to finally get the rewards for their sacrifices.

The USSR is at the height of its strength.

The Red Army occupies half of Europe.

To the world, Stalin appears as one of the winners of the war.

A curious paradox

to see the blood-thirsty dictator sitting side by side with democracies

as partly responsible for the victory over Nazi totalitarianism.

The gulag prisoners in the camps have great hopes too.

Unfortunately, peace does not mean less repression.

Quite the opposite,

the population in the camps has never been as high as during the years after the war.

A new influx of prisoners feeds the gulag.

The allies agreed to send to the USSR all Soviet citizens,

both civilian and military,

living in their country and the countries they occupy.

Within 9 months, from May 1945 to February 1946,

4.2 million Soviets, including 1.6 million former war prisoners

and 2.6 million civilians brought by force to Germany are sent back.

They had to cross filtration and control camps,

where they undergo extended interrogations by NKVD agents.

After this filtration process,

360,000 people are sentenced to forced labor or banishment.

Soviets that were deported or made prisoner and lived in the west during the war

fall victim to a foreign contamination phobia

and are the first group of people joining the gulag after the war.

The second group includes people from the western regions of the USSR,

Baltic States, Belarus, West Ukraine, Moldavia.

Regions that starting in summer 1944 are brutally sovietized.

Hundreds of thousands of people are sent to the gulag.

A new university is built in Moscow,

welcoming the worthy children of the Nomenklatura.

Yet many students are part of the third group of people

sent to the Gulag after the war.

They're suspected of being dangerous counter-revolutionaries

and thousands of academics are arrested by the political police

and sentenced to up to 25 years of forced labor.

Often, a simple joke about Stalin, told among friends,

and reported by one of the countless spies of the political police,

can lead to heavy sentences for the joker.

A car comes near me while I was leaving class.

"Fidelgoltz?" he asks.

"Yeah, that's me."

Follow us.

Iouri Fidelgoltz is arrested in 1948,

while he is studying fine arts,

on the basis that he gathered a group of anti-soviet young people.

Without thinking too much,

they put me in a military vehicle

and drove me to the Butyrka prison.

The guards bringing me there were talking among themselves.

One told the other "who is it we're driving?"

Probably a spy or an anti-soviet.

He won't last long.

They don't go easy on these guys.

We just shoot them.

On February 2nd, early in the morning,

A man dressed as a civilian,

who didn't look like much, kocked on our door.

David Boudennyi

is a member of an underground communist group opposed to Stalin.

He is arrested when he is 20 and sentenced to 5 years of camp.

He got close to me, leaned forward and whispered in my ear:

"David Alexandrovich, gather your things we have to go."

I didn't understand what he meant.

But my mother did and started to panic.

"Where? Where are you taking him?"

Then he said:

"Don't worry, Nadezhda Mikhailovna. He'll be back in 20 or 30 minutes."

"It's enough if he takes his passport."

Another day, Major Maksimov came to see me, he said:

"Listen up. You're but a louse on the body of our nation.

A parasite.

We're isolating you from the wrath of the people.

If I let you go now, people would tear you to pieces

as befits an enemy of the people that you are.

There'll be nothing left of you.

You can thank us for protecting you.

We're protecting you from the wrath of the people."

So in the first couple of weeks it was just interrogation after interrogation.

During the night.

Precisely during the night.

They had one idea in mind.

To find the right article in the penal code.

Ours was Nº 58, paragraph 10 or 11.

Anti-soviet propaganda.

Any form of criticism was propaganda in their eyes.

Saying that we were too poor,

that farmers in kolkhoz the didn't get anything for their work.

That the news wasn't objective.

That was all anti-soviet propaganda.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is an artillery officer in the Red Army

and an ardent communist.

In a letter sent to a friend, he questions Stalin's military genius.

Among other things, he criticizes the decision to cut off the Red Army's head

during the purge before the war.

Solzhenitsyn is arrested in 1945

and sentenced to 8 years in the camps, following article 58.

But most of the people joining the gulag after the war

are ordinary citizens arrested by the NKVD,

renamed MVD in 1946, for minor faults.

The pettiest thefts in a factory, in the Kolkhoz fields, or in shops,

are mercilessly punished by a law from the 4th of June 1947,

despite being committed for the first time or by minors

or in a time of scarcity or even starvation.

From this date on, the number of long sentences for theft explodes.

Within 6 years,

more than 1.5 million Soviets are sentenced and sent to the gulag.

Among people incarcerated because of theft

are many women, war widows, and mothers with young children.

Women represent one quarter of the prisoners in the camps.

But Zek women get no preferential treatment.

The same interrogations, the same exhausting journeys,

the same back breaking work.

Women do the same tiring tasks as men on the great construction sites of the gulag.

I was sent to work underground.

It was a new kind of work for me.

I had to load the wagons.

There were no horses in the mines at that time. Horses came later.

So women had to push the wagons instead of horses. I was one of them.

Our job was to dig and carry soil in wheelbarrows.

We brought it to some kind of dike they were building.

Then on the way back, there were planks and we had to push the wheelbarrows on them.

We used to work in logging.

The quota was really high.

We had to take down six tall pine trees a day.

And we had to do that six times.

That was the quota.

In April, we were sent to cut down trees.

We had snow up to our waist

and we had to walk 5 kilometers in the dark to our working place.

We were building a railway track

that was getting further and further away from the camp.

And so everyday we had to walk further and further to get to the site.

We had to walk 10 kilometers to get there.

Work 10 hours outside to build the railway tracks

and walk 10 kilometers back.

We just dropped on our bedstead without even taking our clothes off.

Exhausted.

It felt like we barely fell asleep,

but it was time to wake up and go back to work again and again.

We were digging foundations.

With a pickaxe, we would break the ice, then put the soil in a wooden crate.

Carry it over 300 meters.

Place it and pack the ground.

If the soil was frozen, we had to bring it back.

Our boss used to say

"I don't give a damn about your work. I'm only interested in your suffering."

Women prisoners are perceived as sexual toys from the moment they reach the camp.

Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya spent a long time in jail,

and once freed, she drew a chronicle of her journey.

This comic book about the gulag shows the abuses women had to endure.

They had to face aggressions by the guards and criminals.

Humiliations and violence are constant.

Gang rapes are common.

To be pretty in the gulag is a curse.

The question of relations between men and women was tricky.

Young women quickly found themselves

in situations where they were asked special things.

The rules forced them and if they refused, they'd go straight to the mine.

One of the guards, Danzig Baldaev, who worked in the prisons for 40 years,

drew disturbing scenes of everyday violence women had to endure.

In a world where moral barriers have fallen,

to accept violence, prostitution, and forced unions

is a way for many female prisoners in the gulag to survive

in a life that has lost all its meaning.

Sexual relations between inmates, men and women,

is forbidden and sentenced to several days in the dungeon,

but in such a hopeless world, the Zeks defy the rule

in one last surge of vital energy as a challenge to the death surrounding them.

The embraces happen anywhere, in the snow at -40ºC,

in the barracks, in front of everyone.

The camp wears down the bodies and the resistance.

Women in the gulag lose their youth and their health.

That group of women were wearing horrible clothes that didn't fit.

They seem to have lost all humanity.

We could have thought they were bears.

Anything but human beings.

I shouted "the mirror, the mirror". And we all ran.

We had spent four years without seeing our faces.

We were running without any clothes on, naked, towards the mirror.

There were many of us and I couldn't find myself.

I remembered myself as a young woman

and suddenly I was facing my mother's gaze and gray hairs.

I understood it was me.

In 1952, there were more than 500,000 women held prisoner in the camps.

And around 35,000 children below 3 kept in houses for the newborn.

"These were children of the traitors to the motherland", to quote Stalin,

whose parents had been executed during the great terror

or who were born in the camps.

A birth in the camp was a curse.

It was a catastrophe.

Children were taken away from their mothers.

When they were 2.

But often right when they were born.

And the mother just didn't know where her child was while in the camp.

They wouldn't tell us whether the baby was still alive or not.

I was born in the camp.

I'm a child of the camp.

My mother was sentenced in 1938 to 10 years of forced labor

because of article 58.

I was born in 1941.

Later on, I kept asking her "why did you keep me? You had to have some reason".

And she say that it wasn't my fault that I was a child born from love.

We've been sent an old prisoner.

An old carpenter to fix the fence.

He's working here and the child is looking at him.

After a while he says "grandpa, Make me a wooden car."

Old man turns around and shouts "leave me alone. I'm too busy."

Then the little boy answers "grandpa, I'm a zek."

And the old man bursts into tears.

Children's homes in the gulag are like hospices.

In 1947, more than 6,000 out of 15,000 children under the age of three died there.

Along with young children,

dozens of thousands of teenagers below 16

are held in the gulag at the end of the 1940s.

Ticket please.

- How are things in Moscow? - Very good.

The last mass trials were a great success.

They're going to be fewer but better Russians.

The movie Ninotchka, shot right before the war by Ernst Lubitsch,

is released in 1945.

This lucid and ferocious anti-Stalin comedy, written by Billy Wilder,

condemns repression in the USSR for the first time in the cinema.

Hello? Comrade Cazabine?

I am sorry. He hasn't been with us for 6 months.

He was called back to Russia and was investigated.

You can get further details from his widow.

You're very welcome, very welcome.

The publishing, in French, in 1947, of "I Chose Freedom",

a book by Soviet Defector Victor Kravchenko,

who escaped to the United States,

leads to a giant polemic.

Kravchenko reveals forced collectivization and the camp system.

The book is a massive international best seller.

It's translated into 22 languages

and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold in France.

The communist weekly magazine, "Les Lettres Françaises",

accuses Kravchenko of being an agent of the US Secret Services.

Kravchenko files a complaint against Les Lettres Françaises for defamation.

I assure, my friend and all my readers,

that I will do my best with their moral help

in order to show the truth during the trial

and show to the world public opinion

the horrors of Soviet reality and the activities of its agents.

I will fight at this trial with all my friends for your and our freedom.

The trial begins on the 24th of January 1949,

in front of the criminal court of the Seine and lasts two months.

For the first time, the gulag comes to the courtroom.

100 witnesses are heard.

The Soviet government sent former colleagues of Kravchenko,

along with his ex-wife, in order to abjure him.

Many famous political and academic people of the left wing are heard.

Frédéric Joliot-Curie, communist and Nobel Prize winner in physics,

and Elsa Triolet, author of Russian origin and Louis Aragon's wife,

defend the honor of the USSR.

Kravchenko counterattacks with vigor.

He refutes and argues.

His lawyers bring in Margarete Buber-Neumann,

widow of the German communist leader Heinz Neumann,

who was shot by the NKVD in 1937.

She had been deported to a gulag camp

before the NKVD handed her over to the Gestapo,

after the signature of the German-Soviet Agreement,

who, in turn, sent her to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Her undeniable testimony heavily influenced the audience.

In the end, Kravchenko wins the trial.

Les Lettres Françaises are sentenced for defamation.

The court's judgment states that the Soviet camps exist

and the Soviet Concentration Camp System is a key element of the USSR economy.

But has the public opinion in France been convinced?

It's doubtful, especially in the middle of the Cold War,

at a time when more than 25% of the French voters support the communists

and hundreds of thousands of people joined the Festival of Humanity.

The prestige of the USSR, of the Red Army and of Stalin,

who freed the world of the Nazi monster,

continued to prevent the western public

from understanding just how big the gulag was.

Yet, thanks to such trials, heavily followed by the media,

the thick veil of lies was starting to disappear.

At a time when communists and their allies in the west

denied the existence of the Soviet camps,

the gulag reached its apex.

Never before had there been that many prisoners in the labor camps.

2,750,000 people,

along with 2.8 million people deported to special settlement villages,

and whose fate is only marginally better than the gulag.

The highest camp densities are found in the same places as in the 1930s.

In the gigantic region of the Kolyma,

where 200,000 prisoners struggle

in the gold, tin, cobalt, tungsten and uranium mines,

strategic ores for the armament industry booming at that time.

The Norilsk region, beyond the Polar Circle, in the North of Siberia,

contains almost 80,000 prisoners tasked with extracting nickel,

another strategic awe.

Other regions with a high camp density

still include the Vorkuta Pechora area with 200,000 people

working mostly in coal mines and on railway construction sites.

In Kazakhstan there are more than 100,000 prisoners

in the Karlag camps, near Karaganda.

About 100,000 prisoners work in the coal basin of Kuzbass, in central Siberia.

And about the same number work in the Krasnoyarsk region.

About 100,000 prisoners work in the Ozerlag and Amurlag camps.

Among the new symbolic projects started after the war

and entirely carried out by prisoners of the gulag,

there is Stalin's crazy idea to build a railway

connecting the Ural with the Yenisei river,

far beyond the Polar circle.

The project is started in April 1947

and will mobilize almost 100,000 people for 6 years.

The railway is supposed to run through thousands of kilometers of swamps

and areas devoid of any living soul,

with temperatures dropping to 50° below during winter.

Every spring, the thaw and floods

caused by the rise in the water level of the great Siberian rivers,

destroy the embankments.

At the end of March 1953,

the whole project is cancelled.

The bits of railway left go down in history as "the dead way".

The "dead way" is the most obvious symbol of the complete failure

of a development model based on forced labor.

The Gulag camps are built by the Zeks themselves,

just like the new roads leading there, and some of the towns around them.

While the places are being built,

the zeks sleep in tents or even in wolves dens, basically big holes in the snow.

In the camps, the barracks are basic, poorly heated and overpopulated.

The zeks sleep next to each other in a long row.

The bunk beds have two to three levels.

The zeks are often forced to sleep on the planks directly without even a straw mattress.

Alexei Priadilov was sentenced to 7 years in a camp

for publishing a clandestine newspaper.

Three big hangers.

About 500 people in each.

Three levels of bedsteads, no mattresses.

We slept against each other on these bedsteads.

The stench in the closed up dormitories is unbearable.

The cold pierces the bones day and night, freezes limbs and skin.

Abandoned and starved.

We were lying on these cold bedsteads covered with frost.

One day my hair stuck to the wall because of the frost.

And I tried to get up. It was impossible.

All clumps of hair was sticking to the wall.

The barracks are aligned in "the zone".

"The zone" is an area bordered by wooden poles, barbed wires, and watchtowers.

Five meters beyond, lies the forbidden area.

Crossing it would mean instant execution.

The streets in the camp are made of planks

to avoid walking in the mud during spring and autumn.

In the center of the camp is a big open plaza,

where prisoners are counted twice a day.

Exhaustion, cold, hunger, violence, theft, extortion, dehumanization, humiliation.

Daily life conditions for a zek in the gulag are like a litany of wounds and pain.

Food is every Zek's obsession.

Supply is subject to all kinds of events and usually happens irregularly.

When food reaches the camp at last, it's often stolen.

Leaders, guards, criminals, and pen pushers get their share first.

Theft and corruption are everywhere.

So what's left for the zeks?

An awful soup called Balanda, with rubbish floating in it.

We were served some dirty and stinky dishwater.

In which some herring bones floated.

Someone had already eaten the herrings obviously.

We had the bones.

Sometimes we find cabbage cores in there.

And we got a portion of bread. A ration of 800 grams.

But inside the bread there was straw, potato peelings, God knows what.

Vladimir Kantovski is sentenced to 10 years of camp

for supporting one of his professors who got arrested.

The thing that the camp taught me first,

and that was important,

is that you should get food by any means necessary.

I won't hesitate to say bye to your clothes from Moscow for a bit of bread.

We were living like... I don't know wild beasts, insects.

All our thoughts, all our dreams, were focused on the next event.

We thought about eating.

Getting extra portion or more crust.

We had our eyes riveted on the plate that guard brought with bread on it.

And we started to estimate which piece we'd get.

Depending on the side he started cutting.

In a camp, extreme violence reigns supreme.

All moral rules are forgotten.

It's about the survival of the fittest.

Absolute evil rules.

The guard hits you, but it doesn't hurt.

It's as if he was hitting a table.

Do you understand?

We no longer felt anything.

Savagery means survival in the gulag

and it excludes solidarity.

Physical strength becomes moral strength, as Varlam Shalamov wrote,

after being deported and spending 14 years in the Kolyma.

He introduces the 3 vital commandments of Zek.

"You shall not trust anyone. You shall not fear anyone.

You shall not ask anyone for anything."

One of them could come down her bedstead and the other couldn't climb up.

How could they have helped each other?

Julius Margolin is a Polish writer,

who spent five years in the gulag.

He wrote:

"In the camp, we had neither the desire nor the possibility to save those who fell.

Everyone was too busy with themselves.

Philanthropy in the camp is like cologne poured in a slaughterhouse."

Civilization stops at the gate of the camp.

Forgetting others is the price to survive.

The only well-structured organization accepted,

something specific to Soviet camps, was the world of criminals.

Violence, rights, language, tattoos,

all perceived as signs of gratitude.

Criminals had a good life in the camp.

They ate well, drank well.

Nearby was the women's camp.

So sometimes we could see women on the bedstead.

We're sitting on the grass with our things.

Then comes a pack.

These weren't people.

But creatures that didn't speak Russian.

They could only swear.

These were criminals coming our way.

And here they are, stealing all our things.

And were completely petrified. We don't understand who those people are.

Those people who took everything from us.

In the beginning of the 1950s, the gulag is no longer profitable.

Investigations in 1951 to 1952 in the main camps,

show the administration was making a loss.

This demonstrated the rapid decline of the gulag's profitability.

Many major sites are very delayed.

Stalin dies on the 5th of March 1953.

A general feeling of shock sweeps over many Soviets

when hearing the news the next day on radio Moscow.

They realized that Stalin's death, after 25 years of ruling supreme,

means the end of an era.

However, amid the camps and special settlement villages, people are happy.

Our reaction?

Most of the old Zeks and deported just shouted "hooray".

But the officers and the guys like that, they had a face like this.

It was their reaction.

But we reacted differently. "Yeah, he's dead!"

And we celebrated.

We all stood up.

We shouted and we all started to clap our hands.

That's how it happened.

Izrael Mazus was sentenced to 7 years in the camps,

because he accidentally knocked a statue of Stalin over.

Guards didn't step inside the camp for 2 or 3 days.

What a mess it was.

The mustache had finally died.

Everyone said before "goddammit, Georgians can live 100 years".

I'm talking about it amongst ourselves we said "no way is this going to happen".

Stalin had always acted as though he was immortal

and the question of succession would never arise.

During his last years,

he used to tell his closest companions, Beria,

Khrushchev, Malenkov, Bulganin, Kaganovich,

the very people carrying his coffin,

"What would you do without me?

You are more powerless than newly born blind kittens."

But soon, the battle for succession amongst Stalin's heirs begins.

All of them were involved in the Soviet regime's mass crimes.

Nikita Khrushchev is in control.

He's happy and cunning and successfully removes his opponents.

Just a couple of weeks after the dictator's death,

a massive change is underway.

A change the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg compared to Thor in a famous text.

On March the 27th, 1953, barely three weeks after Stalin's death,

a major amnesty is decided by the all powerful head of state security

Lavrentiy Beria.

He wants to skim the fat off the gulag and make it more profitable.

After Stalin's death, we felt we were moving towards freedom.

Everything went very fast.

A photographer came,

took a picture of us for the pass that allowed us to leave the camp without guards.

We left the camp.

And we found some girls to have a good time with.

All prisoners with a sentence below 5 years are freed,

along with pregnant women or women with a child below 10 years old.

Minors, people above 50 and handicapped people and those who can't work.

Political prisoners sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes,

along with repeat offenders aren't included in the amnesty, however.

In total, that's 1.2 million convicts.

A bit less than half of all prisoners in the gulag,

who are freed during the summer of 1953.

Among them, there's Varlam Shalamov, who spent 17 years in the gulag.

He can finally leave the Kolyma and write his memoirs as a Zek.

Tales of the Kolyma will be published 30 years later.

Beria is arrested in July 1953.

The master of the political police and the gulag since 1938.

Stalin's henchmen is charged with treason and espionage.

The context of his execution is blurry.

Political prisoners use Beria's death

as an opportunity to demand a revision of their sentence

and even to ask for immediate freedom.

Many political prisoners excluded from the amnesty go on a strike.

During the summer of 1953,

the major special camps in Norilsk, Vorkuta

and near Karaganda in Kazakhstan are on strike.

The rebellions are unusually well organized.

Inside the camp, we had our own guards.

It had been created to control the situation inside the camp.

And we decided to build our own weapons.

What kind of weapons?

Small knives and daggers.

Lev Netto was arrested in 1948 and charged with espionage.

He is kept in Norilsk when the rebellion begins.

The authorities negotiate with the prisoners

and yield to many of their demands.

One of the first demands was to remove ID numbers.

And they said "starting now you can remove the ID numbers".

And that was followed by a general feeling of enthusiasm.

ID numbers were sewn on our clothes. We took them off right away.

And threw them onto the ground shouting hooray.

We didn't go to work.

It wasn't a strike anymore.

It was a revolution. We had declared a revolution.

And when they came to talk to us, we answered by screaming.

4,000 women screamed. "Freedom or death. Freedom or death."

They shouted too, but we shouted louder.

You know, when 4,000 women start shouting, that's a lot of noise.

In order to restore order, the guards open fire.

In Norilsk, Vorkuta, in the Karlag, hundreds of prisoners are killed

and hundreds of others are wounded.

When we reached the camp, it was empty.

Dead.

We were put in a barrack.

The place was covered with bullet holes.

The place was made of wood.

And there was blood everywhere.

Along with pieces of human brain.

We didn't understand anything.

We were told to clean up everything quickly.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party takes place in 1956.

Nikita Khrushchev gives his famous secret report speech behind closed doors,

revealing Stalin's crimes.

At this point,

Khrushchev has been a member of the first circle of leaders since the end of the 1930s.

He frees himself from any responsibility in these mass crimes

on top of revealing only a fraction of them.

Yet, even if the document isn't neutral or complete,

it has the effect of a bomb in the communist world.

That's the beginning of de-Stalinization.

The Gulag is disassembled.

Almost half a million prisoners

sentenced because of article 58 of the penal code leave the camps.

Yet only a few of them will receive proper reinstatement.

In Vorkuta, just like elsewhere, the convicts are freed.

Among them,

Polish people are waiting for an authorization to go back to their country.

Stanislaw Kialka fought in the clandestine Polish Army during the war

and was arrested by the Germans.

He managed to escape but got captured by the Russians in 1945

and was deported to Vorkuta.

While being held prisoner, he managed to build a camera

and to take pictures of the camp secretly.

In 1956, he celebrates his freedom by doing some ice skating in front of the camp.

Following top level negotiations

between the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Government,

German war prisoners are freed and sent back to their country

more than 10 years after the war.

At the same time, more than 1 million Soviet citizens of German origin,

deported during the war, are allowed to leave their exile.

The decision is extended, during 1956, to other punished people,

such as Chechens who were collectively deported during the war.

The thaw continues in Moscow.

Khrushchev speeds up the process of removing the gulags.

In 1957, there are only about 15,000 political prisoners left in the camps.

30 times less than in 1953.

In 1958, the infamous article 58 of the penal code,

the one defining counter-revolutionary crimes, at the core of mass repression,

is erased.

The number of political sentences suddenly drops

and reaches a couple of hundreds per year maximum.

A symbol indeed.

In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev welcomes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Kremlin.

The first Soviet to authorize the release in the USSR

of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich",

the novel written by the former Zek,

who describes the fate of millions of Soviets who went through the gulag.

In many ways, the publishing of Solzhenitsyn's book

is the apex of Khrushchev's thaw.

Soon after, Khrushchev is overthrown and replaced by Brezhnev

and a new period of tensions begins.

The issue of the gulag becomes taboo once more in the public space.

Only in private environments are memories of the camps and repressions kept alive,

even if people don't dare talk about it even to their families.

We thought that when leaving the camps...

Well, I thought that once freed, I would tell everyone about what happened.

All our torments and ordeal or get to complain about my fate.

But after leaving the camp,

we came into a world where it was actually impossible to talk.

I was holding on. I didn't say anything.

But I had it all in me. One day I saw a document.

It was written that my grandfather's brother, Ivan Tarantiovich,

had been removed from the kulaks.

I didn't want to know more.

I didn't have the strength.

I didn't want to reopen the wound.

All of this would go away.

In December 1973,

the Russian version of the Gulag Archipelago is published in Paris.

The manuscript had secretly been taken away from the USSR

and described the Soviet Concentration Camp System

that Solzhenitsyn had experienced first hand.

This essay in historical investigation

is based on many testimonies and reliable documents

and shows the sheer size of the gulag.

The book is a bestseller and Solzhenitsyn becomes famous worldwide.

He is arrested in Moscow on the 12th of February 1974,

loses his Soviet nationality and is expelled.

Solzhenitsyn reaches Western Europe,

where his book "The Gulag Archipelago"

leads to political and ideological upheaval.

After dozens of books over half a century

trying to raise awareness about the repression

in the country of socialism without much success,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's work

finally succeeds in breaking the wall of lies and indifference.

After the fall of communism,

the new Russian state doesn't try to maintain the places

where millions of Soviet citizens were held

and executed during the Stalin era.

Only the non-governmental association Memorial,

created by dissident Andrei Sakharov during Perestroika,

is striving to record the memories of millions of people who were moved,

deported, or held captive,

along with millions of deaths.

The scars of this tragedy remain today

in the middle of endless expanses, traces of barracks in ruins,

the ghosts of watchtowers, twisted barbed wire.

The memory of the gulag is slowly rising from under a veil of oblivion.