All language subtitles for Gulag.The.Story.S01E01.720p.HDTV.x264-CBFM

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.