All language subtitles for Gulag.The.Story.S01E03.720p.HDTV.x264-CBFM

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.