An infant in a pre-trial detention center, locked in a cell with his mother, or sent to a colony by stage is a common practice in the 1920s and early 1930s. “When women are admitted to correctional labor institutions, at their request, their infants are also accepted,” - a quote from the Correctional Labor Code of 1924, article 109. “Shurka is neutralized.<...>To this end, he is let out for a walk only for one hour a day, and no longer in a large prison yard, where a dozen or two trees grow and where the sun looks, but in a narrow dark courtyard intended for singles.<...>Probably, in order to physically weaken the enemy, the assistant to the commandant Yermilov refused to accept Shurka even the milk brought from the outside. For others, he received transmissions. But they were speculators and bandits, people much less dangerous than SR Shura, ”wrote arrested Yevgenia Ratner, whose three-year-old son Shura was in Butyrka prison, in an evil and ironic letter to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Felix Dzerzhinsky.
They gave birth right there: in prisons, at the stage, in zones. From a letter to Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, about the expulsion of families of special settlers from Ukraine and Kursk: “They were sent to terrible frosts - babies and pregnant women who rode in calf cars on top of each other, and right there the women gave birth to their children (isn't this a mockery ); then they threw them out of the wagons like dogs, and then placed them in churches and dirty, cold sheds, where there was nowhere to move.”
As of April 1941, 2,500 women with young children were kept in NKVD prisons, 9,400 children under four years of age were in camps and colonies. In the same camps, colonies and prisons there were 8,500 pregnant women, about 3,000 of them in their ninth month of pregnancy.
A woman could also get pregnant in custody: being raped by another prisoner, a free zone worker or a guard, and it happened that of her own free will. “Just to the point of madness, to banging your head against the wall, to death I wanted love, tenderness, affection. And I wanted a child - a creature of the most dear and close, for which it would not be a pity to give my life, ”recalled the former prisoner of the Gulag Khava Volovich, sentenced to 15 years at the age of 21. And here are the memoirs of another prisoner born in the Gulag: “My mother, Zavyalova Anna Ivanovna, at the age of 16–17, was sent with a convoy of prisoners from the field to Kolyma for collecting several spikelets in her pocket ... Being raped, my mother gave birth on February 20, 1950 me, there were no amnesties for the birth of a child in those camps.” There were also those who gave birth, hoping for an amnesty or an easing of the regime.
But women were given exemption from work in the camp only immediately before childbirth. After the birth of a child, the prisoner was supposed to have several meters of footcloth, and for the period of feeding the baby - 400 grams of bread and black cabbage or bran soup three times a day, sometimes even with fish heads. At the beginning of the 40s, nurseries or children's centers began to be created in the zones: “I ask for your order to allocate 1.5 million rubles for organizing children's institutions for 5,000 places in camps and colonies and 13.5 million rubles for their maintenance in 1941, and in total 15 million rubles, ”writes Viktor Nasedkin, head of the GULAG of the NKVD of the USSR, in April 1941.
The children stayed in the nursery while the mothers worked. The “mothers” were taken under escort to feed, most of the time the babies spent under the supervision of nannies - women convicted of domestic crimes, as a rule, who had their own children. From the memoirs of prisoner G.M. Ivanova: “At seven in the morning, the nannies woke up the kids. With pokes and kicks, they lifted them out of unheated beds (for the “cleanliness” of the children, they did not cover them with blankets, but threw them over the beds). Pushing the children in the back with their fists and showering them with rude abuse, they changed their undershirts, washed them with ice water. The kids didn't even dare to cry. They only groaned like an old man and - gurgled. This terrible cooing rushed from cribs for days on end.
“From the kitchen, the nanny brought porridge flaming with heat. Having laid it out in bowls, she grabbed the first child she came across from the crib, bent his arms back, tied them with a towel to his body and began, like a turkey, stuffing hot porridge, spoon after spoon, leaving him no time to swallow, ”recalls Khava Volovich. Her daughter Eleonora, who was born in the camp, spent the first months of her life with her mother, and then ended up in an orphanage: “During dates, I found bruises on her body. I will never forget how, clinging to my neck, she pointed to the door with her emaciated hand and moaned: “Mommy, go home!”. She did not forget the bedbug, in which she saw the light and was with her mother all the time. On March 3, 1944, at the age of three months, the daughter of the prisoner, Volovich, died.
The death rate of children in the Gulag was high. According to archival data collected by the Norilsk society "Memorial", in 1951 there were 534 children in infant homes on the territory of the Norilsk camp, of which 59 children died. In 1952, 328 children were to be born, and the total number of babies would have been 803. However, in the documents of 1952, the number is 650 - that is, 147 children died.
The surviving children developed poorly both physically and mentally. The writer Yevgenia Ginzburg, who worked for some time in a children's home, recalls in her autobiographical novel The Steep Route that only a few four-year-old children were able to speak: “Inarticulate cries, facial expressions, and fights prevailed. “Where can they speak? Who taught them? Whom did they hear? - Anya explained to me with impassive intonation. - In the infant group, they just lie on their beds all the time. No one picks them up, even burst from screaming. It is forbidden to pick up. Just change wet diapers. If there are enough of them, of course.
Meetings of nursing mothers with children were short - from 15 minutes to half an hour every four hours. “One inspector from the prosecutor's office mentions a woman who, due to her work duties, was several minutes late for feeding, and she was not allowed to see the child. One former camp sanitation worker said in an interview that it took half an hour or 40 minutes to breastfeed a child, and if he didn’t eat, then the nanny would finish feeding him from a bottle,” writes Ann Applebaum in the book Gulag. A web of great terror." When the child was out of infancy, visits became even rarer, and soon the children were sent from the camp to the orphanage.
In 1934, the period of stay of a child with his mother was 4 years, later - 2 years. In 1936-1937, the stay of children in the camps was recognized as a factor that lowered the discipline and productivity of prisoners, and this period was reduced to 12 months by a secret instruction of the NKVD of the USSR. “Forcible deportations of camp children are planned and carried out like real military operations - so that the enemy is taken by surprise. Most often this happens late at night. But it is rarely possible to avoid heartbreaking scenes when the crazed mothers rush at the guards, at the barbed wire fence. The zone is shaking with screams for a long time, ”Jacques Rossi, a French political scientist, a former prisoner, author of the Gulag Handbook, describes being sent to orphanages.
About sending a child to an orphanage, a note was made in personal file mother, but the address of the destination was not indicated there. In the report of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenty Beria to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov dated March 21, 1939, it is reported that children seized from convicted mothers began to be given new names and surnames.
"Be careful with Lucy, her father is an enemy of the people"
If the parents of a child were arrested when he was no longer a baby, his own stage awaited him: wandering among relatives (if they remained), a children's reception center, an orphanage. In 1936-1938, the practice becomes common when, even if there are relatives who are ready to become guardians, the child of "enemies of the people" - convicted under political articles - is sent to an orphanage. From the memoirs of G.M. Rykova: “After the arrest of my parents, my sister and grandmother continued to live in our own apartment<...>Only we no longer occupied the whole apartment, but only one room, since one room (dad's office) was sealed, and the NKVD major and his family moved into the second while we were still there. On February 5, 1938, a lady came to us with a request to go with her to the head of the children's department of the NKVD, allegedly he was interested in how our grandmother treated us and how my sister and I live in general. Grandmother told her that it was time for us to go to school (we studied on the second shift), to which this person replied that she would give us a ride in her car to the second lesson so that we would take only textbooks and notebooks with us. She brought us to the Danilovsky orphanage for juvenile delinquents. In the receiver, we were photographed in full face and in profile, with some numbers attached to our chests, and our fingerprints were taken. We never returned home."
“The day after my father was arrested, I went to school. In front of the whole class, the teacher announced: “Children, be careful with Lyusya Petrova, her father is an enemy of the people.” I took my bag, left school, came home and told my mother that I would not go to school anymore,” recalls Lyudmila Petrova from the city of Narva. After her mother was also arrested, the 12-year-old girl, along with her 8-year-old brother, ended up in a children's reception center. There they were shaved bald, fingerprinted and separated, sent separately to orphanages.
The daughter of Commander Ieronim Uborevich Vladimir, who was repressed in the "Tukhachevsky case", who was 13 years old at the time of her parents' arrest, recalls that children of "enemies of the people" were isolated from outside world and from other children. “They didn’t let other children near us, they didn’t even let us near the windows. No one close to us was allowed in… Vetka and I were 13 at the time, Petya was 15, Sveta T. and her friend Giza Steinbrück were 15. The rest were all younger. There were two tiny Ivanovs 5 and 3 years old. And the little one called her mother all the time. It was pretty hard. We were irritated, embittered. We felt like criminals, everyone started smoking and no longer imagined ordinary life, school".
In overcrowded orphanages, the child was from several days to months, and then a stage similar to an adult: a "black raven", a freight car. From the memoirs of Aldona Volynskaya: “Uncle Misha, a representative of the NKVD, announced that we would go to an orphanage on the Black Sea in Odessa. We were taken to the station on a "black crow", the back door was open, and the guard was holding a revolver in his hand. On the train, we were told to say that we were excellent students and therefore to the end school year We are going to Artek. And here is the testimony of Anna Ramenskaya: “The children were divided into groups. The little brother and sister, having fallen into different places, cried desperately, clinging to each other. And asked them not to separate all the children. But neither requests nor bitter crying helped. We were put into freight wagons and taken away. So I ended up in an orphanage near Krasnoyarsk. How we lived with a drunken boss, with drunkenness, stabbing, to tell for a long time and sadly.
The children of "enemies of the people" were taken from Moscow to Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd, from St. Petersburg to Minsk and Kharkov, from Khabarovsk to Krasnoyarsk.
GULAG for younger students
Like orphanages, orphanages were overcrowded: as of August 4, 1938, 17,355 children were seized from repressed parents, and another 5,000 were planned for removal. And this is not counting those who were transferred to orphanages from camp children's centers, as well as numerous homeless children and children of special settlers - dispossessed peasants.
"The room is 12 square meters. meters are 30 boys; 7 beds for 38 children, where recidivist children sleep. Two eighteen-year-old residents raped a technical service, robbed a store, they drink with the supply manager, the watchman buys stolen goods. “Children sit on dirty bunks, play cards that are cut from portraits of leaders, fight, smoke, break bars on windows and smash walls in order to escape.” “There are no dishes, they eat from ladles. There is one cup for 140 people, there are no spoons, you have to eat in turns and with your hands. There is no lighting, there is one lamp for the entire orphanage, but it is without kerosene.” These are quotations from the reports of the management of orphanages in the Urals, written in the early 1930s.
"Children's houses" or "children's playgrounds", as children's homes were called in the 1930s, were located in almost unheated, overcrowded barracks, often without beds. From the memoirs of the Dutch Nina Wissing about the orphanage in Boguchary: “There were two large wicker sheds with gates instead of doors. The roof was leaking, there were no ceilings. In such a barn there were a lot of children's beds. They fed us on the street under a canopy.
On October 15, 1933, the then head of the Gulag, Matvey Berman, reports serious problems with the nutrition of children in a secret note: “The nutrition of children is unsatisfactory, there are no fats and sugar, bread norms are insufficient<...>In this regard, in some orphanages there are mass diseases of children with tuberculosis and malaria. So, in the Poludenovsky orphanage of the Kolpashevsky district, out of 108 children, only 1 is healthy, in the Shirokovsky - Kargasoksky district - out of 134 children are sick: tuberculosis - 69 and malaria - 46.
“Mostly soup made from dry fish, smelt and potatoes, sticky black bread, sometimes cabbage soup,” recalls the orphanage menu Natalya Savelyeva, in the thirties a pupil of a preschool group of one of the “children’s camps” in the village of Mago on the Amur. Children ate pasture, looked for food in the garbage.
Bullying and physical punishment were commonplace. “In front of my eyes, the director beat older boys with their heads against the wall and punches in the face, because during the search she found bread crumbs in their pockets, suspecting them that they were preparing crackers to escape. The educators told us so: “No one needs you.” When we were taken out for a walk, the children of the nannies and teachers pointed their fingers at us and shouted: “Enemies, enemies are being led!” And we probably really were like them. Our heads were shaved bald, we were dressed haphazardly. Linen and clothes came from the confiscated property of the parents, ”recalls Savelyeva. “Once during a quiet hour, I couldn’t sleep at all. Aunt Dina, the teacher, sat on my head, and if I hadn’t turned around, I might not have been alive,” testifies another former pupil of the orphanage, Nelya Simonova.
Counterrevolution and the Quartet in Literature
Ann Applebaum in Gulag. The Web of the Great Terror” provides the following statistics, based on data from the archives of the NKVD: in 1943-1945, 842,144 homeless children passed through orphanages. Most of them ended up in orphanages and vocational schools, some went back to their relatives. And 52,830 people ended up in labor educational colonies - they turned from children into juvenile prisoners.
Back in 1935, the well-known resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On measures to combat juvenile delinquency" was published, which amended the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: according to this document, children from the age of 12 could be convicted of theft, violence and murder "with the use of all penalties." At the same time, in April 1935, under the heading “top secret”, an “Explanation to prosecutors and chairmen of courts” was published, signed by USSR Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky and Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR Alexander Vinokurov: “Among the measures of criminal punishment provided for by Art. 1 of the said resolution also applies to capital punishment (execution)."
As of 1940, there were 50 labor colonies for minors in the USSR. From the memoirs of Jacques Rossi: “Children's labor camps, which contain underage thieves, prostitutes and murderers of both sexes, turn into hell. Children under 12 years of age also get there, since it often happens that a caught eight- or ten-year-old thief hides the name and address of their parents, but the police do not insist and write down in the protocol - “age about 12 years old”, which allows the court to “legally” convict the child and send to the camps. The local authorities are glad that there will be one less potential criminal in the area entrusted to them. The author met in the camps many children aged - apparently - 7-9 years old. Some did not yet know how to pronounce individual consonants correctly.
At least until February 1940 (and, according to the recollections of former prisoners, even later), convicted children were also kept in adult colonies. So, according to the "Order on the Norilsk construction and labor camps of the NKVD" No. 168 of July 21, 1936, "imprisoned youngsters" from 14 to 16 years old were allowed to use four hours a day for general work, and another four hours were to be devoted to study and "cultural and educational work". For prisoners from 16 to 17 years old, a 6-hour working day was already established.
Former prisoner Efrosinia Kersnovskaya recalls the girls who were with her at the stage: “On average, 13-14 years old. The eldest, 15 years old, gives the impression of a really spoiled girl. No wonder she's already been to the nursery penal colony and it has already been "corrected" for life.<...>The smallest is Manya Petrova. She is 11 years old. His father was killed, his mother died, his brother was taken into the army. It's hard for everyone, who needs an orphan? She picked an onion. Not the bow itself, but the feather. They “have mercy” on her: for the plunder they gave not ten, but one year. The same Kersnovskaya writes about 16-year-old blockade survivors she met in custody, who dug anti-tank ditches with adults, and during the bombing rushed into the forest and stumbled upon the Germans. They treated them to chocolate, which the girls told about when they went to the Soviet soldiers, and were sent to the camp.
Prisoners of the Norilsk camp remember Spanish children who ended up in the adult Gulag. Solzhenitsyn writes about them in The Gulag Archipelago: “Spanish children are the very ones who were taken out during civil war, but became adults after World War II. Brought up in our boarding schools, they blended very poorly with our life. Many rushed home. They were declared socially dangerous and sent to prison, and especially persistent - 58, part 6 - spying for ... America.
A special attitude was to the children of the repressed: according to the circular of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 106 to the heads of the UNKVD of the territories and regions “On the procedure for the placement of children of repressed parents over the age of 15”, issued in May 1938, “socially dangerous children showing anti-Soviet and terrorist sentiments and actions must be brought to justice on a common basis and sent to the camps according to the personal outfits of the GULAG NKVD.
Such "socially dangerous" ones were interrogated on a general basis, with the use of torture. So, the 14-year-old son of the commander Iona Yakir, who was shot in 1937, Peter was subjected to a night interrogation in the Astrakhan prison and accused of "organizing a horse gang." He was sentenced to 5 years. Sixteen-year-old Pole Jerzy Kmecik, who was caught in 1939 while trying to escape to Hungary (after the Red Army entered Poland), was forced to sit and stand on a stool for many hours during interrogation, and was also fed salty soup and was not given water.
In 1938, because “being hostile to the Soviet system, he systematically carried out counter-revolutionary activities among the children of the orphanage,” 16-year-old Vladimir Moroz, the son of an “enemy of the people,” who lived in the Annensky orphanage, was arrested and placed in an adult Kuznetsk prison. To sanction the arrest, Moroz corrected his date of birth - he was credited with one year. The reason for the accusation was the letters that a pioneer leader found in the pocket of the teenager's trousers - Vladimir wrote to his arrested older brother. After a search, diaries were found and confiscated from the teenager, in which he, interspersed with entries about the “four” in literature and “uncivilized” teachers, talks about the repressions and cruelty of the Soviet leadership. The same Pioneer leader and four pupils of the orphanage acted as witnesses at the trial. Moroz received three years in labor camp, but did not get into the camp - in April 1939 he died in the Kuznetsk prison "from tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines."
The network has a resource "GULAG - with a camera in the camps." If anyone has not yet seen the horrors of Stalinism, welcome. You just need to keep in mind that here pictures of those shot by the Nazis are given out as photographs of victims of the camps. Soviet people and even Armenian children evicted by the Turks. The scale of falsification is such that people are perplexed: “Why did the compilers need this - in the presence of undeniable crimes?” Perhaps because a lie is more effective than the truth, and the crimes that they would like to tell us about simply do not exist? You can’t cover it in just one article, but you can take a short walk through the Stalinist camps - with documents in your hands.
Accusations of the use of forced, and even slave labor of Gulag prisoners have become a commonplace in any discussion about the Stalinist period.
At the same time, few people know that the prisoners of the Gulag received a salary for their work. " This money in administrative documents initially and until the end of the 1940s. were designated by the terms "monetary incentive" or "monetary bonus". The concept of "salary" was also sometimes used, but officially such a name was introduced only in 1950.”, - we read in the study “The structure and stimulation of forced labor in the Gulag ...”. The article was published on the website of the Memorial society, and it is not easy to suspect him of trying to whitewash Stalinism.
From the study we learn that, as of 1939, " the bonus payment was necessarily credited to the prisoner's personal account. During the month, working prisoners were given money in an amount not exceeding the monthly bonus. In addition to bonuses, prisoners, depending on their behavior at work and at home, could be issued with the permission of the head of the camp unit and personal money in the amount of not more than 100 rubles. per month».
The authors of the work note that “ cash bonuses were paid to prisoners "for all the work done in the labor camps...". At the same time, over time, the rules for payments have changed: “ prisoners could receive the money they earned in their hands in the amount of not more than 150 rubles (and not 100 rubles, as according to the instructions of 1939 and 1947) at a time. Money in excess of this amount was credited to their personal accounts and issued as the previously issued money was spent.».
The salary of prisoners is also mentioned in the book “Prisoners at the Construction Sites of Communism” published with the support of RAO UES. Here evidence is given from a later period - 1951, however, according to these data, we can more fully present the practice of paying wages to prisoners.
« From the wages of prisoners were deducted "at the average cost of expenses for the camp as a whole, the cost of guaranteed food, clothing and footwear, and income tax, so that, under all conditions, at least 10% of actual earnings were given to working prisoners" ... So , at the construction of the Kuibyshev hydroelectric power station with the accrued average monthly salary of prisoners in 1951 at 397 rubles. on hand they received an average of 200 rubles. At the same time, more than 7% of prisoners received only a minimum 10% guaranteed income.».
Noteworthy is the 10 percent guaranteed earnings of a prisoner of the Gulag.
How justified are the accusations of the Stalinist USSR in the use of forced labor of prisoners? This can be judged by international legal acts. Yes, the convention international organization Labor of 1930 established for the first time that each country member of the ILO " undertakes to abolish the use of forced or compulsory labor in all its forms as soon as possible».
At the same time, he does not consider labor to be forced, demanded from a person as a result of a sentence". Those. the ILO Convention did not apply to prisoners.
Thus, the work of the prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag was not only not considered forced from the point of view of the international norms in force at that time (and even today), it was also paid, which was an advanced phenomenon in terms of the labor legislation of that period. It was only in 1949 that the Convention on the Protection of Wages appeared, on the basis of which lawyers conclude that “ working without pay is tantamount to forced labor».
The authors of the already mentioned book from RAO UES, however, argue that “ From the point of view of the moral and legal criteria adopted in civilized societies, the Stalinist terror and its derivative - the economy of forced labor - cannot be assessed otherwise than as criminal". On what basis these conclusions are made - one can only guess.
The reasons why they appear is not difficult to understand. An impartial account of the realities of the Gulag destroys the long-formed myth about the Stalinist camps. It would seem a trifle - the salary of prisoners. But how many questions arise! Why did the insidious Soviet authorities pay money to "suicide bombers" in "extermination camps" where millions and millions of dissidents were tortured? To prolong the agony? To make fun of?
But if the prisoners were given money in their hands, then they could spend it somewhere? And indeed, it is worth looking at the documents, as it turns out the existence in the camps and colonies of the Gulag " chain stores, stalls, buffets". You can also read about this on the website of the Memorial society, in the Order of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 608 “On improving trade for prisoners in camps and colonies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs” dated 1949. In which, in particular, it is said that in a number of camps trade for prisoners remains unsatisfactory - a number of items of goods and products are missing.
And if you delve into the problem, it becomes clear that the camp stalls and buffets were not limited. For example, from the “Report of Prosecutor V. Gulyakov to the Head of the Department for Supervision of Places of Detention of the USSR Prosecutor’s Office on the regime and conditions of detention in Kuneevsky ITL” we learn about “ weak supervision of their [prisoners] behavior outside the camp”, which leads, in particular, to “hooliganism, association with civilians, drunkenness and smuggling of vodka into residential and industrial areas».
Or, for example, from the complaint of prisoner N.P. Yanysh to the Supreme Court of the USSR": “... I had money, I decided to buy vodka, having drunk the vodka brought to me - I drank alone - I went to my workplace in the lower part of the pit, where my team worked. On the road I was wounded in the head by persons unknown to me. A brigade was working thirty meters away, people who helped me ...»
Not much like the atmosphere of monstrous terror and the extermination of the unfortunate prisoners of the camps, is it?
For this reason, real documents are dangerous for those anti-Soviet people who have made the denunciation of the mythical horrors of the Stalinist regime their hallmark. Their whole ideology is built on lies and omissions - somewhere in small things, and somewhere on a large scale. And this lie, if you look at the real picture, crumbles to dust under the pressure of facts.
Isn't it time to return to them the call once thrown to society - "To live not by lies"?
Dmitry Lyskov
Petrov Kirill Alexandrovich
Friends, today there will be a difficult and terrible post about what was actually done to people in Stalin's times in the dungeons of the OGPU-NKVD, as well as in the camps of the Gulag system, about which, for example, former prisoners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov wrote a lot.
Ordinary Soviet citizens of those years, from among those who go to work every day as some kind of office workers, for the most part did not know what exactly was happening somewhere nearby, and what terrible mechanisms the Soviet system hides behind the facade. People only watched how one or another acquaintance suddenly disappeared, they were afraid of black cars, the night light of headlights in the yard and the creak of car brakes, but they preferred to remain silent - fearing this dark unknown.
What actually happened in the Gulag became known much later, including from the drawings of those who saw all these things with their own eyes. These are very scary drawings, but you need to look at them - to remember and never repeat.
Under the cut, the continuation and the same drawings from the Gulag.
First, a little about who drew all this. The name of the author of drawings and captions to them is Danzig Baldaev- and unlike most other artists of the Gulag, Danzig was "on the other side of the bars" - that is, he was not a prisoner, but a real warden, and saw a little more than ordinary prisoners.
Danzig Baldaev was born in 1925 in the family of a Buryat folklorist and ethnographer Sergei Petrovich Baldaev and a peasant woman Stepanida Yegorovna. Danzig was left without a mother early - she died when the boy was only 10 years old. In 1938, his father was arrested on a denunciation, and Danzig ended up in an orphanage for the children of "enemies of the people." As Danzig later said, there were 156 children in the house. commanders The Red Army, the nobles and the intelligentsia - many were fluent in several European languages.
After serving in the army on the border with Manchuria, Danzig Baldaev falls into the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - he works as a guard in a prison and begins to collect prison folklore and tattoos, as well as make sketches. During the years of service, Danzig visited dozens of Stalin's camps in the Gulag system, was in Central Asia, Ukraine, in the North and in the Baltics.
As Danzig said after the fall of the USSR - during the years of Stalinism, not only his father was arrested, but also 58 people from among his relatives - they all died in the dungeons of the OGPU-NKVD, according to Baldaev - they were all literate people - land surveyors, doctors, technicians, machine operators, teachers... Perhaps this is what made Danzig Baldaev draw in detail and in detail all the horrors of the Gulag. As he would later write in his autobiography, "It's a pity, I'm already over seventy, but at the same time it's good that I managed to scoop up a part of the ridge from our irrevocably leaving slave past and put it in all its glory for future generations".
Now let's look at the pictures.
02. Interrogation in the OGPU-NKVD. That's about the same things they did to people before they were sent to the execution chamber or to the Gulag camps. In the Stalinist planned economy, there was a “plan”, including for spies - a person could be arrested “for espionage” on a denunciation, if, for example, in the kitchen in the closet he has not cheap margarine, but butter - well, obviously financed from Japanese intelligence ! Such a denunciation was written by the neighbors in the communal apartment themselves, and after the arrest of the "spy" they received full possession of his room and property.
Not avoided the arrest and delusional charges, including celebrities with a worldwide reputation. Vsevolod Meyerhold, the famous theater director was arrested on June 20, 1939 - he was accused of "collaborating with German, Japanese, Latvian and other intelligence services." The sick 65-year-old Meyerhold was laid on the floor face down and beaten with a rubber tourniquet on his legs, heels on his back, beaten in the face from a height. Meyerhold was tortured for a total of seven months, after which he was shot as a spy and organizer of the "Trotskyist group."
03. Interrogation of "enemies of the people". People were interrogated for several days without sleep, water, food and rest. A man who had fallen to the floor was doused with water, beaten and then lifted to his feet again. For their "zeal" the executioners were awarded orders and honorably retired in the fifties and sixties.
04. The use of ancient torture during interrogations - hanging people on the rack. 
05. The procedure for the execution by the NKVD of party cadres from the national republics of the USSR. As Danzig Baldaev writes, such "procedures" were carried out periodically during the Stalin years in order to prevent the emergence of a national sense of justice in the Union republics.
06. A very scary drawing called "9 grams - the ticket of the CPSU to a" happy childhood. orphanages were overcrowded, plus the Soviet authorities considered such children as their potential enemies in the future ...
07. Torture of a prisoner by binding with a "swallow". Such things were used as a "punishment" for some misdeeds, and as a means to knock out confessions (most often in what a person did not commit).
08. Interrogation of women was often conducted like this. In general, Danzig Baldaev has a lot of drawings with torture, including women, I will not give them all here - they are too scary.
09. Later, women who ended up in the camp with their children often had their children taken away. Varlam Shalamov in one of the "Kolyma stories" described a notebook with drawings of such a child from the Gulag - the fabulous Ivan Tsarevich was dressed in a padded jacket, earflaps and had a PPSh on his shoulder, and around the perimeter of the "kingdom" was stretched barbed wire and there were towers with machine gunners ...
10. The privileged position of criminals in the Gulag camps. The OGPU-NKVD often found it very easy with real criminals mutual language so that they press and suppress the "political" in every possible way. Such cases are repeatedly described by Varlam Shalamov - "political" thieves' criminals declared - "you are an enemy of the people, and I am a friend of the people!"
11. Camp relations between criminals in the Gulag. Losing cards was one of the formal reasons for reprisals against political ones - at first the criminals forced (under the threat of beating or death) to sit down to play cards with them, and after a predictable loss, they dealt with the loser, allegedly having a "formal reason" for that. According to the internal camp articles, such "showdowns" took place under the guise of "these criminals again did not divide something among themselves."
12. The massacre of the "enemy of the people", who did not want to write off his production norms on criminals (without which, by the way, it was often impossible to get even the most elementary ration). Such murders were not uncommon in the Gulag, the camp administration forgave everything to the criminals, writing off such incidents as "accidents."
13. Another type of "camp self-government" in Stalin's camps is the exemplary execution of "objectionable" people by the criminals themselves. If in the Nazi camps the prisoners tried to stick together and somehow support each other, then in the Stalinist dungeons society was divided into "castes and classes" even in the camp.
14. The drawing is called "Sending blind people to a settlement in the Arctic Ocean", thus in the Gulag they often got rid of corpses - in winter the bodies were thrown into an ice hole, in summer they were buried in long trenches, which were later covered with earth and planted with turf.
15. The criminal kills the "bull", which he lured into the company to escape. Such cases are repeatedly described in the literature about the Gulag, including Varlam Shalamov - one of the people who were sitting in the camp, whom the thieves suddenly began to feed, suspected that he was being prepared for the role of a "bull".
16. The “enemies of the people” killed during the escape were brought back to the camp like this - they were killed, as a rule, by a special group of the NKVD-MVD, and the prisoners themselves carried them to the camp.
17. GULAG "joke" for newcomers to the zone in the winter:
18. People who could not stand the torment sometimes simply rushed into the restricted area under the bullets of machine gunners ... 
Yes, I forgot to say - even at that time there was very tasty ice cream.
Write in the comments what you think about this.
"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners.
Rebuking Nazi Germany in the genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the AUCPB, that the Nazis special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-1930s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Alexander Solzhenitsin also participated in a special TV show hosted live by the NHK of Japan (by phone).
In the process of reading the material, the following is striking: firstly, all the photographs presented are either macro photography or shooting of individual objects or buildings; there are no photographs that would allow us to assess the scope of the camp as a whole (except for two, in which nothing is visible). Moreover, all photos are extremely small, which makes it difficult to adequately evaluate them. Secondly, the text is replete with eyewitness statements, mentions of some archives and names, some statistics, but there is not a single specific scan or photograph of any document.
According to the information from the article, in the aforementioned camp they were engaged in three things: uranium ore, enriched it and put some experiments.
Mining uranium ore was conducted by hands, and again enriched by hands on pallets in primitive-looking ovens. In support of this, a photograph of the insides of some abandoned building is shown. In the foreground is a row of partitions made of incomprehensible material. Apparently it is understood that coal was burning below or something else, and the same pallet was kept on top. It is not clear why it was impossible to build an ordinary oven, and what these, judging by the photograph, rather thin partitions are made of. In general, there are only guesses about the flow of the technical process, and the direction of these guesses is exclusively one-sided. It is alleged that the convicts employed in this job had a catastrophically short life expectancy.
In general, the picture is not surprising. At that time, little was known about radioactive materials. The extraction of uranium ore by the hands of a convict is also not such a shocking event, because it is quite logical in the conditions of that time to send prisoners to this work. Raises questions exclusively about the technological process of enrichment, which in the described form is dangerous not so much for the s / c, but for the administration, civilians and guards. Judging by the photo, the building is quite low in height. This means that there is no question of security guards walking around the perimeter of the hall with machine guns above the heads of the convicts (and no remains of these structures are visible, while the mounts for pipes under the ceiling have been preserved). Apparently, the guards were present directly in the hall, and received the same dose of radiation as the workers. Moreover, the same guard could well become a victim - a desperate s / c could easily splash in her direction from the pallet. Such a routine is very strange, given the fact that since time immemorial, as far as I know, a rule has been formed - the protection of the s / c should be carried out in such a way that the guard has a clear and undeniable advantage. Thus, the topic of uranium enrichment has not been disclosed.
Finally, let's move on to the most interesting. The author cites a number of information that indicates the presence in this camp of a certain mega-secret laboratory, in which scientists, among whom "there were even professors", conducted no less secret experiments. Looking ahead, I note that the topic of these experiments was also not disclosed.
The author traces two versions - experiments on the effect of radiation on the human body and experiments on the brain of a s / c. Judging by the materials presented, he likes the second version more - which, it should be noted, looks much worse than the first. Experiments on the effect of radiation in the conditions of its production by hand are a banal and quite logical matter. Similar experiments were also carried out in the stronghold of democracy - with the exception that the experimental subjects were ordinary citizens who came to stare at the atomic mushroom (I read somewhere that some VIP places were sold almost for money). Yes, and they mined uranium ore for the United States, clearly not white-collar workers. As a result, the topic of experiments on radiation exposure was silenced by the mention of the unfortunate fate of experimental horses, whose bones were found in one of the barracks.
But with the brain, everything is more complicated. Photographs of several individual skulls with trepanation are given as evidence, and only assurances that there are many such corpses. However, the author could well be shocked by what he saw, and forget about his camera for a while; although, judging by his words, he had been there more than once - so there were opportunities.
Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, extracted no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a "not clean" picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances appear in the brain tissues, released during pain and psychological shock.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs into it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.
In confirmation of the words about the presence of experiments on people, a fragment of an interview with a certain lady, allegedly a former convict of that camp, is given. The lady indirectly confirms the fact of the experiments, but to the leading question about trepanation to a living experimental subject, she honestly admits that she is not in the know.
Finally, the author saved up a few photos that a certain “ another boss from big stars on shoulder straps", and it is specified that " for a solid dollar bribe, he agreed to rummage through the archives of Butugychag". This case is very curious. Isn't it true, a familiar picture from various films, and indeed similar stories - a certain citizen in civilian clothes, whose conscience has stuck, transmits mega-secret data to bring his superiors to clean water. Something similar even somewhere in ... hmm ... funny Edvard Radzinsky had - "a railway worker told me ..." Nonsense? With regard to the clerk from the office of "Horns and Hooves" - not necessarily. With regard to "citizens in civilian clothes" - more than likely. Actually, the author did not even consider it necessary to critically consider the current situation, naively believing that “ for a hefty dollar bribe”, popularly known as a bribe, anyone will give him anything. In this situation, systems thinking draws at least three options: the first - everything was as it was, they passed what was needed; the second - it was part of a special operation, they handed me over; the third - " another boss” corny decided to earn extra money on a naive whistleblower, pretended to be an ally and sucked in frank bullshit.
The first option is unrealistic because it assumes that the boss has some ideological principles for which he is ready not only to sacrifice his career, a comfortable chair, a stable income for the sake of some lover of revelations, but to commit an act of treason in the eyes of his colleagues and superiors. A simple “struggle for the truth” is not enough here, a powerful and strong ideology is needed, which, in fact, neither the author nor his sponsors offer.
The second option is unrealistic because it makes little sense to carry out such special operations - all these diggers are already in plain sight, and you can put the necessary photos in another way.
The third option, I think, looks the most reliable. Why? To clarify, let's try to carefully consider the transferred "secret materials".
So, the first photo in the 18+ category contains a number of interesting fragments, some of which I highlighted with a frame and adjusted the brightness / contrast in order to try to make the image more informative:
We are shown a table on which a craniotomy is performed. The body of an obviously male lies on the table, not fixed in any way, which indicates that the procedure is performed on the corpse. Some damage is clearly visible on the scalped area of the skull. On closer examination, we can assume that we are dealing with a wound inflicted by a sharp object:
The body lies on white sheets, which for some reason ... are dry. No stains of blood or fluid from the cranium are visible. Moreover, the scalp is tucked under the head, and also did not leave a single stain on the sheet. There are several explanations here - either the blood and fluid from the skull were previously pumped out, or the scalping and trepanation of the occipital part was carried out in another place (with a different set of sheets), or we are dealing with installation.
In the background we see several corpses or their parts, as well as a fragment of a gurney. It is surprising that such a model of a gurney can be found in some hospitals - was it really the same even in 47 or 52?
What is still puzzling is this. If we are talking about the experiments, it is extremely doubtful that they were carried out in the same room with the storage of corpses. It can also be seen that the corpses lie rather carelessly - most likely, they were recently delivered.
Now the second photo in the "from 18+" category, or rather, a collage. None of the fragments also shows any significant wet spots. But best of all, the room itself is visible on them, where trepanation is performed:
We see tiles on the walls. It is strange, isn't it, to import scarce building material into a very remote area? Moreover, it does not hurt and is needed in this case - it is enough to paint the walls with light paint. However, the room apparently laid out by him to the ceiling - isn't it a very strange luxury, in the conditions of the recently ended war, albeit for a mega-secret laboratory, but located not in Moscow, and not even in Arkhangelsk.
Also of considerable surprise is the central heating battery. It seems perfectly normal to have a boiler house for heating the laboratory and administration buildings, and for sure there was one. However, this battery has a painfully strange shape ... As far as I know, batteries with sections of this shape began to be installed in the late 60s - early 70s of the last century, when this camp, as we know from the article, no longer existed. Feature- wider section shape with edging. The battery sections that were installed earlier were narrower, and when shooting from this distance, their upper parts would look sharper, and not blunt, as they are here (see photo below). Unfortunately, I do not yet have a photo of such an old battery (they are now few where you can find it), I will do it as soon as possible.
Raises questions and the image, apparently a tattoo, on the chest of the body. It is very strange that it depicts a profile reminiscent of Lenin. It's like - s / c in a fit of fanatical Leninism ordered such a tattoo in the zone? Or was it a bloody gebnya that pricked everyone for edification (why, actually?).
Questions about damage to the skull and tattoo sent to a competent person. If he can clarify something, I'll make an update.
So, what kind of photo did they show us? In my opinion, it looks more like a photo from the anatomy of some medical school, where students are shown the process of trepanation on an ownerless corpse. The bodies in the background are material for further work. Citizens frightened by such cynicism should understand that this is a necessary component of the profession of a doctor, pathologist or pharmacist, simply because it helps to maintain a more or less healthy psyche.
It is also possible that we are talking about an autopsy of the body of a person who was wounded in the head with a sharp object, in order to clarify in more detail the nature of the injury and the level of damage to the brain.
In any case, in my opinion, there is no reason to believe that these photos were taken in that camp during the “experiment”. Thus, the version about the sale of frank bullshit to a naive human rights fighter for a handful of green presidents takes on a very real shape ... Moreover, one can hardly doubt that such a “citizen in civilian clothes” has great opportunities supply similar "secret shots" wholesale and retail to everyone.
However, I want to note that if the trepanned skulls were indeed found in those burials, such operations could well have been done there. Whether they were done, and for what purpose, and what actually happened in that camp - should be shown by normal studies aimed at establishing the truth, and not fitting evidence to an existing and generously funded thesis.
The second quarter of the 20th century was one of the most difficult periods in the history of our country. This time is marked not only by the Great Patriotic War but also mass repressions. During the existence of the Gulag (1930-1956), according to various sources, from 6 to 30 million people visited the labor camps dispersed throughout the republics.
After Stalin's death, the camps began to be abolished, people tried to leave these places as soon as possible, many projects that had been given thousands of lives fell into decay. However, evidence of that dark era is still alive.
"Perm-36"
labor colony strict regime in the village of Kuchino, Perm Region, existed until 1988. In the days of the Gulag, convicted law enforcement officers were sent here, and after that - the so-called political ones. The unofficial name "Perm-36" appeared in the 70s, when the institution was given the designation VS-389/36.
Six years after closing in place former colony The Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repressions "Perm-36" was opened. The crumbling barracks were restored and museum exhibits were placed in them. Lost fences, towers, signal and warning structures, engineering communications were recreated. In 2004, the World Monuments Fund included "Perm-36" in the list of 100 specially protected monuments of world culture. However, now the museum is on the verge of closing - due to insufficient funding and the protests of the communist forces.
Mine "Dneprovsky"
Quite a few wooden buildings have been preserved on the Kolyma River, 300 kilometers from Magadan. This is the former Dneprovsky hard labor camp. In the 1920s, a large tin deposit was discovered here, and especially dangerous criminals were sent to work. In addition to Soviet citizens, Finns, Japanese, Greeks, Hungarians and Serbs atoned for their guilt at the mine. You can imagine the conditions in which they had to work: in summer it can be up to 40 degrees of heat, and in winter - up to minus 60.
From the memoirs of prisoner Pepelyaev: “We worked in two shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch was brought to work. Lunch is 0.5 liters of soup (water with black cabbage), 200 grams of oatmeal and 300 grams of bread. Working during the day is certainly easier. From the night shift, until you get to the zone, until you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep - already lunch, you lie down - check, and then dinner, and - to work.
Road on the bones
The infamous 1,600-kilometer abandoned highway leading from Magadan to Yakutsk. The road began to be built in 1932. Tens of thousands of people who participated in the laying of the route and died there were buried right under the roadway. At least 25 people died every day during construction. For this reason, the tract was called the road on the bones.
The camps along the route were named after kilometer marks. In total, about 800 thousand people passed through the “road of bones”. With the construction of the Kolyma federal highway, the old Kolyma highway fell into disrepair. To this day, human remains are found along it.
Karlag
The Karaganda forced labor camp in Kazakhstan, which operated from 1930 to 1959, occupied a huge area: about 300 kilometers from north to south and 200 from east to west. All local residents were deported in advance and admitted to the lands uncultivated by the state farm only in the early 50s. According to reports, they actively assisted in the search for and detention of the fugitives.
There were seven separate settlements on the territory of the camp, in which more than 20 thousand prisoners lived in total. The camp administration was based in the village of Dolinka. Several years ago, a museum in memory of the victims of political repressions was opened in that building, and a monument was erected in front of it.
Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp
The monastery prison on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands appeared in early XVIII century. Priests, heretics and sectarians who were disobedient to the sovereign's will were kept in isolation here. In 1923, when the State Political Directorate under the NKVD decided to expand the network of northern special purpose camps (SLON), one of the largest correctional institutions in the USSR appeared on Solovki.
The number of prisoners (mostly those convicted of serious crimes) increased many times every year. From 2.5 thousand in 1923 to more than 71 thousand by 1930. All the property of the Solovetsky Monastery was transferred to the use of the camp. But already in 1933 it was disbanded. Today, there is only a restored monastery here.
