The Gulag Archipelago

[thorbiorn]

In the previous post I mentioned Kolyma, but what does this region look like today? Here is a Russian youtube. Even if there are no subtitles, one may be able to get an idea, because they pass through some of the areas where ealier camps were located. Beautiful, but cold and inhospitable.
Колыма: жизнь на краю света | НЕИЗВЕСТНАЯ РОССИЯ

 

[Hi_Henry]

I guess in those days it was truly a Russian Roulette as to how your loss was decided. Check out this story,
Nazino 1
Nazino 2

 

[thorbiorn]

The following BBC documentary, see Children of the Gulag - DocuWiki has a selection of interviews with people who were sent to or born in the Gulag. The langauge of the speaker is Gaelic, with English subtitles:

Children of the Gulag (2013)

 

[Aeneas]

Where I am the video above did not show due to country domain (it said). If other people have the same problem perhaps this link with the same documentary will play

 

[thorbiorn]

I guess in those days it was truly a Russian Roulette as to how your loss was decided. Check out this story,
Nazino 1
Nazino 2

Thank you for sharing, this is a scary story, a terrible experiment, still it might in fact be what could happen if infrastructures collapsed in densely populated areas which rely on a steady stream of supplies. The lesson for the Sovjets was that sending a group with a high proportion of city dwellers with no practical skills into deserted and harsh areas was not an economical way to get work done, or to achieve even some progress, because too many died. Besides, the location was not in some ultra remote part of Siberia, but only 500 km north of Tomsk; there was no way to hide the incident.

 

[Niall]

Interview with Stephen Cohen on Stalin's legacy:

Cohen has studied Soviet history up one side and down the other, and lived in the USSR in the 70s and 80s conducting research. The figure he gives for the number Stalin killed is 'roughly 20 million'. His key point though is that Stalin was 'the architect, designer, mastermind' of The Terror, and that it lasted until his death in 1953. Note also Cohen's description of Stalin's 'psychological worldview': he believed everyone wore a mask of loyalty, and that behind that mask they plotted his downfall.

This pretty much seals it for me: there is room for acknowledging Stalin's achievements (the first 'mountain', to use Cohen's metaphor), but the legacy of his second 'mountain' (of people he had arrested, tortured and killed) means that he was monstrous as a ruler.