1930s, deportations of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians Estonians, - - PDF document

Image and Memory. A photographic legacy of GULAG. Tomasz Kizny X My presentation today consists of two parts. Firstly I would like to start with brief review on the exhibition “GULAG” which is going to be open tonight in Verona which shows part of material published in GULAG book. In the second part I wish to present more general overview of discovered till present- day photographs of Gulag and to talk about its role in the process of creating collective memory. X Let me start with few basic facts about Soviet Gulags. Map explanation. Gulag from Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (Main Camps Administration) was soviet security department that administered vast system of forced-labor camps in the USSR, also responsible for prisons, deportations and exiles (internal banishment). The Gulag was officially established in the 1930 and terminated in 1960. But since publication The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974 the term Gulag is used as name for entire Soviet camps system since first camps (May 1918) were established during the early Bolshevik years. The last camp for political prisoners in the USSR “Perm-36” was closed in 1988. The total number of people passed through the Gulags in period 1930-1956 is estimated for 18 million. These figure does not include other repressions did under Gulag administration: victims of “special exile” (internal banishment) and mass deportations like “kulaks” (richer peasants) during collectivization in

1930s, deportations of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians Estonians, Caucasians, Tatars, Volga Germans and others during the war. Adding the numbers together

• f all categories of citizens repressed by Gulag system the total number of

forced laborers and exiled in the USSR in period 1930-1956 comes to 28 million and 700 thousands. To date, no completely satisfactory death statistics for the Gulag system have yet appeared. The number of died in camps and in the exile villages in the Stalinist era (1929-1953) based on archival sources is estimated as 2 milion 750 thousand peopole. However the total number of died as a result of Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet system including victims of Red Terror, Civil War, the famines in 1920s and 1930s, the Gulag camps and exiles and the mass executions is estimated for 20 mln (S. Cortuois) other historians cite numbers around 12 millions. Statistics: Ann Appelbaum GULAG. A History. 2003. Now I am going briefly to show seven chapters of the GULAG exhibition and book. X SOLOVETSKY CAMP The monastery on the Solovetsky Islands is one of the holy sites of the Russian Orthodox world since 15th century. In 1923 the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp was established on this remote northern archipelago. Churches and chapels were converted into barracks for prisoners and camp administration buildings. X By that time at least 100 Bolshevik concentration camps already existed but Solovetsky was the first camp to be directly under the control of OGPU (United State Political Department), which carried out the centralization of the camp system, completed in 1930 with the establishment of the Chief Administration of

Camps or GULAG. X Solovketsky monastery has particular place in the history

• f GULAG due to the fact that since 1929 system of camps started rapidly grow
• n the basis of Solovky camp experience. Solovki might also serve as a symbol
• f the destruction of Russian tradition, religion and culture in the name of

communist ideology. X In 1992 the Solovetsky monastery complex was included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. X X X BIELOMORKANAL Starting from the 1930s, GULAG prisoners were used on a large scale to implement economic tasks and began to play an essential role in the USSR

• economy. The White Sea Canal was one of the first “great construction projects
• f Communism” X which relied exclusively on the labor of prisoners.

At Stalin's instructions work on Bielomorkanal was fast and inexpensive. X Roughly 100 000 prisoners and 70 000 special exiled equipped with the simple tools build 230-kilometre long canal linking the Baltic and the White Sea in 20 months between 1931 and 1933. X Build too small for maritime vessels and for half a year ice-bound The White Sea Canal never played any strategic role and it’s economic importance was marginal. X Bielomorkanal is an example that much of the work in the Gulag was not just hopeless. It was often pointless too. The human cost of White Sea Canal construction was at least 12 300 prisoners. X VAIGACH 1930-1936 So called Vaygach Expedition was one of the first soviet political police landing operation on the Far North of the SU. The tasks of expedition were to extract zinc and lead ore on the island. They were probably also counting on finding deposits of gold there. X The Vaygach Expedition was in many respects a special event in the world of the Gulag. There were no barbed wire fences or watchtowers prisoners were only guarded by soldiers. For fulfilling the daily work norm, two days were written off a prisoner’s sentence. Outstanding

workers were paid cash prizes and were allowed to bring their families to Vaygach what was the part of state policy to settle villages on uninhabited

• regions. X X

X X THEATRE IN GULAG The theatre was very popular in the Gulag camps. Many commanders made it a point of pride to have their own theatre group. For the camp bosses, especially in the far north, the theater was the only entertainment in the isolated world of the

• camps. Actors were recruited among prisoners. X

Gulag theatres varied in nature: from groups dancing to balalaika in the camp dining room, to professional companies with a symphony orchestra, costumes and stage equipment delivered from Moscow and Leningrad. Professional companies were set up by the administrations of large camp centers like Norilsk, Vorkuta or Magadan in Kolyma. Repertoire was mainly operas and operettas and of course propaganda: odes to Stalin, revolutionary songs, etc… Grigory Litinsky, a Moscow writer who, as a prisoner, worked in the administration of the theater at Vorkuta, account that the prison camp officials were in the habit of going to the theater each evening as if to a restaurant. “They would listen to a favorite aria and then go back to the buffet to have a glass of

• champagne. The top commanders had their own office in the theater, where they

were brought alcohol and snacks.” X Memory of Lazar Sheryshevsky “After the performance, in the dressing room the actors took off their princes’, ladies’ and hussars’ costumes and changed into padded jackets and hats with earflaps. In the gloom of the Arctic night, in a ringing frost, an armed convoy escorted the conductor, the musicians, actors and dancers behind the

barbed wire again. Here the performers went back to their real-life role – as prisoners.” Lazar Sheryshevsky X “Why did the Gulag bosses found prison camp theaters? Purely for their own

• pleasure. That’s all.” Nina Gamilton

KOLYMA The complex of camps at Kolyma lying at the northeastern tip of the Soviet Union, was the biggest prison camp system in the USSR which take in total about 10 per cent of the territory of the USSR. X The main activity was extraction of gold and later uranium. Kolyma was one of the harshest places in

• GULAG. Due to the Arctic climate with winter lasting for several months, and

temperatures falling to minus 65 degrees Celsius as well as the ruthless exploitation of prisoners. X The nightmare that was Kolyma lasted for 25 years between 1932 and 1957. X According to records of Prisoners Registration Department of GULAG in the period 1932-1954 through Kolyma camps passed 860 000 prisoners and 121 256 of them died. This mortal statistic is incomplete. X X THE DEAD ROAD “The 'Dead Road” or the Great Northern Railroad Highway was built by a seventy thousand prisoners, the line running 1300 km along the Arctic Circle through Western Siberia. X It was the last "great communist construction project" of Stalinist times. The construction was begun in inexplicable haste, with no plan, no regard for cost, and no technical designs. X In two weeks after Stalin's funeral the work was stopped. By the time almost 900 km had been already constructed (60% of planed 1500 km railway). X Even if the railway had been completed, it is uncertain what

purpose it would serve in this barren wilderness. According to GULAG documents in 1947-1953 on the construction of the Dead Road 3004 prisoners died. X Today the Dead Road is an extraordinary relict of the Gulag: several hundred kilometers of track leading nowhere run through northern wastelands among the ruins of over a hundred camps. X X Locomotives and boxcars are consumed by rust in the bleakness of Siberia. X The construction of the Northern Railway ended in a total fiasco. Nowadays the Dead Road is a sort of allegory for the history of Soviet communism - a road built contrary to common sense, using slave labor, paid for by many of victims and leading nowhere. X Image and Memory. A photographic legacy of GULAG. Twenty years after proclamation of the “Pierestroyka” and fifteen years after the Soviet archives were partially opened for researchers and journalists, the conclusion is inevitable, at any rate, that the overwhelming majority of the currently known photographic records of Soviet repression from 1917 to about 1960 were created to serve either public propaganda or internal surveillance

• purposes. Photographs of human misery and suffering in Soviet concentration

camps are missing – we can only imagine them on the basis of verbal accounts

• f survivors. If the enormous atrocities committed in the Gulag framework were

recorded by the camera, these images have not been unearthed as yet; more likely they were never taken at all. Not a single photo tells us of the horrors of daily life in the camps, of the cruelty of criminal fellow-prisoners, of starving, emaciated and devitalized inmates called in gulag’s jargon - dohodyagas or “goners, the Soviet equivalent of the muselmans in Nazi camps.

For instance according to official reports of the Gulag Department of Prisoner Registration, the highest mortality in the camps took place in 1942 when 352 560 prisoners died, that is, 25% of the total population. In some camps death the rate reached 60 %. We can imagine piles of frozen corpses hastily buried in the snow around the camps, resurfacing in spring. But such photos do not exist. And even though the overall human cost of Gulag is estimated at roughly three million, as far as I know, not a single photograph of a dead prisoner has thus far been found. Let us review what kind of photographs surfaced till present-day. X 1. The identification photographs taken in OGPU/NKVD prisons. These pictures were kept in Soviet top secret archives and not meant to be seen by outsiders. When they surfaced in the 1990s they became one of the most powerful indictments of Stalinist terror – X quite in contrast to the original intentions which not only aimed to annihilate the people but also to erase any memory after them. X The policemen behind the camera were indifferent prison technicians solely concerned with the precise documentation of inmates’ faces. The individuals before the camera, however, were not indifferent; they knew that their lives were at stake. These images speak to the present-day viewer a meaningful language of emotional responses to the existential threat of terror. X 2. The photographs taken by the soviet system for propaganda purpose. For 19th-century Russian revolutionaries the czarist prisons fueled the ethos

• f their fight - present in many revolutionary songs - as an exemplification of the

injustice and cruelty of czarist despotism. However, as soon as the October Revolution brought them to power, new and much more numerous inmates filled prisons and “concentration camps” – a term used by Lev Trocki as early as

May, 1918. From an ideological point of view, the problem was solved, firstly, by presenting camps and prisons as temporary phenomena soon to disappear on the road to building a classless society and a “new communist man;” and secondly, by launching an intensive propaganda campaign depicting soviet camps as comparing favorably to the prisons of the “inhuman capitalist states”. The Gulag camps were presented as an innovation possible only in a socialist state where criminals and “class enemies” are reeducated in a friendly

• atmosphere. For this propaganda campaign the best available means were used,

including film and photography. As an example of propagandistic Gulag photos I have chosen pictures by Alexandr Rodchenko world-wide known artist, creator of constructivism art and gifted innovator in the field of photography who spent longer time photographing the White Sea Canal project and later designed with his pictures an issue of the monthly magazine “SSSR na strojkie” (The USSR under Construction). (nr 12, Dec. 1933) X X X X X The canal was one of the first large-scale Gulag’s projects; it carries Stalin’s name and was trumpeted far and wide as “the great communist construction venture.” Due to this fact it is also the most widely photographed Gulag project. A special “Foto-Kino-Bureau” was organized by the political police (OGPU) which systematically photographed all construction phases. X This is the most relevant picture material in point of depicting the prisoners’ work conditions and the large scale of GULAG projects. However, images of the prisoners’ misery and death are absent. While in 1933 almost 9000 prisoners died – 750 monthly. X 3. The photographs taken for internal GULAG reports.

Contrary to all promises, the camps and prisons were not disappearing in the process of building communism. Instead the prisoners population reached the enormous figure of 2 million in 1938. The huge, enslaved workforce became the heart of Soviet industry and natural resource extraction. As the camp system grew, the Kremlin decided to shield it from public view. The locations of the camps became secret, names were replaced by post box numbers, and even in internal NKVD documents the word “camp” was replaced by spiecobiekt (special object) in order to hide the truth. As a result of this new policy, no further photographs or films were needed for propaganda purposes. However, when the USSR collapsed in 1991 and some Soviet archives were opened for researchers, more then 100 photo-albums were discovered in X X the Russian Federation State Archive (formerly the October Revolution Archive), as a result of the practice that camp commanders sent documentary photographs to the Gulag headquarters at Moscow. However the photographs X were not taken to provide any accurate record of camp conditions at all. Rather, the albums were intended to show the bosses back in Moscow how well things were going, especially the camps’ economic operations. What is amazing in these internal visual records, which were not meant ever to be seen by

• utsiders, is that they followed the same rules of falsifying and doctoring reality

X which governed daily Soviet practice outside the barbed-wire fences, too. In

• ther words, almost all these images reflect ideology, not reality.

But why was it found necessary by a perfectly secret department to hide reality by a false facade? The entire Soviet system was based on and fueled by

• ideology. And since reality did not match ideology at all, a completely falsified,

non-existing world was simulated for public as well as internal party

• communication. There can’t be any exception - even inside the top secret

departments of the system a facade of ideology claiming eternal happiness for mankind must be doggedly cultivated, no matter how staggering the death statistics were, which were regularly sent from the camps to the Gulag

Department of Prisoner Registration in Moscow. A fig leaf had to be kept even if it was so absurd as slogan as “Chieriez trud domoj” (Get home through work), written across the gate of camps full of prisoners sentenced to 20 years murderous work. (compare the motto “Arbeit macht Frei” on the gate of Auschwitz). X X X X However, in this largest Gulag photos collection interesting pictures could be found which are not existing the other sources. For instance the X photographs of prisoners working in the factories, military industry, small workshops, etc. X X In the overall mass of around 2000 album pictures only four show emaciated prisoners. Significantly, all of them were taken in camp’s hospitals. Why were they acceptable to the Gulag administration despite the fact that they show obviously starving persons? The answer is that they did not undermine party ideology since they carry the meaning – “we take care of the camp inmates” in hospitals. X X X Soviet camps were not designed for extermination. Since 1929Gulag was meant to serve as limitless source of slave work for industrialization and other economic needs, while also helping to terrorize the whole of society. To make slave work efficient starving portions of food where divided into several categories gradated according to the prisoners’ enormous but varying work

• loads. In practice, the system divided the prisoners rapidly into those who would

survive and those who would not. Deliberately, hunger was used as tool to extort a maximum of physical exertion, and the death of some percentage of the inmates was part of the inherent logic of the Gulag system. The zek (from the Russian abbreviation z/k for zakliuchonnyi, or inmate) was not considered human, but a “unit of labour” which could be easily replaced. Naftali Frenkel, for many years a high Gulag functionary, is said to have postulated: “We must

force everything out of the prisoner in the first three months – after that we need neither him nor his corpse.” These photographs, in a way, are the most confusing of all Gulag

• photographs. On one hand they are the only ones where we can see faces of

sufferers offering some small piece of the truth about the camps which all the

• ther photos suppress. On another hand they contain the greatest lie because

they say “we take care of the people.” While precisely because those responsible for the Gulag system did NOT care of the people almost three million prisoners died, even without the help of gas chambers. X 4. Photographic documentation of construction projects by the engineering staff. I would like to mention this type of Gulag photographs, without spending time to describe it because it does not throw any light on the horrible camp conditions or bring new visual values. X In these pictures taken for construction documentation, the prisoners are seen seldom and exclusively in working places, like in the pictures taken for propaganda purposes. X 5. The camp commander’s private albums. This source of photographs is very narrow due to the fact that the former Gulag’s functionaries are hardly accessible and not interested to become public. Still, in my research I managed to find photographs Fiodor Ejchmans – commander of camp located on Arctic Island Vaigach, X Arsienij Kuzniecow chief of communications division in the White Sea Canal Construction complex

• f camps and X Eduard Bierzin – the founder and chief commander of Kolyma

complex of camps. As it might be expected the photos from these albums do not document Gulag’s atrocities at all but they give an interesting glimpse of the

• ppressors’ daily life.

X 6. Photographs taken by prisoners released from camps

In 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, Polish GULAG inmates were released from the camps. X While waiting a number of months for repatriation and earning some money for the work they were obliged to continue, some of them bought cameras and snapped souvenir pictures to take home to Poland. X This collection of photos taken after release from the camps is very significant because it carries an important message about human dignity which had not been broken in the hell of camps, and about the basic human need for love and hope. These images tell a story of survival, though without much reference to Gulag itself. X The knowledge about gulags and intuition are necessary to fathom what these people, well dressed and good looking as they seem in the pictures, went through during their ten years in one of the most lethal Gulag camps in Vorkuta behind the polar circle. The horror and suffering

• f camps are already behind them, marked only in the background by the fuzzy

silhouettes of the camps’ watch towers. X While collecting photos in Poland I wondered if someone had ever attempted to make a documentation of the camps themselves – a very risky undertaking, of course. As a matter of fact, two Polish prisoners, Stanislaw Kialka and Bernard Grzywacz, took this risk, though after they had been

• released. First Kialka took several bird-eye views of the camp from the waste

heap of mine 9-10 where he formerly worked as a prisoner; then the engineer Grzywacz made further photos at the same place but in a more systematic way, composing a 360-degree panoramic picture of the Vorkuta camp complex. In the entire known photographic legacy of the Soviet concentration camps this is an absolutely unique picture document. And it is the only one known to me which gives as a glimpse of Gulag “against the soviet system”. X Summary

In sum, the preserved and published photographic record of the Gulag camp system is incomplete and deformed by ideology. There is a significant gap between the testimony of former prisoners and the photographic documents, between the written word and the image. In principle, photographs are capable

• f conveying powerful emotional messages which might help to create

collective memory, but few if any such pictures seem to be surviving from the Gulag Archipelago. Photographs currying important emotional massage which might sufficiently help to create collective memory are missing. In our era, where pictures often count more than written words, this lack of images means diminished understanding and diminished presence in popular consciousness. No images means less understanding, less presence in popular conscious, what in turn reflects on the memory of GULAG. The documentary pictures of Gulag and contemporary photographs taken by me in crime sites show the TRACES of people and places which the Soviet system tried to eradicate in total secrecy. These traces are modest and often distorted, but if read with caution, basic knowledge about Gulag and analytical skill they can help to imagine reality of soviet camps and serve as building blocks for remembering something that must never be forgotten. Believing in your appreciation of my presentation and the particular nature

• f my subject I would ask you to refrain from applause.