Posted on 03/01/2003 4:39:30 PM PST by MadIvan
Fifty years to the week after Stalin died, gulag survivors remain stuck in bleak outposts of the former Soviet Union.
As Russians debate the legacy of the man who ruled for a generation, former prisoners in towns such as Vorkuta have little to celebrate.
Twelve-hundred miles north-east of Moscow, train No 42 crosses the Arctic Circle and bursts from the forest into the blizzard-swept wastleland of this mining town - a huddle of smokestacks and apartment blocks - where the winter temperature falls to minus 50C.
It was once the heart of Stalin's gulags, built by men and women banished for "crimes against Soviet power". Today, a few hundred gulag survivors live among miners and engineers, forgotten by the authorities.
An estimated 18 million Soviet citizens entered the gulags during the 50 years they flourished; a network of about 500 camps where at least seven million died. Coal was found in Vorkuta in the 1920s and by 1934 prisoners from all over the USSR were sucked into its pits and factories. Scattered on the town's fringes are the smashed remains of barracks, isolation cells and watchtowers. Thousands died here from disease, starvation and hypothermia. Those who survived their sentences were often too poor to return home.
Most of the few still marooned have given up hope of return. "I think I will never see my motherland again," said Anastasia Bugaenko, 76, a former prisoner from western Ukraine. "I grew up in green countryside but I will die here in the snow."
Like many, Mrs Bugaenko was a victim of Soviet paranoia. She was sentenced to six years' hard labour in 1949 after young communists denounced her brother for wearing a black armband. He was mourning his father, killed in Auschwitz.
"All my life, I had never so much as swatted a fly," she said. "From the moment I was sent to the gulag, I burned with desire to kill Stalin."
Her life was consumed by a daily struggle for survival. Prisoners toiled all day underground and at night huddled in wooden barracks or zemlyanka - moss-lined bunkers carved from the permafrost.
Rations were limited to soup and 14 ounces of bread a day, a quantity increased by two ounces if production targets were met. "It was almost unendurable," said Olga Olshevskaya, 93, from St Petersburg, who was arrested for political agitation at the height of Stalin's terror in 1937. He died on March 5, 1953.
The survivors were mostly women, said Mrs Olshevskaya. "The food was enough for women but men lacked the nourishment they needed."
Mrs Bugaenko was freed in 1952 but had nowhere to go. "They gave me 200 roubles [now worth less than £4] and pushed me into the tundra." She found a job on the local railway, married, and saved enough money for a short trip to Ukraine five years later.
Under Soviet law she had to return to Vorkuta. It was the last time she saw her family. She is now free to travel but can't afford it on her pension.
Although Vorkuta's last camps closed in the early 1960s, more than 300 surviving former political prisoners are stranded in the town, shackled by their pensions from the local authority.
As Vorkuta dies a slow death - half its mines have closed - thousands of inhabitants are clamouring for homes elsewhere in Russia but victims of political repression do not get preferential treatment.
One gulag survivor, however, is convinced she will finally leave soon. Galina Dall lives alone in a two-room apartment decorated with trinkets from her native Germany. In 1945 she was seized in the Ukraine - where her family had fled on the outbreak of war - and sentenced to 10 years because she had bowed to pressure to work as a translator for Nazi troops. "Now the sound of my language calls to me," she said.
She cultivated condemned artists and singers in the Vorkuta camp and since her release in 1955 has been reading Shakespeare and Goethe.
Mrs Dall's two sons worked as miners and have raised enough money to take her to Stuttgart. "I want to see museums, discuss religion and talk with cultured people in my native tongue," she said. "I want to go home."
Like many in Russia, she refuses to blame Stalin for her suffering. "He didn't know about my imprisonment. The system was to blame, not Stalin. He did the right thing for the Soviet Union."
Mrs Bugaenko is less forgiving. "When Stalin died in 1953 one of my workmates asked why I was not crying. I replied, 'I cried for years in the gulag because of that monster'. I had no tears left."
Regards, Ivan
Good grief, Ivan. If Stalin had known about her specific imprisonment he probably would have had her shot for annoyance. Stalin put the system into place, what is that idiot thinking?
That Bloody Century Pass'd- "We have nothing to fear but Governments Themselves..."
The Killing Fields & Murder of a Gentle Land- what really happened in Cambodia a quarter-century ago
The victims of the Gulags and other of Stalin’s victims are dying at a rapid rate. There needs to be a remembrance project to capture the memories of the horrors that these people have experienced like there is of the Holocaust
This is where Marx made his big mistake. Marx never should have attempted to place his workers' paradise in the hear and now because all that did was give everyone a real world benchmark for whether Marx's religion of Communism was succeeding or failing.
Wow, she is beyond a useful idiot. She outsrips Chauvinism, because Nicolas Chauvin was never imprisoned under Napoleon
Truly a great document but still only the experience of one man.
With at least 11 million dead under Stalin it is with out a doubt inadequate to the task of telling the story of human misery that was life under the boot of that monster.
On a per capita basis Tito was more of a Stalinist than Stalin (one of whose victims incidentaly, was my grandfather), but he was our acomplice and our communist, so we did not care.
Mao was not a Stalinist and he probably was responsible for more people murdered than was Stalin. Other "moderate" communist regimes such as those of Vietnam and Laos were also responsible for the deaths of millions. No communist regime has existed in which thousands of people were not summarily shot or tortured.
The only reason Castro did not reach the million victims mark is that he runs a very small country. Per capita he is just as bad. He is responsible by conservative estimates for upwards of half a million deaths. People who visit Cuba should tour the prison at the "Isla de Cochinos" which holds thousands of political prisoners and see what a paradise it is.
These people who argue such nonsense are idiots and useful tools. Unfortunately there are too many of them around. Our media should constantly remind people of the "other holocaust" that occured under communism so people understand what utopias lead to. Our apologist leftist media however, would not hear of it.
How is that even possible?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.