GULAG Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Euromaidan Press

5 minute read

Story of Frants Brzhezytsky, last Ukrainian survivor of Majdanek concentration camp

Franz Carlowitz Březicki (Ukr: Frants Karlovych Brzhezytsky) was born in a modest Polish working family in Zhytomyr on…

byChristine Chraibi

Putin's Russian Guard exercises to suppress mass protests (Image: screen capture of Open Russia video)

5 minute read

Russian Guard’s aspirations open the way to mass repressions, Stanovaya says

Russia is on the way to acquiring a government institution fully capable of mass repressions, Tatyana Stanovaya says.…

byPaul A. Goble

5 minute read

Russia’s penal reforms point to return of ‘renewed’ GULAG, Novaya Gazeta says

Moscow has taken great pride in the fact that the number of Russians incarcerated in its penal system…

byPaul A. Goble

Putin. MH17: The blood on his hands. (Political cartoon by Ramirez, 2014)

20 minute read

“Putin tells why Russia is seedbed of terrorism” and other neglected Russian stories

The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often…

byPaul A. Goble

10 minute read

Ukrainians discover stories of repressed relatives in newly opened KGB archives

Russia and Ukraine hold the world’s largest documentary collections of Communist secret services that ceased to exist in…

byIhor Vynokurov

Tortures by Russian police (Image: akirama.com)

3 minute read

‘Putin’s GULAG more horrible than Stalin’s,’ researchers say

Many people of good will around the world have been horrified by the case of Rizvan Ibragimov who…

byPaul A. Goble

4 minute read

The story of Anna Popovych: love, war, death, gulag and freedom

Anna Popovych was born in the village of Zelena, Nadvinyansky Raion, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast on May 29, 1925. During…

byChristine Chraibi

7 minute read

Russian blogger Yakovlev: My grandfather was a “chekist” and a murderer

Have you ever seen a real chekist ID? This belonged to my grandfather and I still have it.…

byGazetaUA

6 minute read

Ukrainian dissident Krasivsky: Russia is our historical enemy. Only by fighting back can we survive

Friend and dissident Yevhen Sverstyuk called him a “kind-hearted knight in an old suit of armour”. His friends…

byRadio Liberty

4 minute read

How UPA veteran Anna survived the “Russian world”

After WW2, Anna Kushyk moved to the Donbas to escape the vigilant eye of the Soviet secret police.…

byRadio Liberty

10 minute read

More
Opinion

The price for a clear conscience in Russia

Not being able to go home to your own country, to see your parents, to bury your loved…

byKseniya Kirillova

Magadan Hills, a painting by Mykola Hetman, a former GULAG prisoner, born December 23, 1917 in Kharkov, Ukraine. Background of the picture: In 1932, members of a Soviet geological expedition discovered gold at the mouth of the Utinny River in Siberia. A GULAG settlement was built between the villages of Balaganny and Ola, the hills there destroyed, piers built, and the settlement named Magadan after a nearby stream. Forced laborers were brought in to build roads from Magadan to the gold. Building the roads was incredibly harsh labor in the permafrost. The prisoners were poorly fed and worked for long hours under fierce conditions with rudimentary tools. The sentiment expressed here is that the roads were built on human bones—that every hill, every gully, and every path in Magadan represents human lives and could be the site of a human grave. The sun is eclipsed to symbolize the darkness and evil that cast its shadow over the people of the Soviet Union. The cross represents the enormous burdens the prisoners had to bear. It also symbolizes Christ's trek up the hill of Golgotha, which the artist likens to the prisoners' journey. (Source: thegulag.org)

10 minute read

Why do many Westerners show sympathy to Russia and Communism – but not to their victims?

Those who study the post-Soviet world and especially its non-Russian parts are often struck by the fact that…

byPaul A. Goble

Magadan Hills, a painting by Mykola Hetman, a former GULAG prisoner, born December 23, 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Background of the picture: In 1932, members of a Soviet geological expedition discovered gold at the mouth of the Utinny River in Siberia. A GULAG settlement was built between the villages of Balaganny and Ola, the hills there destroyed, piers built, and the settlement named Magadan after a nearby stream. Forced laborers were brought in to build roads from Magadan to the gold. Building the roads was incredibly harsh labor in the permafrost. The prisoners were poorly fed and worked for long hours under fierce conditions with rudimentary tools. The sentiment expressed here is that the roads were built on human bones—that every hill, every gully, and every path in Magadan represents human lives and could be the site of a human grave. The sun is eclipsed to symbolize the darkness and evil that cast its shadow over the people of the Soviet Union. The cross represents the enormous burdens the prisoners had to bear. It also symbolizes Christ's trek up the hill of Golgotha, which the artist likens to the prisoners' journey. (Source: thegulag.org)

5 minute read

Victor Serge again triumphs over Arthur Koestler

Two images of Stalin’s Great Terror have long competed in the West and even in some former communist…

byPaul A. Goble

Russian soldiers line up to kiss an “icon” of Putin, while a Russian Orthodox priest of the Moscow Patriarchate blesses them. (Image: Social media)

6 minute read

Putin’s Russia well on its way to ‘criminal neo-totalitarianism’ with a ‘neo-terror’ and a ‘neo-GULAG,’ Pastukhov says

Vladimir Pastukhov says that Putin’s Russia is well on its way to “criminal neo-totalitarianism” with all the attributes…

byPaul A. Goble

5 minute read

After Putin, Russians will say they were deceived just as Germans did after Hitler

Not all, but “the overwhelming majority of Germans sincerely believed” what Hitler said, just as not all but…

byPaul A. Goble

A false confession under torture: "I’m… an English, French, American, Japanese, Italian, German and maybe some other spy as well…" ("Drawings from the GULAG" by Danzig Baldaev, a former NKVD guard)

4 minute read

Moscow closed GULAG museum because it doesn’t want a ‘territory of freedom’

Sergey Kovalev, a human rights activist who was once an inmate in the Perm camp memorialized by the…

byPaul A. Goble

Guards disposing of corpses of executed GULAG prisoners in a frozen river by Danzig Baldaev, a former NKVD guard

5 minute read

Moscow analyst: Putin’s ‘greatest task’ is to become a new Stalin and divide world with West

On the 62nd anniversary of his death today, Stalin continues to cast an ever darker shadow over Russia,…

byPaul A. Goble

The Russian occupation authorities in Crimea opening a new Stalin monument to commemorate the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945) between US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that legitimized the post-World War II occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union (Image: Wikimedia)

4 minute read

Three disturbing developments in Russia

At a time when each day brings fresh evidence that Russia is headed in a very dangerous direction…

byPaul A. Goble

3 minute read

International

Russian Interior Ministry wants to restore Stalin-style ‘Troikas’ to speed up ‘justice’

The Russian interior ministry wants to revive the troikas Stalin used to conduct the purges in the 1930s…

byPaul A. Goble

Erection of the cross in memory of the victims of the 1954 GULAG uprising in Kengir, Kazakhstan, 1990

4 minute read

60 years ago this week, Ukrainians rose up against the Soviet GULAG at Kengir

Sixty years ago this week, non-Russian prisoners rose up in Kengir against their Soviet GULAG jailors. They were…

byPaul A. Goble