An often forgotten documentary made by Mikhail Mikheev in 1991.
A detailed description here: https://archive.org/details/KolymaUncut
These people survived during the Great Patriotic War and immediately ended up in the "death camps" in th…
An often forgotten documentary made by Mikhail Mikheev in 1991.
A detailed description here: https://archive.org/details/KolymaUncut
These people survived during the Great Patriotic War and immediately ended up in the "death camps" in the Kolyma. At least two million people were held captive in Germany. This was regarded as a betrayal of the Motherland, article 58. Death camps - an innovation of the NKVD acted flawlessly. It was aimed at destroying the "enemies of the people." No, they did not kill there, people simply could not stand it themselves, they were brutalized and destroyed each other, someone was dying from disease, from cold and hunger. In the film, several rehabilitated prisoners talk about their cruel fate, about what few people know, about what has been kept in strict secrecy for many years. These are the nuances of "prisoners" life, wild and cruel. FILM 1 - "The Story of a Trust" Dilapidated wooden buildings, empty eye sockets of windows, bunks in barracks, stars on towers, a rickety palisade, a wooden bridge - either to freedom, or in conclusion - this is all that remains of one of the countless Stalinist camps. “The stone promised to keep the secret” - now it protects only the countless bodies of victims of the regime, buried here. It all began in the 1930s.
In 1937, at the height of the Purges, Stalin ordered an intensification of the hardships prisoners were forced to endure.[4] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months — after that we don't need him anymore." [5] The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" (dokhodyaga, in Russian).
Robert Conquest, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild and others (see bibliography) describe the Kolyma camps in some detail. The suffering of the prisoners was exacerbated by the presence of ordinary criminals, who terrorized the "political" prisoners. Death in the Kolyma camps came in many forms, including: overwork, starvation, malnutrition, mining accidents, exposure, murder at the hands of criminals, and beatings at the hands of guards. A director of the Sevvostlag complex of camps, colonel Sergey Garanin is said to have personally shot whole brigades of prisoners for not fulfilling their daily quotas in the late 1930s.[6] Escape was difficult, owing to the climate and physical isolation of the region, but some still attempted it. Escapees, if caught, were often torn to shreds by camp guard dogs. The use of torture as punishment was also common.
