“The Gulag Collection,” 50 paintings on the subject, will be on view at The Heritage Foundation beginning this morning.
The exhibit opens as part of “The Year of Miracles: The Fall of the Berlin Wall,” a Heritage-sponsored event marking the approaching 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gulag survivor Nikolai Getman,who died in 2004, created “The Gulag Collection,” as a visual record of the hundreds of penal camps that held more than 14 million political prisoners.
In 1997, Getman was able to enlist the support of the Jamestown Foundation in moving his paintings to a place of safety in the West, arranging their display then, and developing a plan for their preservation.
An electronic catalogue of the full collection can be viewed here.
Whenever I do some traveling I take a little time to read the International Travel Information provided by the U.S. State Department as well as some of the links provided for even more information.
The sections (or footnotes) at the bottom of the various CIA Factbook entries have been of particular interest to me.
Try checking how many entries actually have a section on "Trafficking in persons" under "Transnational Issues."
Here is the "Trafficking in Persons" entry for Russia, for example:
Current situation: Russia is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for various purposes; it remains a significant source of women trafficked to over 50 countries for commercial sexual exploitation; Russia is also a transit and destination country for men and women trafficked from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and North Korea to Central and Western Europe and the Middle East for purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; internal trafficking remains a problem in Russia with women trafficked from rural areas to urban centers for commercial sexual exploitation, and men trafficked internally and from Central Asia for forced labor in the construction and agricultural industries; debt bondage is common among trafficking victims, and child sex tourism remains a concern
tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Russia is on the Tier 2 Watch List for a fifth consecutive year for its failure to show evidence of increasing efforts to combat trafficking over the previous year, particularly in providing assistance to victims of trafficking; comprehensive trafficking victim assistance legislation, which would address key deficiencies, has been pending before the Duma since 2003 and was neither passed nor enacted in 2007 (2008)
Harry Wu may be a name, somewhat familiar, but surely the Foundation he began in 1992 after 19 years in China's Gulag (The Laogai) is less so.
Thankfully, that continues to change.
First, to clarify, Laogai (Chinese: 勞改; pinyin: láogǎi), is apparently an abbreviation for Láodòng Gǎizào (勞動改造), which means "reform through labor," and is a slogan of the so-called Chinese criminal justice system. Laogai must however be distinguished from laojiao, or re-education through labor, which is administrative detention for a person who is not a criminal but has committed minor offenses, and is intended to reform offenders into law-abiding citizens.
"Due to the suppression of free speech within China, much of the material housed within the Laogai Archives is not available to researchers in mainland China. Thus, the Laogai Archives are in a unique position to support academics, journalists, students, and activists in freely conducting research on human rights in China."
Not Walmart Locations
With China, of course, nothing is ever as it seems on the surface; even when the surface one is viewing is quite obviously vast and wide.
Hence, the The Laogai Research Foundation delves into more than mere horrors of a reform/re-education camp system, including some of the other tools utilized by the Chinese Communist Party to control the people of the world's most populated nation.
These tools include the "One Child Policy," organ harvesting (in conjunction with) the death penalty, as well as the recurring challenge of internet freedom.
Harry Wu, truculent and direct, for more than 20 years now, remains in that certain forefront, still trying to prick or awaken the conscience of the West.
Recently, during an interview with The Irish Times, in the context of the West's seemingly insatiable desire for heroes, Harry Wu stated that he was definitely not a hero. "A hero would have killed himself a long time ago."
What is it about the history of justice and injustice within a nation (particularly, one's own) that causes one to take notice and remember?
In Russia, the history and extent of The Gulag system is only now coming more fully to light. With the recent move to have excerpts of one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's classic works shared as part of the curriculum in her schools, there appears to be some sign of hope for that.
There is also, the little known, "Virtual Museum of the Gulag," which since 2004, has aimed (according to the website) toward:
1. The preservation of memory, museum initiatives and unique testimonies. The introduction of our accumulated experience and knowledge into the public sphere.
2. To collate [resource] the uncoordinated initiatives regarding the preservation of memory and testimonies about the Soviet past into a single information. To overcome the regional or confessional divisions in our consciousness of the Terror and the Gulag.
3. To provide information and advice for provincial museums.
4. The creation of a public and generally accessible national museum.
5. Public discussion of the past and the role of such a social and historical legacy.
6. The instruction and education of the younger generation.
As of Autumn 2005, a list of the “Museums of the Gulag” comprising 290 historical sites in the Russian territory and the countries of the former Soviet Union has been compiled. Geographical expansion of the project in the museums of eastern Europe is foreseen.
Meanwhile, Russia's Stalin Revival continues in this report from Miriam Elder of GlobalPost in Moscow.
Outside Russia, the legacy of Stalin, who ruled as a dictator from the 1920s until his death in 1953, is pretty clear. Killing millions of his own people landed him in the pantheon of the world’s worst dictators, alongside Hitler and Pol Pot. His name conjures images of domestic terror, nighttime arrests and a megalomaniacal paranoia that prompted fatal campaigns against perceived enemies.
Inside Russia, the story is more complicated. He was, according to a school textbook adopted last year and endorsed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a “competent manager” who committed atrocities at home out of necessity.
Earlier this year, Stalin nearly won a nationwide call-in poll asking people to vote for the person who best represents Russia.
Also on September 9th, the Associated Press provided this glance at the history of the Gulag prison system compiled from The Encyclopedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A History."
History: The network of forced-labor camps was started by a Soviet decree of April 15, 1919. In 1930, under Josef Stalin, it became Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey (Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), known by its Russian acronym, Gulag.
Location: Gulag camps, run by the secret police, were mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the far north and east of the Soviet Union. At its height the Gulag consisted of at least 476 separate camp administrations, with the average camp holding 2,000 to 10,000 prisoners. Kolyma, a region about six times the size of France, had more than 100 camps.
Inmates: Rich or resistant peasants arrested during the collectivization of farms, purged military officers and Communist Party members, World War II prisoners, members of allegedly disloyal ethnic groups, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals. Many inmates were innocent.
Numbers: The Gulag held 5 million prisoners by 1936. The Gulag administration's own figures show that 10 million people were sent to the camps between 1934 and 1947. Other estimates range much higher.
Type of work: Mining, felling timber, mining, building canals and railroads. Most prisoners faced starvation or execution if they refused to work.
Deaths: It is estimated that harsh weather and working conditions, inadequate food and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag population each year. Western scholars estimate 15-30 million died between 1918 to 1956.
The end: The Gulag started to shrink soon after Stalin's death in 1953 as hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied. By the mid-1950s the remaining camps' activities were absorbed by various economic ministries.
This story just in from the Associated Press in Moscow and other sources:
Russia has made Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic, "The Gulag Archipelago," required reading in the country's schools.
The Education Ministry said excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic have been added to the curriculum for high-school students.
The three-volume book was banned by Soviet censors, sparking Solzhenitsyn's retreat into exile.
The decision announced September 9th was taken due to "the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history" contained in Solzhenitsyn's work, the ministry said.
Details revealed in a story at tvkultura.ru (TV Culture Russia) note the human impetus behind the scenes to this historic addition to the nation's education system.
Earlier "Gulag Archipelago" was optional for study at the secondary school. Now the novel has been included in the federal component of educational standards, and its study becomes compulsory for all Russian senior pupils.
It was the writer’s widow Natalia Solzhenitsyna, who offered to include several lessons on works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the school curriculum.
MOSCOW — In a story Sept. 9, The Associated Press reported that excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" will become required reading in Russian high schools. The story described it as an account of the systematic imprisonment and murder of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the Soviet-era labor camp system known as the Gulag. The passage should have been more detailed on the numbers of victims. Scholars estimate that tens of millions of people were imprisoned in the Gulag and that millions died as a result of the forced labor system.
Recently have been reading the book, "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror" and can recommend it to anyone seeking a different point of view on this most serious, intriguing and contemporary topic.
In brief, the author, Reza Aslan, in this, his second book, attempts to give an outsider (re: objective) view to America's war on terror.
Democracy, though certainly messy, must always be given time and space to bloom, EVEN when it is not always in America's best interest.
I found his insights on the reasons behind the failure of the Bush Doctrine, in such context, fairly revealing.
[Reviews on the Obama Doctrine must wait; for a little while anyway.]
Several reviews of this book on Amazon.com can be found here.
As for where "God" actually fits into any of this, that must (or should) be left to the reader (as usual).
"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves." Frederick Douglass
Sarah J. Young, a lecturer in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London reminds us of the original source or etymology for the word "Gulag" today and makes a very interesting point (or two) for writers.
She writes:
‘Gulag’ is an acronym standing for ‘Главное управление лагерей’ (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), which means ‘Main Administration of Camps’. In other words, it refers to the system as a whole, not to individual labour camps, and therefore should not be used in the plural to refer to different camps. An indefinite article is acceptable if ‘Gulag’ is being used metaphorically, as in the article ‘How California Got to be a Bankrupt Gulag‘, but unless one is comparing systems in different places, the correct term is ‘The Gulag’.
Be sure to keep reading here (of course) and here.
Varlam Shalamov
The short stories of Varlam Shalamov, whom Ms. Young mentions as being "the main focus of my current research," are at least noted here and here.
As God and Gulags is not really "comparing systems in different places," nor quite using the term metaphorically, this blog shall remain unchanged in both name and purpose.
Newly found records in Russia reveal that up to 760,000 Japanese POWs were imprisoned in Siberian labor camps in the aftermath of World War II according to a somewhat overlooked July report from the Kyodo News.
According to the report, the revelation conflicts with virtually all previous Japanese estimates that reported about 560,000 people as being taken prisoner with approximately 53,000 deaths "after being taken to Siberia and other places to engage in railway construction."
The documents could start arriving in Japan as early as this year according to certain "government" sources noted in the report.
The historical context here should be seen as troubling, in any case.
Fresh from victory over the Nazi regime and emboldened by favorable political developments in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union turned its attention to Japan.
On August 8, 1945, after weeks of deflecting Japan’s requests to mediate a surrender to the United States and its allies, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented Japanese Ambassador Sato with a declaration of war, thereby breaching the Neutrality Pact that remained in force between the two countries. The declaration stated that, “the Soviet Government decided to accept the proposition of the Allies and joined the [Potsdam] declaration of the Allied Powers of July 26….”[1] Soviet acceptance of the Potsdam Proclamation meant recognition of the content of the Cairo Declaration of December 1943, which stated that the Allies “covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion.”[2] Two years earlier, the Soviet government had also clearly expressed “agreement with the basic principles of” the Atlantic Charter, which stated that the signatories “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other… [and] desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”[3] The Soviet Union and the United States, between Yalta and the immediate postwar months, would fiercely negotiate territorial and other parameters of power centered on the distribution of territories including both the homeland and colonies of the defeated Japanese empire and the division of Korea into Northern and Southern zones.
Stalin’s promise to Roosevelt and Churchill to enter the war against Japan, long sought as a means to bring the war to a swift end and reduce allied casualties, manifested itself as Operation August Storm, the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula, the island of Sakhalin and the Kuriles.[4] “August Storm” can be divided into two phases. The first was the week from August 9 to 14 when Soviet forces swept aside demoralized Japanese defenders in Manchuria and Korea and moved south in Sakhalin over the border at the 50th parallel.[5] The second was the two-week period from August 15 – the date when Japan formally accepted the Potsdam Proclamation – to September 2, when Japanese government representatives signed the instrument of surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri. While the former period saw a short but effective Soviet campaign that dealt a body blow to the Kwantung Army, the latter saw a determined push to occupy the territories discussed at Yalta and the unleashing of acts that targeted not only the Japanese military but also the helpless civilian population.
"The Three Yokers at Yalta"
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Of some further interest, (for several years now, apparently) the notes of a Japanese soldier in the USSR, Kiuchi Nobuo, are preserved and presented here with personal drawings.
Note that even Mr. Nobuo, the former prisoner, has the number at "about 600 thousand."
Thirteen more horror stories based on interviews with survivors (presented as fiction in order to bypass China's censors) comes to us care of author Xianhui Yang.
In his book, "Woman From Shanghai, Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp," hailed as China's "Gulag Archipelago," we find our basest nature, in agonizing detail, reflected once more.
A brief review by novelist Fan Wu of San Jose, who herself was born on a state-run labor farm in China can be found here.
A strange story of surprising confluences emerges, courtesy of the BBC News.
At 92 years old, one of Hitler's last bodyguards who was with Der Führer and Eva Braun when they committed suicide in the Berlin bunker is asked to share his story.
His estranged daughter however, shares a side of the story that others may find of slightly more interest.
Some might even call it bizarre or perhaps poetic justice.
After spending 9 years in a Soviet Gulag as a German POW, SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch came home to a Jewish daughter.
To this day he still refuses to accept that his wife was Jewish.
The daughter, Brigitta Jacob-Engelken has made a career as an architect. Among some of her projects; the restoration of local synagogues.
According to the United Nations, a refugee is "a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."
From an etymological or possibly more spiritual standpoint, one might also think of the concept of sanctuary as well as that deep human desire to not be "thrown away" like so much refuse.
Has sanctuary been established or is a mere "clean-up" now at hand?
What next for the region where, reportedly, there were "only 16" deaths in June as opposed to the 130 or so every month last year?
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Meanwhile, in the state of Orissa, India, more than 30,000 Christians live in refugee camps (where conditions are poor at best). In order to return home, according to threats of the majority, they must "reconvert" to Hinduism.
Such threats and destitution are not new phenomena or reality in India.
Violence and murder are sometimes the result, however.
According to USCIRF commissioners Imam Talal Eid and Don Argue in an op-ed featured in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: "Last year, Maoists murdered a Hindu religious leader known for his anti-Christian rhetoric, and it sparked a violent campaign targeting Christians in Orissa. The violence, which went on for several weeks, was carried out by supporters of Hindu nationalist groups and resulted in the destruction of hundreds of homes, dozens of churches, and at least 40 deaths. Not only did police forces fail to protect Christians, but there were also indications of awareness, and perhaps assistance, by state and local officials."
Muslims have suffered and continue to suffer displacement, violence and injustice, too.
Continuing:
"The riots in Orissa were a painful reminder of the 2002 riots in the state of Gujarat, where over 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindu mobs, hundreds of mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were looted or destroyed, and more than 100,000 people fled their homes. As alleged in Orissa, government investigations uncovered complicity by Gujarat state government officials and police inaction in the midst of these attacks.
Efforts to pursue the perpetrators of the Gujarat violence have made little progress. Seven years later, human rights groups report that many cases will likely remain unresolved or result in acquittals because of alleged lack of evidence or insufficient efforts on the part of local police."
When shall justice, any justice, be truly served?
"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The Herald, "Scotland's Leading Quality Daily Newspaper" reveals (briefly) further details of the story of the mysterious "Comrade X" (aka, Mikhail Borodin, Jacob Gruzenberg, George Braun, and George Brown) via a summary of previously secret files.
"Comrade X"
In 1922, Comrade X "slipped into Britain to sow the seeds of the Russian Revolution," evidenced quite directly in the police report that notes that he had been arrested at the Communist Party HQ in Glasgow "on the point of delivering a speech to a secret meeting of Communists."
Upon his arrest, "X" spent six months "languishing" in prison in Glasgow for six months as an illegal alien.
The newly birthed Soviet Union (U.S.S.R), publicly denied his existence and so it has more or less remained until very recently.
After ending up as a Soviet spy in China, arranging arms shipments while working directly as a "prominent advisor to Dr. Sun Yat Sen," he fairly quickly fell afoul of the Chinese regime and returned to Moscow, where he briefly edited the English language Moscow News.
Ironically, in 1951, two years after being charged with being an enemy of the Soviet state, Comrade X died in a Siberian gulag.
