As Roland Brown notes in his review of Drawings from the Gulag, these [Baldaev's drawings] are
"not the work of a passive witness, nor are they products of the imagination. They are good art, but they bear the taint of his choice between authority and victimhood. While it would be naive to judge him from a position of safety and comfort, Baldaev dared only to hate the system and bear witness to it; he did not, as the intrepid Solzhenitsyn did, risk confronting it. The terrible truth he identified – that for many of its servile intermediaries, the Gulag had its contemptible pleasures – was one that could never justly remain buried. It is scarcely surprising that Baldaev longed for the old church, for the bottom drawer must have made a poor confessional. While his drawings may have unburdened him a little, his lengthy private lingerings over their horrors must also have enervated him, and have helped his superiors to secure his submission.
Or simply view the brief, brutal video put out by the publisher:
last Sunday.
