Gulag Archipelago by Vladimir Putin

Secrets were forbidden in camp Perm-36. Guards searched everywhere for them, even in prisoners’ eyes, ears and teeth. Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag system for almost half his life, managed to keep his scribbled on pieces of paper and hidden in the crevices of his cell.

Secrets were forbidden in camp Perm-36. Guards searched everywhere for them, even in prisoners’ eyes, ears and teeth. Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag system for almost half his life, managed to keep his scribbled on pieces of paper and hidden in the crevices of his cell.

They were later smuggled out of Perm-36 by his released cellmates to spread the word about political repression in the Soviet Union and the poet’s emotional anguish while kept in solitary confinement.

“The police regime has reached its peak,” said one note, written with a pencil sharpened against the floor of Stus’ cell. “They seize anything they like and we have lost the very right to be ourselves. I do not know when death will come for the others, but I feel it coming for me.”

A few months later, in 1985, Stus was found dead in his cell. He had just been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some believe he hung himself, others say prison guards killed him while he slept.

The forced labor camp closed in 1988.

Around the world, the horrors described in Stus’ notebook are considered to be among the 20th century’s worst crimes against humanity. The Gulag system hit its peak from the 1930s to the 1950s, killing more than a million, with labor camps continuing to exist into the late 1980s. But in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Perm-36, the place of Stus’ death, is the subject of a fierce battle over the country’s past, its present and future.

It is not possible to remember the Soviet political prisoners without thinking about today’s political prisoners — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny

One of the features of Putin’s rule — currently endorsed, according to polls, by 80 percent of the population — is to stoke nostalgia for all things Soviet. Doing so requires a revision of history that sweeps the crimes of Putin’s predecessors under the carpet, including at places like Perm-36, located near this village, Kuchino, about 100 kilometers from the city of Perm. This is the last remaining example of a Gulag camp in the world, which Memorial, a Russian human rights organization, in 1995 turned into a museum of political repression.

Ever since the conflict with Ukraine broke out two years ago, the Kremlin has tried to tarnish that country’s reputation in Russian eyes. As part of a campaign to paint the government in Kiev as neo-Nazi fascists, it has singled out the Ukrainian political prisoners who were kept in Perm-36 for special scorn

In June 2014, at the height of fighting in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Russia’s NTV channel broadcast a documentary about the museum, claiming its directors were putting “a special emphasis” on Ukrainian nationalists in an exhibit on former Ukrainian political prisoners in Perm-36. The documentary featured interviews with former prison guards, alleging that the museum was spreading Western-funded propaganda. They also alleged that the two directors were involved in the ongoing war in Ukraine, where “the followers of Stepan Bandera bomb hospitals and peaceful citizens.” (Bandera was a wartime Ukrainian nationalist.)

After those accusations were aired, the museum was briefly closed and its directors, Tatiana Kursina, 66, and her husband Viktor Shmirov, 69, were removed from their jobs. The couple had saved the prison complex from demolition 20 years ago.  In cooperation with the Memorial group, Kursina and Shmirov, who are both retired historians from the city of Perm, created the museum and saved the archives of material that are testimonies to the camp’s horrors. It is their lives’ work.

“This kind of generation [of prisoners] had never existed before: They created the rear of our army, responsible for supplies and resources, that helped us be victorious in this dreadful war” — Sergei Spodin, a descendent of victims of Stalin’s terror

Last March, the local authorities took control of the complex and declared Kursina and Shmirov “foreign agents,” applying a 2012 law that Russian authorities have used to crackdown on NGOs that receive foreign donations for allegedly engaging in “political activity.” After the couple’s ouster, the museum remained open although most references to political repression and prisoners’ testaments to hardship in Perm-36 had been removed.

“The museum was established in an effort to publicly recognize the crime of repressive policies under the Soviet system and communist ideology,” Kursina said in Perm. “When they destroyed it, it was a loud signal: Our past was no longer seen as criminal!”

Whatever Putin is doing to beautify the Soviet past, some of it appears to stick with Russians, and it is helping him in Ukraine. Russians overwhelmingly supported his annexation of Crimea in 2014. A recent Levada Center poll showed that 45 percent of Russians at least partly think the suffering endured under Stalin and in the Soviet Union was “justified,” an increase from 25 percent in 2012.

The accusations of Ukrainian nationalism and fascism featured in NTV’s documentary on Perm-36 often feature in Russian media reporting on the Ukraine crisis. Since 2013, when pro-European demonstrators took over Kiev’s Independence Square (or Maidan) and for three months demanded the overthrow of a corrupt regime in the Ukrainian capital, Russian official propaganda has compared events in Ukraine to those in Nazi Germany and called the pro-Western Kiev government a “fascist junta.”

Part of the exhibit in the Perm-36 museum is dedicated to Ukrainian political prisoners. It features Stus and his comrades, most of whom were Soviet dissidents and intellectuals, often imprisoned for circulating Ukrainian-language pamphlets, though accused of serious crimes like the murder of Red Army soldiers and collaboration with the Nazis.

One Ukrainian prisoner featured in the exhibition was Vasly Ovsienko, Stus’ cellmate, who smuggled some of the poet’s notes out of the Gulag after his release.  He was sent to the camps on three occasions for “anti-Soviet agitation” after he was caught distributing literature calling for an independent Ukrainian state.

When we met in his apartment on the outskirts Kiev, the now 66-year-old Ovsienko greeted me dressed in a handwoven Vyshuvanka, the national dress of Ukraine, and insists on speaking only in Ukrainian. His home is littered with trinkets and mementos from his days in the Gulag: faded photographs, maps, illustrations, an imitation of his old prison shirt, towering stacks of books and historical essays. “Everything was designed to cause us the most discomfort as possible,” Ovsienko said. “Except for the walls and the cell, nothing was visible. If you stood on a stool you could catch a glimpse of the treetops in  the woods stretching for half a kilometer.”

Apart from the stolen glimpses of the outside, life inside was hell.

“We were constantly ill. There was a terrible problem with the toilets in our cells,” Ovsienko said. “This was one of the most insufferable of psychological tortures.”

To this day, the barracks of Perm-36, where political prisoners, Russians and Ukrainians, were held, is a grim place. It’s encircled by three layers of barbed wire fences and surrounded by stone walls, dotted with watchtowers. There is little difference in temperature inside or outside, and temperatures in Kuchino in winter can drop to -53 Celsius.

The most shocking part to see in the complex are the “exercise” cages. No more than two-by-three meters in size,  and surrounded by concrete walls and razor wire, for 10 years these boxes were the prisoners’ only relief from dim lights in their cells.

The revamped museum tells a different story, though. While there is still acknowledgement of the harsh conditions in the Gulag, the exhibition now refrains from displaying graphic images of brutality. Eyewitness accounts are often told by nurses and guards who had served in Perm-36, rather than former prisoners.

Leonid Obukhov, a historian of the Soviet period in Perm, said local officials, seeking to score points with the powers higher up in Moscow, have perverted the mission of the museum.

“They claim that they want to move away from excessive politicization of history, to take a neutral stance,” he said. “But instead, this new museum is more like a museum for camp architecture. There is now more talk about the buildings and construction sites, rather than the prisoners and the repression.”

For example, the new exhibition is dedicated entirely to the production of timber in the Gulag, emphasizing that this work contributed to Russia’s victory in World War II — which figures prominently in the Putin historical narrative.

“We were victorious against the strongest army in the world, Hitler’s army,” said Sergei Spodin, a museum guide and descendent of victims of Stalin’s terror, during a tour. “This kind of generation [of prisoners] had never existed before: They created the rear of our army, responsible for supplies and resources, that helped us be victorious in this dreadful war.”

As we trudged across to the prisoners’ living quarters, he warned me not to believe everything we hear about the museum in the Western media. “Here, prisoners were able to walk about, they played games and sports.”

Despite his own personal links to Soviet terror, Spodin, like many young Russians, said that repression was a necessary to save the Motherland. He said his grandparents were Kulaks, rich peasants demonized in Soviet times as the enemy bourgeoise: “Their liquidation was expected — the country was at war,” he said.

The fight over Russia’s Stalinist and Soviet past is not confined to isolated parts of the country. It is also taking place in Moscow.  A new, state-funded museum of the Gulag has recently opened in the capital. The credit for the opening is largely due to the work of the Memorial group.

Hundreds of people were tortured and executed there. They were often imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

Along with projects such as “Last Address,” an initiative which places name plaques on buildings previously inhabited by victims of state violence, Memorial successfully lobbied the Russian government to name an official day of remembrance for victims of Soviet repression.

Since 1991, every October 30, about 200 people gather in Moscow at the memorial outside the Lubyanka prison, the center of Stalinist terror. Hundreds of people were tortured and executed there. They were often imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

The Lubyanka commemoration includes lighting candles and reading the names of victims off a seemingly endless list. No official from Putin’s government has attended so far, and when asked why, opposition politician Alexey Navalny, said: “It’s clear that this is an uncomfortable memory for modern Russia, because it is not possible to remember the Soviet political prisoners without thinking about today’s political prisoners.”

Last October, Tatiana Severnova stood outside Lubyanka for three hours in the biting frost of Moscow, waiting for her chance to honor the dead. Her grandfather was executed by the NKVD, precursor of the KGB. When her turn came, she could not read his name out loud.

She was in tears when she explained that she had been overwhelmed with sadness.

“There are too many names,” Severnova said. “We need to remember every single person.”

Francesca Ebel is a freelance journalist based in Russia.

http://www.politico.eu/article/putin-russia-dont-mention-gulag-soviet-history-communism/