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7 unusual facts about Gulag


Alexander Veprik

Veprik was arrested as a "Jewish nationalist" in 1950, maltreated in prison and then deported to the Gulag.

Andrei Nikolishin

His father, Vasyl Nikolishin, was a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and was exiled from Ukraine to a Gulag forced labor coal mine in Vorkuta, the largest center of the camps in European Russia, for a period of 25 years.

Dominik Rainer Radziwiłł

His father Hieronim Mikołaj Radziwiłł was deported to a Gulag during the Soviet occupation of Poland and died on 6 April 1945.

Karl-Heinrich Riewe

Riewe received a sentence of 25 years in the Soviet GULAG and disappeared.

NKVD Special Camp No. 1

In 1946, around 3,000 prisoners were deported to the Gulag in the Soviet Union.

Union for repatriation of Russians abroad

The fate of the returnees, with few exceptions was tragic: the former military officers were shot upon arrival, and former soldiers were sent to Gulag.

Vasily Seseman

A close associate of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev Karsavin, as a prisoner of Gulag he was also an informal philosophy tutor and supporter of Buddhist writer Bidia Dandaron.


Akokan Gulag

Akokan Gulag was located in the Severo-Baykalsky District of the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.

Aleksandras Stulginskis

In 1941 Stulginskis and his wife were arrested by the Soviet NKVD and deported to a gulag in the Krasnoyarsk region, while his wife was deported to the Komi area.

Arkadiy Belinkov

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Viktor Shklovsky interceded for him: the execution was replaced by eight years of imprisonment in Karlag (Karaganda Gulag branch).

Eddie Rosner

For the next eight years Rosner continued to perform in the Gulag camp near Magadan, and was allowed to use music, or be used, to lift the spirits of other prisoners of the Soviet Gulag.

Elizaveta Voronyanskaya

This work, a history of the Gulag prison camps, was ready for publication in New York and Paris by 1973 but Solzhenitsyn had wished for first publication in the Soviet Union.

Frantsishak Alyakhnovich

Alyakhnovich's Gulag experience became a basis for his 1934 book of memoirs У капцюрох ГПУ (U kaptsyurokh HPU, In the claws of the GPU), that was later translated into several languages.

Hieronim Mikołaj Radziwiłł

He was deported to a Gulag during the Soviet occupation of Poland and died on 6 April 1945.

Kolyma River

The river gives its title to a famous anthology about life in Gulag camps by Varlam Shalamov, The Kolyma Tales.

Konservy

One was introduced by Varlam Shalamov in his tales about Gulag, and it was called "calf" - a younger convict accepted to escape team for food, as a walking piece of meat.

Naftaly Frenkel

Frenkel is best known for his role in the organisation of work in the Gulag, starting from the forced labor camp of the Solovetsky Islands, which is recognised as one of the earliest sites of the Gulag.

Nikolaus Riehl

One of the political prisoners in Laboratory B was Riehls’ colleague from the KWIH, N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij, who, as a Soviet citizen, was arrested by the Soviet forces in Berlin at the conclusion of the war, and he was sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag.

Rimantas Dagys

Rimantas Dagys was born in the settlement of Churubai Nura (now Abay, Kazakhstan) to a family of former Gulag prisoners, deported form Lithuania for 10 years: his mother, Filomena Dagienė was imprisoned in Vorkuta camps, his father, Jonas Dagys, in Siblag camps.

Stuart Urban

In 2006 Urban completed Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead, his long-gestating full length theatrical documentary about his father Garri, an escaper from both the Gulag and the Holocaust.

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution

Contesting Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Žižek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp.

Vinnytsia massacre

The executions were clandestine, the families were not informed of their relatives' fate; in rare cases the Soviet authorities claimed that the missing people had either died of natural causes, had been sentenced to Gulag in the Far North or transferred to prisons in other parts of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Petrov

Vladimir Nikolayevich Petrov (1915–1999), writer, teacher, and former prisoner of the Soviet Gulag

Vorkuta State Drama Theatre

After Joseph Stalin’s death the Gulag was reorganized and the theater entered the city system.

Yury Dombrovsky

An account about Dombrovsky written by Armand Maloumian, a fellow inmate of the GULAG, can be found in Kontinent 4: Contemporary Russian Writers (Avon Books, ed. George Bailey), entitled "And Even Our Tears."


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