Gulag

If you look at the map of shock new buildings of the first five-year plans, you will see that this map exactly coincides with the map of Stalin’s concentration camps in the GULAG. Of course, in the Soviet years they were silent about this – telling tales about “millions of Komsomol volunteers” who travel to far northern places to die there with a pick in their hands. Until 1956, for the truth about Stalin’s concentration camps, they could have been sent to the same camp, and after 1956 (when the cult of Stalin’s personality was debunked) it became an inconvenient truth, which they tried in every possible way to hide – but periodically here and there in the places of “Stalin’s five-year plans” people find mountains of frozen skeletons with remnants of camp numbers on decayed quilted jackets. No one really took these burials into account in those years, and is in no hurry to investigate and take into account even now.

There are almost no photographs of the GULAG concentration camps – only occasionally people with cameras managed to get there. Of course, they did not shoot the most horror – photographing only what was allowed, but still – every such photograph is now worth its weight in gold. In today’s post we will look at a selection of photographs of the Gulag that were banned in the USSR.