Second Holocaust: Russian Gulags
At present there are an immense amount of films and books about the Jewish holocaust, the Nazi concentration camps, but, it is forgotten, which in turn, in the USSR they committed that is even more terrifying horrors.
Los Gulag means, General Directorate of Labor Fields. It is known that there were 476 concentration field systems, each one formed by percent.
But where did all this come from?: The Gulag had a history of the Tsarist Russia, in the Brigade of Forced Workers who operated in Siberia from the seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost immediately after concluding the Russian revolution the Gulags adopted their most modern and known form, becoming an integral part of the Soviet system
Lenin, the leader, had demanded that the insecure elements were confined in concentration camps on the outskirts of the main cities. Subsequently, between 1929, until 1953, Death of Stalin, 18 million people had gone through that system, 15% of the population.
The prisoners worked in almost all imaginable industries: forest exploitation, mining, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, aeronautics and weapons . They lived in a separate civilization, as in a country within another country.
The Gulag had its own laws, customs and even its own jargon, generated its own literature, its villains and its heroes, and left a mark on all those who were there, both prisoners and guardians.
But why were there? There were political prisoners, who did not coincide with Stalin’s ideals, but not only were they politicians, that is, anyone who did not agree with the Stalinist policy ended there: priest, former ministers, citizens, peasants etc..
As Aleksander Tvardovski wrote, and fate made them all the same by putting them out of the law, Kulak’s son or red commander, be the son of Pope or Commissioner. Here the whole class matched, all men were brothers, all partners from the countryside, each marked by traitor.
But I also had people from other ethnicities, such as Gypsy Jews etc. However, there is only talk of Hitler in the anti -Semitic issue, but Stalin also considered the Jewish people as a collectively guilty of conspiring against the Soviet state and this is how millions of Jews were deported to the Gulag during the operation that would constitute a second holocaustin Europe.
Miraculously on March 5, 1953, Stalin’s mandate lost his life and ended the Stalinist era, and therefore the cancellation of the second holocaust planned for March 1953.
Until recently it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of communist Europe as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is a part: communist regimes were less censurable over the years. No one was very scared with General Jaruzelski, or even with Brezhnev, although both were responsible for much of the destruction. In addition, the files were closed. Access to concentration fields was prohibited. No television camera never filmed the Soviet fields or their victims, as they did in Germany at the end of World War II. At the same time, the absence of images means that the issue in our visual culture did not really exist either.
Ideology also transformed the ways in which we have understood the Soviet and Eastern Europe history. In the 1920s, Westerners knew a lot about the bloody of the Lenin Revolution and the concentration camps that he had just established. The Western Socialists, many of whose brothers were among the first victims of the Bolsheviks, protested energetic, firm and frequently against the crimes that were being committed by the Bolshevik regime. Interestingly, several Spaniards had to go in these conditions, as prisoners in a gulag.
After the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) with the victory of national Spain against the Second Republic, a total of 4 were exiled in the Soviet Union.195 Spanish Republicans (891 politicians, 192 students in aviation and sailor, 130 teachers and 2.982 children). As a consequence of his defeat in the contest, none could return to his homeland because Francisco Franco’s New Spain would retaliate against them. Faced with this panorama, logically staying in the USSR was the most sensible in appearance, without knowing that over time that would also become a much more dangerous option.
Among the alternatives offered to Spanish Republicans as soon as World War II began in 1939 was to return to Spain, remain in the USSR or exile to a liberal democratic country. Some traveled abroad via Turkey and then to France and Mexico, but most preferred to risk and settle in Russia for the ideological attractiveness that propaganda had sold that nation during the Second Republic. This was how all the Spaniards were dispersed by various cities and towns of the Soviet Union, except for the exception of the pilots and sailors to whom they housed them provisionally in military centers such as Kirovabad, PlanIERNAYA, Mónino and Odessa.
The problems between Soviet and Spaniards began when some of the pilots and sailors made secret efforts with foreign embassies to try to leave the country. Basically it was a series of applications to various countries in Europe, the United States and Latin America, including surprisingly Germany and Spain, although the latter rejected the return to 27 Spaniards who begged forgiveness. As a consequence of these unexpected movements without consent from the State, the NKVD State Police stopped 8 pilots and Odessa to 6 sailors in Odessa. These 14 Spaniards were falsely accused of espionage and immediately deported to Siberia, some of them died during the train trip due to poor savings and cold conditions.
When the third Reich invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, all foreigners in Russian territory were considered by communist authorities as "spies" at the service of the axis. On June 27, the first 45 Spaniards, all sailors, were arrested in Odessa. The next day, on the 28th, other Hispanics (25 pilots and a teacher named Juan Bote García) were arrested in Tolstopaltsevo. As if they were won, the Spaniards started the trip on a Stolypin brand train to the Novosibirsk, Krasnoiarsk, Gorki and Petropavlovsk Gulags. As punishment for their status as foreigners were sentenced to forced labor 14 hours a day, sometimes at temperatures of -65º degrees below zero, although because they were from a neutral country at least obtained certain advantages such as having days off on Sundays, moregrams of bread (600 for good workers, 900 for work leaders, 300 for the sick and 100 for the punished) and a colum diet with col, beets, carrot and sugar. Less luck, however, had those transferred to the works of a water channel that tried to unite the cities of Norilsk and Dudinka through the Yeniséi river because only in the first two months eight Spaniards died due to exhaustion. In fact, between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, mortality increased when the rest of Hispanics were sent to Kazakhistan, specifically to the prison centers of Karagandá, Karabas, Spassk and Kok -usek.
The blue division composed of 60.000 Volunteers of the Spanish Army and the Falange that fought against the Red Army in the Eastern Front, would also suffer the calamities of captivity. For example, after the battle of Krasny Bor at the beginning of 1943, a total of 94 division trapped by the Soviets died in the 25 kilometers of an authentic death march on the ice that was accompanied by abuse and malnutrition. The remaining survivors and other soldiers captured in various clashes that would amount to a total of the 464 prisoners made to the blue division, would be housed in the concentration camps of Borovichí, Makarino and Norilsk, and in several prison centers of Kazakhstan, where all were punishedto forced labor, including officers.
Interestingly, the communists who had infiltrated the Blue Division to leave Spain, did not even save deportation to the Gulag when 75 of them were delivered to the Red Army thinking that they were going to receive them with open arms. Similarly, the 44 Republican exiles who had taken refuge in the Spanish embassy during the battle of Berlin in May 1945, were seated and sent as prisoners to the USSR. Only some Spanish communists escaped on their own, although others were intercepted in the attempt such as José Tuñón Albertos and Pedro Cepeda Sánchez, who had hidden in the suitcases of two Argentine diplomats.
Until 1946 there was hardly news about the Republicans imprisoned in the Gulags when the French communist Francisque Bornet, who had miraculously been released and repatriated to France, explained that more than 100 Hispanics were held in Kazakhistan. Indignant the Spanish exiles in France, Mexico and other countries of the allies of the allies for what was happening, formulated a protest creating the Spanish Federation of Deported and Political Internships. Through this mechanism, the leftist forces among which were the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the anarchists of the National Labor Confederation (CNT), conducted an intense propaganda campaign against the behavior of the USSR. However, on the opposite side, the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) supported by the Kremlin tried. Obviously no one believed the lie because after being released 88 Spaniards of the Kok-Pusek Gulag among which there were 34 sailors, 29 members of the Berlin Embassy, 24 pilots and a teacher;The truth came to light when they were held in the port of Odessa and approached by NKVD guards that forced them to sign a document, in which they had to give up abandoning the country and staying to live necessarily in the USSR in the USSR. Of the 88 inmates signed the 47 and another 41 papers, the latter being deported to the concentration camps of Cherepovéts and Borovichí
After this investigation, I have discovered the terrible evils that were committed in the USSR, since childUSSR until last year. Now that I was informed, a little, after everything I have read, it saddens me that there is not even a monument in honor of the dead in those fields, and I am also angry that Russian citizens see all that with good eyes.
And after understanding the life of a prisoner, I do not understand how today, the world makes deaf ears and a fat eye to what happens in North Korea, it seems that humanity never learns, and lets in North Korea there are fieldof concentration as hard as those of the twentieth century
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