The Gulag In Pictures

Drawings From The Gulag is precisely what the title says. The pictures drawn by Danzig Baldaev, a colonel of the KGB who did them secretly, very secretly. Being caught could well have been fatal. It definitely meant becoming another prisoner in the gulag. The Guardian's article is interesting for its evasiveness; accusing Colonel Baldaev of being a pornographer, coward et cetera. They are the sort that pandered to Marxist evil when they did not have to. They still do. They are just some of Lenin's Useful Idiots & Moral Cretins too. Recall that their reporter wrote up the Ukraine  Massacres, which they refused to print. See Winter in Moscow. They were too fond of Joe Stalin to tell the truth about his evil.

Notice too that the naked prisoners look just as badly starved as any that came out of the Nazi camps. The Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov was written by a victim of the same system of evil. Could things really be that bad, worse than Auschwitz or other Nazi Concentration Camps? The answer is yes; check for yourself using other Sources or Drawings From The Gulag.
PS  Vasili Mitrokhin, another subversive did something of the sort by copying lots of very secret KGB files - see the Mitrokhin Archives.

GULAG Historian Get His Sentence Extended To 15 Years   [
Yury A. Dmitriev of the Memorial_(society) was accused to taking pornographic photos of his foster daughter, aged 11. He got three and a half years then an extra ten. He was due out it November 2020 so they gave him an extra two years. No doubt he has taken the point that they don't want Joe Stalin's evil made public. The Wiki's article is sympathetic.

Drawing From The Gulag Reviewed By A Communist Subversive 
Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev – review
These horrific depictions of life in the Soviet penal system are a troubling blend of fact and allegory, writes Roland Elliot Brown [ Bollocks - he lies - Editor ]

'Third degree interrogation' from Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev. Illustration: Danzig Baldaev

In the Soviet Union, desk drawers became sarcophagi; entombed within them were the creative endeavours of the most talented and perceptive Soviet citizens. Yet it is best not to idealise such hiding spaces as reserves of dormant illumination; indeed, there may have been no limit to the depths of darkness possible within them.

Consider the case of Danzig Baldaev. Born in 1925 in Ulan-Ude, in east-central Russia, Baldaev was the son of an ethnographer who was arrested as an "enemy of the people". He grew up in an orphanage for the children of "enemies" and following his service in the second world war was "forced", as he described it, by the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) to work as a warder at Kresty prison in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. His employment in the Soviet penal system took him all over the USSR, but in private, he poured the psychological detritus of his profession into a terrifying work of sadistic pornography [ sic ], which he dedicated, in 1988, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Baldaev was not a pornographer in any conventional sense, but was nevertheless inundated by pornography, for he was surrounded by the pornographic sadism that characterised – sometimes by design, sometimes by default – the Soviet punitive machine. An amateur anthropologist who had been denied an education because of his family's political ignominy, Baldaev struggled to anatomise on paper the system that defined him, and in which he was complicit. 

His drawings and descriptions imprint themselves awfully in the imagination: in one image, three nude, emaciated women, so wasted by hunger and work that their uteruses have prolapsed, line up before a camp doctor beneath a sign bearing Lenin's dictate, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." In another, an unclothed university professor is lashed, sodomised and gloated over by his uneducated guards for his pursuit of an unapproved science. Elsewhere, sick workers are steamed in a sauna, and then hauled naked into temperatures below freezing to expire from shock. On the most nauseating page, a young woman who has refused the sexual advances of her captors sits tied to a tree atop an anthill in the notoriously insect-ridden Siberian woods with a tube "inserted into the vagina so the ants could crawl inside".

Readers may wonder whether Baldaev's illustrations are accurate documents of atrocities at all, or were intended as anti-Soviet polemic. The answer is both: Baldaev depicts the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as a national tragedy following which "the peoples of Russia recalled life under the tsar as a lost paradise". He describes the Bolsheviks' antireligious militancy as the sole impetus for the moral collapse he encountered. Yet while his analysis of the Soviet disaster rests upon simplistic nostalgia for a golden age of church and monarchy, the editors of this book have convincingly corroborated many of his representations with parallel accounts from the canon of Russian Gulag literature.

Viewers may also question whether the artistic merits of Baldaev's drawings redeem their potential prurience. While it is necessary to know that "enemies of the people" were subjected to revolting forms of torture and humiliation, one may ask: are the interests of history in any way served by a graphic image of a bound woman with ants crawling into her vagina? There are strong artistic precedents to support Baldaev's case: Goya's Disasters of War, for example, recorded politically motivated atrocities in a similar manner and thus prophesied the modern conception of warfare. Gustave Doré's macabre and meticulous engravings for each layer of hell in Dante's inferno gave to posterity a necessary encouragement to contemplate the inverse side of heaven. Baldaev's drawings resemble both artists' works.

Yet they 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.
UNQUOTE
Read this to know the determination of a corrupt fool to excuse blatant evil.

 

An Honest Reviewer Writes - http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/04/review-drawings-from-the-gulag-danzig-baldaev/

Does this remind you of those pictures of naughty Nazis killing wonderful, caring Jews who never did any harm to any one? Just forget what they are doing in the Stolen Land called Palestine for the moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 


Notice the Italian Mafia word  Omerta on a prisoner's back. Jews call it Mesirah. Their criminals are more dangerous

 

 

 

 


Drawings from the Gulag at page 239 mentions:-
Koba the Dread by Martin Amis
Gulag: A History by Anne Apfelbaum - a Jew
Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin's Gulag by  Janusz Bardach
Stalin's Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West
by Martin J. Bollinger
Vorkuta
 by Edward Buca
Inside Stalin's Russia: The Diaries of Reader Bullard, 1930-1934

The Great Terror: A Reassessment
by Robert Conquest
Harvest Of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization And The Terror Famine
by Robert Conquest
Khrushchev's Cold Summer
Soviet Prison Camp Speech
Journey into the Whirlwind
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