What Happened Here?

For more than seventy years, until the overthrow of communism in 1992, the Soviet government could enter any house or factory and simply take people away – to secretly execute them, or send them into exile or to one of thousands of prison camps. It is impossible to find a single family in Russia untouched by the evils of totalitarianism.

Everyone was afraid; quiet with suspicion, and frozen with fear. Total fear lead to an almost perfect system of exploitation: forced labor. This was the sole source of economic might in the USSR. Both repression and the chain of camps known as The Gulag were necessary to keep it going.

Perm-36 was one of the most notorious of the camps. It played a special role: it was one of three camps where some of the most famous dissidents served time in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The maximum security area was for “repeat offenders” – dissidents who had served time before. Here, in near-complete isolation, the “zeks,” fasted in protest and fought strip searches, earning stints in the “shizo,” or cold punishment cells.

Sadistic guards used the terrible winter as an instrument of torture to break their health and spirits. They lived in terror of catching a cold; they were so weak that any illness could prove fatal. Guards played on that fear, often forcing prisoners repeatedly to submit to strip searches in the cold – sometimes five times a day.

The unremitting cycle of hunger strikes and punishment often was fatal. The “politicals” were buried next to criminals, many of their graves marked only by a number on a post – the ultimate power of the state to render them invisible.

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What Happened Here?