The first Soviet prison camps were set up in 1918 as part of the terror by which the regime established itself. The system continued to grow, and became institutionalized. The most notorious of the late 1920s camps were those on the Arctic island Solovki. But it was only in the 1930s that the camps ceased to be merely inhuman rural prisons and the system of intensive slave labor was introduced. And soon many of the several million peasants deported as kulaks were working, either in camps or in 'special' settlements under secret police control. At this time the Soviets were exporting lumber, and the countries to which it was sent were disturbed by reports that it was being cut by forced labor. This the Soviet government denied, despite first-hand evidence. The campaign of total fabrication of the dreadful realities now entered its vital phase. This involved, amongst other things, hiding the camps and the slave labor operations from foreigners, apart from those the Communists were able to blackmail or bribe.

The center of repression moved, in the early 1930s, to the Baltic-White Sea Canal. This was opened with much fanfare in 1932. In fact, though it exploited several hundred thousand forced laborers, it was never of much use. Its predicted ability to transfer the Northern or Baltic Fleets to the other sea was not achieved. A group of writers and others were brought in, however, and produced a book on it in which they printed the results of their interviews with selected prisoners who told them of how they had been spiritually saved by "corrective labor." This book was published in English in New York, but eventually had to be withdrawn, most of the officials and the writers quoted having been shot.

I Remember the Port in Vanino
The portrait is of the artist, Nikolai Getman, at the age of twenty-eight, while boarding a ship at the port of Vanino. During the spring and summer months, up to 6,000 people were transported on every trip from Vanino to the labor camps at Kolyma. Getman arrived at the port in the fall when it was icebound. He thus had the good fortune of living in a transit camp until the water became navigable in the spring, a circumstance that he believes contributed to his survival. The ships in the painting bear the names of the actual ships which became notorious as carriers of human misery. The freight train in the back of the painting was used to transport prisoners from the European parts of the Soviet Union to Vanino. Painted on the plank on which Getman stands is the first line of a famous labor camp song: “I remember the Vanino port/The morose drone of the steamships/As we climbed aboard/Into the cold and forbidding ship’s hold...”

Moving Out
Millions of prisoners were transported by rail to the camps. The journey could take as long as fifteen days. Fifty or sixty people were packed into each freight car and given water only when the train stopped every three or four days to replenish its water supply for the boiler. Food, when provided, was generally salt herring-which only made the prisoners' thirst that much greater. Not eating the fish however, meant starvation and death. For even minor infractions of the rules, a death certificate could be drawn up on the train, and the prisoner left to die on the permafrost. Given the lack of nourishment, inadequate clothing and cramped quarters, only the very strong, usually the young, reached the camps alive. The prisoners in this painting are seated on the snow in groups of five during a stop. It was Gulag custom to sort prisoners into fives.

Many of the projects were more usual, though most effective in wearing out their miserable human capital. But insane enterprises persisted. When, after World War II, Stalin demanded a new railway across north Siberia, for four years-in temperatures down to -55C in winter-thousands of forced laborers in more than eighty labor camps managed to build 850 kilometers of rail. The whole thing was abandoned, locomotives and all, in the 1950s.

From the mid-thirties on, the terror became yet more intense, the treatment worse still. These millions of totally innocent men and women were treated in ways that would have been thought grossly inhumane elsewhere even if applied to the worst criminals. In Russia itself, in Tsarist times, enemies of the state such as Lenin were merely 'exiled' to Siberia-with their wives, housing and even an allowance. In Soviet times most of the prisoners had been held in one or another of the immensely overcrowded prisons, and had been 'interrogated' to produce confessions of being to one degree or another enemies of the people, of society, of the party. It was taken for granted that anyone given only a ten-year sentence was totally innocent, and guards and police officials sometimes implicitly accepted this. The prisoners were then transported in packed and unsanitary cattle trucks for journeys often of weeks, with minimal rations, with not even water given regularly, with hardly room to stand in almost total darkness. In the case of the Kolyma camps in Northeast Siberia, "the pole of cold and cruelty" of the system, as Solzhenitsyn put it, prisoners then had to face a week or more packed into the holds of the slave ships, even more filthy and crowded.

Far worse, if anything, than the general brutality and degradation inflicted on the prisoners was the central point of the whole Gulag operation-the food ration. It was calculated so that satisfactory toil could bring up to 800 grams of bread a day. Anything less than 100 percent fulfilment of the arbitrary and often almost impossibly high 'norm' meant a lower ration. In any case, the corruption in the camps and the favoring of the gang-criminal element kept the ordinary convicts' food intake at little above, often under, starvation level. One striking comparison is with the Japanue prisoner of war camps on the River Kwai whose ration was about 3,500 calories (though, as in the Soviet Union, very deficient in vitamins)-the worst experience of its sort directly known to Westerners. The Gulag ration, in a more lethal climate, was about 2,400 calories.

First Group of Five Move Out
Women prisoners are being divided into the customary groups of five and assigned work for the day, to be guided by armed escort to the work site and back again at the end of the day. Standing near the guards is also a prisoner, but one who has been elevated to a favored position. The price for such power or privilege, however, was steep. Whatever the guards demanded, she had to give. Such women were detested by their fellow inmates and their power was often short lived, especially after being cast aside by guards who had grown weary of them.

The word Gulag only became known the world over with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The material he had collected from a large number of victims proved final and decisive to a wide readership that had not until then really assimilated the realities. In France, in particular, where the Soviet system was deeply entrenched in an unusually idealistic intelligentsia, the book was widely seen as the death blow for communism.

Nikolai Getman shows the world of hunger and deprivation and oppression with extraordinary clarity and vision. In his paintings one can see the whole perspective of what the Soviet government itself had to describe in the last years of the regime as a system in which "death was caused by unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard of degradation and humiliation, by a life that could not have been endured by any other animal."

Last Rites
The burial ritual of the zeks (political prisoners) was quick and simple. It amounted to putting a tag bearing the prisoner’s number on one of his toes, and sending the body to the hills to be buried in the snow. A famous song describing such burials ends with the words “...and no one will ever learn where my grave is.” The prisoner in the painting is transporting dead fellow inmates on a sleigh to the snowy hills for burial. The bodies of those who had starved to death were so light that it was often possible to pick up several of them at a time.

Scurvy Victims
The journey to the camps left prisoners nearly emaciated upon arrival. Within a month or two, hard labor and further malnutrition often resulted in scurvy and dystrophy. Inmates who worked in the permafrost, in the mines, or in the limeworks were more subject to physical ailments than the others. Those who only had a short time to live and had become too weak to work, such as those depicted in the painting, were put in special medical barracks "to be cared for." They were in fact considered already dead. The doctors were also prisoners and tried to help, but had neither proper equipment nor medicines, only iodine and streptocide. The best they could offer was to make the prisoners more comfortable. The authorities were indifferent. New laborers, stronger than those who had been in the camps for a couple of months, were constantly arriving. The doctors lived in special barracks. These were not, however, a luxury, because extremely ill prisoners were transferred into these barracks to suffer out their last days. The doctors were left with the responsibility for determining when someone was no longer fit to work. Exemption could be given only when a convict was too weak to stand or had a life-threatening illness. To excuse a prisoner from labor for any other reason

Punishment By Mosquitoes
The torture-death depicted here was known as komariki (little mosquitoes). For even an insignificant misdeed, such as a harsh word to a guard, a prisoner could be stripped naked, hung crucifixion-style to a pine tree, and left to be fed upon by mosquitoes. Within thirty minutes to an hour he would be taken down. By that time, however, he would have lost so much blood that a slow and painful death was almost inevitable. Such executions were carried out beyond the barbed wire, in full view of the other prisoners. In some camps, the victims of komarki were not hung on trees, but were thrown instead into pits.