Today’s Unbearable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Here’s a description of a Soviet prison camp circa 1980 from the book The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union:
The greater part of the Arkhangel’sk Region, a territory lying astride the Arctic Circle, is an icy, mountainous wasteland. In the south, however, there are large tracts of forest as well as significant deposits of metal ores, especially aluminum bauxite.
Life in these difficult climatic conditions is so hard that volunteers refuse to work here. For this reason, the Soviet state sends thousands of prisoners to the labor camps of Arkhangel’sk Region instead. As of 1980, there were no less than 100,000 prisoners in the three major forced-labor camp complexes, one of which was Oneglag.
Oneglag, whose administrative headquarters designed as no. 350 may be found in Plesetsk, included 50 strict-regime and seven special strict-regime camps and a total prisoner population of approximately 60,000. The camp complex services the Bauxite Construction Trust and the Onega Special Lumber Company which provided lumber for use in the Soviet Union or for export to the West.
The following is an eyewitness account from M.K., an electronics engineer released from Oneglag in 1976:
“I was in a privileged group of specialists assigned to build tracks for the bauxite dredges and to plan the relocation of the logging camps. This gave me the opportunity to observe the conditions under which the prisoners in several ‘Oneglag’ camps lived. To begin with, the prisoners were kept hungry and were denied fresh vegetables, which, under sub-polar conditions, can cause scurvy. The ‘struggle’ against scurvy was carried out at our camp with the use of local remedies. Barrels of spruce-needle extract, which the prisoners drank as a source of ‘vitamins’, were available in the living areas of the camps. This measure, however, did not prevent the prisoners from losing their teeth.
“At winter temperatures of -40º or -50º C., the work in the logging areas was unbearable, and the production quotas were high. Failure to fulfill these quotas was punishable by incarceration in the isolation cell on reduced rations. A prisoner so punished, however, was at least withdrawn from his work duties.
“In the camps, I often saw desperate prisoners who had resorted to self-mutilation in order to escape the work that was sending them to their graves. Some placed a leg under a falling log, others chopped off a finger. Some even deliberately allowed a hand to become frostbitten so that it would have to be amputated. An atmosphere of hopelessness and despair reigned in the camps. Only the religious prisoners were able to stand above the human degradation. They believed that they were being tested by God and that they had to endure their sufferings. The others, however, fought each other over food or reduced themselves to acts of homosexuality or even sodomy. There were no women at the camps. The barracks at the camps were built of damp wood, which the prisoners had to dry with their own bodies. Not even the heating ovens were of any help against the dank winter cold.
“Even though we lived in the forest, we did not always have firewood for the ovens. The supervisors were more interested in fulfilling their work plans than in sending the prisoners out to gather firewood for the camps. This was left to the disabled prisoners. The camp rations condemned us, moreover, to permanent hunger. Because of the impassability of the roads in the winter, it was not always possible for the authorities to deliver provisions to the camps, which made matters much worse. In such cases, helicopters sometimes dropped packages of zwiebach from the sky. In the summer, swarms of midges, tiny gnat-like insects, plagued and literally devoured the prisoners. Even the protective nets on our headgear were of no help. The netting was coarse enough for the insects to penetrate. Yet the quotas had to be met and the prisoners had to continue working —swollen from illness, bloodstained, and hungry.
“When I was released from this horror after three years (I was unexpectedly rehabilitated), I could not for a long time believe that I had come out alive. And now, I can hardly believe that this horror continues to exist today. But it does exist. I still correspond with friends I left behind in the camp.”
Prisoners working along the Gulag railroad
Culled from: The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union
Civil War Portrait Du Jour!
By comparison with the ragtag forces of the South, the Union Army was magnificently equipped, as exemplified by the cornetist of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry pictured here. Yet Northerners were repeatedly chagrined by the frequency with which the ill-equipped Rebels bested them in battle. A Unionist lady wrote of Lee’s army marching through Frederick, Maryland:
I wish, my dearest Minnie, you could have witnessed the transit of the Rebel army through our streets… Their coming was unheralded by any pomp and pageant whatever… Instead came three long dirty columns that kept on in an unceasing flow. I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Was this body of men, moving… along with no order, their guns carried in every fashion, no two dressed alike, their officers hardly distinguishable from the privates—were these, I asked myself in amazement, were these dirty, lank, ugly specimens of humanity, with shocks of hair sticking through the holes in their hats, and the dust thick on their dirty faces, the men that had coped and encountered successfully and driven back again and again our splendid legions…?
I must confess, Minnie, that I felt humiliated at the thought that this horde of ragamuffins could set our grand army of the Union at defiance. Why, it seemed as if a single regiment of our gallant boys in blue could drive that dirty crew into the river without any trouble!
Culled from: Portraits of the Civil War