Arte - Gulag The Story (2019) Part 1 Origins From experimentation to setting up the forced labour system (1917-1933)

A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century, the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown. With exceptional archives and testimonies, it unfolds, from 1917 to the end of the 1950s, the history of the Soviet concentration camp system which constituted the hidden heart of the empire. Ignored, then denied for decades, it shattered the lives of millions of deportees. The secrecy established by the USSR, the blindness of the West, then the persistent denial of the Russian authorities have long hampered historical work. Thanks to the opening of the archives, written but also filmed, and to the extraordinary work of collecting testimonies accomplished by the Russian organization Memorial, this documentary series unfolds, for the first time in images, the Dantesque story of an “archipelago” largely forgotten and misunderstood. The history of the Gulag is long, complex and in many ways out of the ordinary. From the Revolution of 1917 to Gorbachev, touching on the civil war, the Great Terror, World War II, the Cold War and the death of Stalin, this series describes the workings of the Gulag. How and why did the USSR create this system of forced-labour camps in which 20 million prisoners were exploited and worked to the bone? Through the exceptional fates of numerous protagonists, both executioners and victims, the history of the Gulag is deciphered with previously-unreleased documentary sources and the help of historians and Gulag experts, like Nicolas Werth, an internationally renowned scholar of Soviet history.

Part 1 Origins From experimentation to setting up the forced labour system (1917-1933)

In 1918, only a few months after the October Revolution, the first concentration camps appeared. With the aim of getting rid of political adversaries and re-educating the so-called “asocial” elements through work, the new Bolshevik regime conducted its first large-scale experiment on the Solovki archipelago, very close to the Arctic Circle. Thousands of political and common law detainees, men and women, were deported there and subjected to forced labor. With the arrival of Stalin in power, slavery in these camps became a major economic resource. However, the death of thousands of zeks (“prisoners”) will not worry the regime, which sees its population as an inexhaustible source of labor…

Full Version Available Upon Request
Related Documentary