Arte - Gulag The Story (2019) Part 3 Peak and Death The Gulag's peak and decline (1945-1957)

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 3 Peak and Death The Gulag's peak and decline (1945-1957)

At the end of the 1950s, populations of the newly occupied territories of the East and intellectuals remained two categories particularly suspected of anti-Sovietism. Subjected to exhausting tasks like men, women, including many war widows condemned to heavy sentences for petty food pilfering, now represent a quarter of the zeks. Nearly 2 million detainees, many of them on the very edge of survival, are still crammed into the camps. Little by little, these appalling living conditions cause the economic profitability of the Gulag to drop. On March 5, 1953, after Stalin's death, a million releases were announced. In 1956, Khrushchev, exonerating himself from his responsibility, however undeniable, denounced the crimes of Stalinism, provoking an immense shock wave in the world.

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