Dear Friends of CCI,
Our September 2019 mega-delegation of American citizens were dazzled by the beauty of current day Russia and also horrified to learn what today’s grandparents and great-grandparents endured in the Gulag work across the USSR. It is reported that over 17,000,000 persons, mostly men, were worked to death in frigid camps throughout the USSR from the 1920 to the 1950s.
Much of this history had been closed off to Russian society. However, the new Moscow Gulag Museum makes the history abundantly clear. The FotoJournal below is but a tiny sample of what is housed within the Gulag Museum.
How could a vast country like Russia become normal again after such tragedy and loss for 30 years … knowing their own leaders turned on millions of them? Those decades had a mass effect on the entire population. They never knew when a knock at the door would come … and their loved ones would be taken away. When we arrived in the USSR in 1983, people on sidewalks carried a silent blank look on their faces like they were registering no one. There were no smiles, the buses were silent, metros were silent. Nearly everyone had a small book to read in their hands, usually the front and back covered neatly with a newspaper wrapping. No one looked to the left or right. Russian people, I learned at that time, had very few friends and didn’t make new friends … they couldn’t trust strangers for fear of being informed on. It then became obvious that most Soviets seemed to have small, tight inner circles. They invited us in, we suspected because we wouldn’t inform on them and would soon be gone. They loved practicing English. I began to think of these small groups as pods, “pea pods” …their insides were surrounded by a tough outer covering that was difficult to penetrate.
