Cyle of 5 events at the Jan Michalski Foundation
In no other country in the world were concentration camps so widespread and used so intensively as in the Soviet Union, and subsequently in all the Communist regimes of the twentieth century. Those sent to these camps were those whom the powers that be labelled "enemies of the people", an assessment subject to the greatest arbitrariness.
Although the word Gulag, which has become part of everyday language, is identified with this tragedy, we know less about what it actually means: The acronym refers to the Main Camp Administration set up in the USSR in 1930 with the aim of regulating the life and death of all prisoners in the same way throughout the Soviet Union, in terms of the standards of forced labour to be provided for each prisoner in mining or forestry operations, the food rations to be received according to these standards and, generally speaking, the profitability of this slave labour.
The Gulag made it possible to develop hostile regions, regardless of the loss of human life. Up until the 1950s, around 20 million male and female prisoners were sent to the 476 concentration camp complexes that made up the Main Administration. Around 4 million "zeks", the name given to the deportees, died there.
All the peoples of the Soviet Union, all strata of society, were confronted with this repressive machine. It was a collective tragedy that gave rise to a vast literature of personal accounts, stories and novels that recounted the unspeakable ordeal of the disappeared in the icy Siberian immensities. The aim of this series of lectures, organised to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, is to pay tribute to these works of human heritage, going beyond the duty to remember. The five meetings will be accompanied by audiovisual testimonies, documentary extracts, music and songs composed in the Gulag, and punctuated by readings.
