It all started with a book.
We held in our hands «58th. Unseized”—a unique publication by Novaya Gazeta journalists Anna Artemyeva and Elena Racheva. It contains stories of former prisoners and guards of Stalin’s GULAG, their portraits, and photographs of personal belongings from the camps. 64 lives. 64 testimonies of a terrifying era, often told for the first and, most likely, the last time (as the book’s protagonists were between 80 and 103 years old).
A generation of our grandparents, divided by barbed wire, united by lack of freedom, poverty, hunger, and fear.
Thus, the idea for the project “GULAG. Witnesses” was born—an attempt to bring «58th. Unseized” to the screen and preserve these stories. In this book, for the first time, Russia that was imprisoned and Russia that guarded it met under one cover.
We also realized that even in prosperous Canada, there are people for whom the words GULAG, arrest, camp, exile still carry the searing pain of loss, a sense of injustice, and fear. They carried this memory throughout their lives, and in emigration, they carefully preserve faded photographs, letters, rehabilitation documents—everything that is in any way connected with the memory of their long-lost loved ones.
Human memory is designed so that tragedy fades over time, and pain diminishes. A person cannot live with an unhealed deep emotional trauma. That is why those who survived the GULAG often do not want to recall their life in the camps.
But we live in a historical moment when the issue of human freedom, humiliation, dignity, and fear is becoming relevant once again.
There was a GULAG, but there was never repentance.
And it is no coincidence that in Russia today, bans, denunciations, Stalinist sentences have once again become possible. And even the war in Ukraine—criminal and unjustifiable.
We decided to retrace the path that almost everyone who ended up in the GULAG had to endure: arrest, interrogation, forced transportation, life in the camp—and, for those who were lucky, freedom.
The stories that many prefer to remain silent about must be told.
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