ALZHIR: A look into the gulag

The gulag. It’s not my favorite topic as the details are rather unpleasant. But Kazakhstan is a post-Soviet country that endured a great deal of the human suffering, forced labor, and famines, so I believe it’s a topic that shouldn’t be skirted around either. Thus, I’ll try my best to explain. Expect this to be a less fun post than the others I’ve written so far.

The Main Administration of Camps, or as it is referred to in Russian, the “Главное Управление Лагерей” (or “GULAG” for short), was a system of internment and forced labor which was built for the detainment and “correction” of those who were deemed unfit for the wider Soviet society. It was a defining feature of Stalinism, having been established by Vladimir Lenin early in the country’s history as a means to aid his party, the Bolsheviks, in eliminating tsarist elements from the socialist state and seizing total political control. Stalin perfected the system of totalitarian oppression, detaining millions using his secret police (the NKVD) and exiling them, often to Siberia, with ruthless impunity. No one was safe from the gulag, not even Stalin’s own inner circle, and the 1930s and 40s saw the height of the dictator’s purges. People would regularly perish from overwork or starvation. If you tried to escape, you’d be shot by the guards.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors abolished the gulag in the process of de-Stalinization, which saw many political prisoners released and granted amnesty. However, this reform, while it dissolved much of the system’s administration, functioned in name only, as the Soviet Union continued to use forced labor on prisoners well after Stalin’s death. The legacy of the gulag cannot be understated, and continues to haunt Russia, Kazakhstan, and the other post-Soviet countries to this day.

Some of you may have read my review to The Gift to Stalin, and if so, the name ALZHIR may sound familiar, as it happened to be the prison camp the character Vera was released from. Even so, I haven’t gone much into depth into the subject, nor have I talked about our visit there. During our trip to the capital Astana, we got to see the museum and memorial dedicated to the victims of this camp. It was a rainy, miserable day, which kind of set the mood for our visit.

Like the word “gulag”, the name “ALZHIR” too is an acronym which stands for “Акмолинский Лагерь Жён Изменников Родины” (“Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland”). As the name suggests, this was a camp built specifically for women, who had been married to “traitors” and thus deemed untrustworthy by the state. From 1937 on, over 18,000 women from all across the USSR, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and the other Soviet republics were brought to Akmolinsk, located in the far reaches of northern Kazakhstan. Here they were forced to harvest materials and weave clothes until they had served their sentences and the state deemed them properly “corrected” to rejoin Soviet society. More commonly, however, prisoners were detained indefinitely, or at least until death. The blizzards are unforgiving in this part of the world, and were conditions the prisoners had to endure if they wanted to survive. Barbed wire fences and watchtowers were erected to keep prisoners in, which you can see in a model that we saw on display in the museum complex. There are also full-scale towers and carts located around the museum, but unfortunately, I was unable to get a good picture of those.

In short, the ALZHIR camp left both the prisoners and their families scarred. Those who had children were separated from them, and it would not be until many years that they’d be reunited (if at all). And, as was common under the watch of Soviet officers, the women here were generally mistreated, beaten, and raped, simply because the guards had the ability to do so. As shown in one exhibit, many of the guards would use dirty tricks like bringing a prisoner in for questioning and having her sit on a tall stool for hours until she eventually passed out, and from there, the guard would do whatever he wanted with her while she was unconscious. This was widespread that hundreds of women gave birth both while in the camp and after being released in 1953, which was when the camp was finally closed.

The legacy of ALZHIR, and of all the gulag camps, is something Kazakhstan still grapples with to this day. The memorial outside, dedicated to victims of political repression and totalitarianism, was opened in 2007 by the Kazakhstani government, and remains a place where people come and pay respects to the victims.

One final piece I’d like to leave you with is this artwork at the center of the museum floor. It’s a sculpture of a black rose rising from the cracked earth, that I found particularly striking. The atrocities at ALZHIR won’t be forgotten, but despite the ugly past, maybe it’s possible for the country to move into a better future.

-Adrian