The Soviet Union was known for many things, communism, Stalin, the color red, but one of the scariest things as a person living in the Soviet Union at the time would have been getting arrested and being sent to a Gulag camp. Gulag (гулаг in Russian) is an abbreviation for Главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей which means Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. We had a chance to visit a memorial/museum dedicated to the camp АЛЖИР (ALZhIR) near Astana when we visited a few weeks back. The camp had been specifically for the wives of traitors to the motherland, and it had not officially been called ALZhIR, that was a name that the inhabitants had given it. ALZhIR, as you might guess because of the all-caps spelling, is another acronym which stands for Акмолинский лагерь жён изменников Родины, which translates to Akmolinsk Camp of Wives of Traitors to the Motherland.
As soon as we arrived, we saw picture after picture showing people who we sent to the camp or their husbands who they were sent on behalf of. The museum itself was not huge, just two floors that were wrapped around an open area where a black metal rose sprouted from the ground.
We were treated to a tour explaining all the mementos, documents, and artifacts lining the walls of the place. She explained the horrors that these people were subjected to even though, in essence, they hadn’t done anything wrong except marry someone the state had determined was an “enemy of the people.” Can you even imagine that? To be subjugated to forced labor for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I, for one, was deeply moved by the entire museum. There even was a diorama showcasing how women would be interrogated for hours on end by the NKVD, when they weren’t being forced to do other things. There was forced labor of course, but also according to an article in Euroasianet, “From its inception in 1937 to its closure after Stalin’s death in 1953, the camp witnessed 1,507 births by prisoners raped by their guards.” I looked at a separate Russian source, and it looks like the statistic might just be 1,507 births occurred on the grounds of the camp, so some of those women would have been pregnant before arriving. It still is horrific that women were forced to leave everything they knew behind and be forced to give birth a terrible environment.
These women didn’t have access to their families, their husbands, or even their children. Once children reached a certain age, they would be taken away from their mothers and sent to an orphanage. Children would send letters to their mothers, but probably did not know why they could not be with their mothers, depending on their age. It was evident throughout the museum the horrors that Stalin and the Soviet Union inflicted upon families, completely ripping them apart.
As I was walking, I remembered when we read The Keeper of Antiquities by Yury Dombrovsky, which also dealt with the terror and fear caused by Stalin’s mass arrests and executions. I already mentioned how the wives had done nothing wrong, but oftentimes the husbands hadn’t either. There were some pictures of political prisoners in the museum, especially from the Qazaq “Alash” political party, if I remember correctly. Members of this national intelligentsia political group were arrested and executed, and their wives likely sent to this Gulag camp. Reading The Keeper of Antiquities helped give me a taste of the fear that living under Stalin’s rule could inflict. It was enlightening to be able to get an even more complete picture of that time by going to the ALZhIR museum.
Near the end of the tour, I remember they mentioned that some of the survivors of the camp (many did not make it out alive) met up to share their stories. Interviews from that reunion made it into a film that we watched after the tour. But I was struck by how few people showed up. Thousands of women were imprisoned at ALZhIR, but maybe less than a hundred (guessing from the picture) came to the gathering. It goes to show how powerful the fear was, that even decades after the camp had closed, many women feared being persecuted again. It is also possible, that they simply wanted to forget about the horrors they endured and keep the past in the past. For that, I honestly do not blame them.
