Prisoner: Galina Ivanovna Levinson
"The barracks, of course, had two-level plank beds. Each was for eight people: four at the bottom, for at the top. At night, the barracks were locked and we used buckets… When we arrived, they gave us mattress covers and straw to fill them, pillow covers and straw for the pillows, half-wool blankets, and, I think, even rough sheets. [...] For the first year and a half, we didn’t have the right to correspondence… Then, they let women who gave birth in the camp to write. When their children grew to one year old, women got permission to inquire about kids who were sent to orphanages. Only after we were all allowed to write one letter a month."
Digging a Grave
Propaganda’s Impact
Measuring the impact of propaganda is difficult. Despite all they suffered, many Gulag prisoners loved their country, and when it faced a battle for its very survival in World War II—the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War”—the love of country proclaimed in camp propaganda found a receptive audience. Eugenia Ginzburg recalled the arrival in Kolyma of news about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. “We, the outcasts, racked by four years of suffering, suddenly felt ourselves citizens of this country of ours. We, its rejected children, now trembled for our [motherland].”
Many Gulag prisoners worked hard in the camps to provide food, energy, and munitions for the front. More than a million prisoners were even released to join the Red Army at the front, and some performed heroically in defense of the motherland. But did their love of country and their heroic actions come from the Gulag’s propaganda? It seems very unlikely.