Prisoner: Lev Kopelev
Kopelev was released in January 1947 but after a short freedom was told that his case was to be retried. A few months later he was arrested again. He did have an opportunity to defend himself at his trial but was sentenced to three more years in corrective labor camps with an additional two years loss of civil rights. This sentence was voided as being too lenient. He was re-tried and sentenced to ten years in the camps and then five years loss of civil rights. “I came to understand that my fate was just because I did deserve to be punished – for the many years I had zealously participated in plundering the peasants, worshiping Stalin, lying and deceiving myself in the name of historical necessity. Gradually I lost my awe for those ideas which, in ‘capturing the masses,’ can become ruinous to whole peoples.” After Stalin’s death, Kopelev was finally released from the Gulag.
Remembering the Gulag
Other than a brief period of openness that saw the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, discussing the Gulag’s history was forbidden until late in the 1980s. At that time, groups of former political prisoners started to document and commemorate the history of Soviet repression through monuments and publications. Although at first there was tremendous interest in learning about this part of their history, since the mid-1990s Russians seem to be forgetting the Gulag—a troubling development for many who believe historical knowledge is key to avoiding a repetition of the abuses of dictatorship.
To learn about the efforts to preserve the last Soviet camp as a museum and historic site, please visit the related exhibit on the Gulag Museum at Perm-36.
The post-war Gulag population differed in two key ways from its pre-war counterpart. First, it included significant numbers of nationalist partisans from the Baltics, western Ukraine, and western Belorussia—peoples whose homelands had been joined to the Soviet Union only as a result of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and who had fought a vicious guerilla war against Soviet forces until the late 1940s. These prisoners were accustomed to struggling against the Soviet state and against long odds. Second, the post-war Gulag population comprised many Red Army soldiers and officers who had served in Europe or been held in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps and thus came under the suspicion of the state. After Stalin’s death, such veterans combined forces with the former nationalist partisans to carry out a series of mass uprisings in Gulag camps.