A memorial tablet ‘August, 16’ commemorating Gulag prison builders has been installed in the Komi Republic, a federal subject of Russia.
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“From grateful students to their teachers. They are proud of the memory of their grandfathers who built a concentration camp in 1937. There are no words for that,” Olga Romanova, a human rights defender and contributor to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said on Facebook.
On 16 August 1937, NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, ordered to build Ust-Vymlag camp near the village of Vozhayel (Komi Republic). It was part of the Gulag, the system of Soviet labour camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed millions of political prisoners and criminals. The term (an abbreviation of the Russian words for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps) was largely unknown in the West until the 1973 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s Gulag Archipelago.
The Gulag consisted of hundreds of camps, under the control of the secret police, where prisoners felled timber, worked in the mines, or laboured on construction projects. An estimated 15–30 million persons died there due to harsh working conditions, inadequate food and summary executions.
