Voices of the Gulag (1/6)

Audio 48:30

Sound archives - European memories of the gulag.

© CNRS / RFI

By: Valérie Nivelon

52 mins

A look back at a little-known history, a history long obscured by the Cold War and the division of Europe into two blocs, that of the East and the West ... While the Allies celebrated the victory against the Nazis in 1945, the The Soviet Union continued to deport hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to camps and villages in the gulag.

Europeans for whom Stalin is not a hero, but an executioner.

Europeans for whom the Soviet Union is not the liberating power, but the colonizing power. 

Publicity

From 1939 until the early 1950s, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and Romanian families were torn from their homes and diverted from their destiny.

With the researchers Alain Blum and Marta Craveri, we undertook to research them, for five years, to record them and create the Sound Archives of the Gulag *.

Stories of survival and resistance to repression, cold and hunger, stories of young adults and children where the greatest sorrows are mixed, but also sometimes the greatest joys ... "A bitter school", according to one of the survivors Klara Hartman.

Episode 1: Facing the Archives

In this first episode, we come back to the experience of historian Marta Craveri in the Soviet Gulag archives in 1992. We evoke the birth of the “Gulag sound archives” * project with Marta Craveri, Alain Blum, demographer passionate about the discovery of the land and Valérie Nivelon, producer of La marche du monde, initiated the recording of the last witnesses.

We listen to “The disillusionment of Jan Bohdan”, “The tractor of Juozas Miliautskas”, “The lesson of Klara Hartman”, “The know-how of Rimgaudas Ruzgys”, “The taïga of Silva Linarte” and “The luck of Henry Welch ”.

* Gulag sound archives

To read:

Deported to the USSR.

Stories of Europeans at the Gulag

, by Valérie Nivelon, Alain Blum and Marta Craveri, Autrement editions, in partnership with RFI, CNRS and CERCEC).

This documentary series is produced within the framework of the project "SOUND ARCHIVES-EUROPEAN MEMORIES OF THE GOULAG © CNRS / RFI":

The sound archives of the gulag are the result of an unprecedented investigation, carried out by a team of 13 researchers from eight different nationalities , coordinated by CERCEC (Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European World Studies, CNRS / EHESS) in collaboration with RFI. More than 160 testimonies, or 300 hours of sound in 11 languages, were collected in Central and Eastern Europe, also in Kazakhstan and in Siberia, between 2008 and 2010. These archives were born from the common will of Alain Blum, Marta Craveri , both researchers at CERCEC and Valérie Nivelon, journalist and producer at RFI to allow European survivors of the Soviet repression to testify.

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