Biarritz (AFP)

It was a concentration camp system of unprecedented scale, which reduced millions of men and women to the state of "insects": in the documentary "Gulag, a Soviet history", Patrick Rotman draws a panorama chilling of this "prison industry" which played a central role in the former USSR.

Presented in competition at the Fipadoc documentary festival, which ends Saturday in Biarritz, and scheduled on February 11 on the Franco-German channel Arte, this documentary series tells in three 52-minute episodes the formation, the heyday and the dismantling of this a relentless regime, which served both as a machine to crush opponents and as a motor of the Soviet economy, through the use of forced labor on a very large scale.

A work that took two years, explained to AFP Patrick Rotman, who has always been interested in the history of communism and the USSR, and who was offered this project by two great specialists on the subject , Nicolas Werth and François Aymé, co-authors with him of this documentary.

"The ambition was to do what, I believe, did not yet exist: a total and global history of the gulag, from its origins in 1918, long before the word gulag was invented in the 1930s, until 'dismantling in the late 1950s,' he says.

Far from being a mere outgrowth of the regime, the gulag was an essential cog in it, serving as a tool of political repression and an engine of economic development.

- "Desperate looks" -

"There is the repressive function of setting aside the" enemies of the people ", distance, ostracism", fueled by waves of arrests (religious, kulaks, "traitors" condemned during the great Stalinist purges; then, after the war, the minorities from the territories liberated from the German occupation, suspected of complicity with the Nazis ...), recalls Patrick Rotman.

"But there is also the economic function which is absolutely preponderant: it is to provide a slave labor, free and obviously inexhaustible, which we can renew all the time for the construction of major works (canals, tracks ...), or the exploitation of the Kolyma gold deposits (a region in the Far East as large as three times France) which contributed decisively to the construction of socialism ", details- there.

The director's team drew on a wide variety of sources, including archives of Soviet news and propaganda films shot in the 1920s by the regime in an attempt to stifle the first accounts published in the West. But even if these films wanted to boast re-education through work, "we can see on the marble faces of the prisoners, and in their desperate looks, the reality of what they are undergoing", considers the director.

And, in addition to official or clandestine drawings and photographs, many of them unpublished, the documentary is based on around thirty testimonies, essentially stemming from the collection work carried out with survivors or their descendants by the Russian association Memorial.

- "On edge" -

Testimonies which give an account of the terrible living conditions of the prisoners, nicknamed the "zeks", and in particular of the women, "human cattle" for the guards, as well as of the children who had the misfortune to be born or to be trained in this nightmare.

"We lived like wild beasts, insects," says a former zek.

"Civilization stops at the gates of the camp", wrote the writer Julius Margolin, one of the authors who described life in the gulag, with Alexandre Soljenytsine ("L'archipel du goulag") and Varlam Chalamov ("Les stories from the Kolyma ").

This documentary was produced despite a climate of hostility on the part of the Russian authorities, who do not appreciate that we come to remember these dark hours of the Soviet past.

"The current regime is doing everything so that we do not talk about the gulag," says Patrick Rotman, who specifies that from their first sighting trip to Siberia, Nicolas Werth and the Polish photographer who accompanied him, Tomasz Kisny, were intercepted and dismissed by the FSB (federal secret service).

"It is a buried past, an underground story, but on edge", and which only asked to resurface, judges the documentary filmmaker, recalling that in total, "one in six adults has been in the gulag, that is, 20 million people, plus the 5 to 6 million who were deported to the "settlement villages", these sites built around the concentration camp system.

© 2020 AFP