On the 23 February, one Andrew Roth, put pen to paper to write an article by the title of; “A lifetime sentence’: children of the gulag fight to return from exile.” The story he tells is of families with a “German heritage” being ‘rounded up’ during WW2 and sent to a closed village in the Kirov region, a gulag if you will. The name Gulag instantly throws up images of ragged prisoners being beaten, starved and worked to death because, over many years that is the picture that has been painted for us by people like Mr Roth. In reality, gulags were penal work camps, usually centred around a farm where prisoners could help to grow extra food for themselves and live out their sentences in homes rather than prison cells. The gulags were for criminals where the end goal was for them to be put back into society as useful members. This was a million miles from the chain gangs of the USA or the three men in a cell made for one in Britain.
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Memorial are flooding bookshops, airwaves and newspapers with their lies. Another journalist who is knowingly or otherwise spreading their falsehoods is Vin Arthey, who on 5 March promoted one of their books in a review of “My father’s letters – Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag”, translated by Georgia Thomson. This waste of trees and paper is, we are told, a collection of letters from victims of the Gulags, i.e., the letters are from prisoners to their families. There are claims of innocence but there is no proof shown that the letters were from anyone other than criminals but that is not important to Memorial, they may be murderers, rapists, arsonists, or embezzlers but, if they were in the Soviet penal system they are “victims of the gulags!”