“Drawings from the GULAG” by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard. c. 1950s

Pictures from the book “Drawings from the GULAG” by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard. Depictions of the Soviet brutality against Soviet government designated "Enemies of the People." These images are representations of the tortures that the GULAG prisoners underwent at the hands of the N.K.V.D and the thugs that were themselves incarcerated; the 'enemies of the people' were brutalized by the N.K.V.D guards and the thugs who were imprisoned at the Gulags. The illustrator of the images shown was anti-Bolshevik, and believed that their takeover of Russia in 1917 was a catastrophe.

The following paragraph is derived from a meduza.io article written 08/01/2017.

"Eighty years ago, on July 30, 1937, secret NVKD order number 00447 was signed. This day is widely considered the start of the “Great Terror,” a period of political repressions lasting into 1938 during which no less than 1.7 million people were arrested, more than 700,000 of whom were executed. Soviet secret police targeted “enemies of the people,” “counterrevolutionaries,” “wreckers,” and their friends and relatives. To mark the anniversary of this human catastrophe, Meduza asked historian Sergey Bondarenko, who works with the civil rights society “Memorial,” to answer some of the most basic, embarrassingly ignorant questions about the Stalinist repressions between 1937 and 1938.

What exactly happened in 1937?

During the summer of 1937, a whole series of repressive campaigns by the state got underway. Today, we know this period as the start of the “Great Terror.” Coined by British historian Robert Conquest in the 1960s, the term only gained currency in Russia after Perestroika. NKVD order number 00447 launched the so-called “kulak operation,” leading to the arrests of peasants, priests, former nobles, and individuals suspected of ties to the anti-Bolshevik counterrevolutionaries or various opposition political parties. Almost in parallel with this effort, police carried out a campaign against different ethnic minorities, arresting Germans, Poles, Latvians, and many others. A purge of the army began with the arrests of several major military commanders. Thousands of people found themselves in prison camps, charged with having ties to enemies of the people. These individuals were known as “members of the families of traitors to the Motherland.”

It seems to me that the secret NVKD order number 00447 is a blueprint for gang-stalking which bears similar themes to the Soviet "Great Terror" mechanism.