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The previous posts are pictorial descriptions (captions) of images 1-44 of Danzig Baldaev’s c. 1950s book, ” Drawings from the (Soviet) Gulags “. This book contains over 100 illustrations of the USSR’s nightmarish and unbelievably brutal Gulag prison system, which was where the most violent thugs and the most notorious criminals were sent to serve their prison sentences. The prisons were filled with less violent more vulnerable citizens from 1937-38 for the following reasons: They were deemed by the Bolshevik governmental authorities to be spies, traitors, subversives, intellectuals, teachers of destabilizing educational precepts, political dissidents, those critical of the Soviet government, and other people committing “thought crimes” or the friends and family members of the above named individuals.
The detainees of the Gulags were systematically tortured and subjected to hard-labor both to punish the prisoners and to generate revenues for the business enterprises associated with the Gulags. 700,000 inmates were killed in various ways in the Gulags, mainly those inmates who were called ” Enemies of the People ” by the Bolshevik governmental structure, and really posed no threat to society at all. People were rounded up by the thousands and hurled into the Gulags, which were actually private enterprises that did business with the State. The detainment exercise which was imposed upon free-thinking Russian citizens who voiced an opinion, was simply a way to generate cash for the Gulag’s investors, as the state continually pumped vast sums of money into the Gulags as a way to house and work all of the prisoners. The massacres that would take place in the Gulags generated a need to dispose of the bodies so that new prisoners could be kidnapped off of the street and incarcerated, an act that required vast sums of money to accomplish in and of itself.
The NKVD, the secretive governmental enforcement group was responsible for the gathering of information on potential prisoners. Their means of gathering information included confidential informants, police interrogations, and word-of-mouth mechanisms which led to the arrests of at least 1.7 million Russians from 1937-38.
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