Haunting Photos From Memorial's Archive Of Tragedy
Some of the photos compiled over decades of work by Russia's Memorial International, which was ordered to be "liquidated" by the country's Supreme Court on December 28.
A skull, perhaps dug up by hungry animals, next to a typical gulag grave marker in Kolyma, in Russia's Far East.
This haunting 1990 photo of human remains near a Soviet labor camp is one of more than 800 images published online by Memorial International, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the countless innocents who were repressed during the Soviet era.
On December 28, Russia's Supreme Courtordered the closureof Memorial International, citing its alleged failure to mark several social-media posts with an official "foreign agent" status. Authorities in 2016 flagged Memorial for receiving funding from abroad.
The ruling caused widespread anger within Russia over what many see as an attempt to silence those who speak out about the atrocities carried out during their country's Soviet past.
A police building at a Tomsk labor camp in 1934. On the balcony are portraits of Soviet leader Josef Stalin (right) and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Polish-Soviet communist and secret police chief behind mass political killings known as the Red Terror. Slogans on the building include the phrase, "Only in the country of the Soviets is it possible to reform a person through labor."
The photo archive began at the inception of Memorial in 1989, when victims of the Soviet regime and their relatives began to donate images to the organization.
The stated goal of the archive is to "preserve the memory of the tragic pages in the history of our country, to collect historical evidence of the state terror and its victims, the resistance to the regime, and the difficult everyday life of the Soviet people."
A Kazakh Soviet official at a 1989 meeting to establish a Memorial branch in Nur-Sultan (then known as Tselinograd). The man reportedly shouted, "Go back to Moscow with your 'Memorial.'"
Soviet police pose with a beluga whale they shot off Vaigach Island in 1930. A labor camp was set up that year on the island in the Arctic Ocean.
A sign at an abandoned labor camp on Stalin's abortive Transpolar Mainline railway project. The sign reads, "Implementation of the fifth five-year plan will be a major step forward toward developing from socialism to communism."
A mugshot of a young woman under investigation in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1949. Her fate is not mentioned in the original caption.
Skulls of people shot dead who are presumed to have been prisoners in a concentration camp in Krasnoyarsk in the 1920s.
Prisoners transport bricks in Tomsk in the 1930s.
Yulia Odintsova wears the first dress she sewed for herself, two years after being released from a labor camp. Odintsova was charged with 'anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation" and survived eight years in various forced-labor camps in Siberia before being released in 1952.
Prisoners use a rudimentary rail system to transport logs outside a labor camp in the Leningrad region in the early 1930s.
A priest (left) and a peasant after their arrest in 1932 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, for allegedly opposing the collectivization of the farming and logging industries in the northern Komi region.
A senior NKVD officer holds a book titled Basics Of Leninism in 1932.
A kennel for guard dogs at the Transpolar Mainline forced-labor project.
Guards and other workers of a labor camp enjoy a holiday with their families in Karelia in 1940.
Boots in an abandoned labor camp in Kolyma. The photo was made during a 2002 expedition to the camp, where prisoners once mined tin and uranium ore.
After Memorial was ordered to be shut down on December 28, the organization released a statement vowing to continue its work, saying, "Memorial is more than an organization, even more than a just public movement. Memorial is the need felt by Russians to know the truth about our country's tragic past and the fate of millions of victims. There is no one who is capable of liquidating that need."
Memorial International is the parent organization of the Memorial Human Rights Center. On December 29, a Moscow courtalso ordered its closure, again due to alleged violations of the "foreign agent" legislation.
