Haunting ‘Gulag Collection’ Records Soviets’ Inhumanity
Ken McIntyre /
“The Gulag Collection,” 50 compelling paintings of life and death inside the Soviet Union’s notorious prison camps, will be on view at The Heritage Foundation beginning this morning, Sept. 30. The exhibit opens as part of “The Year of Miracles: The Fall of the Berlin Wall,” a Heritage-sponsored event marking the approaching 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gulag survivor Nikolai Getman created “The Gulag Collection,” an unparalleled visual record of the hundreds of penal camps that held more than 14 million political prisoners — many of whom died in captivity or shortly after release.
Getman began painting the scenes in secret once freed in 1953 after eight years’ forced labor in Siberia and Kolyma. His own crime? He’d been in the company of a fellow artist who had mocked Stalin by drawing a tiny caricature.
Of his “task,” Getman later said:
I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not be forgotten.”