Last week at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Štěpán Černoušek, founder of the Gulag.cz Association, presented A Journey to the Gulag, a film he made of a 2016 trip to a Gulag camp in Siberia.
The camp was one of the labor prisons which originally got their start in 1919 under Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and surged under the leadership of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) who used them for cheap labor and as a place to stash recalcitrants or anyone who remotely may have been deemed suspicious of Stalin's goals, whatever they were.
With a team of photographers and videographers, Mr. Černoušek's group traveled by air, water, and foot to an abandoned camp in a remote region 120 miles from the closest town, one of four labor camps Mr. Černoušek visited between 2009 and 2016.
On the way, the boat they rented for lake travel broke down, and they had to wait for a passing rescue vessel to carry them on their journey, rushing, since time was limited for them to catch a return flight home before winter advanced.
It is cold in September in Siberia, especially when traveling at high speeds across a lake in an open boat.
Reaching the coast, the men tore their way through the thick tagia to the site, fearful of bears but none were shown.
In the remote forest they found a ghost site with few remains save broken railway tracks covered by the tagia, and barbed wire, practically hidden by the overgrowth.
The tagia is beautiful, like jewelry treasures of the woods with its stripes of many colors and varying heights and widths, reminiscent of giraffe statues, in contrast to the harsh conditions the former residents lived at the camp.
The tagia and 'Part of 'Project 503' to build a railroad from Salekhard to Igarka near Turukhansk on the Yenisey River, close to the site Mr. Černoušek and his group found /Photo by Dr. Andreas Hugentobler - Own work, CC BY 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=818367
At the remnants of the camp's hospital, the men found a prisoner's diary written by an engineer, and a dark, sad solitary confinement cell about the size of a parking space with four high walls and single window near the ceiling, much like today's solitary cells in Virginia prisons. (Thank you, ACLU of Virginia for filing a class-action lawsuit.)
An estimated 20 million persons from Russia, the U.S., Poland, France, the Netherlands, and other European nations were confined in subhuman conditions to the camps. (Americans ventured to Russia to work on construction projects, Mr. Černoušek said.)
He finished the film in February.
After the Kennan screening ended, a line of guests formed to try virtual "augmented reality" and experience more of the camps through special lenses.
Moscow has a Gulag museum which is not big, Mr. Černoušek said. When President Vladimir Putin opened it last year, he never mentioned Stalin's name.
Introducing Mr. Černoušek was Hynek Kmoníček, the ambassador of the Czech Republic to the U.S.
Mr. Černoušek is a Czech citizen and a Russia scholar who, like many enthusiasts, began his study of the Gulag as a hobby, to satisfy his curiosity.
"I never dreamed [his hobby] would end up in Washington, D.C. at the Kennan Center," he said. His goal is to "share my experience" using new technologies and 3-D with as many persons as he can.
"It's necessary to speak more about it [now] because it's an international topic," Mr. Černoušek said.
"Some young people in Russia do not know what the Gulag was."
He intends to document the sites and educate the world about the Gulag (an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration).
Recently he visited California's World War II American internment camps for the Japanese.
For him, finding and learning about the Gulag has been "a great adventure" which continues, and his team, all of whom enjoy the outdoors, wants to go back.
Appearing with Mr. Černoušek were Steven Barnes, associate professor of history at George Mason University, and Izabella Tabarovsky of Kennan, the moderator.
In 2016 Ms. Tabarovsky discovered that her great-grandfather, Leonty Briskin, was taken in 1941 from his family to the Gulag. Fifteen years later he was "rehabilitated" in the "Khrushchev Thaw," and his case closed, which was the same year, 1956, his family learned he died in prison in 1944. Still, she writes, even today some Russians are ashamed that their family members, although unwilling participants, were part of Gulag camps.
I wanted to ask Mr. Černoušek about the source of his funding.
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