Pictures from the book “Drawings from the #GULAG” by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard. Through his eyes, we get to see some of the brutal acts of Soviet genocide performed on those imprisoned. How can anyone want to glorify Stalin?
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Established after the Bolsheviks took power in 1919, the gulags were forced labor camps where at least 1 million people died over the next 50 years.
During the days of Joseph Stalin, one wrong word could end with the secret police at your door, ready to drag you off to a Soviet gulag – one of the many forced labor camps where inmates worked until they died.
Historians estimate that nearly 14 million people were thrown into a gulag prison during Stalin’s reign.
In early December 1930, a Congress of the Folk Singers of Soviet occupied Ukraine, with 337 delegates from different oblasts, was held at the Opera Theatre in Kharkiv.
The stated objective of the congress was to involve the folk singers in the building of socialism and to give them new ideological priorities while distancing them from their traditions.
The kobzarists (Ukrainian bards, often blind, who sang to their own accompaniment on a bandura or kobza) were packed into train cars under the pretext of a trip to Moscow for the Congress of Folk Singers of the USSR and taken to the outskirts of the Kozacha Lopan station.
In the wake of the 2013 Euromaidan protests and the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the decommunization laws were signed by then-President Petro Poroshenko OTD May 15, 2015.
Under these laws, streets, towns, and institutions with Soviet-inspired monikers were renamed, and all Soviet flags, emblems, and military regalia were banned in Ukraine. This ban extended to any imagery bearing the likenesses of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
Ukraine's Decommunisation Laws:
#1 “On the Legal Status and Honouring the Memory of Fighters for Ukraine’s Independence in the Twentieth Century” honours the fighters for Ukraine’s freedom [notably the Ukrainian insurgent army].