On the 23 February, one Andrew Roth, put pen to paper to write an article by the title of; “A lifetime sentence’: children of the gulag fight to return from exile.” The story he tells is of families with a “German heritage” being ‘rounded up’ during WW2 and sent to a closed village in the Kirov region, a gulag if you will. The name Gulag instantly throws up images of ragged prisoners being beaten, starved and worked to death because, over many years that is the picture that has been painted for us by people like Mr Roth. In reality, gulags were penal work camps, usually centred around a farm where prisoners could help to grow extra food for themselves and live out their sentences in homes rather than prison cells. The gulags were for criminals where the end goal was for them to be put back into society as useful members. This was a million miles from the chain gangs of the USA or the three men in a cell made for one in Britain.
This takes us then to what to do with foreign nationals living in the country while you are at war with that nation. America herded especially those from a Japanese background into concentration camps just as Britain did with German descendants, royalty excepted of course, and in the Soviet Union it was understood that spies could and did exist among German nationals. The solution was purpose-built towns and villages away from important centres like Moscow where families could live and work ensuring little danger to the soviet state or themselves. These towns and villages were not part of the criminal system.
While throwing around various numbers of those who went to these places as children with their families and grew up there Mr Roth concentrates his attention solely upon one woman, Alisa Meissner.
Ms Meissner is now 71, (remember the war ended 76 years ago) she lives in a town some 30 miles from the town (Ozhmegovo) that her family were moved to and where she was born. She is demanding compensation for her family having been moved and an apartment in Moscow for herself now because prior to the 1917 revolution her family had owned and ran a large pharmacy in Moscow. Apparently, a group of lawyers have rounded up a few other people who are minded like Ms Meissner to bring a case against the state. These lawyers are in the pay of ‘Memorial’, an anti-Soviet and increasingly anti-Russian Federation ‘human rights’ NGO with some very shady connections to various Zionist organisations and Western intelligence agencies. Memorial has sought to promote the stories of the children of the gulag, including paying for a special project called ‘Back Home’.
One of Memorial’s leaders, Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev, is currently serving a 13 year sentence for sex abuse of a child in his care and has a past conviction of owning illegal guns. Anti-Soviet ‘dissident’ was one of the leading lights in setting up the organisation initially and it now works as an international body supporting any accusations against the Soviet Union and, indeed, the Russian Federation, on behalf of Western imperialism.
Memorial are flooding bookshops, airwaves and newspapers with their lies. Another journalist who is knowingly or otherwise spreading their falsehoods is Vin Arthey, who on 5 March promoted one of their books in a review of “My father’s letters – Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag”, translated by Georgia Thomson. This waste of trees and paper is, we are told, a collection of letters from victims of the Gulags, i.e., the letters are from prisoners to their families. There are claims of innocence but there is no proof shown that the letters were from anyone other than criminals but that is not important to Memorial, they may be murderers, rapists, arsonists, or embezzlers but, if they were in the Soviet penal system they are “victims of the gulags!”
One quote, perhaps to claim innocence for the letter writers actually does the opposite and shows the class nature of those running this nasty anti-Soviet global enterprise; “Apart from one father, an unashamed and vocal Trotskyist from the peasantry, the men are doctors, teachers or managers and if not committed to the regime at least they are good citizens!” So doctors, teachers and managers are by default “good citizens!” It seems that Memorial are claiming that certain professions are above political wrecking and espionage (something we do know to be untrue) but if that is so then surely, they must be common criminals such as house burglars, murderers, rapists etc! And before anyone claims that the quoted professions are also above those common crimes, take a look around the prisons of West, you will find them represented in plentiful numbers. Memorial exists to dirty the name of communism, at the moment it is doing the same job on capitalist Russia. Our job is to expose the Memorial lies and to ask people to think about the accusations and the motives of the accusers.