Display cases display dozens of old black-and-white photographs of young women in their thirties, each with a brief biographical note in Kazakh, Russian, and English. Suddenly, the statistics of the Red Terror, especially from Stalin’s years as leader of the Soviet Union, take on both faces and names in this former gulag: an estimated 18,000 prisoners passed through ALZHIR, an acronym in Russian for Akmola Camp for Women or the traitors to the fatherland, in the 28 years of operation. Among them, the museum built on the site of the gulag recalls, was “Nikolaeva Shubrikova, Russian from Leningrad, born in 1905, wife of Vladimir Shubrikov, first secretary of a regional branch of the Communist Party”, “Raisa Mamayeva, Ukrainian from Kaluga, born 1900, wife of Ivan Mamayev, military adviser to the Soviet Union”, “Maria Minkina, Belarusian Jew, from Gomel, born 1904, wife of Jacob Bronstein, secretary of the Writers’ Union of Belarus” or “Damesh Zhurgeneva, Kazakh from Karkalinsk, born 1905, wife of Temirbek Zhurgenev, Commissar of Education of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic”.
When it was founded, in late 1937, when the first train of wagonloads of prisoners arrived in January 1938, ALZHIR was in the borders of the Soviet Union, a convenient 1,500 miles from Moscow, as it was meant to be forgotten. Today, however, the museum and memorial to the victims of political repression and totalitarianism is half an hour’s drive from Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan since 1997, a city connected to the world by several daily flights. Therefore the subtitles in English, since there are foreign visitors, many tourists, other journalists, but also heads of state, such as the Polish President Andrzej Duda, who was here in 2017, or the President of the European Council, also the Pole Donald Tusk, who came in 2019, accompanied by President Kassim-Jomart Tokayev, who wants the past of repressions to be known so that it does not happen again. In the first half of the 20th century, the Kazakh steppe was the destination of thousands of political prisoners of different nationalities, but also of more than a million deportees, sometimes entire communities, people such as the Volga Germans or Koreans from the Far East of the Soviet Union, seen as a threat. Ethnic Poles were also involved, hence the arrival of Duda and Tusk to this location, one of the many islands of the Soviet prison system described in The Gulag Archipelago by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself once sent to a forced labor camp in Kazakhstan.
A modern sculpture, called Arco da Tristeza, precedes the museum building. Surrounding it, in a garden whose colorful flowers cannot withstand the sudden arrival of the icy Kazakh winter, a carriage from the 1930s recalls the conditions in which prisoners arrived in ALZHIR, often pregnant or with small children, who were eventually brought up for some time behind barbed wire until they were taken from their mothers and sent to orphanages. And among the exhibits in the cone-shaped building that houses the museum, which bring the photographs to life, are prisoner clothes, children’s toys, cups, and various other everyday items that these crime-free women (and those of their own) spouses were often fictitious, acquaintances under torture) they tried to be as normal as possible in the range of forced labor, which ranged from sewing uniforms for the army to raising cattle and farming, sometimes even construction.
Winters in Northern Kazakhstan can be bitterly cold. In Astana, minus 50ºC is in fact one of the features of the modern city, which was even baptized with the first name of the man who led the country’s independence process in 1991 and who dreamed of this capital to replace Almaty, Nursultan Nazarbayev. . Nearly a century ago, prisoners in Akmola had to adjust to the extremely low temperatures, which made living with inadequate clothing and a diet based on vegetables and potatoes even more difficult. There are many survivor memoirs describing the hardship in ALZHIR. And there are even books written by famous prisoners, actresses such as Tatyana Kirillovna, a big name in Soviet cinema, that tell the story of life in the gulag (the autobiography is in a display case next to her photo).
The memories of a prisoner named Gertrude Platays, probably an ethnic German, a descendant of the peasants who came to the Tsarist Empire in the time of Catherine the Great, reveal how Kazakh peasants from the vicinity of ALZHIR who tried to help women, mostly originated from from afar, many of them blonde and blue-eyed, so different from the slanted eyes and black hair that make Kazakh women beautiful. Platais said that one day while working in the fields, he saw people approaching. They were mainly children and the elderly. In response to their parents’ orders, the children started throwing stones. Faced with the desperation of the prisoners, some of the guards began to laugh, saying that no one liked them, that everyone knew they were enemies of the state. Platais—as she herself told museum staff during a 1990 visit—was disgusted by the way Stalinist propaganda seemed to succeed in even the most remote Soviet villages, even among these Central Asian peoples. And this stoning lasted for days, according to her. Until one day she fell exhausted and noticed that the countless white pebbles that had accumulated on the floor had an odor. He picked one up, it smelled like cheese, and he tasted it. The taste was a bit salty but pleasant. Kazakh prisoners later said they were qurt, cheese balls that are part of the tradition of several Turkic-speaking peoples, especially those ancient nomads who are the Kazakhs (the word means free and gave rise to the expression Cossack). After all, the villagers were consistent with the hospitality that has always been the custom of their people and tried to help the women who came from far to survive. Discretely, Platais filled his pockets and then offered the room to other prisoners to try. This story, which Kazakhs are proud to tell, even inspired a history teacher to write a poem based on the memoirs of Gertude Platais and entitled Qurt – a gemstone.
With more than 100 communities living in their country today, the Kazakhs, who have once again become the majority of the population in the Republic of Kazakhstan, appreciate the solidarity with which they have welcomed political prisoners and deported people. And that is why in this museum, inaugurated in 2007, the protagonist is given to the drama lived by the Wives of the Traitors of the Fatherland. And if several of them were Kazakh – some even famous, such as Zhambike Shanina, actress, wife of the first Kazakh film director, Zhumat Shanin, born in 1900 in Karhalan village but certainly converted to modern times, as evidenced by the hat with a plume used in the photo shown -, the great tragedy of this people was the forced collectivization of 1931-1933, which sought to transform nomads into agricultural workers who worked on state farms. More than two million people died then, a suffering that is also recounted in this museum and memorial to the victims of political repression and totalitarianism.
DN traveled at the invitation of the Kazakh Embassy.
Source: DN
