Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The full official name of the agency changed several times.
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume series written between 1958 and 1968 by the Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and it was translated into English and French the following year. It presents a vision of life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system, through a narrative which was constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him, at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement.
Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Kolyma or Kolyma Krai is a historical region in the Russian Far East that includes the basin of Kolyma River and the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the Kolyma Mountains. It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Kolyma Krai was never formally defined and over time it was split among various administrative units. As of 2023, it consists roughly of the Magadan Oblast, north-eastern areas of Yakutia, and the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
Noel Haviland Field was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD. His name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia. Much controversy surrounds the Field story. In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union.
John H. Noble was an American survivor of the Soviet Gulag system, who wrote two books which described his experiences in it after he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union and return to the United States.
Bohdan Mykolayovych Stashynsky or Bogdan Nikolayevich Stashinsky is a former Soviet spy who assassinated the Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera in the late 1950s. He defected in West Berlin in 1961.
Night People is a 1954 American thriller film directed, produced and co-written by Nunnally Johnson and starring Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Björk and Buddy Ebsen. The story was co-written by Jed Harris, the theatrical producer.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Heinz Baumkötter was an SS-Hauptsturmführer and concentration camp medical doctor in Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof and Sachsenhausen, who conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
The Vorkuta Corrective Labor Camp, commonly known as Vorkutlag (Воркутлаг), was a major Gulag labor camp in the Soviet Union located in Vorkuta, Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1932 to 1962.
The Vorkuta State Drama Theatre is located in the Russian city Vorkuta. It was opened in 1943 in the Gulag.
Jānis Mendriks was a Latvian Catholic priest who was killed in the Vorkuta uprising.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
De-Stalinization comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power, and his 1956 secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the Stalinist political system.
Günter Stempel was a German politician (LDPD). He was involved in the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), despite which he was a victim of political repression in both the GDR and the USSR.
Among the factors that influenced the Cold War were the detention of several hundred Americans in Gulags, in addition to the obstacles in returning some 2,000 American POWs out of an estimated 75,000 who ended up in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany by 1945, as well as the reunification of Soviet wives with their American husbands.
Rechlag also known as Special Camp no.6, Osoblag no. 6 was a Gulag special labor camp headquartered in Vorkuta, Komi ASSR. It was established on August 27, 1948, from camp departments of Vorkutlag and disestablished on May 26, 1954, by joining back into Vorkutlag.
