Drawing From The Gulag Reviewed By A Communist Subversive
Drawings from the Gulag by
Danzig Baldaev – review
These horrific depictions of life in the Soviet penal system are a
troubling blend of fact and allegory, writes
Roland Elliot Brown [
Bollocks - he lies - Editor ]
'Third degree interrogation' from Drawings from the Gulag by
Danzig Baldaev. Illustration: Danzig Baldaev
In the Soviet Union, desk drawers became sarcophagi; entombed
within them were the creative endeavours of the most talented and
perceptive Soviet citizens. Yet it is best not to idealise such
hiding spaces as reserves of dormant illumination; indeed, there may
have been no limit to the depths of darkness possible within them.
Consider the case of Danzig Baldaev. Born in 1925 in Ulan-Ude, in east-central Russia, Baldaev was the son of an ethnographer who was arrested as an "enemy of the people". He grew up in an orphanage for the children of "enemies" and following his service in the second world war was "forced", as he described it, by the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) to work as a warder at Kresty prison in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. His employment in the Soviet penal system took him all over the USSR, but in private, he poured the psychological detritus of his profession into a terrifying work of sadistic pornography [ sic ], which he dedicated, in 1988, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Baldaev was not a pornographer in any conventional sense, but was nevertheless inundated by pornography, for he was surrounded by the pornographic sadism that characterised – sometimes by design, sometimes by default – the Soviet punitive machine. An amateur anthropologist who had been denied an education because of his family's political ignominy, Baldaev struggled to anatomise on paper the system that defined him, and in which he was complicit.
His drawings and descriptions imprint themselves awfully in the imagination: in one image, three nude, emaciated women, so wasted by hunger and work that their uteruses have prolapsed, line up before a camp doctor beneath a sign bearing Lenin's dictate, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." In another, an unclothed university professor is lashed, sodomised and gloated over by his uneducated guards for his pursuit of an unapproved science. Elsewhere, sick workers are steamed in a sauna, and then hauled naked into temperatures below freezing to expire from shock. On the most nauseating page, a young woman who has refused the sexual advances of her captors sits tied to a tree atop an anthill in the notoriously insect-ridden Siberian woods with a tube "inserted into the vagina so the ants could crawl inside".
Readers may wonder whether Baldaev's illustrations are accurate documents of atrocities at all, or were intended as anti-Soviet polemic. The answer is both: Baldaev depicts the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as a national tragedy following which "the peoples of Russia recalled life under the tsar as a lost paradise". He describes the Bolsheviks' antireligious militancy as the sole impetus for the moral collapse he encountered. Yet while his analysis of the Soviet disaster rests upon simplistic nostalgia for a golden age of church and monarchy, the editors of this book have convincingly corroborated many of his representations with parallel accounts from the canon of Russian Gulag literature.
Viewers may also question whether the artistic merits of Baldaev's drawings redeem their potential prurience. While it is necessary to know that "enemies of the people" were subjected to revolting forms of torture and humiliation, one may ask: are the interests of history in any way served by a graphic image of a bound woman with ants crawling into her vagina? There are strong artistic precedents to support Baldaev's case: Goya's Disasters of War, for example, recorded politically motivated atrocities in a similar manner and thus prophesied the modern conception of warfare. Gustave Doré's macabre and meticulous engravings for each layer of hell in Dante's inferno gave to posterity a necessary encouragement to contemplate the inverse side of heaven. Baldaev's drawings resemble both artists' works.
Yet they are not the work of a passive witness, nor are they
products of the imagination. They are good art, but they bear the
taint of his choice between authority and victimhood. While it would
be naive to judge him from a position of safety and comfort, Baldaev
dared only to hate the system and bear witness to it; he did not, as
the intrepid Solzhenitsyn did, risk confronting it. The terrible
truth he identified – that for many of its servile intermediaries,
the Gulag had its contemptible pleasures – was one that could never
justly remain buried. It is scarcely surprising that Baldaev longed
for the old church, for the bottom drawer must have made a poor
confessional. While his drawings may have unburdened him a little,
his lengthy private lingerings over their horrors must also have
enervated him, and have helped his superiors to secure his
submission.
UNQUOTE
Read this to know the determination of a corrupt fool to excuse
blatant evil.
An Honest Reviewer Writes -
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/04/review-drawings-from-the-gulag-danzig-baldaev/
Does this remind you of those pictures of naughty
Nazis killing wonderful, caring
Jews who never did any harm to any one? Just forget what they are
doing in the Stolen Land called
Palestine for the moment.
Notice the Italian Mafia word
Omerta on a prisoner's
back. Jews call it
Mesirah. Their criminals are more dangerous