Eli From Russia:

"Lately Russian propaganda has been justifying the GULAG camps. On May 26, 2021 the largest news agency RIA Novosti published an article explaining that Stalin's labor camps were not so terrible anymore, but on the contrary, Stalin’s camps were useful for the citizens.

I've decided to make this video so that more people know what Gulag really is, learn its history and what life there was like.

Perm 36 is the only GULAG camp (Soviet union forced labor camp) that was preserved in Russia, and everything here is kept the way when the camp functioned. All the other camps were demolished after dissolution of the Soviet Union.

My name is Elina, friends call me Eli. I am from Russia, and on my channel I share the Russian culture and travel to the remote places of the country. I also discover other countries, cultures and languages when studying or working abroad.”

I want to thank Eli so much for making this testimony of a dark history so widely available. The empty buildings and all the fences and every strand of barbed wire are carefully and competently preserved, cleaned and painted as well as any historic museum site I have ever seen. Eli takes us through the empty iron cages and the interrogation rooms and the small visitors’ room and overnight accommodation for visitors. One word of negativity regarding the Soviet Union would have earned any of these visitors 20 years in this living hell during Stalin’s lifetime and up to 20 years after he died, right up to the 1970s. That’s how long this hell, and hundreds of camps like it or even larger, endured.

Eli’s videos on the side bar, I notice, began a year ago. This video was produced last August 13. She did another one at that time about daily life in Perm, the small village in the Urals where this camp is preserved, it seems, by the local people all on their own. Russians are ashamed of this terrible history, that’s plain; the bus driver who brought Eli to Perm “forgot" to stop at the preserved camp so she had to walk back 3 kilometres to see it.

Do I need to be afraid that Eli will be punished for showing us this one and only preserved GULAG camp? I don’t think so. The sidebar shows me that others have exposed this history before, including The Atlantic Magazine one year ago.

And there’s another thing that reassures me. It was President Vladimir Putin who made it compulsory that high school curricula throughout Russia must include The GULAG Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This book, written in exile from the USSR, was secretly passed among the most courageous resisters in Russia and whispered about and rumoured until it dissolved the very fabric of the USSR in the hearts and minds of Russians.

As Wikipedia puts it:

"The Gulag Archipelago, a history and memoir of life in the Soviet Union's prison camp system (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

"Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia…”

There is a terrifying testimony in that mighty book, and in the silent relic here in Perm, of the darkest evil that Stalin’s communism produced. But here in Perm there is also a stirring testimony of how even an evil system that appeared so strong was overcome by the ordinary human spirit of the Russian people. The very fact that The Gulag Archipelago was published in Russia in 1989 only one year before internal strife finally caused the USSR to be abolished is an amazing story of human freedom rising from the darkest abyss. The very fact that the dying USSR ordered the destruction of all the hundreds of GULAG camps as almost its last administrative act testifies that these officials were ashamed of these camps because despite all the propaganda they had no doubt been immersed in all their lives they knew the GULAG was wrong.

And here are the ordinary people of Perm preserving on their own initiative this terrible relic of evil so that Russians and all people should remember and never let this evil be rebuilt. I find that hopeful. We in the West are especially assaulted by a globally controlled totalitarian system trying to impose itself and build itself over all of our heads. The Great Reset, as Klaus Schwab describes his vision of global One Government, has been justly compared to Hitler’s dream of world conquest. But it could be compared to Stalin’s USSR with equal justice.

And if that parallel is valid, there is a bright flame of hope for us. Quite unlike Hitler’s Nazi regime, Stalin’s evil regime was destroyed without a war waged by foreign powers. It was destroyed by the eternal human spirit of the Russian people themselves. If I may, I will dare to call that spirit God-given.

God-given. That’s a phrase that earns us ridicule from the ideological soldiers of the advancing new religion of Wokeness just exactly as the expression of any belief in God was suppressed and condemned in the Soviet Union. God and Truth are dirty words in this new catechism. I’ve been reminded from time to time by university educated contemporaries ever since the 1960s that “there is no God and there is no Truth”. And now more lately there are No Facts, thus sayeth the University. Instead there are Critical Race Theory and Transgender Transhumanism to replace facts and reality. There are no Men and no Women and no Mothers and no Fathers and no Boys and no Girls and no facts at all. Not in the Church of Woke.

Thus we, the sleepy and smug people that we are, are called to account by something far above the power of vicious dictators and their fanatical stooges. Are we worthy vessels of the human spirit, as stubborn and as enduring as the Russian people? Do we have the Spirit of Truth in our hearts as they did?