Gulag with a camera in the camps. Gulag for the little ones. Vorkuta camp. Northern hard labor

Explosions for reign!

Translation into Russian of the original of the scandalous article from the GQ magazine banned from distribution in Russia about how the FSB blew up houses in Moscow and other Russian cities to ensure the rating of the rat ruler.

The Russians do not care. But for readers who have a head on their shoulders, and not a pumpkin, reading is extremely useful.

Perhaps our officials will keep away from the "wobble-eyed", fearing to get dirty!

Mater's favorite Asian dish is "Russian" ram baked in a tandoor ...

Vladimir Putin - a sinister rise to power

The first explosion occurred in the barracks of the Buinaksk garrison, where Russian servicemen and their families lived. An unremarkable five-story building on the outskirts of the city was blown up in late September 1999 by a truck loaded with explosives. From the explosion, the interfloor ceilings collapsed on each other, so that the building turned into a heap of burning ruins. Under these rubble were the bodies of sixty-four people - men, women and children.

On the thirteenth of September last year, at dawn, I left my Moscow hotel and headed for the workers' district located on the southern outskirts of the city. I have not been in Moscow for twelve years. During this time, the city was overgrown with skyscrapers of glass and steel, the Moscow skyline was generously studded with construction cranes, and even at four in the morning life in the bright casinos on Pushkin Square was in full swing, and Tverskaya was packed with jeeps and BMWs of the latest models. This trip to Moscow at night gave me the opportunity to look out of the corner of my eye at the colossal changes fueled by petrodollars that have taken place in Russia during the nine years that Vladimir Putin was in power.

However, my way that morning lay in the "former" Moscow, in a small park, where a nondescript nine-story building once stood at 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway. At 5:03 am on September 19, 1999, exactly nine years before my arrival, the house at 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway was blown to pieces by a bomb hidden in the basement; one hundred twenty-one tenants of this house died in their sleep. This explosion, which sounded nine days after Buinakskiy, was the third of four apartment bombings that occurred during the twelve days of that September. The explosions killed about 300 people and plunged the country into a state of panic; this series of attacks was among the deadliest in the entire world before the fall of the Twin Towers in the United States.

The newly elected prime minister, Putin, blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists and ordered the use of scorched earth tactics in a renewed assault on the rebellious region. Thanks to the success of this offensive, the previously unknown Putin became a national hero and soon gained full control over the power structures of Russia. Putin continues to exercise this control to this day.

On the site of the house on the Kashirskoye highway, neat flower beds are now laid out. Flowerbeds surround a stone monument with the names of the victims, crowned with an Orthodox cross. On the ninth anniversary of the attack, three or four local journalists came to the monument, watched by two policemen in a patrol car; however, no special occupation was found for either one or the other. Soon after five in the morning, a group of two dozen people approached the monument, most of them young, presumably relatives of the victims. They lit candles at the monument and laid red carnations - and left as quickly as they came. In addition to them, only two elderly men appeared at the monument that day, eyewitnesses to the explosion, who obediently on television cameras told how terrible it was, such a shock. I noticed that one of these men looked very upset, standing at the monument - he was crying and constantly wiping tears from his cheeks. Several times he began to resolutely walk away, as if forcing himself to leave this place, but each time he hesitated on the outskirts of the park, turned and slowly returned back. I decided to approach him.

"I lived nearby," he said. "I was awakened by the rumble and ran here." A large man, a former sailor, he helplessly swept his hands around the flower beds. "And nothing. Nothing. They took out only one boy and his dog. And that was all. Everyone else was already dead."

As I later found out, the old man had a personal tragedy that day. His daughter, son-in-law and grandson lived in a house on the Kashirskoye highway - and they also died that morning. He took me to the monument, pointed to their names, carved in stone, and again began desperately rubbing his eyes. And then he whispered furiously: "They say that the Chechens did it, but this is all lies. They were Putin's people. Everyone knows this. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everyone knows about it."

The mystery of these explosions has not yet been solved; This riddle is in the very foundation of the modern Russian state. What happened in those terrible days of September 1999? Maybe Russia found in Putin its angel-avenger, the notorious man of action, who crushed the enemies who attacked the country and brought its people out of the crisis? Or maybe the crisis was fabricated by the Russian secret services in order to bring their own man to power? The answers to these questions are important because if the 1999 explosions and the events that followed them did not take place, it would be difficult to imagine an alternative scenario for Putin's coming to the place that he currently occupies - a player on the world stage, head one of the most powerful countries in the world.

It is strange that so few people outside of Russia want the answer to this question. Several intelligence agencies are believed to have conducted their own investigations, but the results of the investigations have not been made public. Very few American lawmakers have shown an interest in the case. In 2003, John McCain told Congress that "there is credible information that the Russian FSB was involved in organizing the bombings." However, neither the United States government nor the American media showed any interest in investigating the explosions.

This lack of interest is now observed in Russia as well. Immediately after the explosions, various representatives of Russian society expressed doubts about the official version of what happened. One by one these voices fell silent. In recent years, a number of journalists investigating the incident have either been killed or died in suspicious circumstances - as have two Duma members who participated in the commission to investigate the attacks. At the moment, almost everyone who in the past expressed a different position from the official position on this issue either refuses to comment, or publicly denied his words, or is dead.

During my last year's visit to Russia, I addressed a number of people, one way or another connected with the investigation of the events of those days - journalists, lawyers, human rights activists. Many refused to speak to me. Some limited themselves to listing well-known inconsistencies in this case, but refused to express their point of view, limiting themselves to remarking that the issue remains "controversial." Even the old man from the Kashirskoye Highway ended up as a living illustration of the atmosphere of uncertainty that hangs over this topic. He readily agreed to a second meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to the relatives of the victims, who, like him, doubt the official version of events. However, he later changed his mind.

“I can't,” he told me during a telephone conversation a few days after we met. "I talked to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet with you, then I'm finished." I wanted to know what he meant by this, but did not have time - the old sailor hung up.

There is no doubt that part of this reticence is due to memories of the fate of Alexander Litvinenko, a man who has devoted his entire life to proving that there was a conspiracy of the secret services in the case of the house bombings. From his London exile of Litvinenko, the fugitive KGB officer launched an active campaign to compromise the Putin regime, accusing the latter of a wide variety of crimes, but especially of organizing the bombings of residential buildings. In November 2006, the world community was shocked by the news of the poisoning of Litvinenko - it is assumed that he received a lethal dose of poison during a meeting with two former KGB agents in a London bar. Before his death (which came only after twenty-three painful days), Litvinenko signed a statement in which he directly blamed Putin for his death.

However, Litvinenko was not the only one working on the bombing case. Several years before his death, he invited another ex-KGB agent, Mikhail Trepashkin, to participate in the investigation. In the past, the relationship between the partners was rather confusing, it is said that in the 90s one of them received an order to liquidate the other. However, it was Trepashkin who, while in Russia, was able to obtain most of the disturbing facts about the explosions.

Trepashkin, among other things, came into conflict with the authorities. In 2003, he was sent to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years. However, by the time of my visit to Moscow last year, he was already free.

Through my intermediary, I learned that Trepashkin has two little daughters and a wife who passionately wants her husband to stay out of politics. Considering this, as well as the fact of his recent release and the murder of a colleague, I had no doubt that our communication with him would not work out in the same way as my attempts to communicate with other former dissenters.

"Oh, he will speak," the intermediary assured me. "The only thing they can do to silence Trepashkin is to kill him."

On September 9, five days after the explosion in Buinaksk, terrorists struck Moscow. This time, their target was an eight-story building on Guryanov Street, in a working-class area in the southeast of the city. Instead of a truck with explosives, the terrorists planted a bomb in the basement, but the result was practically the same - all eight floors of the building collapsed, burying ninety-four residents of the house under the rubble.

It was after the explosion on Guryanov that a general alarm sounded. During the first hours after the terrorist attack, several officials announced at once that Chechen fighters were involved in the explosion, and a special provision was introduced in the country. Thousands of law enforcement officers were sent to the streets to interrogate, and in hundreds of cases, to arrest people with Chechen appearance, residents of cities and villages organized popular squads and patrolled courtyards. Representatives of various political movements began to call for revenge.

At Trepashkin's request, our first meeting took place in a crowded cafe in the center of Moscow. First, one of his assistants came, and twenty minutes later Mikhail himself came with something like a bodyguard - a young man with a short haircut and blank eyes.

Trepashkin, although small in stature, was robustly built - a testament to years of martial arts training, and, at 51, is still handsome. His most attractive feature was the half-surprised smile that never left his face. This gave him a certain aura of friendliness and general affection, although the person sitting opposite him in the role of the interrogated, such a smile would probably get on the nerves.

For some time we talked about general topics - about the unusually cold weather in Moscow, about the changes that had taken place in the city since my last visit - and I felt that Trepashkin was evaluating me internally, deciding how much he could tell me.

Then he began to talk about his career in the KGB. He spent most of his time investigating antiques smuggling cases. In those days, Mikhail was absolutely loyal to the Soviet regime and especially to the KGB. His loyalty was so great that he even took part in an attempt to keep Boris Yeltsin out of power in order to preserve the existing system.

“I understood that this would be the end of the Soviet Union,” Trepashkin explained. "Moreover, what will happen to the Committee, to all those who made the work in the KGB their lives? I saw only the approaching catastrophe."

And the catastrophe happened. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic and social chaos. One of the most devastating aspects of this chaos has been the transition of KGB agents to work in the private sector. Some have started their own businesses or joined the mafia they once fought against. Others became "advisors" to the new oligarchs or old apparatchiks, who were desperately trying to grab everything that was more or less valuable, while verbally expressing support for Boris Yeltsin's "democratic reforms".

Trepashkin knew all this firsthand. While continuing to work in the successor to the FSB, Trepashkin found that the line between criminals and state power was increasingly blurred.

“There was a kind of confusion in case after case,” he said. "First, you find the mafia working with terrorist groups. Then the trail goes to the business group or the ministry. And then - is this still a criminal case or an already officially sanctioned covert operation? And what exactly does" officially sanctioned "mean - who makes the decisions ? "

In the end, in the summer of 1995, Trepashkin became involved in a business that changed his life forever. This case led to a conflict between him and the supreme leadership of the FSB, one of whose members, according to Mikhail, even planned to kill him. Like many other such cases investigating corruption in post-Soviet Russia, it was tied to the rebellious Chechen region. By December 1995, the militants who had fought for the independence of Chechnya for a whole year had put the Russian army in a bloody and shameful stalemate. However, the success of the Chechens was not caused by superiority in training alone. Already in Soviet times, the Chechens controlled most of the criminal groups in the Union, so the criminalization of Russian society only played into the hands of the Chechen fighters. The uninterrupted supply of modern Russian weapons was ensured by the corrupt officers of the Russian army who had access to such weapons, and the Chechen crime lords who had spread their network across the country paid for it.

How high did this close collaboration go? Mikhail Trepashkin received an answer to this question on the night of December 1, when a group of armed FSB officers broke into the Moscow branch of Soldi-Bank.

The raid was the culmination of a complex operation that Trepashkin helped plan. The operation was aimed at neutralizing the notorious group of bank extortionists associated with Salman Raduyev, one of the leaders of the Chechen terrorists. The raid was crowned with unprecedented success - two dozen malefactors were in the hands of the FSB, including two FSB officers and an army general.

Inside the bank, the FSB officers found something else. To protect themselves from a possible trap, the extortionists placed electronic bugs throughout the building, which were controlled from a minibus parked near the bank. And although this precaution was ineffective, the question arose about the origin of the listening equipment.

"All such devices have serial numbers," Trepashkin explained to me as he sat in a Moscow cafe. "We traced these numbers and found that they belonged either to the FSB or the Ministry of Defense."

The conclusion to be drawn from this discovery was overwhelming. Since few had access to such equipment, it became clear that high-ranking officers of the special services and the army could be involved in the case - in a case, not just a criminal one, but in one whose purpose was to raise funds for the war with Russia. By the standards of any country, this was not just a fact of corruption, but treason to the motherland.

However, Trepashkin did not have time to begin the investigation, as he was removed from the Soldi-Bank case by Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB's own security department. Moreover, Trepashkin says, no charges were brought against the FSB officers detained during the raid, and almost all the other detainees were soon quietly released. Towards the end of the investigation, which lasted almost two years, Trepashkin's life was turning. In May 1997, he wrote an open letter to Boris Yeltsin, in which he described his participation in the case, and also accused most of the FSB leadership in a number of crimes, including cooperation with the mafia and even hiring members of criminal gangs to work in the FSB.

"I thought that if the president finds out about what is happening," Trepashkin said, "he will take some measures. I was wrong."

Exactly. As it turned out later, Boris Yeltsin was also corrupt and Trepashkin's letter warned the FSB leadership that a dissenter had entered their ranks. A month later, Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, unable to withstand, according to him, the pressure that they began to exert on him. However, this did not mean that Trepashkin was going to quietly hide in the fog. That summer, he filed a lawsuit against the leadership of the FSB, including the director of the Service. He seemed to be hoping that the honor of the Office could still be saved, that some hitherto unknown reformer could take responsibility for rebuilding the agency. Instead, his tenacity seems to have convinced someone in the FSB leadership that Trepashkin's problem must be resolved once and for all. One of those they turned to for a solution was Alexander Litvinenko.

In theory, Litvinenko looked like a suitable candidate for such an assignment. After returning from a difficult business trip to Chechnya, where he served in counterintelligence, Litvinenko was sent to a new, secret unit of the FSB - the Office for the Development and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Associations (URPO). Unbeknownst to Alesander at the time, the department was created for the purpose of conducting secret assassinations. As Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko's widow, Marina, write in their book "The Death of a Dissident", Alexander found out about this when in October 1997 he was summoned by the head of the department. "There is such a Trepashkin," the boss allegedly told him, "This is your new object. Take his case and check it out."

In the process of acquaintance, Litvinenko learned about Mikhail's participation in the Soldi-Bank case, as well as about his litigation with the FSB leadership. Alexander did not understand what he should do about Trepashkin.

“Well, this is a delicate matter,” said Litvinenko, the boss told him. "After all, he summons the director of the FSB to court, gives interviews. We must shut him up - this is the director's personal order."

Shortly thereafter, Litvinenko claimed, Boris Berezovsky, a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose death appears to have been wanted by someone in power, was included in the list of potential victims. Litvinenko was playing for time, coming up with numerous excuses as to why the liquidation orders had not yet been carried out.

According to Trepashkin, at that time there were two attempts on his life - one from an ambush on a deserted section of the Moscow highway, the other by a sniper on the roof, who failed to make an aimed shot. In other cases, Trepashkin claims, he received warnings from friends who were still working at the Office.

In November 1998, Litvinenko and four of his colleagues from the URPO spoke at a press conference in Moscow with a story about the existence of a conspiracy to kill Trepashkin and Berezovsky and their role in it. Mikhail himself was present at the press conference.

On this, without much fanfare, everything died out. Litvinenko, as the leader of a group of dissident officers, was dismissed from the FSB, but that was the end of the punishment. As for Trepashkin, oddly enough, he won a lawsuit against the FSB, remarried and got a job in the tax service, where he intended to quietly continue to retire.

But then, in September 1999, apartment bombings rocked the foundations of the Russian state. These explosions again threw Litvinenko and Trepashkin into the shadowy world of conspiracies, this time united by a common goal. In the midst of the panic that gripped Moscow after the explosion on Guryanov, in the early morning of September 13, 1999, the police received a call about suspicious activity in an apartment building on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The police checked the signal, found nothing, and left the house 6/3 on Kashirskoye highway at two in the morning. At 5:03 am, the building was destroyed by a powerful explosion that killed 121 people. Three days later, the target was a house in Volgodonsk, a southern city where seventeen people were killed in a truck bomb.

We are sitting in a Moscow cafe, Trepashkin frowning, which does not look like him at all, and looks into the distance for a long time.

“It was impossible to believe,” he finally says. "That was my first thought. There is panic in the country, volunteer squads are stopping people on the street, there are police checkpoints everywhere. How did it happen that the terrorists moved freely and had enough time to plan and carry out such complex terrorist attacks? It seemed incredible."

Another aspect that raised questions from Trepashkin was the motives of the explosions.

“Usually the motive for the crime is on the surface,” he explains. "It's either money, or hatred, or envy. But in this case, what were the motives of the Chechens? Very few people thought about it."

From one country, it is easy to understand. Dislike for Chechens is firmly rooted in Russian society, especially after their war of independence. During the war, both sides committed indescribable atrocities towards each other. The Chechens did not hesitate to transfer the hostilities to the territory of Russia, their target was often the civilian population. Only the war ended in 1997, with the signing of a peace treaty by Yeltsin, which gave Chechnya broad autonomy.

“Then why?” Trapeshkin asks. "Why would the Chechens provoke the Russian government if they have already received everything they fought for?"

And one more thing made the former investigator ponder - the composition of the new Russian government.

In early August 1999, President Yeltsin appointed the third prime minister in the past three months. It was a thin, dry man practically unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.

The main reason for his obscurity was that, just a few years before his appointment to the high post, Putin was just one of many middle-ranking officers in the KGB / FSB. In 1996, Putin was promoted to the economic management of the presidential administration, an important post in the Yeltsin hierarchy, which allowed him to gain leverage over Kremlin politics. Apparently, he made good use of his time in this post - over the next three years, Putin was promoted to deputy head of the presidential administration, then appointed director of the FSB, and then prime minister.

But despite the fact that Putin in September 1999 was relatively unfamiliar to the Russian public, Trepashkin had a good idea of ​​the man. Putin was the director of the FSB when the URPO scandal erupted and it was he who fired Litvinenko. "I fired Litvinenko," he told the reporter, "because FSB officers shouldn't call press conferences ... and they shouldn't make internal scandals public."

Equally alarming for Trepashkin was the appointment of Putin's successor as FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev. It was Patrushev, who was the head of the FSB's own security department, who removed Trepashkin from the Soldi-Bank case, and it was he who was among the most ardent supporters of the version of the "Chechen trace" in the case of the apartment bombings.

“That is, we saw such a turn of events,” Trepashkin says. “We were told:“ The Chechens are to blame for the explosions, so we need to deal with them. ”

But then something very strange happened. It happened in sleepy provincial Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

In an atmosphere of super-vigilance that gripped the population of the country, several residents of the house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street in Ryazan noticed suspicious white Zhiguli parked next to their house on the evening of September 22nd. Their suspicions turned into panic when they noticed how the passengers of the car carried several large bags into the basement of the building and then drove away. Residents called the police.

In the basement, three 50-kilogram bags were found connected with a timer to a detonator. The building was evacuated, and an explosives technician from the local FSB was invited to the basement, who determined that the bags contained RDX, an explosive that would be enough to completely destroy the building. At the same time, all roads from Ryazan were blocked by checkpoints, and a real hunt was launched for white Zhiguli and their passengers.

The next morning, news of the Ryazan incident spread throughout the country. Prime Minister Putin praised the residents of Ryazan for their vigilance, while the Minister of Internal Affairs boasted of success in law enforcement, "such as preventing an explosion in an apartment building in Ryazan."

This could have ended if the two suspects in planning the terrorist attack had not been arrested that night. To the amazement of the police, both detainees presented their FSB identity cards. Soon after, a call came from the Moscow headquarters of the FSB, demanding the release of the detainees.

The next morning, the director of the FSB spoke on television with a completely new version of the events in Ryazan. According to him, the incident at 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was not a prevented terrorist attack, but an FSB exercise aimed at checking public vigilance; the bags in the basement did not contain hexogen, but ordinary sugar.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in this statement. How to correlate the FSB's version of bags of sugar with the conclusion of a local FSB expert that the bags contained RDX? If it really was an exercise, why did the local FSB department know nothing about this and why Patrushev himself was silent for a day and a half since the incident was reported? Why did the explosions of residential buildings stop after the incident in Ryazan? If the terrorist attacks were the work of Chechen fighters, why did they not continue their dirty work with even greater zeal after the incident in Ryazan, which was disastrous for the FSB in terms of PR? But the time for all these questions was already lost. While Prime Minister Putin delivered his September 23 speech extolling the vigilance of Ryazan residents, warplanes have already launched massive bombing raids on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Over the next few days, Russian troops, previously concentrated on the border, entered the rebellious republic, initiating the second Chechen war.

After this, events developed rapidly. In his 1999 New Years Address, Boris Yeltsin stunned the Russian people by announcing his immediate resignation. This move made Putin acting president until the next elections. Instead of the planned summer, the election date was set just ten weeks after Yeltsin's resignation, leaving little time for the rest of the candidates to prepare.

In a public opinion poll conducted in August 1999, less than two percent of those polled were in favor of Putin being elected president. However, in March 2000, Putin, on the wave of popularity caused by the policy of total war in Chechnya, was elected by 53 percent of those who voted. The era of Putin began, which irrevocably changed Russia.

Trepashkin made an appointment for our next meeting in his apartment. I was surprised - I was told that for security reasons Mikhail rarely invited guests to his home, although I understood that he was aware that his enemies knew where he lived.

His apartment, located on the ground floor in a high-rise building in the south of Moscow, made a good impression, although it was furnished in a Spartan style. Trepashkin showed me his apartment and I noted that the only place where there was some confusion was a small room filled with papers - a built-in closet converted into an office. One of his daughters was at home during my visit, and she brought us tea as we settled in the living room.

Smiling shyly, Trepashkin said that there is another reason why he rarely invites guests related to work - his wife. "She wants me not to be involved in politics anymore, but since she is not at home now ...". His smile faded. “This is because of the searches, of course. it will happen again. "

The first of these searches took place in January 2002. One late evening, a group of FSB agents invaded the apartment and turned everything upside down. Trepashkin claims that they did not find anything, but they were able to plant enough evidence - secret documents and live ammunition - so that the prosecutor's office could initiate a criminal case against him on three counts.

“It was a signal that they took me on a pencil,” says Trepashkin, “that if I don’t change my mind, they will take me seriously.”

Trepashkin guessed what caused such attention from the FSB - a few days before the search, he began to receive calls from a man whom the Putin regime considered one of the main traitors - Alexander Litvinenko. Lieutenant Colonel Litvinenko quickly fell into disgrace. After a press conference in 1998 at which he accused the URPO of plotting the assassinations, he spent nine months in prison on charges of “abuse of power”, after which he was forced to leave the country, while prosecutors prepared new charges against him. Litvinenko and his family, supported by the exiled oligarch Berezovsky, settled in England, where Alexander began a campaign with Boris to expose what they called the crimes of the Putin regime. The main focus of the campaign was to investigate the facts of a series of explosions in residential buildings.

Therefore, Litvinenko called him, Trepashkin explained. Litvinenko, for obvious reasons, could not come home, and they needed someone who could conduct an investigation in Russia.

It was easy only in words, since by 2002 Russia had changed a lot. In the two years that Putin was in power, independent media virtually ceased to exist, and the political opposition was marginalized to such an extent that it played no role.

One of the indicators of these changes was the review of all aspects of the FSB's weakest case - the case of the "exercises" in Ryazan. By 2002, the head of the Ryazan FSB, who led the hunt for "terrorists", officially supported the version of the exercise. A local explosives expert, who claimed in front of the television cameras that there were explosives in the Ryazan bags, suddenly fell silent and disappeared from sight. Even some residents of the house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street, who starred in the documentary 6 months after the events and desperately protested against the official version, now refuse to talk to anyone, confining themselves to statements that they may have been wrong.

"I told Litvinenko that I could only help in the investigation if I was officially involved in the case," Trepashkin explained to me, sitting in his living room.

The official role for Trepashkin was organized during a meeting organized by Berezovsky at his London office in early March 2002. One of those present at the meeting, State Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, agreed to organize a special commission to investigate the circumstances of the explosions, Trepashkin was invited to this commission as one of the investigators. The meeting was attended by Tatyana Morozova, a 35-year-old Russian émigré living in Milwaukee. Tatyana's mother was among those killed in the explosion on Guryanov Street - according to Russian law, this gave her the right to access the official records of the investigation. Since Trepashkin had received a lawyer's license shortly before that, Morozova had to appoint him as her attorney and send a request to the court asking for access to the materials of the explosion case.

"I agreed with both proposals," Trepashkin told me, "but the question remained where to start. Many reports could not be trusted, many people changed the initial testimony, so I decided to turn to physical evidence."

Easy to say, difficult to do. The reaction of the authorities to the explosions was distinguished by excessive haste, with which the site of the terrorist attack was cleaned up. Americans delved into the ruins of the World Trade Center for six months after its fall, viewing the site as a crime scene. The Russian authorities cleared away the rubble at the site of the explosion on Guryanov Street within a few days, and all the debris was sent to the city dump. Whatever evidence remained - and it was unclear whether they existed in nature - they were all presumably in the warehouses of the FSB.

More recently, a website for photo and film documents "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" has appeared. This is the first network resource that contains photographs from the archives of the repressive Soviet authorities. The site will be based on archival materials from the NKVD and the KGB: 12 ​​tons of folders in two containers. So over time, it can become the largest informative resource-archive of camp photos and documents in the world.
http://www.gulag.ipvnews.org/

The author of the project is Sergei Melnikoff, a former board member of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, and now a famous American photo artist. He himself served a long sentence in the political camps of the USSR - for free-thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for a trial of the CPSU.

The love to climb behind the fences with the "Forbidden Zone" sign led to the fact that the Soviet dissident, along with the "native" special agencies, was also searched for by the North Korean regime for unauthorized filming inside the concentration camps of this country.

Immediately after the beginning of Gorbachev's glasnost, Melnikoff organized a photo-documentary exhibition, unprecedented even in modern times, "Accusing the USSR of Experiments on People." Japan, South Korea, the USA immediately recognized the uniqueness of the presented material and organized a world tour for the exhibition. The Soviet press talked about the exhibition through gritted teeth, mostly throwing mud at its author.

A year later, Sergei and his family were forced to flee the USSR through Mongolia to China, illegally crossing the state border at night with his one-year-old daughter in his arms.

In China, the American CBS News hid them for a long time. The same powerful television corporation achieved for the fugitives, directly from the UN, the status of political refugees (the third case in the entire history of Soviet dissidence). The family, which the KGB was already looking for with might and main, was sent by the US government and the UN to Thailand, and then was able to immigrate to the US, where Sergey founded his own non-profit television company IPV News USA. In the past fifteen years, he continues to travel on endless expeditions to all six continents of the Earth. I even signed up for a space flight ...

And so, the network appeared "GULAG - with a camera in the camps". The new resource is a collection of unique photographs taken from negatives that fell into the hands of Sergei both as a result of a dozen trips to the Stalinist camps preserved in the wilderness, and as a result of the suddenly awakened commercial interest of people who had previously served faithfully "the country of October". These people with "hot hearts, cold heads and clean hands" helped Sergey to become the owners of priceless photographic documents. Well, who else besides them could have evidence of crimes against their own people?! ..

Specialists from numerous camps, strewn with the map of Russia, like the black dots of an old lampshade covered with flies, not only began to sell everything that was possible, but, smelling money, like many of their Lubyanka "colleagues", began to run across to where the smell was spreading from. Many of them settled in the newly created tax inspectorates. Then, as we know, their appetites increased immeasurably.

What is shown in the photographs amazes even seasoned connoisseurs of the "charms" of the Soviet regime. And they were filmed by someone who did all this. Like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, they looked over and over again at the evidence of their atrocities.

Because of this hobby, unnatural for normal people, today we have the opportunity to look into this terrible world. Their world. A world in which there are no such concepts as philanthropy, spirituality, compassion, decency, friendliness, intelligence, disinterestedness, generosity of the soul.

The photographs are accompanied by texts so powerful that they leave no stone unturned from the myth that today's successors of the "Iron Felix" case - a true moral monster and real executioner of Russia - Dzerzhinsky continue to hammer into the heads of Russians. The myth of the supposedly wise, just and selfless "knights without fear and reproach." Moreover, the current, irreplaceable despite the continuous failures, the chief security officer agreed to the point that his subordinates are "... modern-minded, educated people ..., modern" non-nobility "...

Well, the "nobles"! .. "Nobles", who once a year - in December - celebrate the foundation of their office not from the beginning of the 90s, but from 1918! That is, they consider themselves to be the successors of the work of the people's executioners Dzerzhinsky, Peters, Menzhinsky, Yegoda, Yezhov, Beria ...

In addition to the photo galleries "Butugychag" and "Thorny Truth", the site contains articles that are deadly in their power, for example - "Death Valley", "Marble Gorge", "Georgy Zhzhenov's Stage", "Capital Punishment", "Scoundrel's Letter", " Children's GULAG "," Kill Stalin "and" Dedicated to bitches from the KGB ". And this is just the beginning. So the "bitches" learn a lot more about their affairs, which they are trying to forget about all of us.

This is what the aforementioned monsters in human form and their henchmen did and the story is told on the pages of the project by Sergei Melnikoff. The narrative is made even worse by the fact that it is accompanied by "visual aids" - evidence of the deepest fall of the knights of fear and reproach. Reproaches that they have not yet really heard from a society tired of reforms. But this does not mean that they will never hear them. Sergey Melnikoff's project brings these days closer.

We will look forward to new articles, as well as photo galleries of this enthusiastic, wonderful person and a real citizen of our Fatherland and only part-time Citizen of the World - Sergei Melnikoff!

In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of Sergei himself: "... Human memory does not contain such a force of grief, such a scale of tragedy that the people of the Russian Empire inherited from the Bolsheviks. Therefore, the executioners easily escape from retaliation, and the next generation is doomed to repeat itself. We are obliged to to bring criminals, old and new, to justice, so that every next ruler knows what the imposed despotism threatens him with ... "

The biography of the international adventurer and editor-in-chief of the site "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" in terms of the degree of "saturation" with events and false traces leaves far behind the history of another famous falsifier - the "camera man" Danzig Baldaev. Only the date and place of his birth is reliable - July 13, 1955, Leningrad, "in the family of a WWII pilot, an aviation general." Education - " graduated from higher courses in economics at the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations". A ministry with this name was formed only in 1988 on the basis of the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. There were sectoral courses under the ministries, but their task was not to train specialists, but to improve their qualifications - that is, they could only get on after graduating from a specialized university and having worked for some time in the relevant departments. Thus, Melnikoff, most likely, did not study anywhere and does not have a diploma, since it is traditional for the biography genre to report information about the place of higher education, and not about “qualification courses”. There were no vocational schools that would train specialists in "foreign economic relations" in the USSR.

However, "the concept has changed again." Now Melnikoff calls as his alma mater not mysterious “courses”, but LSU: “ So why, in the city on the Neva, where I was born and studied at the university with the accursed name of Zhdanov on the facade, two healthy 20-year-old guys who do not look like Downs killed and ate their friend entirely?» (

Sergey Melnikov (possibly) began his career in the ideological structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is also very strange - because those who received education in the field of "foreign economic relations" made every effort to work "according to their profile", since such work presupposed the possibility of regular trips abroad. He himself writes about this period as follows - “ former board member of the Soviet Culture Fund. Has over 30 years of experience in professional journalism". Wherein " for free thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for a trial of the Communist Party, served a long sentence in the political camps of the USSR”, And Melnikoff calls either 1983-1986 or 1981-1987 as the period of stay in places not so distant. For what exactly he was imprisoned - it is not known, but there is unverified information that the Soviet court by "free thinking" meant Art. 156 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR "Deception of buyers and customers." At the same time, already in 1989, Melnikoff took part in a hydrographic expedition aboard the Dmitry Laptev ship and dived to the sunken steamer Chelyuskin. Really participated:

« Dmitry Laptev "again discovers the steamer and Melnikov dives into a veryunsuitable equipment (although 10 years have passed since Gerasimov's expedition). The dive takes (a little more) 4 minutes and Melnikoff is brought aboard in a semi-faint state. However, he later claims that he touched the Chelyuskin, saw the letters on board and even took a photograph during this more than a short time. The photograph shows (quite indistinctly) a kind of interweaving of something with something. It can be anything. Therefore, today's statements of Mr. Melnikoff, according to the unanimous opinion of qualified experts (both today's specialists and current veterans Kashtanov and Gerasimov) cannot be trusted».

Mr. Melnikoff's "dissident past" generally raises a lot of questions. He himself reports the following information about this stage of his biography:

« For free thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for a trial of the Communist Party, he served a long sentence in the political camps of the USSR».

Please note that this "version" does not say anything about the time or place of detention. Those who have served their sentences usually say about themselves: “I served some (5,6,7,10) years in Karaganda / Kazakhstan / near Magadan, etc.”.

With the term of imprisonment, in general, an extremely interesting picture is obtained:

In 1994, in the afterword to his book "Captive Americans are always a commodity" (about her - below) Melnikoff wrote about himself:

« Born in the former Soviet Union, Sergei Melnikoff was an outspoken opponent of the Communism, ..... his political views brought about his arrest resulting in three and a half years imprisonment (1983 - 1986)". - That is, we are talking about a camp imprisonment from 1983 to 1986 (3 and a half years).

« While working as a journalist in Russia, Melnikoff ran afoul of the hard-line Communist government and he was imprisoned in 1980, to spend six years in what he describes as a concentration camp ........ “When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the USSR, he was more tolerant of critics of Communism, ”he recounts. If not for him I would have been in prison for another ten years. He pardoned me in 1986 ... " (While working as a journalist in Russia, Melnikoff opposed the hard line of the Communist government and was imprisoned in 1980 and spent 6 years in what he describes as a concentration camp. "When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the USSR, he was more tolerant of critics of communism." he notes. "If not for him, I would have spent another 10 years in prison. He pardoned me in 1986").

In recent publications on his website, Melnikoff extended his term even more, and writes about the imprisonment from 1980 to 1987. It is not far from here to the "Stalinist" ten-year term.

Similarly, the question remains unresolved - for what exactly Melnikoff was subjected to "political persecution" in the USSR. There is no information about his participation in dissident organizations, about his appearance at meetings and demonstrations. The repressions of the authorities against dissidents (at least in large cities) were scrupulously recorded by human rights organizations, “voices” and samizdat press like the infamous Chronicle of Current Events. But in these sources there is no information about the dissident activities of Melnikoff. Melnikoff himself also never mentioned the specific content of his anti-Soviet activities. "Calls for the Trial of the Communist Party in 1980" look like a late insert. The idea of ​​a trial against the CPSU did not sound at all in the speeches of Soviet dissidents until 1989 and arose only after the abolition of the constitutional provision on the leading role of the CPSU in the Soviet state. Such a trial (over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), as you know, took place in 1991-92, but they began to discuss this idea for the first time somewhere in 1989-90. Obviously, Melnikoff in 1990 simply used a "hot" topic for that time, and attributed such calls to himself in order to obtain refugee status.

In 1989 (according to other sources - in 1990 (l) or in 1991), at the height of perestroika, Melnikoff fled the USSR, and not to the West, but to China, which is surprising in itself. But in fact de

There is no mystery in this - during the heyday of "shuttle trade" on the border with China, there was a simplified visa regime and you could go there with a train ticket. Upon arrival, Melnikoff immediately contacted the UN Office in Beijing, calling himself a "victim of political persecution." Having received refugee status, he safely left for the United States, where he opened a small photo company selling “elite calendars from Sergey Melnikoff”.

A separate story is connected with Melnikoff's attempt to get a job on the Pentagon's commission to search for missing American prisoners of war. In some versions of his biography, he writes “worked as an independent consultant to the Pentagon on the POW / MIAs Commission. The author of the acclaimed US bestseller "American prisoners of war are always a commodity", which sharply criticizes the methods of work of the military department, although then, if they pay attention to this moment, he begins to clarify that he "wanted to work as a consultant", but he was "not taken", apparently for a reason lack of valuable information and connections for the aforementioned commission. The "sensational bestseller" is not registered in the catalog of the US Library of Congress.

Melnikoff claims that he is being hunted by North Korean intelligence agencies "for unauthorized filming inside the camps of this country." There is also other information on this score: The "North Korean concentration camp" was actually a Korean timber industry enterprise in the Primorsky Territory, where Koreans, under a contract with the USSR, logged timber. In 1989 or 90, the journalist of the Far Eastern newspaper S. Melnikov came there. He entered through a hole in the fence, managed to photograph the office with a portrait of Kim Il Sung, and was ushered out of the gate. "

In addition, Melnikoff claimed that the famous song by Anna German "Hope, my earthly compass ..." was dedicated to his family, which at that moment was preparing to sail around the world on the yacht "Nadezhda", "converted from a life raft" - no comment ...

In 2002, Melnikoff climbed a small hill in the Tien Shan and named it "The Peak of September 11" in honor of George W. Bush. The name was not registered anywhere due to the insignificance of the discovery. In November of the same year, he was looking in the area of ​​the lake. Issyk-Kul relics of the Apostle Matthew. In his project, Melnikoff intended “to involve such celebrities as Steven Spielberg, Patriarch of Russia Alexy II, writer Chingiz Aitmatov, heads of several states and Pope John Paul II himself”, as well as to acquire the exclusive right to shoot the relics of the saint for 50 years, nothing I never found it.

Site "GULAG-WITH A CAMERA IN THE CAMERAS"

The first disclosures of falsifications were made by history Alexander Dyukov immediately after the appearance of this site in 2006. His initiative was continued by Bair Irincheev, Nikolai Anichkin, users of Live Journal leorer, maxwallah, etc. During all this time Melnikov not only did not remove the fakes, but also continued to fill the site with new ones. Below is an analysis of some cases of forgery, distortion and outright lies. And this analysis is by no means exhaustive.

12 tons

Armenian boy

The story with the Armenian boy was one of the loudest. The article "Children's GULAG" is illustrated with a snapshot of an emaciated child with the caption: " Hundreds of thousands of children of the peoples of the Caucasus found their death by starvation together with the deported parents. Whole villages and regions died". Children of the displaced peoples of the Caucasus could not die in hundreds of thousands, if only because the number of all those displaced only slightly exceeded 500 thousand. And no matter how hard the Kazakh exile was, it didn’t come to the point of exhaustion that the boy had in the photograph. The photo source turned out to be even more interesting. This is evidence of the Turkish genocide of Armenians, filmed in the Ter-Zor desert. After the exposure, Melnikoff urgently added an "honest" link to the Armenian National Institute at the bottom. Only now the photo from this did not become more related to the GULAG, and if you hover the cursor over it, you will still see the plate “Children of Soviet GULAG”.

Klooga

This "secret" photograph was published several times in the Soviet Union. True, it does not depict the victims of the NKVD at all, but the corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in the Klooga concentration camp (44 km from Tallinn) prepared for burning. This photograph is kept in the State Archives of the Russian Federation in the fund of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German fascist invaders. The photograph was published in the collection of materials of the Nuremberg trial (Moscow, 1959. T. 4. Insert between pages 336 and 337). Pictures from other angles were published in the collections of documents "Criminal Purposes - Criminal Means" (Moscow, 1968, p. 104) and "Neither Prescription, nor Oblivion" (Moscow, 1983, p. 171). After being exposed, Melnikov hastily added the commentary to the picture: “ Always Soviet propaganda passed it off as evidence of the atrocities of the fascists. We believe that these are the consequences of collectivization in the countryside. Take a close look at the fighters in the background. Caps and budenovks are clearly visible on them.". Later, he began to say at all that the picture was taken on Solovki. Unfortunately for the liar, the filming and photography in Klooge was carried out, as noted above, from different angles. You can only see a budenovka on one of the people if you have a lot of imagination (note that on the site the photo is shown in extremely poor quality, no budenovka is observed in normal resolution).

"Shooting"

The collage, with mixed archive footage and photographs from Chechnya, gives a vivid picture of the site's tendentious and propagandistic nature. The historical part of the collage again has nothing to do with the declared theme. In the photo in the upper left corner on the killed boots of the Red Army with iron horseshoes, at some distance lies a Soviet helmet and a rifle. The dead lie chaotically, not in rows. All this indicates that this is not a photograph of the victims of the GULAG, but Soviet Red Army soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War, and the photograph was taken by a German officer or soldier. A small photograph with a seated corpse has nothing to do with the GULAG - this is a very famous Finnish photograph of a Red Army soldier who died from the cold in one of the encirclements during the Soviet-Finnish war. In the central part of the collage, there are again no signs of the GULAG. On the sleeves of people there are characteristic white armbands - a distinctive sign of the policemen in the occupied territory.

"Pain of Ukraine: Holodomor"

Here Melnikoff is already unoriginal. Illustrate the "genocide of Ukrainians in 1933" photographs of the 1921 famine taken by F. Nansen's commission are a long-standing bad tradition. The photograph under the heading "Russian Fascism" really has a direct bearing on fascism - it comes from the Nazi propaganda book "Und du Siehst die Sowjets Richtig" by Dr.-Ing. A. Laubenheimer. Nibelungen-Verlag. (Berlin-Leipzig, 1935). Where and when the picture was taken is unknown.

But the photo with two children located under it does not raise questions. This is a photo of the famine of 1921, which has been repeatedly published on charity cards. The signature was as follows: " Famine in Russia III. TWO STAGES OF HUNGER. These children emaciated to skin and bones, with distended bellies (caused by grass, husk, worms and earth). These children cannot be saved, it's too late. In order to save them, it was necessary to feed them before the onset of this stage of exhaustion.».

Further, we again and again see on the page of Nansen's photographs, including the notorious "cemetery in Kharkov in 1933", about which everyone already knows that the year is not 1933, but the 21st, and the cemetery is not in Kharkov, but in Buzuluk, Orenburg province. Such is the “pain of Ukraine”.

"Children's GULAG"

In addition to the Armenian boy, there are two more impudent forgeries on the Children's GULAG page. Medical examination of children does not take place in the Gulag, but in the besieged Leningrad of 1942, the photograph is well-known and published many times. And just below there are such pictures with the caption “ Nobody needed photographs of the little slaves. It was only by chance that a person with a camera (even in the NKVD uniform) could get to the place where the Soviet regime was spreading rot tens of thousands of children of its own people. But still, several of these pictures remained in the archives.". Judging by the pathos, we finally see a sample of those 12 tons of documents. Alas. Before us is the famine of 1921-23 again. On the left is the photo "Starving children in Gulyai-Pole". It is by no means kept in the secret archives of the KGB, but in the cantonal archive of Geneva, in the fund of the Union international de secours aux enfants. This is photo # 14 received on May 5, 1922 from the Red Cross mission in Ukraine. No camps, little slaves and the NKVD.

"Shows the NKVD: Public Executions in the USSR"

First, let's define what the record is. The death penalty by hanging was introduced in the USSR on April 19, 1943 for traitors and war criminals (that is, with regard to "collectivization" - nonsense). The video contains a montage from filming of two different executions. In the first case, policemen are hanged, and where the names of the convicts are visible on the plates, the execution of the murderers from the SS-10-A Sonderkommando in Krasnodar in 1943.

“A closed, obscured, buried topic” is a lie. It is enough to open the popular collection “Inevitable Retribution. Based on the materials of trials over traitors to the Motherland, fascist executioners and agents of imperialist intelligence services ”, published in 1984 in one hundred thousand copies. An article on the Krasnodar trial reports: “ The verdict over the fascist accomplices was carried out on July 18, 1943 at 13.00 on the city square of Krasnodar, where about 50 thousand people were present»

The description of the execution at the Gigant cinema (on January 5, 1946, German war criminals were hanged there) is fantastic. There was no trace of ropes with loops, which is easy to see by looking newsreel.

As for "acts of medieval obscurantism", for example, in France, Article 26 of the Criminal Code read " The verdict is carried out in one of the public squares of the area indicated in the conviction”And only under the law of 1939, executions began to be carried out in prison in the presence of a narrow circle of officials.

"Burial of villagers shot by the Chekists in one of the Ukrainian farmsteads, recaptured by the White Army"

This video is assembled from three unrelated fragments. The first is the shooting of a traitor in a partisan detachment, a chronicle of the Great Patriotic War. The second - with a crying woman - seeing off the militia divisions to the front. And only the third part is directly related to the name. True, shots with the same chances can be attributed to both the civil war and the First World War (an armband with a red cross on the sleeve is visible), and the bodies can belong to both those who were shot and those who died in battle.

Butovo polygon

Since no filming was made in Butovo in 1937, both photographs of the "mass executions" are a deliberate forgery. So far, only the second snapshot has been identified. It was taken from the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission and was published in the collection of documents of the Nuremberg Trials. The corpses of Soviet people after one of the mass executions near the town of Zolochev, photographed by the Nazis before being buried (German photo. Discovered in the Gestapo of the town of Zolochev in July 1944).

NKVD in 1941

The photograph illustrating the article is quite common on the Internet, but its origin is unknown. Nevertheless, it can be argued that we have before us a modern dramatization not a theme of the Second World War. This is evidenced by the theatrical pose of the "executioner", and the symmetrical figures of the "victims", and later-style underwear. It is impossible to determine the nationality of the officer (he was removed from the back and no insignia are visible), although the authors of the staged photograph were clearly guided by the German uniform. This does not prevent a number of anti-communist sites in Eastern Europe, and after them, and Melnikov, to pass off the photograph as NKVD.

Medical experiments in the Gulag

General agreement between the NKVD and the Gestapo

"Bitches of Russia"

Above there is a video from youtube - a video from Deutsche Wochenschau with Brest broadcast footage. Note that the video was edited in a sloppy manner - the events took place not on October 27, but on September 22, 1939. But the paragraph below it, in italics, is much more interesting. This is a quote from the "Genocide in East Prussia" by Peter Hedruk - a source no less odious than the Melnikoff site "GULAG ..." itself.

The order of the headquarters of the Supreme High Command No. 0428 of November 17, 1941 is well known and has been published more than once. He prescribes "in the event of a forced withdrawal of our units in one sector or another, take the Soviet population with us and be sure to destroy all settlements without exception so that the enemy cannot use them." Stored in TsAMO, f. 208, op. 2524, d. 1, l. 257-258. No dressing up and no killing.

"March of the slaves of the Cheka"

Under such a loud name on the "GULAG" there is a video clip for the radio broadcast of Seva Novgorodtsev dated August 26, 1983 about the similarity of the famous song "Higher and higher and higher ..." ("Aviamarsh") with the German "Berliner Jungarbeiterlied" (Seva mistakenly calls her "Horst Wessel"). The fact that the priority has long been recognized precisely for the Soviet song - Melnikov is silent. You can familiarize yourself with this fascinating musical detective story.

The visual series that accompanies the recording deserves a separate consideration. It is a rambling collection of Nansen photographs of the famine, cartoons of Putin, German posters, Russophobic pictures and "Hitler's icons." And it’s quite unexpected to come across here the notorious photograph of children killed by a crazy gypsy woman from a Polish textbook on psychiatry. She was repeatedly attributed as a crime of the UPA, but to illustrate her song ...

"Our democratic scribblers and oppositionists throw mud at our country ..."

Garbage from the Internet again. The selection of quotes allegedly by Goebbels, widely distributed on the Russian Internet, goes back to the forum of the Belarusian tabloid newspaper "Secret Research", which does not deserve the slightest trust. Goebbels did not write or pronounce anything of the kind, at least in March 1933. 03/12/1933 he did not perform anywhere. A cursory review of other speeches did not reveal such maxims.

The network has a resource "GULAG - with a camera in the camps." If anyone has not yet seen the horrors of Stalinism, welcome. It is only necessary to bear in mind that here photographs of the victims of the camps are presented as photographs of Soviet people shot by the Nazis and even of Armenian children evicted by the Turks. The scale of falsification is such that people are perplexed: "Why did the compilers need it - in the presence of undeniable crimes?" Perhaps because a lie is more effective than the truth, and the crimes that we would like to tell us simply do not exist? It is impossible to cover just one article, but you can take a short walk through Stalin's camps - with documents in hand.

Accusations of the use of forced and even slave labor of GULAG prisoners have become a commonplace in our discussion about the Stalinist period.

At the same time, few people know that the GULAG prisoners received a salary for their labor. " This money was in administrative documents initially and until the end of the 1940s. designated by the terms "cash incentive" or "cash bonus". The concept of "salary" was also sometimes used, but this name was officially introduced only in 1950.", - we read in the study" The structure and incentives for forced labor in the GULAG ... ". The article was republished on the website of the Memorial society, and it is not easy to suspect him of attempts to whitewash Stalinism.

From the study we learn that, as of 1939, “ the bonus was necessarily credited to the prisoner's personal account. During the month, working prisoners were given money in an amount not exceeding a monthly bonus. In addition to the premium, prisoners, depending on their behavior at work and at home, could be issued with the permission of the head of the camp unit and personal money in the amount of not more than 100 rubles. per month».

The authors of the work note that “ cash bonuses were paid to prisoners “for all work performed in forced labor camps ...". At the same time, over time, the rules for payments have changed: “ prisoners could receive the money they earned in their hands in an amount not exceeding 150 rubles (and not 100 rubles, as according to the instructions of 1939 and 1947) at a time. Money in excess of this amount was credited to their personal accounts and issued as soon as the previously issued money was spent».

The salary of prisoners is also mentioned in the book "Prisoners at the construction sites of communism ..." published with the support of RAO UES. Here evidence is given from a later period - 1951, however, based on these data, we can more fully represent the practice of paying salaries to prisoners.

« The prisoners' wages were deducted "according to the average cost of expenses in the camp as a whole, the cost of guaranteed food, clothing and footwear, and income tax, so that, under all conditions, at least 10% of the actual wages were given to working prisoners." , on the construction of the Kuibyshevskaya hydroelectric power station with an accrued average monthly salary of prisoners in 1951 at 397 rubles. on average, they received 200 rubles. Moreover, more than 7% of prisoners received only a minimum 10% guaranteed earnings».

Noteworthy is the 10% guaranteed earnings of a prisoner of the GULAG.

How justified are the accusations of the Stalinist USSR in the use of forced labor of prisoners? This can be judged by international legal acts. Thus, the 1930 convention of the International Labor Organization established for the first time that each member country of the ILO “ undertakes to abolish the use of forced or compulsory labor in all its forms as soon as possible».

At the same time, labor is not considered compulsory, " required of a person by conviction". Those. the ILO convention did not apply to prisoners.

Thus, the labor of prisoners of the Stalinist GULAG was not only not considered compulsory in terms of the international norms in force at that time (and even today), it was also paid, which was an advanced phenomenon in terms of labor legislation of that period. It was only in 1949 that the Convention "On the Protection of Wages" appeared, on the basis of which lawyers conclude that " working without pay is tantamount to forced labor».

The authors of the already mentioned book from RAO UES claim, nevertheless, that “ From the point of view of moral and legal criteria adopted in civilized societies, the Stalinist terror and its derivative - the economy of forced labor - cannot be assessed otherwise than as criminal". What these conclusions are based on is anyone's guess.

The reasons why they appear is not difficult to understand. An impartial account of the realities of the Gulag destroys the long-formed myth of the Stalinist camps. It would seem a trifle - prisoners' salaries. But how many questions arise! Why did the insidious Soviet authorities pay money to the "suicide bombers" in the "extermination camps" where millions and millions of dissidents were tortured? To prolong the agony? To make fun of?

But if the prisoners were given money in their hands, then they could spend it somewhere? Indeed, it is worth looking at the documents, as it turns out the existence in the camps and colonies of the GULAG " chain stores, stalls, buffets". You can also read about this on the website of the "Memorial" society, in the "Order of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs No. 608" On improving trade for prisoners in camps and colonies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs "of 1949. In which, in particular, it is said that in a number of camps, trade for prisoners remains unsatisfactory - a number of names of goods and products are missing.

And if you delve into the problem, it becomes clear that the camp stalls and buffets were not limited to. For example, from the "Report of Prosecutor V. Gulyakov to the Head of the Department for Supervision of Places of Detention of the USSR Prosecutor's Office on the regime and conditions of detention of prisoners in the Kuneevsky ITL" we learn about " weak supervision over their [prisoners'] behavior outside the camp ", which leads, in particular, to" hooliganism, communication with civilians, drunkenness and bringing vodka into residential and industrial areas».

Or, for example, from the complaint of the prisoner N.P. Yanysh to the Supreme Court of the USSR ": “... I had money, I decided to buy vodka, having drunk the vodka brought to me - I drank alone - went to my workplace in the lower part of the pit where my team worked. On the way, I was wounded in the head by persons unknown to me. A team was working about thirty meters away, people who helped me ...»

Not very similar to the atmosphere of monstrous terror and extermination of the unfortunate prisoners of the camps, is it?

For this reason, real documents pose a threat to those anti-Sovietists who made exposure of the mythical horrors of the Stalinist regime their calling card. Their entire ideology is built on lies and omissions - somewhere in the little things, but somewhere in the big. And this lie, if you look at the real picture, crumbles to dust under the pressure of facts.

Isn't it time to return to them the call once thrown into society - "To live not by lies"?

Dmitry Lyskov

Petrov Kirill Alexandrovich

This article is an attempt at a consolidated analysis of the falsifications on the site "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" of the notorious Sergei Melnikoff. The first revelations were made by the historian Alexander Dyukov immediately after the appearance of this site in 2006. His initiative was continued by Bair Irincheev, Nikolai Anichkin, LJ users leorer, maxwallah, etc. During all this time Melnikov not only did not remove the fakes, but continued to fill the site all new and new lies. Below is an analysis of the 20 most obvious cases of forgery, distortion and outright lies. And I must say that this analysis is by no means exhaustive.

1. "12 tons of documents"

The lie starts already in the announcement of the site. According to Melnikoff, "the basis of the archive is 12 tons of materials from the former USSR, classified as highly secret, on which there are stamps" Keep forever "and" Not subject to declassification. " All these thousands of folders were bought from the officials of the modern Kremlin brigade. " Elsewhere, he adds to this photographs taken in the colony by himself: “For three years I spent in prison with a miniature camera. About how I used it, I hid it from all-present informers and guards, where I developed the film and how I transferred the material to the wild - this photo story. " Sounds promising, but it's safe to say that Melnikoff has none of this. The site "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" has existed for six years, but no "top secret" materials have appeared on it. Everything that is on the site is pulled from the Internet and other publicly available sources. In fact, this is a dump where they drag any garbage, as long as it is Russophobic, without thinking about such "trifles" as authenticity.

2. Armenian boy

The story with the Armenian boy was one of the loudest. The article “Children's Gulag” is illustrated with a photograph of an emaciated child with the caption: “Hundreds of thousands of children of the peoples of the Caucasus found their deaths by starvation together with the deported parents. Whole villages and districts perished ”. Children of the displaced peoples of the Caucasus could not die in hundreds of thousands, if only because the number of all those displaced only slightly exceeded 500 thousand. And no matter how hard the Kazakh exile was, it didn’t come to the point of exhaustion that the boy had in the photograph.

With the source of the photo, everything turned out to be even more interesting. In fact, this is evidence of the Turkish Armenian genocide, filmed in the Ter-Zor desert. After the exposure, Melnikoff urgently added an "honest" link to the Armenian National Institute at the bottom. Only now the photo from this did not become more related to the GULAG, and if you hover the cursor over it, you will still see the plate “Children of Soviet GULAG”.

3. Klooga

This "secret" photograph was published several times in the Soviet Union. True, it does not depict the victims of the NKVD at all, but the corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in the Klooga concentration camp (44 km from Tallinn) prepared for burning. This photograph is kept in the State Archives of the Russian Federation in the fund of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the German fascist invaders. The photograph was published in the collection of materials of the Nuremberg trial (Moscow, 1959. T. 4. Insert between pages 336 and 337). Pictures from other angles were published in the collections of documents "Criminal Purposes - Criminal Means" (Moscow, 1968, p. 104) and "Neither Prescription, nor Oblivion" (Moscow, 1983, p. 171).

After being exposed, Melnikov hastily added the commentary to the picture: “Soviet propaganda has always passed it off as evidence of the atrocities of the fascists. We believe that these are the consequences of collectivization in the countryside. Take a close look at the fighters in the background. Caps and budenovka are clearly visible on them. " Later, he began to pass her off as Solovki. Unfortunately for the liar, the filming and photography in Klooge was carried out, as noted above, from different angles. You can only see a budenovka on one of the people if you have a lot of imagination (note that on the site the photo is shown in extremely poor quality, no budenovka is observed in normal resolution).

4. "Shooting"

A collage of mixed archival footage and photographs from Chechnya provides a vivid picture of the site's tendentious and propagandistic nature. The historical part of the collage again has nothing to do with the declared theme. In the photo in the upper left corner of the dead - Red Army boots with iron horseshoes, at some distance lies a Soviet helmet and a rifle. This photograph is dated September 1941. In fact, these are the dead Red Army men who tried to get out of the encirclement near Kiev. A small photograph with a seated corpse does not belong to the Gulag in any place. This is a very famous Finnish photograph of a Red Army soldier who died from the cold in one of the encirclements during the Soviet-Finnish war. In the central part of the collage, there are again no signs of the GULAG. On the sleeves of people there are characteristic white armbands - a distinctive sign of the policemen in the occupied territory.

5. "Pain of Ukraine: Holodomor"

Here Melnikoff is also not original. Illustrate the "genocide of Ukrainians in 1933" photographs of the famine of 1921 taken by F. Nansen's commission are a long-standing bad tradition.

The photograph under the heading "Russian Fascism" really has a direct bearing on fascism - it comes from the Nazi propaganda book "Und du Siehst die Sowjets Richtig" by Dr.-Ing. A. Laubenheimer. Nibelungen-Verlag. (Berlin-Leipzig, 1935). Where and when the picture was taken is unknown.

But the photo with two children located under it does not raise questions. This is a photo of the famine of 1921, which has been repeatedly published on charity cards. The signature was as follows: “Famine in Russia III. TWO STAGES OF HUNGER. These children emaciated to skin and bones, with distended bellies (caused by grass, husk, worms and earth). These children cannot be saved, it's too late. In order to save them it was necessary to feed them before the onset of this stage of exhaustion. "

Further, we again and again see on the page photographs of Nansen, incl. and the notorious "cemetery in Kharkov in 1933", about which everyone already knows that this is not 1933, but the 21st year, and the cemetery is not in Kharkov, but in Buzuluk, Orenburg province. Such is the “pain of Ukraine”.

6. "Children's GULAG"

In addition to the Armenian boy, there are two more impudent forgeries on the Children's Gulag page. Medical examination of children does not take place in the Gulag, but in the besieged Leningrad in 1942, this photograph is well-known and published many times. And just below there are such pictures with the caption “Photos of little slaves were not needed by anyone. It was only by chance that a person with a camera (even in the NKVD uniform) could get to the place where the Soviet regime was spreading rot tens of thousands of children of its own people. Nevertheless, several of these pictures remained in the archives. " Judging by the pathos, we finally see a sample of those "12 tons of documents"? Alas! Before us is the famine of 1921-23 again. On the left is the photo "Starving children in Gulyai-Pole". It is by no means kept in the secret archives of the KGB, but in the cantonal archive of Geneva, in the fund of the Union international de secours aux enfants. This is photo # 14, received on May 5, 1922 from the Red Cross mission in Ukraine. No camps, little slaves and the NKVD.

7. "Shows the NKVD: public executions in the USSR"

First, let's define what the record is. The death penalty by hanging was introduced in the USSR on April 19, 1943 for traitors and war criminals (thus, all Melnikoff's fabrications regarding "collectivization" are nonsense). The video contains a montage from filming of two different executions. In the first case, policemen are hanged, and where the names of the convicts are visible on the plates, the execution of the murderers from the SS-10-A Sonderkommando in Krasnodar in 1943.

“A closed, obscured, buried topic” is a lie. It is enough to open the popular collection “Inevitable Retribution. Based on the materials of trials over traitors to the Motherland, fascist executioners and agents of imperialist intelligence services ”, published in 1984 in one hundred thousand copies. An article about the Krasnodar trial reports: "The verdict of the fascist accomplices was carried out on July 18, 1943 at 13.00 on the city square of Krasnodar, where about 50 thousand people were present."

The description of the execution at the Gigant cinema (on January 5, 1946, German war criminals were hanged there) is fantastic. There was no trace of ropes with loops, which is easy to see by looking newsreel.

As for "acts of medieval obscurantism", for example, in France, Article 26 of the Criminal Code read "The verdict is carried out in one of the public squares of the area indicated in the guilty verdict," circle of officials.

8. "Burial of the villagers shot by the Chekists in one of the Ukrainian farmsteads, recaptured by the White Army"

This video is assembled from three unrelated fragments. The first is the chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, the execution of a traitor in a partisan detachment. The second, with a crying woman - seeing off the people's militia divisions to the front. And only the third part is directly related to the name. True, shots with the same chances can be attributed to both the civil war and the First World War (an armband with a red cross on the sleeve is visible), and the bodies can belong to both those who were shot and those who died in battle.

9. Butovo training ground

Since no filming was made in Butovo in 1937, both photographs of the "mass executions" are a deliberate forgery. So far, only the second snapshot has been identified. It is taken from the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission, and was published in the collection of documents of the Nuremberg Trials. It depicts the corpses of Soviet people after one of the mass executions near the town of Zolochev, photographed by the Nazis before burying them (German photo. Discovered in the Gestapo of Zolochev in July 1944).

10. NKVD in 1941

The photograph illustrating the article is quite common on the Internet, but its origin is unknown. Nevertheless, it can be argued that we have before us a later dramatization of the Second World War. This is evidenced by the theatrical pose of the "executioner", and the symmetrical figures of the "victims", and underwear of a modern style. It is impossible to determine the nationality of the officer (he was removed from the back and no insignia are visible), although the authors of the staged photograph were clearly guided by the German uniform. This does not prevent a number of anti-communist sites in Eastern Europe, and after them, and Melnikov, to pass off the photograph as "atrocities of the NKVD."

11. Medical experiments in the Gulag

One of the most large-scale falsifications of Melnikov, about medical experiments allegedly carried out in the GULAG on living people, deserves consideration in a separate article. While you can familiarize yourself with its content. Pay attention to the boorish anonymous comments - this is Melnikoff again betraying himself.

12. General agreement between the NKVD and the Gestapo

13. "Bitches of Russia"

Above there is a video from YouTube - a video from the German documentary film review "Deutsche Wochenschau" with footage of the transfer of Brest to Soviet troops. Note that the video was edited carelessly - in fact, the events did not take place on October 27, but on September 22, 1939. Much more interesting is the paragraph below it, in italics. This is a quote from the "Genocide in East Prussia" by Peter Hedruck, a source no less garbage than the "GULAG" itself.

The order of the Headquarters of the Supreme Command No. 0428 of November 17, 1941 is well known and has been published more than once. He prescribes "in the event of a forced withdrawal of our units in one sector or another, take the Soviet population with us and be sure to destroy all settlements without exception so that the enemy cannot use them." Stored in TsAMO, f. 208, op. 2524, d. 1, l. 257-258. It does not say about any disguises and murders of civilians. You can read a detailed analysis of this fake.

14. "March of the Cheka slaves"

Under such a loud name on the "GULAG" there is a video clip for the radio broadcast of Seva Novgorodtsev on August 26, 1983, about the similarity of the famous song "All Higher" ("Aviamarsh") he discovered with the German "Berliner Jungarbeiterlied" (which Seva mistakenly calls "Horst Wessel "). The fact that the priority has long been recognized precisely for the Soviet song - Melnikov is silent. You can familiarize yourself with this fascinating musical detective story.

The visual series that accompanies the recording deserves a separate consideration. It is a rambling collection of Nansen photographs of the famine, cartoons of Putin, German posters, Russophobic pictures and "Hitler's icons." And it’s quite unexpected to come across here the notorious photograph of children killed by a crazy gypsy woman from a Polish textbook on psychiatry. She was repeatedly attributed as a crime of the UPA, but to illustrate her song ...

15. "Our democratic scribblers and oppositionists throw mud at our country ..."

And again Melnikoff drags all the rubbish from the Internet to his website. The selection of quotes allegedly by Goebbels, widely distributed on the Russian Internet, goes back to the forum of the Belarusian tabloid newspaper "Secret Research", which does not deserve the slightest trust.

Goebbels did not write or say anything of the kind, at least on 03/12/1933 he did not speak anywhere. A cursory review of other speeches also did not reveal such maxims.