Many heart rending images of the ghastly Soviet Gulags can be seen here. (If the link doesn't work just search for "gulag" in Google images.)
The drawings of Danzig Baldaev are an even starker depiction of the kind of human beasts who ran and populated that satanic system of forced labor and death. Many of his drawings can be seen at the link immediately above.
Unbelievable crimes were perpetrated in the name of Soviet communism. Soviet forced labor produced little net economic value. Its signature accomplishment was terrible suffering and death. Communist killing in the last century exceeded 100 millions yet the National Socialist holocaust is all that most Westerners know about.
On a more pleasant note, Walter's a very interesting guy and he seems to have a knack for finding warm hearted and cheerful Siberians. These are some local hunters driving some kind of tank:
"Diversity" is a stupid word the way it's used in the West but Walter's site captures friendliness and something healthy about our fellow humans.
Walter also links to some great photos at Road of Bones and the Kolyma Highway - Pure Photos.
What a fearsome and delightful world we live in.
I got sucked into reading all the way through Walter's thread about the Road of Bones and went on to read about riding the BAM highway there too.
ReplyDeleteI was absolutely awed by the response they received as they rode through the countryside.
Not because it surprised me. Because it was what I suspected.
The generosity and hospitality of rural Russia was just like my rural neighbors in the USA. Interested in what and how you are doing and willing to lend a hand because you CAN. NOT because someone else is saying you should or making you.
What a lovely story about basics.
We have far more in common these days (and in those to come) with the Russian people than most people think. THAT is a shame.
Read the original participants' posts (3 guys) (I skipped many of the commenters on story) and have your eyes reopened (reeducated) to part of reality that we forget due to media manipulation.
Thank You Francis~ I really enjoy your posting,(remember your hiatus!) I had a horrible morning yesterday (bad people being rotten) but ended up reading all that positive stuff. It fixed me:)
Funny how that works... Carry On!
~JO:)
Oh -HA! I overlooked the posted by...
ReplyDeleteFrancis- Keep writing!
Col Bunny- YOU TOO!
I owe the thanks to YOU for the RR (Ride Report) Road of Bones, above, that got my mind right yesterday.
Muchas Gracias!!! Many times!
~JO:)
No problem, JO. I'm delighted by your having read the whole report. Walter's experiences are just wonderful to read about and they are indeed an antidote to the perverted "leadership" we must suffer under in the modern world.
ReplyDeleteI've had similar experiences hitchhiking in the U.S. and Europe. The older Norwegian friend of my godmother slipping me a few kroner when I was about to leave Norway is a small but treasured memory of human kindness. I also dated a very smart Russian woman once and visited her in St. Petersburg. We came back from Moscow on the train and we enjoyed a great chat with a young man in our compartment who was pursuing a career in naval architecture. He was just tickled to be able to talk to an American.
There were also some Chinese workers in Taiwan along the cross-island maintenance trail for the power lines who showed me and my pals hospitality and I still can't get over that the people who ran the small "hotel" I stayed in in Hong Kong in '66 let me take their grandson around Hong Kong by myself!
Isaac Bashevis Singer had it right. He wrote that the world crawls with wickedness but it is also full of many wonders.
It's interesting that when I went looking for that quote I ran across a 2012 New Yorker article by him where he wrote:
"I knew where the informers were and I avoided them. A lot of leftists—half-leftists and converted leftists, so to speak—went to Vilna or Kovno, but I went on to Russia, not to the big cities but to little towns, villages, collective farms. There I found a different kind of Russian: generous, ready to help. There they laughed at communism."
He reminds me of a book I read by a fellow who was sent to the Gulag but got out after something like five years. He eventually found work as a bookkeeper in a timber collective. What he wrote about mirrors what Singer said. When you got away from the sickness of the ideologues in Moscow, people acted normally.
Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin's Russia: A Memoir was the name of the book. By Ann E. Healy and Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov. (On eBay.)Quite unlike the accounts of the horror of Stalinism and the camps.