TORONTO — As world leaders, including the Governor General of Canada, gathered in Moscow on May 9th to commemorate Soviet contributions to the liberation of Europe in 1945, thousands of Baltic and Eastern European war veterans were remembering their compatriots who died from starvation and disease in Soviet labour camps after being forced to mobilize with the Red Army in 1941.
Despite the recent publication of two books on the subject, current levels of awareness of the Soviet GULAG system in the west are very low. The systematic deportation by Stalin of 30,000,000 people throughout the Soviet Union in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s is largely unknown to the majority of Canadians and Americans.
A new Canadian documentary,
“GULAG 113,” produced by Realworld Pictures with 100% funding from the OMNI Television Independent Producers’ Initiative, retraces the story of Eduard Kolga, an Estonian-Canadian survivor of the camps. Kolga was sent to the Soviet GULAG system in June 1941 after his family was threatened with torture and execution.
He returned to Russia in the summer of 2004 to revisit key locations in the dark odyssey he experienced 60 years ago, recalling months of incomprehensible mass suffering and mourning the fate of his fellow countrymen.
The inhumane treatment experienced by the hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other Eastern Europeans at the hands of the Red Army has never been acknowledged outside those countries. Their contributions were critical to liberating Europe in 1945: their gross, criminal suffering, undeniable.
While the world celebrated the Russian “Victory Day” this month, Eduard and his fellow survivors were again abandoned by the insensitivity of the West: left alone to remember the nightmare of watching their brothers, friends and countrymen succumb to subhuman misery while labouring to help defeat the Nazi occupation of Europe.
Background A secret treaty between Hitler’s murderous Nazi regime and Stalin, paved the way for Soviet forces to enter The Baltic States in 1939. Without any objections from the Western Powers, Soviet authorities began the immediate ethnic “sovietization” of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania: a hate fueled and racially driven policy that saw the deportation of _ of the people of The Baltic States to the Soviet GULAG prison system.
In 1941, 50,000 Estonian men were forced to mobilize with the occupying Red Army in 1941. But instead of becoming part of the Red Army, the 30,000 Estonian men who endured their transport to Russia, were sent to toil and starve in remote GULAG forced labour camps.
For more information please contact:
MARCUS KOLGA
Realworld Pictures
416 833 5553
marcus@realworldpictures.ca
www.realworldpictures.ca