Irkutsk and Kazakhstan are the two places where my family was exiled during the war. I do not treat this as a mission, but I grew up in a family that did not have any illusions about communism, as it knew its true face. As a result of this upbringing, during the martial law period I was in the so-called Solidarity underground, and when I got a passport in my hand for the first time in 1990, unlike my friends, I travelled East instead of West. I was going backwards – from the experience of communism that I had to its roots.
– said Tomasz Kizny.
As he pointed out, the album is an attempt to recall the image of the Gulag Archipelago through historical photographs in particular, which he sought for many years in private and public archives in Russia.
The photos are from the period after 1923 – this is the Solovki prison camp, which is considered one of the first labour camps and which existed as late as 1955, or the period after Stalin’s death, when prisoners were released. One chapter is devoted to Vorkutlag, to the Polish prisoners of the Gulag, mostly Home Army soldiers, who in 1955-56 had the opportunity to return to Poland and photographed Vorkuta’s landscape before leaving.
– said the author.
The publication presents important Soviet forced labour camps, such as the former monastery on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, gold, coal and uranium mines in Kolyma or the Salekhard–Igarka Railway (the so-called Dead Road). The photographs document the work and daily life of prisoners: we see inmates within the camp, in their bunks, on the way to work and the facilities built by them.