Falsifications on the website "GULAG

This article is an attempt at a consolidated analysis of the falsifications on the website "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 also 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 begins 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" Declassified not subject to ". 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, what is on the site is pulled from the Internet and other publicly available sources. In fact, this is a dump where any garbage is dragged, as long as it is Russophobic, without thinking about such "trifles" as authenticity.

How the material for the site was collected is evidenced by an anonymous comment posted on the ffix1975.livejournal.com blog on August 30, 2006 (the blog is suspended, but there is a saved copy in Yandex): “ Dear author, could you share a“ piece of chronicle ”with construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal with our photo site about the GULAG ( http://gulag.ipvnews.org )? Email info@ipvnews.org to Philip. Thank you for your attention . " This is how Melnikoff and his few employees are begging.

2. Armenian boy

The story with the Armenian boy was one of the loudest. The article “Children's Gulag” is illustrated with a picture 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 evicted peoples of the Caucasus could not die in hundreds of thousands, if only because the number of all evicted people 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 move the cursor over it, you will still see the plate “Children of Soviet GULAG”.

3. Klooga

This "secret" photograph was repeatedly published 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 standing 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 stated 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 the 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 photograph 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, 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 of 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 images 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 stored not in the secret archives of the KGB, but in the cantonal archive of Geneva, in the fund of the International Union for Aid to Children (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 about “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 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 cables with loops, which is easy to see by watching the 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.

8. "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 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 the insignia are not 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. For now, you can familiarize yourself with its content here . Pay attention to the boorish anonymous comments - this is Melnikoff again betraying himself.

12. General agreement between the NKVD and the Gestapo

Again, nothing new. You can see a detailed exposure of this crude fake .

Summary of the myth

On November 11, 1938, the NKVD and the Gestapo concluded a secret agreement on cooperation and mutual assistance. The myth is used to substantiate the identity of the political systems in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Examples of using

“Stalin ordered the intelligence to find a way out to the Hitlerite command and, from his, Stalin's name, make a proposal for an armistice and even more (far-reaching plans) for a radical turn in the war. There were real opportunities for the implementation of these secret negotiations: as early as 1938, an agreement on cooperation was concluded between the NKVD and the Gestapo. There is a genuine document confirming this ” 1) .

“Today, the facts of cooperation between the NKVD and the Gestapo at the level of transfer of experience are no longer a secret, when the Gestapo practiced in Soviet camps and prisons. But so far no one has dared to announce the legal basis of this cooperation - a secret agreement between the most famous punitive bodies of the Soviet Union and Germany in the world. N.P.F. "Memory" was the first to publish the texts of the "General Agreement" between the NKVD and the Gestapo, hidden for decades by the criminal regime of the CPSU " 2) .

Reality

The so-called "General Agreement" is a primitive falsification. It was made in the 1990s, the authors are not known for certain. According to the most common version, the author is a certain German Nazarov, whose book "Myths of the Soviet Era" is filled with such forgeries. It was first published in the anti-Semitic newspaper Pamyat, published in Moscow, in 1999 3) . This "document", which tells about the joint struggle of the NKVD and the Gestapo against the "Jewish threat", was widely circulated and was later partially cited in the book of the writer Vladimir Karpov "Generalissimo".

The fake demonstrates the total incompetence of the authors in the history of Germany. Already in the preamble, they begin to get confused about the name of the German department. In the title of the "agreement" there is the "General Directorate of Security of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (GESTAPO)". Now let's look at the preamble:

The Main Security Directorate of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, represented by the head of the fourth directorate (GESTAPO) Heinrich MÜLLER, on the basis of power of attorney No. 1 448 / 12-1, dated November 3, 1938, issued by the head of the Main Security Directorate of the Reichsführer SS Reinhard Heydrich, hereinafter according to the text GESTAPO.

The authors call by the abbreviation GESTAPO the whole “Main Directorate”, sometimes only its fourth directorate. But these are trifles. The Gestapo has never been the "General Directorate of Security of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany". The Gestapo is the Geheim Staats Polizai, the Secret State Police. Those. a state structure, not a party structure.

There was no structure at all called the "Main Security Directorate of the NSDAP". There was the Main Directorate of Imperial Security - RSHA (German Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA). Okay, let's say there is a translator's mistake. But the RSHA was organized only on September 27, 1939, ten months after the date of the "agreement." Only then did the Gestapo enter the RSHA as the IV administration, and only from that moment it was headed by Heinrich Müller. Accordingly, only in 1939, Reinhard Heydrich became the head of the RSHA (and his position was called "Chief of the Security Police and SD", and not the chief of the Main Directorate), but he was never Reichsfuehrer SS at all (from 1929 to 1945. was Himmler).

Continuing the topic of titles, we note that Müller became an SS Brigadeführer only in 1940, and in 1938 he had the rank of Standartenführer. In addition, on November 11, 1938, Mueller was not in Moscow, as is evident from the "Agreement", but in Berlin, summing up the results of the famous "Kristallnacht".

And finally, let's pay attention to the visa "That's right: the head of the secretariat of the NKVD of the USSR Mamulov SS." Mamulov Stepan Solomonovich got into the Secretariat of the NKVD on January 3, 1939 as the first deputy chief. He became its chief (and not "leader") on August 16, 1939, and at the time of the "signing of the document" he was in charge of the agricultural department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia.

1) V.V. Karpov "Generalissimo" Book 2 , chapter "Counteroffensive (Probe of respite)"

2) Ukraine today: Russian and German fascism: cooperation between the NKVD and the Gestapo

3) Russian Globe, Document of the NKVD-GESTAPO Agreement. In the footsteps of the origins

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 under it, in italics. This is a quote from the "Genocide in East Prussia" by Peter Hedruk, 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 .

Brief description of the myth

Stalin allegedly gave the order to burn down the front-line villages by special NKVD detachments dressed in German uniforms.

Reality

We are talking about the well-known order of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command No. 4028 of November 17, 1941, which reads:

“German soldiers live, as a rule, in cities, in small towns, in villages, in peasant huts, sheds, barns, baths near the front, and the headquarters of German units are located in larger settlements and cities, they hide in basements, using them in as a shelter from our aviation and artillery. The Soviet population of these points is usually evicted and thrown out by the German invaders .

All settlements at a distance of 40 - 60 km inland from the front line and 20 - 30 km on the left and right sides of the roads in which the enemy troops are located should be burned and destroyed. To destroy settlements within the indicated radius, I order the use of aviation, artillery, as well as teams of scouts, skiers and partisan groups, which must be equipped with bottles with incendiary mixture.

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. "

As we can see, there is nothing “savage” - we are talking about burning houses in settlements occupied by the Germans, where there are no longer peaceful Soviet residents (they either managed to evacuate to our rear, or were driven out in the cold by the invaders).

There is and is being discussed a version of the order, stating the following:

“Most of those involved in this important state mission should be dressed in the captured uniform of the German Wehrmacht and SS troops.

It should be noted that after the "punitive expedition" there are witnesses who will then be able to tell about the atrocities of the fascists. This will incite hatred of the fascist occupiers, facilitate the recruitment of partisans behind enemy lines ” 1) .

Emigrant writer Vladimir Batshev, who has lived in Germany since 1995, refers in this case to the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), fund 353, inventory 5864, file 1, sheet 2. This alleged quote from the order, which Batshev cites, is well known German historians - back in 2000, historians Christian Hartmann and Jurgen Zaruski published an article with its analysis, in which they came to the conclusion that it was a fake 2) . You can download this issue of "Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte" here .

For the first time, as German historians point out, this quote appears in the book by Fritz Becker, published in Kiel in 1995, "Stalin's Blood Trail in Europe" 3) . Becker, in turn, refers to the German translation of Dmitry Volkogonov's famous book "Triumph and Tragedy: A Political Portrait of Stalin", published back in 1989. This document was first published in it with reference to TsAMO, fund 66, inventory 178499, sheet 61. However, this quotation is not in Volkogonov's book.

Becker, who himself has not been in the Soviet archives, claims that Volkogonov "does not fully" cite the order. However, in subsequent editions of Volkogonov's book (for example, in the 1992 edition), not only the text of the order is given, but also a complete photocopy of the corresponding archival document. Here is a photo of a spread from the fourth edition of the 1997 book 4) , which is a facsimile copy of the 1992 edition:

Thus, this "quote" is a fake. German historians come to the same conclusion on the basis of checking the quotation by other methods. They prove that Becker's additional reference to the American National Archives is false - the corresponding archival unit contains a completely different document.

Source: http://v-rodyonov.livejournal.com/1350.html

1) Batshev V., Vlasov T. "Frankfurt-am-Main: Bridges"; Literary European, 2001.S. 214.

2) Hartmann Christian, Zarusky Jurgen. Stalins "Fackelmanner-Befehl" vom November 1941. Ein verfalschtes Dokument / Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte. 2000. No. 4. S. 667 - 674.

3) Becker Fritz. Stalins Blutspur durch Europa: Partner des Westens 1933-1945. Kiel: Arndt-Verlag, 1995. S. 268

4) Volkogonov D. Stalin. Political portrait: In 2 vols. Book. 2. M .: Novosti, 1996. Insert between p. 64 and 65.

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 dated August 26, 1983, about the similarity of the famous song "All Higher" ("Aviamarsh") 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 get acquainted with this fascinating musical detective story here and here .

The visual series, which 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 is completely 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. Source: Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Tei I. Aufzeichnungen 1923-1941. Band 2 / III. Oktober 1932-März 1934, München 2006 (diary entry from 12.3.1933 is on p. 144f.)

16. Terezin

There is a story about the German concentration camp Terezin, a poem of the same name and a famous photograph of children in Auschwitz. There are no questions about the authenticity, and even a link to the original source is honestly indicated, only these materials have nothing to do with the GULAG.

17. "Kill Stalin!" Nikolay Blagin's letter

Again Melnikoff brought a very old fake to the site. This "letter" was launched by the émigré press back in 1935. Its falsity is revealed by one phrase: “You live in a country infected with the communist plague, where red bloody imperialism reigns supreme. The name of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks) covers up bandits, murderers, vagabonds, idiots, madmen, cretins and degenerates. "

First, the party is not All-Russian, but All-Union; secondly, the word “Bolsheviks” was written in brackets; and thirdly, to whom in the Soviet Union of the 1930s it was necessary to explain what the CPSU (b) was? But the foreigners, for whom the fake was created, had to.

18. Premium ax of the executioner of the NKVD

Photos of the comic souvenir "Award ax of the NKVD" were widely distributed on the Internet and became the subject of numerous jokes. Such an ax really exists, one of its copies was sold on Ebay, and the other was donated to Valery Leontyev. But, of course, this curious souvenir was never awarded by the NKVD.

But Sergei Melnikoff has no sense of humor at all, so under the photograph he writes in all seriousness: "The editorial staff of the GULAG website thanks Sergei Barinov for finding rare photographs and archival documents exposing the criminal regime of Russia."

19. Dyba

Again from a series of curiosities. With the commentary "Drawings of Former Gulag Prisoners" on the Melnikoff website, there is a well-known drawing of the 18th century depicting torture on a rack . Of course, it is quite possible to assume that the “former prisoner” redrawn a picture from some history textbook, but until Mr. Melnikov names the source, we will consider it the most anecdotal falsification on the site.

20. Politkovskaya

From history to the present. After the murder of A. Politkovskaya, a sensational letter was published at the GULAG "Former members of Movladi Baysarov's gang testify against the FSB and the Russian GRU." And on March 29, 2007, the MK published an article by Vadim Rechkalov "Feathers of War", from which it became clear that the "letter" was an alteration of one of the journalist's old articles.

Source ; http://wiki.istmat.info/