Sixty kilometers from Krakow is the most terrifying place in Europe - the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Over two years, the Nazis exterminated one and a half million people here.
This concentration camp in Poland, specially created for the secret mechanized extermination of people, became for contemporaries and descendants alike a symbol of the most inhuman events of the 20th century. Practically the only symbol. In Western Europe, indeed, there was nothing worse. But there was in the USSR.
Seven to eight years before the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet soldiers, a series of NKVD special operations took place in the Soviet Union, later known as the "Great Terror." Its beginning is dated to July 30, 1937, when NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued, establishing quantitative "limits" for the first (execution) and second (imprisonment in a camp) categories for each region of the USSR, as well as specifying the personnel of the "troikas" issuing sentences (head of the NKVD, party committee secretary, regional prosecutor).
Over a period of fifteen months, from August 1937 to November 1938, around two million people were arrested and sentenced. Of these, 750 thousand were immediately shot. It is said that there was a time when up to two thousand people were shot in Moscow daily. The scale is quite Auschwitz-like. The "production tasks" assumed almost the same level of organization and systematic planning as in Auschwitz. And the methods of operation. In 1937, most of the bodies were cremated in the crematorium at the Donskoy Monastery. Later, when the crematorium's capacity became insufficient, they were simply buried in special zones.
Fourteen years before the liberation of Auschwitz, in 1931, a deliberate mass famine was organized in Soviet villages. It's not that the government wanted to kill as many people as possible on purpose; the goal was different. At that time, Western technologies for the industrial and military objects of the first five-year plan, which were being constructed, were being purchased in giant quantities abroad. And the only source of currency inflow was the sale of grain and timber abroad. Therefore, from 1931 to 1934, food was completely confiscated in the countryside. The exact number of victims of the Holodomor is unknown. Estimates range from a minimum of three to four million to a maximum of eight to nine million people who died of starvation. From two to six Auschwitzes.
But the state industry for the extermination of people really started to gain momentum even earlier when the plans for the first five-year plan were adopted, and the issue of providing labor for construction arose. There was no talk of people voluntarily going from cities and villages to construction sites. Therefore, industrialization plans automatically included plans for repression. The use of forced labor on a nationwide scale was planned. From 1929 to the mid-1950s, about 15 million people passed through the Gulag on falsified political charges. There were also deliberately brutal articles "for embezzlement of socialist property" when people were sentenced to many years for taking ears of grain from the field or a spool of thread from a factory (for example, the "seven eighths" law of August 7, 1932: from 10 years to execution). People were also sentenced for being late to work or for absenteeism. In total, the number could be around 20 million people. There were no death camps as such in the USSR; the authorities' task was purely pragmatic: to squeeze out all the strength from a person in the shortest possible time.
In terms of organization and technological sophistication, the Soviet repression apparatus closely resembled the Nazi one. In terms of scale, it far exceeded it.
During the toughest period in the early 1940s, the average mortality rate in the camps reached 24% per year. It is difficult to calculate the total number of deaths in the Gulag, but one and a half to two times the scale of Auschwitz is a realistic estimate.
In addition to those arrested and passing through the camps, there were even more numerous groups of repressed individuals - victims of forced migrations conducted from 1930 to 1952. This amounted to about six million people. These were the dekulakized peasants, expelled "disenfranchised" individuals from cities, and victims of ethnic deportations. Ten nations were deported totally, and many partially. Deportations were carried out incredibly cruelly and cold-bloodedly. Sometimes entire convoys were left in the winter steppe, where everyone froze to death within a couple of days (as was the case with Russian Germans in Kazakhstan). Sometimes the population of entire villages was shot or burned alive if the deportation could not be completed within the established time frame (as with the Balkars). There are no exact figures for mortality among the deported, but this is approximately another Auschwitz.
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, but it guarded Soviet camps until the very end. Few people know that Nazi concentration camps were used for this purpose for another five years. Among the most famous were Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen (Special Camp No. 2 and Special Camp No. 7 in Soviet terminology). Since 1948, the special camps were subordinated to the Gulag, and in 1950 they were liquidated. But their equipment did not disappear: new thrifty owners took it out and used it for its intended purpose in domestic camps. As follows from this document, dismantled wooden barracks, kitchen and laundry equipment, medical property were exported to the USSR. As well as some "production mechanisms" - what is hidden under this ominous definition is not deciphered in the document.
Therefore, there are neither photographs of what was happening there, nor accurate numbers, nor exhaustive documentation. That is to say, documentation certainly exists, but it is only accessible to the archivists of the FSB. And they still do not share information. Therefore, today the symbols of mass extermination of people in the 20th century remain only the well-studied and turned-into-museums Nazi concentration camps.
Soviet history, following the Nazi one, cannot yet become just history.