What this project is about
GULAG. Witnesses is a documentary project about an unpaid historical debt left by a totalitarian system.
About crimes that were never acknowledged. About memory that was silenced.
About a past that never became the past — and returned as war
GULAG. Unpaid Debt is not just about history.
It is about the direct connection between unprocessed totalitarianism and today’s war.
It is about violence fueled by silence.
About those who should have spoken — but didn’t.
About how Russia is exporting the Gulag into the present:
through filtration camps, torture, deportation, forced conscription, and the erasure of identity.
This is a project about memory — and why memory is a form of resistance.
No reckoning - continued violence
After the collapse of the USSR, there was no “Nuremberg.”
No public accountability, no punishment for the perpetrators, no restitution for the victims.
Those who built the Gulag were honored as “heroes of labor.”
Those who survived it either kept silent — or lived with shame.
When crimes go unacknowledged, they return.
And they return in new forms: as aggression, as “imperial justice,” as “denazification.”
The Gulag as a system of control
The Gulag was more than camps. It was a system of rule through fear, denunciation, violence, and silence.
That system did not vanish — it evolved into the FSB, into autocracy, into the annexation of Crimea and the massacres in Bucha.
This war is not a malfunction.
It is the continuation of a logic that once turned people into cogs in a brutal machine.
Imperial memory as a poisoned foundation
Post-Soviet Russia never truly acknowledged that it was not just a “victor in the war,” but a state that committed crimes —
an empire that subjugated others.
And because it never confronted that truth, it tries to recreate the empire today.
The unpaid debt of the Gulag is also the unpaid debt to Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, and the Baltic nations.
