It’s been almost a year and 2 months since me and my family were sent to the Gulag. I’ve already lost two toes from the frost bite. My father ran a church for fifteen years and had a fairly happy life with my two sisters and mother. When “uncle joe’s” secret police came, they shot both my mother and sisters. My father knew that if he kept the church running and disobeyed the law, he would be killed. That’s what he thought a least. When he saw the bodies on the ground bleeding to death, watching them slowly die in the cold, he went mad. He hung himself two weeks after arriving to the camp. He used his coat to hang himself when he was finally alone in the Odinochka. Within a few short weeks, I lost everything.
Before all of this happened I thought all of the rumors couldn’t be true. Why would the government lie to its own people? It made me realize how much power the government had in being able to control the people. Most of my fellow inmates were imprisoned for this very reason. They were journalist trying to expose what our government does behind the closed doors. They tell me very little about the government because of the many informants within this camp. The journalist whisper about the times before Stalin, before my time. Most of the prisoners grew up in the
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My friend from my village two years older than me was the local smuggler. What he did was an extremely dangerous job. He smuggled everything from food, to drugs, and for me, books. I read about two books a week trying to educate myself on other cultures and economic systems. I just started “The wealth of nations” by Adam Smith the night before we were taken. If and when I get out, I don’t want to become a “media slave” like the others. I plan on trying to get out of the country somehow and expose the truth about this once great country. Maybe by the time I get out of this hell hole I’ve called home for the past year, there will be a regime