Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko (1920-2013): o homem que falou a verdade sobre Stalin

Russia Mourns Stalin Scholar, Gulag Museum Founder

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko

MOSCOW, July 11 (RIA Novosti) – His father was executed on Josef Stalin’s orders, his mother committed suicide in jail, and he survived 13 years in the Gulag – to become one of the most outspoken critics of Stalinism.

Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote several seminal books denouncing the Soviet tyrant, his henchmen and the political system that devastated Russia and doomed millions to exile, disgrace, prison or death. Even blindness, exacerbated by merciless prison conditions, did not stop him from writing and running the Moscow branch of the Union of Victims of Political Purges.

Yet Antonov-Ovseyenko was best known as the founder and president of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, where a modest memorial service was due to be held Thursday, two days after his death.

He died Tuesday at the age of 93 – having outlived the Communist system his father helped create and witnessed the sweeping and chaotic changes in post-Soviet Russia. But his twilight years coincided with attempts to whitewash Stalin's legacy and political system that Antonov-Ovseyenko described and denounced in his books.

“The sad thing is that now there is a new wave of reviving the cult of Stalin, of worshipping him,” he told Radio Liberty in 2005. “There is a new Stalinization.”

In February, almost half of all Russians said that Stalin played a “very positive” or “quite positive” role in the nation’s history, according to a poll by the independent Levada Center. Scholars, politicians and bloggers have debated recent history textbooks and Stalin biographies that either denounce his atrocities or praise him as an “effective manager” who helped crush the Nazis and turned Soviet Russia into an industrial superpower with a nuclear arsenal.

© RIA Novosti.

GULAG History and Fact Sheet

In 2008, Stalin was ranked third in an online vote organized by a Russian television channel for a show on the greatest Russians in history – and a poetic line from the 1940s Soviet anthem mentioning Stalin was recently restored to a metro station in central Moscow.

Antonov-Ovseyenko described Stalin as a common criminal – a claim he said his own experiences as a Gulag prisoner, historian and son of a Communist leader meant he was entirely qualified to make.

He was born in 1920, the son of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, a revolutionary who organized some of the key events of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Red Army commander fiercely objected to the rise of Stalin within the Communist Party ranks and sided with Stalin’s archenemy, Leon Trotsky.

When Anton was nine years old, his mother was arrested and sentenced to jail. The year was 1929 – the year of Trotsky’s deportation from the Soviet Union. She committed suicide seven years later. Her husband publicly rejected his Trotskyist affiliations and served as a justice minister and a consul to Spain.

However, he was executed in 1938, after being arrested at the peak of the Great Purge of 1936-1939 that decimated the Communist ranks, resulting in at least 700,000 death sentences – about 1,000 executions a day – according to declassified KGB archives. Millions more were exiled and jailed.

Antonov-Ovseyenko, who studied history and began working at art museums, was branded the son of an “enemy of the people” and was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment three times. He spent 13 years in five Gulag camps, and was eventually released in 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death.

While working unremarkable day jobs, Antonov-Ovseyenko gradually collected data and interviews with purged Communists in order to write “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny,” a book that was published in the West in 1981 and nearly got him jailed again back home. In 1984, he came under pressure yet again for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

Despite almost completely having lost his eyesight, Antonov-Ovseyenko penned several more books that cemented his reputation as a leading expert on Stalinism.

In 2001, Antonov-Ovseyenko founded the Gulag History Museum in central Moscow, which features models of prison cells and a watchtower, as well as a gallery of art depicting prison life and personal items of former convicts. It also holds exhibitions, seminars and theater performances on topics ranging from mass deportations of entire ethnic groups to the persecution of the Russian Orthodox clergy under Communists.

In one of his last interviews, he deplored the decades of Stalinist “degeneracy” that will hinder Russia’s development for years to come.

“I look to the future with cautious optimism,” he told the Rossiiskiye Vesti weekly in March 2012. “It will take more than a generation to revive a nation gripped by physical and spiritual degeneracy.”

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Stalin: a political killer, for communism (Economist)

Soviet history
Stalin and his cursed cause
The Economist, March 30th 2013

High five for communism
Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War. By Robert Gellately. Knopf; 464 pages; $32.50. Oxford University Press; £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk

FIRST and foremost, Stalin was a communist, who believed that the sacred cause justified the most extreme measures: what non-believers would call unparalleled barbarity. This central message in Robert Gellately’s masterly new book is an uncomfortable one for those who believe that Stalinism was an aberration, or a reaction to mistakes made by the West. It is facile to say Stalin was simply a psychopath, that he believed in terror for terror’s sake, or that the Red Tsar’s personality cult replaced ideology. A Leninist to his core, he was conspiratorial, lethal, cynical and utterly convinced of his own rightness.

“Stalin’s Curse” draws mainly on German and Russian archives, plus numerous first-hand accounts, and the author’s formidable interpretative skills. Unlike other biographies that have focused on the most sensational episodes in the dictator’s life, it sets Stalin firmly in the historical context: the rise (and eventual fall) of what the author calls the “Red Empire”.

Mr Gellately’s latest work has a good claim to be the best single-volume account of the darkest period in Russian history. It is part of a crop of excellent new accounts of the era. It sits well with Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book, “Bloodlands” (about mass killings) and Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain” (which deals with eastern Europe after 1944 and which came out last year). It is also a worthy successor to his “Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (2008), which compared and contrasted the three monsters.

Stalin’s supposed strategic genius gets short shrift, along with his generalship. Because communist doctrine said all imperialists were equal, Stalin failed to see that the Western powers were not the same as Nazi Germany, and might even be useful allies against it. For all his paranoia and cynicism, the Soviet leader was determinedly friendly to Adolf Hitler, apparently believing that close ties with the Soviet Union made a Nazi attack less likely. But Hitler saw it the other way round: relying on Soviet imports endangered his long-term goal of destroying communism.

Where Stalin excelled, again and again, was in ruthlessness and attention to detail. He paid minute attention to extending Soviet rule in places conquered at the war’s end. He took great interest in details of science and cultural policy, fearing even the faintest breach in communist omniscience. The results might be disastrous: but they were in accordance with communist theory, which was what mattered.

Mr Gellately, a professor in Florida, has a deft touch with detail. For all the havoc he wreaked on the countryside, Stalin knew next to nothing about it (he seems to have visited farms only once, in 1928). During their furious conquest of Germany, the Red Army soldiers avenged their homeland’s suffering in an orgy of destruction. An eyewitness describes their taking “axes to armchairs, sofas, tables and stools, even baby carriages”. Individual stories are recounted with understated sympathy. But the scope of the suffering is inconceivable. An all but forgotten post-war famine in the Soviet Union killed 1m-2m people. Communism probably killed around 25m: roughly the same toll of death and destruction as that wrought by the Nazis.

Aside from the chief villain, Western leaders too come in for quiet but deserved scorn. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman failed to grasp their counterpart’s malevolence. Winston Churchill made casual deals that consigned millions of people to slavery and torment. The foreigners thought Stalin was a curmudgeonly ally to be coaxed and cajoled. He treated them as enemies to be outwitted. Far from provoking Stalin into unnecessary hostility, the Western powers were not nearly tough enough.

Some of the strongest passages of the book concern Stalin’s final years: the sharpening contrast between his obsessive paranoia and his analytical powers; the looming anti-Semitism, and the beginnings of a massive new arms build-up. Little of that came to fruition, sparing the world untold new horrors. But what Stalin did achieve was quite bad enough.

Stalin: um criminoso leninista, metodico

HISTÓRIA SOVIÉTICA
A ideologia de Stálin e sua causa maldita
Livro sobre Stálin estabelece o ditador firmemente dentro do contexto histórico
Opinião e Notícia, 5 de abril, 2013

Em primeiro lugar, Stálin era um comunista que acreditava que a causa sagrada justificava as medidas mais extremas: o que seria chamado pelos incréus de barbaridade sem precedentes. A mensagem central do magistral novo livro de Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War, desconfortará aqueles que acreditam que o stalinismo foi uma aberração ou uma reação a erros do Ocidente. É fácil dizer que Stalin era simplesmente um psicopata, que ele acreditava no terror pelo terror, ou que o culto à personalidade do Czar Vermelho eclipsou a ideologia. Um profundo leninista, Stalin era conspiratório, letal, cínico e absolutamente convencido de suas razões.

Stalin’s Curse tem como fontes principais os arquivos alemães e russos, além de numerosos relatos de primeira mão e a formidável capacidade interpretativa do autor. Diferentemente de outras biografias que se concentraram nos episódios mais sensacionais da vida do ditador, esta estabelece Stalin firmemente dentro do contexto histórico: a ascensão (e finalmente a queda) do que o autor chamada de “Império Vermelho”. O trabalho mais recente de Gellately pode reivindicar com tranquilidade o título de melhor volume único da fase mais obscura da história russa.

O suposto gênio estratégico de Stálin não recebe muito crédito, bem como suas capacidades como general. Stálin logrou sucesso, repetidas vezes, devido a uma atenção obsessiva aos detalhes e à crueldade. Ele tratou com muito cuidado a questão de estender o domínio soviético em lugares conquistados ao fim da guerra.

Durante a furiosa conquista da Alemanha, os soldados do Exército Vermelho vingaram o sofrimento de sua pátria em uma orgia de destruição. O escopo do sofrimento é inconcebível. E a praticamente esquecida fome pós-guerra da União Soviética matou entre 1 milhão e 2 milhões de pessoas. O comunismo provavelmente matou cerca de 25 milhões de pessoas: aproximadamente o mesmo número de mortes causadas pelos nazistas.

Texto traduzido e adaptado da Economist por Eduardo Sá
Fonte: The Economist-Stalin and his cursed cause

Republica Popular do Gulag - Shanghai Daily

Um dos últimos países do mundo a ter esse simpático sistema de reeducação dos recalcitrantes, que não concordam com o socialismo de características chinesas...

Labor camp re-education system set for reform

Source: Xinhua  |   2012-10-10

CHINA is working on reforms to its system of imprisoning people in labor camps without trial, a senior judicial official said yesterday.

The comments were the firmest indication that after years of debate the government is preparing to revise but not abolish the system - known as "re-education through labor." 

Jiang Wei, head of a government committee on judicial reform, said the government has found widespread agreement among legal scholars and lawmakers on the need to reform the labor camp system, and an overhaul is being devised based on that consensus.

Yesterday, the government issued a white paper on judicial reform, highlighting the country's progress in safeguarding justice and protecting human rights.

Discussing the white paper at a press conference, Jiang said China was formulating reforms for the re-education through labor system. "Some loopholes currently exist in the system's regulations and procedures," Jiang said.

"The necessity of the reforms has been recognized and authorities have done plenty of research and heard advice from experts and legislators, and they are now working on a plan for the reforms," he said, adding that the system has its basis in the country's legal system and had played an important role in maintaining social order. The re-education through labor system was established in the 1950s.

The white paper, the first of its kind issued by the Chinese government, said the ultimate purpose of the judicial reforms was to maintain social fairness, justice and human rights protections.

"China's judicial reforms are aimed at strengthening judicial organs' capability to maintain social justice by optimizing the structure of the judicial organs and the allocation of their functions and power, standardizing judicial acts, improving judicial proceedings and enhancing judicial democracy and legal supervision," it says.

Human rights

Improving the protection of human rights is an important goal, the white paper says.

In terms of protecting human rights, effective measures are being taken to deter and prohibit the obtainment of confessions through torture, better protect the rights of criminal suspects and defendants and protect attorneys' rights to exercise their duties.

Jiang said a series of efforts had been made to prevent judicial cases in which people were unjustly charged.

The Criminal Procedure Law amended earlier this year stipulates that no person may be forced to prove his or her own guilt, adding that no criminal suspects or defendants may be forced to confess.

As a populous developing country, China still has problems in its judicial system, Jiang said, adding that the country's judicial system will be based on its reality, instead of simply copied from other countries. "Copying foreign experience or systems might lead to a bad end," he said, in response to a question about whether China's judicial system should follow Western models.

However, he added, China was keen to learn from the experience of other countries and would try to incorporate judicial concepts and practices used elsewhere.

Jiang said that China would steadily push the reforms forward step by step, adding that there were no "best" systems in the world, but only those suitable for different countries.

Livro: inferno dantesco, na Coreia do Norte

A Coreia do Norte é, possivelmente, o regime mais repressivo que tenha existido na face da terra, superando largamente os horrores do gulag soviético e dos campos de reeducação maoístas. Só perde, talvez, para os "campos de extermínio" do Kmer Vermelho no Camboja, mas apenas porque este matou mais gente num curto espaço de tempo, ou seja, em doses concentradas, mas a Coreia do Norte ainda assim ganha nas estatísticas de sofrimento humano e de mortes por fome e por violência política.
Que o Brasil se tenha empenhado em manter relações com tal regime, e que o governo tenha fornecido alimentos para o governo norte-coreano -- que serve para alimentar os vinculados ao próprio governo -- apenas testemunha, mais uma vez, sobre as opções dos companheiros no poder, e suas simpatias por todo regime repressivo (desde que anti-americano) e supostamente socialista.
Abaixo um relato sobre um caso extraordinário: um "subhumano", nascido em campo de concentração, consegue escapar do inferno terrível que é aquele país, para testemunhar livremente, e sobretudo comer fartamente...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
Addendum: o livro existe em edição brasileira, como me comunicou um leitor, a quem agradeço:

FUGA DO CAMPO 14

Autor: HARDEN, BLAINE; Editora: INTRINSECA; ISBN: 8580571650; ISBN-13: 9788580571653; Edição: 1ª; Ano de Lançamento: 2012; Número de páginas: 232; Sinopse: Shin Dong-hyuk nasceu e cresceu no Campo 14, um dos imensos complexos destinados a presos políticos da Coreia do Norte. Seus residentes estão condenados a trabalhar até 15 horas por dia, sofrendo fome e frio, sujeitos a uma rotina de violências sumárias - aos 13 anos, Shin assistiu à execução da mãe e do irmão mais velho por tentarem escapar. De lá, ninguém foge. Existe apenas uma exceção. Determinado a descobrir como é a vida do outro lado da cerca eletrificada, Shin supera todo tipo de dificuldade e consegue deixar a Coreia do Norte. Mas as marcas do passado ainda estão em seu corpo e assombram sua mente, pois durante muitos anos ele guardou um terrível segredo. Em 'Fuga do Campo 14', o jornalista Blaine Harden procura lançar luz sobre uma realidade considerada sinistra, e busca acompanhar a jornada de Shin rumo à liberdade

DANIEL J. FLYNN

Escape from Hunger

A North Korean survivor story

The City Journal, 25 May 2012

Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden (Viking, 224 pp., $26.95)

Explaining why socialism failed to gain traction in the United States, German academic Werner Sombart famously noted: “All socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” Fat and happy aren’t the ingredients for a socialist revolution. A century after Sombart’s observation, Shin Dong-Hyuk shows why starving and miserable aren’t the ingredients for keeping the people in a people’s republic: all socialist dystopias come to nothing on tree bark and barbecued rat. Shin’s amazing tale, inspired by the most basic human drive—hunger—is told by veteran journalist Blaine Harden in Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.

Shin is the only person born into a North Korean political prison to escape to the West. Only he can explain what it’s like to be a lifer in the Hermit Kingdom’s gulag. A victim of Kim Il Sung’s practice of inflicting the sins of the father upon the sons (and grandsons), Shin knew only the harsh existence of the work camps. Incarcerated from birth, he remained wholly ignorant of God, money, and the outside world until contact with a cosmopolitan North Korean unleashed his imagination. This man told him about China and Europe, but what really got Shin’s attention was his description of foreign dishes. As Harden writes: “Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat.”

That’s a meal that camp-dwellers went without, except on the occasions when they captured a rat. When prisoners stole a pig, they devoured it raw, lest the aroma alert their overseers. “Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage, and cabbage soup,” Harden writes. “Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.”

An outsider’s perspective can’t help but see the food itself as punishment. Inmates picked undigested corn kernels from cow dung to eat. They warded off hunger by regurgitating their meals to eat again. They dined on sand, dirt, trees, and whatever else they could find. They risked their lives to fill their stomachs. Shin tells of a six-year-old classmate discovered with corn in her pockets. The teacher beat her to death in front of the class with a pointer. An official rule at Camp 14 instructed: “Anyone who steals or conceals any foodstuffs will be shot immediately.”

Hunger pangs are the catalyst for a pivotal moment in the book. Discovering his mother and brother eating a secret meal without him prompts a spiteful teenage Shin to reveal their conversation about escape to camp authorities. “I want a guarantee of more food,” he tells his guard-confessor. Instead, interrogators chain-hoist him by the wrists and ankles and ignite a fire beneath his sagging back. Today, a charred back testifies to the truth of Shin’s story, as do a finger sliced off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine and limbs bowed from overwork.

Regaled by descriptions of Chinese, German, and Russian delectables, Shin lets his appetite make up his mind. He would someday taste that food. “He did not thirst for freedom or political rights,” Harden writes. “He was merely hungry for meat.” On January 2, 2005, while performing forestry work on the camp’s perimeter at dusk, Shin and an accomplice made their long-planned break. His coconspirator’s electrocution on a security fence provided insulation and conducted some of the voltage away from Shin, who escaped with mere burns. He ran for two hours until he reached a barn, where he found corn, clothes, and cover. He bummed his way through North Korea and bribed his way into China.

Accustomed to the regimented life of the camps, Shin marveled at the freedom of North Koreans on the outside. Even more astonishing was China, where he listened to a radio, ate three meals of meat a day, traded a concrete floor for a mattress, and worked for pay without supervision. Shin gained asylum in South Korea by rushing into its embassy in China with the encouragement of a journalist. In the South—occupying the same peninsula as the North, yet free and prosperous where the North was repressive and impoverished—the culture shock continued. Eventually, Shin moved to the United States. Adjusting to American life continues to be difficult, though the dining is good. Harden tells of a surprise birthday party thrown for the refugee at a TGI Friday’s. “I was very moved,” Shin tells the author. “Shin was passionate about food and did his best talking in Korean and Mexican restaurants” in Southern California, Harden writes.

Shin’s adventure might have better fit the West’s conception of heroism had he struggled to free his people rather than feed himself. But it’s typically ordinary desires that lead to extraordinary heroism. An inmate jonesing for a hamburger may strike outsiders as insignificant—just as a seamstress refusing to yield a seat on the bus or a fruit vendor balking at bureaucratic harassment once did. These seemingly trivial indignities, however, sparked momentous uprisings. Perhaps it’s too early to say what the results will be of Shin’s escape.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America.

Coreia do Norte: o pais du SUPER-GULAG

Desculpem as maiúsculas, mas de fato a Coreia do Norte merece: seu Gulag é muito maior, proporcionalmente, e muito mais longo, do que os exemplares (e como!) da URSS stalinista e da China maoista.
Um verdadeiro horror, praticamente desconhecido do mundo.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Turning a blind eye to North Korea’s ‘hidden gulag’

The Washington Post, Editorial Board, April 12, 2012

WHILE ATTENTION focused on North Korea this week ahead of Friday morning’s missile launch, hundreds of Americans, Koreans, Japanese and others gathered in Washington to examine a different aspect of life in that communist nation: its “hidden gulag.”
That was the title of an unprecedented conference organized by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights. The gulag is a network of labor camps that houses 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners. They are generally arrested for no crime, sent away with no trial, never again allowed to communicate with anyone outside the camps, fed on starvation rations and forced to work until they die. Other than from one camp, according to South Korean expert Yoon Yeo-sang, no one deported to North Korea’s gulag is ever released.
As noted by Blaine Harden, author of the recently published book “Escape from Camp 14,” the North Korean gulag has existed twice as long as did the Soviet network of labor camps created by Lenin and Stalin, and 12 times as long as Hitler’s concentration camps. Yet, for the most part, “Americans don’t know anything about these camps,” Mr. Harden said. “They don’t know they exist.”
This is not, the title of the conference notwithstanding, because the gulag is all that hidden, although North Korea’s regime continues to deny its existence. In fact, as David Hawk said, a great deal is known about the camps, both from the testimony of those who have escaped and from satellite imagery. Mr. Hawk has just published the second edition of his definitive survey, also called “The Hidden Gulag,” which draws on horrifying testimony from 60 former prisoners.
The reason for the ignorance is mostly political. The United States, with a goal of keeping the peace and depriving North Korea of nuclear weapons, has not made human rights a priority. In South Korea, the gulag has been a political football between left-wing politicians favoring warmer ties with the North and right-wing politicians pushing a harder line. China, North Korea’s neighbor to the north and west, abuses the human rights of its own population and does not believe any country’s freedom to abuse its population in the same way should be interfered with.
China, in fact, is complicit in North Korea’s abuses, since it sends many defectors who have made it across the Yalu River back into North Korea, where they face punishment or, if they are repeat escapees, execution. North Korean women who have become pregnant in China often are forced to abort their children. “In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born,” writes Roberta Cohen, the chair of HRNK.
Inevitably, there remains much that is unknown. It’s impossible to be confident of a population count for the gulag, Mr. Hawk said, because it’s not clear whether deaths are outpacing deportations.
Enough is known, however, for indifference to be inexcusable. As a first step, the United Nations could establish a commission of inquiry to investigate crimes against humanity taking place inside the prison camps. As Ms. Cohen said, “It is not just nuclear weapons that have to be dismantled but an entire system of political repression.”

O Gulag da Coreia do Norte - Liberation (France)

Kwan-li-so, le goulag nord-coréen scruté par les Nations unies

Par ARNAUD VAULERIN

Libération (França), 4/04/2012

Au moment où la Corée du Nord s'apprête á célébrer, le 15 avril, le centième anniversaire de la naissance de son père fondateur, Kim Il-sung, deux rapports d'enquêtes et de témoignages viennent rappeler la réalité du goulag dans la dynastie des Kim. Publiés hier, les deux documents prônent une action urgente de l'ONU.

Quels sont les objectifs des rapports?

Le premier est un état des lieux et un outil juridique pour éclairer la situation des prisonniers politiques en Co-rée du Nord. Il est soutenu par une quarantaine de grandes ONG regroupées dans la Coalition mondiale pour mettre un terme aux crimes contre l'humanité en Corée du Nord (ICNK). Il exige que le mécanisme onusien des procédures spéciales soit instauré pour qu'une enquête sur les goulags soit menée de toute urgence. L'ONU avait fait usage de ce système de consultation tous azimuts pour obtenir des informations sur les personnes détenues par les Etats-Unis à Guantánamo. Le second document détaille la situation des proches de Kang Cheol-hwan et Shin Dong-hyuk, deux survivants des camps de concentration nord-coréens ayant fui au sud.

Qu'est-ce que Kwan-li-so?

C'est l'autre nom du goulag nord-coréen que l'on connaît mieux depuis la publication de Hidden Gulag en 2003 par le comité américain pour les droits de l'homme en Corée du Nord. Entre 150 000 et 200 000 personnes seraient internées dans six camps nichés dans le nord du pays. Placés sous la coupe de l'Agence de la sécurité nationale, tous sont des forteresses qui fonctionnent en autarcie. Les tortures, exécutions, travaux forcés sont le quotidien des prisonniers - adultes comme enfants -, qui doivent également affronter le froid sibérien, les dénonciations et les famines. Les rations alimentaires sont si insuffisantes qu'un ancien garde du Camp 22 a noté qu'entre 1500 et 2000 prisonniers mouraient de faim chaque année. Certains régurgitent leurs aliments, d'autres s'empêchent de déféquer pour garder le ventre plein. L'ICNK avance que 400 000 prisonniers sont morts dans ces camps depuis leur création, en 1953.

Quelles sont les victimes du goulag?

Tous ceux qui «agissent mal», «pensent mal», ont de «mauvaises fréquentations» ou pratiques religieuses, et les familles ayant des transfuges dans leur rang. Pour ce délit, Pyongyang a inventé la culpabilité par association. Ce qu'avait théorisé Kim Il-sung en 1972: «La semence des ennemis de classe, quels qu'ils soient, doit être éliminée sur trois générations.» Kim Jong-un, son petit-fils arrivé au pouvoir en décembre, a conservé les préceptes.