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In 40 minutes, David Bellamy claims you can't see the wood. First on BBC One, the final programme in the series, The Hammer and the Cross. [MUSIC PLAYING] The remote monastery of Ura Kidane Merit on Lake Tana,

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fabled source of the Blue Nile. Monks of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church gather for morning worship. Since the fourth century,

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when Emperor Izana was converted to Christianity, Ethiopia has been a Christian kingdom. Today, it's in its 11th year of revolution, a revolution that has attempted to propel Ethiopia

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from a feudal slumber into Africa's first self-declared Marxist-Leninist state. (drumming) Ethiopia is a word etched into our minds

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via images of helpless suffering. But Ethiopia is also a country at war with itself, where priests and propagandists maneuver for the loyalty of the people.

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(drumming) I don't see any country better than the Soviet Union. I have seen myself there. There is no any, they are well off.

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I mean the poor people, you see, the grassroot level people. It is not the very few people who are privileged, but it is the masses who are privileged.

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(chanting) [CHANTING] The state and religion are separate. This is the policy of the revolution.

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there is no special relation with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as to policy. But the Ethiopian, the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia is really the cradle of our civilization. [singing] I assure you, my friend, being a Christian in Ethiopia today

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is a tremendous liability, and as time goes, it is going to be even more so. At the monastery on Lake Tana, the pattern of life for the 30 monks continues much as it has for the past 500 years.

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The Bible is still copied onto parchment in the original Semitic language of Ethiopia, Gez. Icons depicting the lives of the saints and events of the Old and New Testaments

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are still painted in the traditional style. Ethiopian orthodoxy is a survival of early Christianity. It's probably the most archaic form of Christianity still practiced. Ethiopia was the only African country to avoid European colonization.

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But her modern icons, Marx, Lenin, Engels, are inherited from Europe. Her new messiah, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu, basks in their reflected glory, and in turn illuminates the way for Ethiopia's 45 million inhabitants.

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From the capital, Addis Ababa, to the Ogaden desert, the new religion is spread. The lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, has been replaced by Comrade Mengistu.

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The style is different, simpler, more extrovert. The power is just as absolute. His aim is to convert his people to an alien belief, but the problem is that he first has to wean them

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from traditions that have become entrenched here over 1,500 years. - See, it's not a question of weaning, it's a question of convincing.

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You see, after the revolution, millions of socialist books were brought to the country. These books were translated in various vernaculars, Ethiopian language such as Amharic, Aramean, Tigrinya, and the other languages. The scientific teaching of Marxism-Leninism were spread through the mass media, radio,

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television, and newspapers. [Music] Ethiopia, 11 years into the revolution, is at that delicate stage when the party has enough power to intimidate the population, but not enough to organise them.

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This is a dictatorship over chaos, and the loudest voice is that of propaganda. [Music] [Speaking in Ethiopian] On Ethiopian TV, daily programs exhort the people in East European style rhetoric to

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further the goals of scientific socialism. (speaking in foreign language) - Good evening and welcome to our Monday evening transmission. - But for most Ethiopians, it's still possible

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to accept the advantages of the new ideology while clinging to the old. - My name is Genna Tayele. I was born 21 years ago in the east of Ethiopia,

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in the town of Harar. Now I am married and a mother of two children. Most of the women before the revolution, they were not allowed in so many fields of working.

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But now it's their privilege, I think. They are using it. Most of the people believe in church, and especially the elders encourage

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I'm going to go to church. Addis Ababa. A church dedicated to the Archangel Gabriel. Today is his day,

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and hundreds of thousands flock to his churches all over the country. For the Ethiopians, Gabriel is the most trusted spiritual power and the most effective help in human affairs. (sirens blaring)

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- Gannett's husband is away in Moscow and coping isn't always easy. - When I'm in trouble, sometimes I ask him to help me in that way.

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And when that is going to be fulfilled, I'll bring what I have promised to the church on Gabriel Day. - Is it very important for you in your life,

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do you feel, the church? - Yes, it's very important. Most of the time, especially when I have problems, it is part of my life, I can say.

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I come to church and it's very important for me. (crowd cheering) - And you go to church every day? - Every day.

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Morning I have to go to other ways. I can't feel better. - And you pray, what do you pray for when you come to church?

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- What can I say? To save me up to end for my soul and to make easy my lessons and to become a psychiatrist.

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- And does Gabriel, is he a very powerful saint? - Yes, he is powerful. - Is he the best? He is the best father.

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Mikael Uriah, but he is my Christ father also. Today, more people are going to church than before the revolution. The crowds that flock to worship the archangel

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are an open witness to the party of a spirit of potential dissent in the country. [chanting] But do the Christians in Ethiopia feel that the party really wants to rid the country

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of all religious faiths? Yes, in the long run, because those are the bulwarks against accepting Marxist-Leninist ideology. Those are the bulwarks against worshipping Lenin.

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and so on that they have in Addis Ababa, their posters and their statues and so on as icons now. So the church, not only in Ethiopia, the communists fear any ideology that has sway over the people more than theirs. The church in response is undertaking its own reformation.

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Of course, we should respect the regulations and the laws of the country. We should not be idle. Those who would like to go all the time to the church, day and night. We had so many holidays, you see, like in the medieval ages, but now we are in the 20th

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century. The church itself is trying to reform her practices for a reason. There is this pressure of attitude of the age, not only because the government is a Marxist government, but we are in the 20th century.

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What we can't reform is the doctrine of the church. Regarding the religious practices in the church, to make the sermons a little short, this we should reform. The Marxist government is a Marxist government, and the religious life is completely different

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than ideology. So we know that the Marxist-Leninist teaching is to make all people materialists. That we know. But we preach, they preach, I think we are in a parallel land. This is what I see. But you don't sense that you're in conflict with them?

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As long as we obey the rules and regulations of the revolutionary government, and as long as we do not interfere in their political affairs, I think we are free and we can practice. It's a familiar picture.

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The church is trimming its religious services to project a more modern image, At the same time, it's highly visible around the country in social work. Members of the Synod go to inspect a church relief camp in Wallow, set up to care for victims of the famine.

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At the camp, 1,500 families come to receive food and medical care, paid for by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The rains of last year were adequate, and the disaster of drought has receded. But the dry rations that must be carried up to a week's walk away

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are desperately needed to sustain these people until the next harvest. And for the children, disease is now proving nearly as great a killer as the famine. [Crying] So those who are starving now in the northern parts of the country,

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at least 90% of those people are members of the European Orthodox Church. So when these people suffer, the church also suffers. So the church was trying to assist these people locally. We made infrastructure and we have opened seven centers.

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In each center we assist 10,000 families. [crowd noise] We are not limited to the relief work only. We are also engaged in the development work, relief and rehabilitation.

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Thousands of orphans have been created by both the drought and the civil wars, and these too are the concern of the church. They've lost the network of family and tribal ties which should have supported them throughout their lives, and the church must somehow find a way to replace these.

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The government, on the other hand, is accused of using the famine as an excuse to weaken opposition forces by resettling dissident peoples and by channeling supplies to their own supporters. Ethiopia's endemic famine has directly influenced its politics.

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In 1974 it led to the downfall of the emperor. The world's media exposed the extent of starvation that Emperor Haile Selassie was hiding from his own population. While the drought and the famine were killing 250,000 people,

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Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, the last of a dynasty that traced its lineage from the union between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, was celebrating Moscow.

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It's the festival of the finding of the true cross. [CHANTING] (crowd shouting) - The emperor was a patron of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

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So the hierarchy and the emperor, they had a harmonious relation. Without the approval of the emperor, no patriarchy is elected.

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Even in the time of the emperor, heads of cathedrals, even small churches, were appointed by the emperor. During the time of the emperor, the relation between church and state was like any absolute monarch,

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like the Czarist Russia or Louis XIV of France. The state and the throne were one and the same. They were not separated. They were one and the same. In the feudal Ethiopia, 65% of the arable land was owned by the royal family and the feudal nobility. 30% of the arable land was owned by the higher echelon of the Orthodox

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Christian Church. Emperor Haile Selassie, isolated both by tradition and personality, seemed unaware of the growing unrest in his country. What started as demonstrations by students and government officials gathered momentum.

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The creeping coup had begun, and when junior army officers joined in, the power of the feudal monarch crumbled. But at that time, the revolution was not Marxist. You see, Marxism-Leninism was not really--

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it was prohibited. Literature was prohibited before the 1974 revolution. It was a state crime to have a Marxist book with intellectuals.

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But there were some literatures in the university. But the Marxist-Leninist teaching was not spread before the 1974 revolution. Even to that matter, there was no political activity

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in the country, you see. Politics as a concept was taken by the feudal regime as a suppressive activity. The old order collapsed under the weight of popular dissents, and the emperor was bundled into the back of a Volkswagen Beetle and sent into exile.

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The Derg, as the army officers became known, set about the search for an ideology upon which to build a new nation. Property was distributed to the peasantry. Campaigns were launched to increase the literacy rate.

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It was 10% at the time. The ideology finally settled on was Marxist-Leninist, and Mengistu eliminated all his rivals in the Red Terror of 1977. They executed people in Addis Ababa like flies.

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So many perished during the Red Terror. So the terror is all consuming. And if you want to count how many dead in Addis Ababa, if you want to count how many are rotting in police state

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concentration camps, you know, apart from the resettlement now, you have at least in Ethiopia today 30,000 political prisoners whose only crime is their non-acceptance of Marxism, communist ideology.

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When Mangustu took over, initially, the church tried to protest the real terror, for example, the injustice. Then he turned on them savagely, particularly the Protestants,

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those that were considered foreign imported religions. He jailed many of them. He executed quite a number of them. He shut down the church.

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confiscated their property, hoping that when their property is confiscated they would not have any means to continue their activity, what he considers their counter-revolutionary activity. The Orthodox Church suffered less, but it became increasingly clear that the new elite did not wish to accept a rival orthodoxy.

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But would it be possible to be a party member and go to church? I do not know. That's a very difficult question. But do you expect all party members to be fanatic communists at this stage within ten years? I don't believe. You see, in Ethiopia, The tradition of the religious tradition is very deep rooted in the hearts of the people.

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So they may accept the ideology, they may practice the ideology, but to be completely detached from the religious tradition, I think it would be very difficult. This is my own personal opinion. So when they saw that they could not, through a frontal assault, dismantle the church, they

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They started by doing it, by removing those who were giving moral and religious leadership, replacing them by collaborators. When we asked to interview the patriarch, His Holiness Abune Tekle Haimanot, it was Abebe Yixor, the government-appointed head of the church office,

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who insisted on conducting the interview. I am a Muslim. I want to be a Muslim. I want to be a Muslim.

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I want to be a Muslim. I want to be a Muslim. That's all. So you don't see any major program to try and preach atheism in the country?

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Oh sure, it's openly preached. You see Marxist-Leninist books anywhere in the country. Not like at the time of the Emperor where our students were taking a page from the Communist Manifesto, you see, putting in their pocket. But now what you see is a Marxist-Leninist book, more than the Bibles in the country.

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The village of Andhasa on the banks of the Blue Nile. Political science is a compulsory subject in this farming community school. The inevitable collapse of advanced capitalism is being taught in one of the world's most backward areas.

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We have Marxist-Leninist socialism. Marxist-Leninist socialism. Marxist-Leninist socialism. It's a very complicated subject.

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It has a very complex meaning. In the world, all the books are based on this. For example, "The Philosopher". And then?

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) We have two types of food. The first type is cooked with a special method.

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It is cooked in a special way. It is called "Kanfar Mazalzal". And what else? What else do you need? When we cook meat, we need to cut it into small pieces.

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Yes, when we cut the meat into small pieces, we need to cut it into small pieces. We need to put the pieces of meat in a bowl. If we put the pieces of meat in a bowl, it will become a big bowl. And when we cook meat, we need to put it in a bowl.

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When we put the meat in a bowl, it will become a big bowl. [ Foreign Language Spoken ] [ Singing ] But baptisms are still a major part of Fakadu, the village priest's work.

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The majority of his parishioners, including the head of the local cooperative, still want their children to be baptised into the Orthodox Church. (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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I was six years old when I was killed. I was seven years old when I was killed. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week.

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I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week.

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I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week. I was in the hospital for a week.

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I was in the hospital for a week. The village cooperative headquarters. Fakadu's opinions carry weight. His position still gives him status,

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even though the political and economic power is with the Peasants' Association. Fakadu has now been a priest for six years. Today he lives modestly with his wife and two children,

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working occasionally in the fields, but largely supported by his parishioners. The normal practice in the communist world is to confine religious teaching to licensed church buildings, and this is generally accepted by the churches.

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Fakadu has other views. We are BabyanyinBIowan, recently annihilated. The most important passed away in the village and buried is forgotten, the following years, the 43 people have died.

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Temporary palace office lover is forgotten and you saw his face is forgotten! As long as I remember, that there is no memory is forgotten, uncle, send some siblings today. What the demons, dig through this,

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this before you see all the talking and they will regain their memories and will be my [ Foreign Language Spoken ] [ Foreign Language ]

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(speaking in foreign language) [ Foreign Language ] (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) [Arabic]

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but while being outspoken with his parishioners Fakadu was more circumspect when we interviewed him through our government interpreter (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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[ Foreign Language Spoken ] [ Sound of a Waterfall ] Fakadu's enthusiasm for the revolution may well have been influenced by the presence of the government interpreter.

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But the new regime has brought real benefits, even to Christians, like Gabriel, whose church-going activities and career have apparently changed for the better. I was still a child at that time. I was in the army. I was 17 years old. I was a soldier, but I was sent to the army. I was in the army for 13 years.

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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and when I was in the army I was a soldier. I was a good soldier. I was a good soldier. I was a good soldier. I did the military service. I was a soldier. I had a good life. I was a good soldier.

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I was a good soldier. I was a good soldier. Now, I'm a good soldier. I'm a good soldier. (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language)

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and then we went to the other side of the river. We had to go through a lot of difficulties. We had to cross the river and cross the river again. We were in a very bad situation.

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We were in a very bad situation. We were in a very bad situation. We were in a very bad situation. We were in a very bad situation.

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(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) [ Foreign Language Spoken ]

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Nobody can do whatever he wants in any country, but if they would like to practice their religious life, to baptize, to preach the gospel, to take the holy communion, I mean to practice their religious life, they are free within the church. And as long as we do not interfere in the political affairs of the revolutionary government, we are free to organize our parish

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to train our priestess. We have now five clergy training centers after the revolution, and we have reopened the theological college.

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Today, 11 years after the Dirk took power, there are over a quarter of a million priests 20,000 Orthodox churches in the country. The government realises that priests can be effective propagandists,

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so the party line is inculcated at the seminaries. From the church there is little dissent. It's too dangerous. And besides, the Orthodox churches have always been more concerned

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with continuing the practice of the liturgy than political reforms. [chanting] People, when their backs are up against the wall, they always find to sustain themselves in hard times.

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They go back to their religion, they go back to their God. Because to survive this kind of nightmare, you need something stronger spiritually more than you. And this is what the Ethiopian people are discovering.

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but will the creed of scientific socialism win over the people of Ethiopia? Goma Yilma again. It will really take time. I think to change a man's mind really is the most difficult job.

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But the party is determined to convince and to teach and to guide to the correct line. So it will take time, but it will be really achieved. [Chanting]

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Goma Yilma and his party are setting off down a road which many have trodden before them. No one has yet reached the end of it. The casualties along the road have been awesome. The failures to harness religious instinct to the ideology of the party or to eradicate

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its traditions among the people have been striking. But although the conflict of ideology is the same in all parts of the world, the circumstances are very different. Such state relations in Ethiopia, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Poland, Nicaragua, are unique

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to each country. And the only sure generalization is that however hard the new religion tries to axe the old one, it rarely manages more than to prune it. The roots go too deep.

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[Chanting] Whatever political beliefs these children grow into, their religious experience will be that of the Orthodox Church.

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(chanting) (upbeat music) [music] The producer of The Hammer and the Cross writes about Christianity in Ethiopia in Thursday's edition of The Listener.

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[Music] ...four years to investigate the nuclear gulag of the Soviet Union. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

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[Music] This is covertly shot amateur film of what now remains of a once top-secret Soviet uranium mine, located in a forbidden zone a thousand miles south of Moscow. From this mountainous area came some of the essential raw ingredient for Russia's nuclear bomb and power program.

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But many of the men who mined and processed the uranium here were convicts, cheap forced labour, operating in dangerously unsafe conditions with virtually no protection against radioactive gas and dust. Cancer, leukemia, tuberculosis and other diseases have claimed the lives of countless Soviet prisoners in various uranium

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mines. For many other prisoners death was preferable to life. The suicides were They're very frequent. The hopeless one committed suicide, and I usually was afraid to go to a public toilet

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early in the morning because you will see someone hanging there, and it was awful. - In theory, the Soviet state aims to correct and rehabilitate prisoners through work

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in general labor camps. In reality, behind the barbed wire and the gun towers, we found slave labor, starvation, primitive medical care, and murder.

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Mr. Gorbachev is just the latest Soviet leader to utilize Joseph Stalin's extensive network of concentration camps and prisons, where death and suffering are still commonplace,

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and where outside scrutiny is strictly forbidden and punishable by long imprisonment. It's taken four years to secretly film just a few of these harsh penal centres and to assemble previously unseen footage in an attempt to take an uncensored look

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at a dark side of Soviet life and to investigate for the first time the nuclear gulag. Last February, Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet Union's most famous prisoner and human rights activist, ended nine years in labour camps and jails. His freedom was traded in a spy swap with the West.

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"Even on this happiest day of our life, I am not going to forget those whom who I left in the camps, in prisons." Sharansky left behind at least a million and a half ordinary convicts, like thieves, fraudsters and murderers, and an estimated minimum of 4,000 political and religious prisoners.

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Prisoners like this man once was, Herman Hartfeld, a Baptist clergyman, interned for preaching Christianity. And this man, Yakov Suslensky, jailed for persistently writing letters and articles critical of the regime. I was not the enemy of the system. I became the enemy of that system. But I was not. I worked hard in the Soviet Union.

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I was a married teacher there, and I tried to improve that system. Our colonel, the chief of the labor camp, usually said to us, "You are a dirt of our Soviet societies, and the more of you die here, yet the best it will be for our communist society.

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- The officials in the Soviet Union say that there are no political prisoners in the Soviet Union, that there are only criminals. They called us, you are hooligans, political hooligans.

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- He was able to see in front of thousands of prisoners to me that as a religious activist, I was much more dangerous than any murderer. And therefore, he said we should kill you all who came, who come into Levek camp because of his belief in God.

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And we said, "Is there a freedom of speech here in the Soviet Union? Can we express our opinion?" And the investigator said, "Yes, there is freedom of good speech in the Soviet Union. You have to speak only good about our system." Tourists see nothing of Soviet labor camps. They are hidden away.

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Foreigners observe only an apparently stable, docile population, considerable food and consumer shortages, but not grinding poverty. Underlying this normality, there's an alarming level of drunkenness and crime associated with endemic bribery and corruption.

00:44:45.640 - 00:45:04.400

The Soviet regime doesn't tolerate social deviance, criminal or political. A man can get three years for being drunk, or seven years for publicly criticising the state. Life in custody is then extremely hard. That's clear even from this Soviet television film,

00:45:04.400 - 00:45:27.300

made as a public relations attempt to warn citizens that excessive drinking leads to jail and public disgrace. However, behind even this propaganda, there's a grimmer reality inside the camps and prisons. [Sound of a helicopter] They're restricted secret places and getting information out of them is both difficult and dangerous.

00:45:27.300 - 00:45:43.300

[Sound of a helicopter] Prisoners' families are watched by the police and the KGB. Foreigners are monitored too. Correspondents and film crews are tightly controlled and contact with ordinary citizens can be hazardous.

00:45:43.300 - 00:46:06.460

[Sound of a helicopter] Nevertheless, news about criminal and political prisoners does seep out of the Gulag. Convicts write on tiny scraps of paper messages of despair and resistance, appeals for help, all smuggled out to be sewn into the clothing and baggage of sympathetic tourists returning to the West.

00:46:06.460 - 00:46:34.100

Then they're passed to this man in Munich, Kronid Lubaski, himself a former Soviet convict, who's now the editor of a fortnightly bulletin on political prisoners. These scraps of paper are letters telling me about what's going on in the camps, about hunger strikes, about those who have been sent to the camp cooler.

00:46:34.100 - 00:46:58.700

But what's the most important for me on these scraps of paper is information about new prisoners, which previously wasn't known to us. Camps for criminals existed before the Russian Revolution in 1917, but the victorious Communists soon began interning their political opponents too.

00:46:58.700 - 00:47:23.700

Peter Reddoway, a leading Russian scholar based in Washington, explains what happened. There was a category of people who were regarded as class enemies and unredeemable, and so you had what one can regard as the origins of the Soviet concentration camp system, and they were in fact called concentration camps, officially, from an early stage.

00:47:23.700 - 00:47:44.460

There were no gas chambers in Soviet camps that we know of. There were occasions when all the inmates of a particular camp were shot and eliminated, but that was for some sort of special reason. There was not a systematic policy

00:47:44.460 - 00:48:02.480

of exterminating all political opponents. - But about 10 million people had died in Soviet camps by the time Joseph Stalin died in 1953. About 2,000 camps still operate today,

00:48:02.480 - 00:48:25.640

a vast web stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. This incomplete map shows just 96 of them, where religious prisoners are known to be held. Outsiders are often unaware of the similarities between Nazi and Soviet camps, according to Boden Nahailo, a Soviet specialist and broadcaster.

00:48:25.640 - 00:48:54.960

Just because we haven't had the film from inside Soviet labour camps labor camps to match the films that we have seen of Auschwitz, of Belsen, and of the worst Nazi concentration camps is no excuse for us to pretend somehow that these appalling camps do not exist today. These things are happening in a state which is a superpower and whose behavior has a bearing

00:48:54.960 - 00:49:15.880

on the rest of the world. One of Stalin's most infamous penal colonies, Mordovia, remains in business today in a swampy wilderness 400 miles east of Moscow. Countless thousands have died here, bones and skulls are often uncovered.

00:49:15.880 - 00:49:40.040

It comprises 15 or so camps for both men and women, 20 odd miles of uninterrupted concentration camps linked by their own private railway with trains perpetually collecting and discharging their convicted passengers. Nicholas Sheregin was once one of them. You travel through the tunnel of barbed wires and barbed wires walls and barbed wires all

00:49:40.040 - 00:49:57.320

over you, you know. It's very strange. And the first time I was travelling there in the winter time, it looked like it was kind of, you know, it was the fairy lights because all this frost and the shines on it and the barbed wire. He said, "Sometimes it's frightful, you know,

00:49:57.320 - 00:50:09.560

"and sometimes it's even nice if you try to forget "where you are." - At each camp, there is a special military team to guard the prisoners.

00:50:09.560 - 00:50:21.460

At each of the fences, there are control towers or guard towers. At the towers, there are soldiers who are armed with machine guns or submachine guns,

00:50:21.460 - 00:50:34.380

watching that no one escapes. In addition, along the perimeter of the fence, there is a control strip which is plowed, along which the guards go back and forth,

00:50:34.380 - 00:50:52.500

and they keep watching that no one crosses this control strip. - The people who tried to escape were usually killed. very, very few were brought back.

00:50:52.500 - 00:51:02.900

If they were caught, they were killed on the spot? Yes. They weren't brought back and sentenced to death? No, they were usually killed during the escape

00:51:02.900 - 00:51:19.580

when they found them. I have never experienced that people who tried to escape got far away from the camps. - The guards would shoot them? - Yes.

00:51:19.580 - 00:51:35.380

Prisoners are marched to work at gunpoint by soldiers of the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These few seconds of shaky film were taken at great risk. The hidden amateur cameraman might have been shot

00:51:35.380 - 00:51:54.680

or certainly arrested for anti-Soviet activities if he'd been caught. Women prisoners too are just as heavily guarded by armed troops. (plane engine roaring) - One woman who knows the Mordovian Gulag well

00:51:54.680 - 00:52:07.780

was interned there for her part in an alleged plot to hijack a plane. She's Silva Zalmanson, who now lives in Israel. - The most horrible menace were the rats

00:52:07.780 - 00:52:22.080

running everywhere around the camp. One could see them in toilets, in store rooms, running between rooms. Occasionally, they even managed to sneak into our dormitories.

00:52:22.080 - 00:52:34.480

The food was prepared in such unhygienic conditions that it was difficult to swallow. But if one is hungry, one is prepared to eat anything once given.

00:52:34.480 - 00:52:44.960

Nevertheless, there were people who preferred to stay hungry rather than eat the food they were given. The soup was made from rotten cabbage.

00:52:44.960 - 00:52:57.440

The meat, which was given to us, was pork fat covered by green fungus. - Sometimes I get a dry potato with worms in it. In the beginning, I saw it was properly fried onion.

00:52:57.440 - 00:53:05.120

You see, then somebody said, "Oh, it's a bit of meat." I said, "Meat's strange, it looks like a macaroni." He said, "No, no, you see, it's black, it's a little nose, "it's a little warm."

00:53:05.120 - 00:53:11.680

So I didn't believe it, and I looked closely, it was warm in it, you see. So, but I said, "It doesn't matter, it's already cooked. "Whether you chuck it out or you eat it still,

00:53:11.680 - 00:53:43.640

Many women prisoners in the criminal camps were trying to get pregnant just to get better rations. A glass of milk a day or maybe a little sugar or some butter. Russian prisoners are often transported in enclosed metal trucks nicknamed Black Ravens. This one was secretly filmed near a courthouse in Prokofievsk, Siberia, delivering a prisoner

00:53:43.640 - 00:53:56.320

for trial. They're often driven fast over poor roads to cause the maximum discomfort to the prisoner inside. Silva Zalmanson remembers that a woman prisoner who'd just had a baby was crippled travelling

00:53:56.320 - 00:54:19.340

inside a black Raven. The girl fell and she hit a metal bench so hard that she broke her spine. The newborn baby fell as well and was hit so hard in his head that he became mentally retarded.

00:54:19.340 - 00:54:40.460

After the accident, she was hospitalized. She was paralyzed and couldn't get up. The authorities said the woman could leave the camp with her handicapped baby, but only when she'd completed her sentence.

00:54:40.460 - 00:54:59.820

There's no known case of a prison or camp guard being convicted of ill-treating an inmate, and the state has given them more powers. New laws have been introduced giving power to the camp administration, to the camp officials, in effect to prolong the sentences of recalcitrant prisoners.

00:54:59.820 - 00:55:15.820

Prisoners who are unprepared to renounce their dissenting views are condemned to being eternal prisoners. They are not going to be released. The authorities don't see a prisoner as a human being.

00:55:15.820 - 00:55:37.260

The prisoners are considered to be working animals. The authorities are keen that the prisoners shouldn't actually die, but continue to work, because after all, they exist for work, and not for anything else. So they are kept on the survival line, where the human being is not exactly dead, but is

00:55:37.260 - 00:56:03.980

barely alive. Soviet television shows convicted well-fed drunks being reformed by doing socially useful construction work. Reality in the frozen gulag can be much tougher. We were expected to do hard work, construction. As soon as I came to the camp I was given

00:56:03.980 - 00:56:26.180

a spade and I was forced just to dig the frozen soil in Mordovia. It is a meter or a meter and a half was frozen. Immediately I was given such hard work and on the very, on the first day I had a heart attack.

00:56:26.180 - 00:56:38.860

If you had refused to do the work, what would have been the effect? Would you have been punished? Of course, yes. For refusal you received very hard punishment.

00:56:38.860 - 00:56:52.860

For instance, as the first step, you are put into an isolated, solitary confinement and kept there for 15 days. - And is your food reduced as well?

00:56:52.860 - 00:57:07.780

- Food reduced and it's very cold there and you are not allowed to wear warm clothes and so on. So it's terrible conditions there in a punishment cell. But to punish you by reducing your rations and putting you in solitary confinement just

00:57:07.780 - 00:57:18.180

worsens your physical state. Well, but they don't take it into consideration. But then when you go back into the camp, you have to do the same thing all over again. Yes, yes.

00:57:18.180 - 00:57:34.980

And that's it, that's the trouble. And that's why many prisoners are really afraid just to break their regulations, you see, because of the punishment, of the hard punishment. They know that if they go on the road of the punishment, they are lost.

00:57:34.980 - 00:57:49.580

It means their health is destroyed. Destroyed and soon they will die. Only last year, well I know that four Ukrainians died in the prison just because of the terrible state of their health.

00:57:49.580 - 00:58:05.140

The four were Ukrainian human rights activists, Vasil Stus, Yuri Litvin, Olexii Tikhi, and Valery Marchenko. Camp authorities suggested they died in an unspecified epidemic. Oddly it claimed no other victims.

00:58:05.140 - 00:58:30.100

It's impossible to say exactly how many ordinary criminals die through medical neglect. There is a high death rate, not caused in most cases by guards killing people, although that does happen, but simply by the combination of heavy labour, compulsory labour, bad food and very bad medical attention.

00:58:30.100 - 00:58:43.280

- Usually our doctor, our camp doctor gave us, well, just a pill of aspirin for all the diseases that we are in the camp. - So you got an aspirin for an ulcer?

00:58:43.280 - 00:59:04.640

- Yes, for everything, yes. Many of the prisoners walked like skeletons. And the air fell and the air was very, and their teeth fell out also, and they suffered terrible diseases.

00:59:04.640 - 00:59:21.640

The few hundred political and religious prisoners whose records are known are suffering diseases and disorders that run through the entire medical alphabet. The principal illnesses involve the stomach and heart, and many of the disorders can be attributed to a diet which lacks nutrition and vitamins.

00:59:21.640 - 00:59:47.260

The overall medical picture suggests a perilously low level of general health in Soviet labor camps, inevitably leading to more deaths in the future. [singing] People in the West really think that Stalin ended the whole system of terror in the Soviet Union.

00:59:47.260 - 01:00:19.260

But it's a big mistake. It's a mistake because the main essence of that system still remained. It remained. In the Stalin period, billions of people died. Now thousands of people die. So only the difference is in number of people. But every human being has only one life. Not unexpectedly, Soviet television's benign portrayal of medical care in penal institutions

01:00:19.260 - 01:00:39.260

reveals nothing of the death through neglect and deprivation. The Soviet media constantly reiterate that labor camps exist not to punish, not to inflict suffering and ill-treatment on prisoners. And yet in blatant contradiction of this, the system as it exists in reality,

01:00:39.260 - 01:01:20.660

not only is cruel, not only is inhuman, it actually in the long run dehumanizes the inmates and does not lead to their reform. These Soviet television pictures showing a hard but humane, caring penal system are part of a public relations exercise. For some who know its fiction and who've seen behind the illusion, there's a special farewell from the KGB if they emigrate. "The lieutenant of the KGB, Dovichenko, he told me that whatever you tell Western people

01:01:20.660 - 01:01:39.900

about your experiences, we will firstly deny, secondly we will undertake everything in order to eliminate you." The prospect of being hunted down and murdered has so far kept this clergyman from giving his most damning testimony about forced labor in Soviet concentration camps.

01:01:39.900 - 01:02:12.660

But in part two, he breaks 12 years of silence and talks for the first time about violent life and lingering death inside Soviet uranium mines, where prisoners are subjected to dangerous radiation as they dig out the raw material for Russia's nuclear weapons. These are the last few secretly filmed moments of freedom for this man, a Baptist pastor

01:02:12.660 - 01:02:31.660

called Modnov, jailed for three years in 1982 for his religious beliefs and activities in the Siberian city of Prokofievsk. Soviet prisoners go to court knowing there's effectively no question of them being found not guilty. There's no presumption of innocence for the defendant. The fact that the state

01:02:31.660 - 01:02:54.420

has brought a person to court indicates guilt in itself. Except in rare cases, courts simply hand out punishments from a fine to a firing squad. The way a government treats its prisoners is a very useful barometer. It tells us a great deal about the attitude of the government towards individuals, towards the value of

01:02:54.420 - 01:03:23.660

human life. The Soviet authorities do not really respect, do not accept the notion that individuals can have differing viewpoints, that they can somehow challenge the line which the government sets for society to follow. The object, therefore, becomes to break down the resistance of dissenters of whatever category and either to make docile individuals out

01:03:23.660 - 01:03:45.740

of them or else to destroy them in the long run. These prisoners aren't religious or political dissidents. They were convicted of drink-related offences. Their appearance on Soviet television was a warning to all citizens about the dire consequences of excessive drinking and of the unpleasant fate awaiting alcoholic criminals

01:03:45.740 - 01:04:07.940

in prison. Though some have had their head shaved, they look reasonably well fed. Maybe because the television cameras were there, viewers also saw a happy ending. This convict has repented and reformed.

01:04:07.940 - 01:04:24.860

He gets back his internal passport. There's a handshake from the friendly guards and he's off to join his family once more. The firm but fair prison system is seen to work. Real life isn't usually like this.

01:04:24.860 - 01:04:46.860

It was absolutely cruel, horrifying, especially the first time. They didn't regard us as ordinary human beings. To some extent I felt even worse degraded as a human being when I was in a German camp during the war for years, you see.

01:04:46.860 - 01:05:00.860

That they can treat you anyhow, the way that they like, without being answered to by anybody else. Nicholas Sharijgin was held in a prison in Vladimir, a town about 40 miles east of Moscow,

01:05:00.860 - 01:05:31.860

which attracts many foreign tourists to its beautifully restored old churches. The prison is an infamous and barbaric place which has never been filmed before. That prison consists of about four main blocks which can hold up to 500 or 600 prisoners in each block. One actually, block number four, it used to be a church during the tsar, but then it was converted into a so-called very strict block,

01:05:31.860 - 01:05:55.860

but there's not very big cells there and they're very very strict and very rough I punish myself in the basement and this is wooden covered passageways which are completely covered and when it was with a prisoner from block to block so that nobody can see you you can't see anybody else this is out a wall bit higher and

01:05:55.860 - 01:06:16.820

in a wall bit lower so between those walls is a passage when the armed guard and also in each corner of the prison is a machine gun tower. There are about 40 underground punishment cells without bedding, furniture or windows. They're two metres by one, too small to lie down in.

01:06:16.820 - 01:06:43.940

Some are deliberately kept very hot, others very cold. I was kept in one cell for 15 days and I couldn't sleep 15 days and nights. nights I couldn't sleep an hour during that time because there were only five degrees by Celsius five degrees yes and all the warm clothes were taken away from me so I had I trembled the whole

01:06:43.940 - 01:07:15.380

the whole time I I couldn't after that when I came out I had a stroke and I lost my memory I lost my voice, I couldn't move, I stumbled at every step, and many prisoners, my cellmates thought that I was mad. Yes. Luckily it wasn't madness, but it was only the result of those terrible conditions.

01:07:15.380 - 01:07:47.300

The Soviet system is like the Nazi system in one important respect, and like a lot of authoritarian systems, nobody wants, nobody is ready to put particularly inhumane and drastic orders onto paper. And it is subordinates who are used to doing what their authorities tell them to do, who carry out the particularly nasty things and behave sadistically and cruelly

01:07:47.300 - 01:08:06.500

to prisoners and sometimes kill them. Robert Suslensky, now a teacher in Israel, remembers that four convicted murderers were licensed to kill awkward inmates in a special cell called a "press hatter", prison slang for a place where someone is crushed.

01:08:06.500 - 01:08:41.860

On the 25th of October 1975, a prisoner was sent to such a press hatter, and we heard cries coming out of that cell. So we started beating on the door and calling the guard and trying to prevent, to stop that. But he said, "That's none of your business. Well, we know what to do." Yes, and to the evening that man was killed. When we were taken to

01:08:41.860 - 01:09:02.700

the walking yard and we passed that cell, we saw how an officer was peeping through the hole and the cries came out of that cell. The authorities could have stopped this murder if they wanted. They didn't want to stop it. They didn't want to stop it. Perhaps they didn't think that

01:09:02.700 - 01:09:31.560

he would be killed, but if he was killed, it's for the better. How can other human beings, prison guards, how can they treat prisoners like that? You see, in the Vladimir prison, not only the guards, but even the doctors, even the doctors worked there for tens of years, and they keep mum, they don't tell anybody about

01:09:37.440 - 01:09:51.180

they worked there, so all the secrets are inside. And one of the doctors said, when I addressed her asking for help, she said, "First, I am a Chekist, a KGB agent,

01:09:51.180 - 01:10:11.400

"and then I am a doctor." - Soviet doctors, like all Soviet citizens, are subordinate to the KGB and carry out their orders. On numerous documented occasions, doctors have obediently diagnosed sane but dissenting

01:10:11.400 - 01:10:34.360

people as mad and locked them away in the KGB's psychiatric prisons where they've been tortured with painful, powerful drugs. This man's family believe he was murdered by the KGB and that doctors were somehow involved too.

01:10:34.360 - 01:10:47.340

Samuel Walter was a pastor with a Pentecostal group in eastern Siberia, persecuted for refusing to register their church and submit to state supervision, and for repeatedly applying to emigrate.

01:10:47.340 - 01:11:04.100

In 1984, Pastor Walter went into hospital for a minor operation on his varicose veins. He quickly recovered and was waiting to go home when some KGB officers visited the hospital

01:11:04.100 - 01:11:17.420

and spoke to his doctors. Pastor Walter was suddenly moved to a side ward and his family prevented from visiting him. Within 24 hours, he was dead.

01:11:17.420 - 01:11:27.980

The official cause was lung cancer. His family completely reject this and say he was murdered by the KGB, though they know they'll never prove it.

01:11:27.980 - 01:11:59.620

[helicopter] The thinking behind the selective murders is to frighten society, is to show that the KGB is all-powerful, that if dissenters were not intimidated by the prospect of the gulag, of psychiatric prisons, then there were other ways to be rid of them once and for all.

01:11:59.620 - 01:12:10.820

Kill one, terrify a thousand. Exactly. This influential Lithuanian priest, an active human rights campaigner, was thrown under a truck and crushed to death.

01:12:10.820 - 01:12:26.560

This prominent Ukrainian nationalist was found beheaded. This Roman Catholic priest was tortured and then beaten to death. This young Ukrainian composer was found hanging from a tree with his eyes gouged out and his fingers broken.

01:12:26.560 - 01:12:47.260

This young Baptist army conscript was repeatedly stabbed and beaten, then drowned because he wouldn't renounce his religious beliefs. This other young Baptist had his tongue and fingernails ripped out while in police custody, but the authorities refused to investigate his murder.

01:12:47.260 - 01:13:11.380

There are many other cases of mysterious unexplained deaths and beatings of people whose religious, political or social views the state doesn't like, but the culprits haven't been found. When they choose to do so, Soviet police can catch murderers and other serious criminals, and the courts impose tough sentences.

01:13:11.380 - 01:13:36.380

Konstantin Simis was a defence lawyer in Moscow. He now lives in America and has a unique insight into Soviet justice. In the Soviet Union, the people are executed not only for murder, for rape, but even for the economic crimes, such as embezzlement of the state government of property, bribes,

01:13:36.380 - 01:14:01.140

speculation with the foreign currency on the black market, and some other non-violent crimes. As part of a drive against corruption, Soviet television recently showed the bribery trial of these racketeers in the southern city of Rostov, who sold scarce meat on the black market and made a fortune.

01:14:01.140 - 01:14:17.780

Some defendants were interviewed, admitting their guilt and expressing regrets. The prosecution asked for the death sentence for one man, and the rest got jailed for up to nine years. The Soviets execute by a gunshot to the back of the neck.

01:14:17.780 - 01:14:36.380

Soviet newspapers report only about 30 such executions a year. Amnesty International can document just 43 since 1979. But as a lawyer, Konstantin Simis had access to confidential information from within Soviet district courts, appeal courts and prisons.

01:14:36.380 - 01:15:00.200

Using this secret data, he mathematically calculated that the true figure is very much higher. I got the figure between 865 to 895 each year are executed by the Soviet executioner, by by the Soviet courts if you want.

01:15:00.200 - 01:15:14.920

But in the Soviet criminal legislation itself, it claims that capital punishment is an exceptional or rare punishment. Now what you're saying is that there are something like three executions every day, Saturday and Sunday included.

01:15:14.920 - 01:15:23.240

Every day, yes. If your figure is correct. Every day, two, three persons are killed by Soviet state. That's right.

01:15:23.240 - 01:15:44.280

The death penalty is retained by Soviet leaders as a deterrent. Yet if they publicise the actual number of executions, about three a day, their assiduously cultivated image of a progressive, relatively crime-free state would be seriously undermined. For every one criminal executed, two others are reprieved.

01:15:44.280 - 01:16:03.000

Their sentences are commuted and they're committed to labour camps. But they do not get off lightly. A lot of the people who were committed and who get 15 years instead of the death penalty, they are sent to the uranium mines.

01:16:03.000 - 01:16:21.080

To uranium mines? Yes. It is almost the same, but it is not the executioner in a few seconds who performs the sentence, But it is radiation who performs the same sentence in six months, in one year, sometimes

01:16:21.080 - 01:16:40.280

in one year and a half, but it is absolutely the same. It is a death penalty too. Constantine Simis knows this because he defended a black market currency speculator whose death sentence was commuted to a term in a uranium mine where he died within 18 months.

01:16:40.280 - 01:16:57.000

But why have such camps remained secret for so long? Peter Redaway. The Soviet authorities clearly went to very great lengths to make sure that no prisoner was sent to the uranium mines who would ever get out and leave for the West, and preferably

01:16:57.000 - 01:17:21.280

who wouldn't have any ties, direct or indirect, to the West. And it's just the few exceptions, the few people who've slipped through the net, who have provided us with detailed and clearly genuine information about the most horrific of all types of imprisonment in the Soviet Union.

01:17:21.280 - 01:17:47.180

This man, Herman Hartfeld, slipped through the net after surviving 18 months as a prisoner in two uranium installations. He's now a clergyman in Zurich, Switzerland. Until 1974, he was a pastor in the Russian Evangelical Christian Baptists, a church which refuses to officially register and submit to state supervision.

01:17:47.180 - 01:18:09.140

Despite a constitution notionally guaranteeing religious freedom, police often break up services and arrest worshippers. That happened here, under the watchful eye of the man from the KGB and his camera team. In this climate of persecution, Herman Hartfeld was arrested for religious youth work in Kazakhstan.

01:18:09.140 - 01:18:25.140

and got five years. His crime was considered sufficiently serious for him to be sent initially to a uranium mine, along with murderers whose death sentences had been commuted. The men's bodily defences against disease were low,

01:18:25.140 - 01:18:57.480

because of bad food and hard work. But exposure to radioactive dust and dangerous chemicals quickly weakened some of them still more. Prisoners became affected by radiation and got leukemia. [BLANK_AUDIO]