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[MUSIC] [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.

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From this mountainous area came some of the essential raw ingredient for Russia's nuclear bomb and power program. But many of the men who mined and processed the uranium here were convicts, cheap forced labor, operating in dangerously unsafe conditions with virtually no protection against radioactive gas and dust. Cancer, leukemia, tuberculosis and other diseases

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have claimed the lives of countless Soviet prisoners in various uranium mines. For many other prisoners, death was preferable to life. The suicides were They are very frequent. The hopeless one committed suicide,

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and I usually was afraid to go to a public toilet early in the morning because you will see someone hanging there, and it was awful. - In theory, the Soviet state aims to correct

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to correct and rehabilitate prisoners through work in general labor camps. In reality, behind the barbed wire and the gun towers, we've found slave labor, starvation, primitive medical care, and murder. Mr. Gorbachev is just the latest Soviet leader

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to utilize Joseph Stalin's extensive network of concentration camps and prisons, where death and suffering are still commonplace, and where outside scrutiny is strictly forbidden and punishable by long imprisonment.

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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 at a dark side of Soviet life and to investigate for the first time the nuclear gulag.

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Last February, Anatoly Sharansky, the Soviet Union's most famous prisoner and human rights activist, ended nine years in labor camps and jails. His freedom was traded in a spy swap with the West. "Even on this happiest day of our life, I am not going to forget those whom I left in the camps, in prisons."

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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. 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.

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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, the best it will be for our communist society. The officials in the Soviet Union say that there are no political prisoners in the Soviet

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Union, that there are only criminals. They called us, "You are hooligans, political hooligans." 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 Lebegham because of

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his belief in God. When 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.

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you have to speak only good about our system. Tourists see nothing of Soviet labor camps. They are hidden away. Foreigners observe only an apparently stable, docile population,

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suffering considerable food and consumer shortages, but not grinding poverty. Underlying this normality, there's an alarming level of drunkenness and crime

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associated with endemic bribery and corruption. 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.

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Life in custody is then extremely hard. That's clear even from this Soviet television film, 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.

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They're restricted secret places and getting information out of them is both difficult and dangerous. Prisoners' families are watched by the police and the KGB. Foreigners are monitored too. Correspondents and film crews are tightly controlled,

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and contact with ordinary citizens can be hazardous. 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.

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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, letters telling me about what's going on in the camps,

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about hunger strikes, about those who have been sent to the camp cooler. 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,

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but the victorious communists soon began interning their political opponents too. Peter Redaway, a leading Russian scholar based in Washington, explains what happened. There was a category of people who were regarded as class enemies and unredeemed for. And so you had what one can regard as the origins of the Soviet concentration camp system.

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And they were in fact called concentration camps officially from an early stage. 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.

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There was not a systematic policy 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, a vast web stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan.

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

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Just because we haven't had the film from inside Soviet 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

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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.

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Bones and skulls are often uncovered. 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.

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Nicholas Sheregin was once one of them. You travel through the tunnel of barbed wires, and barbed wires walls, and barbed wires all over you, you know. It's very strange.

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When the first time was traveling in the wintertime, it looked like it was kind of, you know, going through the fairy lights because all this frost and the fries and the barbed wire. You see, sometimes it's frightful, you know, 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.

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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, 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,

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and they keep watching that no one crosses this control street. The people who tried to escape were usually killed. Very, very few were brought back. If they were caught, they were killed on the spot?

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Yes. They weren't brought back and sentenced to death? No, they were usually killed during the escape when they found them. I have never experienced that people who tried to escape

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got far away from the camps. The guards would shoot them? Yes. Prisoners are marched to work at gunpoint by soldiers of the MVD,

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the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These few seconds of shaky film were taken at great risk. The hidden amateur cameraman might have been shot or certainly arrested for anti-Soviet activities if he'd been caught. Women prisoners too are just as heavily guarded by armed troops.

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One woman who knows the Mordovian Gulag well 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 running everywhere around the camp. One could see them in toilets, in storerooms, running between rooms.

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Occasionally, they even managed to sneak into our dormitories. 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. Nevertheless, there were people who preferred to stay hungry rather than eat the food they were given.

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The soup was made from rotten cabbage. 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. onion, you see, and then somebody said, oh, it's a bit of meat. He said, meat's strange, it looks like a macaroni.

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He said, no, no, you see, it's black, it's a little warm. So I didn't believe it, and I looked closely, it was warm in it, you see. So but I said, doesn't matter, it's already cooked.

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Whether you chuck it out or you eat it, still it's there, you see, so. - Many women prisoners in the criminal camps were trying to get pregnant just to get better rations.

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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 for trial. They're often driven fast over poor roads, to cause the maximum discomfort to the prisoner inside.

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Silva Zalmanson remembers that a woman prisoner who just had a baby was crippled traveling 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

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After the accident, she was hospitalized. She was paralyzed and couldn't get up. [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] The authorities said the woman could leave the camp

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with her handicapped baby, but only when she'd completed her sentence. There's no known case of a prison or camp guard being convicted of ill-treating an inmate,

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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. Prisoners who are unprepared to renounce their dissenting views are condemned to being eternal prisoners.

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They are not going to be released. The authorities don't see a prisoner as a human being. The prisoners are considered to be working animals. The authorities are keen that the prisoners shouldn't actually

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die, but continue to work, because after all, they exist for work and not for anything else. So they're kept on the survival line, where the human being is not exactly dead,

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but is barely alive. [GUNSHOTS] Soviet television shows convicted, well-fed drunks being reformed by doing socially useful construction work.

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Reality in the frozen Gulag can be much tougher. We were expected to do hard work, construction. Well, I was given, as soon as I came to the camp, I was given a spade and I was forced just to dig

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the frozen soil in Mordovia. this 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.

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- If you had refused to do the work, what would have been the effect? Would you have been punished? Would you have-- - Of course, yes.

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For refusal, you received punished, very hard punishment. For instance, as the first step, you are put into an isolated, solitary confinement and kept there for 15 days.

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- And is your food reduced as well? - 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.

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- But to punish you by reducing your rations and putting you in solitary confinement just worsens your physical state. - Well, but they don't take it into consideration.

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But then when you go back into the camp, you have to do the same thing all over again. Yes, yes. 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.

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They know that if they go on the road of the punishment, they are lost. But it means their health is destroyed and... Destroyed and soon they will die. Well, only last year, well, I know that four Ukrainians died in the prison just because

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of a terrible state of their health. 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.

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Oddly it claimed no other victims. 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 labor, compulsory labor, bad food

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and very bad medical attention. 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?

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Yes, for everything, yes. Many of the prisoners walked like skeletons, and the air fell, and their teeth fell out also and they suffered terrible diseases. The few hundred political and religious prisoners whose records are known are suffering diseases

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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. The overall medical picture suggests a perilously low level of general health in Soviet labor

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camps, inevitably leading to more deaths in the future. People in the West really think that Stalin ended the whole system of terror in the Soviet Union. 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

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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 reveals nothing of the death through neglect and deprivation.

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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, not only is cruel, not only is inhuman, it actually in the long run dehumanizes the inmates and

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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 it's fiction and who've seen behind the illusion, there's a special

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farewell from the KGB if they emigrate. Yeah. The lieutenant of the KGB, Vdovichenko, he told me that whatever you tell Western people about your experiences, we will firstly deny, secondly we will undertake everything in order

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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 labour in Soviet concentration camps. But in part two, he breaks 12 years of silence and talks for the first time about violent life and

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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. [BLANK_AUDIO]