Nikolai Getman - The Gulag Legacy

The Gulag Legacy

During the eight years Getman spent at Taishetlag (Siberia) and Svitlag (Kolyma), he started to develop his plan to record the horrors of the camp conditions in the form of paintings. While he could not paint openly in the camps, he took careful note of all that transpired. Even when he started to paint after his release in 1953, he still had to do so in secret as he would otherwise have been convicted once again, perhaps even sentenced to death. In his own words: "I undertook the task because I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died"

The Jamestown Foundation provides access to all 50 of Getman's paintings together with explanations of their significance. Their impact is especially effective in providing visual representations of the conduct of the camps, the harsh working conditions, the severe climate and the fate of the prisoners themselves.

The Gulag paintings were not shown until 1993 at a private exhibition in the gallery of the Russian Artists' Union in Orel. In 1995, there was a special ceremony in the Turgenev Theatre in Orel where a Getman exhibition entitled "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" was opened in the presence of the artist and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago.

In June 1997, with the support of the Jamestown Foundation and Getman's own wish to bring his paintings to the West, the private exhibition "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" was displayed at the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C.