Tag: War

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Into the Gulag: The Prisons of Soviet Russia

This new video, made for Blogs Don’t Burn by filmmaker James Arnold, tells the story of the Soviet Gulags; a vast and complex network of prisons and forced-labor camps which stretched across the USSR throughout much of its history. Started under Lenin and hugely expanding under Stalin, this system would swallow up millions of lives for good. Many prisoners were incarcerated for decades, solely for the crime of thinking and writing against the regime.

This video is dedicated to the prisoners of the Gulag, the dissenters who spoke out for them, and for all the other victims of the 20th century whose names have been lost to history.

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Short Story: ‘Chroniker’

On our fourth day alive we killed the elderly, as has always been the custom. Three days of tolerance, of something like restraint, then when the great Chroniker chugged into gear for another cycle, we had at it. I would not have waited so long, but tradition does have some brief part to play in life’s journey.

The three-day rule has its purposes, of course. The baton being passed, lessons from yesterday brightening today. But frankly, my people need very little instruction before being ready to blaze out into the world, and our days are far too few to be spent lingering in lecture halls, enduring those withering old Tenners droning on and on about bygone decades. Five, seven, even ten minutes at a time we are expected to just sit and listen! If you knew anything at all about my race, traveller, you might appreciate a little more how tortuous that kind of patience really is.

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