The Breath of Death

These drawings depict the life of the Soviet Gulag prisoners. Very cruel and gloomy…

I’m… an English, French, American, Japanese, Italian, German and maybe some other spy as well…

The Gulag had its own “thieves by law” who were in a privileged position like modern bureaucrats.

Criminals were in a much better position than “enemies of the people”. Authoritative, repeatedly convicted “thieves by law” usually didn’t work. Petty thieves were their minions. Bytoviki (prisoners serving for domestic crimes) gave them a part of their wage payments. Criminals helped to destroy “enemies of the people” in labor camps of the Gulag…

The prisoner who lost his life in a card game is carried out to the cold…

- Sprinkle him with holy water to make his life in the other world better. And I’ll cover him with snow so that the prison guards wouldn’t find him soon…

Cut the skull of an “enemy of the people” for his refusal to give a part of his wage payments to the criminals.

An execution of the sentence made by the “court of thieves” in a labor camp…

In Stalin’s camps of the Gulag criminals committed murders of other prisoners, with the connivance of its administration. They used electricity, knives, gallows, beheaded them, pushed a heated in the fire crowbar into their anus, etc. Many criminals had 10 and even more “rams” each (“ram” is a murdered prisoner).

“Sanitary shooting” was periodically carried out by the workers of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in the years of Stalinism.

Its aim was to prevent non-Russian peoples from getting a national sense of justice. Party, Soviet, economic and artistic workers shot at the command. There even were the orders for the number of “heads”. Like a hunting license permitting to shoot certain kinds of animals: elks, saigas, wild boars, wild rams, bears and so on.