'Gulag' a must-watch history lesson

I once heard of a man who offered his college-age daughters $500 each if they would read The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's difficult three-volume work about the Soviet prison camps. The girls refused. Though the Holocaust rightly remains fixed in our collective memory, hardly anyone seems to remember the Gulag - or feels the need to. Yet it is possibly the most extensive genocide of the 20th century, which is saying something. From the Bolshevik Revolution through Stalin's reign, an estimated 20 million people disappeared inside the Gulag's vast system of jails, killing fields and forced-labor camps. That is why "Gulag," a new BBC documentary airing 8 p.m. Thursday on TLC, fills an important void. The filmmakers toured some of the most notorious sites, long since abandoned, and drew on the recollections of surviving prisoners and guards to paint an unsparingly grim portrait of the Soviet terror apparatus. Most of those on the inside were arrested on bogus charges like "economic sabotage" or "attempting to assassinate Stalin." The lucky ones were shot. Many were worked to death under inhuman conditions. The psychological toll may have been even worse. One woman recalls being pulled out of school as a young girl and told that her parents had been arrested; she was put in an orphanage that night. Another woman tells of being in prison camp when a snitch reported her for helping an ailing prisoner. Thrown into solitary, she nearly died. More than 60 years later, she has a look of unbearable sadness as she says, "I have never done a good deed since." "Gulag" covers a broad sweep, from the Siberian industrial camps to Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison to the terrible Volga Canal, an 80-mile waterway dug entirely by hand and, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, literally built upon the bodies of those who worked on it. The interviews with the guards and Gulag bureaucrats are disturbing in their own way. They kept the machine running and enjoyed perks and pensions. The secret police in each town had a quota of arrests to meet. One man matter-of-factly tells how he ran a "conveyor belt" of interrogators who kept detainees awake night and day, harassing them until they "confessed." The film ends where it begins, with the testimonies of those few who survived. "What were we guilty of?" one of them asks. "Will anyone ever be held responsible for all of our suffering?" The only way that can happen is if we remember that the suffering took place. "Gulag" is an ambitious step toward that goal.