“Snow falling is just ash dressed up pretty.” – Every poor bastard who survived this hellscape

You know how people say, “It could be worse?”
Babe, that’s because they’ve never heard of the Gulag system - Stalin’s charming little chain of work camps where the only benefits included frostbite, starvation, and a free shovel to dig your own grave.

🪓 What Were They?

• GULAG = Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei → The Main Camp Administration

• Not one camp, but a vast network of forced labor camps across the Soviet Union

• 1920s–1950s: Over 18 million people were sentenced

• Most for “political crimes” like owning a Bible, joking about Stalin, or just being a little too smart

🌨️ What Was Life Like?

Imagine this:
It’s -40°C.
You're wearing a thin cloth uniform.
You’ve just worked 14 hours cutting timber with a dull axe.
Your food? A crust of bread and cabbage water.
Someone next to you collapses - you don’t look.
Because if you stop moving, you die next.

Daily Realities:

• Beatings and torture

• Starvation-induced hallucinations

• Forced marches through frozen wilderness

• Mass graves dug with bare hands

• Cannibalism? Yes. Especially in Kolyma - the coldest, deadliest camp in Siberia

• Prisoners built railroads, factories, entire cities - and then died under them

🧊 Kolyma: “The Land of White Death”

• Coldest inhabited place on Earth

• Nicknamed “The Planet of the Gulag”

• A one-way ticket. Most never returned.

• Prisoners called snowflakes "white lice" - they never stopped falling.

👁️ What Did They Do to Deserve It?

• Wrote poetry

• Spoke their native language

• Were Jewish

• Owned farmland

• Looked “nervous” at a meeting

• Or just… nothing.

“We were all guilty. We just didn’t know the sentence yet.”
- Survivor of Vorkuta Camp

🕯️ The Haunting Aftermath

The Soviet Union never fully acknowledged the horror.
Many survivors were forbidden from speaking.
Others lived in silence, with missing fingers, teeth, and whole families.

Some camps still stand - rotting in the snow, filled with names no one remembers.

👻 Why You’ve Probably Never Heard Much About This

Because after it all?
The Soviet Union did the thing all toxic exes do:

❝Gaslight. Deny. Bury the evidence.❞

Even today, many Russians don’t know the full truth.
It was all shoved under the rug like a haunted doll at grandma’s.

🕯️ Witch’s Take:

This isn’t just about “the past.”
It’s about what happens when power eats empathy, when fear becomes law, and when your soul becomes state property.

And babe, you better believe the snow still remembers.