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From the Artist

By Nikolai Getman

Original biographical essay on the artist, as submitted, before line edit.

From early childhood, for as long as I can remember, I was always drawing; I tried to express the things I felt and observed as a child in my drawings. They were primitive, of course, but these early sketches were utterly sincere. At school, I would do drawings for the class newspaper, decorate the classroom, and on special occasions the whole school. My classmates predicted that I would become an artist.

I remember the 1918 civil war and its consequences — the 1921 famine — from the age of four. The situation was appalling — huge cauldrons were set up on campfires on every street corner in Kharkov, where food was prepared to feed the hungry townspeople. I heard people say "This aid has come from America — the American Relief Administration — for the starving people of Ukraine and the Volga region."

Our family did not have an easy life in Kharkov — then the capital of Ukraine. I was saved from starvation by my aunt Masha — my father would take me to stay with her in the village of Pokrovskoe in Dnepropetrovsk oblast.

Pokrovskoe was a small town with three Orthodox churches — and I witnessed with horror how grown men in greatcoats and other bigwigs in leather jackets and trousers carrying Mausers and rifles shouted orders at people to hurl the bells down from the bell towers, and throw icons, religious books, standards and banners onto a huge bonfire in the square beside the church. I saw crowds of people, shocked at this unprecedented vandalism, standing in numb silence. I can still hear the moans of the crowd, the crackle of the huge bonfire and the boom of the falling bells ringing in my ears: The memory is stamped on my soul.

The nightmare of the repression of peasant families in the countryside and their liquidation as a class began in 1929. The hardest-working peasant farmers — the tillers of the land — were banished from that land and exiled to camps in the Solovetsky Islands, insultingly dubbed "class enemies" — kulaks. Millions died — innocent but pronounced guilty.

I lived through the artificial famine engineered by the Bolsheviks during the bumper harvest of 1932-33. I witnessed people fainting with hunger and dying in the streets of Kharkov. I saw the bodies of whole families lying in the road, exhausted by the journey they had made from nearby villages.

To become a professional artist, I entered Kharkov Art College, where one of the teachers was a pupil of Repin's: Professor Semyon Markovich Prokhorov. The professor often spoke of the great artist and teacher. I have never forgotten the words which were to become my credo: "The most important thing in a picture is color: It is through your use of color that you will make the viewer sense the mood of your canvas. Without color there is no art."

I lived through the tragic news of the death of my brother Aleksandr, who was accused of committing a "white" terrorist act and shot by firing squad on 11 December 1934. After the murder of Kirov on 1 December 1934, the NKVD arrested hundreds and thousands of perfectly innocent people, accusing them of terrorism, sabotage, subversion and so on.

On a trumped-up charge, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR sentenced Aleksandr Ivanovich Getman to death by firing squad. Thus was the life of this handsome young man cut short. He was 24 years old.

Fearing persecution and repression, my brother Pyotr took refuge for several years in a friend's house in Moscow. My father left in secret one night to live with his sister, my aunt Masha, who moved from Pokrovskoe to Dnepropetrovsk not under her maiden name of Getman, but using the name of her husband, Pavel Epifanovich Sokh.

The fates decreed that the repression would not affect me, a second-year technical college student, but that was in the 1930s. After graduating from the technical college in 1937 I continued my studies at Kharkov Art College. In my third year I was called up to join the Red Army — which was where the war found me. I saw military action in the 24th army. On Victory Day I was on the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, a lieutenant technician. Marshal Tolbukhin sent me to Romania as an art specialist to serve on the Soviet Commission for the return of art treasures stolen by the Germans.

I returned home to Kharkov in October 1945. In January 1946 I was convicted and sent to Taishetlag in Russia's Irkutsk oblast. I was one of the millions of Stalin's victims. My crime was meeting with other artists in Dnepropetrovsk — where I was visiting my father — and exchanging memories of what we had seen in the towns we liberated: Remnants of fascist propaganda, posters, leaflets, cartoons. One of the artists took a cigarette box and drew a caricature he had seen of Stalin with a play on the abbreviation SSSR (USSR): Skoro Smert' Stalinskomu Rezhimu (Sudden Death to the Stalinist Regime). An informer reported the sketch, and the whole group of us were arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. I was arrested on 12 October 1945.

The Dnepropetrovsk oblast court condemned me under article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. In Russia this is known as article 58. I was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment and five years' suppression of civic rights. I spent about eight years in Siberia (Taishetlag) and Kolyma (Svitlag). Labor camps records show that I was held in custody for seven years, ten months and 18 days. I was freed on 30 August 1953.

Many years later, when the reform process began, the iron curtain came down and there was a reevaluation of the past, my son sent an inquiry to the relevant authorities, and received the reply: Your father, Nikolai Ivanovich Getman, is rehabilitated.

But I had to wait several decades for this happy moment. After my release in 1953, I threw myself entirely into my art: I worked as an artist in the House of Culture in Yagodnoe in Magadan oblast. In 1956 I took part in a huge exhibition of the works of artists from Siberia and the Far East, and I was adopted as a candidate for membership of the USSR Union of Artists in 1957.

It was only in 1969 that the authorities allowed me to move to the Kolyma regional capital, Magadan, with my wife Anna Filippovna and my son Viktor. That same year I traveled to Chukotka to work on a portrait of the Chukchi hunter Klara Kalyana, a hero of Socialist labor and a Komsomol member in Anadyr, in the Chukchi national okrug, Magadan oblast.

In April 1963 I took part in the Second Congress of the USSR Artists' Union in Moscow, and in 1964 became a member of the USSR Artists' Union. I helped organize the Magadan Artists' Union and the Magadan section of the Arts Foundation of the RSFSR, and served as director of the Magadan section of the Arts Foundation of the RSFSR from 1963-66.

I participated in local, regional and private exhibitions in various towns: Magadan, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Ulan-Ude, Vladivostok, Bryansk, Orel, Ryazan, Leningrad and Moscow; and jointly with other artists in various countries: Germany, Bulgaria, Finland, Holland. My private exhibitions were held in Magadan in 1972, Orel in 1977, 1987 and 1993, and Bryansk in 1994.

In 1976 I moved from Magadan to the town of Orel. I had my own studio in the Orel branch of the Russian Artists' Union.

In 1996 (exactly 20 years later) I revisited Magadan. A live interview with me, showing examples of my work, was broadcast by Magadan television to Magadan oblast and the Chukchi national okrug, where I had lived for over 25 years in Kolyma and Chukotka; the heroic local people were reflected in my work.

My paintings — genre pictures, landscapes, still-lives, portraits, posters — can be found in the ministry of culture of the RSFSR; the Arts Foundation of Russia; the Directorate of Art Exhibitions; the Anadyr museum of local history and culture; the Magadan museum of local history and culture; the Orel oblast picture gallery; the Far Eastern Shipping Line, Vladivostok; the State Turgenev Museum, Orel; the N. S. Leskov museum, Orel; and in private collections in Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Italy, Holland, Germany and the USA.

Alongside my easel paintings, I had to do portraits of top political figures (the Politburo), commissioned by the authorities, so-called socialist realism, and also, in order not to forfeit my membership of the Artists' Union and my studio — a very important consideration — I had to play an active role in the Union's exhibitions.

From the very day I was released, I began to implement my plan to paint a series of pictures on the theme of the Gulag, but as this was a forbidden topic, one which was not to be disclosed, I had to do my civic duty in secret.

And so, in complete secrecy, beginning in 1953, I painted pictures about camp life which I recreated from memory. I told no one about this work — not even my wife — because this sort of activity was punishable by imprisonment or even death. Despite the danger, I undertook to achieve the task I had set myself, convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not forgotten.

It took me over 40 years to create this visual chronicle of the Gulag. My collection eventually grew to a total of 50 pictures, recording various aspects of camp life.

To be able to draw and paint from life, even if the artist tackles contemporary subjects, is not necessarily to describe one's time in the language of art. In order to describe the epoch, one has to try to visually encapsulate its meaning, the way the great artists used to.

This is why it is very important to depict not just what you see, but what you know. It is essential to possess the material from life in order to freely express the design. Thus in its essence, from the perspective of image and content, the "theme" (in this case the theme of camp life) becomes an artistic category.

I developed a unique way of working, which seems to go against all the established rules for creating a picture. In the camps, it is unthinkable to do sketches or drafts or details. All the material amassed for the future painting is concentrated in intense mental work. The idea in my head and the blank canvas — that's the starting point for each work. There are not many artists who would readily agree with me. This method, this approach, is not taught in art college, and it would be very risky to imitate me.

One should never forget the established canons — firstly, "what" to portray and "how" to portray it; secondly, that there is no art without color. As the brush lays the picture onto the canvas, the color — not the paint — comes into its own.

I am sometimes asked how I felt, or rather how anyone can feel in such unimaginable circumstances as loss of freedom, arrest, interrogation, trial, prison, labor camp. The human brain possesses a unique ability to adapt, and this ability is far greater than we can imagine in ordinary life.

I did not think about death at all, because I did not believe in it. I did not live in permanent fear, but I had a very strange sensation: An extremely heightened sense of danger. The organism is in a general state of tension which does not exist in normal life. I was always on my guard, but the main thing is that I would not have survived without the belief, the absolute conviction that good would triumph over evil. Nothing could convince me that Bolshevism — the plague of the 20th century — would reign unchecked in Russia. That could not happen: I was one of a huge number of people, where, in the face of death, the whole gamut of human behavior was revealed more clearly than ever before.

People always want to draw a specific conclusion based on their own experience. And this was my conclusion: There is a human virtue which is called strength of will. I realized what a great, unbending force that is, if even the terrible Gulag machine could not extinguish it. This is why I am absolutely convinced in the victory of good over evil. I believe this, because that extremely harsh and tragic repression and lawlessness persuaded me of the value of man, and of the dignity of his spirit and mind.

The very atmosphere of our age arouses great alarm for the fate of Russia and her jewel — mankind. Each of us is responsible for the future. Because of this responsibility, I cannot be silent.

Some may say that the Gulag is a forgotten part of history, and that we do not need reminding of it. But I have witnessed monstrous crimes. It is not too late to talk about them and reveal them for what they were; on the contrary, it is absolutely essential.

It is extremely important for my pictures to serve as a reminder to the people, as part of their education, and as a tribute to the memory of the more than 50 million who died as a result of one of the harshest acts of political repression in the USSR.

I was utterly convinced that my collection would be shown to the public — but when?

I invited to my studio some fellow artists — who had also fought at the front in the Second World War — and showed them two of the pictures. Their reaction was very threatening, hinting that for this sort of "rubbish" I might end up in Kolyma again — this time for good.

This was 1989; I was given to understand that the time was not yet ripe. The existing censorship policy pursued by exhibition committees would not allow paintings about labor camps to be exhibited in the galleries of the Artists' Union.

The fear of arbitrary reprisals by the NKVD-KGB is firmly entrenched in people's minds, and none of the political changes taking place in the country will quickly change the faith of an extremely deluded people in the idea of a bright future — communism.

It was only in 1993 that my paintings were first shown in a private exhibition in the gallery of the Russian Artists' Union in Orel.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the defeat of fascist Germany, there was a special ceremony in the Turgenev Russian drama theater. And there in the foyer, in front of my exhibition — "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" — two former front-line soldiers and two former Gulag inmates met: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I.

Visitors from the town and the local authorities were at the exhibition, as was Yegor Stroyev himself — governor of Orel oblast and speaker of the Federation Council — who in the presence of all the guests promised financial aid and every assistance in producing a catalog. But he did not keep his word.

Fearing that the pictures may be lost or even destroyed (such suggestions were made), I appealed for sponsors to help take the paintings out of Russia to somewhere in Europe, with a view to saving them and exhibiting them to the general public in art galleries in the West.

The Jamestown Foundation, a not-for-profit organization mainly involved with the former USSR, raised funds to help me take the pictures to a safe place in the United States of America and save them from possible destruction. After six months of hard work, the pictures arrived safely in the USA.

In June 1997, the private exhibition "The Gulag in the Eyes of an Artist" was displayed in the building of the US Congress, and in July in the Russell Senate building in Washington.

From 12 March to 31 December 1999, the exhibition was on display in the National Public Museum of Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.

On September 21, 1999, at a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the Jamestown Foundation, the Foundation's president, William Geimer, presented former US president Ronald Reagan and Russian artist and former Gulag prisoner Nikolai Getman with an award for services and personal contributions to world culture.

I was invited to the opening of all the exhibitions, and was warmly received by the American people.

I remain convinced that the day is not far off when my life's work will be welcomed in Russia. The bright, long awaited day will come when the citizens of Russia will see my forty-year artistic journey. This day is awaited by all the innocent prisoners who perished in Kolyma's serpentine roads, in the mines, the uranium deposits and forest camps, in the hills and along the entire Kolyma highway, which was built on the bones of prisoners.

I knew many of them personally, and knew their fate: In their death throes, their last look begged that the whole story should be told. They could not speak — not even a groan passed their lips — but their eyes spoke volumes.

I dedicate my collection to the memory of those who survived the Gulag and to those who did not return from Stalin's camps.

Light a candle in memory. The living are in need of it more than the dead.

Bow your heads.

Nikolai Getman
7 March 2001