Exhibition "Rostislav Gorelov. Camp etudes" Automatic translate

In 1933, 28 young people were arrested in Moscow and the Moscow region. They were accused of participation in a certain counter-revolutionary fascist-terrorist group “Union of Russian Patriots”. Among the 28 convicts is Rostislav Gorelov, a 17-year-old student of the Polygraphic Institute, who “called for” the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime, the destruction of collective farms, the murder of Stalin, the leadership of the CPSU (b) and members of the Soviet government.

Gorelov was named a terrorist and was sent to the Temnikovsky forced labor camp for two years. Gorelov was rehabilitated, on an equal basis with other convicts in a group case, on October 15, 1956.

But what the young prisoners saw and experienced - sudden arrest, pressure during the investigation, violence, communication with criminals, backbreaking work in logging, hunger, illness and death - were imprinted in the memory and did not let go all their life.

Forty years later, Gorelov writes memoirs, creates plot pictures based on them, studies the case in the archive, wants to make portraits of prisoners from investigative photographs.

A series of paintings by Rostislav Gorelov from the collection of the Museum of the History of the GULAG is dedicated to episodes from the life of a person subjected to repression. Here is a collective image in typical circumstances: arrest, interrogation, prison, stage, life in camp barracks, infirmary. Gorelov’s works are of particular value because they are based on the memories of a direct participant in the events.

Excerpts from these memories are presented in the exhibition in the form of quotations accompanying the paintings. “The main thing in the camp is food. At the entrance, bread is given out for the whole day, on the first three days upon arrival, the full norm of precious bread is eight hundred grams. Usually this is a piece to which a small appendage is pinned with a white-pink torch. And here it was considered a great success to get a hump, since biting off a small piece of it, it was easier to swallow a larger amount of burda and thus trick the stomach, stretching the crumbs for the whole day. It was worse for those who came across pieces of pulp, it was swallowed quickly and imperceptibly, it was not possible to stretch it for the whole day, ”says Rostislav Gorelov’s quote to one of his works.

At the exhibition you can see the materials of the Gorelov case, as well as works from the collection of the International Memorial, made by Gorelov during the years of imprisonment (the International Memorial was entered by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation into the register provided for in clause 10 of article 13.1 FZ of 12.01.1996 N 7-FZ "On NGOs").

The exhibition will run until September 25, 2020 and is available with an entrance ticket to the museum.

For reference:

Rostislav Gavrilovich Gorelov (1916 - 2004) - Soviet painter, graphic artist, representative of the socialist realism genre, master of industrial landscape and genre-historical painting. Studied at the art department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. Arrested on December 28, 1933, together with a group of fellow students. He was convicted by a troika of the OGPU Mission in the Moscow Region as a minor to two years in forced labor camps (ITL). In 1935 he was released early due to the petition of his father, and in 1956 he was rehabilitated together with other convicts in a common case. Since 1961 he taught at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Lenin. Participated in the design of the memorial complex on Poklonnaya Gora. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, with his father Gabriel Gorelov and his brother Yuri Gorelov.