Ibraim Pashi’s Story “Şeytan Esirliğinde” and the Hell Created by The Soviet Union on the Earth: Gulag Camps

Abstract

The concentration camps used by the Nazi government in Germany to imprison political opponents since 1933 were places designed to systematically murder millions of people. The Gulag system had similar characteristics to the concentration camps of the Nazi Germany. The Gulag camps, described as “hell on the earth”, were labor camps in the Soviet Union where prisoners of war, political and ordinary criminals were exiled and left to die, and all prisoners were forced to work. Hundreds of Turkish intellectuals were sent to these camps, often without justification, and forced to work under harsh conditions and many of them lost their lives. In Crimea, in 1944, many people were exiled for invalid reasons, while intellectual figures were declared “public enemies” and exiled to these labor and prison camps. Crimean Tatar writer Ibraim Pashi draws the dark panorama of the period by examining these concentration camps in his story “Şeytan Esirliğinde”. In the story, the gaps that the Soviet regime created in people’s lives and that were impossible to compensate, and the struggles of the intellectuals who were lost in this cause are mentioned. One of the important facts in the story is the reflection of certain periods and events in the author’s life. In this study, İbraim Pashi’s story “Şeytan Esirliğinde” is examined in terms of the author-work relationship, and important facts that are a source for history and shed light on the mentioned periods are analyzed in the work.

Ethical committee approval is not required for this research.

The author declares no conflicts of interest in this study.

This research received no external funding.