Five European Countries Propose to Add Birch Bark Letters From Soviet Gulags to UNESCO Register

Five European countries - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine - have submitted a joint appeal to UNESCO to add the so-called "birch bark letters" to the Memory of the World Register. These are messages written on the bark of a tree sent to their families by repressed prisoners of Soviet political camps.

This is stated on the website of the Ministry of Culture of Estonia. 

According to the report, the list will include 148 documents for the period from 1940 to 1965, which are stored in 31 memory institutions.  It is noted that among the surviving documents from the Soviet gulags are letters on birch bark, as well as other artifacts created by political prisoners or deportees.

Birch bark from field elm trees was the only way to write letters to loved ones, not just because paper was unavailable in Soviet camps, but also because correspondence, with few exceptions, was prohibited. Hence, most messages to relatives were smuggled out of Gulag areas.

Mostly, totalitarian regime prisoners in Gulags attempted to learn about the fate of their loved ones or greet them on important occasions through 'birch bark letters.' Occasionally, inmates managed to create notebooks from tree bark and keep diaries with notes about life in political camps.

UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' Register encompasses globally significant documentary heritage, forming part of the broader World Memory Programme, ensuring preservation and accessibility of documentary heritage. The Register currently lists 494 items.

Gulag, or the 'Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,' was a massive system of forced labor camps in the USSR, used by the dictatorship to suppress political opponents, dissidents, and punish so-called 'enemies of the state.'

These camps first appeared in the 1920s as a source of cheap labor intended to 'contribute' to the technological and industrial development of the USSR. However, soon, dissenters against Kremlin actions - Ukrainian intellectuals, dekulakized peasants, artists, poets, actors, political and cultural figures, were sent to Gulags.

Most Gulags were strategically located in isolated regions of the USSR, sometimes very close to the Arctic Circle, contributing to the mortality rate among unlawfully imprisoned individuals. They were provided with minimal food and clothing, and basic human rights were regularly violated.

Throughout the decades of the Kremlin's repressive machine, at least 20 million people were repressed in Gulags. According to various estimates, the death toll ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 million people.