There were hundreds of thousands of them and they were crowded everywhere. An unnecessary and corrupting image of Soviet socialist society. The new post-war Russian man is a winner after all. A young muscular hero with a sparkling gaze boldly looking towards a happy future.
What about war invalids? How will the motherland repay them? The Russian way. From the point of view of the comrades, they are not even human anymore. Just used and no longer needed waste. It has to go somewhere.
1948 is a year of great cleaning. The Soviet Socialist Fatherland will celebrate the birthday of its leader and landlord. Everywhere must be clean. Gotta get rid of all THAT crap. It spoils the festive atmosphere and the building of bright tomorrows. Tens of thousands of war invalids disappeared from Soviet cities in a single night. Some were shot, some were taken to gulags for the disabled.
Siberia is big enough and can be used as a carpet under which it is possible to sweep THAT crap. Gulags became the final station of their lives. They were built on the far northern islands for many war invalids. Solovka, Kirillov, Peroslav and Valaam.
Dehumanization was also ended by the official removal of personal documents. Relatives, if they were still interested in the fate of their loved ones, were not allowed to visit. Out of sight, out of mind. Simple.
The big cleanup continued. Not everything was successful the first time. Between 1951 and 1953 another half million difficult and unnecessary were taken away. Most of them were war invalids who could not be cleared in the first wave.
Hundreds of thousands survived in the inadequate conditions of gulags for the disabled, the image of a society of corrupting, once human beings. Inadequate accommodation, lack of staff and harsh conditions gradually and quickly completed the cleaning.
At the end of the 1950s, when relatives had the opportunity to visit their loved ones for the first time, only 1,500 people survived in the last gulag, Valaam, located in a former monastery.
This is how the celebrated winners of the Patriotic War ended ingloriously, in the form of unnecessary war invalids, transformed in the Russian mind into unsuitable waste polluting Soviet cities. So their Soviet homeland and Russian mentality took care of them.
