The gruesome Gulag mosquito punishment
Summer stories about mosquitoes in Russia can be particularly horrific. One of them is related to the Gulag camps, where, due to their geographical location, these insects were especially fierce.
In the ‘Solovetsky’ camp, guards would use mosquitoes as an instrument of sophisticated torture.
"The warden got angry and ordered to put them 'on mosquitoes’," Oleg Volkov, a former Soviet camp prisoner, recalled in his book ‘Diving into Darkness’.
The prisoner, most often naked, was tied to a tree in the dense ‘Solovetsky’ forest, to be literally “eaten” by mosquitoes. If a person survived (and some of the weaker prisoners did not), they were thrown back into the barracks to suffer from the bites that covered their entire body.
Memories of such humiliation can be found in many memoirs of those who visited the camps, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn's ‘The Gulag Archipelago’.
