Buried Hopes

Horrors of the past, wasted lives, and remnants of uranium mines and labour camps.  Time is slowly washing away the forgotten history in Kyrgyzstan, and the growing influence of Russia hinders efforts at studying it. There were many citizens of Czechoslovakia amongst the victims of Soviet repressions.

In the spring of 1925, hundreds of Czechoslovaks embarked on a journey of thousands of kilometres to the distant steppes in the Tian Shan promontory. They built a prosperous community in an undeveloped corner of the Soviet empire. They paid a steep price for their success, however, falling prey to diseases, death, and mounting Stalin terror.

A Gulag.cz expedition set out for this region with tumultuous history in August 2024 on the occasion of the approaching 100th anniversary of the Interhelpo cooperative that our fellow countrymen founded in Kyrgyzstan. The names of more than 50 Czechs and Slovaks who fell victims to Soviet repressions have been documented as a result of the expedition. More than two dozen of them were executed instantly during the Stalin era.

The result of the expedition is a documentary that maps the search for traces of terror as well as encounters and conversations with the Czechs’ descendants, witnesses, and local experts on the backdrop of Kyrgyz towns and exotic landscape.

Where did our compatriots die? What can be found in Kyrgyz archives, and what is the local memory of the Soviet terror? The dark past of the Soviet Union still holds many questions to which we should seek answers and multitudes of wasted lives we should never forget.