Press Release, 24.02.2025

Photo: Viktor Antonovich Bulgakov

Past week, the central office of the Yabloko party hosted the premiere screening of the film “Songs of a Forgotten Mine” and also conducted a meeting with its main character, writer and human rights defender Viktor. The film, made during 2022-2024, focuses on the hardest episodes in the life of Viktor Antonovich Bulgakov: two arrests in 1953 and 1959, a three-year prison camp term, and his encounter with Soviet punitive psychiatry. The film, a biography of the human rights defender, is crowned by a story about his work as a deputy in the Moscow City Council during the hectic times of the late 1980s – early 1990s.

As one of the authors of the film, director Grigory Grishin, said, “Songs of a Forgotten Mine” is a film-story about Viktor Bulgakov, composed of his words and imbued with the atmosphere of the time through which he lived.

The protagonist of the film, who turns 90 this year, communicated with the audience not only from the screen. Bulgakov spent more than an hour at the microphone: he read poetry, answered questions from the audience, shared memories and performed songs written at different times in his life.

The author of the idea for the film, Viktor Kogan-Yasny, recalled an episode in Viktor Bulgakov’s political biography, when in the early 1990s he sharply spoke out against the selective application of justice for demonstrative political purposes. Kogan-Yasny, referring to the words of the historian and Soviet dissident Susanna Pechuro, who had introduced them, expressed confidence that if Viktor Bulgakov were given the opportunity, he would change the whole world.

Viktor Bulgakov was arrested on 5 March, 1953. The seventeen-year-old student of the journalism department of Moscow State University, who wrote poetry and played music, was accused of creating a terrorist organisation. If Bulgakov had been eighteen, he would have been shot, but as it was, he was given 25 years of camps and sent to a camp in the Far North in Inta. The mine became the Moscow boy’s new home, and the miner’s code of honour, to which Viktor Bulgakov remained devoted all his life, became his new rules of life.

Chairman of the Yabloko party Nikolai Rybakov said that for him the most valuable thing in the film was the story about how one can survive truly difficult times with the dignity with which Viktor Bulgakov did it.

“I am very grateful to Viktor Antonovich Bulgakov, who came to Yabloko today and gave us all the opportunity to learn about his experience,” Nikolai Rybakov said.

Viktor Bulgakov thanked the creators of the film. According to him, the film talks about many hidden things that need to be thought about.

“The film is very detailed, with reflection, with an expression of not only generally accepted things about the GULAG, but also a reflection how it happened in Russia… This is preserved here. And this, in my opinion, is very good,” the writer said.