Remember Gulag

Originally named Vacation in Gulag, Remember Gulag is a video slot by Nolimit City that we at GMBLRS – owners, editors and writers – decided not to review. The history of unimaginable atrocities committed in Gulags, resulting in immense suffering, an estimated 2.6 million deaths and millions more of affected families cannot be simply overlooked. There is nothing fond to remember of, nor does anyone, whose grandmother, grandfather, parents or other relatives were among the deported, need reminding of the cruelty.

Instead of our usual full review, we decided to keep the game page but fill it with information for our readers and members that will allow them to learn about the history of Gulags as well as find sources where more in-detail reporting and depictions can be found. Such were the atrocities that to this day Russia is keeping the archives and records locked bar for a brief open period in the early 1990s as it would demonstrate the terror in Gulags.

Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev

Gulag – Information And Historical Sources

For a general overview regarding Gulags, I recommend the Wikipedia entry. It will give readers a summary with some rudimentary details about the history of Gulags, starting from the end of WWI to their final closure.

A more in-depth look at life in Gulags with authentic witness statements on audio and documentaries can be found at GulagHistory.org, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and George Mason University.

For those wanting to read a very detailed history of the camps, we highly recommend Gulag Archipelago by a Soviet dissident, namely Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Written over 10 years mainly in the 1960s, it took until 1989 for the 3-part book to be approved for publishing.

A virtual museum can be found at Gulag.online with an interactive map of all known or recorded camps (might not be fully complete).

My personal connection to the history of Gulags

A total of 22 of my extended family were deported to various Gulags after WWII and only 3 returned alive. Roughly 15% of the Transylvanian Saxon population were rounded up in January 1945 and stuffed into cattle train carriages for a weeks-long journey to either what is today Ukraine or Ural or even deeper into Siberia. Of the three that returned, two were released because they were deemed terminally sick and of no further use as the Soviets liked to keep the official number of deaths as low as possible. Needless to say that many never survived the arduous journey back home.

• My grandfather (father’s side) ended up in Gera, East Germany and became an alcoholic for the rest of his life, forever struggling to forget his time in the Gulag.
• My great aunt (mother’s side) ended up in Vienna, Austria with advanced typhoid and weighing just 34 kg. Throughout her four years in the Gulag, she was raped not 100s of times, it was 1000s of times as she was young and pretty. Something the guards/soldiers loved to keep in separate barracks for their “entertainment”. I will spare you the details she told me about her horrific experience. She survived, heavily scarred for the rest of her life.

The third family member was my grandmother (mother’s side). When talking about her experience, she considered herself “lucky” as she was a cook and a good one at that. Preparing meals for the guards/soldiers meant that she was raped only occasionally and overall treated somewhat better. She was one of the last to return, making it back to our home village in 1950.

My people, the Transylvanian Saxons, were just a fraction of those deported to Gulags. Millions and millions of other families, including Russian and other nationalities, went through a similar course of events, be it the grandparents, great-grandparents, parents, sisters, brothers, etc.

Nolimit City and Remember Gulag

Nolimit City is known for its edgy, at times even macabre slot designs that are meant as a shock-and-awe experience for volatility, visuals and gameplay. Mental and Tombstone R.I.P. are just two of the examples. We, ourselves, are big fans of most of their creations to date. Many would say though that the designs are increasing in so-called edginess, pushing boundaries to the point where some casino operators refused to list selected titles.

However, in my opinion, with Remember Gulag they went a step too far with their “no limit” mentality. The well-documented atrocities committed in Gulags should have been an early red flag for the designers. But apparently, the millions of people suffering in the forced labour camps, the barbaric torture practices, the systemic raping of female prisoners as well as the grieving of countless families who lost their relatives did not convince the Nolimit City team to abstain from creating a slot that will no doubt make them millions in profit over its lifetime.

More recently, they seemed to have gotten some doubts as they hastily renamed it from Vacation in Gulag to Remember Gulag in the last weeks before the release. Not that it justifies in any way to profit on the back of the millions of people affected by deportation to the camps. A rushed donation to Ukraine in support of their current war against Russia is surely commendable but cannot be a means to whitewash their ignorance about the sensitive matter.

We at GMBLRS tried to engage Nolimit City in a discussion and have written emails to various contacts as well as their general email address, only to be completely ignored with no answer received in three weeks. The policy seemingly is to rather stick the head in the sand, pretending to not see or hear anything and wait for the “storm” to blow over. We expected at least some empathy or respect for the victims but, sadly, came out empty handed.

We can only hope that one of their next releases won’t be Remember Auschwitz. A member in a different casino forum posted maybe the most fitting wording and with that an apt ending to our post: “I just see NLC as a provider that has absolutely no moral or ethical compass…”.

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