Nikolai Getman

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Nikolai Ivanovich Getman (also Mykola Ivanovych Hetman) was a Ukrainian-born Russian artist, born in 1917 in Kharkiv. He showed artistic talent early, studied at Kharkiv Art College, and became a professional artist after graduation. He served in the Red Army during World War II. In 1946 he was arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda after a friend drew a caricature of Stalin on a cigarette box, and he spent eight years in gulag camps in Siberia and on the Kolyma.

During his time in the camps, Getman planned to document camp life through paintings. After his release in 1953, he continued to paint, often in secret, because openly depicting gulag horrors could bring punishment. He ultimately created about 50 paintings showing the harsh conditions, brutal climate, and the fate of the prisoners.

Getman’s work was not shown publicly until 1993 in Orel. In 1995, a major exhibition in Orel opened with Getman present and in the presence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1997, his Gulag paintings were exhibited in Washington, D.C. Earlier in his career he worked in Magadan and helped organize the Magadan Artists’ Union; he moved to Orel in 1976, where he had a studio and painted portraits of political figures. He exhibited across the Soviet Union and internationally.

Getman believed his paintings fulfilled a duty to remind people of the crimes of the Gulag and the suffering of its prisoners. A book featuring his paintings was published in 2001 by the Jamestown Foundation. Nikolai Getman died in August 2004 in Orel, Russia, at about age 86 or 87.