Georgy Demidov

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For other uses of "Demidov", see Demidov (disambiguation).

Georgy Demidov (Russian: Гео́ргий Гео́ргиевич Деми́дов) (1908-1987) was a Russian political prisoner and writer.

Born in Saint Petersburg to a working class family, Demidov showed technical and engineering gifts at an early age and was thought to be a future physicist. In 1938, he was arrested in Kharkov, where he was working, after being served a summons for an internal passport check. It was a check that was to last eighteen years. His interrogator threatened to arrest Demidov's wife, and orphan his five-month old daughter. Demidov confessed and was sentenced as a Trotskyist, but did not accuse anyone else, and was sent to corrective labor camps.

For fourteen years he served in the Kolyma region of Siberia, ten in the most brutal of conditions. In 1946, he received a second sentence, after which he sent a telegraph to his wife that was in the form of an official telegraph informing her of his death. In the main camp hospital, Demidov became acquainted and then a friend to a hospital assistant, the future writer Varlam Shalamov.

He wrote several stories on labor camp themes, two of which were published in Novy Mir (1997, Volume 5, pp. 116-145) -- "People Die for Metal" (“Люди гибнут за металл”) and "The Artist Baccilla and his Wonders" ("Художник Бацилла и его шедевр”). Unlike other writers of the camps, Demidov remains comparatively unknown and untranslated.