Gulag

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Gulag (from the Russian Главное Управление Лагерей, "Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey", "The Chief Directorate of Collective Labor Camps") was the branch of the Soviet internal police and security service (the NKVD and later on the KGB) that dealt with concentration camps. Made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, the Gulag system was the stage of perhaps the worst atrocities and crimes ever committed by a country towards its own citizens.

The Gulag was a natural extension of earlier labor camps (katorgas) operated in Siberia as part of penal system in Imperial Russia. The Gulag as such was first established in the late 1920s, and some parts of it exist up until the present day. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave the Soviet government control over prisoner of war camps with a capacity of 2 million which were surrendered by the Germans. Many of the prisons of the Czarist regime had been emptied by local actions during the Revolution and their guards discharged. The Bolsheviks had instituted the policy of Red Terror against the class enemy among who they included their former political allies on the left. This resulted in demand for prison space. Isolation of the political prisoners was desirable to cut off Western support for them.

The first major part of what became the Gulag was the Solovetsky concentration camp which used the facilities of the Solovetsky monestary which along with the Petromisk monestary and the Kholmogory monestary. These properties were confiscated from the church and given to the Cheka or GPU in 1923. Together they make up the northern camps of special significance, Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya, or SLON. The methods of the Solovetsky camp, developed mainly by Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a former prisoner, first made guard, then administrator, were known as the Solovetsky model and were adapted by Stalin as the template for the rest of the Gulag system. The key to Frenkel's system was rationing food according to how healthy the inmates were and how hard they worked.

The plan gradually developed that the prison camps would be self supporting using the slave labor of the prisoners. The camps, located in Karelia were in timber rich country so was the major economic activity. The first big project built using prisoner labor was the White Sea Canal, a pet project of Stalins, stretching from the White Sea to St. Petersburg. The project required excavation of 141 miles of canal 12 feet deep using only hand tools and such equipment the concentration camp inmates were able to construct for themselves. Stalin expected the canal to be complete in two years. At great sacrifice it was, during 1931 to 1933.

Under the former Czarist regime the resources of vast areas in the far north and far east of Russia remained undeveloped. Following the Revolution the leaders of the Soviet Union used the resources of the expanding concentration camp system to open up undeveloped areas. First was the Komi area, first explored by the Ukhtinskaya Expedition in 1929. This group including the geologist, N. Tikhonovich, a prisoner, traveled from Arkhangelsk east to the mouth of the Pehora River then upstream to the then village of Syktyvkar. This area became intensively developed and hosted an extensive network of labor camps, known for a time as Ukhtpechlag, linked by a railroad which extended northeast from more developed lands through the cities of Ukhta and Kedrovyi Shor to the coal mining camp of Vorkuta.

In the far east the gold mining camps of Kolyma were opened upstream from the port of Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk, in the Kolyma river valley. Vislag, built by Eduard Berzin, first administrator of Dalstroi, Far Northern Constuction Administration, beginning in 1926, was the first camp built in the region by the OGPU. Conditions were very harsh with bitter Siberian cold. Stalin and the politburo took an active interest in the Kolyma project as sales of gold was an important source of foreign exchange.

The Gulag is most widely associated with the late 1930s when, fed by Stalin's Great Purges, it incarcerated more than 30 million people at one point or another. Robert Conquest estimated that in 1931-32, there were approximately 2 million prisoners in the camps, in 1933-35 5 million, and in 1935-36 6 million.1 During World War II, the camp population may have been as much as 10-12 million, or 5% of the total population. The evidence supporting these statistics is disputed.

The Communist leadership continued to sponsor Gulag for a while after Stalin's death, and it is estimated that a total of 7 to 10 million people have been killed by this system. Large numbers of prisoners began to be released in the late 1950's after Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and his violent regime.

The majority of Gulag camps have been positioned in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia - the best known are Bereglag near Kolyma, Gorlag near Norilsk) and in the south-eastern parts of Russia (mainly in Kazakhstan - Luglag, Steplag, Pechanlag). These are vast and uninhabited regions with no roads or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (like timber). However, camps were also spread throughout the entire Soviet Union, including in the European parts of Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. There were also several camps located outside of the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Mongolia, which were under the direct control of the Gulag.

In order to mine, process and ship resources, inmates were forced to work in inhuman conditions. In spite of the fearsome climate, they were almost never adequately clothed, fed, or given medical treatment, nor were they given any means to combat the lack of vitamins that led to nutritional diseases such as scurvy. In some camps, the fatality rate during the first months was as high as 80%.

A unique form of Gulag camps called sharashka (шарашка) were in fact secret research institutes, where anonymous scientists were developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research. The results of this research were usually published under the names of prominent Soviet scientists, and the real authors have been forgotten. However, during World War II, and in the late 1950s, several brilliant prison-scientists and engineers were freed from the Gulags and became famous.

The tragedy caused by the Gulag system has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore. Many songs by people such as Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Alexander Gorodnitsky, none of whom incidentally ever served time in the Gulag camps, deal with life inside the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn's books became a symbol of defiance in the Soviet totalitarian society.

Contents

References

  • Robert Conquest: The Great Terror, 1968, look on ABE for this.
  • Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, May 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0195055802; trade paperback, Oxford, September, 1991, ISBN 0195071328
  • Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, April, 2003, hardcover, 677 pages, ISBN 0767900561; trade paperback, Bantam Dell, 11 May, 2004, 736 pages, ISBN 1400034094 Introduction online
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn aka Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an Experiment in Literary Investigation", HarperCollins, 1974, hardcover, ISBN 0060139145; many other editions, latest editions have additional material regarding fall of the Soviet Union.
  • Paul R. Gregory, Valery Lazarev and V. V. Lazarev, Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, Hoover Institute Press, October, 2003, trade paperback, 356 pages, ISBN 0817939423
  • Jacques Rossi, William A. Burhans, William Burnhans, Robert Conquest, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps, Paragon House, October, 1989, hardcover, ISBN 1557780242
  • Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, September, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087

See also

History of the Soviet Union

External links


References

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