Gulag

From Metapedia

Gulag (from the Russian Главное Управление Лагерей, "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey", "The Chief Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps") was the branch of the Soviet internal police and security service (the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD and later the KGB) that dealt with forced labor camps. Exposed 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 an extension of earlier labor camps (katorgas) operated in Siberia as a part of penal system in Imperial Russia, which became quickly overflown with the enemies of the people, a conveniently fluid designation under Bolsheviks' totalitarian regime. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. One such name, Solovki, turned synonym for torture after 1918. New camps were constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, including facilities in Moscow and Leningrad.

Officially the Gulag was established on April 25 1930 as the "Ulag" by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930, and was renamed into Gulag in November, and terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960, after the MVD was officially eliminated by the order 44-16 of Presidium of Supreme Council USSR, to reemerge as the KGB.

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 this 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 mid-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, Peschanlag). These are vast and uninhabited regions with no roads or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were also spread throughout the entire Soviet Union, including 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, the inmates were forced to work in inhuman conditions. In spite of the brutal 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%. Many megalomaniac projects of the Soviet rapid industrialization of the late 1930s, war-time and post-war periods were built by this slave labor.

A unique form of Gulag camps called sharashka (шарашка) were in fact secret research laboratories, where anonymous scientists were developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.

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 the authors-performers (known as the bards) such as Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Alexander Gorodnitsky, none of whom incidentally ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag.

Chilling memoirs of Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg, among other books became a symbol of defiance in the Soviet totalitarian society.

External links

The Gulag: Communism's Penal Colonies Revisited