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Gulag: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Gulag
The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for Glávnoye upravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh lageréy, which translates to Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps, yet the full official name of the agency changed several times. The term was not often used in Russian, either officially or colloquially, where the predominant terms were the camps and the zone, usually singular, for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term correctional labour camp was suggested for official use by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the session of the 27th of July 1929. Even more broadly, Gulag has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the meat-grinder: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths. Western authors use the term Gulag to denote all the prisons and internment camps in the Soviet Union, and the term's contemporary usage is at times notably not directly related to the USSR, such as in the expression North Korea's Gulag for camps operational today.
The Man Who Invented Starvation
One of the Gulag system founders was Naftaly Frenkel, who in 1923 was arrested for illegally crossing borders and smuggling and sentenced to 10 years hard labor at Solovki, which later came to be known as the first camp of the Gulag. While serving his sentence he wrote a letter to the camp administration detailing a number of productivity improvement proposals including the infamous system of labor exploitation whereby the inmates food rations were to be linked to their rate of production, a proposal known as nourishment scale. This notorious you-eat-as-you-work system would often kill weaker prisoners in weeks and caused countless casualties. The letter caught the attention of a number of high communist officials including Genrikh Yagoda, and Frenkel soon went from being an inmate to becoming a camp commander and an important Gulag official. His proposals saw widespread adoption in the Gulag system. The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions, and because of its principle of correction by forced labor, it quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of corrective labor camps, the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the Gulag, was a secret decree from the Sovnarkom of the 11th of July 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of the Politburo meeting of the 27th of June 1929. The Gulag was officially established on the 25th of April 1930, as the GULAG by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated the 7th of April 1930. It was renamed as the GULAG in November of that year.
The abbreviation GULAG stands for Glávnoye upravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh lageréy, which translates to Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps. The full official name of the agency changed several times during its existence.
When was the Gulag system officially established?
The Gulag was officially established on the 25th of April 1930, as the GULAG by the OGPU order 130/63. It was renamed as the GULAG in November of that year.
How many people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953?
A 1993 study of archival Soviet data estimates 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. The tentative historical consensus is that between 1.6 million and 1.76 million perished as a result of their detention.
Who founded the Gulag system and what was their proposal?
One of the Gulag system founders was Naftaly Frenkel, who wrote a letter detailing a productivity improvement proposal known as nourishment scale. This system linked inmates food rations to their rate of production and caused countless casualties.
When was the Gulag system officially abolished?
The Gulag system was officially abolished on the 25th of January 1960 when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Nikita Khrushchev. This occurred six years after Khrushchev was elected First Secretary.
During the Great Purge of 1937-38, mass arrests caused another increase in inmate numbers, with hundreds of thousands arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the multiple passages of the notorious Article 58 of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of counterrevolutionary activities. Under NKVD Order No. 00447, tens of thousands of Gulag inmates were executed in 1937-38 for continuing counterrevolutionary activities. Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased more than eight times, and the number of prisoners with high education increased five times. It resulted in their increased share in the overall composition of the camp prisoners. Among the camp prisoners, the number and share of the intelligentsia was growing at the quickest pace. Distrust, hostility, and even hatred for the intelligentsia was a common characteristic of the Soviet leaders. Information regarding the imprisonment trends and consequences for the intelligentsia derive from the extrapolations of Viktor Zemskov from a collection of prison camp population movements data. In 1931 alone, 1,803,392 people were exiled during the dekulakisation process, and although these massive relocation processes were successful in transferring a large potential free forced labor work force to places where it was needed, that is about all it was successful in doing. All of the special settlers, as the Soviet government referred to them, lived on starvation level rations, and as a result, many people starved to death in the camps, and anyone who was healthy enough to escape tried to do just that.
The War And The Death Toll
After the German invasion of Poland that marked the start of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political and anti-state crimes in the USSR in 1939-41 was 211,106. Approximately 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the Polish Defensive War. Almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered or sent to Gulag. Of the 10,000-12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940-41, most prisoners of war, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. During the Great Patriotic War, Gulag populations declined sharply because of a steep rise in mortality in 1942-43. In the winter of 1941, a quarter of the Gulag's population died of starvation. GULAG: a History, Anne Applebaum 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941-43, from a combination of their harsh working conditions and the famine caused by the German invasion. This period accounts for about half of all Gulag deaths, according to Russian statistics. In 1943, the term katorga works was reintroduced. They were initially intended for Nazi collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners were also sentenced to katorga works. Prisoners sentenced to katorga works were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime, and many of them perished.
The Camp Economy And The War Effort
Until World War II, the Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet camp economy. Right before the war, forced labor provided 46.5% of the nation's nickel, 76% of its tin, 40% of its cobalt, 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25.3% of its timber. And in preparation for war, the NKVD put up many more factories and built highways and railroads. The Gulag quickly switched to the production of arms and supplies for the army after fighting began. At first, transportation remained a priority. In 1940, the NKVD focused most of its energy on railroad construction. This would prove extremely important when the German advance into the Soviet Union started in 1941. In addition, factories converted to produce ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Moreover, the NKVD gathered skilled workers and specialists from throughout the Gulag into 380 special colonies which produced tanks, aircraft, armaments, and ammunition. Despite its low capital costs, the camp economy suffered from serious flaws. Actual productivity almost never matched estimates: the estimates proved far too optimistic. Scarcity of machinery and tools plagued the camps, and the tools that the camps did have quickly broke. The Eastern Siberian Trust of the Chief Administration of Camps for Highway Construction destroyed 94 trucks in just three years. But the greatest problem was that forced labor was less efficient than free labor. In fact, prisoners in the Gulag were, on average, half as productive as free laborers in the USSR at the time, which may be partially explained by malnutrition. To make up for this disparity, the NKVD worked prisoners harder than ever. To meet rising demand, prisoners worked longer and longer hours, and on lower food-rations than ever before.
The Post War Repatriation And The Thaw
After World War II, the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies sharply rose again, reaching approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s. When the war ended, as many as two million former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated into the USSR. On the 11th of February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union. One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets. British and United States civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left the Russian Empire and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947. Multiple sources state that Soviet POWs, on their return to the Soviet Union, were treated as traitors. According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag. During and after World War II, freed POWs went to special filtration camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 percent were cleared, and about 8 percent were arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. In 1945 about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated Ostarbeiter, POWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, the major part of the population of these camps were cleared by NKVD and either sent home or conscripted.
The Death Toll And The Final Years
Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million. Mortality in Gulag camps in 1934-40 was 4-6 times higher than average in the Soviet Union. Post-1991 research by historians accessing archival materials brought this range down considerably. A 1993 study of archival Soviet data estimates 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. It was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death, so a combined statistics on mortality in the camps and mortality caused by the camps was higher. The tentative historical consensus is that, of the 18 million people who passed through the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.6 million and 1.76 million perished as a result of their detention, and about half of all deaths occurred between 1941 and 1943 following the German invasion. Timothy Snyder writes that with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. If prisoner deaths from labor colonies and special settlements are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, according to J. Otto Pohl's incomplete data. In her 2018 study, Golfo Alexopoulos attempts to challenge this consensus figure by encompassing those whose life was shortened by the extreme conditions. Alexopoulos concludes that a systematic practice of the Gulag was to release sick prisoners on the verge of death; and that all prisoners who received the health classification invalid, light physical labor, light individualised labor, or physically defective encompassed at least one third of all inmates who passed through the Gulag died or had their lives shortened due to detention in the Gulag in captivity or shortly after release.
The Abolition And The Legacy
Almost immediately after the death of Stalin, the Soviet establishment started to dismantle the Gulag system. A mass general amnesty was granted in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death, but it was only offered to non-political prisoners and political prisoners who had been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. Shortly thereafter, Nikita Khrushchev was elected First Secretary, initiating the processes of de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw, triggering a mass release and rehabilitation of political prisoners. Six years later, on the 25th of January 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labor continues to exist in the Russian Federation, but its capacity is greatly reduced. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands, and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population, informally or formally continues many practices endemic to the Gulag system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation. In the late 2000s, some human rights activists accused authorities of gradual removal of Gulag remembrance from places such as Perm-36 and Solovki prison camp.