The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals, along with political and religious dissenters.
The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.
Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The Gulag also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.
Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.
For an excellent account of this period in history, please visit Anne Applebaum's site. A contributor to the Tovarisch film, her account won a Pulitzer Prize for its harrowing and accurate portrayal of life in the Gulags.
Showing posts with label gulag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gulag. Show all posts
Monday, 6 November 2006
Monday, 25 September 2006
A Gulag World?
Hi all, Tom here. I'd like to ask visitors who have direct or indirect experience from the gulags if stories from Iraq about torture, interrogations, extra-territorial renditions and the like are familiar, disturbing, frightening...?
As I'm American (the only Yank on the team here), I guess I'm curious. What my country is doing--is it the same as what happened in the U.S.S.R.? The Washington Post published an article centered on an interview with Vladimir Bukovsky about interrogations in the Soviet era-- here's the link. How true is this?
I'll probably write more on this later--I don't want this to become the dominant issue of this weblog, but I am curious about this.
Thanks for your input.
As I'm American (the only Yank on the team here), I guess I'm curious. What my country is doing--is it the same as what happened in the U.S.S.R.? The Washington Post published an article centered on an interview with Vladimir Bukovsky about interrogations in the Soviet era-- here's the link. How true is this?
I'll probably write more on this later--I don't want this to become the dominant issue of this weblog, but I am curious about this.
Thanks for your input.
Monday, 21 August 2006
Remembering The Gulags Through Art
While searching for information about other survivors of the Gulags I came across the story of an artist who spent 8 years in Stalin's prisons. Nikolai Getman was arrested in 1945 for the crime of meeting with other artists - one of them drew a caricature of Stalin and all of them were arrested. Nikolai, after his trial in 1946 was sent to Taishetlag in Russia's Irkutsk Oblast.
While Nikolai's story echos many that I have read, it is the images on his site that made me feel I had to include his tale as part of Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead.
As an artist Nikolai felt that he should make a record of the Gulag, and upon his release in 1953 he started a 40 year project, in secret, to create a series of paintings and sculptures.
The images on both pages on the site that I found are both moving and disturbing, and are accompanied by the artist's own recollections.
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Suggested Reading
Garri S. Urban: Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead This is the true and striking story by a Jewish doctor of his struggle for survival when caught in 1939 between the evils of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia. After facing death from frontier patrols, a firing squad and torture, Urban arrives at a position of considerable power in Soviet society in a medical post. He risks his life again, fighting epidemics. These fascinating memoirs give a very rare glimpse of the Soviet Union in wartime, particularly into the exotic life of the Moiscow elite, where beautiful women, diplomats and spies mingled at parties and sex was used as a method of recruiting agents.
Ruth Kluger: Landscape of Memory - a Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Ruth Kluger is one of the child-survivors of the Holocaust. In 1942 at the age of 11, she was deported to the Nazi "family camp" Theresienstadt with her mother. They would move to two other camps before the war ended. This book is the story of Ruth's life. Of a childhood spent in the nazi camps and her refusal to forget the past as an adult in America. Not erasing a single detail, not even the inconvienient ones, she writes frankly about the troubled relationship with her mother even through their years of internment and her determination not to forgive and absolve the past.
Sir Martin Gilbert: The Holocaust A very thorough account of the experience of the Jews of Europe during World War II. This title gives a virtual day-by-day account, in men and women's own words, of the horrifying events of the Holocaust - the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race.
Anne Applebaum: Gulag The Pulitzer Prize winning narrative of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps. Based on archives, interviews and new research the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system.
Jean-Francois Steiner: Treblinka This is without a doubt one of the better books about the death camps. You will become intimately acquainted with Treblinka and the Nazis who ran it. Steiner's book is well-written and does justice to the horror.
Richard Overy: Russia's War The astounding events of 1941-45 in which the Soviet Union, after initial catastrophes, destroyed Hitler's Third Reich and shaped European history for the next fifty years.
Willy Peter Reese: A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944 The haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead.
Slavomir Rawicz: The Long Walk The story of a young Polish cavalry officer who was arrested by the Russians, tortured and sentenced to 25 years forced labour. His escape and journey across the Gobi desert to Tibet and freedom.- Rodric Braithwaite: Moscow 1941 Sunday Times review - ‘a wide-ranging and excellent account...Braithwaite never shirks the terrible truths'.
Suggested Films
Schindlers List
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.