Post on 14-Dec-2015
GULAG
Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps)
Not a new idea
Prison camps had been used in tsarist Russia
Many Soviet gulags were actually revamped prison camps
many new ones were also made, and they were overcrowded compared to tsaristuse
Three Big Arrest Periods
1. 1930-1933 Campaigns against the “Kulaks” Peasants were arrested, sent to exile, or shot
for being “enemies of the people.” Peasants were required to turn over all grain to
the government—collectivization “Hoarding” grain, or keeping any for yourself,
was seen as anti-Soviet “Kulaks” were “rich” peasants—ones who
owned an extra cow, had a successful crop, or who had a jealous neighbor that turned them in
Between 1930-33, 2,000,000 were exiled to Siberia, 100,000 to gulags
1934: Kirov Affair
Assassination of Sergei Kirov—leader in the Communist party & close to Stalin
Set off mass arrests and executions 40,000 residents of Leningrad were
arrested and sent to prison camps or shot
Called “the Kirov flood”
1937-1938: The Great Terror One of the most brutal times under Stalin Directed at anyone, peasant or leader,
deemed an “enemy of the people” Arrests began with Communist Party
members accused of counter-revolutionary activities, then their family members and the public
During this time 1,575,259 people were arrested, half of them shot (If 700,000 people were shot, that is 1500 a
day during the Great Terror)
Success of the Camps
Gold mined in Siberia helped boost the USSR’s financial status
Russia became an industrialized nation through forced labor, public works projects like the White Sea Canal were built
Other stats you found earlier…
Gulags < or > than Nazi Camps?
Important distinction: Nazi camps were used to exterminate whole groups of people GULAG was used as a weapon to control the country—
all ethnicities, nationalities, and religions were persecuted
Soviet prisoners, if they survived their sentence, could be released at the end of it. This never happened with Nazi camps
More people passed through gulags than Nazi camps (roughly 14-18 million people vs. 11ish million in concentration camps)
Both had labor camps; some Nazi camps were purely for extermination purposes
Gulags: 1930-1953 (Stalin’s Death) Nazi Camps: 1933-1945 (End of WWII/Death of
Hitler)