IT’S A GULAG LIFEThe USSR’s Prison System

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)

Siberia

Siberia

Siberia

Let’s go here!