IT’S A GULAG LIFE The 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 tsarist use

Three Big Arrest Periods  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 , 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”

: 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 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 million people vs. 11ish million in concentration camps)  Both had labor camps; some Nazi camps were purely for extermination purposes  Gulags: (Stalin’s Death)  Nazi Camps: (End of WWII/Death of Hitler)

Siberia

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