THE GULAG CAMPS
The term “GULAG” is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei, meaning Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps. This was the institution which ran the Soviet camps. Nowadays, the word has come to mean a cruel injustice, slave labour, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, and the early and unnecessary deaths. All because of the tyranny of the Stalin era.
A system of forced-labour camps were built throughout the Soviet Union under the order of Stalin’s secret police, OGPU, to fulfill Stalin’s plan to industrialise and modernise the country. The inmates that filled the GULAG were criminals, such robbers, rapists, murderers, and thieves, who served their sentences in the GULAG instead of prison. However, not all housed in the GULAG were guilty: imprisoned were the kulaks during the years of collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, Stalin’s political enemies caught during the purges, as well as ordinary people paying for arbitrary and faults such as lateness and unexcused absences from work.
A combination of rampant violence, extreme temperatures, hard labour, inadequate food rations, and unsanitary conditions contributed to the extremely high death rates among the prisoners of the camp. Figures show an estimated total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947, however the true figures remain unknown.
A system of forced-labour camps were built throughout the Soviet Union under the order of Stalin’s secret police, OGPU, to fulfill Stalin’s plan to industrialise and modernise the country. The inmates that filled the GULAG were criminals, such robbers, rapists, murderers, and thieves, who served their sentences in the GULAG instead of prison. However, not all housed in the GULAG were guilty: imprisoned were the kulaks during the years of collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, Stalin’s political enemies caught during the purges, as well as ordinary people paying for arbitrary and faults such as lateness and unexcused absences from work.
A combination of rampant violence, extreme temperatures, hard labour, inadequate food rations, and unsanitary conditions contributed to the extremely high death rates among the prisoners of the camp. Figures show an estimated total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947, however the true figures remain unknown.
GULAG locations across the Soviet Union
Living in the GULAG
Living in the GULAG camps had been brutal and violent. Many survivors of the GULAG tell their constant feelings of fear, embarrassment and degradation while living.
In the GULAGs were solitary confinement cell, or otherwise known as an odinochka. This is where prisoners would sleep. The cells were very small and suffocating with no windows. A barrel substituted a bathroom, which is very unhygienic. There were no proper bed, only planks, and there was no blankets provided. To sleep without pain, they would have to lie on their right side with their left knee pushed against their chest because to lie on their back or their belly causes excessive suffering. |
Odinochka
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A full ration of food given to the prisoners had barely provided enough for survival. Additionally, the amount of food in a meal decreased if a prisoner failed to fulfil their standard work load. If a prisoner was consistently unsuccessful in achieving their work quota, then they would slowly starve until they died. Author Varlam Shalamov described the conditions in his novel, Dry Rations:
“Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup
would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as
slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been
hungry for too long.”
“Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup
would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as
slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been
hungry for too long.”
Prisoners of the GULAG working
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Working in the GULAGPrisoners of the GULAG camps were engaged in a variety of exhausting physical work that was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. Prisoners might spend their days chopping trees with handsaws and axes or digging at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes. Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful and fatal lung diseases from inhalation of ore dust.
During non-working hours, prisoners lived in a camp zone which was overcrowded, smelly and poorly heated, surrounded by a fence or barbed wire and overlooked by armed guards in watch towers. |
The GULAG started to dissipate after Stalin’s death in 1953. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were reprieved from 1953 to 1957 and is now officially disbanded. All that remains are memories of cruelty and hardship.