Gulag’s

The word “gulag” was originally an acronym of the Russian name Glavnoje upravlenije lagerej (Main Report camps). Designated the institution that governed the huge complex work, transit, crime, criminal, political and children’s camps scattered throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union. However, over time became synonymous with the whole process of the Soviet prison system. Included in each arrest, investigation, transportation, labor, family breakdown, loss of dignity, exile and often, death. To a wider public awareness of the world joined the communist camp in 1972 when a leading Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has published extensive work The Gulag Archipelago. After the disintegration of the red empire followed it dozens of studies and memoirs of former prisoners. Nevertheless, still find millions of people, not only in the former Soviet Union who would most likely deny that the Soviet concentration camps ever existed. And if so, are intended solely for thieves, murderers, Trotskyists, Fascists, hairworms and other criminals. Why so vehemently defend what can not defend? As the examples of mass destruction troublesome individuals and entire populations can best compare the similarities of the two najzvrátenejších ideologies in human history: Communism and Nazism.
Comprehensive scientific work on the history of the gulag in our book market so far lacked. This gap has recently filled a Czech translation of Gulag. A History of American journalist and current wife, incidentally, the Polish defense minister, Anne Applebaum.This truly monumental work was drawn up based on a thorough study of professional literature and memoirs, archival sources and the author’s own historical research.
In the introductory section titled The Birth of the Gulag (pp. 35-128), the author charts the period from 1917 to 1939. The first concentration camp was barely half a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, namely the fourth June 1918, and was intended for the captives of Czech legionnaires. Shortly afterwards, in August 1918, commanded V. I. Lenin in a telegram addressed to the Commissioner of Pensions unleash a “mass terror against the kulaks, priests and bielogvardejcom” who “should be closed to separate concentration camps …” (p. 39). According to the decrees of the Soviet government in spring 1919 was a penal camp for at least 300 people opened in every regional capital.Even then appeared chozraščotu known requirement, so full of self-financing camps should be achieved by using prisoners for forced labor.
After the Russian Civil War concentration camps were canceled, which does not mean that the terror against opponents of the Bolshevik regime ended. Reprisals principally involved members of banned political parties, so called. former people (aristocrats, businessmen, Czarist officials, officers, etc.). and not least of believers of all faiths, who refused to adjust the official atheistic ideology. The need for thorough political isolation “criminals” in 1923 led to a “special purpose camp” on Solovetsky in the White Sea.Arrest “counter-revolutionaries” were there “subject sadizmu and unjust torture of a kind in the Gulag seldom occur in later years …” (p. 51).
Quantitative expansion of Soviet labor camps and crime is linked to the “big breakthrough year” 1929 when communist dictator J. V. Stalin said the conversion program backward agrarian Russia’s industrial power. Funding needed to carry out their megalomaniac plan wanted to get nationalization of private property of farmers.Opponents of collectivization were deported to Soviet security organs vyhnaneckých settlements, or to the gulag, where inhumane conditions to build factories, dams, roads and railways, stínali trees and mined minerals. The most famous symbol of slave labor, however, the building was Bielomorského channel between 1931-1933, which has claimed about two hundred and fifty thousand lives.
Another wave of sprawl is associated with the Gulag so. great purge in the second half of the 30th years, when Stalin in consolidating his power destroyed most of the old Bolshevik cadres. Many former execs ended on the scaffold or in the camps in which they themselves eagerly sent before “class enemies”. However, A. Applebaum rightly points out, the vast majority of victims of repression were nestraníci. Mass arrests were no longer necessary because the life of ordinary zeka (prisoner) in a concentration camp above the Arctic Circle does not exceed one month. Prison carousel machine, therefore, had to wiggle faster and faster. While in 1930 was 179 000 persons camps, on the eve of World War II, their number reached almost two million.
Despite the huge influx of prisoners, however, productivity in work camps, not heat, but, by contrast, fell sharply. Among the convicts were in fact a huge amount of women, children, elders and the disabled. We must not forget that in Soviet camps, as well as in Nazi concentration camps, do not remain purely innocent. Murderers, thieves and other criminals embezzlers, however, in the Soviet prison system a privileged position. They were referred to as “socially close” elements (not damage mode, but of individuals) who can rehabilitate physical work. They therefore entitled to better treatment and a variety of benefits. Criminals, however, any work on the principle of avoiding. If we add to the expenses related to the maintenance and guarding of prisoners, it is clear that the costs of running the camps had to constantly exceed the value of goods produced.
The situation has not much changed after November 1938 when the Gulag administration passed into the hands of an ambitious Lavrentija Beria. With his name is linked to the emergence of special workshops and laboratories for scientists imprisoned, which went down in history under the name šarašky (ulievárne). Their most famous “residents” just to mention a designer Andrei Tupolev aircraft, the designer of rocket engine designer Valentin Glushko, and father of the Soviet aerospace Sergei Koroľova.
Forcing the reader to directly conclude that the main mission of the Gulag was the destruction of human dignity and utter transformation of the independent wheel anonymous individuals in a monstrous machine-style Orwelovho the 1984th Soviet reality, however, outperformed even the most terrifying visions. It proves the second part of the book entitled Living and working in the camps (p. 129-360). A. Applebaum is it focuses on “everyday history” Gulag. From arrest through interviews, court and deported in cattle wagons, through accommodation, meals and work schedules to the dying. The death camps were in fact pervasive. Inmates frequently die as a result of malnutrition and accidents at work. Another succumbed to extreme weather conditions and outbreaks of communicable diseases, which the starved and emaciated people selected relentless toll. Many zekov, often on a whim, was murdered by criminals or camp guards. Exceptional were not suicides. However, they only do not cause despair resulting from endless sufferings. Many of those who voluntarily resorted to life, consider voluntary departure from the world for the last and often the only way to express their opposition to the inhuman.
The author of course notes and ethnic situation in the camps, the relationship between political prisoners and criminals, the position of overseer, riots and escapes. Particularly appalling is the content of chapter devoted to women and children prisoners. According to official statistics, women accounted for more than a third of staff labor camps.”Special social hierarchy in the Soviet camps, however, has meant that women were tortured and humiliated to an extent unusual even in the prison system itself.” (P. 281) The children in the camps could get two ways: either they were born, or “ arrested “along with their parents. Most children consumed Gulag prisoners forced collectivisation in the early thirties, and then after the outbreak of World War II in the reprisals against “hostile ethnic groups.” These unfortunate creatures were put into camp “nursery homes” or so.children’s colonies.
Fate of children was in many cases worse than the lives of adult prisoners “… their health and well-being interested in the list of priorities of most camp commandants very low rung, so permanently inhabited the worst, coldest and oldest barracks – yet does not contribute to the productivity of the camps. “(p. 289) Child mortality was therefore extremely high. His minor criminals “criminals” uninhibited and sexually abused huckali against other convicts. Children who survived despite all the injustice adulthood, lived physically and mentally retarded. Lacked any moral inhibitions and the release could not be included under “normal circumstances”. Except for minor exceptions ended up in the ranks of gangsterism.
The third part of the Rise and Fall of the camp industry (p. 361-480) is devoted to the period of the years 1940 – 1986. Arrival of the Second World War and the first wave of Soviet expansion into Central Europe meant further expansion of the Gulag. ”Arrests for novookupovaných territories began immediately after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, and continued after the coming invasion of Romania and the Baltic countries.Goals as the NKVD were safety – rebellion and wanted to prevent the emergence of a fifth column – and Sovietisation; therefore focused on people who are expected to be resisted Soviet rule. “(P. 369) only of Polish territory went to the Gulag Less than two years 108 000 people and 320 000 other settlements vyhnaneckých ended in the far north and Kazakhstan. After the Nazi invasion of Soviet deportations to extend to the entire nations have been accused of “collaborating” with the enemy: the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, and others. Many of them did not survive the cruel deportation or died in exile on the effects of cold, hunger and epidemics. Just noted that the population of Crimean Tatars in the year 1949 stenčila in half. About this monstrous genocide, which can be compared only with the Nazi Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge take to task, however, history textbooks are silent.
When Soviet troops in 1944 again came to Central Europe, followed by a new wave of mass terror. Arrests and deportations did not avoid the population of any country “liberated” by the Red Army. Gulag and then devoured thousands of Slovaks, while about them is A. Applebaum does not mention specifically. It can not forget the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens and bielogvardejských emigrants who went into the hands of Stalin’s allies. With these additions, the number of prisoners of the Gulag after the war did not diminish, but rather peaked. ”According to official statistics, the first January 1950 in the Gulag camps and colonies of 2,561,345 prisoners – more than one million five years earlier … “(p. 401)
Decline of the Gulag is associated with the death of Stalin in March 1953, but signs of degradation can be traced for a long time. A new generation of prisoners, often veterans are in fact did not break and humiliate as easily as cotton wool victims of purges of the thirties. On the intolerable conditions responded by killing whistleblowers, strikes and armed rebellion, which varies from year to year escalated. In the summer of 1954 has been the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and all the power garniture clear that the camps are not profitable, and began a gradual prisoner releases. After XX. Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 was canceled Gulag, but only a few of the former zekov not wait rehabilitation. Even Khrushchev could not openly admit that his comrades had committed so many crimes and the country since November 1917 “misconstrued the legal government, but a bunch of gangsters”, as aptly appreciated member of Stalin’s Politburo Anatáz Mikoyan (p. 441). Nobody cared about the well, where prisoners will be released to live and work. The worst however was the general ignorance. Most family members and friends of victims of the Gulag was not interested at all in what survived. Everyone wanted to camp as quickly forgotten.
After Stalin’s death, although the system of forced slave labor became a thing of the past, but the continued persecution of opponents of communism. Already in 1957, jailed by Soviet soldiers and other citizens who sympathized with the unsuccessful Hungarian uprising. They were soon joined thousands of independent intellectuals, the Caucasus and Baltic nationalists and – how else – nonconformist believers.
In contrast to the Stalinist era, however, about the persecution of politically inconvenient people could not conceal a violation of human rights in the Soviet Union evoked in the West ever more massive protests. Soviet regime, therefore, tried to discredit dissidents maximum. Many were convicted of fabricated crimes, criminal, other declared mad and closed the special psychiatric hospitals (psichušiek), where they were “treated” with dangerous electric shocks and drugs. Neither slave labor camps completely disappeared. According to the findings of Amnesty International, the majority of Soviet political prisoners, concentrated in two plants of this type. One is located south of Moscow in Mordovia in Perm and the other on the western foothills of the Urals. Terms of the old Gulag in them too did not differ. Dissidents have been subjected to physical abuse, living in disastrous conditions of hygiene and food received less than guard dogs.
As A. Applebaum rightly pointed out, the real end of the Gulag came after a general amnesty for political prisoners at the end of the 1986th Unfortunately, forgot to add that this did not reach a decision by the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by itself. It did so under pressure to actual gravedigger of communism – U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
In the epilogue of the book, aptly titled memory (p. 481-491) the author refers to the attitude of Russia and some former Soviet bloc countries to the communist crimes. The final appendix (p. 492-498) attempts to quantify the total amount of Gulag prisoners. It states that according to official Soviet statistics, passed between 1929 – 1953 penal camps and colonies around 18 million people and 2,749,163 of them died. A.Applebaum, however, this number is rightly considered to be biased because it excludes people who died in the investigation, deportation, or shortly after release, or were executed in “non-political” reasons, for example. thousands of Polish officers massacred in Katyn.
At the very conclusion, that the book Gulag – History is a very impressive work that comprehensible form in full nudity exposes the most terrible crimes of the Soviet regime.Commemorates the millions of innocent victims of communism and provides inspiration for all who seek historical truth.