Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
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Over 40 Millions ...
By decree of the Council of People's Commissars, the main administration of the corrective labor camps (Russian: Glawnoje uprawlenije isprawitelno-trudowych lagerej, abbreviated GULAG) is founded on April 15, 1919.
Although there have been "wild" camps of the "Cheka" secret police since the October Revolution, now there is administrative order in the matter.
In the decree on the “Red Terror” (the Bolsheviks really openly called it that!) It was already stated in 1918 that class enemies should “be isolated in concentration Lager”.
Incidentally, the term “Lager” comes from the German language, as Russian has no word for such things.
After the end of the civil war, the "wild" Lager were dissolved and those people who were not released at all were held on the Solovyetsky Islands, five small islands in the White Sea, where there was also a prison monastery from the Tsarist era.
Under the direction of the Cheka successor organizations GPU and NKVD, the main administration of the camps got something to do, because the camps covered the Soviet Union like a cancer and became a state within a state. The map only shows the main camps, each of which had about a dozen or more sub camps ...
They were officially called "corrective labor camps".
Compared to the German camp system during the Nazi era, it must be noted that the GULAG was not primarily an "extermination camp", but - since 1926 at the latest - a labor camp in which the prisoners had to toil under the harshest conditions, which the camps caused made a not unimportant economic factor of the Soviet Union.
The millions of deaths in the camps were the result of the slave working conditions and the poor treatment - the prisoners had to meet their daily norms, they died while the authorities did not care!
The people in the camps would not have cared about these subtle differences - they died ...
The majority of the people came to the camp through a specially tailored paragraph in the Soviet penal code, paragraph 58, which placed “terrorism”, “propaganda or political agitation”, “organizational activity” and the like under the harshest penalties.
The sentence in such trials was mostly a total of 25 years - to get such a term of imprisonment a careless word in a letter or the possession of a wrong, because forbidden book was enough!
“Lighter cases” usually got 10 years, lucky ones “only” five. But many files also had the notorious stamp "Keep forever!" That was not related to the file (which was kept anyway) but meant nothing more than: "Never release again!"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, through a careless word to a comrade in 1945 as an artillery officer
... arrested in East Prussia and sentenced to camp imprisonment ...
... provides the following information on the number of victims:
"The number of prisoners who passed or died in the GULG archipelago in the course of 35 years (up to 1953) is an estimated forty to fifty million (a conservative estimate, because that is only three or four times the average population of the GULAG, In the war, however, one percent died every day."
There are lower, but also much higher estimates!
In 1960 the main administration and most of the camps were closed - but the state has never officially abandoned the principle of penal and labor camps. Until the end of the Soviet Union, the production standards of the remaining camps, which were now subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, were part of the official state economic plan.
And even in today's Russia there are still labor camps - two members of the band "Pussy Riot", Nadezhda Tolokonnikowa and Marija Aljochina were among the inmates of a camp near the city of Berezniki in the Perm region in the Ural foothills ...
... and the opposition politician Akelsej Navalny, who is also known in the West, has been imprisoned in prison camp No. 2 in Pokrov 100 kilometers east of Moscow since February 2021 ...:
By far the best background information about the GULAG system is Alexandr Solschenyzin's book "The GULAG Archipelago" and his story "A day in the life of Iwan Denisovich".
In particular, "The GULAG Archipelago", in which all stages of arrest, detention, interrogation, prison, transport, storage and working conditions are accurately described, is harrowing ...
By decree of the Council of People's Commissars, the main administration of the corrective labor camps (Russian: Glawnoje uprawlenije isprawitelno-trudowych lagerej, abbreviated GULAG) is founded on April 15, 1919.
Although there have been "wild" camps of the "Cheka" secret police since the October Revolution, now there is administrative order in the matter.
In the decree on the “Red Terror” (the Bolsheviks really openly called it that!) It was already stated in 1918 that class enemies should “be isolated in concentration Lager”.
Incidentally, the term “Lager” comes from the German language, as Russian has no word for such things.
After the end of the civil war, the "wild" Lager were dissolved and those people who were not released at all were held on the Solovyetsky Islands, five small islands in the White Sea, where there was also a prison monastery from the Tsarist era.
Under the direction of the Cheka successor organizations GPU and NKVD, the main administration of the camps got something to do, because the camps covered the Soviet Union like a cancer and became a state within a state. The map only shows the main camps, each of which had about a dozen or more sub camps ...
They were officially called "corrective labor camps".
Compared to the German camp system during the Nazi era, it must be noted that the GULAG was not primarily an "extermination camp", but - since 1926 at the latest - a labor camp in which the prisoners had to toil under the harshest conditions, which the camps caused made a not unimportant economic factor of the Soviet Union.
The millions of deaths in the camps were the result of the slave working conditions and the poor treatment - the prisoners had to meet their daily norms, they died while the authorities did not care!
The people in the camps would not have cared about these subtle differences - they died ...
The majority of the people came to the camp through a specially tailored paragraph in the Soviet penal code, paragraph 58, which placed “terrorism”, “propaganda or political agitation”, “organizational activity” and the like under the harshest penalties.
The sentence in such trials was mostly a total of 25 years - to get such a term of imprisonment a careless word in a letter or the possession of a wrong, because forbidden book was enough!
“Lighter cases” usually got 10 years, lucky ones “only” five. But many files also had the notorious stamp "Keep forever!" That was not related to the file (which was kept anyway) but meant nothing more than: "Never release again!"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, through a careless word to a comrade in 1945 as an artillery officer
... arrested in East Prussia and sentenced to camp imprisonment ...
... provides the following information on the number of victims:
"The number of prisoners who passed or died in the GULG archipelago in the course of 35 years (up to 1953) is an estimated forty to fifty million (a conservative estimate, because that is only three or four times the average population of the GULAG, In the war, however, one percent died every day."
There are lower, but also much higher estimates!
In 1960 the main administration and most of the camps were closed - but the state has never officially abandoned the principle of penal and labor camps. Until the end of the Soviet Union, the production standards of the remaining camps, which were now subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, were part of the official state economic plan.
And even in today's Russia there are still labor camps - two members of the band "Pussy Riot", Nadezhda Tolokonnikowa and Marija Aljochina were among the inmates of a camp near the city of Berezniki in the Perm region in the Ural foothills ...
... and the opposition politician Akelsej Navalny, who is also known in the West, has been imprisoned in prison camp No. 2 in Pokrov 100 kilometers east of Moscow since February 2021 ...:
By far the best background information about the GULAG system is Alexandr Solschenyzin's book "The GULAG Archipelago" and his story "A day in the life of Iwan Denisovich".
In particular, "The GULAG Archipelago", in which all stages of arrest, detention, interrogation, prison, transport, storage and working conditions are accurately described, is harrowing ...
