HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4)PRESENTATION 14

STALIN MODULE4. USE OF REPRESSION AND TERROR

THE GULAGS

POWERPOINT BASED ON Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53 chapter 2

G. Zheleznov, Vinogradov, F. Belinskii (December 14, 1926). "Letter To the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)".

Retrieved June 14, 2016. Applebaum, Anne (2003) Gulag: A History.

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia.Steven Rosefielde. Red Holocaust.

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More? by Timothy Snyder.Getty, Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (October 1993). "Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence".

Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. Arlindo-correia.org. Retrieved June 14, 2016.Robert Conquest. "Victims of Stalinism: A Comment." Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49.

MAIN ADMINISTRATION OF THE CAMPS

The Gulag is the acronym of Russian "main administration of the camps", translated as "Chief Directorate of Camps“.This was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labour camp systems during the Stalin era, from the 1930s until the 1950s.

THE FIRST CAMPThe first such camps were created in 1918 and the term is widely used to describe any forced labour camp in the USSR.While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment (the NKVD was the Soviet secret police).The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union, based on Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code). The term is also sometimes used to describe the camps themselves, particularly in the West.

OGPU chiefs responsible for construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal:

Right: Frenkel; Center: Berman; Left: Afanasev (Head of the southern part of BelBaltLag).

CORRECTIVE LABOUR CAMPS"GULAG" was the short form of the official "Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements". It was administered first by the GPU, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The first corrective labour camps after the revolution were established in 1918 (Solovki) and legalized by a decree "On creation of the forced-labor camps" on April 15, 1919. The system grew rapidly, reaching population of 100,000 in the 1920s and from the very beginning it had a very high mortality rate.

The fence and guard tower at the Soviet forced labour camp Perm-36 100 km northeast of the city of Perm in Russia, part of the prison camp system operated by the Soviet Union in the Stalin era known as the Gulag. The last remaining example of a Gulag labour camp, the site has been preserved as a museum and is open to the public as "The Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm-36“.

SOVIET DISSIDENTSForced labour camps continued to function outside of the agency until late 80s (Perm-36 closed in 1987). A number of Soviet dissidents described the continuation of the Gulag after it was officially closed: Anatoli Marchenko (who actually died in a camp in 1986), Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov, Nathan Shcharansky, all of them released from the Gulag and given permission to emigrate to the West, after years of international pressure on Soviet authorities.

Group of prisoners in Sakhalin, remote prison island, c. 1903

STOP! NEW TERMS! DISSIDENTSA dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often affect a dissident movement.The word has been used since 16th century in the context of religion. The noun was first used in the political sense in 1940, with the rise of such totalitarian systems as the Soviet Union.

GULAGS AND LABOUR COLONIESAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, who spent eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands" and as an eyewitness described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Some scholars support this view, though it is controversial, considering that with the obvious exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labour colonies in the USSR. Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.

Prisoner labour at the construction of the White Sea – Baltic Canal, 1931–33

PEOPLE IN GULAGAbout 14 million people were in the Gulag labour camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period 1918–1929 are even more difficult to calculate). A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4–5 million passed through labour colonies, plus 3.5 million already in, or sent to, labour settlements.According with some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.

Road construction by inmates of the Dalstroy (part of the 'Road of Bones' from Magadan to Yakutsk).

ESTIMATESAccording to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53 (there is no archival data for the period 1919–1934).However, taking into account the likelihood of unreliable record keeping, and the fact that it was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death, non-state estimates of the actual Gulag death toll are usually higher. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the whole period from 1929 to 1953, while other estimates go beyond 10 million.

Transpolar Railway was a project of the Gulag system that took place from 1947 to 1953.

POLITICAL PRISONERSMost Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time. Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment. About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned without trial; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences to imprisonment on cases investigated by the secret police throughout 1921–53.The GULAG was reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953, in a period known as the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1960 the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD) ceased to function as the Soviet-wide administration of the camps in favor of individual republic MVD branches. The centralized detention facilities temporarily ceased functioning.

The White Sea–Baltic Canal was the first major project constructed in the Soviet Union using forced labour.