GULag:
the Soviet lagers
WHERE AND WHEN:
GULag is the acronym, introduced in 1930, for Gosudarstvennyj Upravlenje Lagerej, the central administration for collective labour camps. The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn adopted the expression "the Gulag Archipelago" to encompass the entire Soviet concentration camp system, which numbered 384 lagers.
Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Soviets started to build concentration and forced labour camps for political dissidents in the most inhospitable regions of the USSR, from the Solovki islands to the Kolyma mines, in Siberia
SCALE OF THE KILLINGS:
During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the entire class of small farmers known as the kulaks was liquidated, reduced to starvation by having their harvests requisitioned and by the famine induced to exterminate them, like the one in Ukraine that caused millions of deaths and has been defined as a "genocidal crime".
Only after the death of Stalin and the rise of Kruschov - with the secret report to the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 - were numerous political prisoners released and rehabilitated. The number of camps was reduced to 37, but the final closure of the "Gulag Archipelago" only came in 1987 under Gorbachov, two years before the fall of communism.
The final figures of this mass extermination are still not clear but it is thought to have affected between 20 and 40 million people.
The "Memorial" Study Centre, set up in Moscow after the fall of the regime, has gradually been gathering archive material and recording the testimony of survivors in order to make a precise and rigorous historical reconstruction. However, this is still proving to be a long and arduous task.
THE PERPETRATORS:
Responsibility for this concentrationary system, which used terror and imprisoned people from all social classes, lay as much with Lenin, who initiated it, as it did with Stalin, who, with the launch of the five-year plans, extended and reinforced the forced labour system. They share this responsibility with the powerful secret police, the NKVD, the whole Soviet judiciary and the directors appointed to run the gulag. These included Lavrentji Beria, one of Stalin's most ferocious henchmen, who, at the end of the Thirties, also organized a secret laboratory in which to experiment the effects of chemical poisons on the detainees.
PLANNING:
Sentences were handed down without trial by the "troikas", administrative organs composed of three political commissars, who judged the "enemies of the people " according to article 58 of the new penal code. Terror - already used by Lenin as a means for keeping society under control - was taken a step further by Stalin and the Soviet regime effectively became a totalitarian State.
IDEOLOGICAL REASONS:
The ideology that inspired Soviet power was Marxism-Leninism, which set out to create a new society, first of all by removing those social groups that were considered class enemies. The regime established in the USSR had all the characteristics of an authentic totalitarian system: power was in the hands of a party that identified itself with the State and acted according to a dominant ideology, which defined the goals to be achieved. Society as a whole was completely controlled by the media and by the ubiquitous secret police. The most economical and effective means used to keep the population under control and eliminate dissent was terror, which overwhelmed all members of Soviet society in successive waves and entirely arbitrarily. The phenomenon was that of an objective enemy, or in other words an enemy not defined according to its hostility to those in power, but according to arbitrary choice, designed to keep society as a whole in its thrall.
METHODS OF EXECUTION:
The first victims sent to the gulags were the "class enemies": the Russian aristocracy, businessmen, landowners, the Orthodox clergy and in general any groups considered privileged. Later the "pogroms" affected all sectors of Soviet society, including the prisoners of war who had survived the Nazi camps and the scientists and engineers required to build dams, canals, roads and towns, to work the mines or produce timber. Climatic conditions were extreme, hunger, arbitrary shootings, back-breaking labour and the psychological violence used to bend the prisoners' will led to an average mortality rate of 10% in the gulags, and 30% in Kolyma.
