The Soviet Gulag, infamous slave labor camps that persisted for three decades and killed
hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.
Years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the lifting of the iron curtain, details on
the Soviet gulag can still be hard to come across, and survivors even rarer.
Most prisoners were worked to death or so malnourished or crippled by their experience
that their lifespans was cut tragically short even after release.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show, today we're taking a look
at what life inside the Soviet gulag was like.
First established in 1919, the Gulag was created by Vladimir Lenin as a prison camp for common
criminals and wealthy peasants known as kulaks.
Because collectivization basically eliminated the prosperity of many kulaks by forcing them
to give up their private farms and pool them together into public farms, they revolted
or protested against it, earning themselves a swift arrest and imprisonment for a few
years of hard labor.
Lenin showed restraint in his use of the Gulag as a punishment tool however, reserving it
only for the worst offenders and criminals.
Yet after Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power, one of the first things Stalin did
was to dramatically increase the population of the gulags and oversee a rapid expansion
of more labor camps.
Anyone deemed an enemy of the state could be sent to a gulag, often with absolutely
no trial.
During Stalin's great purges where he rid the government of opposing members of the
Communist party, the gulag was the destination of choice for former military officers and
government officials who were deemed disloyal- that is if they avoided a simple bullet to
the back of the head.
As the purges continued and grew in scope, Stalin began rounding up doctors, writers,
intellectuals, students, artists and scientists- anyone who could oppose Stalin publicly and
whip up public support could not be tolerated.
Yet it wasn't just the accused who were targeted for imprisonment, as anyone with direct ties
to the accused could also be rounded up and thrown into a gulag.
During the German invasion in World War II, Stalin issued an order that any Red Army soldier
who retreated from battle would be sent to the gulag- and for any soldier who surrendered
to the Germans, their entire family would be sent in their place.
Soviet soldiers thus had a simple choice to make: die under the German onslaught, or condemn
their families to a decade or more of hard labor and likely death.
But what was life actually like inside the Soviet gulag?
For starters each camp housed a population of both men and women prisoners, often with
the two intermingling and living together.
This placed women at severe risk, as rapes from both the guards and other prisoners were
common place.
Women would often be forced to find a 'gulag husband', a man whom would protect them in
exchange for sexual favors.
If not, they would often be forced to perform those favors for the prison guards in exchange
for some level of protection.
Guards could coerce women to do what they wanted with the promises of better food, clothing
or perhaps shelter- or simply do what they pleased with the female prisoners as they
would face absolutely no repercussions for assaulting someone seen as an enemy of the
state.
Children too were at risk, as they were often thrown into prison camps along with the adult
population, and could also face the risk of being preyed upon by both other prisoners
and guards alike.
Prisoners received little in the way of clothing, a fact which would prove fatal for many during
the harsh Soviet winters.
Perhaps two or three times a year a prisoner might be able to receive a small clothing
allowance, although for the most part prisoners simply took clothing from those who died.
Others might craft their own- as in any prison, a cottage industry of sorts sprung up ran
by individuals with talents ranging from sewing to tattooing.
Each person received two daily meals, although these were just short of starvation diets.
A family of three for example might receive a daily allowance of 140 grams of bread- hardly
enough for a single individual.
Add on to that the fact that these prisoners were then expected to engage in hard labor,
and the low food rations were a near-certain death sentence.
Prisoners would often try to catch their own food in the form of what little wildlife they
might encounter, mostly rats and other rodents, though eating insects when available was not
out of the question.
Boredom would certainly not have been a problem for prisoners in a gulag camp.
Not one to let any amount of human misery go to waste, Stalin saw the gulags as an excellent
source of free labor- just the thing to modernize a Russia that was far behind its modern competitors.
Stalin immediately put the gulag prisoners to work on everything from collective farms,
to iron and copper mines, and felling trees to provide timber for the growing engine of
the Soviet industrial revolution.
Some of the Soviet Union's greatest engineering achievements were all thanks to slave labor,
with the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea- Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway all built
atop a pile of thousands of dead gulag prisoners.
In a very real sense, the Soviet Union was literally built on a pile of corpses.
Prisoners would face 14 hour workdays, seven days a week, all year round.
While the harsh winters would force other industry to shut down, gulag prisoners would
toil in extremely cold weather, often without adequate clothing.
Frostbite and hypothermia were common, as were missing toes, fingers, ears, and even
noses thanks to the cold.
The prisoners were also given very simple and crude tools to work with, and absolutely
no safety equipment.
200,000 prisoners would dig the 128 kilometers (80 miles) of the Moscow-Volga canal with
nothing more than pickaxes and shovels, sometimes even just their bare hands.
The frozen ground would be difficult to break, and the harsh conditions killed many- yet
in Soviet Russia there were few problems that couldn't be overcome by simply throwing enough
slave laborers at it.
The work would be so brutal that some prisoners would mutilate themselves to get out of it,
going so far as to stick their arms in a wood stove to severely burn themselves.
Back home in the gulag, living conditions were appealing.
There was little heating, and the prison facilities were often roughly constructed longhouses
that were poorly insulated from the bitter cold.
Overcrowding plagued the camps, with prisoners forced to sleep anywhere they could find a
place to lay down amidst dozens of their fellow prisoners.
Gangs ran the gulags, preying on the weak and stealing or coercing food and other supplies
from weaker prisoners.
Most prisoners however were not imprisoned for life, but served sentences of varying
lengths.
Family members of suspected traitors for example would receive a minimum sentence of five to
eight years, and prisoners who made it to the end of their sentence were permitted to
leave.
If they worked extremely hard and surpassed their work quotas consistently, some prisoners
even qualified for early release.
Yet prison sentences could be extended without warning, prompting many prisoners nearing
the end of their sentence to commit suicide out of depression.
With an average 10% of the total population dying each year however, making it to the
end of your sentence was extremely unlikely.
Immediately after Stalin's death in 1953, millions of prisoners were released.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, was a staunch critic of the camps and most of
the late dictator's policies, and very quickly reversed as many as possible.
Yet the gulags didn't go away completely, they were after all a fantastic source of
free labor for a Soviet Union with a weak economy, but Khrushchev did away with the
arbitrary sentencing of most dissidents and political adversaries.
Instead the gulags were restructured as prisons for normal criminals, democratic activists,
and anti-Soviet nationalists.
Not a perfect change, but a far cry from the days of Stalin.
The gulags would go on to last until 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev, grandson of gulag
victims, began the process of completely eliminating them from the Soviet countryside.
Though the world knew of the Soviet gulags for decades, very little factual information
about them was ever obtained during the Cold War thanks to very strict censorship.
State archives detailing the length and breadth of the gulag system were also sealed before
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, taking years before official information on this
brutal system of forced labor would come to light.
Yet despite the appearance of economically benefiting the Soviet Union through free labor,
experts believe that the camps did not make a significant contribution to the Soviet economy,
as without adequate food and supplies gulag prisoners were simply unequipped to provide
productive results.
How would you have survived a Soviet gulag?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called Could Russia Invade Europe?!
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