THE gulag they were concentration camps established in the Soviet Union in the years of Stalin (1926-1953), were built in the most impervious places, such as Siberia, in order to announce dissidents and common criminals. The prisoners were often forced to forced work And they lived in very hard conditions of detention, so much so that the mortality rate was high, despite not having the gulag the explicit purpose of eliminating the inmates. They were closed after Stalin’s deathbut some forced work colonies remained in operation until the 80s.
How gulag worked
The word “gulag” is the acronym for Gosudarstvennyj Upvelleje lagerejMeaning what Central direction of the concentration campstherefore refers to the ruling body and not to the individual fields. However, the habit of calling the individual prison structures established in the Soviet Union by Stalin is widespread in the West. There were various types of gulags, widespread throughout the USSR territory: forced work fields, women’s fields, colonies For popular areas that are not very inhabited and other types.
The gulags were active From 1926 until Stalin’s death, in 1953but their origins are preceding his dictatorship. Already in Tsarist Russia there were fields of imprisonment for opponents, known as Katorga, Inside there were numerous Bolsheviks leaders who then became important political exponents of the USSR, including Stalin himself, prisoner from 1913 to 1916. Furthermore, concentration camps were institutions during the civil war who opposed the red army to the counter-revolutionary forces (1918-1922). After the ascent to power, Stalin decided to reactivate the Tsatrists fields and perfect the concentration system.
Who were the prisoners in the gulag
In the gulags they were held various categories of people: exponents of social categories considered enemies of the Soviet state, such as nobles, clergy, kulaki (landowners); common offenders; Political or presumed opponents, although most of them adhered to communist ideology and supported the Soviet Union. Stalin, in fact, boiled as enemies too Communists who did not perfectly follow his political line And they showed that they shared, even if only partially, the ideas of other Bolshevik leaders, such as Lev Trotzki (went into exile and killed by Stalin in Mexico in 1940). In the second half of the 1930s, the period of “great purges“And of the most intense repression of opponents, simple suspicions of non -adherence to the Stalinist ideology were enough to end up in the gulag. After all, the fields, according to the Stalinist political management, were not only used to isolate people considered dangerous, but they had to also encourage their “political re -education”.
The living conditions of the prisoners were very hard. The fields were in the most inhospitable locations of the USSR and prisoners were often forced to forced work in mines, in the construction of dams and bridges and in other sectors. In some cases, prisoners were exposed to fatal dangers, such as uranium extraction without protections.
Some famous people were among the imprisonment, such as the writers Solženicyn and Šalamov or the physicist Landau, but not the most important political leaders who, if they entered into contrast with Stalin, were sentenced directly to death. In the Stalinist fields, moreover, some also ended Italian communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union to escape fascist persecutions.
The number of prisoners and dead
In the gulags they were locked up, overall, About 18,000,000 people. In moments of maximum system development, more than 2,500,000 people were set at the same time. The mortality rate was high: it is estimated that a number of prisoners included between 1,000,000 and 1,600,000 died in the fields. However, the gulags, unlike the Nazi extermination fields, were not explicitly designed for eliminate prisoners. Most of the prisoners were released after serving the sentence.
Closing and memory
After Stalin’s death, the fields were gradually dismantled and in 1960, as part of the decrease promoted by Nikita Kruscevthe Soviet government officially decreed its abolition. Nonetheless, imprisonment and work fields remained in operation for common criminals and political opponents, including the well -known field Perm-36in the area of the Urals, closed in 1987.
The notoriety of the Gulag in the West is partly due to the book of a former prisoner, Aleksandr Solženicyn, Gulag archipelagopublished in France in 1973 and in other Western countries in the following years (in Italy it came out in 1974), which tells the author’s experience and describes the concentration system. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union The memory of the gulag It remained alive, and some fields, like that of Perm, have been transformed into museums.
