Soviet Prisons And Concentration Camps

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

A historic photographic record of the Soviet Gulag and its legacy. The Gulag was a network of labor camps and penal colonies run by the Soviet security organizations. While forced labor and internal exile had a long history in Russia, the Gulag evolved into a devastating tool of political suppression and massive industrial production. From the early years of the Revolution to the final years of the USSR, millions labored and perished within this system. Gulag covers the history of the Gulag with incredible essays and firsthand narratives by former prisoners. The text is accompanied by photographs provided by the prisoners, survivor groups and state archives as well as contemporary photographs that show the camps as they look now. Each chapter covers a key camp or work project of the Soviet penal-industrial complex: Solovki, the monastery that was the birthplace of the Gulag system The White Sea Canal Vaigach, the doomed humane camp The Theater in the Gulag Kolyma, the deadly Siberian gold rush Vorkuta, coal mining above the Arctic Circle The Railroad of Death Each chapter has: A concise introductory essay Formerly banned and previously unpublished archival photographs Detailed chronology of the camp Prisoners' accounts of life and death in the camps and colonies Contemporary photographs Accounts of survivors some of whom still live near their former camp or colony. Gulag is a remarkable pictorial history of a harrowing era of the twentieth century.

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the "welcome" that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 -- a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle -- has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia.

Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, Barnes shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. He takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. Barnes traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. Death and Redemption reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would reenter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.

485 entries of articles, memoirs, novels and research studies arranged chronologically by year of publication, with author and title indexes.

The shocking and absorbing account of life in the hell of the Soviet Gulag system is told in all his horrific details here by Elinor Lipper. “IN THIS BOOK I have described my personal experiences only to the extent that they were the characteristic experiences of a prisoner in the Soviet Union. For my concern is not primarily with the foreigners in Soviet camps; it is rather with the fate of all the peoples who have been subjugated by the Soviet regime, who were born in a Soviet Republic and cannot escape from it. The events I describe are the daily experiences of thousands or people in the Soviet Union. They are the findings of an involuntary expedition into an unknown land: the land of Soviet prisoners, of the guiltless damned. From that region I have brought back with me the silence of the Siberian graveyards, the deathly silence of those who have frozen, starved, or been beaten to death. This book is an attempt to make that silence speak.”-from the Author’s Preface.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts *Includes a bibliography for further reading One of the most idiosyncratic horrors of Soviet Russia was the Gulag system, an extensive network of forced labor and concentration camps. Part of the rationale behind this system was that it could serve as slave labor in the drive for industrialization, while also serving as a form of punishment. The name Gulag is in fact an acronym, approximating to "Main Administration of Camps" (in Russian: Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei) and operated by the Soviet Union's Ministry of the Interior. The Gulag consisted of internment camps, forced labor camps, psychiatric hospital facilities, and special laboratories, and its prisoners were known as zeks. Such was the closed and secretive nature of the Soviet state that to this day, knowledge of the Gulag system comes mainly from Western studies, firsthand accounts by prisoners such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and some local studies after the fall of communism. The most recognizable version of the Gulag, a term that was never pluralized in Russia itself, existed from the 1930s-1950s, a period in which a huge network of camps and prisons was established across the vast Soviet federation. Prisoners were often used as forced labor, made to do physically arduous and soul-destroying tasks. Some workers helped to build large infrastructure projects, and indeed the system was partly rationalized in terms of economics. By the early 1960s, Gulags were synonymous with various forms of punishments, including house arrest, imprisonment in isolated places, or confinement to a mental hospital where a prisoner would be declared insane or diagnosed with a "political" form of psychosis. In its later years, the Gulags held a particular place in the public's imagination, both within the USSR and in the outside world. They could mean exile, brutal punishment, or simply being banished to Siberia. Though it's often forgotten today, in many respects the Gulags represented a continuation (albeit a more far-reaching version) of the kind of punishment meted out during the Russian Empire under the Romanov dynasty, which was overthrown in 1917. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the system in the context of the broader history of Russia and its empire, even as the system of repression, imprisonment and punishment persisted for decades in the Soviet Union and has been primarily aligned with the rule of one leader: Josef Stalin. As the USSR's leader for almost 30 years and one of history's most notorious tyrants, Stalin was a believer in the economic utility of the Gulags' forced labor. He was so paranoid that he constantly saw potential enemies among his people, particularly his Bolshevik contemporaries. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulags, notably in the 1930s during his "Great Terror" and after the end of the Second World War. For Soviet politicians, the Gulags served as a propaganda disaster, and they were constantly cited by Western leaders. Many nominal supporters of the Soviet Union were forced to reappraise their stance towards the country when reports of Stalin's Gulag became common knowledge, and the prison camps became an international issue during the Cold War, especially as human rights became a foreign policy priority for the West in the 1970s. A number of Soviet dissidents and former or current occupants of the Gulag, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, became cause celebres for campaigners outside the country. The USSR collapsed in December 1991, and it can be argued that the labor camps were not only integral to the very existence of the Soviet Union, but also a damning indictment of the Soviets' failed experiment in communist totalitarianism. The Gulags: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Soviet Labor Camps examines the rise of the labor camps, how they were instutionalized by Soviet leaders, and what life was like for the prisoners.