Soviet Gulag Monster - Josef Stalin Slave Drivers - World Documentary Films

Soviet Gulag Monster - Josef Stalin Slave Drivers - World Documentary Films.

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The Gulag (Russian: ГУЛАГ, tr. GULAG; IPA: [ɡʊˈlak] ( listen); acronym of Главное управление лагерей, Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerej, lit. "Main Camp Administration") was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is also commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union.[1][2] 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 (secret police) and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

The agency's full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й и коло́ний, Glavnoye upravleniye ispravityelno-trudovykh lagerey i koloniy). It was administered first by the State Political Administration (GPU), later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The Solovki prison camp, the first corrective labour camp constructed after the revolution, was established in 1918 and legalized by a decree "On the creation of the forced-labor camps" on April 15, 1919 (Article 58 of the Russian SFSR penal code). The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s and from the very beginning it had a very high mortality rate.[3]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived 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 he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.[4] Some scholars support this view,[5][6] though this claim is controversial, considering the fact that with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of the people who entered the Gulag system left it alive.[7] Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on "campfire folklore" as opposed to objective facts.[8] In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the USSR.[9] 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.[10]

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