Question by Alicia: What led up to the violence of Stalin’s Gulag ?
What led up to the violence?
How were the groups identified?
Were there acts of discrimination/hate crimes prior to the actual killings?
What tactics did the dominant group use to separate or polarize?
How did the dominant group come into power?
How did the genocide take place?
How did the group/state try to cover up the killings?
How did it affect the country and its population? Are there still problems to this day?
Can you guys please help me answer these questions a.s.a.p !?
Thanks.
Answers and Views:
Answer by Spellbound
Firstly you have to separate the Gulag from the system of informers, arrest and execution, as the Gulag was a series of labour camps spread across (mostly) the Soviet Far East – they were not death camps.
The violence of the regime became institutionalised under Stalin from about 1928 onwards, this was when he consolidated power. In order to maintain that power he then set about not just politically eliminating his rivals, but be executing them as well. Because of the system of patronage that the Communist Party operated by – each person in the party was responsible for those people that they recruited – if one person fell, so did all those who he had recruited, and those people they had recruited and so on; one arrest could lead to a thousand.
The groups of people were identified by lot. A series of orders emanated from the Politburo to the regional party headquarters with the numbers of people to be expelled from the party, the number to be arrested and the number of them to be executed. There was almost no “quality control” about who was arrested, and often the directive was used to settle old scores, or because one party member owed another money or favours.
There was what could be called hate crimes before the system of Gulags were put in place. Initially, after the October Revolution the aristocracy and the wealthy were targeted, many fled abroad and several thousand (not millions) were arrested and executed. Then, in the mid to late 1920s the target of the Communists ire was the richer peasants. The Communists believed that the richer peasants were naturally an exploiting class, as they could afford to hire labour. They set about eliminating these so called kulaks through a policy of collectivising (managing all the farms in an area as a single farm) . In Ukraine in the early 1930s this policy led to approximately 7million deaths by starvation.
The dominant group, the communist party never isolated or polarised society, they used people’s belief in communism, propaganda, faith in the party and fear to achieve their ends.
The communist party came to power in October 1917 through an armed uprising known as the October Revolution.
Genocide is not quite the right word to describe the deaths that occurred in the Soviet Union, as the people were not singled out because of race, religion or ethnicity.
The killings occurred mostly by overwork, malnutrition and disease – only about 650,000 were shot. Also, of some 30 million arrested some 25 million returned home – the Gulag was horrendous and inhumane, but the Soviet Union did not want to kill all those who may not support the regime.
They did not try to cover up the killings, the country was a closed society at the time and the news was tightly controlled, most people were however, aware that there could be a knock on the door in the middle of the night, but the system of informers ensured that people did not talk about it, even to their wives, children or close work colleagues.
The brutality of the Soviet system became reliant on prisoner labour – slave labour – but, when the Gulag was shut down, from the early 1960s, they tried different methods to get people to do difficult or dangerous work in inhospitable regions of the country – like paying them to do it.
The legacy of the Gulag is a string of towns across the Soviet Far East with little work, few prospects and poverty. For the rest of the country the legacy is more mixed, firstly it was a long time ago – some fifty years since the camps began to shut, and secondly there is not a big movement to re-visit the crimes of the past, it would be very difficult, as people would find out who informed on their parents or grandparents.
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