Question by Mrs. Beautiful: What historical content led to the development of the russian gulags?
What historical content led to the development of the russian gulag?
And please add sources you retrieved your information from.
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Answer by K2010
Perhaps this link will be helpful
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
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CMV says
ALL of the aspects ( secret political police , secret and unfair tribunals , use of informers and agents-provocateurs , foul communal celled prisons in old fortresses , Stolypin railroad prison cars , siberian camps , transport into the wilds in ships and barges holds , locked shut , detention for years , release to a precarious existence restricted to siberian exile ) ALL those things were already in place under the czars .
Faced with political dissidence and criminals at home , Russia has always shipped the problem off to the ocean depths of the Taiga forest and the southern deserts .
Stalin simply expanded what was there already , and the " Organs " of the state turned it into a wealth-making exercise .
It has now reverted to its Czarist state , but it is all still there , all being used as it always was .
Spellbound says
Russia has a long history of internal exile for political prisoners, the Tsars made use of their labour.
However, the Gulag – singular because it refers to the camp system, not the camps themselves -developed initially to deal with ant-Stalinist elements within the Communist Party, notably Trotskyites: it came into being on April 25, 1930.
What necessitated this expansion of the Soviet prison system was Stalin's belief that "the class-war intensifies AFTER the revolution". He believed that unless "class enemies", particularly in the party, were routed out, then they would launch a counter-revolution. Whether not he actually believed this, the manifestation of his paranoia and his calculating mind or whether it was merely rhetoric is open to conjecture. Certainly by 1930 his major political opponents had been removed from office, but many of their supporters remained, and the Party's authority and control was weak in many of the far flung provinces.
The Gulag were in many places in the USSR, some were in closed cites, some in the remote parts of the country, whilst others were mobile, as the inmates were building roads, railways or canals. Some were reasonably appointed – many of the scientists employed on the Soviet nuclear weapons project were gulag inmates, and they were treated extremely well.
However, the majority of the camps were in remote areas, where escape would be very difficult, if not impossible, and the inmates worked in difficult and hazardous jobs, logging was possibly the most common work done by inmates, although many were also employed in mines, notably uranium mines.
Life in them varied depending on the work being done, in most of the camp life was cold in winter, stiflingly hot in summer, hunger gnawed at the inmates, and bureaucratic cruelty infected all the guards. The novel One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch sums up the other main feature of daily life- the sheer tedium of being imprisoned.
The people sent to them changed over time. When they were established the kulaks – richer peasants, and prominent members of opposition parties were sent there. During the Great Purge, the party turned on itself, and most of the newcomers were former party members, supporters of Stalin's enemies, particularly Trotsky.
During WWII collaboration with the enemy, or the suspicion of collaboration, could see someone shot, or imprisoned. After WWII, many of the returning Soviet POWs were sent to the camps – as Stalin thought that those who were captured were cowards at best and Nazi agents at worst.
The camps were about to be filled with Jewish people, as Stalin was preparing another purge just before he died.
Thankfully his successor, Khrushchev, began to close the camps, the last one closed in 1960. Most people, the living as well as the dead, were "rehabilitated", although most were still forbidden to return to their home towns and cities.
Julek says
If you go back and read almost any historical book on the Czars of Russia you will find that the gulags or prisoner camps were first introduced by them (The Czars of Russia). These camps evolved into the labor camps /death camps which we refer to today as gulags or penal camps. They are not only for criminals but work camps or death camps for anyone that the Russian/USSR government wanted to detain for any reason. They used labor from any country and even their own citizens as machines to do hard labor. When these humans were worked and starved to death they just replaced them with a new bunch of humans. The average life expectancy of these camps was from 3 months to 9 months during the Bolshevik and Stalin period through 1980 and even in some case through the current time.
The Bolshevik revolution evolved into what we call today as Communism. In Communism the state is the most important institution and must be kept alive at all costs. Humans are considered expendable if necessary to make sure the state survives.
I would suggest looking up on the web Bolshevik, Stalin, Communism and Gulags during the Czar regime to get a clear picture.