Question by Hanna bear: During the era of Joseph Stalin, what work did the prisoners in the Gulag camps engage in?
WWI
Answers and Views:
Answer by The spirit of historian
– Stalin convince people with fear and death camps…
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Whortleberry says
Alexander Solshintzin, in his breakthrough novel about life in the gulag, "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich," said, "It was a good day. The mortar did not freeze." He should know, having spent time in one. Sounds like they did a certain amount of cement work — and hoped the mortar wouldn't freeze.
Aode96 says
"GULAG was the acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.
Gulag prisoners could work up to 14 hours per day. Typical Gulag labor was exhausting physical work. Toiling sometimes in the most extreme climates, prisoners might spend their days felling trees with handsaws and axes or digging at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes. Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful and fatal lung diseases from inhalation of ore dust. Prisoners were barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labor.
In the eyes of the authorities, the prisoners had almost no value. Those who died of hunger, cold, and hard labor were replaced by new prisoners because the system could always find more people to replenish the labor camps.
Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the first massive construction project of the Gulag. Over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows in just 20 months. Initially viewed as a great success and celebrated in a volume published both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the canal turned out to be too narrow and too shallow to carry most sea vessels. Many prisoners died during construction."