Russian Gulag Essay

Often situated in cold and remote regions, they housed millions of prisoners, especially in the late 1930s. Conditions were inhumane and death rates were high for the prisoners. They were still heavily used after 1945 though fell into disuse after Stalin’s death.

Lenin's control of Russia led to the creation of the secret police, or Cheka. The officers were known as chekists, and instilled terror in citizens. They were used to quell any sort of opposition to Lenin's rule.

One of the most brutal mistakes made by Stalin was the creation of a GULAG. It is difficult to give a precise characterization of its purpose. The aim of this work is to answer the question, “Can we generalize why certain people were able to survive the Gulag more than others?” To survive the Gulag, many prisoners had to fight with others for food, shelter, and simple medical care. Certain prisoners went into religious and intellectual meditations to preserve at least the appearance of intelligence. The survival required willpower, strength of mind, skills, mercilessness, and a lot of luck.

This brutal campaign to eradicate the state of perceived enemies began in the summer of 1936, when Lev Kamenev, Grigorii Zinoviev, and fourteen others were convicted of organizing a “Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center” and the group was blamed by the state for Sergei Kirov’s assassination in December 1934. This was soon followed by the purge of prominent leaders in the revolution such as Nikolai Bukharin. Others who were executed were: new party members, high ranking military officials, party secretaries, and other officials. However, even poor Soviet citizens who had nothing to do with plotting against the government were searched and arrested by the NKVD. In particular, those citizens who were previously accused of being counter-revolutionary were the main targets of the

Under the rule of Stalin, people were sent to be housed at the Gulag camps, by then they were using them as a slave labor. These camps housed a wide range of convicts from minor criminals to political prisoners. The Soviet Union’s main offences were robbers, rapists, murders, and thieves, so instead of spending their sentences in prison they got taken to the Gulag.

With Robert Conquest’s first edition of The Great Terror published in 1968, critics acclaimed that his work was a spotlight on the atrocities wrought by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Since then, with new sources and statistics coming forward, there have been two reassessments published by Conquest. Regardless of edition, the author attempts to provide the reader a gripping account of Stalin’s mass purges where millions were murdered and millions more were sent to Soviet prisons in brutal, inhumane conditions. Furthermore, to give the reader a well-rounded view of this period Conquest writes about more than just the gulags. He shares his research on the “Moscow Trials,” the vicious methods for obtaining false confessions, life in the labor camps, and much more.

The creation of the secret police and the establishment of the gulags and labour camps, are signs that Lenin had created a successful totalitarian state, and could assert physical control over the people.

In conclusion, the conditions that many suffered when in the Gulags were unimaginable. Many say it was easier to commit suicide rather than to suffer and live each and every day in these intense labor camps. Many were starved to extreme measures and even the most hard working people were feed little to nothing at all. Sleeping conditions were nowhere near to comfortable. Over a million perished between 1923-1953 and very few made it out and even if they did the Gulags were set in remote areas so they would not make it too far from the camp and would eventually die. Unlike concentration camps, you were eventually released from the Gulags, but once you were released you were either half dead or suffered severe psychological trauma. Many were

No citizen was immune to the wayward forced labor camps that were formed in the Soviet Union officially in 1930. These camps were administered by the government agency known as The Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements. This agency was then referred to as the acronym for this title- Gulag- and eventually the whole camp system was known as the Gulag (Applebaum viii). The Gulags were the Soviet’s penal system and Stalin’s administration used the camps as free labor to complete construction projects involving canals, railways, roads, and mines. Anyone could be sent, without trial, to a Gulag camp, regardless of their gender, age, political views, or ancestry. Felons who committed crimes of rape, murder, and robbery

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Lenin was the Bolshevik leader. He was a clever thinker and a practical man; he knew how to take advantage of events. When Lenin arrived in Russia, he issued a document called the April theses, promising ‘peace, bread, land and freedom’. He called for an end to the ‘Capitalist’ war, and demanded that power should be given to the soviets.

This is what interactions with government officials were like when trying to see someone inside the Gulag. The government officials would be unhelpful and stubborn to make sure nothing was accomplished. Interactions with government officials was different when living inside the Gulag camp system. The government officials were most NKVD officers and they would be very rough and violent to the prisoners. The type of camp prisoners lived in affected their interactions with the guards and officials. At the Sharashka scientist and engineers were treated with more respect and scientific work was allowed in the provided labs. Interactions with government officials varied from camp to camp depending on the severity of the crimes and the type of camp

once this was a very silly idea as they would not be able to pull it

Soviets do so by inserting “constant fear, servitude, secrecy and mistrust, universal ignorance, squealing, betrayal and lie as a form of existence, corruption, cruelty, and slave psychology.” Fear was instilled into the captives’ bones as they “always knew that it would take only one careless work or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.” Being held as a captive does not fear them, but the detailed security questionnaires do. This is similar to Frankl’s fear of being sent to the gas chambers instead of towards other labor. To survive in the Soviet camps, people were to constantly spy and lie to each other as “anyone who burst out with a sincere protest was predestined to loneliness and alienation.” The citizens have never known anything as peace of

Communism in the USSR was doomed from the onset. Communism was condemned due to lack of support from other nations, condemned due to corruption within its leadership, condemned due to the moral weakness of humanity, making what is perfect on paper, ineffective in the real world. The end of this system was very violent. It left one of the two most powerful nations in the world fearful of what was to come. <br><br>Communism can either be called a concept or system of society. In a society that follows the communist beliefs groups own the major resources and means of production, rather than a certain individual. In theory, Communism is to provide equal work, and benefits to all in a specific society. Communism is derived from many ancient

In order to understand what life is like in a Russian prison, one must first understand that there are different prisons with different sections. When you are arrested, you are held in pre-trial detention unless you are judged to be neither a flight risk nor a risk with respect to committing another crime. In practice, this is uncommon. Some prisons are relatively modern, while others like Kresty (“Crosses”) in St. Petersburg are centuries old - you get the satisfaction of being imprisoned in a historical landmark at the expense of modern comforts. However, as a general rule, you will be in a cell with seven or more other inmates, the ventilation will be terrible and overcrowding used to be so bad in the 90s that there were not enough cots