The Gulag Research Paper

World leaders are leaders with high governmental power in the world. Every leader, not just world leaders, is either great or corrupt; they are rarely both. Most of Russia’s history is filled with corrupt leaders. Joseph was one of those leaders. Stalin killed millions of people during his rule. But Stalin also led the Soviet Union almost to the top in world power. Stalin had many influences that led him to his Soviet Leadership in which gave him many admirers but even more non-supporters.

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.

prisoners would work up to 14 hours a day doing extremely hard labor, in very bad conditions, and extreme climates. Some prisoners cut down trees with hand-saws and axes. Some dug frozen ground with pickaxes. Some mined coal and copper. Prisoners barely had enough food to deal with the extreme labor they were being put through. In 20 months, prisoners of the Gulag built the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal. Over 100,000 prisoners dug out a 141 mile long canal with just simple tools. Many prisoners died during that construction, and in the end it was too shallow to carry most ships. To the guards the prisoners had no value, they could replace them with another person. Kolyma was said to be the worst of all of Gulag. It was the coldest, and most isolated camp. Women also had to work, and suffered greatly. They would get raped by guards, camp employees, and other male prisoners. They would get "camp husbands" to protect them, and for companionship. Most pregnancies ended with the babies being taken to an orphanage.

In the book Night written by Elie Wiesel, dehumanization is a large part of the lives of Jews in concentration camps. Night is a memoir capturing the memories of Eliezer Wiesel’s of his eight months of living in a concentration camp when he is fifteen years old. There, Wiesel along with the rest of the prisoners, are tortured everyday, being dehumanized physically, mentally, and spiritually until they are unrecognizable. Physically, inmates in concentration camps are brutalized like animals.

It wasn’t just the fact that you had to work and go through harsh conditions but sometimes you wouldn’t be fed either. During a ten year decade, more than 40,000 concentration camps were built for all the poor jews and persons Hitler hated too. When people would first go there, they didn’t know what was going on ; they just knew something bad and scary was going to occur in the following days. Then the families would get separated into females or males so it would be easier to sort through them. The group of household would be terrified because the fact that they didn’t have their own blooded people around them scared them. Little kids would be sent to a different camp because Nazis found them useless and didn’t serve a purpose either. Some kids wouldn’t even make it a day through out the caps, they would just be separated and be sent straight to the crematory. Some moms were pregnant when they got to the concentration camps and those would be forced to abort and be instantly killed when they were born since they didn’t have much space to put a ton of useless kids. The age that made you survive alittle more was about 15 because they could actually put you to work. For example, younger kids would work in labors and machinery to teach them young and for them to learn for when they were older. Kids between the ages of 10 and 14 who were developed but not enough for the them would be tested on to see how they would react towards the chemicals to see how they would kill future people in the concentration camps. Testing on these kids would prove if either they were using were effective or not ;however, sometimes the chemicals wouldn’t work and would only damage the kids lungs which made them only suffer. Adults who were in group range between 18 and 45 were the ones they taked more care of since they were the most helpful. These adults had to be male howeverr because females

Imagine being pried away from your family. Not only that, but being left at the concentration camps, knowing that you are about to face the dreaded word “death”. Concentration camps broke people’s hearts and changed them forever. They had to encounter many terrifying and petrifying medical experiments. Alongside that, the so called “concentration camps” were basically almost becoming, or were, actual death camps. The things that they had to endure were heartbreaking and agonizing. They were starved from the moment that they got there until the end. If they were lucky, their concentration camp would’ve been liberated by the Allies. Most were not so lucky. During the Holocaust, many different concentration camps were built that were to change the lives of people forever.

The gas chambers had a really bad smell and the gas was still on the wall of the chambers. The living environments were horrible the beds were stacked up on top of each other there was no pillow or blanket and were lucky if they got a mattress. They were barely ever fed there a lot of the people died from starvation. There was also not a lot of water for them to drink. The food that they got usually was bread or a really bad stew and it was a really little if you got

Jeff Stein, a columnist at Newsweek who covers national policy topics, wrote an article about Mr. Trump’s executive order on border security and immigration enforcement security. The title itself sets the mood of his article, Steve Bannon’s Fever Dream of an American Gulag. Of course, Gulag is a Soviet portmanteau that refers to the notorious Communist concentration camps in which tens of millions of political prisoners were worked to death (Solzhenitsyn, 1975).

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

“GULAG” (main administration of the camps) was set up in 1930 and became a terrible symbol of the totalitarian communist regime. However, state repressions in Russia have existed for a long a time. In the 19th century, the czar authorities exiled more than a million people to Siberia. Many famous revolutionists, including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were sent there.

One of the best methods to surviving the Gulag system was by reaching the work quotas, but this was at times impossible to reach, so both parties found ways to re-interpret quotas which lead to inferences. The method that quotas were to be enforced were very strict and were also used as a way to blame someone for letting down the Soviet Union. For the Guards, officers, and bosses, if quotas were not met, they were to be charged in court as hinders to the soviet cause and were put themselves in prison. Prisoners themselves were given fewer rations, but this will be explained later in this analysis. The standards of how many logs were to be cut or how many miles of track were to be laid daily were set very high, so accomplish this feat, many

Josep Stalin was a social dictator during world war 2, who rose to power in 1929 after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. After his rise to power salt in would collectivized farming and would start killing off many of his own citizens. Stalin would launch multiple five year plans in hopes of bringing his lower class society into an industrial superpower. His five year plans consisted of one main idea, complete control of the government and economy. This would include control of the agricultural, which would lead to widespread famine killing millions

Life at Auschwitz squeezed every drop of life a human could tolerate, and then ten times more than that. The Auschwitz concentration camp yielded intolerable living conditions that had disease and infection plastered through it. Every day was a fight to survive. All desire for hope was lost and all yearned for food and water. Many concentration camps deprived and devitalized the lives of millions. Auschwitz, being one of the most formidable concentration camps, had the utmost insufferable living conditions and treatment.

For those who had the misfortune of being locked up in prison by the state (millions of people), these conditions were exacerbated to the point of concentration camp deprivation and abuse "There wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month.  Not even a doghouse.  And fires were out of the question.  There was nothing to build them with.  Let your work warm you up, that was your only salvation" (Solzhenitsyn 19).  We are treated to one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, a former member of the army who is serving the ninth year of a ten year sentence because he has been convicted of being a spy for the Germans.  Often called zek, a Russian word for prisoner, Ivan and the other men become numbers which is a criticism of how the Russian people are mere numbers to communist leaders.

During Stalin’s reign, there were many problems in the USSR: economic problems, social problems and political. Due to these problems Stalin developed many domestic policies in order to counter these problems and try to avoid an uprising. These plans were put into motion almost immediately during Stalin’s reign, but they proved unsuccessful and Stalin was unable to solve the problems that existed within the Soviet Union.