Gulag
The abbreviation Gulag denotes the network of penal and labor camps in the Soviet Union , in a broader sense it stands for the entirety of the Soviet forced labor system , which, in addition to camps and forced labor colonies , also special camps , special prisons , forced labor without imprisonment and, in the post-Stalinist era, also some psychiatric clinics as places of imprisonment included. In the broadest sense, the entire Soviet system of repression is meant.
Gulag Gulag or is in the parlance of the Soviet authorities for Russian Г лавное у правление лаг ерей (abbreviated ГУЛаг , stressed on the last syllable) or officially also Главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей и колоний , transcribed G lawnoje u prawlenije isprawitelno-trudowych was erej i kolonij translated "headquarters of corrective labor camps and colonies." Initially, this authority was assigned to the secret police GPU of the RSFSR . After the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922, the secret police were expanded to include all of the former Union republics , based on the Soviet Russian model of the GPU , and renamed the OGPU in 1923 . In 1934 the OGPU was incorporated into the NKVD , the Soviet Ministry of the Interior.
From 1930 to 1953 at least 18 million people were imprisoned in the camps. More than 2.7 million died in the camp or in exile . In the last years of Stalin's life , the gulag reached its highest level of inmates at around 2.5 million. In addition, there were around six million people who were exiled to remain at their place of work as “special settlers” or “work settlers”. During the Second World War and the Soviet Union also about four held in the postwar years to six million prisoners of war in camps of GUPWI ( Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных transcribed G lawnoje up rawlenije po delam w ojennoplennych i i nternirowannych translated "head office for matters of Prisoners of War and Internees ”) and demanded forced labor from them. Immediately after the end of the war, 700,000 inmates from filtration camps were added. Experts now assume that a total of around 28.7 to 32 million people in the Soviet Union had to do forced labor.
Historical development
Background and history
Ssylka and Katorga
In the criminal nature of the Russian Empire took exile (ссылка - 'ssylka') and the system of Katorga an important place. The katorga showed a number of typical signs of labor camps: convictions, hard physical labor without special specialist knowledge, the simplest housing and forced labor. It took place mainly in the sparsely populated, hostile, but resource-rich regions of Siberia and in the Russian Far East . The penal colony on the remote island of Sakhalin was the epitome of the katorga system in the 19th century . The katorga prisoners, who had been sentenced to several years or life sentences, often worked in mines and in the timber industry . Ssylka and Kartorga included condemned political opponents such as the Decembrists and Narodniki or the Bolsheviks , but also serious criminals, as categories of punishment .
From 1824 to 1889, 720,000 people were exiled to Siberia. In comparison, the katorga remained a rarer punishment; in 1906 it affected around 6,000 people; in 1916 this number was 28,600. In literary terms, Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( Notes from a House of the Dead ) , Anton Chekhov ( The Island of Sakhalin ) and Lev Tolstoy ( Resurrection ) dealt with exile and forced labor and thus made known the distant places of imprisonment in European Russia.
After the February Revolution of 1917 , the katorga sentence was abolished. A new edition witnessed the reintroduction of hard prison form Katorga ( katorshnye raboty, KRT ) in the form of so-called Stalin Katorga from 1943 up to the establishment of special camps of the MVD 1948. The Stalinist hard labor camps were camp with particularly sharp regime for both political as well as criminals .
Warehouse at the beginning of the 20th century
In addition to Russian punishment traditions, the international development of the (isolation) camp is also one of the roots of the Gulag. During the Cuban War of Independence (1895 to 1898), the Spanish military set up so-called concentration camps (campos de reconcentración) to separate the Cuban civilian population from insurgents who fought for the island's sovereignty . During the Second Boer War (1899 to 1902), the British military forced Boer women and children as well as Africans living in the Boer area into concentration camps . At the behest of the Reich government under Bernhard von Bülow, German colonial troops isolated members of the Herero and Nama in concentration camps in German South West Africa from 1904 to 1908 .
POW camp in the First World War
The First World War increased the number of camps. The prisoner-of-war camps were militarized, the camp infrastructure and the prisoners' labor were used intensively, and the camp architectures were aligned.
The war justified a pronounced friend-foe thinking not only on the battlefield . The search for enemies , spies and potential collaborators was also rampant within the warring states , for example in the Russian Empire. Experiences with camps were omnipresent there too: interned soldiers of the Russian Empire knew them, as did their relatives. But employers who used the labor of prisoners of war in the Russian camps were also familiar with the camps, the same applied to neighbors as well as to the administrative and security personnel of such facilities.
Origin and development up to the German-Soviet War
Revolution, civil war and terror
In the turmoil that followed the February and October revolutions , violence spread among Russian civil society. The Bolsheviks fueled them by using terror , with reference to the Jacobins of the French Revolution, along the lines of the Grande Terreur . After the Left SRs left the joint government with the Bolsheviks because they refused to sign the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty (March 3, 1918), the Bolsheviks had their former partner's followers sent to prisons and concentration camps. Often these concentration camps had previously been prisoner of war camps - the military institution was thus transformed into a political one.
In August 1918, the Russian civil war had been raging for months, Lenin took up the term concentration camp . He called for terror against " kulaks ", " priests " and members of the White Army ; "Dodgy elements" should be locked in a concentration camp. The Cheka developed into the central organs of terrorist violence from 1917 onwards , followed by the GPU and, from 1923, its successor organization, the OGPU. After the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, carried out by the anarchist and social revolutionary Fanny Kaplan , a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918 legitimized the systematic use of red terror against " class enemies " and their deportation to concentration camps. In 1921 there were 48 such camps in 43 governorates . In addition to earlier prisoner of war camps, monasteries were also used as concentration camps.
During and after the Russian Civil War, the use of so-called labor armies for the further development of the Gulag system was of not inconsiderable importance as an economic factor. It was a militarized form of forced labor that soldiers of the Red Army were subjected to in order to remedy the negative economic consequences of war communism . Already at the beginning of the 1920s in the 1st period of the labor armies - they existed again from 1942 to 1946 - parallels between the labor armies and the Gulag are clearly recognizable. Common features were forced labor or forced labor, the massive use of labor for hard work, military command economy, a bonus system for the fulfillment of labor standards as well as the associated food rations.
Solovetsky
Although the Bolsheviks claimed that prisons and exiles had no future under socialism, and certainly under communism , these instruments of repression remained in use after the civil war. The focus of ideological concepts for the organization of detention was initially “upbringing” and “reforging” (perekowka) : offenders were to become citizens who welcomed the society and state of the Soviet Union. The idea of “corrective work” took up a lot of space here; during Lenin's lifetime it dominated competing models aimed at exploiting the labor of prisoners. The first codification of “corrective work” took place in 1924 : in the penal system, work should play a central role in education. In contrast to western prison concepts, the social origin of the delinquent was included in the type and duration of the sentence; In judgment and imprisonment, the class approach replaced the principle of equality .
On the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea , around 160 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle , the "primordial cell of the later Soviet camp system of the Stalin era" was created. Starting from the Solowezki monastery there , a camp complex developed from 1923: the “Solowezki Camps for Special Use” (SLON). More than 840,000 people were imprisoned here until it was closed in 1939. The camp complex was intended for serious criminals and political prisoners. For this purpose, the latter were transferred from the so-called “political isolators” (special detention centers for political prisoners) on the mainland. In the 1920s there were an average of several thousand prisoners in the SLON. "Political" (members of left parties, anarchists ) and " counter-revolutionaries " (survivors of the Kronstadt sailors' uprising , representatives of the old regime such as White Guard officers, clergy, nuns, etc.) made up the majority of the inmates, "criminals" were in the minority. Until 1928/1929 the “political” set the tone among the prisoners, after which the “criminals” took over the rule among the prisoners. Everyday life in the camp included beatings of guards, harassment , torture, and rape and sexual coercion of female inmates.
The SLON developed into an experimental field for the future gulag. In particular, Naftali Frenkel , previously a prisoner himself, swung himself up to transform the warehouse system in the second half of the 1920s and implemented economic principles in the use of the labor force. Regardless of whether they were “political”, “counterrevolutionary” or “criminals”: the prisoners were used extensively for road construction work and for the timber harvest . Corresponding work was carried out not only in the vicinity of the islands, but also in distant areas of the Karelian Republic or the Arkhangelsk Oblast . Complaints by the Soviet authorities about SLON and its competitive advantages through cheap prison labor were ineffective. Frenkel also linked the food rations to the labor yield, that is, to the fulfillment of the prescribed labor standard. He divided the prisoners into three groups according to their physical condition: capable of hard labor, capable of light physical labor, and disabled ; each of these groups now had its own tasks and work standards. The catering corresponded to the work categories. The differences were considerable: inmates in the lowest category received only half the ration that was due to inmates in the highest category.
In the 1920s, reports on the conditions in the Soviet camps were repeatedly sent to the West because the "political" had appropriate connections to organizations in exile . The SLON warehouse complex was also affected. An incident on December 19, 1923 sparked indignation abroad: guards shot at a group of political prisoners and killed six of them. In the following years, too, prisoners tried to keep other countries up to date about conditions and events. But the communist propaganda drowned them out more and more. Maxim Gorky made his contribution here. After a visit to the Solovetsky Islands on June 20, 1929, he wrote an anthemic travelogue that praised the living and working conditions of the prisoners and their successful "reforging" into useful Soviet citizens. A commission of the OGPU had come to completely different conclusions only six weeks earlier. Her report spoke of catastrophic working conditions, torture of prisoners and arbitrary shootings. 13 of the 38 camp administration officers were executed.
Even high officials of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police , considered Frenkel measures with favor. Frenkel's ideas promised to turn costly and unproductive "seated prisons" under the jurisdiction of the judiciary into productive and profitable labor camps for the industrialization of the Soviet Union by reducing the costs of housing and feeding the prisoners to the bare minimum . Genrich Jagoda , with reference to the Solovetsky Islands, demanded that more such camps be set up in the north. In April 1929 a corresponding concept envisaged opening such camps and placing them under the direction of the OGPU. The majority of prisoners were no longer subject to the requirements of the Ministry of Justice. From 1928 to 1930, the number of prisoners who were now in the headquarters of the secret police increased from 30,000 to 300,000 people.
Special settlements and large buildings after the "Great Wall of Change"
In 1929, Stalin had prevailed against all supposed opponents in the party and had his project of a " great turnaround " (Velikij perelom) tackled . The first five-year plan (1928 to 1932) approved in 1929 provided for the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union . The economic and technological level of the industrialized countries should be reached within a decade . Because the funds for industrialization could not be raised either by exploiting colonies or by taking out loans abroad, the peasantry had to pay a “ tribute ”, according to Stalin. Grain exports were supposed to finance the equipment and goods necessary to build up the industry. The farmers themselves should not receive full equivalents for the agricultural products they acquire . The forced collectivization of agriculture thus became the necessary condition for industrialization, and peasant resistance was stifled in the campaign of de- kulakization.
The deculakization created a large army of special settlers who were forcibly settled in inhospitable regions of the Soviet Union in order to develop them economically. The world of the special settlers was "a kind of middle thing (...) between the free world and the camp world". The barren settlements in hostile surroundings, created out of nothing with little, were basically peasant settlements under state supervision - without walls, barbed wires and fences. Central infrastructure facilities such as canteens or washrooms were usually missing. Occasionally the men were separated from the women and children. This compulsory segregation of male workers was only relaxed in these cases after the problems with the children and women who remained behind became greater and greater. The special settlers were also allowed to manage their own parcel . However, hunger and deprivation remained the order of the day in these settlements.
The chaotically prepared settlement attempts could end fatally, especially if the special settlers weren't farmers who knew about agriculture and the rigors of nature, but “socially harmful and declassified elements” - mainly townspeople. This is how the Soviet authorities referred to groups of people who they forcibly removed from the streets of certain cities (→ Nasino tragedy ).
In 1930/1931 around 1.8 million people lived in special settlements. The mortality was high: Alone in the northern administrative region died 1932/1933 around 240,000 people. Many people also fled these settlements. The number of people who escaped between 1932 and 1940 was 600,000. Their destination was either their home or the growing and industrializing cities. From the mid-1930s, the importance of the special settlements slowly declined; in 1939, around 1.2 million special settlers were recorded. During the Second World War, their number rose sharply again, because the special settlements were filled with members of those nations which Stalin suspected of collaborating with the enemy and therefore had them forcibly deported . The number of special settlers in 1953 was 2.7 million.
The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal , initially called the Stalin Canal, was built from 1931 to 1933 and was the first example of a major infrastructure project that was implemented through the use of mass forced labor. The novel connection of such large construction sites with the storage system is regarded as a "turning point in storage policy", the canal itself was "style-forming" in this regard.
The water main line was to overcome 227 kilometers of land, five dams and 19 locks had to be built. Frenkel managed the construction work from November 1931 until it was completed, OGPU boss Jagoda was in charge of the political process. Because there were almost no machines available, the work was done with bare hands - labor became a “bulk consumer good”. 170,000 forced laborers were used on the construction site, 25,000 of whom died during the major project. Initially, SLON provided the forced laborers, then the BelBaltLag established itself as the warehouse for this canal .
Stalin and his entourage viewed the canal as a success: the large-scale project was completed within the planned deadline, the massive deployment of forced laborers, who had been offered the prospect of reduced prison terms if the requirements were met, seemed to have paid off, and the OGPU proved itself in the eyes of Stalin Management qualities. However, the new canal was hardly suitable for the intended economic and military purposes because the water depth was insufficient. In this respect, it is now regarded as a “symbol of senseless and deadly excesses of Soviet despotism ”. Communist propaganda saw it differently. She considered the canal to be a showpiece of the Soviet creative will. 36 authors, including the well-known writers Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy , Mikhail Soschtschenko , Viktor Shklowski , Vsevolod Ivanov , Demjan Bedny , Valentin Katajew , Bruno Jasieński and Nikolai Tichonow , wrote a jubilee pamphlet on his fame, which highlighted the "reforging" effect of the Prisoner work and overcoming all natural adversities. The text collection appeared not only in the Soviet Union, but also in an English edition. Today it is considered a prime example of the “avowed terror” of Stalinism and the corresponding use of intellectuals and writers.
A comparable development project was the Moscow-Volga Canal , a main project of the second five-year plan (1932 to 1937), with its DmitLag camp complex near Moscow . From 1932 to 1938 it was the largest Gulag camp ever. It held almost 200,000 prisoners annually from 1934 to 1936. From mid-September 1932 to the end of January 1938, more than 22,800 DmitLag prisoners died.
Prisoners were also used in the construction of the railway , for example for the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM). The associated camp, the BamLag, which opened in November 1932, held up to 268,700 people. The slave laborers' task was to prepare the first phase of BAM construction, which also included civil construction work along the BAM route. They also had to lay a second track for the Trans-Siberian Railway .
The gulag also played an important role in the development of raw material deposits. The so-called Ukhta expedition started in 1929. Their task was to locate oil deposits in northwest Russia . The city of Uchta gradually emerged from the first base of the expedition . The discovery of extensive coal deposits was more significant than oil discoveries . In a few years, the “Rudnik 1” (mine 1) camp became the city of Vorkuta and the center of the VorkutLag camp . In 1938 there were already 15,000 prisoners living in the WorkutLag. Around one million prisoners were to pass through the Vorkuta camps by 1953, a quarter of whom were killed in the process. The Uchta expedition also created camps in other places, such as the UchtPetschLag in mid-1931, a camp that expanded over the years and often changed its name. In 1932 there were almost 4,800 prisoners, by mid-1935 there were already almost 18,000 people.
The SibLag, which was operated from 1929 to at least 1960, was also one of the large camp complexes. The inmates of the SibLag were mainly employed in the timber industry, agriculture, in the construction of roads and industrial plants as well as in industrial production. Camp inmates built parts of the cities of Novosibirsk and Mariinsk . The maximum number of prisoners in this group of camps was more than 78,000. The average occupancy varied between 30,000 and 40,000 inmates.
In Dolinka near Karaganda in the Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic , the headquarters of the KarLag had been located since 1931. The inmates of this camp worked in a number of industries, most notably in agriculture, but also in coal mining. The camp complex had around 10,400 inmates at the end of 1932. At the beginning of January 1936, more than 38,000 prisoners were registered.
Another example of extensive peuplication and development projects is the NorilLag . North of the Arctic Circle, it had functioned as a forced labor camp since the summer of 1935 for the construction and operation of the Norilsk copper-nickel combine , which exploited the non-ferrous metal deposits in northeast Siberia. The NorilLag convicts also established the city of Norilsk . The number of inmates in this camp was 1,200 on October 1, 1935, and rose steadily, reaching around 70,000 to 90,000 in the early 1950s. A total of 270,000 people passed through the camp, and 17,000 to 18,000 died while in custody.
An extensive forced labor complex was built in the Kolyma region from April 1932 . This area encompassed more than the landscapes on the Kolyma River. Time and again, additional areas throughout the northeast of the USSR were added to the forced labor complex until it finally reached an area of 3.5 million square kilometers in 1953 - one seventh of the territory of the Soviet Union. Eduard Bersin (1894–1938) acted as the first head of the industrial giant Dalstroi and the SewWostLag camp, even if these organizations were formally separated. The directors of the Dalstroi, Bersin and his successors , were also agents of party, executive, police and intelligence agencies - they were the undisputed rulers of the region. The Communist Party remained without its own influence on the territory, where hundreds of lagpunkty migrated with the extensive exploitation of nature. The reason for the outwardly emphasized separation of Dalstroi on the one hand and SewWostLag and its subordinate and successor camps on the other hand was the concern that foreign countries would boycott the mined mineral resources - especially gold - after the forced labor became known . Such a ban could have endangered the industrialization of the Soviet Union, because in addition to agricultural products, it was financed with gold sales. For Dalstroi, deposits of uranium and tin were also of interest. Magadan emerged as an economic and administrative center . Between 1931 and 1957, around 880,000 people were imprisoned in the Dalstroi area, around 125,000 died in the camps.
organization
Between 1929 and 1953, 476 camp complexes with thousands of camp points were built. In addition, there are no fewer than 2,000 colonies for “special settlers”, “work settlers”, repressed young people, etc. The constant growth of the camp and special settlement system made it necessary to reorganize and reorganize the administrative structures. In 1934 the OGPU was absorbed by the NKVD , which was now responsible for all camps, special settlements, prisons and other places of detention in the USSR. In 1934 the main warehouse administration (GULag) was established in this ministry . In accordance with the growing importance of the camps for the Soviet economy, the camps had to meet the requirements of state economic planning . Essential sectors of the Soviet economy were reflected in the responsible Gulag sector administrations, for example for the timber industry, agriculture, mining, railroad or road construction. There were also specialist departments for the camp staff, such as those for cadre , informers and repression ("Operative Chekist Administration"), for medical and hygienic matters, for camp administration and supply or for propaganda, cultural and educational tasks in the camps .
Different types of camps and settlements developed over the years: there were transit camps, labor camps, penal camps, women's camps, camps or “labor colonies” for children and young people, camps for the disabled, special camps for scientific research, test and filtration camps, special settlements, work settlements and more .
Great terror and forced labor
Many Gulag functionaries also fell victim to the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938, above all the former OGPU boss Jagoda. Many of his protégés did not survive either, among them Matwei Berman , who had been head of the Gulag for many years, and his successor Israil Pliner (1896–1939). Eduard Bersin died violently, as did Semjon Firin (1898–1937), who headed the DmitLag. With Firin, around 200 other DmitLag cadres were executed . They were accused of conspiracy against Stalin.
However, the shootings during the Great Terror affected the Gulag prisoners to a much greater extent. The NKVD order no. 00447 "for the repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements" provided for the Gulag camps to shoot 10,000 people at the end of July 1937. At the end of the Great Terror, the number of prisoners murdered on the basis of this instruction was 30,178. On the basis of this and a number of other operational orders for ethnic cleansing , NKVD members shot, for example, around 1,000 to 1,800 prisoners of the SLON, around 2,000 to 2,900 in Vorkuta and around 3,000 to 5,900 in the Dalstroi area.
The Great Terror also shook the system of prisons, camps and special settlements of the Gulag in other ways. The number of inmates rose considerably: from 786,595 on July 1, 1937 to 1,126,500 on February 1, 1938 to 1,317,195 on January 1, 1939. The Gulag's precarious logistics were therefore out of joint. This had consequences for the reception, distribution, supply, guarding and work of these masses of prisoners. The camps were overcrowded, the camp regime became tougher, and the productivity of the camps declined. In 1937, according to official Soviet statistics, 33,499 people died in the camps, special settlements and prisons. A year later it was 126,585. The number of people who died during the deportation transports and on routes between Gulag camps also skyrocketed by 38,000 between 1937 and 1938. The statistics also showed that the rate of inmates unable to work due to illness, disability or emaciation was over nine percent in 1938 and thus affected more than 100,000 people. In 1939 around 150,000 inmates were unable to work, not including disabled people. The Great Terror turned out to be a disaster for the Gulag economy, but this applied not only to the camp system, but to the entire Soviet economy.
It was only under the direction of Lavrenti Beria , who took over the management of the NKVD in November 1938 with the end of the Great Terror, that productivity rose again. His reorganization of the Gulag after 1939 led to the abandonment of the geographical or functional classification, instead it was now organized according to sectors. Inside the camps, the living conditions of the individual were to be linked to the degree of compliance with the norms, similar to how it was conceived in the SLON at the end of the 1920s. The individual was classified according to sentence, occupation and ability to work. Basically, every prisoner was given a task and a norm that set the productivity goals. How individual prisoners were able to satisfy their needs for food, clothing, shelter and living space should only depend on the degree to which they fulfilled their respective norms. Beria's concern was to align every aspect of camp life with the given production results. Even when productivity increased, the realities in the camp were often different: corruption , embezzlement, theft, fraud and swindles in compliance with the norm - the so-called Tufta - were the order of the day, the prison hierarchy was not dependent on work performance.
World War II and post-war period
Members of enemy nations
From 1939 to 1941, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet occupation of the corresponding territories, NKVD employees deported many Poles , Balts and Ukrainians , together around 170,000 people, who were considered particularly dangerous, to the Gulag, plus Moldovans and Belarusians .
The war years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941) brought further waves of deportation against members of ethnic groups who were suspected with the invaders to collaborate or as a fifth column to act of the enemy. Shortly after the war began, this affected around one million Soviet citizens of German origin , especially those from the Volga German Republic (ASSRdWG). In addition, thousands of German emigrants , mostly former citizens of the German Reich, were caught in another wave of deportations from November 1941 onwards, which lasted until spring 1942. The banishment targets for Germans, including for the Soviet authorities since the annexation of Austria in 1938, also Austrian emigrants of the KPÖ or former Schutzbündler , were generally - for security reasons - behind the Urals , mainly in Siberia and Central Asia . In 1942 the deportees, mainly Germans from Russia and Germans of origin, were mobilized in labor armies and used for forced labor. Some of the so-called “labor armists” were gathered in the same Gulag camps as regular prisoners. In 1943 peoples were deported from the North Caucasus and Crimea : Karachay , Kalmyks , Chechens , Ingush , Balkar , Crimean Tatar , Meshet and Kurdish .
Life in the new settlements and the transports there were characterized by high mortality rates: 20 to 25 percent of the deportees died by 1948. Not only did the Gulag camps fill up, the special settlements also grew. While the number of these settlers was around one million shortly before the Second World War, it rose to 2.2 million by the beginning of October 1945.
Evacuations
Triggered by the surprise attack by the Wehrmacht , the camps in the western Soviet Union were hastily evacuated in the summer of 1941 . Due to a lack of transport capacity, this evacuation was often done on foot. The prisoners were forced to march , often more than 1,000 kilometers. 210 labor colonies and 27 camps were evacuated in this way, and 750,000 people were affected. Another 140,000 prisoners from 272 prisons were also transferred to eastern parts of the country. Many deportees did not arrive at their destination. Where there was not enough time for deportations, NKVD employees unceremoniously murdered the prisoners. If German units discovered such murder victims on their advance, they used this for propaganda purposes and for pogroms against Jews - such as in Lemberg or Tarnopol . The National Socialists accuse the Jews of being behind all crimes of the Bolsheviks (→ Jewish Bolshevism ).
War years
Although around one million prisoners were released as fighters at the front during the war to make up for the heavy losses suffered by the Red Army , living conditions in the camps deteriorated dramatically. However, this deterioration was not a special phenomenon of the Gulag, but a general trend that affected the entire country. The provision of food to the prisoners and the provision of accommodation were catastrophic in many places. Hunger and epidemics increased, especially cholera and typhus . Over two million people died in the camps and labor colonies during the war. The inmate death rate was 20 to 25 percent. Most of the living were also in poor condition: at the end of 1942, 64 percent of all camp inmates were unable to work due to poor health or were only able to do light work.
After the end of the war
While prisoners of war on Soviet territory were as a rule subordinate to the "Central Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees" (GUPWI) from 1944 , people convicted of war criminals served their imprisonment in the Gulag. Due to the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, the Gulag filled with people from Eastern Central Europe as well as from Austria and the Soviet occupation zone after the end of the war . These included people who came from Poland, the Baltic States or the Ukraine and were considered nationalists , often they had experience in partisan combat ; In the Gulag their cohesion was considered great. The number of prisoners also grew because Soviet soldiers who had become prisoners of war in Germany or who had to do forced labor, as well as returning civilian workers from the East were sent to the Gulag by the hundreds of thousands. They were considered guilty for allegedly deserting or collaborating with the enemy. Finally, the extremely repressive anti-theft decrees of June 4, 1947 - a harsh reaction to the famine of 1946/1947 - caused an increase in the number of prisoners. Despite an amnesty for 600,000 prisoners announced in July 1945, the convict population doubled between 1944 and 1949. At the beginning of the 1950s the number of prisoners reached its historical high of 2.5 to 2.6 million, which corresponded to four percent of the working-class population in the Soviet Union.
Zenith and crisis
The fact that the gulag was an important factor in the Soviet economy was evident in individual branches of production. At the beginning of the 1950s, it stood for 100 percent of diamond and platinum mining , 90 percent of silver mining , 35 percent of nickel and non-ferrous metal mining, one third of Soviet gold mining, 50 percent of all wood yields and 50 percent of coal production. The uranium extraction , which was of strategic military importance for the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb , came 100 percent from the Gulag and its affiliated companies such as Dalstroi. The Soviet Union's first nuclear reactor near Chelyabinsk was built by Gulag prisoners.
The economic importance of the gulag was also shown in the construction of waterways, river power plants and other large hydroenergetic projects. The Volga-Don Canal is an example : from 1948 to 1953, more than 236,000 Gulag prisoners were deployed here, although they were able to fall back on a much larger machine park than in pre-war projects. Four camp complexes of the VolgoDonStroi provided the convict reservoir. However, the forced labor of the Gulag prisoners was completely omitted from the propaganda depictions. Also in the construction of the Kuibyshev reservoir , gulag prisoners who belonged to the Kuneevsky camp were used, in which on January 1, 1953, according to official information, almost 46,000 people lived. The Akhtubinski camp provided the forced labor reservoir for the construction of the Stalingrad reservoir ; at the beginning of 1953 it contained more than 29,000 prisoners.
Another large area of activity for Gulag prisoners after the Second World War was the construction of the railway, in particular the further construction of the BAM. The Arctic Circle Railway , which became famous as the deadline , as well as the Selichino – Sakhalin railway line are also included - both of which are unfinished major projects.
In 1952, a total of nine percent of all state investments flowed into the Gulag. However, behind this sheer size there were also problems: the availability and mobilization of forced labor whitewashed the weaknesses in labor productivity and acted like a narcotic . Productivity often only reached 50 percent of that of free labor. Forced labor appeared useful where crude and simple work was done; if, on the other hand, specialist knowledge and commitment were required, they reached their limits. Despite the large population losses in the Soviet Union due to the war, the Gulag administration found no means to use the prisoners' labor sparingly. The aging Stalin also exerted strong pressure by advocating economically nonsensical large-scale projects; Such prestige projects based on forced labor seemed to have sprung from Stalin's wish to erect monuments while he was still alive . All attempts to establish incentive systems in prisoner work failed - not least because they were undermined by the so-called Tufta (work for pretense or ubiquitous and systematic standard fraud). Another characteristic of the economic crisis was the enormously bloated administrative apparatus of the gulag. At the beginning of the 1950s, this authority comprised around 300,000 people, two thirds as security guards and one third as technical and administrative staff. In March 1953 the number of Gulag employees was 445,000; 234,000 of them worked as guards.
In addition to the economic crisis, there were changes within the warehouse society. The rule of the serious criminals among the prisoners, unchallenged since the 1930s, was challenged by the new groups that entered the camps after the war: former soldiers of the Red Army as well as Ukrainian, Baltic and Polish “nationalists”. These were imprisoned for up to 25 years with no prospect of release, emphasized their solidarity and were therefore difficult to discipline . The guards and the serious criminals now faced a dangerous opponent: experienced in war, violence and organization. The authorities reacted to this from 1948 to 1954/1957 with the establishment and operation of so-called special camps of the MWD (Ossobye lagerja) . A tougher detention regime, longer working hours and stricter security regulations applied here; Accommodation and care were consistently poor, visits from relatives were forbidden, and correspondence with letters was severely restricted (one or two letters per year) or completely prohibited. At the beginning of 1953, 210,000 people were incarcerated in the special camps. This measure did not bring peace. Rather, the isolation of the unruly “political” led to the formation of real nests of resistance. Between 1948 and 1952 there were around 30 hunger strikes , demonstrations , strikes and revolts in special camps - harbingers of the great uprisings after Stalin's death.
The Gulag after Stalin
"Dissolution" and continuation in a new form
The main administration of the warehouse within the MWD was formally established shortly after the XX. CPSU party congress abolished in May 1956. This did not mean the end of the camp institutions, but their reorganization in a new form. Initially, the individual camps that were not incorporated into the economy were briefly subordinated to the judiciary from October 1956 to April 1957 - as in the early 1920s and 1930s. Some camp complexes such as the one on Kolyma ( Dalstroi ) and WorkutLag were not closed until the early 1960s. From the head office bearing (GULAG) was headquarters of corrective labor (GUITK) within the Justice Department of the USSR. At the beginning of the 1960s, this was renamed the Headquarters of the Correctional Facilities (GUITU) and was again under the MWD. In principle, all of the successor organizations of the structure based on the old Stalin gulag system were arrested, in the camp regime only slightly more lenient. It stayed that way until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Riots
In the summer of 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, there were major uprisings in the Gulag. The GorLag , a special camp near Norilsk, was affected by this from the end of May to the beginning of August 1953 . From mid-June to early August, the prisoners in the Vorkuta special camp RetschLag ( Vorkuta uprising ) rose. In both camps, Western Ukrainians, Poles and Balts took the lead in the action during this rebellion. Although negotiations took place between the insurgents and representatives of Moscow, the Soviet state power finally put down the revolts. This violent pacification resulted in eleven dead, 14 seriously and 22 slightly injured in GorLag; 64 dead and 123 injured were counted in Vorkuta.
From mid-May to the end of June 1954 there was the Kengir uprising in StepLag , which, despite negotiations, also ended in a violent crackdown. The death toll here was 35 and 37 respectively, 106 wounded prisoners were added; 40 soldiers were injured. During this period there were also considerable unrest in other camps, for example in the Kuneevsky camp.
The uprising was triggered by the news of Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, of the uprising of June 17, 1953 in the GDR and of Beria's dismissal (June 26, 1953). Many prisoners linked this news with the hope of a fundamental change in their living situation.
Reforms, amnesties and rehabilitation
Immediately after Stalin's death, Beria organized a restructuring of the secret police. He assigned responsibility for the gulag to the Soviet Ministry of Justice. Large industrial complexes were subordinated to other ministries, such as those for forestry, mining, road construction or the manufacturing industry. In addition, Beria had more than 20 major construction projects that were based on forced labor. In June 1953 he announced his intention to liquidate the entire system of forced labor because it was economically inefficient and had no prospects. The number of camps fell: in March 1953 the Gulag included 175 camps, by April this number had already halved. At the end of 1953 it was 68.
Not only did the number of camps change, but also the camp regime. On July 10, 1954, the Central Committee of the CPSU passed the resolution to reintroduce the eight-hour day , the regulations on daily routine in the camps were relaxed; the prisoners were given the opportunity to do good work to qualify for a reduced term. The special camps were closed or converted into ordinary labor camps. Prisoners were now allowed to write letters and receive parcels without restriction. The marriage of prisoners was also officially permitted.
After Khrushchev's secret speech on the XX. At the CPSU party congress on February 25, 1956, in which he addressed Stalinist crimes and forced de-Stalinization , the overall administration of the camp system came to an end: the governing body of the Gulag, the main camp administration , was officially dissolved as early as May 1956 . In 1957 the Dalstroi and Norilsk camp complexes were liquidated. Three years later, in 1960, there were only 26 camps left in the Soviet Union.
On March 27, 1953, barely three weeks after Stalin's death, 1 to 1.2 million of the 2.5 million Gulag prisoners were amnestied. This amnesty affected all inmates who were serving up to five years' imprisonment for official and economic crimes, as well as pregnant women, women with small children, minors, the elderly and the seriously ill. Those who were considered “counter-revolutionaries” were not amnestied.
The wave of layoffs in the weeks after March 27, 1953 was precipitous and chaotic: Due to the lack of planning, preparation and control, there were many attacks, debauchery, looting , mass rapes, murders and violent clashes with the law enforcement officers. The evacuation from the places of detention was slow due to the lack of transport logistics . Many ex-prisoners were exposed to bureaucratic harassment, often at the place of their detention, in order to hinder their departure. Some of the amnesties therefore stayed where they were, these people now lived as “free” people near their detention center. Largely penniless and without support from family or friends, they saw little prospect elsewhere for themselves. The surprising amnesty and its chaotic side effects aroused fear and unrest in the Soviet population.
Even after Beria's death, the wave of amnesties continued. From the beginning of 1954 to the beginning of 1956, 75 percent of the political prisoners still in prison were released. By January 1, 1960, the proportion of those in prison for political reasons in the camp population had fallen to 1.6 percent.
Those who received amnesty were not automatically rehabilitated . In order to restore their reputation , the former inmate or his family members had to undergo bureaucratic procedures. The corresponding applications were very often rejected. Even successful rehabilitation applications were in any case Geheimsache connected and never with a public apology from the state. From March 1953 to February 1956, the Soviet authorities rehabilitated about 7,000 people. It was not until Khrushchev's “secret speech” that a change was initiated: by the end of 1956, a total of 617,000 people had been rehabilitated. Despite this absolute number, rehabilitation remained the exception. This is how the so-called revision commissions, which immediately after the XX. Party congress had been launched and were directly active in the Gulag camps, until October 1, 1956, a rehabilitation decision was only made for four percent of all cases examined, compared with 6.4 percent of all those released.
The revision commissions moved within a contradicting field of forces. While Khrushchev wanted to advance the rehabilitation practice, the public prosecutor, fearful of a loss of competence, slowed down. For its part, the headquarters of the CPSU reserved the right to revise the judgments of the commissions. The commissions often only had a few minutes to review each individual case. Just requesting old investigation files was lengthy and complicated and could take weeks. Many former prisoners therefore preferred to forego rehabilitation and to be content with the mere amnesty. In 1956, after the Poznan uprising and the Hungarian people's uprising, there was the insecurity of the political leadership in addition to the conflict of competence and the bureaucratic hurdles . It seemed less and less opportune to accommodate the dismissed in this situation. The pace of rehabilitation decreased noticeably until it almost completely came to a standstill: only 24 people were rehabilitated between 1964 and 1987.
As compensation for detention , the Soviet authorities often granted those who had been rehabilitated no more than two average monthly wages equal to their earnings before arrest. Despite statements to the contrary, the ex-prisoners remained at a disadvantage in finding accommodation and work. There were also restrictions in other areas: Deported peasants were left with no acknowledgment of their innocence. Confiscated property was not returned to the rehabilitated. The Volga German Republic was not restored, the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to their homeland.
A fundamental change did not take place until the end of the Soviet Union. On January 16, 1989, an ukase issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet overturned all extrajudicial judgments of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1950s, and at the same time declared that all persons who had been punished after such judgments had been rehabilitated. Politically, the ukase of the President of the USSR "on the restoration of the rights of all victims of political repression in the 1920s to 1950s" of August 13, 1990 went even further. All repression committed for political, national, religious and social reasons was described as unlawful for the first time in this document. It classified the repression as criminal and as a violation of the norms of civilization. The ukase also addressed the victims of collectivization, as well as the persecution of the clergy and the inconsistencies of the rehabilitation process after the XX. Party congress.
On October 18, 1991, a few weeks before the dissolution of the USSR , the law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” - adopted by the Russian Federation - regulated the future understanding and procedure: All victims of political persecution since the October Revolution of 1917 were addressed. The USSR was described as a totalitarian state, condemned state terror, and expressed sympathy for the victims and their families. The law stipulated that those politically persecuted, those convicted by extrajudicial organs, exiles, special settlers, forced laborers, deported peoples, exiled family members and other relatives were to be rehabilitated. In addition, it clarified how corresponding applications should be applied for and processed. It also regulated compensation payments as well as privileges for the victims relating to local transport, rents and medical care. At the end of 2001, 4.5 million political prisoners had been rehabilitated in Russia.
Dissidents
Political repression also characterized the post- and neo-Stalinist Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era. However, the type and extent were not comparable to the oppression that had been common in the previous decades. The number of those politically persecuted in the USSR from 1957 to 1987 was between 8,000 and 20,000. In 1975, Amnesty International estimated the number of dissidents imprisoned at 10,000 out of one million prisoners in the USSR as a whole. This group included people who had sympathized with the Hungarian uprising, Jews who had been refused entry to Israel , Baptists , members of special religious groups , politically maladjusted children and relatives of "enemies of the people" and many intellectuals.
Camp Perm 36 and the DubrawLag in Mordovia were special camps for political prisoners of the post-Stalinist era . In the 1970s, the Vladimir prison took on such a function. Occasionally, prisoners have died from detention conditions and hunger strikes , during which they revolted against detention. The targeted psychiatization of dissidents led to psychiatric hospitals being abused to imprison political prisoners, for example the Serbsky Institute in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to such practices and in late 1986 announced a general amnesty for all political prisoners in the USSR.
Camp world and groups
Accesses
Arrest, investigation, judgment
The way to the camp began with the arrest. If they were not ordinary criminals, the arrest depended on the political cycles in the history of the Soviet Union , in which repression campaigns were repeatedly ordered. It could meet members of social classes and strata that were considered historically outdated, for example traders , former entrepreneurs or nobles . "Socially harmful and declassified elements" - this was the official term for people who were considered undesirable, socially relegated or uprooted - were also targeted by arrest campaigns. Farmers who were hostile to “kulaks” came into the focus of the authorities during the 1930s. Members of diaspora nations were also victims of waves of arrests, especially during the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 . The title as a “ class enemy ” or “ enemy of the people ” could also provide a pretext for imprisonment, including the relatives (→ kin imprisonment in the great terror ). Violations of strict workplace attendance rules also resulted in arrests. The same applied to violations of the repressive anti-theft regulations, especially in times of starvation. Under Stellter treason met mainly soldiers of the Red Army, which in German prisoner of war had fallen. In phases of mass repression, denunciation or allegation was often enough for arrest.
The arrest was followed by the establishment of personal details in a prison , the taking of photos of the arrested person for the files, the taking of fingerprints , showering, disinfection, hair removal and body searches - the latter often several times and in degrading manner.
Depending on their location and situation, those arrested were placed in a single or collective cell. Solitary confinement could mean being held in a standing cell with no possibility of sitting or lying down. Collection cells, on the other hand, were often overcrowded, interspersed with informers and sometimes dominated by criminals, which made solidarity much more difficult.
During interrogations , the investigators often confronted the arrested with allegations, some of which were absurd, and asked for confessions or to cooperate in the investigation, i.e. to denounce acquaintances. Mental or physical torture was common. Interrogation records were usually riddled with false information, if not entirely fictitious .
With or without a confession - the indictment drafted by the investigating officer was approved by his superior. Then it went to the judging authorities. These could be regional courts, people's courts, “special deliberations”, “colleges” or military tribunals . Publicly held court hearings took on the function of show trials . Hundreds of thousands of the accused were secretly sentenced by extrajudicial organs, mainly by troikas and dwoikas of the 1930s.
A common vehicle for convicting defendants since 1927 has been Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code . On the basis of its vague provisions, delinquents were convicted of “counter-revolutionary” offenses, “pest activity” or even for “sabotage” and “espionage”.
Way to the camp
The main means of transport to move prisoners to transit camps, to their final detention sites, or to other camps were simple cattle wagons or “ stolypin wagons ”. The overcrowding of the wagons left little room for the individual. During the sometimes weeks-long journeys, those transported often suffered from a serious shortage of food and water. Inadequate hygienic conditions and malnutrition led to diseases such as dysentery , typhus, scabies and scurvy . In summer it could get stuffy and hot, in winter it was icy cold in the barely or unheated wagons. Theft, embezzlement, robbery , brutality of the guards, physical violence up to rape and murder were part of everyday transport.
It was not just railways that supplied the Gulag with prisoners. In particular goals in the far north, in Siberia and the Russian Far East could only by Kahn , domestic or coaster reach. For this purpose, the prisoners were crammed into the cargo holds for days or weeks. The last part of the way to the assigned camp was often on foot. Occasionally, marches of over 100 kilometers had to be covered.
The transports ended fatally for many prisoners. In the first year of Bersin's rule over the Kolyma region (1932), of the approximately 16,000 prisoners who were transported to Magadan, only about 9,900 people reached their destination. During the Second World War, 78,000 people are said to have died during the deportation of the Chechens alone.
Transit and distribution stations
As a rule, the way to the detention center was interrupted by stays in transit prisons or camps. These facilities were "junctions and points of the transport routes through which the Moscow camp administration regulated the flow of prisoners to the various camps". The conditions there were hardly better than on the trains or in the remand prisons. Here, too, crowded tight spaces, pest plagues, diseases, insufficient supplies and degrading disinfection and cleaning procedures shaped the picture.
Within a warehouse industrial complex there were distribution stations that were used for the initial reception and distribution of newcomers.
Arrivals
If the intended camp did not yet exist, the newcomers had to build it themselves. Before the barracks stood, the prisoners had to make do with primitive earth huts, makeshift tents or tarpaulins. If a camp existed, the new prisoners first had to undergo a roll call . After a shower and a disinfection procedure, prisoners were provided with clothing, if such textiles were available on site. The decisive process, however, was the selection of the individual newcomers in order to classify them according to the work categories: light work, medium work and hard work. The decision was dependent on the prisoner's social origin and his current physical condition. New inmates could avoid assigned heavy work if they were able to establish contact with inmates or camp personnel with relationships (blat) .
Camp existence
Storage zone
In 1939 and 1947, orders from the NKVD and the successor organization MWD regulated how a Gulag camp was to be set up: the way to the workplace should be short, while the way to the places of residence of non-imprisoned people should be as long as possible. Surface water should be able to drain off easily. Access to drinking water had to be guaranteed. The outer shape of the camp territory should resemble a rectangle or a square. Barbed wire was used to demarcate the place of detention ; in cities, opaque wooden fences or walls should be used. There should be watchtowers on the outer perimeter, but outside the camp . Access to the camp was through a central gate (several in larger camps), which was secured by guard buildings. In some camps, the guards used watch dogs on the outside of the fence . In some places, a control strip (raked earth or pristine snow) in front of the fence was used to show the footprints of fugitives. Attention was paid to gender segregation within the camp zone. Barbed wire or board fences were usually used for this. The prisoners were given freedom of movement within the camp zone after work and before evening roll call.
Storage regime
Central guidelines of the Gulag headquarters also regulated the prison regime in 1939 and 1947. The typical day of the prisoner was marked by the set wake-up time, the morning roll call, the guarded march in the column to work, forced labor, keeping the accommodation clean, the distribution of food, the evening roll call and the night's rest. Concrete implementation practices of these specifications depended on local or production conditions. The camp administration seldom granted days off; the May Day could be a day off as well as the anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7) when the population should be spared the sight of "enemies of the people" and "traitors". Dangerous sandstorms or snowstorms as well as extreme freezing temperatures could lead to the daily interruption of the forced labor. As a matter of principle , the camp staff demanded obedience , maximum effort from the prisoner and strict observance of the camp and movement regulations.
Punish
Violations of the provisions of the Gulag or arbitrary decisions by the guards could result in draconian punishment of the prisoners. In many camps, specially sealed off buildings were available as “prison within a prison”: the punitive isolators (schtrafnye isoljatory) . The cells in these sturdy buildings restricted the inmates' freedom of movement even further, and supplies were even worse than those on the usual camp grounds. In addition to punishment, these facilities also served as a deterrent: it should be made clear to each prisoner what to expect if he did not follow the orders of the staff. Even if the specific treatment in the special detention buildings could not be predicted: extreme brutality was one of their characteristics. In large camp complexes there were entire camps that took on the function of an isolator, for example in Dalstroi the Serpantinka was notorious for this .
Refusals to work , the loss of equipment, drinking bouts , unauthorized sexual contacts, thefts, card games, so-called hooliganism , self-mutilation and other misconduct gave rise to being instructed in isolators . The camp administration also used other penalties, such as the ban on mail and parcel traffic or the revision of promised reductions in liability. Even death penalties were possible after a new process with judgment.
Work and tufta
The work might be monotonous for the individual prisoner. Across all camps, however, it was a reflection of the Soviet economy and therefore diverse. Forced labor took place in all economic sectors : in agriculture, in industry and in the service sector. Even a single camp inmate sentenced to long imprisonment could carry out a wide variety of activities during the course of his imprisonment.
Prisoners feared the exhausting general work for which no special qualifications were required. This general work was most common in the Gulag. Very often a brigadier, a kind of foreman among the inmates, directed them. He was made responsible for delivering the labor standard. Such norms created considerable peer pressure .
The central and local gulag administrations did not see inhospitable weather conditions as a compelling reason for the interruption, restriction or waiver of forced labor. In the winter of 1938/1939 the thermometer at Kolyma had to show 60 minus degrees before the inmates were called back to the camp. Appropriate work clothes were only available for the respective work in rare cases. The lack of technical aids and equipment, the general disorganization and the exhaustion of the prisoners led to many work accidents . However, there was not only a lack of machines and tools, but also of technical staff and engineers .
The gulag could also become a place of scientific research. Such camps were called sharashka in prisoner jargon , a word from the Rotwelschen for botch work . The prisoners who performed forced labor in such an institution included, for example, Andrei Tupolew , Valentin Gluschko , Sergei Korolev , Lev Kopelew and Alexander Solzhenitsyn .
Many non-criminal prisoners viewed work as a form of giving meaning and therefore attached great importance to thoroughness and target achievement. Where there was the prospect of easing imprisonment through good work, there were incentives for the “ push work ” that occurred time and again in the entire Soviet economy . For example, push workers were promised significantly better food standards.
Its counterpart was part of the work: Tufta - work to appear. However, it is not a peculiarity of the Gulag, but permeated all areas of the planned economy. In the statistics it expressed itself as a result-distorting balance sheet falsification. In many ways, tufta was vital in the gulag, because those who couldn't keep up with the norms tried to hold back the strength to survive.
Meaning, self-respect, empowerment
In addition to giving meaning through work, prisoners also developed and used other strategies to maintain their self-respect and dignity and to strengthen themselves mentally. To this end, high demands on one's own cleanliness and hygiene could serve in the dirty barracks, the making and cultivation of friendships, the practice of artistic and handicraft activities, nature observation, the enjoyment of concerts or theater performances in the camp, often secretly practiced religious ceremonies or spiritual activities such as telling stories and retelling novels, reciting poetry, learning foreign languages or singing songs.
A number of inmates also strengthened their will to persevere by thinking about family members, as well as by the will to enforce their own rehabilitation after imprisonment or to share their experiences with others after their release.
Culture and propaganda
A special department of the Gulag took on responsibility for cultural activities in the camps: the Kulturno-Vospitatelnaja Tschast (“Department for Culture and Education”). It was her job to ensure that performances (concerts, theater, films) took place. She also took care of lectures, which often contained nothing more than political propaganda. She also organized chess competitions and football games. Camp libraries were also supposed to help raise the cultural level, but they were usually poorly equipped. Formally, the cultural work claimed to contribute to the "rehabilitation" and to the mobilization of the workforce. In reality, however, many musical and theatrical performances served to diversify and entertain the camp staff. For their part, prisoners often rated the events as “ carrots ” or “ serf theater ”. For artists, commissioning them with propaganda, artistic or acting activities could save them from arduous general work . In this respect, they benefited from the fact that the managers of large camp complexes vied to have a pleasant cultural program. In the camps, art was not just performed. Occasionally there were also situations in which the production of art from the camp was officially called for, including music, literature, poetry and painting.
In the 1920s and 1930s, camp newspapers, for example in SLON and BelBaltLag, claimed to be involved in the reforging of prisoners. There was, however, a large gap between theory and reality. The press within the camps became more and more uniform in terms of topic choice and design. Often it was little more than a justification of the Soviet penal system, a means of intentionally raising work morale and a medium that propagated re-education ideals and examples as well as the values of Soviet society.
Contact with the outside world
The authorities by no means sharply demarcated the gulag from the outside world everywhere and in every respect. In the KarLag, groups of prisoners regularly worked unguarded outside a fenced area. It often happened that freelance workers and forced laborers worked at the same place of work, for example on a large construction site. Free and on-site former prisoners often helped internees in the Gulag to maintain contact with the outside world by smuggling mail and parcels . The camp administration restricted the correspondence, but did not prohibit it in principle. However, paper was in short supply and the prisoners had to bill for the letter censorship and long delivery times . Providing the inmates with parcels from relatives and friends helped to improve the situation in the camp, even if the parcel contents were misappropriated by the camp staff. The Gulag administration estimated the number of parcels at eleven million in 1949.
Visits to close relatives were also possible after approval by the camp management. However, there were also illegal visits.
Depending on the specific circumstances were dozens, hundreds or even thousands of camp inmates at certain times and on certain routes as outdoor cats (zazonniki) move outside the camp. Still other inmates were not allowed to move freely there, although they were allowed to spend the night outside the camp. Even living together with one's own family could be approved.
Orchestras made up of Gulag prisoners sometimes performed in front of the civilian population. Individual imprisoned artists also performed duties in civil life, for example directing local theaters , leading music and art groups or giving lessons in music schools . But such things remained the exception.
Diet, hunger and disease
"Hunger was the prisoners' way of life" - this was not only the case during the war years, when hunger and epidemics spread across the whole country. Many prisoner memories deal with the bread rations. “In the worst-supplied camps and in the years of hunger, bread became a sacred object.” Another basic element of the prisoner's diet was the balanda - a watery soup with inferior contents. Meat , fresh vegetables , fat and sugar were rare. The generally poor supply of food to the inmates also suffered from theft and embezzlement. Against this background, jobs in the kitchen were in great demand.
Due to the nutritional and hygienic situation, the weather conditions and the exhausting work, illnesses and deficiency symptoms such as typhus , dysentery, scurvy , pellagra , scabies and night blindness occurred regularly . Colds , bronchitis and frostbite also occurred at low temperatures . Glaring light in snow and ice could lead to snow blindness and permanent blindness . In camps to the south, prisoners feared malaria .
Despite the inadequate supply of medical equipment and medicines, Gulag prisoners found staying in a sick barracks a relief. Doctors decided when an inmate was considered healthy and had to do forced labor again. The majority of the medical staff were convicted themselves. The position of a camp doctor or field clerk meant employment in a dry and comparatively warm place. Because prisoners depended on a doctor's judgment, there were opportunities for corruption here too . Anyone who, in the eyes of the camp management, gave the impression of being too indulgent towards prisoners as a doctor, endangered their position.
Mortality and dying
Inmates were “hungry, exhausted, overtired, dehydrated , exposed to adverse weather conditions, emaciated, sick to varying degrees ”. These living conditions resulted in a high mortality rate . On the one hand, it depended on the location of the camp. In the agricultural KarLag, the chance of survival was up to fifteen times higher than in the hardest camps of the Kolyma. On the other hand, the death rate changed significantly with the respective historical points in time. For example, it soared to 20 to 25 percent in World War II. Conservative calculations estimate that from 1929 to 1953 the total number of deaths in the camps and in exile was more than 2.7 million. The dead were often buried in mass graves or anonymous grave sites .
Escape
Attempts to escape from regions of exile and camps were a common phenomenon. According to the authorities, around a third of all deported "kulaks" escaped from the exile regions in the 1930s, i.e. around 600,000 people. The Gulag statistics recorded over 45,000 attempts to escape from camps in 1933, only a good 28,000 people could be caught again. In 1947 the statistics spoke of 10,440 prisoners who fled, 2,894 of them were caught. In 1948, 8,964 escapes were registered, this number decreased in the period that followed. In 1950 it was 3,532, and in 1952 it was 1,454. After Stalin's death, the number of eruptions rose to 2,367 in 1953, only to drop to 1,634 in 1954. Only every eighth to ninth escape was successful at the time.
The Soviet authorities always tried to make escape attempts more difficult. In particular, fences, guards and dogs should secure the camp against attempts to escape. The internal system of informers also served this purpose. The remoteness and the inhumane conditions of the natural environment also reduced the likelihood of success in escape attempts. Those who ran away were not allowed to expect much support from the local population, as escape assistance was strictly forbidden. Those who were caught while trying to escape, the expected harsh punishment up to and including execution.
Social groups
Women
The proportion of women fluctuated over the years and was between 6 and 38 percent. It increased during World War II because the authorities sent male prisoners to the front and because violations of the rules on presence at work were severely punished. In 1945 the proportion of women was 30 percent. By 1948 it fell and was 22 percent, in 1952 it was 17 percent.
Women had gender-specific experiences in the Soviet forced labor system. Often they suffered more than male prisoners from the precarious hygienic conditions. They have also been victims of sexual humiliation and violence. Every third woman with experience of imprisonment in the Gulag speaks of sexual intrusiveness, coercion and rape by male prisoners or camp staff. The traumatic separation from their own children also plays a major role in women's memories .
children
According to conservative estimates, between 1934 and 1955 more than half a million children and young people performed forced labor. Many of them were forced to do so due to kin liability regulations . However, children also ended up in the gulag because they were considered neglected and criminal. The Gulag administration set up children's wards and their own children's camps for infants born in the Gulag. These children were transferred to state children's homes at a young age and suffered from poor material conditions and a lack of caring care. Child mortality in the camps was consistently high.
During the war years, hundreds of thousands of war and starvation orphans roamed the Soviet Union, looking for food, booty and work on their own. The Soviet authorities picked them up and transferred them to child labor colonies, children's homes or factory schools. In the penal colonies for minors alone, 190,000 children and adolescents were incarcerated during the post-war years.
Political prisoners
In the language of the camp administration, prisoners were called " counter-revolutionaries " for political reasons , and in prisoner jargon the term was " 58ers ". There could be differences and factions between the inmates who actually saw themselves as political prisoners when they judged the Soviet leadership.
In the terror years of 1937 and 1938, the "political" made up between 12 and 18 percent of all prisoners. In the war years this value rose to up to 40 percent. In 1946 around 60 percent were "political" because the "criminals" benefited in 1945 from an amnesty due to the outcome of the war. The convictions of alleged or actual collaborators were also responsible for the rise in the number of "political" people. Subsequently, the proportion of "political" sank again. Until Stalin's death in March 1953, he was between a quarter and a third.
Religious inmates
Another group of inmates was imprisoned for their beliefs because the practice of religious acts could be interpreted as counterrevolutionary activity with the aid of Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, especially when members of religious groups - for example Catholics , supporters of Protestant churches and groups, Jehovah's Witnesses or Muslims - refused to recognize institutions and practices of the atheist state. In many cases, religious prisoners rejected the detention regime if they believed it violated religious norms. They could hardly be dissuaded from this, even by draconian punishments, which met with admiration and rejection from fellow inmates.
criminal
People could become criminal prisoners if they were accused of violating the strict laws for the protection of social and state property in years of hunger. For example, from August 1932 it was sufficient to steal or pick up a few ears of corn .
Violations of the prohibition of hooliganism (Chuliganstwo) - which meant public hooliganism with personal injury or property damage - were also considered grounds for detention . Simple drunkenness in public could also be considered a criminal offense. At the turn of 1941, 147,000 people had become inmates of the Gulag in this way, around 10 percent of the Gulag prisoners.
In addition to poverty and petty criminals as well as allegedly socially conspicuous criminals, there were also serious and professional criminals who had been convicted of “bandits”, murderers or repeat offenders. The “rulers” among the prisoners were recruited from this group. With the help of gang structures and unconditional loyalty of the gang members, through the involvement of prison functionaries and camp staff through corruption and threats of violence, as well as robbery and theft, this group of criminals largely evaded forced labor. Anyone who betrayed members of such a group as an apostate, victim or witness had to fear for his physical integrity and his life. Serious and professional criminals could be recognized by their specific clothing and language, as well as by the variety of tattoos . The camp memories, many of which came from political prisoners, paint a gloomy picture of this social group.
The relationship with the camp management and administration distinguished two groups of professional criminals. One adhered to a specific code of ethics and rejected any form of cooperation with representatives of the authorities, in particular forced labor. Opposite these “ thieves in the law ” was the group of those who bowed to the state authorities and in return sought preferential treatment, for example through posts as prison officials. They were therefore called "swine dogs " (suki) by the "thieves in the law" . Especially after the Second World War, conflicts between these criminal groups could prove fatal.
A special group among the criminals, the Bytowiki , also sought functionary prisoner posts : These prisoners were civil lawbreakers and were convicted of economic crimes , official offenses and other offenses such as insults or trespassing. If they had administrative or economic knowledge, the camp administration was happy to make use of them.
Head and security guards
| Gulag leader | |
|---|---|
| Surname | Period |
| Fyodor Eichmans | April 25, 1930 - June 16, 1930 |
| Lasar Kogan | June 16, 1930 - June 9, 1932 |
| Matwei Berman | June 9, 1932 - August 16, 1937 |
| Israil Pliner | August 16, 1937 - November 16, 1938 |
| Gleb Filaretov | November 16, 1938 - February 18, 1939 |
| Vasily Chernyshev | February 18, 1939 - February 26, 1941 |
| Viktor Nassedkin | February 26, 1941 - September 2, 1947 |
| Georgi Dobrynin | September 2, 1947 - January 31, 1951 |
| Ivan Dolgich | January 31, 1951 - October 5, 1954 |
| Sergei Yegorov | October 5, 1954 - April 4, 1956 |
The detention depended not only on the directives of the Moscow Gulag headquarters, but also to a significant extent on the security personnel on site. In 1952 the official ratio of guards to inmates was 1 to 9.7. However, not all positions could be filled.
The job as a security guard was hardly respected, even in the Ministry of the Interior. This was mainly due to the material conditions of the places of detention. The guards repeatedly complained about low salaries, inadequate accommodation, inadequate supplies and their low prestige . In many cases, they were also forced to take on additional special shifts, and vacation was only granted to a limited extent. These factors resulted in high fluctuation . In 1951 around 50,000 guards resigned. Another 40,000 left the security service, mostly at their own request. Because of their working and living conditions , guards also deserted . Annually celebrated three to four hundred members of the guards, given the conditions in the camps suicide .
The guards were consistently regarded as the “dregs of the ruling apparatus”. The level of education was low, as was the knowledge of the respective party line. Training hardly changed that. Internal Gulag audit reports criticized the fact that a large part of the guards had to be regarded as having character problems: Drunkenness, violence against women and their own children as well as a large number of official offenses were complained about, such as embezzlement, abuse of office, forgery of documents or bribery.
Many guards involuntarily worked as gulag guards. At the beginning of the 1950s, two out of three guards were doing forced service, and only a third had volunteered. Many of the forced security guards were war veterans or Eastern workers. A number of guards were also occupied because former prisoners were unable to leave the area after they had been detained due to official requirements, lack of prospects or lack of funds. In the 1930s it was by no means uncommon for former inmates to become guards. Even people whose term of detention had not yet ended could be entrusted with guard duties.
Some of the guards were therefore victims of external circumstances. However, as rulers over the prisoners, guards were primarily perpetrators. The internal documents of the Gulag administration speak in many places of atrocities and the despotism of the guards. Occasionally criminals and guards worked together. This could go so far that the surrounding area was affected when criminal gangs of prisoners from the camps raided villages and small towns at night. Also on the black market with Gulag resources outside of bearings criminals and guards were involved.
Consequences and Effects
Life after imprisonment and exile
20 to 40 percent of the Gulag inmates were released each year. For many, life afterwards was difficult. They suffered physical and mental damage. They remained at a disadvantage when looking for work and a home. A “wolf pass” - special stamps and entries in the identity papers - prevented settlement in large cities. The establishment in the home region could also be prohibited.
The authorities also forbade many released people to leave the detention area and forced them to look for work as "free workers" there. This practice peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1968 to 1973 it affected more than 800,000 people. Between 1948 and 1953, the MGB again subjected many prisoners and exiles to repression by ordering lifelong banishment.
The "organs" observed many former prisoners for years. They often asked them to go to the State Security offices. The employees often threatened those called with punitive measures. Many people kept their experiences of imprisonment and banishment to themselves, they hardly or not at all talked to their children about it in order not to stress them psychologically. Children of “enemies of the people” were generally exposed to increased pressure to conform .
A number of sacked ex-members of the CPSU went to great lengths to get re-admitted to the party. Behind this was the belief in the communist idea and the clinging to one's own maxims of life, as well as the desire for proof of belonging again. A re-admission was tantamount to legal rehabilitation, led to reinstatement in all rights and was therefore not always to be understood as an address of loyalty to the party. Between 1956 and 1961, more than 30,900 communists were rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, many of them posthumously .
Stigmatization and discrimination remained part of their everyday life for “kulaks” and their children , although the political leadership of the Soviet Union officially adopted a different tone towards them during World War II and claimed that they had proven themselves as Soviet citizens. Those affected often concealed their origins and experiences later on, even in close family circles.
Commemoration
Hundreds of books containing the memoirs of Gulag prisoners have been published since 1980 . For a long time they were the most important source on Soviet forced labor. In addition to the published texts, there are also unpublished texts that are kept in archives. In total there are around 2,000 to 3,000 such records. Works of this kind include the depictions of Margarete Buber-Neumann , Gustaw Herling-Grudziński , Jewgenija Ginsburg , Susanne Leonhard , Olga Adamova-Sliozberg , Dalia Grinkevičiūtė , Jewgeni Gnedin and Lew Kopelew. Some of these writings circulated in samizdat or tamizdat up to Gorbachev's glasnost policy . Oral reports that have been recorded on tapes , compact cassettes and video cassettes since the 1980s ( oral history ) also belong to the corpus of memories preserved for posterity .
The longstanding attempts to set up a central official museum or a main memorial including an associated research institute in Moscow or elsewhere have largely failed. The nucleus of this initiative remains, the 1987 human rights organization Memorial . In addition to caring for victims of repression and doing human rights work, she campaigns for commemoration: she keeps the public's memory of the repression in the Soviet Union alive, tries to find places of execution and mass graves, encourages research on the forced labor system, organizes exhibitions or participates in it, maintains an archive with documents and memoirs and prepares memorial books with names and key words on the biography of victims. She also organizes competitions for students on the history of Soviet repression. In addition to Memorial, other civil society organizations campaign for a commemoration. They include the Sakharov Center , the Sakharov Museum in Nizhny Novgorod , the Russian Association of Victims of Unlawful Political Repression and the “Poisk” (Search) society .
A number of museums in the successor states of the Soviet Union convey the history of forced labor in the USSR. In Moscow this task is taken over by the Gulag Museum , in Perm the Perm-36 Gulag Museum , which is now under state control , and in Dolinka near Karaganda the KarLag Museum. Some local and historical museums also deal with the Gulag. Often, however, the information and relics are staged in an uninviting way - multimedia presentations, animations and interactive offers are usually missing. The "Virtual Gulag Museum" is dedicated to the digital communication of the Gulag, in the Russian network it is an important resource on Soviet social crimes and the Gulag.
Monuments and memorials also serve to commemorate the victims of Soviet violent practices. Not infrequently, Memorial was involved in the establishment of these more than 100 memorial sites. The first monument was erected in Vorkuta in 1988. Since the summer of the following year, a natural stone on the Solovetsky Islands has been a reminder of the islands' Gulag period. By 2007, comparable boulders had been set up in four other locations : two in Moscow (near the Lubyanka ) and one each in Arkhangelsk and Saint Petersburg . In addition to boulders, crosses, cracks and recesses have established themselves as formal elements of the memorials.
On a mountain slope near Magadan, the mask of mourning is dedicated to the people who were imprisoned in the camps on the Kolyma. In Astana , the Kazakh government had a monument erected for the “victims of political repression”, and in Karaganda a memorial stone commemorates the victims of terror and the prisoners of the KarLag. In Aqmol , during the Stalin era the location of the “Akmolinsk camp for women of traitors to the fatherland”, a place of detention for women in clan confinement, there is today a monument reminiscent of state violence with the “arch of mourning” as the most obvious design unit.
In 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic decided to mark the day of commemoration of the victims of political repression on October 30th every year . This date goes back to a hunger strike in the Perm camp on October 30, 1974, when inmates protested against political repression. Since then, this day of remembrance has established itself in the subculture of prisons, camps and affected families. Since the early 1990s, special events have been held at memorial sites of repression on this day.
The great interest in the gulag and prisoner memories that went along with the perestroika era has been increasingly marginalized in Russia. Indifference now prevails. Those who demand memories come under suspicion of wanting to damage the country's image . Russian authorities and media, for example, brought Memorial close to foreign agents .
Another characteristic of the Russian discourse is the sacralization of the victims. The Russian Orthodox Church officially describes around 40 clergymen who perished on the Solovetsky Islands as “new martyrs”. Also Butovo , an execution site during the Great Terror, is recognized by it for a religious commemoration.
There is hardly any social debate about perpetrators. The heads of state around Stalin are consistently considered responsible, the social anchoring of the many accomplices is not discussed. Memorial, too, which identifies with the victims and their perspective, is considered cautious when naming the perpetrators, even though Memorial 1999 already published a manual on perpetrators. Less than one percent of the perpetrators have been prematurely retired, and not a single perpetrator was brought to justice after the end of the Soviet Union.
Government agencies are reluctant to critically examine their own history - in addition to a renaissance of patriotism, the elite continuity in post-Soviet Russia is responsible for this . Leading state representatives advocate an image of history that strengthens identification with the national past. In 2008, Vladimir Putin asked history teachers that when dealing with Russian and Soviet history, it should not be allowed “that a feeling of guilt is forced upon us”.
On February 12, 2014, Russia issued a secret order to destroy archived index cards containing information about the Gulag inmates. The internal, non-public order was signed by eleven ministries and government agencies, including the secret service FSB and foreign intelligence service SWR as well as the Ministry of the Interior and Justice . The index cards contain data on which prisoners were interned in which prison camp, where they were transferred and what became of them - whether they died in captivity or were released. According to representatives of the Gulag Museum, the destruction of documents about the Soviet tyranny is worrying and has a negative impact on research on the Gulag. At the beginning of June 2018, it became known to a wider public that certain Gulag files had not been archived but had been destroyed from 2014 onwards.
research
Initially, research on the Gulag was based on memoir literature. The analysis of the documents of the Gulag administration, piled up to form mountains of files due to an intensive culture of reports, was not possible for Soviet and foreign researchers for a long time. It was not until the end of the Soviet Union that the archives were politically opened up (“archive revolution”) in the 1990s that laid the foundations for viewing, evaluating and classifying these archive materials . In the years that followed, a number of fundamental document publications and overview presentations were created. In 1997, Galina M. Iwanowa presented the first compact overview, which was published in English in 2000 and in German in 2001. As early as 1996 Ralf Stettner published a German-language synopsis of the current state of knowledge. In 2004 Anne Applebaum received the Pulitzer Prize for her study on the gulag that she had published a year earlier. Central research results also contain the handbook published by Michail B. Smirnow in 1997 on the system of the Soviet corrective labor camps (German translation: 2003) and the seven-volume history of the Stalinist Gulag published in 2004/2005. In addition to depictions that focus on forced labor throughout the Soviet Union, studies were carried out with a regional focus. As a result of this work, separate “schools” have formed, for example in the Urals , in the Russian Far East and in Siberia.
Before the archives were opened, Western historians debated intensely the number of imprisonments and exiles. This dispute was part of a fundamental conflict in the interpretation of the Soviet system of rule in the 1980s - representatives of the theory of totalitarianism and representatives of the "revisionist school" faced each other in this dispute, which shaped the entire research of the Soviet Union . The dispute on numbers is now considered to have been resolved. Research assumes that around 28.7 to 32 million people have been victims of forced labor and exile; conservative estimates put the number of deaths at 2.7 million. At the beginning of June 2018 it became known that certain Gulag files had not been archived, but had been destroyed as of 2014.
Several comparisons have been made between the National Socialist and the Stalinist mass crimes. Both the National Socialist and Stalinist systems of rule labeled certain people “enemies” - the specific social and ethnic groups were not random, but varied. The integration of these "enemies" into their social environment was dissolved by legal regulations and physical violence, "enemies" were more and more dehumanized . Overall, the number of camp types in the Soviet Union was greater. The history of the National Socialist camps, however, is more uniform and shorter. The fate of Jewish prisoners had been determined by the end of 1941 at the latest: All Jews were to be physically exterminated (→ Holocaust ). The lot of Gulag prisoners, however, could change: In the course of the Great Terror, for example, Poles were persecuted as potential enemies, after the attack by the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union they were released as allies, after the end of the Second World War they could be called "nationalists" be arrested again. The Soviet detention centers were not extermination camps . As a rule, prisoners in the gulag did not lose their lives through the efficiency of their tormentors, but rather through neglect and inefficiency.
The majority of Russian and foreign researchers morally condemn the Soviet camp system. However, some Russian scholars and journalists fear that criticism of the Gulag could also delegitimize the current Russian penal system , which not only has to combat crimes but also "deviations from social norms".
Artistic processing
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Archipelago Gulag is the best-known “attempt at an artistic mastery” of the Gulag . This 1,800-page work, published in Paris in 1973 , with which the author described the Gulag from his perspective and that of many other ex-prisoners, had “the format a journalistic bomb ". It revealed to the reader the close connection between state terror , forced labor and the industrialization of the USSR. The three-volume script disaffected many sympathizers of real socialism living in the West . In France in particular , an intense debate developed about Moscow-style socialism. Solzhenitsyn had already emerged in 1962 with the novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . In it, he described the circumstances in a forced labor camp in the 1950s using a day of imprisonment for the eponymous person, an ordinary prisoner. In 1968 his novel The First Circle of Hell , which depicts life in a sharashka , was published.
Well known - although without the broad impact of Solzhenitsyn's literary works - are the works of Varlam Shalamov , especially the stories from Kolyma . Shalamov lived in the Kolyma region from 1937 to 1953 as a Gulag prisoner. His stories initially only circulated in samizdat and in incomplete foreign editions. Shalamov's presentation of the material breaks with the traditions of Russian poets , their humanism and their teachings to the audience. As “new prose” it deliberately eludes easy access for the reader. "Šalamov's portrayal of the Gulag does not call for moral indignation, but for entering the hopeless and cruel world of the camp."
A less well-known but early attempt to literary aspects of the Gulag and its cover-up is the novel Insurrection in Poshansk by Robert Neumann , published in London in 1952 ; In the same year it was published in German with the title Die Puppen von Poshansk , a German-language new edition followed in 2012. The novel describes a seemingly bizarre incident: An American politician is on a goodwill tour in the USSR and is shown the Kolyma region. The distinguished visitor does not see through the fact that he is being led to believe Potemkin villages - also because a sudden infatuation with the interpreter distracts him from the facts. The novel parodies a real event: Henry A. Wallace visited Magadan in 1944 as Vice President of the United States and failed to notice that he was being deceived about the realities of the Gulag. After his return to the United States, he wrote an eulogy on the conditions at Kolyma.
Evfrossinija Kersnowskaja (1907–1995) filled more than 2,000 pages in twelve notebooks with memories of her Gulag times and illustrated them with more than 700 drawings. To save them from discovery and destruction, they wrote and copied text and pictures three times and deposited them with confidants. In 1983 friends provided a typewritten version, which Evfrossinija Kersnowskaya also provided with illustrations. This version was then passed around in samizdat. Editions of her records and illustrations of various sizes are now available in several languages.
Gdansk Baldayev lived in a children's home for two years after his father was condemned as an "enemy of the people". After the Second World War he became an employee of the MWD. Since the early 1950s, he has been secretly processing his own professional experience with violence against prisoners and stories from colleagues in ink drawings that often show the torture and torture of prisoners. From 1989 he went public with his drawings.
As an example of the conflict in the visual arts is regarded Gulag cycle of Nikolai Getman . After his release from the Gulag (August 1953), the ex-prisoner created this 50-part series of pictures over a period of 40 years. But he didn't dare show it to anyone. In 1993 he presented the cycle to the interested public for the first time.
Based on the film Die Reue , Soviet filmmakers dealt with the topics of Stalinism, exile and the camp world in the time of glasnost and perestroika. They were often concerned with questioning the basic theses of socialist realism : positive expectations for the future, belief in the wisdom of political leaders, the existence of malevolent conspirators against socialism and praise for work and work heroes. Russian TV series have also addressed the issue since then. These include, for example, the adaptations of Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle of Hell , the novel The Children of Arbat by Anatoly Rybakow and Shalamov's stories from Kolyma . Some films about the time of the war against National Socialist Germany staged people released from the Gulag who are now fighting at the front as the main heroes of the film plot. The antagonists of these heroes include representatives of Soviet power, such as members of the NKVD. In other films, however, they appear as intrepid fighters against organized crime and as guarantors of public order.
Among the better-known films that were not made in the successor states of the Soviet Union , Mitten im Sturm, starring Emily Watson and Ulrich Tukur , is one of the leading roles. It is about the film adaptation of the Gulag memories by Jewgenija Ginsburg.
attachment
literature
Bibliographic overviews
- Research literature on the gulag
- List of books with titles from literary controversies and memorial literature on the Gulag
- Annotated bibliography of memories of former Gulag prisoners (PDF; 358 kB)
Monographs, edited volumes and special issues
- Nanci Adler: Keeping Faith with the Party. Communist Believers Return from the Gulag , Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2012, ISBN 978-0-253-22379-1 .
- Nanci Adler: The Gulag Survivor. Beyond the Soviet System , Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, London 2002, ISBN 0-7658-0071-3 .
- Anne Applebaum : The Gulag. Siedler, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-88680-642-1 .
- Steven A. Barnes: Death and redemption. The Gulag and the shaping of Soviet society , Princeton University Press, Princeton [u. a.] 2011, ISBN 978-0-691-15112-0 .
- Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal: The “imprisoned” press. The press system of Soviet forced labor camps 1923–1937 , Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-447-06471-2 .
- Jörg Ganzenmüller , Raphael Utz (ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- Klaus Gestwa: The large Stalin buildings of communism. Soviet technical and environmental history, 1948–1967 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58963-4 .
- Johannes Grützmacher: The Baikal-Amur-Magistrale. From the Stalinist camp to the mobilization project under Brežnev . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-70494-5 .
- Wladislaw Hedeler , Meinhard Stark: The grave in the steppe. Life in the GULAG. The story of a Soviet “corrective labor camp” 1930–1959 . Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] 2008, ISBN 3-506-76376-8 .
- Wladislaw Hedeler, Horst Hennig (eds.): Black pyramids, red slaves. The strike in Vorkuta in the summer of 1953 . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 978-3-86583-177-4 .
- Gustaw Herling-Grudziński : World without mercy. Experiences in Russian prisons and labor camps . Translated from the English by Hansjürgen Wille. Verl. For politics and economy, Cologne 1953/2000 ( Inny świat: zapiski as well asckie , 1951/1953 (pl))
- Galina Michajlovna Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union. Reinhold Schletzer Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-921539-70-6 .
- Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe, New Series , Vol. 57 (2009), No. 4, Topic: Departure from the GULag .
- Stefan Karner : In the GUPVI archipelago. Captivity and internment in the Soviet Union 1941–1956 , Oldenbourg, Vienna [a. a.], 1995, ISBN 3-486-56119-7 .
- Tomasz Kizny: Gulag , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-930908-97-2 .
- Oleg V. Khlevniuk : The History of the Gulag. From Collectivization to the Great Terror. Translation by Vadim A. Staklo. With ed. Assistance and commentary by David J. Nordlander. Foreword by Robert Conquest , Yale University Press, New Haven [et al. a.] 2004, ISBN 0-300-09284-9 .
- Inna Klause: The sound of the gulag. Music and musicians in the Soviet forced labor camps from the 1920s to the 1950s , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8470-0259-8 .
- Joël Kotek , Pierre Rigoulot: The Century of Camps. Captivity, forced labor, extermination . From the Franz. By Enrico Heinemann, Propylaeen Verlag, Berlin [u. a.] 2001, ISBN 3-549-07143-4 .
- Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (eds.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Eastern Europe , 57th year, 2007, no . 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and the processing of the Gulag) .
- Karl Schlögel : Terror and Dream. Moscow 1937 . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-446-23081-1 .
- Meinhard Stark: The marked ones. Gulag prisoners after their release , Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940938-72-5 .
- Meinhard Stark: Women in the GULag. Everyday life and survival. 1936 to 1956 , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-446-20286-2 .
- Ralf Stettner: "Archipel GULag". Stalin's forced camp - a terrorist instrument and economic giant. Origin, organization and function of the Soviet camp system 1928–1956 , Schöningh, Paderborn [u. a.] 1996, ISBN 3-506-78754-3 .
- Lynne Viola : The Unknown Gulag. The lost world of Stalin's special settlements , Oxford University Press, Oxford [et al.] 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-538509-0 .
- Nicolas Werth : The island of the cannibals. Stalin's forgotten gulag . Siedler, Munich 2006 ISBN 978-3-88680-853-3 .
Essays
- Bernd Bonwetsch : Gulag. Arbitrariness and mass crime in the Soviet Union 1917–1953. Introduction and documents . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 30–49, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Marc Elie: The “revolving door” and the marginalization machinery of the Stalinist Gulag, 1945–1960 . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014 ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 pp. 106–117
- Marc Elie: Impossible rehabilitation. The 1956 Revision Commissions and the Uncertainties of the Thaw . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) pp. 369–385.
- Simon Ertz: Forced Labor in Noril'sk. An atypical, ideal-typical camp complex . In: Eastern Europe . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 289–300.
- Beate Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? Amnesties and rehabilitation after 1953 . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 170–178, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal: Through work - to freedom. The Gulag as a means of "re-education"? . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 60–69, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz: Exculpation and Identity Foundation: The Gulag in the Russian Culture of Remembrance . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 1–30, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- Klaus Gestwa: Departure from the GULag? Research status and conception of the special issue . In: Year books for the history of Eastern Europe 57 (2009), 4, pp. 481–491.
- Klaus Gestwa: Built on water and blood. The Gulag hydrotechnical archipelago . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 239–266.
- Michail B. Gnedovskij, Nikita G. Okhotin: Suffering as an exhibit or a museum of the “strict regime” in Russia today . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 190–197, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Katharina Haverkamp: Commemoration as a Challenge - On the History of the First Gulag Exhibition in the Soviet Union . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 180–188, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Wladislaw Hedeler: Resistance in the Gulag. Mutiny, insurrection, flight . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 353–368.
- Michael Kaznelson: Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak Children and Dekulakisation . In: Europe-Asia Studies , Vol. 59, No. 7 (Nov. 2007), pp. 1163-1177.
- Inna Klause: Music by prescription. Official cultural life in the camp . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 301–313.
- Natal'ja Konradova: Search for the form. Gulag monuments in Russia . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 421–430.
- Ekaterina Makhotina: Rooms of mourning - places that are silent. Symbolic design and ritual practices of remembrance of the victims of the Stalinist terror in Levašovo and Sandormoch . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 31–57, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- Martin Müller-Butz, Christian Werkmeister: The history of the GULag in the Russian Internet (RuNet): Possibilities and limits of virtual cultures of remembrance . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 217–244, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- Ivan Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and facts . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 267–283.
- Manuela Putz: The gentlemen of the camp. Professional criminal in the gulag . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 341–351.
- Immo Rebitschek: Prosecution under Stalinism. The fate of “non-political” inmates . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 128–139, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Irina Šcerbakova : memory on the defensive. Schoolchildren in Russia on the gulag and repression . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 409-420.
- Irina Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps in the Soviet Ruling System . In: German Bundestag (ed.): Materials of the Enquete Commission “Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity”, Vol. VI: All-German forms of remembrance of the two German dictatorships and their victims. Forms of Memory - Archive , Nomos-Verl.-Ges., Frankfurt am Main, Baden-Baden, 1999, pp. 567–622.
- Felix Schnell: The Gulag as a systemic body of Soviet rule . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (ed.): The world of camps. On the “success story” of an institution , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, pp. 134–165.
- Anna Schor-Tschudnowskaja: Activists of Remembrance: The Society Memorial - Aims, leading theses and thought patterns . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 137–159, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- Michail Borisovič Smirnow (Ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923-1960. A manual. Translated from the Russ. and arrangement Reinhold Schletzer, Reinhold Schletzer Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-921539-72-2 .
- Mirjam Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan. Economy and camp in the northeast of the Soviet Union . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 80–91, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Mirjam Sprau: Life after the GULAG. Petitions from former Soviet prisoners as a source . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Vol. 60, 2012, H. 1, pp. 93–110.
- Mirjam Sprau: Gold and Forced Labor The Dal'stroj camp complex . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 58, 2008, no. 2, pp. 65–79.
- Meinhard Stark: Women and children in the gulag . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014, pp. 118–127, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Andrej B. Suslov: The special contingent in the late 1920s to early 1950s in the Perm region . In: In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 92–105, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Nicolas Werth: A brief historical overview of the Gulag . In: Volkhard Knigge, Irina Scherbakowa (ed.): Gulag. Traces and testimonials 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, pp. 102–123, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
- Nicolas Werth: The Gulag in the prism of the archives. Approaches, findings, results . In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and dealing with the Gulag) , pp. 9–30.
- Aleksej V. Zacharčenko: The processing of the history of the Gulag in Russia . In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and Documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 70–79, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 .
documentary
- Patrick Rotman : Gulag - The Soviet "head office of the camps". Arte , accessed February 14, 2020 .
Web links
- Website of the human rights organization Memorial
- German-language portal from Memorial about the Gulag with specialist texts, photos, prisoner biographies, etc.
- “Virtual Gulag Museum” , a multilingual project of the Memorial Research and Information Center in St Petersburg
- Website of the Gulag exhibition . Traces and evidence 1929–1956 , archived at archive.org
- Website about the Gulag of the Foundation The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (English)
- Moscow GULAG Museum website (Russian and English)
- Website of the research project Mapping the Gulag with many maps of the camp system
Individual evidence
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 9.
- ↑ Overview map of the Gulag camps in the USSR. In: Portal from Memorial / Germany. Retrieved March 21, 2020 (the interactive map leads to individual camps in the regions of the USSR).
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system point , p. 134.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 568.
- ↑ Four to six million according to Karner: Im Archipel GUPVI , p. 9, p. 237, note 2.
- ↑ Numbers according to Gestwa: Departure from the GULag? , P. 481 f .; Suslov: The special contingent. P. 92; Number of Gulag Dead at Applebaum: The Gulag. P. 619.
- ↑ Markus Ackeret: In the world of Katorga. The forced labor sentence for political delinquents in the outgoing tsarist empire (Eastern Siberia and Sakhalin) . Eastern Europe Institute Munich . Historical Department, Communications No. 56, April 2007. Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-938980-11-8 . For the practice of exile and criminal labor in Russia, see also Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 26–30.
- ↑ Numbers from Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 29.
- ↑ Ackeret: In the World of Katorga , p. 6.
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 102 f.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 195 f.
- ↑ See Alan Kramer : Introduction . In: Bettina Greiner , Alan Kramer (ed.): The world of camps. On the “success story” of an institution , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, pp. 7–42, here pp. 13–16, ISBN 978-3-86854-267-7 . For Cuba see Kotek, Rigoulot: The Century of Camps, pp. 45–55, for the camps during the Boer War see there pp. 56–73.
- ↑ On this Claudia Siebrecht: Forms of bondage and extremes of violence. The concentration camps in German South West Africa, 1904–1908 . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (ed.): The world of camps. On the “success story” of an institution , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, pp. 87–109; see also Kotek, Rigoulot: Das Jahrhundert der Lager, pp. 79–83. For the camps in South West Africa and South Africa see Jonas Kreienbaum: “A sad fiasco”. Colonial concentration camps in southern Africa 1900–1908 , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86854-290-5 .
- ↑ Kramer: Introduction . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (eds.): Die Welt der Lager , pp. 18–20; Heather Jones: A Technological Revolution? The First World War and the radicalization of the prisoner of war camp . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (ed.): The world of camps. On the “success story” of an institution , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, pp. 110–133, here p. 114, p. 117, p. 126 f.
- ↑ See Emmanuel Debruyne: Espionage on 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War (accessed March 19, 2015).
- ↑ Jörg Baberowski : The red terror. The history of Stalinism . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Munich 2003, p. 26, ISBN 3-421-05486-X .
- ↑ a b Kramer: Introduction . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (eds.): Die Welt der Lager , p. 22.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 31, p. 47; Fast: Gulag as a system office , p. 140.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 47; Jörn Petrick: Introduction to the extract from Minutes No. 21 of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) [founding of the Cheka], December 7 (20) 1917 , 100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history . Exemplary evidence of Lenin's propagation of terror from Norman Naimark : Revolution, Stalinism and Genocide. In: APuZ , 44–45 / 2007 (PDF; 2.0 MB), pp. 14–20, here pp. 18–20.
- ↑ Aleksandr Šubin: Introduction to the Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars on the Red Terror, September 5, 1918 , at: 100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history .
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 10.
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 70.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 95 f.
- ^ Putz: The Lords of the Camp , p. 341 f.
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 47 f.
- ↑ Fischer von Weikersthal: Through work - into freedom , p. 62 f.
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 76.
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 426–429. See also Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 57–78; Fischer von Weikersthal: Die " imhaftierte " Presse , pp. 45–77; Klause: The sound of the Gulag , pp. 59–65.
- ↑ For the subsequent history of the islands, the monastery and the camp relics see Katharina Haverkamp: Today on the Solovki - tomorrow in Russia. The search for traces of the photographer and regional historian Jurij Arkad'evič Brodskij . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz: Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 161–176, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- ↑ Kizny: Gulag , pp. 38 and 78.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 77 f.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 79.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 83.
- ↑ Kizny: Gulag , p. 37; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 62 f .; See also Karl Schlögel: Solowki - Laboratorium der Extreme , article on the website solovki.org ( accessed on March 21, 2015).
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 140.
- ↑ On Frenkel's reforms, see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 69–76.
- ↑ Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 32; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 76; Jürgen Zarusky : The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model: Ideological Debate and Foreign Policy Concepts, 1917–1933 . Oldenbourg Verlag, 1992, ISBN 3-486-55928-1 , p. 213 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 78.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 81–84. Karl Schlögel: Solowki - Laboratorium der Extremes , article on the website solovki.org ( accessed on March 21, 2015).
- ↑ Hubertus Knabe : Solowki - The first gulag. April 5, 2019, accessed April 7, 2019 .
- ↑ On the relationship between the OGPU and the People's Commissariat for Justice (NKJu) see Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 10, p. 51 and 92. Quotation: “In the same year [1929] the Soviet secret police began to take control of the penal system , and wrested from the judiciary one camp and prison after another. ”Ibid. P. 10.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 88–90.
- ↑ Graphic based on numbers (January 1st) at Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 614. These values do not include all people who were sentenced to forced labor. For example, there is a lack of those who were sentenced to forced labor without imprisonment, prisoners of war and inmates of filtration camps. In addition, fluctuation during the year is not taken into account. See Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 614–617.
- ^ Leonid Luks : History of Russia and the Soviet Union. From Lenin to Jelzin , Pustet, Regensburg 2000, p. 265, ISBN 3-7917-1687-5 ; Lynne Viola: Peasant Rebels Under Stalin. Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance . Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-535132-0 , pp. 23 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ On forced collectivization see Manfred Hildermeier : The Soviet Union 1917–1991 . Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-70112-8 , p. 36–39 ( limited preview in Google Book search). Furthermore Manfred Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991. The rise and fall of the first socialist state . CH Beck, 1998, ISBN 3-406-43588-2 , pp. 377–401 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Basically on this Lynne Viola: The unknown Gulag .
- ^ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 106.
- ↑ a b Schnell: Gulag als Systemstelle, pp. 143–147; Viola: The unknown Gulag , p. 85 f.
- ↑ See Nicolas Werth: The island of cannibals .
- ↑ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 106; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 16.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 596.
- ↑ Grützmacher: The Baikal-Amur Mainline. From the Stalinist camp to the mobilization project , p. 99.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 101.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 101 f.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag als Systemstelle , p. 148. Stettner's term “quantity consumption good”: “Archipel GULag”: Stalins Zwangslager , p. 180.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag als Systemstelle , p. 149; Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 246.
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (Ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 162–165. See also Fischer von Weikersthal: Die "imhaftierte" Presse , especially pp. 89-107.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 101.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 122.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 149.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 233, note 236; Kizny: Gulag , p. 118.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 105-107.
- ↑ Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 246.
- ↑ For this channel see Schlögel: Terror und Traum , pp. 361–372.
- ↑ For this camp complex see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 220–222. Furthermore, Schlögel: Terror und Traum , pp. 373–379.
- ↑ Schlögel: Terror und Traum , p. 363.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 128; Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 249.
- ↑ Schlögel: Terror und Traum , p. 374.
- ↑ For this camp complex see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 151–153. See also Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , pp. 235–237 as well as Grützmacher: The Baikal-Amur-Magistrale. From the Stalinist camp to the mobilization project .
- ↑ On this expedition and its consequences see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 116–121. See also the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923-1960 , pp. 543 f.
- ↑ See the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 195–197.
- ↑ Hedeler, Hennig: Schwarze Pyramiden , p. 31.
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 544 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 121.
- ↑ On SibLag, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 422–425.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 34.
- ↑ On this camp complex see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de as well as the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , p. 302 f. See also Hedeler, Stark: Das Grab in der Steppe , esp. Pp. 31–91; Barnes: Death and Redemption . For the management personnel of the warehouse management see Wladislaw Hedeler: The example of KARLag. The administration of a corrective labor camp . In: Wladislaw Hedeler (Hrsg.): Stalinscher Terror 1934–41. A research balance sheet, BasisDruck, Berlin 2002, pp. 109-131, ISBN 3-86163-127-X .
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 361–364.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 151.
- ↑ Ertz: Forced Labor in Noril'sk. An atypical, ideal-typical camp complex , p. 293.
- ↑ Ertz: Forced Labor in Noril'sk. An atypical, ideal-typical camp complex , p. 295.
- ^ Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan , p. 83; Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and facts , p. 267. This area is thus more than nine times larger than that of Germany in the 1991 borders.
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 412–415.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 123.
- ↑ Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and facts , p. 269.
- ^ Sprau: Gold und Zwangsarbeit, p. 70; Kizny: Gulag , p. 301.
- ^ Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan , p. 83.
- ^ Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan , p. 81.
- ^ Sprau: Kolyma and Magadan , p. 84.
- ↑ Sprau, Kolyma and Magadan , p. 84. Slightly different figures in Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and Facts , p. 283, about 870,000 prisoners and about 130,000 dead are named here.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 10 and 211.
- ↑ Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 194.
- ↑ On this briefly Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival. Pp. 31-33. In detail Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalin's forced camp. Pp. 115-167.
- ↑ See Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalin's forced camp. Pp. 194-212.
- ↑ Schlögel: Terror und Traum , p. 384 f. For the end of Jagoda, Berman, Pliner and Bersin see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 134-136. In addition to Jagoda, Berman and Pliner, the former Gulag bosses Fjodor Eichmans and Lasar Kogan (1899–1939) also fell victim to the Great Terror, see Ivanova: The Gulag in the Totalitarian System of the Soviet Union , p. 150.
- ↑ Timothy Snyder : Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin . From the English by Martin Richter, CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62184-0 , p. 101.
- ↑ Felix Ackermann: More than a package “Belomorkanal”: Solovki and the memory of the GULag . In: Katharina Kucher, Gregor Thum, Sören Urbansky (eds.): Silent Revolutions. The new formation of the world since 1989 , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main [u. a.] 2013, ISBN 978-3-593-39851-8 , pp. 173-184, here p. 176; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 143; Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag , p. 170. See also Uta Gerlant: Commemoration of Terror Victims in Karelia , Berliner Zeitung , December 4, 1997 (accessed on March 24, 2015).
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 144.
- ↑ Hedeler, Hennig: Schwarze Pyramiden , p. 29.
- ↑ Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and facts , p. 279.
- ↑ Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag , p. 171.
- ↑ Figures from Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 178 f.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 601 f.
- ↑ See Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 141–143. Using the example of Dalstroi, see Panikarov: Kolyma. Data and facts , p. 280 f.
- ↑ Figures from Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 179.
- ↑ Figures from Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 179 f.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 159.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 150 f.
- ^ Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 115 f. For a breakdown of branches see also Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 602.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 212 f.
- ↑ a b Bonwetsch: Gulag. Arbitrariness and mass crime , p. 34.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 447.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 442–444; Werth: A short historical overview of the Gulag , p. 116.
- ↑ On the acts of violence in Lemberg see Hermann Frank Meyer : Blutiges Edelweiß. The 1st Mountain Division in World War II . Ch. Links Verlag , 2008, ISBN 978-3-86153-447-1 , p. 58–65 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ On Tarnopol see Ela Hornung: Denunciation as social practice cases from the Nazi military justice . Böhlau Verlag Vienna, 2010, ISBN 978-3-205-78432-6 , p. 99 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 116; Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 603. Special settlers were also able to use the weapon, up to November 1942 this was 60,000 people, see Viola: The unknown Gulag , p. 170.
- ^ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 116.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 440.
- ↑ a b Specification of a quarter in Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 24, p. 211 and 619. The author's reference to this quota changes: Sometimes it is all war years, sometimes 1941/1942. Specifying a quarter even with Scherbakowa: prisons and camps , S. 603 (reference: 1942). Specifying a fifth in value: A brief historical outline of the Gulag , S. 108 (reference: 1942 and 1943) and Fast: Gulag as a systems point , S. 160 (reference: all the war years).
- ↑ Werth: A short historical overview of the Gulag , p. 116 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 458 f .; Kramer: Introduction . In: Bettina Greiner, Alan Kramer (eds.): Die Welt der Lager , p. 37.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 461–464. Only around 15 percent of these people were released into civilian life. Around 20 percent of the repatriates were punished with death or 25 years of forced labor, the rest received shorter sentences (see Karner: Im Archipel GUPVI , p. 137).
- ↑ Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On Strengthening the Protection of Private Property of Citizens" and Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On criminal responsibility for theft of state and social property" , June 4, 1947 to 100 ( 0) Key Documents in Russian and Soviet History ; Ivanova: The Gulag in the Totalitarian System of the Soviet Union , pp. 60–62.
- ↑ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 118; Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 604.
- ↑ Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , p. 394 f.
- ↑ Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 22.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag als Systemstelle, p. 150. Pre-war figures and information from Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 92–94; Figures for 1949 from Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 123.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 464.
- ↑ Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 239, p. 248.
- ↑ Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 255, p. 257; Gestwa: The large Stalin buildings of communism , p. 397.
- ↑ For this storage complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de .
- ↑ For this storage complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de .
- ↑ Gestwa: The Stalinist large buildings of Communism , p 396, footnote 26th
- ↑ This formulation goes back to Oleg Khlevniuk, see Schnell: Gulag als Systemstelle , p. 151 f.
- ^ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 150; Barnes: Death and Redemption , p. 38.
- ↑ Hildermeier: The Soviet Union 1917–1991 , p. 128.
- ↑ Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , p. 115.
- ↑ On this Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 378–387; Gestwa: The large Stalin buildings of communism , p. 405 f. The prisoners of the Gulag dissolved the word tufta , which denoted the other side of the standardization of all camp work and the food ration , as technika uceta fiktivnogo truda (calculation technique of fictitious work), see Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , p. 405, footnote 76.
- ↑ Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 24.
- ^ Barnes: Death and Redemption , p. 47.
- ↑ On this Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 491–494; Putz: The Lords of the Camp , p. 350 f.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 162 f.
- ↑ Hedeler: Resistance in the Gulag , pp. 354, 361 f .; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 490 f.
- ↑ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 118.
- ↑ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , pp. 358–362.
- ↑ a b c Hedeler-Hennig: Black Pyramids , p. 57.
- ↑ For this camp complex, see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de ; also the relevant information from the Memorial Society, Krasnoyarsk .
- ↑ On the RetschLag (German: Flusslager) see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de .
- ↑ For these two uprisings see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 514-522. On the uprising in Vorkuta see above all Hedeler, Hennig (ed.): Black pyramids . Furthermore Fritjof Meyer : The forgotten slave revolt: death in the Gulag. In: Spiegel Online . October 10, 2003, accessed April 7, 2015 .
- ↑ a b Hedeler: Resistance in the Gulag , p. 365.
- ↑ For this camp complex see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de and the entry in Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923–1960 , pp. 435–437.
- ↑ See Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 522-531.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 530.
- ↑ Gestwa: Built on water and blood , p. 261; Gestwa: The large Stalin buildings of communism , p. 420 f. Further examples of unrest at Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 353.
- ↑ On the removal of Beria see Stephan Merl : Introduction to the resolution of the plenary session of the CK of the KPSS “On anti-party and subversive acts by Beria” [Lavrentij Beria's disempowerment], July 7, 1953 , at: 100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history .
- ↑ See Hedeler, Hennig (Ed.): Schwarze Pyramiden , pp. 53–58.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 503.
- ↑ a b Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 606.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 533 f .; Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalin's forced camp , p. 354 f.
- ↑ See on this speech, its background and immediate consequences Karl Eimermacher: Introduction to the speech of the First Secretary of the CK of the KPSS, NS Chruščev on the XX. Party congress of the KPSS [“Secret Speech”] and the decision of the party congress “On the personality cult and its consequences”, February 25, 1956 , in: 100 (0) key documents of Russian and Soviet history .
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 537; Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalin's forced camp , p. 358.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 537.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 504; Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? , P. 171; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 29.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 605 f.
- ↑ Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 120 f .; Adler: The Gulag Survivor , pp. 83, 88 f .; Sprau: Life after the GULAG. Petitions from former Soviet prisoners as a source , p. 109.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 505.
- ^ Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? , P. 172; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 29.
- ^ Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? , P. 172.
- ↑ a b Sprau: Life after the GULAG. Petitions from former Soviet prisoners as a source , p. 99.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 536.
- ↑ Elie: Impossible Rehabilitation , p. 376.
- ↑ Elie: Impossible Rehabilitation , p. 384 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 587.
- ↑ Stark: Die Gezeichen , p. 139; Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? , P. 175.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 607.
- ↑ See ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On additional measures to restore justice in connection with the victims of repression in the 1930s to 1940s and in the early 1950s” on the website of the Memorial Society, Krasnoyarsk.
- ↑ See the Ukas of the President of the USSR "On the Restoration of the Rights of All Victims of Political Repression in the 1920s to 1950s" on the website of the Memorial Society, Krasnoyarsk.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 611.
- ↑ See Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 612 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 600.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 608.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 556.
- ↑ For this camp see the key information on the website www.gulag.memorial.de .
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 575, p. 575-579.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 589.
- ↑ Information on Maier's biography ( memento of February 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on the website www.ausstellung-gulag.org .
- ↑ Examples of the most varied reasons for arrest at Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 156–162 and at Stettner: “Archipel GULag”: Stalin's Zwangslager , pp. 168–172 or at Stark: Women in Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 35–37.
- ↑ See Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 162–164; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 40 f.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 40–45; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 165 f.
- ↑ On the torture of German communists who were arrested during the Great Terror, see Reinhard Müller: NKVD-Torture. Terror Reality and Production of Fictions . In: Wladislaw Hedeler (Hrsg.): Stalinscher Terror 1934–41. A research balance sheet, BasisDruck, Berlin 2002, pp. 133–158, ISBN 3-86163-127-X .
- ↑ References to such instances in Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 534 and Stark: Frauen im Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 45.
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , pp. 182-184.
- ↑ These are wagons that were barred on the outside. Inside they were divided into individual cells with grids or steel nets. See Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 191 f .; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 54. Photo of such a wagon on the website www.akg-images.co.uk ( accessed March 27, 2015).
- ↑ For the situation on rail transport, see Stark: Frauen im Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 52–69; Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 189–194.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 196–199; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 80–83. For conditions during a shipment on the Ob river, see Nicolas Werth: Die Insel der Kannibalen , p. 130 f.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 83–86, 155.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 126.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 454.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 73.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 73–78; Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 194–196. On the conditions in the Tomsk transit camp in 1933 see Nicolas Werth: Die Insel der Kannibalen , pp. 95, 101 and 124 f.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 78–80.
- ^ The collection of images from the Gulag exhibition . Traces and evidence from 1929–1956 on the website of the German Historical Museum shows such an earth hut (see illustration no. 11).
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 101 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 203-209.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 214 f .; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 91–93.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 88, 91-93; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 216.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 114–119; Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 218–222.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 142.
- ↑ For the following see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 269–274.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 273.
- ↑ For the years 1939 and 1950 in the KarLag see the information in Stark: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 146 f.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 147–152.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 243 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 244–246.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 250–256. For the lack of engineers, for example, see Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , pp. 129, 148, 153, 401, 442 f.
- ↑ Brief remarks on these institutions, for example in Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 119.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 148 f .; For information on how Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn stayed in a Sharashka, see www.gulag.memorial.de .
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 380 f .; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 214 f.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 378.
- ↑ Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 22.
- ↑ Examples of Tufta in Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 383–387 and in Stark: Frauen im Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 219–221.
- ↑ See Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 406–413; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 436–444. For information on singing, see Klause: Der Klang des Gulag , pp. 65–75 and 535–539.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 431 f.
- ↑ For cultural and propaganda work, see Klause: Music per Ordinance (there on p. 309 explanations on competitions in the arts); Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 178–185; Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 258–267, 296 f .; Kizny: Gulag , pp. 258-261; using the example of DmitLag, see Schlögel: Terror und Traum , pp. 380–383. The term "serf theater" comes from Yevgenia Ginsburg, quoted from Barnes: Death and Redemption , p. 64.
- ↑ See Fischer von Weikersthal: Die " imhaftierte " Presse , especially pp. 467–489.
- ↑ For the following see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 274–278 for a summary.
- ^ Barnes: Death and Redemption , p. 44 f.
- ↑ Using the example of the DmitLag and the Moscow-Volga Canal, see Schlögel: Terror und Traum , pp. 374 and 379.
- ↑ See the descriptions in Orlando Figes : Send a greeting, sometimes through the stars. A story of love and survival in times of terror . Translated from English and Russian by Bernd Rullkötter, Carl Hanser Verlag, Berlin [u. a.] 2012, ISBN 978-3-446-24031-5 . See also Stark: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 449.
- ↑ Gestwa: The Stalinist large buildings of communism , S. 414th
- ↑ Also on this Figes: Send a greeting, sometimes through the stars . Also strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 455 f.
- ↑ See Alan Barenberg: Prisoners Without Borders: Zazonniki and the Transformation of Vorkuta after Stalin ( Memento of October 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 57 (2009), 4, pp. 513-534.
- ↑ Klause: Music by Ordinance , p. 310.
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 156.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 239.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 232; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 243.
- ↑ Volkhard Knigge, Irina Scherbakowa (ed.): Gulag. Traces and evidence 1929–1956 , p. 62.
- ↑ For the nutritional situation see overall Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 232–240.
- ↑ For storage diseases see Stark: Women in Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 351–357. On the danger of winter sunlight in ice and snow Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 110.
- ↑ On the situation of health care see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 395–406 and Stark: Frauen im Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 340–351.
- ↑ Ertz: Forced Labor in Noril'sk. An atypical, ideal-typical camp complex , p. 290.
- ^ Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 108 f .; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 20.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 619.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 368-370; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 368 f.
- ↑ Nicolas Werth: The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n ° 00447 (August 1937 - November 1938) ( Memento from January 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence , published on May 24, 2010, accessed in the Internet Archive on May 18 , 2015 April 2015.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 421.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 422.
- ↑ Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , p. 428.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 417-419; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 339; Barnes: Death and Redemption , pp. 53-57.
- ↑ Strong: Women and Children in the Gulag , p. 118.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 335.
- ↑ See Stark: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival .
- ↑ Strong: Women and Children in the Gulag , p. 119; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 384. On mass rape Stark: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 389–391.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday life and survival , p. 39, p. 431 f, p. 451–455.
- ↑ Strong: Women and Children in the Gulag , p. 124.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 344–358.
- ^ Rebitschek: Prosecution in Stalinism , p. 134.
- ↑ Elie: The "Revolving Door" , p. 113.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 259–263.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 319.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 268–271; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 329 f.
- ↑ The legal basis was the so-called "Ears Law" of August 7, 1932, see Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag , p. 55; Jörg Baberowski: Scorched Earth. Stalin's rule of violence , CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63254-9 , p. 184.
- ^ Rebitschek: Prosecution in Stalinism , p. 132 f.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , pp. 272–278; Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 310-318.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 313; Rebitschek: Prosecution in Stalinism , p. 135.
- ^ Putz: The Lords of the Camp , p. 350; Strong: women in the gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 278; Gestwa: The large Stalin buildings of communism , p. 419.
- ↑ Strong: Women in the Gulag. Everyday Life and Survival , p. 281.
- ↑ History of Gulag in 7 volumes. Volume 2: Structure and Personnel documents, ed. Petrov NV State Archive of the Russian Federation , 2004 (Russian)
- ^ The Heads of the Central Committee of NKVD Petrov NV , Sorokyn KV Who Headed NKVD 1934-1941 Moscow: Memorial , 1999, 504 pages. ISBN 5-7870-0032-3
- ↑ Lubyanka. VCheka - KGB. Documents 1917-1960 Moscow: International Democracy Fund, 1997. ISBN 5-89511-004-5
- ↑ For the security personnel see above all Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus , pp. 422–432; Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 285–307.
- ↑ Number of suicides at Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union , p. 166. Memoirs by guards about experiences are very rare. The records of Ivan Tschistjakow are an exception. They show the horror and habituation of a compulsory gulag security guard. See Irina Scherbakowa: My whole life lies in the diary. The Notes of a Guard in the Gulag , in: Same: Torn Memory. Dealing with Stalinism and World War II in today's Russia , Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, pp. 63–89, ISBN 978-3-8353-0601-1 . The diary is now available in German translation. See Ivan Petrovic Cistjakov: Siberia. Siberia. Diary of a warehouse supervisor , Matthes & Seitz Berlin , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-88221-092-7 .
- ↑ Schnell: Gulag as a system office , p. 157.
- ^ Adler: The Gulag Survivor , p. 232 f.
- ↑ Elie: The "revolving door" , p. 106; Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 107; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 17.
- ↑ On the psychological consequences of imprisonment and exile, see Adler: The Gulag Survivor , pp. 112–118.
- Jump up ↑ Stark: The Drawn , pp. 124–126.
- ↑ Elie: The "revolving door" , p. 111.
- ^ Adler: The Gulag Survivor , p. 65 f .; Stark: The Drawn , p. 127 f .; Barnes: Death and Redemption , p. 165.
- ↑ Stark: The Drawn , p. 141 f, p. 200.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 544 f.
- ↑ Šcerbakova: Memory on the Defensive , p. 412 f.
- ^ Fieseler: End of the Gulag system? , P. 176; basically Adler: Keeping Faith with the Party .
- ^ Adler: Keeping Faith with the Party , p. 4.
- ↑ Viola: The unknown Gulag , pp. 167-181.
- ↑ Kaznelson: Remembering the Soviet State , pp. 1173-1176.
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 548.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 569.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 574.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 581.
- ↑ Gnedovskij, Ochotin: Leiden als Exponat , p. 193; Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 609.
- ↑ See the relevant information ( Memento of September 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the German-speaking section of Memorial (accessed April 27, 2015); on the memorial books see Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 617.
- ↑ Klaus-Helge Donath: Russian NGO "Memorial": A thorn in the side of those in power , Die Tageszeitung December 17, 2014 (accessed April 27, 2015). In detail, Šcerbakova: Memory on the defensive .
- ↑ Konradova: Search for the Form , p. 421 f.
- ↑ For the museum in Perm, see Immo Rebitschek: Re-measurement and redesign of a memorial site: The Perm'-36 memorial . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz: Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 91-108, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 ; on government pressure on the museum, see Sabine Adler : Putin's bureaucracy forces the Gulag Museum to go out , Deutschlandradio Kultur , March 9, 2015 (accessed April 27, 2015). For information on the KarLag Museum, see the museum's trilingual website ( Memento from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on May 13, 2015).
- ↑ Šcerbakova: Memory on the Defensive , p. 417.
- ^ Museum website (German) , accessed on April 27, 2015.
- ↑ See also Müller-Butz, Werkmeister: The history of the GULag in the Russian Internet (RuNet) , pp. 237–241; Gnedovskij, Ochotin: Suffering as an exhibit , p. 194 f .; Schor-Tschudnowskaja: Activists of Remembrance , p. 151 f.
- ↑ Werth: A Brief Historical Outline of the Gulag , p. 105; Werth: The Gulag in the Prism of the Archives , p. 14; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 597.
- ↑ Konradova: Search for the Form , p. 425; Ganzenmüller, Utz: Exculpation and Identity Foundation , p. 11; Photo of this memorial on Spiegel Online , accessed on April 27, 2015.
- ↑ Haverkamp: Commemoration as a Challenge , p. 185.
- ↑ Konradova: Search for the form , p. 426 f .; Ganzenmüller, Utz: Exculpation and Identity Foundation , p. 11.
- ↑ Konradova: Search for the form , pp. 422–429.
- ↑ Konradova: Search for the Form , p. 423 f.
- ↑ Hedeler, Stark: Das Grab in der Steppe , pp. 436-438.
- ↑ Gesine Dornblüth : Processing of the Gulag in Kazakhstan , Deutschlandfunk , May 23, 2015 (accessed on June 12, 2015).
- ↑ Makhotina: Rooms of Mourning - Places that are silent , p. 37.
- ↑ Scherbakowa: Prisons and Camps , p. 570; Šcerbakova: Memory on the Defensive , p. 410; Shor-Chudnovskaya: Activists of Remembrance , p. 159.
- ↑ Schor-Tschudnowskaja: Aktivisten des Andenkens , p. 155; NGO searches in Russia: Authorities paralyze “Memorial” , Die Tageszeitung , March 21, 2013 (accessed April 28, 2015).
- ↑ Haverkamp: Commemoration as a Challenge , p. 187.
- ↑ On this Margarete Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as a memory-political actor (1995–2009). The Butovo shooting range as a case study for post-Soviet commemorative culture . in: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz: Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings from the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 59–90, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- ↑ See Schor-Tschudnowskaja: Aktivisten des Andenkens , pp. 145–148; Ganzenmüller, Utz: Exculpation and Identity Foundation , p. 13 f, p. 17 f.
- ↑ Nikita V. Petrov, Konstantin V. Skorkin: Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934-1941. Spravočnik . Zvenʹja, Moskva 1999, ISBN 5-7870-0032-3 .
- ^ Werth: The Gulag in the prism of the archives , p. 24 f.
- ↑ Ganzenmüller, Utz: Exculpation and Identity Foundation , p. 6 f, p. 28.
- ↑ Quoted from Daniel Brössler : Vladimir Putin's historical image - No to Yeltsin, Yes to Stalin , Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 26, 2008 (accessed April 28, 2014).
- ↑ Террор снимают с архивного учета (German: "Terror will be removed from the archive"). In: Kommersant , June 8, 2018.
- ↑ В РФ по секретному указу уничтожаются данные о репрессированных ( Eng .: "In the RF, data about the repressed are destroyed by secret command "). In: Deutsche Welle , June 8, 2018.
- ↑ Russia Secretly Orders Destruction of Gulag Prisoners' Records, Media Warns . In: The Moscow Times , June 8, 2016.
- ↑ Террор снимают с архивного учета (German: "Terror will be removed from the archive"), Kommersant , June 8, 2018.
- ↑ In 1951 alone, the Gulag administration received 132,738 reports and accounts from the camps and colonies, see Ivanova: The Gulag in the Totalitarian System of the Soviet Union , p. 105.
- ^ Werth: The Gulag in the prism of the archives , p. 14 f .; Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 105; Gestwa: Departure from the GULag? , P. 482.
- ↑ Galina Michajlovna Ivanova: Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva , Moskovskij Obšcěstvennyj Naučnyj Fond, Moskva 1997. Translated into English as Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova: Labor camp socialism. The Gulag in the Soviet totalitarian system . Ed. by Donald J. Raleigh. Transl. by Carol Flath, Sharpe, Armonk, London 2000, ISBN 0-7656-0426-4 . Translated into German as Ivanova: The Gulag in the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union .
- ^ Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalin's forced camp .
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag .
- ↑ Smirnow (ed.): The system of corrective labor camps in the Soviet Union 1923-1960 .
- ↑ Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga . Konec 20-ch - pervaja polovina 50-ch godov, Sobranie dokumentov , 7 volumes, Moskva 2004–2005.
- ↑ Zacharčenko: The processing of the history of the Gulag in Russia , p. 70.
- ^ Werth: The Gulag in the prism of the archives , p. 12 f .; Werth: A short historical outline of the Gulag , p. 104; on the different numbers see also Stettner: "Archipel GULag": Stalins Zwangslager , p. 187 f.
- ↑ Gestwa: Departure from the GULag? , P. 482; Applebaum: The Gulag , p. 617.
- ↑ Suslov: Das Spezkontingent , p. 92.
- ↑ Applebaum: Der Gulag , p. 619. For the earlier controversy over these numbers see Stettner: “Archipel GULag”: Stalins Zwangslager , p. 188–190.
- ↑ Террор снимают с архивного учета (German: "Terror will be removed from the archive"), Kommersant , June 8, 2018.
- ↑ See the overview by Dieter Pohl : National Socialist and Stalinist Mass Crimes: Considerations for Scientific Comparison. In: Jürgen Zarusky (ed.): Stalin and the Germans (series of the quarterly books for contemporary history , special issue), Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, pp. 253-263, ISBN 978-3-486-57893-5 .
- ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 34–39.
- ↑ Zacharčenko: The processing of the history of the Gulag in Russia , p. 72.
- ↑ So the subtitle of the work.
- ↑ Julia Landau: Introduction . In: Same, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and Documents, 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 7–11, here p. 8, ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 ; Similar formulation in Werth: A brief historical outline of the Gulag , p. 103.
- ↑ Volker M. Schütterle: Milestone in the literary appraisal of Soviet tyranny: “The Gulag Archipelago” (contribution by the Scientific Services of the German Bundestag from December 17, 2013), accessed on May 12, 2015.
- ↑ See Ulrich Schmid : Non-literature without morality. Why Varlam Šalamov was not read ( memento of August 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: Osteuropa , Vol. 57, 2007, no. 6 (Writing the camp. Varlam Šalamov and coming to terms with the Gulag) , pp. 87-105 (quote “Entering the hopeless and cruel camp world” there on p. 94) ; Marisa Siguan: Writing at the Limits of Language. Studies on Améry, Kertész, Semprún, Schalamow, Herta Müller and Aub , de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, pp. 196–241, ISBN 978-3-11-034834-7 ; Hans-Peter Kunisch: People without a biography. A great discovery: the Russian author Varlam Shalomov talks about the Stalinist camps like no other before . In: Die Zeit October 4, 2007 (accessed on May 1, 2015).
- ↑ On Neumann's novel see Günther Stocker: Between gray and grotesque. Robert Neumann's Gulag novel The Poshansk Puppets and Cold War Culture . In: ILCEA , 16, 2012 ( accessed May 1, 2015); Jan Koneffke: Showdown of world views. Robert Neumann's novel “The Puppets of Poshansk” , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 7, 2013 (accessed May 1, 2015). On Wallace's visit, see Applebaum: Der Gulag , pp. 466–468; Sprau, Kolyma and Magadan , p. 86; Klause: The sound of the Gulag , p. 376 f.
- ↑ Information on the website www.gulag.su . There you will also have the opportunity to digitally view excerpts from different versions of the work. See above all: Yefrosinija Kersnowskaja: "Oh Lord, if our sins accuse us". A pictorial chronicle from the Gulag . With a foreword by Lev Kopelev and a foreword by Vladimir Wigiljansky. Translated from Russian by Iwan N. Tscherepow, Neuer Malik Verlag , Kiel 1991, ISBN 3-89029-062-0 . On Kersnowskaja see also Adler: The Gulag Survivor , pp. 118–120; Aglaia Wasp: Deny vulnerable femininity. The pictorial chronicle of Evfrosinija Kersnovskaja as self-testimony and place of remembrance . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 177–196, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
- ↑ See Ralf Schlüter: Seltsamer Mann (article about a ZDF documentary that presents Baldajew and his drawings), Berliner Zeitung June 19, 1997 (accessed on May 2, 2015); Information and some drawings by Baldajew ( memento of September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (accessed May 2, 2015); Dancik Sergejewitsch Baldajew: GULag. Drawings . Edited by Hans-Peter Böffgen, Thees Klahn and Andrzej Klamt, Zweiausendeins , Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-86150-001-9 .
- ↑ On the artist and his cycle, see Nikolai Getman: The Gulag Collection: Paintings of the Soviet Penal System . The Jamestown Foundation, 2001, ISBN 0-9675009-1-5 .
- ↑ See Liliya Berezhnaya: The Stalin Era in the Russian Post-Perestroika Film: Between National Meaning, Soviet Nostalgia and Melodramatic Box Office hits . In: Jörg Ganzenmüller, Raphael Utz (Ed.): Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 197–215, ISBN 978-3-486-74196-4 .
