GULAG

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• GULAG
• Leonore Heino Hoyt
• Centennial High School

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• The Gulag System was first implemented by Lenin
  in 1918 to house enemies of the people and
  contain counter-revolutionaries.
• In 1929, Stalin expanded the Gulag System in
  order to help implement his first 5 year plan.

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A mining camp
A guard tower
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• The term GULAG is an acronym used to describe
  476 camp systems, each made up of hundreds or
  thousands of
• individual camps, or lagpunkts.
• Some of these systems were spread out over
  thousands of miles of frozen tundra.

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Laborers
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• The first Five Year Plan was an extraordinarily
  costly attempt, in human lives and natural
  resources, to force a 20 percent annual increase
  in the Soviet Union's industrial output and to
  collectivize agriculture.

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• The plan led to millions of arrests as peasants
  were forced off their land and imprisoned if they
  refused to leave. It also led to an enormous
  labor shortage.

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• Suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself in need
  of coal, gas, and minerals, most of which could
  be found only in the far north of the country.

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• The decision was taken The prisoners should be
  used to extract the minerals. Here is how Alexei
  Loginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk
  camps, north of the Arctic Circle, justified the
  use of prisoner labor in a 1992 interview
• If we had sent civilians, we would first have
  had to build houses for them to live in. And how
  could civilians live there? With prisoners it is
  easy--all you need is a barrack, a stove with a
  chimney, and they survive.

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But, did they survive?
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• Between 1929, when the camps first became a mass
  phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin's death,
  some 18 million people passed through them.

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• In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were
  deported, not to camps but to exile villages.

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• In total, that means the number of people with
  some experience of imprisonment in Stalin's
  Soviet Union could have run as high as 25
  million, about 15 percent of the population.

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• The camps were not constructed in order to kill
  people--Stalin preferred to use firing squads to
  conduct mass executions.

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• The vast majority of prisoners were peasants and
  workers, not intellectuals who later wrote
  memoirs and books.
• The camps were fluid, prisoners died, were
  transferred, released, or even at times were
  promoted to guards.

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• A person could be sent to the GULAG for various
  crimes ranging from political activities, to
  petty theft.

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• Remember, the purpose of the GULAG system was to
  build the great Soviet State under Stalins Five
  Year Plans.

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• Prisoners not only extracted precious materials
  from Siberian soil, they also built factories,
  railroads, roads, canals, even whole cities.

The White Sea Canal Built entirely by
Gulag Prisoners.
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• Many of these cities still exist and are located
  in cold, inhospitable regions.
• The government has to spend a great deal of money
  to maintain these cities of the GULAG legacy.

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• One of the GULAG cities that still exists today
  is Vorkuta.
• Millions of prisoners passed through Vorkuta, one
  of the two or three most notorious hubs of the
  Gulag.

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• With the help of prisoners, the Soviet
  authorities built a city with shops and schools
  and later swimming pools. Yet the cost of heating
  shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of
  the year was astronomical, far more than the
  value of the coal itself.

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• The city's infrastructure, built on constantly
  shifting permafrost, required huge efforts to
  maintain. Miners could, instead, have been flown
  in and out on two-week shifts, as they are in
  Canada or Alaska.

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• Nevertheless, Vorkuta, now a city of 200,000
  people, kept going throughout the 1970s and 1980s
  and still exists today.

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• The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta was and
  still is completely unnecessary. Why build
  kindergartens and university lecture halls in the
  tundra? Why build puppet theatres? Vorkuta has
  three.

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• Yet in Vorkuta, you cannot ask such questions,
  even now.

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• We are going to explore this situation in greater
  detail.
• Russia is currently undergoing a population
  crisis.
• You will help solve the problem.

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• Sources
• Applebaum, Anne. 2004. Gulag, A History.
• Bantam. New York.
• -Hill, Fiona Gaddy, Clifford. 2003. The
  Siberian Curse How Communist Planners Left
  Russia in the Cold. Brookings. Washington, D.C.