Concept in Definition ABC

If we talk about secret police, detention and internment centers, and punishments for the population dissident, most of us tend to think in the Nazi Gestapo, and the notorious concentration camps.

However, Stalin's USSR was the one that most and best used these coercive tools to control, intimidate and punish its own population and get rid of the dissidents, with the NKVD / KGB, and with a series of forced labor camps and detention centers whose name would go down in history: the Gulag.

The name Gulag in Russian means General Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps and Colonias, and called a series of penal colonies established throughout the entire territory Soviet Union to which prisoners were sent convicted of all kinds of crimes but, above all, dissidents politicians.

This last facet, that of punishing dissent politics, is what the Gulag system is best known for in the West.

In the Tsarist Russian Empire there was already an extensive network of prisons and forced labor (the communists they knew it well, as some had experienced it personally), which was adopted and reinforced by the Soviet regime.

The coming to power of Stalin gave a new impetus to this network; the Gulag was created in 1930 as a result of the obsessive paranoia of the "red czar", and was dissolved in 1960 (seven years after his death).

The first and best testimony of the Gulag was bequeathed to us by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the work Gulag Archipelago.

Drafted on the basis of the experience staff of Author In the form of independent narratives between them, it was kept secret until it was published in 1973 in the West (specifically in France; it had been drawn up between 1958 and 1967).

In this work, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that the entire Gulag system was set up to exorcise the fears of the regime rather than to punish the real ones. criminals, and that once an inmate (after torturing him to confess what the political policemen who detained him wanted) entered the system, he was stripped of all his humanity and driven to become a whistleblower and distrustful, so that human ties were severed with the rest of the prisoners.

Dehumanizing and instilling fear so that the inmates would become "good citizens" according to the regime's concept, was thus the purpose of the entire concentration system.

Solzhenitsyn also testified to the disunity between common and political prisoners, and riots in some center of the Gulag.

Indeed, in the centers of the Gulag there was a certain anarchysince the guards (who often abused prisoners) did not care about internal fights, so that the law the strongest.

In some of these forced labor camps, the prisoners attempted riots, some of them succeeding even temporarily.

In the Gulag camps, inmates were forced to work for the state.

Infrastructures of the USSR were thus built with this slave labor, so that the state paid its maintenance with what I saved for its use.

The deaths in the Gulag were also numerous, especially in the period of the Second World War.

Interestingly, in the same period many inmates who were in this system were also released, but only to be framed in battalions of prisoners who were sent to the front to be used as true "meat of Canyon".

After Stalin's death the Gulag system relaxed its practices.

So much so that as of 1953 the number of released prisoners grew, although the number of incoming prisoners did not decrease, quite the contrary. Let us remember that the USSR was still a totalitarian state and that prisoners for reasons of conscience they were common.

Although the Gulag officially ceased to exist in 1960, its memory has not faded, so that now the term has changed to denominate, in the collective imagination, any organization or space that imposes draconian control measures, such as Korea North.

Thus, it is cited the gulag of North Korea in reference to a police state that has its citizens confined in what really ends up being a prison.

Photos: Fotolia - Jegas Ra / Afrutin / A_Mikhail

Themes in Gulag