Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are characterized by not supporting any criticisms or disagreements directed at them. Thus, regimes like Russian absolutist tsarism and the system that replaced it in the 1920s after the RevolutionRussian, a USSR Stalinist, developed various types of repression, control, espionage and processes of jettisoning everyday life, as well as capital punishment.
The resource of Gulag, short for Glavnoe Upravlenie I will bequeath, which means “Central Administration of the Fields”, was widely used by the Russian Empire as a way of penalizing common and political prisoners. In the USSR, under Stalin, the Gulag regime became a key player in Soviet repression. Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, the soviet gulags they did not have a systematic death engineering, with a crematorium of bodies and gas chambers for instantaneous death.
But these camps were none the less pernicious and outrageous, as millions of people were confined in the gulags. At the time of World War II, it is estimated that there were about 476 distinct camp complexes. Several of these people died of starvation during the war as a result of the actions of Stalin's government. Forced labor ranged from the extraction of minerals, such as gold and coal, to the extraction of wood.
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One of the main accounts of life in the gulags is that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book ArchipelagoGulag. The very trajectory of writing and publishing his work follows the story of the rise and decline of the Soviet Empire. Solzhenitsyn and his book were constantly stalked and watched by the KGB before publication was completed.
In addition to the work of Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, others such as Gulag – the Soviet concentration camp, by Anne Applebaum, The Great Terror - Stalin's Purges, by Robert Conquest, and dating house, by Martin Amis, are among the works that help to understand the situation of those who were in one of these fields during one of the darkest times of humanity.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
FERNANDES, Claudio. "Gulags – Soviet Concentration Camps"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/guerras/gulags-campos-concentracao-sovieticos.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.