Let’s take that as a talking point.
That statement reflects a common perception in the West that the gulags were the Soviet equivalent of Nazi extermination camps, and that prisoners were systematically starved to death or otherwise killed there. The evidence doesn’t seem to support that impression.
Death rates for gulag prisoners, according to Soviet archives, were 24.9% in 1942; 22.4% in 1943; 15,3%; in 1933; 9,2% in 1944; around 5% to 6% in 1938, 41 and 45; around 4% to 5% in 1930, 32, 34, and 38; 3,59% in 1947; around 2% to 3% in 1931, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 46 and 48; 1.21% in 1949; and between 0,67% and 0,95% from 1950 to 53: Anne Applebaum, Gulag, Doubleday, New York, 2003, pp. 582-3. (A quick cross-check on one of these and some other figures she presents shows that there may be problems with those figures, as there seems always to be in this area, but her figures will do for indicative figures for the purposes of this topic.) Applebaum rightly cautions against taking even the figures I’ve quoted as accurate, if only because they ignore deaths outside the gulags.
The death rates for 13 of the 23 years in Applebaum’s figures are in roughly the same range as for Axis POW’s held in Allied camps of 1% to 2.6% http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/for/us-germany-pow.html The wartime gulag death rates reflect food shortages and, probably, less healthy prisoners remaining in the system while the healthier ones went into the armed forces. Applebaum says nearly a million prisoners left the gulags during the war to join the forces (p. 579) Death rates declined steadily after the war to below 1% for the last four years of figures for 1950 - 53…
People didn’t leave Nazi extermination camps alive. Most prisoners left the gulags alive: about 75% in the worst year and over 99% in the four best years.
Applebaum notes at p. 579 that in 1943 2,42 million prisoners passed through the gulags and that the total held declined from 1,5 million on 1 January to 1,2 million at the end of the year. Assuming the Soviet population was about 165 million in 1943 (based on a 162 million real figure in the 1939 census rather than the 170 million Stalin wanted and which 170 million new statisticians wisely delivered after their 1937 predecessors were eliminated for coming up with only 156 million - this is from memory so don‘t crucify me if it‘s a bit wrong), about 0,72% of the population was in gulags in 1943. I can’t find 1940’s figures for America, so the best I can do is current figures. America’s current population is around 301 million https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/us.html
of which about 2.2 million http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm , or about 0,73% of the population, are in prison. America‘s current imprisonment rate is just about identical with the USSR’s in 1943, although America‘s imprisonment rates have gone up dramatically in recent years. If we don’t regard America now as running a shockingly unjust legal and penal system just because of the percentage of its population in prison, we can’t regard the USSR in 1943, when attitudes and penalties in all nations were much harder, as having an excessive imprisonment rate.
Applebaum notes at p.580 that there were frequent amnesties for the old, the ill and pregnant women. That’s hardly consistent with gulags being extermination camps.
Still, there is no question that the gulags were often very harsh places where people were misused; abused; starved; worked beyond their capacity; subjected to harsh physical punishment; and often with death rates that could only be explained by appalling treatment. Some prisoners managed to escape. The following passage summarizes a 1930’s book by an escaped prisoner.
Conditions were brutal. Men were put out to work, swinging 12lb sledge hammers for 16 hours a day, malnourished. Prisoners were shackled together, unable to move their legs a full stride. The shackles rubbed against their legs and the resulting wounds often became infected, leading to illness and death. Prisoners who could not keep up with the grueling pace of labor were beaten. Prisoners were regularly whipped for disobeying orders. Particularly recalcitrant prisoners were shut in a small coffin-like enclosure with no ventilation. They suffered severe dehydration, hallucinations and frequently, death.
The author of that book was describing his experiences before he escaped. From an American chain gang. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=634711
In looking at the gulags, it’s fair to compare them with the American prison system of the time, because both were state run systems of forced convict labour…
The fundamental “reform” in abolishing convict leasing and replacing this system with chain gangs was that the state now owned the convicts and their labor. Whereas previously the bureaucracy of the state had been the supplier of convict labor for private industries, they now became the direct exploiters. For over 30 years, African-American, and some white, convicts in the chain gangs were worked at gunpoint under whips and chains in a public spectacle of clear chattel slavery and torture. Eventually, the brutality and violence associated with chain gang labor in the United States gained worldwide attention. As reformists learned about the endless stories of prisoners dying in sweat boxes after being beaten by the guards, and of teenage boys being whipped to death, they began organizing and calling for an end to the use of extreme violence against convicts. Historian and theorist, Walter Wilson, was particularly critical of the ideology behind these movements, since they focused only on the most outward displays of violence. In 1933, Wilson wrote of this reform movement:
When some of the inhumane tortures that constantly occur on the gangs are forced into the light, reformers and liberal apologists for capitalism are “shocked” and call for an investigation. The investigation usually whitewashes the prison system as a whole by pinning the blame on one or two subordinate guards who are then dismissed. The reformers then go into ecstasy over their “victory.” [13]
Cases involving the dismissal of certain guards were hailed as the “abolition of whipping,” until the next horrifying story of torture was released. Reformers failed to address the fundamental problem of violent domination, control, and isolation forming the basis of the penitentiary system from which the chain gangs had emerged. They failed to realize that there could be no benevolent form of a chain gang. Consequently this system of overt slavery persisted through all the minor reforms. The chain gang was finally abolished in every state by the l950s, almost 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
http://prisonactivist.org/?q=node/view/452
Walter Wilson, quoted in the above passage, compared the American prison labour system unfavourably with the gulags in his 1933 book Forced Labor in the United States, which is on the internet http://ia331315.us.archive.org/1/items/forcedlaborinuni00wilsrich/forcedlaborinuni00wilsrich_djvu.txt
Wilson is clearly pro-Soviet and his conclusions, along with the quotes I’ve used from others, should be treated with caution in the absence of more solid evidence for their sweeping claims, but for the purposes of this exercise it is plain that the gulag system and the legal system behind it was, so far as forced labour went, not different in its essential nature to that operating in parts of the United States before and during WWII.
The American chain gang system suffered the same problem as the gulags: government desire for free labour encouraged sentences to forced labour camps. If my trawling through the internet and a university library catalogue today is any guide, surprisingly little seems to have been written on the history of the American chain gangs and prison farms in comparison with gulags, although chain gangs and their brutality have been a staple of American cinema since the 1930’s.
The gulags, like the American penal system, differed from Nazi extermination camps because they were part of a prison system in which prisoners served defined sentences for various criminal or political offences.
The gulag system, like parts of the American prison system at the same time and especially in the American South, was a source of labour for the state. The state had an interest in keeping its labourers alive and productive for as long as possible, unlike extermination camps where there was no point in wasting food on people who were going to die anyway.
Like the American chain gang system, the gulag system was supposed to be self-supporting on its earnings from forced labour.
There was nothing remarkable about prisoners being required to undertake forced labour up to 1945, or later, in any country. It’s within living memory that courts in England and Australia, along with other countries, routinely sentenced prisoners to ‘hard labour’ as extra punishment for worse crimes. Even if it meant just breaking up stones with a sledgehammer in a prison yard all day. We also hanged and flogged people under our legal systems during the war, and afterwards. And put prisoners on a diet of bread and water for punishment. Was this so much worse than the mentality behind the gulags?
Continues next post
