Death/mistreatment in the Gulag - Deliberate or incidental?

Wendigo

Banned
Were the deaths and mistreatment/brutality that prisoners faced in the Gulag under Stalin's reign deliberate or incidental?

Was it simply a case of callousness and uncaring on Stalin and the Politburo's part?

Gulag_mortality_rate_1934_1953.PNG
 
Feature, not a bug.

Poor food, beatings, and exposure to elements ontop of sunrise to sunset work periods, it's fairly obvious what the goal was.

It's not like the USSR was ever going to run out of new 'Enemies of the State' to replace the fallen.
 
Depends which gulag. Some were comparable to prisons in the US where prisoners were used in forced labour in chain gangs. However, couple that with putting the prison in a harsh environment with few resources and a bored, frustrated group of guards...
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Depends which gulag. Some were comparable to prisons in the US where prisoners were used in forced labour in chain gangs. However, couple that with putting the prison in a harsh environment with few resources and a bored, frustrated group of guards...
This is the key. There were specifically prisons of different regimens. When a prisoner was "convicted" the regimen was a specific part of the sentence. A sentence to a "Harsh Regimen" facility was close to a death sentence. A sentence to a "Mild Regimen" was not much worse than any other prison in a country that was poor as dirt (i.e. it sucked, but wasn't designed to destroy you physically).
 
This is the key. There were specifically prisons of different regimens. When a prisoner was "convicted" the regimen was a specific part of the sentence. A sentence to a "Harsh Regimen" facility was close to a death sentence. A sentence to a "Mild Regimen" was not much worse than any other prison in a country that was poor as dirt (i.e. it sucked, but wasn't designed to destroy you physically).
Didn't it depend to a degree if you had any useful skills, like some of the aircraft designers were in gulags and designed aircraft, though the concern that if you made a bad plane design , you stood a strong chance of a visit to a brick wall made up for in psychological torture.
 
Didn't it depend to a degree if you had any useful skills, like some of the aircraft designers were in gulags and designed aircraft, though the concern that if you made a bad plane design , you stood a strong chance of a visit to a brick wall made up for in psychological torture.

The Sharashka still wasn't a nice place, much of Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, that the transfer to Siberian Camps was frequently in mind. He should know, as he went thru the scientific prison for part of the 11 years he was in the Gulag system, from Work camp, to Science, to Political camp and then internal exile till Khrushchev's pardon.
 
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