1. STALIN’s GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
The Role of Slave Labor and the Labor Camps in the USSR’s Industrial Revolution

2. The 5-Year Plan Need for Labor
Enormity of the tasks set
Labor Shortages
Role of Prison Camps
I. Some of the tasks set by the 5-Year Plan were so big and ambitious that there were not enough workers to do them. In such cases, prisoners in prison camps were made to do the work. These prisons thus became labor camps and prisoners became slaves.

3. GULAG Introduction of the Gulag First Gulag Project: Belomor Canal
Equipping of Prison Workers
I. A special department of the secret police was set up in 1930 to run the labor camps. Its name was gulag, the Chief Administration of Camps. II. The first major work project organized by Gulag was a 500 kilometer canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea. Nearly 300,000 prisoners were set to work on the canal with promises that they would be set free after completion. III. The work on the canal was done entirely without machinery. The prisoners, known as zeks, as they called themselves, dug the ground with picks and shovels, moving huge rocks by hand and carted earth in wheelbarrows. By working long hours in all weathers they completed the canal in May 1933, only 20 months after starting it. 72,000 zeks were promptly released, but the remaining 228,000 were transferred to other construction projects in distant parts of the USSR. The canal itself, which was intended to provide the Soviet navy with an escape route from the Baltic Sea, proved too shallow for this purpose. After being bombed by German planes in WWII, it was hardly ever used.

4. The Belomor Canal Project
Prisoners work at Belbaltlag, a Gulag camp for building the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal .

5. Workers Working with Nothing
Gulag workers working with picks and shovels on a massive construction project. Note the absence of heavy machinery that would normally be used.

6. The Labor Camps Abundance of labor camps by end of 1930s
Rapid increase in number of prisoners
Horrible Conditions
I. Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system grew to tremendous proportions during the course of Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture in the early By the end of the 1930s, there were labor camps in every part of the USSR. Surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire, there were camps, in the most remote areas of the country, as well as towns and cities, in full view of the public. II. The numbers of zeks in the camps grew from about 30,000 at the start of the first 5-Year Plan to around 2 million by By 1937, the numbers had grown to 6 million, and by 1938 to 8 million. III. Condition svaried from camp to camp, but in all camps conditions were bad. Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south. Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps. The zeks were made to work hard by a system of rationing food. The amount of food that a zek was given depended on whether he or she achieved the “norm”, or set amount of work for the day.

7. The Gulag Archipelago: Gulags in the USSR in the 1930s
Gulag Map showing where all the prison camps were located during Stalin's era. (1) Circles: Regional administration (departments) of maps and colonies. (2) Green lines: Roads built by prisoners. (3) Black lines: Railway roads built by prisoners. (4) Gray areas: Territories where exiles were sent in mass.

8. Gulag Worker Filing Out for Work

9. Eating Utensils & Daily Bread Ration
"Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. All human emotions—love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty—had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies...“ - V.T. Shalamov, “Dry Rations,”

10. Vicious Cycle of Malnutrition & Work
We were never in a condition to o what was demanded of us to have enough to eat. The hungrier we were, the worse we worked. The worse we worked, the hungrier we became. From that vicious circle there was no escape

11. Conditions in a Labor Camp
Gulag prisoners could work up to 14 hours per day. Typical Gulag labor was exhausting physical work. Toiling sometimes in the most extreme climates, prisoners might spend their days felling trees with handsaws and axes or digging at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes. Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful and fatal lung diseases from inhalation of ore dust. Prisoners were barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labor.

12. Meals in a Labor Camp Account by a Gulag Survivor
1st cauldron (for those who failed to achieve the full norms; the day laborers in the zone; and invalids, second class) thin soup twice a day and 400 grams of bread.
2nd cauldron (the full norm and office workers) thin soup twice a day; 700 grams of bread, and buckwheat in the evenings
3rd cauldron (for those achieving 15 or 20 percent above the norm): soup twice a day, 900 grams of bread, buckwheat and a small piece of fish or meat in the evening.
4th cauldron (the governing staff) 750 grams of bread and a meal twice a day containing meat or fats.
5th cauldron (sick food) a meal three times a day and 700 grams of bread.
The prisoners are fed between 4 and 5 AM before leaving for work and after their return between 5 and 7 PM. But as a rule the prisoners receive no food during their 12 hours of work.

13. What Were Their Crimes?
“Look Me in the Eyes and Tell Me Honestly: Who is your friend? Who is your enemy? You have no friends among capitalists. You have no enemies among the workers. Only in a union of the workers of all nations will you be victorious over capitalism and liberated from exploitation. Down with national antagonisms! Workers of the world unite!”
The Gulag held many types of prisoners. It served as the Soviet Union’s main penal system: robbers, rapists, murderers, and thieves spent their sentences not in prisons but in the Gulag.
In addition, the Gulag held political prisoners, a group including not only real opponents of the Soviet regime but also many innocents caught up in the paranoid clutches of the Soviet secret police. Most prisoners were the victims of arbitrary and severe legal campaigns under which petty theft, lateness, or unexcused absences from work were punished by many years in these concentration camps.

14. Crimes Punishable Have you ever been late to work?
In the Stalin era, a person who arrived late to work three times could be sent to the Gulag for three years.
Have you ever told a joke about a government official?
In the Stalin era, many were sent to the Gulag for up to 25 years for telling an innocent joke about a Communist Party official.
If your family was starving, would you take a few potatoes left in a field after harvest?
In the Stalin era, a person could be sent to the Gulag for up to ten years for such petty theft.

15. War Against the Kulaks
I. Arrest of kulak in This peasant, Mikhailov, had attempted escape from a state-owned farm where he had been sent into exile.
II. Trial of so-called “rich peasants” in Stalin’s drive to seize all private land in the 1920s and 1930s met significant resistance. Some victims were shot, some were arrested and sent into the Gulag camps, and many were exiled to remote parts of the country.

16. Women in the Gulag Suffering and violence
No consideration of special circumstances
I. Women suffered greatly in the Gulag. Male camp employees, guards, and even other male prisoners sometimes raped and abused women. Some female prisoners took on “camp husbands” for protection and companionship. Some were pregnant on arrival or became pregnant while in the Gulag. Occasionally, Gulag authorities released pregnant women and women with young children in special amnesties. II. More frequently, mothers had little respite from forced labor to give birth, and Gulag officials took babies from their mothers and placed them in special orphanages. Often these mothers were never able to find their children after leaving the camps.

17. The Kolyma Camps Severity of Kolyma Region Camps Conditions in
I. Some of the worst labor camps were in the Kolyma region in the north-east. During the winter a continuous polar night keeps Kolyma in darkness. The temperature can drop as low as -60 degrees Celsius and mercury freezes in thermometers. Beneath the surface the oil never thaws, even in summer: it is permafrost – hard as concrete. Locked in the soil, it was discovered in 1926, there are vast deposits of gold and platinum. II. A special gulag unit called Dalstroy, the Far Eastern Construction Trust, was set up in 1931 to organize the mining of gold in the Kolyma. As the only way of reaching the area was by sea, prisoners were taken there in ocean-going convict ships carrying as many as 12,000 prisoners per time.

18. Kolyma
Work in the Kolyma goldfields was done without machinery. Two men in each work team had to light a bonfire while a third fetched ice and melted it. Then the frozen ground was thawed, dug over and sifted in search of gold. Using such methods the Kolyma prisoners produced about 300 tons of gold per year, half the total world production

19. Death in Kolyma
The newly-arrived prisoner transport saw even before being led through the door [that] every tent in the settlement was surrounded with piles of frozen corpses on three out of four sides, except where the door was (And this was not to terrify: people died, the snow was 2 meters deep, and beneath it was only permafrost.
Conditions in the Kolyma were so bad that thousands of zeks died.

20. Human Cost of the Gulag System
It was not only in the Kolyma that large numbers of prisoners died in captivity. The death rate in all the camps was high. By 1938 about 20% of all prisoners in camps died each year. This meant that a prisoner stood very little chance of coming out alive at the end of his sentence if it was longer than five years. Between 1936 and 1950 around 12 million prisoner died in the gulag system.

21. Quotes of Stalin
You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves. Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem. The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

22. The Gulag Archipelago – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Do not pursue what is illusory–property, position, all that is gained at the expense of your nerves, decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life–don't be afraid of misfortune and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same–the bitter doesn't last forever and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold, if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if your arms bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all.

23. The Gulag Archipelago – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Rub your eyes and purify your heart–and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part with them in anger; after all, you simply do not know, it may be your last act. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn