Sociology

When one speaks of the word,  Gulag,  what would come into mind is a prison camp. Essentially, it was a vast chain of concentration camps operated by the former Soviet Union as an instrument of what was called  rationalized evil.   Anne Applebaums book, Gulag, A History, adds more literature to those earlier written such as the late Alexander Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago which was considered the standard for writing about the topic. Applebaum, a former correspondent from the Economist made full use of her journalistic expertise to conduct a very comprehensive research which utilized a combination of archival and library research to interviews to be able to come up with a very interesting read.  She outlined the highlights of the the book in chronological order starting during the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the decadent Tsarist regime. As point of clarification,  Gulag  was actually a Russian acronym for  Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityelno-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy   or  Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.  This was a bureau run under the auspices of the Soviet state police, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.  As the name already states, this agency that operates a chain of these camps and they way they are situated, they were like an archipelago as depicted in  Solzhenitsyns book.  But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the word  gulag  became synonymous with a prison camp and carries the connotation of being an instrument of repression in oppressive states like the former Soviet Union.

Part I dealt with the history on how the gulags came about.  Although the word  Gulag  came to be known during the Soviet regime, such camps were already in place during the reign of the Tsars.  Siberia, especially the northeastern regiuons, was the ideal place to put up these camps owing to its vast, dreary and desolate regions, perfect for  dumping  the undesireables of society where nobody seemed to care if they existed or not hence it became the ideal place to put dissidents who were considered  dangerous  to the regime.  Ironically, future Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin were sent to these places by the imperial government and rather than be broken down by the system, they studied it and understood its inner workings which was why when they came to power, they utilized this same system as well though the proverbial shoe was now on the other foot.  They saw the  weaknesses  of the penal system of the Tsars  and owing to their own experience, they sought to reinvent the system in such as way that it would be intended to be a true instrument of oppression.    The penal systems of the Tsarist regimes were considered exclusive  country clubs  compared to the system they would implement. It was this new system that they would introduce that would give the  gulag system  its infamous characteristic.  As the word  corrective  suggests, one of the functions of the camps was to  reeducate  those who did not subscribe to Marxist-Leninist teachings and still held on to  bourgeois  values which were anathema to the Soviet state that stressed the  rule of the proletariat.   Besides slave labor, the camps also conducted lectures of communist doctrine in an effort to  brainwash  or  force feed  the prisoners, called  zeks  into loyal members of the state as part of their  rehabilitation  and first step to be reassimilated into Soviet society.  During Stalins regime, he had the gulags expanded.  He saw the gulags had other purposes apart from merely confining dissidents there.  He, as well as his successors, saw the gulags as a source of free labor for the state and the Sibera was the ideal location owing to the vast untapped natural resources of the region.  Because of this, gulags did not only serve as reeducation camps to  reform  dissidents, but also became labor camps akin to the ones put up by the Nazis during the Second World War.  The laborers would be put on work details to mine these resources to help speed up Soviet industrialization and take advantage of the regions vast resources (Applebaum, 1-2).

As for the millions of people who were sent there, political dissidents were not the only denizens of the gulags.  Part II of Applebaums book gives readers a glimpse of the gulag as a world of its own, with its own set of norms and cultures set under bleak and despicable conditions. Her book describes how  enemies of the state  were rounded up arbitrarily without any regard of due process.  Part II further goes on discussing how certain people such as women and children were treated.  Once there, the gulag staff from the administrator down to the jail guards behaved like petty lords-cum-bullies and used their power and position to exploit the zeks and had virtually absolute authority which was virtually autonomous from the powers that be in Moscow.  As far as they were concerned, they were on top of the pecking order in the gulags.  Among the prisoners, survival became the motivation of several, even if it meant surviving at the expense of others which was why several of them became informants to the authorities who rewarded them with better conditions compared to the others.  Gulag life was a  dog-eat-dog  world among the prisoners as they were stripped of whatever vestiges of dignity and humanity they had left.  The results of these inhuman conditions varied ranging from insanity to death which could come either through work, attempts to escape, torture or execution (Applebaum, 93).

Part III explains what happened to the gulags during the Stalin years and Applebaum cited instances where revolts took place.  Some where successful and others were not. It can be inferred that these revolts were the results of the conditions the inmates suffered to the point it became unbearable and the only other way left for them was to escape even if it meant rising up against the authorities at the expense of their lives.

With regards to the issue of human rights, it can be inferred through Applebaums works that human rights were nonexistent in the gulag.  In a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, individuality meant nothing as it tried to make every individual a part of the state, regardless of what may happen to them.  To entertain thoughts of rights and freedom was considered un-Soviet or  bourgeois.   This was shown in the way how zeks were loaded into trains like cattle much the the Jews being sent to Nazi concentration camps for slave labor or extermination. The congestion of the cars plus the prevalence of disease took a toll on several and they died even before arriving at their destination. Torture was also very prevalent as a drastic means of making the most intransigent inmate break down to the point of losing all semblance of humanity.  Torture was not merely limited to physical means but also included psychological means as well such as sleep deprivation meant to wear down the inmates will to resist.  In work details, they were given little provisions or none at all as part of the torture and little regard was given if any of them die in the process.

As a parting shot to her book, Appleabaum stated that she wrote this book to make people aware such a system of  rationalized evil  existed in the gulag (not to mention the Nazi concentration camps) and (hopefully) that it would never happen again in the future.