What impact did Stalin’s Gulag have on our society?
“Leftist Bend”
Recently, there are articles in which the authors talk about the misery of the notorious Stalinist repressions, where if innocent people suffered, then very little. As the saying goes, it happens…
Such articles are a resounding success in all their technical indicators, which, to be honest, is frightening. The saying that if God wants to punish, he deprives people of reason, is out of place. At least, it is difficult for me to explain this strange phenomenon with anything else, especially with the colossal number of open departmental documents of the Gulag, as well as the documents of the OGPU-NKVD-MGB.
No, I would probably be a completely heartless person if I did not realize that this is largely due to the fact that all sorts of enemies of Russia and Russophobes like to speculate on such topics. Faced with this widespread phenomenon, many of our citizens, in order to defend themselves, try to push them away from themselves and downplay their importance. This is understandable. He himself practically nullified the analysis of various Stalinist crimes on his channel, and precisely because of the same thing. But, I repeat, recently there has been a fierce bias in the opposite, it is important to emphasize, in the wrong direction. And it’s just as annoying. Therefore, I decided to write a series of small articles on this topic to remind you of a couple of truisms. Although, unfortunately, many do not know them either.
But first, let’s define the numbers. I will say right away that all my estimates are based on the 7-volume work of the Russian State Archives “History of Stalin’s Gulag”, posted in electronic form on their office. website. This is the fruit of many years of archival work by dozens of the best Russian historians, so it is useless to dispute their assessments. And they are not the main thing in this article…
How many were there?
After the collapse of the USSR, Russian historians carried out a tremendous amount of work with the documents that were discovered and comprehensively assessed the scale of the Soviet Gulag.
It turned out that from 1930 to 1958 about 16 million people passed through the camps (18 million unique prisoners, with “repeaters” – 18 million).
Of these, about 3.5 million people were convicted under Article 58, of whom about 600,000 died while serving time in the camps. The rest were either released or were amnestied and released after Stalin’s death, during Khrushchev’s “thaw.”
There is no need to argue about how many of them were imprisoned “for the cause” either, because about 3 million have been officially rehabilitated today (out of the total number of those convicted under Article 58). By the way, don’t forget about the 850,000 people shot under the same Article 58 (for all the Stalin years), who were not included in these statistics (we are talking only about those who were imprisoned in the camp).
In addition, it is important to understand that, contrary to myths, in addition to “political” prisoners, the bulk of the prisoners in the Soviet camps were occupied not by criminals, but by “bytovniki”, “pokazniki”, that is, people convicted of relatively minor offenses (at any other time or country) under various emergency Stalinist decrees. Many of them for truancy or being late for work, stealing a well-worn loaf of bread, equated by the authorities to social property, They received gigantic prison sentences of 7 or 10 years.
By the way, this topic was directly raised in the so-called “last letters” to Stalin in 1952 (we will talk about them later). One of the Soviet schoolchildren did not hesitate to complain to Stalin about the hardship of life under the yoke of such potentially difficult prison terms. After all, he wrote to the leader in his letter (which reached him through the censorship of the secretariat), “In our collective farm, if you don’t steal, you can’t live.”
Numbered prisoners are prisoners of the so-called “special” political camps
Is it a lot or a little?
Well, let’s figure it out. For example, about 2 million people fell under the so-called Nazi “schutzhaft” (protective arrest), which was used by the Gestapo and SD to arrest all those who were undesirable to the Reich in Europe, in 12 years. Of these, about 500,000 died in concentration camps and prisons (we are talking exclusively about non-Jewish, political victims). Less than in the Gulag. True, the period of existence of the Reich was much shorter, and the Germans did not like to bother with imprisonment in the camp during the war. It was easier to nail it on the spot and right away. Therefore, this is not an indicator. But still…
Although here we really begin to cross the dangerous line beyond which speculation begins. And in no way do I want to equate the Nazi and Soviet camps. They performed completely different functions, so the German camp system, in general, took many more human lives in a short time. But is it easier for us that the Gulag has taken an “honorable” second place in the European prison-camp anomaly of the 20th century?
One of the millions of political prisoners in the Gulag
A Devastating Legacy
But the most important thing is that even decades after the liquidation of the Gulag system, we continue to feel its influence. Even if we are not always clearly aware of it. And that’s the most important thing…
Judge for yourself. In Stalin’s time, an extensive network of camps, colonies, special settlements, special commandant’s offices and other semi-camp formations of the Soviet punitive organs embraced a significant part of the population. Do not forget that in addition to the camp inmates, millions of our citizens in one way or another came under the blow of Stalin’s “justice”, were in prison and under investigation, but were, for example, released by the court without getting into the camp, and therefore not in the statistics of the Gulag. They, too, can rightly be called victims. Tens of millions more were expelled, exiled, resettled, or severely restricted in their rights (which, among other things, led to a significant decline in living standards). This arbitrariness contributed to the formation of a vast “camp world,” which is well described in our literature. Through it, the Gulag seemed to spill out of its boundaries, penetrate the fabric of society and poison it. Despite the attempts of the authorities to isolate and limit his influence.
The “poisoning” of the country by the Gulag was most aptly described by Solzhenitsyn, who is disliked by many here, comparing it to his own cancerous tumor:
… I had to carry a tumor the size of a large man’s fist. This tumor protruded and twisted my abdomen, prevented me from eating, sleeping, I always knew about it (although it did not make up even half a percent of my body, and the Archipelago in the country was eight percent). But it was not terrible because it crushed and displaced adjacent organs, but what was most terrible was that it emitted poisons and poisoned the whole body.
In the same way, our country was gradually poisoned by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether they will ever be rid of — God knows…
And you can’t argue…
Gulag metastases on the body of the USSR
Entire regions of our country (some the size of five Frances) formed continuous clusters inhabited by former convicts or exiles, digested and spat out by the Gulag, as well as their guards (with their families), who often did not differ much from their “wards”. In many ways, they formed the “new world”.
The cruelty of Soviet laws in practice led to the fact that everyone around them, even those who were not in prison, voluntarily or involuntarily joined the Gulag subculture. At some point, it became fashionable. This, in turn, has directly contributed to the multiplicity and romanticization of criminal activity. Although this, in fact, is only half the trouble…
Due to the huge number of citizens who fell under the steamroller of various repressions, ideas about the injustice of Soviet policy, the lack of justice and the social gap between the top and the bottom became widespread in Soviet society. This undermined faith in the state, gave rise to fierce legal nihilism and contempt for the law enforcement and judicial systems. The result was an absolutely depressive social passivity of our society, a fear of our state and its “organs”.
And this is the most terrible legacy of the Gulag, by the way, which has not been completely eradicated to this day. Even the statistics are more frightening, which no one gives a damn about today. But the Gulag, for a second, was abolished back in 1958!
In addition, we must not forget about the impact on the international socialist system. no, not even the Gulag as such, but just a distant (and unverified at the time) rumor about the simple fact of its existence. As it was fiercely denied by the “Eurocommunists”, they sued the “slanderers” who claimed that an extensive network of Gulags existed in the USSR. In many respects, it was the Gulag destroyed by Khrushchev in the 1950s that dealt a mortal crushing blow to the world social system. No one in their right mind wanted to build such socialism in their country. But, that’s a completely different story (Kanevsky).
Comments Fragments!
There is no need to be over-sophisticated. Just look around and shift the current situation in the country to 1937. And everything becomes clear.
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