Russian Gulags
Under harsh communist rule, eliminating any potential enemy was a stated and practical goal. This, of course, leads us to the subject of Russian gulags.
Russian Gulags
There are many different types of jails and prison institutions throughout the world. The United States, known for its regard to human rights, is also known for having some of the best kept and most humane penal facilities in the world. Some other countries, however, have a far worse reputation. The former Soviet Union, for example, was one of the worst offenders when it came to inhumane prisons. The Russian gulags were not places that anyone ever wanted to end up in, no matter how horrible their crime.
The word “gulag” is actually an acronym, coming from the Russian words that translate into “The Chief Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”. The gulag system was a chain of forced labor camps that were generally used to house all criminals, but political prisoners were those who really made the camps come into the light of the Western world. Some historians call any of the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union period (1917-1991) gulags, while others prefer to separate the gulag from other camps, such as women's camps, punishment camps, children's camps and several other types.
Others have used the term Russian gulags to represent the entire political/penal system, what the inmates called the “meat grinder”. This was a process of arrests, interrogations, transportation in unheated cattle cars, and imprisonment in the harsh labor camps. The word “gulag” was never actually used in Russian to denote the groups of labor camps, they were just referred to as “camps”. The official term for the labor camps was originally “concentration camps”, but they were later called “corrective labor camps”.
There were also different varieties of Russian gulags. The Sharashka were actually secret research laboratories, where convicted scientists were sent to perform secret experiments and develop items and techniques for the USSR. The Psikhushka was a place of forced medical and psychiatric treatment, where political prisoners were taken to be broken down. There was even a special camp devoted to the “wives of traitors of the Motherland”, where wives and other family members of political prisoners were sent for their own punishment. Mothers, children, and mothers with babies also got special camps, or zones.
The use of Russian gulags were officially stopped in 1991, but by this time there had been over 1.5 million documented deaths that had taken place in the many labor camps. This number doesn't include the 800,000 political prisoners that were killed outside of the gulag system, or the 390,000 peasants that were killed as part of a labor settlement. Those who were released from the system alive still faced hardships, including restrictions on where they could live and work.
