The original gulag (actually a Russian language acronym) was the name history gave to the vast Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system created by Lenin around 1919 and greatly expanded by Stalin. Its exact size and how many millions of people it killed is disputed. But it held at its maximum around 1950 it held perhaps 15 -20 million people. Western estimates of the number of dead vary greatly, but are said t be at least 1.5 million individuals.
Lots of nations have political prisoners and large prison systems. What distinguishes a “gulag,” at least as I meant it in the topic title, is three things:
- Its vast size. There were hundreds of gulag camps and millions of prisoners.
- Its use as a dumping ground for all undesirables, from political dissidents to ethnically-cleansed minorities to regular criminals to totally innocent people swept up by the KGB.
- And, maybe most distinctly, its main purpose: Forced labor. Stalin built an entire generation of Soviet infrastructure on prisoners’ dead bodies.
Note we are not talking about extermination camps, where entire peoples were sent to be wiped from the face of the earth. Annual mortality rates in the Soviet gulag ran about 5%, except during WWII years when it was 20%, says Wiki.
Who has gulags today? There are several obvious places, like China and North Korea. Good readings below and at Meetup posted by Ed. These two systems are vast, hold political dissidents, and use have slave labor and concentration camps. China’s also involves ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide (of Uighur and other Muslim groups).
Others countries’ internment systems are harder to label. Some nations have thousands of political prisoners, like Egypt and Turkey and Myanmar, to name a few. Other poor nations have held or do hold very large numbers of refugees from nearby countries in squalid refugee camps. Three million Afghans once lived in neighboring countries to escape the Taliban. Millions fled the communist takeover of Southeast Asia for squalid camps in Thailand and other places. Since the 1990s, millions more have fled the Congo, Rwanda, Syria, and many other nations under attack or in civil wars. The world has about 60 million refugees right now, the most since 1945.
What about the United States? See the readings, below. I think calling our penal or migrant internment systems “gulags” is an exaggeration and an insult to the victims of real gulags. Still, human rights groups have pilloried our system, including our common practice of forcing prisoners to work. (Did you know we did that
I had a second subject in mind too, for Monday. We could use this topic to discuss other types of gross human right abuses that happen under our noses every day, but get little systematic attention. Not all of them happen much here, but some do. I mean things like:
- Trafficking of people across borders (for forced labor or sex work).
- Actual human slavery, which still exists.
- Child labor.
- Prison labor as already mentioned.
- Migrant camp abuses.
Why? To help bear witness, yeah. If survivors and investigators risk their lives to tell these stories to the world we can certainly listen. But also, because we need to learn about the ugly underbelly of the modern global economy. Forced labor plays a significant role in keeping it all going.
And, we are not helpless. Outside pressure sometimes works, at least at the margins and sometimes when Western consumers/companies benefit from the forced labor. President Biden seems to be emphasizing human rights in his foreign policy, at least rhetorically and via the use of sanctions, at least early on. It is a very distracted world right now. But in the longer run, govt pressure can change things and global public opinion matters.
OPTIONAL BACKGROUND READINGS –
The Soviet original:
- The dry basics of the hideous Soviet gulag system. Shorter here.
- Putin is bringing it back, albeit at much smaller scale but with lots of cruelty.
Who still has gulags or large-scale political prisons?
- China’s gulag for Muslims:
- Explainer: Concentration camps and forced labor – China’s brutal repression of the Uigurs. Recommended. More on China’s gulag.
- I escaped China’s gulag and here’s what goes on. Recommended.
- North Korea:
- North Korea’s gulag system.
- “As terrible as Nazi camps.” Recommended.
- Myanmar: The internment and genocide of the Muslim Rohingya minority.
- Middle East: Lots of political prisoners. In Egypt, “Generation Jail.”
- Venezuela has quite a few.
- Many more, no doubt.
How to help –
- The problem of what to do after we declare a genocide (via Ed)
- Biden Administration talks like human rights will be a priority.
Does the United States have a gulag-like system?
- USA uses prison labor on a large scale.
- Prison labor profits, even in a pandemic.
- U.S. immigrant system is a “dehumanizing mess.” Conservative POV.
NEXT WEEK (4/12): TBD shortly.
Civilized Conversation 