Extermination Through Labor - Controversial Cases

Controversial Cases

The Soviet GULAG is sometimes presented as a system of death camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduced the expression camps of extermination by labor in his non-fiction work The Gulag Archipelago. According to him, the system didn't exterminate opponents with poison gas, but rather let them work as prisoners on big building sites (for example the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, railroads, and urban development projects) under what are said to be inhumane conditions. Roy Medvedev comments: "The penal system in the Kolyma and in the camps in the north was deliberately designed for the extermination of people." Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev expands upon this, claiming that Stalin was the "architect of the gulag system for totally destroying human life." However, this point of view is contested by some scholars who argue that Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it was not a death camp.

According to formerly secret internal Gulag documents, some 1.6 million people must have died in the period between 1930 and 1956 in Soviet forced labor camps and colonies (excluding prisoner of war camps), though these figures only include the deaths in the colonies beginning in 1935. The majority (about 900,000) of these deaths therefore fall between 1941 and 1945, coinciding with the period of German-Soviet War when food supply levels were low in the entire country.

These figures are consistent with the archived documents that Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk presents and analyzes in his study The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, according to which some 500,000 people died in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1941. Khlevniuk points out that these figures don't take into account any deaths that occurred during transport. Also excluded are those who died shortly after their release due to the harsh treatment in the camps, who, according to both archives and memoirs, were numerous. The historian J. Otto Pohl estimates that some 2,749,163 prisoners perished in the labor camps, colonies and special settlements, although stresses that this is an incomplete figure.