Russia and The Soviet Union
- See also: List of Gulag camps, Katorga, List of Soviet Union prison sites that detained Poles, Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
- Syretzk concentration camp in the outskirts of Kiev.
- Darnitza concentration camp. "Over 68,000 Soviet prisoners of war and peaceful citizens."
In Imperial Russia, labor camps were known by the name katorga.
First Soviet camps were organized in June 1918 for Czechoslovak soldiers. Solovki prison camp existed since 1923.
In the Soviet Union, labour penitentiary camps were called simply camps, almost always plural ("lagerya"). These were used as forced labor camps, and had small percentages of political prisoners. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book they became known to the rest of the world as Gulags, after the branch of NKVD (state security service) that managed them. (In the Russian language, the term is used to denote the whole system, rather than individual camps.)
In addition to what is sometimes referred to as the GULAG proper (consisting of the "corrective labor camps") there were "corrective labor colonies", originally intended for prisoners with short sentences, and "special resettlements" of deported peasants. At its peak, the system held a combined total of 2,750,000 prisoners. In all, perhaps more than 18,000,000 people passed through the Gulag in 1929-1953, with further millions being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. The survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see Order No. 270). Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag.
After World War II, some 3,000,000 German soldiers and civilians were sent to Soviet labor camps, as part of war reparations by labor force. Less than 1,000,000 returned to Germany.
An extensive List of Gulag camps is being compiled based on official sources.
Read more about this topic: List Of Concentration And Internment Camps
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, russia and, russia, soviet and/or union:
“If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let’s all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“They were right. The Soviet régime is not the embodiment of evil as you think in the West. They have laws and I broke them. I hate tea and they love tea. Who is wrong?”
—Alexander Zinoviev (b. 1922)
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)