The transportation methods to the Gulags were often more disturbing and painful than the camps themselves. The level of terror of the journey depended largely on the guards, as some were friendlier than others. Most long journeys began at the railroad station. However, prisoners were not loaded onto trains at the station in full public view; they were loaded at sidings down the track, away from public glare. It was done secretively, just as the process of arrest late at night was secret (Rossi 56-57).
It was usual for up to sixty or more people to be crammed into one carriage, which was constructed from wooden planks and had a few rows of horizontal boards to sleep on. There was no illumination, and rats and vermin abounded (Rossi 182). Through varying weather, the captives were only allowed to wear the clothes they were arrested in. Food rations included bread every two or three days and salted herring that caused severe thirst.
Prisoners being transported by sea simultaneously experienced these living conditions. Though transport by sea only occurred eight to fifteen times a year, it was generally more perilous than railroad transfer. In the late summer of 1933, the Dzhurma (transport ship) with 12,000 prisoners aboard was blocked in the ice flows. Rescuing the prisoners was determined to be uneconomical and they all perished (Rossi 103). Those who did not die while trying to make it to the camps were once again the unlucky individuals.
Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south (Introduction: Stalin's Gulag).
Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps. (Introduction: Stalin's Gulag).
The prisoners worked up to 14 hours per day cutting trees, mining, and performing other physically exhausting activities. When some were not working, they would be called to line up in the forest and would all be shot down by machine guns. This cruel camp life lingered on until eventually, the entire Gulag system was deemed inefficient and abandoned (Killer File: Joseph Stalin).
Camp output almost never compensated for the cost of running the Gulags. Most of the felled trees rotted and never reached lumber mills; many of the railroad lines and canals the prisoners built were never used; and most of the construction was hopelessly shoddy. Not only had the USSR not gained anything economically from the camps, they were also responsible for the deaths of approximately 18 million Russian people. Even though Stalin died on March 5, 1963, his Gulag system meagerly survived.
Soon, Stalin's successors deemed the Gulag a complete economic failure and closed the operation (Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. He was a great believer in the superiority of socialism and in the possibility to create a socialist system without the violence and repression of the earlier Soviet eras (Introduction: After the USSR). The vast majority of information regarding the Gulag system was unknown to him, but once he learned of it, he unwittingly started a movement that led to the final collapse of the Gulag system, and the entire Soviet Empire (Introduction: After the USSR).
During Joseph Stalin's reign, approximately 18 million people died in his Gulag camps, the majority being innocent people who committed no crimes or injustices. It is a revealing, yet sickening discovery that people know what the Holocaust is, but have never heard of Stalin's Gulag and the millions that perished. The Global Community cannot allow events like this to vanish into the library shelves.
The greatest weakness of mankind is forgetting; without the past, we are eternally lost in the future. Without mistakes to learn from, humans cannot expect to move forwards in correcting their occurrences. When those who were silenced finally speak up, there will be a final solution to our problems, and it will not be genocide. Instead, it will be a culmination of the ideas every human being that walks free and believes in liberty.
