yes I'm being serious, I have literally 0 history education. Also if someone knows a good site where I can educate myself about general world history that they could share, that'd be great
Open air labor camps/jails frequently far removed from civilization, some where very bad, some where tolerable. Used to labor, particularly mining in far removed places and building stuff with not so good worker safety conditions. Despite western non-sense, mainly populated by criminals, but conditions still were not humane somewhat frequently, especially in building projects (as far as I know, mining/channel building were the worst offenders, while forestry was mainly tolerable). Sort of continuation of katorga from tzarist russia, which explains their form, but doesn’t excuse it. Also sentences in ussr (in that period) were either less than 3 years and carried out without gulag involvement, or 5 to 10 (for crimes more than 10 years “worthy”, death penalty was the punishment). It’s all from memory, so maybe some comrades can correct me.
They were prisons, prisons that held far fewer people at their height than the modern US prison population
I'm shitposting and at work but i'm sure someone will come in and give a proper account of everything but as I understand it they were seen as something akin to a petite bourgeois class. I really need to brush up ussr history myself tbh. Also, again as far as I know, gulags were basically just prisons and the word is mostly used by the west to conjure up the idea of a scary slave camp bc of anti-soviet propaganda.
Kulaks were peasants who owned capital, essentially proto-capitalists acting under the fuedal framework of the Russian Empire, who mostly owned rural infrastructure ie farms, mills etc. Naturally, they resisted every single reform the Bolsheviks made, and were ultimately dispossessed in a number of ways including forced deportation to make way for collectivized infrastructure.
they were milder than american fruit-picking farms for illegal immigrants in the year 2021
They were the prison system that used forced labor in Russia.
Initially, they were created under the Russian Empire, but they were continued under the Soviet Union.
It is a matter of debate how many prisoners sent to these facilities were genuine criminals and how many were political prisoners.
To be clear, I would hardly call myself an expert on them.
Prison labor camps, popularized by the author Solzhenitsin in after Stalin died. Solzhenitsin was arrested as an officer in WW2 when military censors caught him sending a letter critical of Stalin. After his stint at a gulag, he wrote an embellished account about his time there,and gulags became one of the atrocities of the USSR in the eyes of the west, although similar systems existed in the US at the same time, Solzhenitsin s numbers were exaggerated and most people were definitely just criminals. The soviets were sending kulaks (rich peasants that sabotaged soviet reforms) and other reported people (innocent) to distant parts of Siberia, but not into gulags, just regular settlements.
