What was the Soviet government agency that administered the country's forced labor camps which were compared to 'a chain of islands' by a Nobel Prize winning author?
"only beginning to do so after Stalin’s death in 1953. The remainder of prisoners were released in 1956 to build diplomatic relations with West Germany. Forced labor in the Soviet Union Forced labor was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. Forced labor also provided manpower for government projects and for reconstruction after the war. It began before the Gulag and Kolkhoz systems were established, although through these institutions, its scope and severity were increased. The conditions that accompanied forced labor were often harsh and could be deadly. The following closely related"
"plan of destruction"" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of ""The Gulag Archipelago"" in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to ""a chain of islands"", and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as"
"effort. This led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area. The overall number of the 1932–1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is variously estimated as 6-7 million or 6–8 million. The Gulag ""was the branch of the State Security that operated the penal system of forced labour camps and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state."" Russian author and former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote extensively about"
"extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agency was first administered by the GPU, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The Solovki prison camp, the first corrective labor camp constructed after the revolution, was established in 1918 and legalized by a decree ""On the creation of the forced-labor camps"" on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. According to Nicolas Werth, author of ""The Black Book of Communism"", the yearly"
"thousand inmates were transferred elsewhere, or shot on the mainland and on Solovki. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the ""mother of the GULAG"". It was openly termed a concentration camp until the late 1920s when the euphemism ""corrective labour camp"" was applied throughout the system, now organised under the main directorate for corrective-labour camps or GULag (Главное Управление Лагерей). The Solovki ""special"" camp served as a testing ground where security measures were developed and tried out, as were innovations in ""living conditions"", work production norms, and other forms of repression. Historically, the Solovetsky Islands were the location of the famous Russian"
"labour camps, and labour colonies were associated with punitive forced labour in detention. Forced labour camps (""GULAG camps"") were hard regime camps, whose inmates were serving more than three-year terms. As a rule, they were situated in remote parts of the USSR, and labour conditions were extremely hard there. They formed a core of the GULAG system. The inmates of ""corrective labour colonies"" served shorter terms; these colonies were located in less remote parts of the USSR, and they were run by local NKVD administration. Preliminary analysis of the GULAG camps and colonies statistics (see the chart on the right)"
"officials in charge that led to poor living-standards, waste of government funds, and decreased productivity. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book about the Soviet-era labor camps, ""Gulag Archipelago"", quoted Chekhov extensively to illustrate the enormous deterioration of living conditions for inmates and the huge increase in the number of people sent there in the Soviet era, compared to the katorga system of Chekhov's time. Peter Kropotkin, while ""aide de camp"" to the governor of Transbaikalia in the 1860s, was appointed to inspect the state of the prison system in the area; he later described his findings in his book ""In Russian"
"simply ""camps"") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union. Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners. Some suggest that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period 1918–1929 are even more difficult to calculate). Other calculations by the historian Orlando Figes, refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953. A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4–5 million passed through"
"made of boulders from the Solovki camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. Moscow's memorial is on Lubyanka Square, the site of the headquarters of the NKVD. People gather at these memorials every year on the Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30). Moscow has the State Gulag Museum whose first director was Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. In 2015, another museum dedicated to the Gulag was opened in Moscow. Gulag The Gulag (, ; , acronym of Main Administration of Camps) was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labor camp-system that was set up under Vladimir"
"the Soviet concentration camp system as a ""Stalinist aberration"". Solzhenitsyn documented the Soviet government's reliance on the prison system for governance and labor, placing doubt on the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. The government could not govern without the threat of imprisonment. The Soviet economy depended on the productivity and output of the forced labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned. In Western Europe, the book eventually contributed strongly to the need for a rethinking of the historical role of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin. With ""The Gulag Archipelago"", Lenin's"
"the camps). From there it was sent to the de-Stalinist Khrushchev, who, despite the objections of some top party members, ultimately authorized its publication with some censorship of the text. After the novel was sent to the editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky of ""Novy Mir"", it was subsequently published in November 1962. The labor camp described in the book was one that Solzhenitsyn had served some time at, and was located in Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan. ""One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"" was specifically mentioned in the Nobel Prize presentation speech when the Nobel Committee awarded Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize"
"to 10 years' hard labor at Solovki. The Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea, came to be known as the ""first camp of the Gulag"". Together the islands were known as 'northern camps of special purpose': ""Severnye lagerya osobogo naznacheniya"" or SLON. In Russian ""slon"" means 'elephant'. ""The name was to become a source of humour, of irony and of menace."" He rose rapidly from prisoner to staff member on the strength of his proposal to the camp administration that they link inmates' food rations to their rate of production, the proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). How exactly"
"Katorga Katorga (; from medieval and modern Greek: ""katergon, κάτεργον"", ""galley"") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisoners were sent to remote penal colonies in vast uninhabited areas of Siberia and Russian Far East where voluntary settlers and workers were never available in sufficient numbers. The prisoners had to perform forced labor under harsh conditions. ""Katorga"", a category of punishment within the judicial system of the Russian Empire, had many of the features associated with labor-camp imprisonment: confinement, simplified facilities (as opposed to prisons), and"
"Svirlag Svirlag, SvirLAG (Svirskiy Lager' – Svir Concentration-Camp, , also ' / ' – ) was a Soviet forced labour camp run by NKVD's GULAG Directorate. It was located on the river Svir (hence the name Svirskiy in Russian) in the forests by the town Lodeynoye Pole, 244 km north-east of Saint Petersburg, in Leningrad oblast, Vepsland – the land of the Vepses, operated in the 1930s (Joseph Stalin's time) and onwards. SvirLAG concentration camp was supplier of wood to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The camp was established on November 17, 1931. The number of those who died or were"
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (; 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, ""One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"" (1962), in the periodical ""Novy Mir"". After this he had to publish in the West, most notably ""Cancer Ward"" (1968), ""August 1914"" (1971), and ""The Gulag Archipelago"" (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel"
"of freedom within the camp walls, intermittent negotiation, and mutual preparation for violent conflict, the uprising was suppressed by Soviet armed forces with tanks and guns on the morning of 26 June. According to former prisoners, five hundred to seven hundred people were killed or wounded in the suppression, although official figures claim only a few dozen had been killed. The story of the uprising was first committed to history in ""The Gulag Archipelago"", a work by former prisoner and Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A year before the uprising, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. His death raised"
"his workforce to impossible levels of hardship which inevitably resulted in illness, starvation and death in even higher proportions. Eduard Berzin Eduard Petrovich Berzin (, ; 1894–1938), born in Latvia, was a soldier and Chekist, but is remembered primarily for setting up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of forced-labour camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners died. It was considered to be the most brutal of all the Gulag regions. Before World War I Berzin studied painting at Berlin's Academy of Fine Arts where he met his wife, Elza Mittenberg, also an artist, from Riga. In"
"of war were being held in Soviet prison camps. According to Arnold Beizer, a Hartford lawyer, the testimony was corroborated by Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, who said American soldiers had been transferred to Russian labor camps. According to Avraham Shifrin's research, massive Russian Gulag concentration camp has been found on the Russian Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (71° North, 179° West). The camps on Wrangell were revealed in the 1982 book ""The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union,"" by Avraham Shifrin (Bantam Books). His research institute interviewed hundreds of escapees from Soviet"
"before in swathes of the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatus. A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, later administered by a new government agency, Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 inmates. Those interned in the camps were used as slave labour. From July 1922, intellectuals deemed to be opposing"
"with his elder brother Stephen. After serving six months in prison in Ivanovo, Kulakov was sentenced to five years in the corrective hard labor camps of the U.S.S.R. The first 18 months of his five-year term (1948–1953) he was held in the corrective labor camp in Mordovia (about 400 miles east of Moscow). Kulakov's brother Stephen was one of the thousands who died in the labor camps near the Far North city of Vorkuta. Despite the many hardships he faced, Kulakov remembered his experiences in the camps as a “life university” and he was grateful that he survived. He also"
"through starvation and neglect."" She criticizes other commentators' conclusion that the purpose of the camps was a supply of cheap labor. According to her, the Soviets were able to liquidate the camp system without serious economic consequences, showing that the camps were not an important source of labor and were overall economically irrelevant. 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 labour camps and colonies (excluding prisoner-of-war camps), though these figures only include the deaths in the colonies beginning in 1935. The majority (about"
"derive from the extrapolations of Viktor Zemskov from a collection of prison camp population movements data. The GULAG was an administration body that watched over the camps; eventually its name would be used for these camps retrospectively. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin was able to take control of the government, and began to form the gulag system. On June 27, 1929 the Politburo created a system of self-supporting camps that would eventually replace the existing prisons around the country. These prisons were meant to receive inmates that received a prison sentence that exceeded three years. Prisoners that had a"
"camps, Ginzburg managed to coordinate relatives and friends to help other inmates and their families. This included support such as donating household goods for those in exile, helping relatives who faced expulsion from work, or offering places to stay in Moscow for wives who journeyed to visit their husbands in remote Siberian camps. After his release in 1972, Ginzburg consulted with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on how to continue this informal support. Solzhenitsyn offered a quarter of his Nobel Prize award for the cause. After Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974 following the publication of ""The Gulag Archipelago"", he set"
"POW labor in the Soviet Union Systematic POW labor in the Soviet Union is associated primarily with the outcomes of World War II and covers the period of 1939-1956, from the official formation of the first POW camps, to the repatriation of the last POWs, from the Kwantung Army. This form of forced labor was handled by the Chief Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees Affairs (Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных, ГУПВИ, transliterated as GUPVI) of the NKVD, established in 1939 (initially as the ""Directorate for Prisoners' Affairs"", управление по делам военнопленных) according to the NKVD Order"
"Yertsevo labor camp was described in a book entitled ""A World Apart"", written by the eminent Polish writer and philosopher Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, camp survivor and, later, political dissident under the communist system. Captured by the NKVD in early 1940 as a Polish army soldier soon after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Herling-Grudziński spent a year and a half in the Yertsevo camp. Sentenced to five years, but eventually amnestied, he was also imprisoned at the Kargopol labor camp facility. Prisoners were sent to the bath-house once every month. Some of them self-mutilated themselves at work by cutting off their fingers"
"slang and customs. At the camp, hard work, poor living conditions and illness dramatically damaged Likhachov's health, but he survived. On the Solovetsky Islands he met both exiled Russian intellectuals and real criminals, who happened to save his life. As Dmitry Likhachov said many years later, ""At the Solovki, I understood that every person is a person."" Whilst on the islands, for some period of time Dmitry Likhachov worked as a member of the Criminological Cabinet, organizing a labor colony for teenagers and saving them from death caused by hunger, drugs, and cold. On the night of 28 October 1929,"
"especially dangerous by the State. All of them, as a rule, were sentenced to 10 years. During two and a half decades, since the end of the 1920s and till the day of Stalin‘s death, GULAG [official abbreviation for ""Main Administration of Camps""] was not only a huge camp agency containing thousands of camps and millions of convicts, but the country‘s way of life. GULAG was an absolutely necessary element of the system. Without the GULAG cheap slave labour, Stalin‘s socialist modernization programme of the country‘s economy would have been impossible. Without the total fear in the face of the"
"obvious exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduced the expression ""camps of extermination by labour"" in his non-fiction work ""The Gulag Archipelago"". According to him, the system eradicated opponents by forcing them to work as prisoners on big state-run projects (for example the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, remote railroads and urban development projects) under 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"
"Corrective labor colony A corrective colony (, ""ispravitelnaya koloniya"", IK) is the most common type of prison in Russia and some post-Soviet states. Such colonies combine penal detention with compulsory work. The system of labor colonies originated in 1929 alongside the Gulag labor camps, and after 1953 the corrective penal colonies in the Soviet Union developed as a post-Stalin replacement of the Gulag labor-camp system. In the late Soviet Union, the labor colonies were governed by Article 11 of the Corrective Labor Law and were intended for adult (16 years and over) convicts. The colonies were classified according to the"
"camps, first at No. 35 at Vsechsvyatskaya, but he was then moved to No. 36 in the village of Kutchino, Perm Region. While in prison, he took part in the resistance movement. He was involved with hunger strikes, the writing of appeals and the writing of chronicles of the two camps. He was married to poet and fellow dissident, the late Iryna Kalynets (died 31 July 2012, aged 72), who also actively opposed the suppression of the Uniate Church and was a professor of Ukrainian language and literature at the Polytechnical Institute of Lviv. She was sentenced to six years"
"In 1989 the Soviet Union had few prisons. About 99% of convicted criminals served their sentences in labor camps, supervised by the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps which was under the MVD.The camps had four regimes of ascending severity. In the strict-regime camps, inmates worked at the most difficult jobs, usually outdoors, and received meager rations. Jobs were less demanding and rations better in the camps with milder regimes. The system of corrective labor was regarded by Soviet authorities successful in that the rate of recidivism was quite low. Prisons and labor camps, in the views of former inmates"
"totalitarian regimes since the 20th century where millions of convicts were exploited and often killed by hard labour and bad living conditions. For much of the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist states, political opponents of these governments were often sentenced to forced labour camps. The Soviet Gulag camps were a continuation of the punitive labour system of Imperial Russia known as ""katorga"", but on a larger scale. Most inmates in the Gulag were ordinary criminals: between 1934 and 1953 there were only two years, 1946 and 1947, when the number of counter-revolutionary prisoners exceeded that of ordinary"
"Varlam Shalamov, the Russian writer, whose ""Kolyma Tales"" depict the brutality of human nature laid bare in this remote camp of the archipelago. Released from prison in the week that Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in World War II, Petrov made his way across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. He avoided Soviet mobilization; as an ex-convict he would have been placed in a mine-clearing battalion. The German front established by Operation Barbarossa passed by his town and thus came under control of the Third Reich. He managed, over two years, to work his way across Eastern Europe, into Germany and"