4. The Gulag

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Camp System ◽  
Nazi Camps

‘The Gulag’ examines the Stalinist system of camps and ‘special settlements’ that developed through different phases of deportation from 1929–30 through to the late 1950s, although the camp system prevailed until the end of the USSR. Many of these camps were remote, where workers were needed for large mining or factory operations. Throughout the Gulag, the phenomenon of ‘de-convoyed’ prisoners permitted interaction between inmates and those ‘outside the zone’ to a surprisingly large extent. Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years and there was a constant stream of prisoners being released. However, in terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps.

3. The Third Reich’s world of camps

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-49
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Nazi Camps

‘The Third Reich’s world of camps’ examines the history of the Nazi camp system, comparing labour camps devised to build the ‘racial community’ with concentration camps set up to exclude political opponents and eventually to eradicate unwanted others—‘asocials’ and then Jews. The SS concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, which were designed to brutalize the inmates and at which death was common, can be distinguished from the death camps at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Exceptions were Majdanek and Auschwitz, which by 1942 combined the functions of concentration and death camps. The images and testimonies of the liberation of the Nazi camps have shaped our definition of concentration camps.

State Violence, Justice, And The Suffering Of Others

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Sandrine Sanos
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Painful Experience ◽  
Tzvetan Todorov ◽  
Nazi Camps ◽  
Do So

In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document