ON THE IDEA OF LABOR, LABOR LAW, AND FORCED LABOR SELECTED REMARKS IN THE SOVIET UNION (1917-1945)

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, work was compulsory according to the 1918 labor code. This stemmed from the ideas of Marx. This position was also held by Lenin, Trotsky and others. The Communist Party could assign anyone any work. Evading work was a counter-revolutionary crime. Likewise, it was a crime to arbitrarily change one’s place of work. The compulsion to work required the use of terror. Terror was an everyday phenomenon in the USSR. Low labor productivity was a constant affliction. Prison labor was used en masse from the beginning. The GULAG system (forced labor camps) expanded. Prison labor was becoming less and less productive. In 1956, the GULAG camps were renamed “penal colonies,” which still exist in Russia today.

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Gulag Letters

10.12987/yale/9780300209310.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Arsenii Formakov

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Soviet Union ◽

English Language ◽

Language Translation ◽

Forced Labor ◽

Soviet Society ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Labor Camps ◽

Labor System ◽

Camp Life

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.

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Motherhood and Survival in the Stalinist Gulag

Aspasia ◽

10.3167/asp.2019.130106 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 65-94

Author(s):

Elaine MacKinnon

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Family Relations ◽

Political Prisoners ◽

Forced Labor ◽

Polar Regions ◽

Small Children ◽

Family Unit ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Labor Camps ◽

The Family

This article analyzes the Gulag memoirs of four women political prisoners—Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Liudmila Miklashevskaya, Nadezhda Joffe, and Valentina Grigorievna levleva-Pavlenko—to examine the interplay of motherhood and survival. Each was a mother of small children sentenced to forced labor camps in the northern polar regions of the Soviet Union. Motherhood played a complex role in their survival. The rupture in family relations, particularly the separation from their children, magnified the psychological and emotional stress of their incarceration. Yet, being a mother in the camps provided a compelling motivation to stay alive. It helped them to sustain a sense of normalcy by connecting them to their former lives and to the family unit that represented stability and sustenance amid the bleakness of their Gulag existence.

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Vanguard of the Revolution

10.23943/princeton/9780691196428.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

A. James McAdams

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Communist Party ◽

Political Institutions ◽

North Korea ◽

Karl Marx ◽

Modern World ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

History Of ◽

The Revolution

This book is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. The book argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. It shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.

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