Power

This chapter illustrates the challenges faced by the Gulag medical-sanitation department. The principal task of this department was to maximize the number of working prisoners. Yet health care workers operated in a highly constrained environment and were forced to serve the system of physical exploitation. The Stalinist leadership established quotas and target figures on the numbers of prisoners that had to perform the basic work (osnovnaia rabota) of the camp, be it construction, mining, or forestry. There were also quotas restricting the number of inmates who were sick, hospitalized, in recovery or convalescent camps, invalids and nonworking, and even quotas on mortality. Doctors who undermined the camp's mandated quotas often faced punishment. And although the department was tasked with a great deal, it possessed little power within the camp hierarchy. Hence Gulag health care workers, even the well-intentioned, came to be associated with mass violence.

Releases

This chapter describes the Gulag policy for releasing their “inferior workforce,” also known as the “ballast.” Camp officials referred to the process of discharging terminally or severely ill prisoners as “unloading” (razgruzka), and it involved many types of releases, including medical discharges and special amnesties. Just as Stalin selected German POWs for repatriation who were invalids, and whose labor could no longer be exploited in camps, he unloaded sick and emaciated Gulag prisoners. Terminally ill prisoners who had been fully exploited were callously discarded, and many died shortly after their release. Medical releases and amnesties of dying prisoners thus constituted a fundamental Gulag practice applied on a massive scale. It effectively kept official mortality rates low, and thus concealed the destructive nature of the Gulag.

Invalids

This chapter presents the ways in which the Gulag administration dealt with its “inferior workforce.” Severely ill and disabled prisoners were considered as physically inferior (fizicheski nepolnotsennye), the defective labor force (nepolnotsennye rabsily), and the not-work-capable elements (netrudosposobnye elementy). They were unable to do the camp's basic work, which involved heavy physical labor in such sectors as construction, mining, and forestry. The so-called inferior workforce included both prisoners classified as invalids and those assigned to light labor. This segment of the Gulag labor force represented an enormous population of prisoners, and it grew significantly over the Stalin years. Given that a significant portion of the prison labor force was severely ill and disabled, the Gulag leadership sought ways to manage, conceal, and discard this enormous emaciated population.

Illness and Mortality

This chapter discusses the role of the Gulag medical-sanitation department. Their task was not necessarily to keep prisoners healthy, but to maximize exploitation and minimize “labor losses.” The Gulag routinely reported health data under the heading “illness and lost labor.” Inmate health was only relevant as it impacted production. The Stalinist leadership established quotas on illnesses and deaths, and would not tolerate large numbers of non-working prisoners. The Stalinist leadership called this “labor therapy,” and believed in work as the key to convalescence. Although sickness, emaciation, and disability were widespread, Gulag officials concealed their existence. In the Gulag, illness was widespread, yet it remained largely untreated, concealed, and even criminalized.

Health

This chapter discusses the official perceptions of inmate health within the Gulag system. Rather than being concerned over the people's health, Gulag officials were more interested in their “physical labor capability” (kategoriia fizicheskoi trudosposobnosti). Gulag administrators needed people who could perform hard manual labor in logging, mining, and construction, so they examined and documented the bodies of prisoners to determine who was “fit for physical labor.” Inside the barbed wire, individuals constituted simply bodies, either “fit” or “weakened.” This chapter shows how individual bodies were perceived and treated within the Gulag health system and how prisoners were shuffled from one physical labor category to another.

Epilogue

This concluding chapter examines the ways in which the Gulag was able to hide its true nature from the public eye. For most of its existence, the Gulag had operated under a heavy veil of secrecy. Routine silences and distortions made it possible for the violent exploitation to persist for decades. The chapter looks at the Gulag's methods of concealing information outright, as well as the manipulation of facts which did enter the public eye. Some of these methods are efficient enough to make present-day investigations into the Gulag rather challenging. In addition, the chapter also briefly discusses the gradual dismantling of Stalin's labor camp system, which began with the large-scale release of the Gulag's majority prisoner population.

Prisoners

This chapter describes the kinds of prisoners the Gulag mostly employed and how they were perceived in the Gulag system. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of prisoners in Stalin's labor camps and colonies were not intellectuals, former communists, perceived spies and saboteurs, or other “counterrevolutionaries.” Most were ordinary workers and peasants, largely ethnic Russian and less educated, who had been arrested for routine Soviet crimes, such as workplace infractions, speculation, theft, or internal passport violations. This prisoner profile satisfied the Gulag's need for prisoners who could perform heavy physical labor. Bolshevik ideology made productive labor the defining feature of the Soviet citizen. This produced a system of values wherein the stronger represented the morally superior. In this worldview, frail and sick individuals constituted an inferior population.

Selection

This chapter explores a process of selection (otbor) with which the Gulag manages its disabled workforce. This process illustrates the degree to which camps, colonies, prisons, and settlements had formed a single unified system. These diverse forms and locations of incarceration formed a “hierarchy of detention.” Many historians believe that this system of detention was because of changing demands for labor and the desire to separate certain categories of prisoners. However, this chapter describes another process of prisoner sorting, one governed not by the perceived danger of prisoners, but by their health. The prisoners were distributed among camps and colonies according to the inmates' health, with the ultimate goal of maximizing production and exploitation.

Food

This chapter focuses on the ways in which the Stalinist regime willfully denied food to many prisoners and created an institution of mass starvation. Working citizens were an important part of the Communist regime, and this emphasis on labor was clearly stated in the popular slogan, “Whoever does not work, shall not eat!” The Stalinist regime took this Soviet work ethic to extremes by making hunger both an incentive in the Gulag and a punishment. The most productive earned more food, but they had to exert themselves more to receive more, and the Gulag ration was not sufficient to compensate for energy expended. The Stalinist leadership thus created a punitive and inadequate feeding system by design, which willfully starved less productive prisoners.

Introduction

This introductory chapter argues that violent human exploitation constituted the essential purpose of Stalin's Gulag. Over the course of the Stalin years, this system of exploitation was unrelenting, punitive, and increasingly brutal. Camp prisoners had to be maximally “utilized” and worked to the point of utter depletion. Stalin's Gulag was, in many ways, less a concentration camp than a forced labor camp and less a prison system than a system of slavery. The official language of the camps, as revealed by recently declassified Gulag archival sources, illustrates the degree to which prisoners were constituted, exploited, and discarded as “human raw material.”