Meet the real GULAG

Professor R.J. Rummel dashes the hopes of the anti-US coalition against the truth.

Amnesty International (AI) has likened Camp Delta," the U.S. Military Detention Facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for captured terrorists to a Gulag. This is so absurd for those who know about Gulag as to raise a serious question about AI's objectivity. I would go further. It is a left-wing attempt to defame the United States in the same way that some leftists have likened President Bush to Hitler. This is an ideological war, and these blasts are from the left's artillery. In response, please pass this around to that an appreciation of what Gulag really meant gets the widest possible dissemination.



The Real Gulag*

The history of this sewage system [labor camps] is the history of an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through gutters; and then just plain individually scooped-up droplets. ---- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn


The forced labor camp system that ultimately became known as Gulag (from the Russian acronym Gulag for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police, originally the Cheka; subsequently the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and finally the KGB) were legally sanctioned in July, 1918, with the decree that inmates capable of labor must be compelled to do physical work. This was the beginning of the deadly, Soviet forced labor, what could as well be called, slave labor, system. In the next year decrees established forced labor camps in each provincial capitol and a lower limit of 300 prisoners in each camp. The first large camps were established on the far north Solovetsky Islands. In August, 1919, Lenin made the Party view clear in a telegram: “Lock up all the doubtful ones in a concentration camp outside the city.” As Solzhenitsyn notes, these people are not even “guilty” ones, but only “doubtful”.

From the beginning, the conditions in some of these camps were so atrocious, often calculatingly so, that prisoners could not expect to survive for more than several years. One at Kholmogori near Archangel became known as a death camp, it was so perilous to prisoners that were often sent to these camps to die, not after a court trial, but by a simple administrative decision.