Editing Gulag (section)

=== Origins and functions of the Gulag ===
According to historian Stephen Barnes, the origins and functions of the Gulag can be looked at in four major ways:<ref>{{Cite book |last=Barnes |first=Stephen A. |title=Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-691-15112-0 |location=Princeton |pages=7–16}}</ref>

* The first approach was championed by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|Alexander Solzhenitsyn]], and is what Barnes terms the '''[[moral explanation]]'''. According to this view, Soviet ideology eliminated the moral checks on the darker side of human nature – providing convenient justifications for violence and evil-doing on all levels: from political decision-making to personal relations. 
* Another approach is the '''political explanation''', according to which the Gulag (along with executions) was primarily a means for eliminating the regime's perceived political enemies (this understanding is favoured by historian [[Robert Conquest]], amongst others). 
* The '''economic explanation''', in turn as set out by historian Anne Applebaum, argues that the Soviet regime instrumentalised the Gulag for its economic development projects. Although never economically profitable, it was perceived as such right up to Stalin's death in 1953.
* Finally, Barnes advances his own, fourth explanation, which situates the Gulag in the context of modern projects of ''''cleansing'''<nowiki/>' the social body of hostile elements, through spatial isolation and physical elimination of individuals defined as harmful.

[[Hannah Arendt]] argues that as part of a [[totalitarian]] system of government, the camps of the Gulag system were experiments in "total domination." In her view, the goal of a totalitarian system was not merely to establish limits on liberty, but rather to abolish liberty entirely in service of its ideology. She argues that the Gulag system was not merely political repression because the system survived and grew long after Stalin had wiped out all serious political resistance. Although the various camps were initially filled with criminals and political prisoners, eventually they were filled with prisoners who were arrested irrespective of anything relating to them as individuals, but rather only on the basis of their membership in some ever shifting category of imagined threats to the state.<ref name="ReferenceA">[[Hannah Arendt|Arendt, Hannah]]. 1985. ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]''. [[Harcourt (publisher)|Harcourt]].</ref>{{Rp|437–59}}

She also argues that the function of the Gulag system was not truly economic. Although the Soviet government deemed them all "forced labor" camps, this in fact highlighted that the work in the camps was deliberately pointless, since all Russian workers could be subject to forced labor.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}} The only real economic purpose they typically served was financing the cost of their own supervision. Otherwise the work performed was generally useless, either by design or made that way through extremely poor planning and execution; some workers even preferred more difficult work if it was actually productive. She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps".<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}}

In authentic labor camps, inmates worked in "relative freedom and are sentenced for limited periods." Concentration camps had extremely high mortality rates and but were still "essentially organized for labor purposes." Annihilation camps were those where the inmates were "systematically wiped out 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.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}}

Arendt argues that together with the systematized, arbitrary cruelty inside the camps, this served the purpose of total domination by eliminating the idea that the arrestees had any political or legal rights. Morality was destroyed by maximizing cruelty and by organizing the camps internally to make the inmates and guards complicit. The terror resulting from the operation of the Gulag system caused people outside of the camps to cut all ties with anyone who was arrested or purged and to avoid forming ties with others for fear of being associated with anyone who was targeted. As a result, the camps were essential as the nucleus of a system that destroyed individuality and dissolved all social bonds. Thereby, the system attempted to eliminate any capacity for resistance or self-directed action in the greater population.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|437–59}}