Editing Gulag (section)

=== Background ===
[[File:V.M. Doroshevich-Sakhalin. Part I. Prisoners on Steamship of Voluntary Fleet.png|thumb|Prisoners on a ship on their way to  [[Sakhalin]], remote prison island, c. 1903]]

The [[Tsardom of Russia|Tsar]] and the [[Russian Empire]] both used forced [[exile]] and [[forced labour]] as forms of judicial punishment. [[Katorga]], a category of punishment which was reserved for those who were convicted of the most serious crimes, had many of the features which were associated with labor-camp imprisonment: confinement, simplified facilities (as opposed to the facilities which existed in prisons), and forced labor, usually involving hard, unskilled or semi-skilled work. According to historian [[Anne Applebaum]], katorga was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000 [[katorga]] convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 of them were serving sentences in 1916.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxxi</ref> Under the Imperial Russian penal system, those who were convicted of less serious crimes were sent to corrective prisons and they were also made to work.<ref>Jakobson, Michael. ''Origins of the Gulag''. E-book, The University Press of Kentucky, 2015, pp. 11</ref>

Forced exile to [[Siberia]] had been in use for a wide range of offenses since the seventeenth century and it was a common punishment for political dissidents and revolutionaries. In the nineteenth century, the members of the failed [[Decembrist revolt]] and [[Sybirak|Polish nobles who resisted Russian rule]] were sent into exile. [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]] was sentenced to die for reading banned literature in 1849, but the sentence was commuted to banishment to Siberia.  Members of various socialist revolutionary groups, including [[Bolsheviks]] such as [[Sergo Ordzhonikidze]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Leon Trotsky]], and [[Joseph Stalin]] were also sent into exile.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxix–xxx</ref>

Convicts who were serving labor sentences and exiles were sent to the underpopulated areas of Siberia and the [[Russian Far East]] – regions that lacked towns or food sources as well as organized transportation systems. Despite the isolated conditions, some prisoners successfully escaped to populated areas. Stalin himself escaped three of the four times after he was sent into exile.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxxiii</ref> Since these times, Siberia gained its fearful connotation as a place of punishment, a reputation which was further enhanced by the Soviet GULAG system. The Bolsheviks' own experiences with exile and forced labor provided them with a model which they could base their own system on, including the importance of strict enforcement.

From 1920 to 1950, the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state considered repression a tool that they should use to secure the normal functioning of the Soviet state system and preserve and strengthen their positions within their social base, the working class (when the Bolsheviks took power, peasants represented 80% of the population).<ref name="Земсков">{{cite journal|last=Земсков|first=Виктор|title=ГУЛАГ (историко-социологический аспект)|journal=Социологические исследования |year=1991|issue=6–7|url=http://scepsis.ru/library/id_937.html |access-date=August 14, 2011}}</ref>

In the midst of the [[Russian Civil War]], Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a "special" prison camp system, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the [[Cheka]].<ref>Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 12</ref> These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had a distinctly political purpose.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 5</ref> These early camps of the GULAG system were introduced in order to isolate and eliminate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements, whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the [[dictatorship of the proletariat]].<ref name="Земсков" />

Forced labor as a "method of reeducation" was applied in the [[Solovki prison camp]] as early as the 1920s,<ref name="ApplebaumChapter3">Applebaum, "Gulag: A History", Chapter 3</ref> based on Trotsky's experiments with forced labor camps for Czech war prisoners from 1918 and his proposals to introduce "compulsory labor service" voiced in ''[[Terrorism and Communism]]''.<ref name="ApplebaumChapter3" /><ref>"The only way to attract the labor power necessary for our economic problems is to introduce compulsory labor service", in: {{cite web|title=Leon Trotsky: Terrorism and Communism (Chapter 8) |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm |website=www.marxists.org |access-date=August 6, 2015 |first=Leon |last=Trotsky}}</ref> These concentration camps were not identical to the Stalinist or Hitler camps, but were introduced to isolate war prisoners given the extreme historical situation following [[World War I]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Krausz |first1=Tamás |title=Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography |date=27 February 2015 |publisher=NYU Press |isbn=978-1-58367-449-9 |page=512 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=z23IBgAAQBAJ&dq=lenin+concentration+camps+stalinist+obviously&pg=PA512 |language=en}}</ref>

Various categories of prisoners were defined: petty criminals, POWs of the Russian Civil War, officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, political enemies, dissidents and other people deemed dangerous for the state. In the first decade of Soviet rule, the judicial and penal systems were neither unified nor coordinated, and there was a distinction between criminal prisoners and political or "special" prisoners.

The "traditional" judicial and prison system, which dealt with criminal prisoners, were first overseen by The People's Commissariat of Justice until 1922, after which they were overseen by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, also known as the [[NKVD]].<ref>Jakobson, Michael. ''Origins of the Gulag.'' E-book, The University Press of Kentucky, pp. 52</ref> The Cheka and its successor organizations, the GPU or [[State Political Directorate]] and the [[OGPU]], oversaw political prisoners and the "special" camps to which they were sent.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. 12.</ref> In April 1929, the judicial distinctions between criminal and political prisoners were eliminated, and control of the entire Soviet penal system turned over to the OGPU.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2003, pp. 50.</ref> In 1928, there were 30,000 individuals interned; the authorities were opposed to compelled labor. In 1927, the official in charge of prison administration wrote:

<blockquote>The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing "golden sweat" from them, the organisation of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.<ref>[[David Dallin]] and [[Boris Nicolaevsky]], ''Forced Labor in Soviet Russia'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 153.</ref></blockquote>

The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps" ({{lang|ru|исправи́тельно-трудовые лагеря}}, {{lang|ru-Latn|Ispravitel'no-trudovye lagerya}}), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree from the [[Sovnarkom]] of July 11, 1929, about the use of [[penal labor]] that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of the [[Politburo]] meeting of June 27, 1929.{{citation needed|date=April 2018}}<ref>{{Cite book |title=Transcripts from the Soviet Archives Volume III |publisher=Erdogan A |year=2021 |isbn=978-1-329-63144-1 |publication-date=February 9, 2021}}</ref>

One of the Gulag system founders was [[Naftaly Frenkel]]. In 1923, he was arrested for illegally crossing borders and smuggling. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor at [[Solovki prison camp|Solovki]], which later came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag". While serving his sentence he wrote a letter to the camp administration detailing a number of "productivity improvement" proposals including the infamous system of labor exploitation whereby the inmates' food rations were to be linked to their rate of production, a proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). This notorious you-eat-as-you-work system would often kill weaker prisoners in weeks and caused countless casualties. The letter caught the attention of a number of high communist officials including [[Genrikh Yagoda]] and Frenkel soon went from being an inmate to becoming a camp commander and an important Gulag official. His proposals soon saw widespread adoption in the Gulag system.<ref>Applebaum, Anne (2004). Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. London: Penguin Books., p. 52-53</ref>

After having appeared as an instrument and place for isolating counter-revolutionary and criminal elements, the Gulag, because of its principle of "correction by forced labor", quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. Hence it is followed by one more important reason for the constancy of the repressive policy, namely, the state's interest in unremitting rates of receiving a cheap labor force that was forcibly used, mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north.<ref name="Земсков" /> The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions.<ref name="Ellman">{{cite journal |last=Ellman |first=Michael |title=Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments |journal=Europe-Asia Studies |year=2002 |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=1151–1172 |s2cid=43510161 |url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf |access-date=August 14, 2011 |doi=10.1080/0966813022000017177}}</ref>