Gulag

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to extremely high death rates in the camps.
From 1920s to 1950s, the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet state considered repressiveness not only as a way to provide the conditions for normal functioning of the state system, but also to preserve and strengthen positions of their social base, presented by working class, in society. From social class perspectives, the Gulag is an offspring of the working class which became a leading class of society after the October Revolution. The Gulag was invented to isolate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements (real and imaginary ones) whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." After having appeared as a tool and place for isolating counterrevolutionary and criminal elements to protect and strengthen the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the Gulag, because of its principle of "correction by forced labor", quickly became, in ...

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barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labor.
In the eyes of the authorities, the prisoners had almost no value. Those who died of hunger, cold, and hard labor were replaced by new prisoners because the system could always find more people to replenish the labor camps.
Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the first massive construction project of the Gulag. Over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows in just 20 months. Initially viewed as a great success and celebrated in a volume published both in the Soviet Union and the United States, the canal turned out to be too narrow ...

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