On April 15, 1919, by decree of the Soviet authorities, labor - the educational camps called Gulag (Main Administration of the Camps).
They were a division of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the USSR in 1934-56, managing the labor and correctional camps. Under the system of mass repressions and arbitrariness, many people who were politically inconvenient for the Soviet authorities ended up in the camps.
Prisoners work for free in the construction of roads and industrial sites in Siberia. Due to the harsh working conditions, hunger and disease, the death rate is extremely high. The truth about the non-observance of elementary human rights in the camps was revealed by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1973 in the book "The Gulag Archipelago".
The first decision of the Soviet People's Commissars to shoot or deport class enemies was made in September 1918, in the middle of the civil war, Deutsche Welle recalled. In parallel, the first camps for criminals are being built, but the differences between one and the other are extremely blurred. "The Red Terror" in Soviet Russia it was followed by a brutal war against the rural population in which over 6 million people died. The sadistic arbitrariness of the Cheka /commission for the struggle against the counter-revolution/ was eventually replaced by a penal system with slave labor rules, which in 1929 became part of the criminal law reform that led to the creation of the Gulag - the main management of the camps, for which the world public learns thanks to Solzhenitsyn's work.
The story of the Gulag is the story of a war against its own people that lasted several decades. Russian society has not yet fully recovered from it, explains writer Jorg Barbovsky, author of a book on the subject. Workers were sacrificed in the name of senseless gigantic projects /25,000 people died during the construction of the ultimately unnavigable White Sea Canal alone/. In the peak times of the Gulag - from 1929 to the beginning of de-Stalinization - about 20 million people passed through the camps. The number of victims is unknown, as tens of thousands died already during the deportation, and a large part of the archives have been lost.