ORIGINAL FILE SOURCE: https://archive.org/details/youtube-dBjcT0QxSS0
“A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century, the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown.
The hist…
ORIGINAL FILE SOURCE: https://archive.org/details/youtube-dBjcT0QxSS0
“A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century, the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown.
The history of the Gulag is long, complex and in many ways out of the ordinary. From the Revolution of 1917 to Gorbachev, touching on the civil war, the Great Terror, World War II, the Cold War and the death of Stalin, this series describes the workings of the Gulag.
How and why did the USSR create this system of forced- labour camps in which 20 million prisoners were exploited and worked to the bone?
Through the exceptional fates of numerous protagonists, both executioners and victims, the history of the Gulag is deciphered with previously-unreleased documentary sources and the help of renowned historians and Gulag experts.
Episode 3:
The prisoners and populations of the newly occupied territories in the East, such as the Polish, were suspected of anti-Sovietism, and many were sent to the camps. The condition of women, who formed a quarter of camp prisoners, was tragic. At the end of the 1940s, two million prisoners were crammed into the camps and struggling to survive. This very quickly led to a decrease in economic viability. With Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Khrushchev's Thaw commenced and one million prisoners were freed. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes. There was an immense shockwave. Gradually, the Gulag would disappear. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was published in 1973, creating an international stir, which finally brought down the wall of indifference. After the fall of Communism, Russia's political leaders wanted to start afresh. All signs of the Gulag progressively disappeared from the Russian landscape and its memory.”
