SOVIET GULAG - THE STORY | PART 1B: ORIGINS | 1917-1933

ORIGINAL FILE SOURCE: https://archive.org/details/youtube-7fhI9YMyvOo

“ 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 1:
The first concentration style camps were set up as of 1918, a few months after the October Revolution. The new Bolshevik regime wished to rid itself of its political adversaries and use work to re-educate the so-called social misfits. The first wide-scale experiment was that of the Solovetsky Islands. Thousands of political prisoners and criminals, both men and women, were imprisoned there in inhumane conditions. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin came to power and launched the accelerated industrialisation of the country along with the collectivisation of agriculture, which would lead to deadly famines. Immense building projects were launched in the most remote regions such as Kolyma in Siberia. The GPU, the Communist Party's secret police, which was in charge of cleansing society and ridding it of undesirables, sent hundreds of thousands of Russians to the camps to participate in the establishment of socialism.”