Talk:Gulag

Contents

1 Old talk 2 Fatalities 3 Institute for historical review link 4 Terminology 4.1 ITK, ITL, ITU 5 Death toll 6 GULAG camps 7 Number of victims 8 recent addition

Old talk

Gulag is an English language word. It's origins as a Russian acronym are of interest, but now it is simply an English language word. - Tim

Well, that's true, but the English usage is inprecise (as far as I understand, it is used as a countable noun for "a concentration camp", while GULAG is the name of a system. So a gulag is not GULAG - these are 2 different things, and I think that they should be differentiated. --Uriyan

I think 'gulag' is used either to refer specifically to the Soviet camp system, or is used metaphorically in reference to some other camp system, in order to emphasize a similarity with the Soviet system. So I don't think there is any need for two articles, since the word and the acronym have the same referent. And to fall back on convention, the book 'The Gulag Archipelego' is always spelled with 'Gulag' the word, not 'GULAG' the acronym - suggesting that the word is correct even when referring specifically to the system. - Tim

On further reflection, I don't think gulag is even an acronym. It is a word made up from parts of other words, which was common practice for the Soviets. Comintern is another. Laogai is a Chinese example, I think. Orwell's 'Ingsoc' is a parody of this practice. I believe it was Orwell who wrote about this practice, claiming it was an attempt to reduce language to mere symbolism devoid of any semantic content by divorcing words from concepts. - Tim

Well, GULAG is an acronym. It is always capitalized in Russian text, and it follows the same pattern as e.g. GUPO (Glavobye Upravleniye Pozharnoy Okhrany, Main Administration of Fire Fighting), GURKM and many others. It is capitalized, too. --Uriyan

In English, Gulag is certainly a word and not an acronym. And since this is the English wikipedia... :-/ --Anders Törlind

No, I don't object to the article's name, I've just written it to answer the last comment. Obviously I have less authority in describing English usage than native English speakers :-) Uriyan

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A strange thing is mentioned: that the scientists in sharashkas published their research under substitute names. This may have happened a few times (I am not aware of any), but was not common by any means. Should be restated or deleted, I guess. Cema 03:35 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

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The Cyrillic letters are coming out all messed up on my system - it looks like "çÌÁ×ÎÏÅ õÐÒÁ×ÌÅÎÉÅ ìÁÇÅÒÅÊ" to me. Can we change them to HTML codes, like in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party article, so they'll come out correctly on all browsers? kwertii

Yes, sure. I will do it momentarily.

In reality, all browsers that understand unicode html codes are also known to understand Russian Cyrillic encodings, but you are certainly correct that the codes should be used instead. (What you quoted looks right with Koi-8.)

Cema 05:48 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

Done. Cema

Fatalities

I have replaced this: it is estimated that a total of 1.5 to 2 million people have died in the camps and colonies — mainly during World War II when German occupation cut off food supplies. with Britannica 2004 estimates of 15-30 million, much closer to the truth IMHO. I picked it up at Talk:Concentration camp, so let's keep in sync. ←Humus sapiens←Talk 07:38, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Gulags were not concentration camps. Gulags were labor camps while concentration camps were DEATH camps. Places like Auschwitz and Treblinka were literally used to murder people. A train-load of people came in, they were gassed; another train-load came in, they were gassed and repeat so on and so forth. The purpose of Stalin's gulags were for labor and state profit, not deliberate mass murder! Majority of the deaths were because of over-work, disease, starvation and exposure. Hitler's concentration camps killed people but failed to gain profit and resources for Nazi Germany but Stalin's gulags gained profit and resources at the cost of human lives; big difference.--Secret Agent Man 02:02, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Well, their purpose really was not to destroy people. But in fact, due to absence of control over 'ocassional' deaths, they were turned into death camps. Solovki is a good example. It was mainly used to cut trees on the island, but in the history of this cam there were several cases of massive murders there. Estimation of number of people died during Stalin's governing that is given in official russian textbooks - 20 million. Mihail Vasiliev 00:50, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Given that Stalin and his henchmen were no doubt well aware of conditions in the

Gulag camps, I think it's safe to assume that they expected large numbers of "class enemies" would perish therein. Maybe "mass manslaughter" is the term.

With many people spending their life in the Gulag, having such a high number of deaths in prison is not itself indicative of the conditions under which the prisoners were held. How many people die in US prisons, the country with the largest number of prisoners world-wide? We need better data such as "% who died within the first 5 years of confinement", "average lifespan in Gulag / outside Gulag", preferably plotted over time. Does such an extensive empirical analysis exist?

I am afraid that it's impossible to find this kind of statistics. The main reason is that this system used to destroy all the documents about their prisoners. May be some estimations can be done besed on archeological data, but it will be only estimations... Mihail Vasiliev 09:26, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I also note that the intro says that 7 million "were killed" in the Gulag. Again, we need to distinguish between different causes of death. Given that the number appears to be from a different source anyway, and lacks a citation, I have removed it for now.--Eloquence* 08:52, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)

In any case - now we have references to the literature; yes, extensive numerical analyses exist (and are referred to in the text). By the way, where does the 80%-of-all-prisoners-dying-in-a-few-months figure come from?

Institute for historical review link

The link on the use of Gulag prisoners for cleaning up nuclear submarines (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n1p39_michaels.html), introduced in a recent edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Gulag&diff=4689130&oldid=4685661) is a link to the Institute for Historical Review. This is an institute which has a primary aim of holocaust denial through direct lies and subtle insinuation.As such, it is inherently discredited and linking to it without risks discrediting the article. I'm not deleting it yet, since I'm specifically interested in the accusations they use (which, incidentally, shows that it is effective propaganda :-).

A couple of quotes from the linked article

When Gutman attempted to show the documentary in New York City, however, it opened and closed to such taunts as: "He should be killed for making such a movie. Shame, a Jew describing the sufferings of Germans."

Today we Americans, from children to dotards, are bombarded with Holocaustiana, a saturation that borders on, and in some case results in, Holocaustomania.

Such material which is designed to incite hatred is something to be very careful of. Certainly we shouldn't be linking to it or quoting from it without comment or backing from a less Neo-Nazi oriented group.

Terminology

The "Variety" section right now includes a lot of terminology (e.g., the member of the family of a motherland traitor), yet the terminology section comes further down. I feel this is less than perfect, but don't have a vision of a nice merge. Maybe reorder them so that "Terminology" comes right before the "Variety"? What do you think? BACbKA 08:18, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. Only now I realize that since this is English encyclopedia, the terminology should be English, correspondingly and would vote for moving z/k para. out of it. What do you think? ←Humus sapiens←Talk 08:57, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I liked it better the way it was before, as what you've moved down as Terminology served as a mild disambiguation (w.r.t. "the gulags"). z/k looks the best near "the gulags" explanation IMHO, wherever it goes. I agree though that this way the initial section grew too fat... Maybe try merging Terminology and Variety and move the result higher up in the article? BACbKA 12:20, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

ITK, ITL, ITU

IMO the Gulag buzzword made us to miss a more general article, Corrective labor in the USSR.

To do:

• To figure out the difference:
  • исправительно-трудовой лагерь, ИТЛ
  • исправительно-трудовая колония, ИТК
  • исправительно-трудовое учреждение,ИТУ
  • воспитательно-трудовая колония, ВТК
  • рабочие колонны НКВД
  • and my favorite one: лечебно-трудовой профилакторий, ЛТП ("химия" (inosrantsam ne ponyat'))

• How long the term GULAG was in use and what was the successior?

Mikkalai 10:28, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Death toll

If I recall correctly, solzyenitsin totalls the number of casualties following a prudent estimate at 60 million. Maybe you should look into this and add Gulag to List_of_historical_events_by_death_count.

First, Gulag is not an event. Second, I find this Gunnessism for deaths disgusting. Third, IMO while Solzhenitsyn was good in details, his generalizations and theories must be taken with reserve. He is good as a writer, an eyewitness, a chronist, but not as historian (or politician). Mikkalai 20:10, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

GULAG camps

I am trapping my grandfathers way up to GULAG camps in and around the White Sea. I know for sure that the first place he was sent located near Irkutsk and called Черемхово. It was in 1930. Unfortunately I found no camps with the name near Irkutsk on your GULAG camps map. Is it possible that the mentioned camp was not one of the GULAG-s, some other type?

Best regards Aire from Estonia aire@saaga.hetako.ee

Number of victims

I am amazed the Gulag page doesn't have a good section about the number of victims - is this a new PC not to write about it? I understand that the precise numbers will never be known, but how about the estimates by various historians/authors? I also see a need to have a break down by nationalities. --Ttyre 18:37, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• The ones who really care: Memorial Society have recently collected and published a lot of factual data from opened archives, but all this is in Russian, and I don't think they really care whether a random American dude knows this now or not. Mikkalai 20:34, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's difficult for me to say how much Memorial Society cares about random American dud's knowledge of Gulag victims estimate(s). Obviously they do care about the English speaking audience since they have created English language version of their site. --Ttyre 17:29, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is but a front page of the central office. Its content is even not a tip of the iceberg. It is a snowflake on this tip. There is an enormous amount of material ammassed by local charters of the organization. It would take a huge effort to translate all of it in English. I may see that these peopler (volunteers, in poor countries) simply have no time, busy with collecting and preserving the information. Mikkalai 17:48, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I like the way Massacres of Poles in Volhynia page deals with the number of victims issue - summary of the contemporary (within last 10-15 years) estimates by published historians/authors. I strongly believe Gulag page needs the victims data organized in a similar way. --Ttyre 17:29, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Your hands are welcome. Mikkalai 17:48, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

recent addition

Recent addition of 128.12.187.115 needs cleanup. AFAIK it is based on the book they added into quotes. Some things are misinterpreted. I have no time right now. mikka (t) 05:28, 31 May 2005 (UTC)