But it was Stalin who employed them to their most hideous and at least semi-effective ends. The camps, like prisons throughout the world, were used to house criminals. The GULAG's primary purpose, though, was to gain control of the population through fear — by imprisoning, torturing and killing undesirables, critics of Communism and anyone who defied Stalin — to drag the Soviet Union from its agrarian past into an industrialized society.
More than 3. Almost , of them were shot. More people passed through the GULAG system, for a much longer time, than were imprisoned in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in their entire existence. It's really about social control. From about to , in the name of furthering Communism and strengthening his hold on the state, Stalin seized the land and property of millions of peasant families and forced them off their property with many landing in the GULAG.
These people — "kulaks" — were the richer of the peasant class and seen as a direct threat to Stalin's rule. So they were dispossessed, many were murdered, and the others were exiled and forced to work in collective farms or in GULAGs in mining or construction, where millions more died. Stalin, worried about subversive elements within Soviet borders, also ordered the forced resettlements of entire populations — people of specific nationalities living in the Soviet Union that were either deported or moved to remote areas of the country — into what some call " special settlements.
With his "dekulakization" policy, Stalin effectively wiped out an entire class, badly damaging the agricultural sector of the economy, which contributed to millions more dying in the Great Famine. More on that chapter next. Estimates of the number of dead vary widely, but it's generally agreed that millions perished — Ukraine and Kazakhstan were especially hit hard. And unlike other famines where drought was the main cause, it was Stalin's policies toward industrialization and away from small farm food production that contributed to this disaster.
In addition, Stalin used the food shortages strategically, making sure that certain areas were affected more than others. He baldly welcomed many of the deaths, especially when it came to enemies of the state, "kulaks," and "idlers" those who did not work on the collective farms.
He quoted Lenin in saying that, " He who does not work, neither shall he eat. From " Stalin's Genocides ," by Norman M. In , Stalin initiated " The Great Purge ," aiming to rid the Communist Party of some of his biggest detractors and rivals. Of the highest-ranking members of the Communist Party, 81 were executed. Eventually, more than a third of the Communist Party died during The Great Purge, which had the effect of terrorizing the general population, too.
Many people turned on friends and family members in an attempt to save themselves from the GULAG or sure death. He was executed in But high-powered NKVD police like Yezhov didn't just disappear from life, they also disappeared from photos.
Stalin replaced Lenin's market socialist New Economic Policy with a series of Five Year Plans of state guided crash industrialization, and forced the collectivisation of agriculture.
The process was brutal but soon successful, resulting in increasing production and efficiency. Related: 10 things you didn't know about Stalin. When faced with resistance, the regime assembled shock brigades to force peasants into collective farms; however, they often destroyed their farms.
Stalin blamed this drop in food production on Kulaks rich peasants , ordering them to be transported to Gulag prison camps. Millions of people lost their lives during this campaign and the famines that followed. Stalin consolidated his near-absolute power with the Great Purges against his suspected opponents in the Bolshevik Party. Suitcases that belonged to people deported to the Auschwitz camp. This photograph was taken after Soviet forces liberated the camp.
Auschwitz, Poland, after January Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. By December , when it appears that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union.
Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5. A few hundred thousand more Jews died during deportations to ghettos or of hunger or disease in ghettos. Most Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the war 3. The Germans also killed more than a hundred thousand Roma. All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included.
For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the s.
Since the Germans killed chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of Nazi Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself.
The Nazi regime killed approximately , German Jews. Apart from the inacessibilty of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility. In Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets.
Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side. We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.
New understandings of numbers, of course, are only a part of any comparison, and in themselves pose new questions of both quantity and quality. He collectivized agriculture at enormous human cost, and he led the Soviet Union in its devastating war with Nazi Germany. The purges and repression during those years cost the lives of as many as 22 million people, two-thirds of whom were executed or died in labor camps. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property.
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