Gulag | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2019-05-07

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag


00:04:05 1 Brief history
00:08:39 2 Contemporary word usage and other terminology
00:10:33 3 History
00:10:42 3.1 Background
00:16:35 3.2 Formation and expansion under Stalin
00:20:39 3.3 The early years of Stalin's Gulag (1929–1931)
00:25:12 3.4 During World War II
00:25:21 3.4.1 Political role
00:29:06 3.4.2 Economic role
00:36:37 3.5 After World War II
00:43:33 4 Death toll
00:46:49 5 Gulag administrators
00:46:59 6 Conditions
00:52:48 6.1 Gulag and famine (1932–1933)
00:55:11 6.2 Social conditions
00:56:12 7 Geography
01:04:31 8 Special institutions
01:05:27 9 Historiography
01:05:37 9.1 Origins and functions of the Gulag
01:11:19 9.2 Archival documents
01:19:35 9.3 History of Gulag population estimates
01:25:39 10 Influence
01:25:49 10.1 Culture
01:27:46 10.1.1 Literature
01:38:09 10.2 Colonization
01:39:39 10.3 Life after term served
01:40:32 11 Gulag memorials
01:41:12 12 Gulag Museum
01:41:38 13 See also



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SUMMARY
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The Gulag (, UK also ; Russian: ГУЛаг [ɡʊˈlak] (listen), acronym of Main Administration of Camps) was the government agency in charge of the  Soviet  forced-labor camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin and reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag to refer to any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union, including camps which existed in post-Stalin times. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as by NKVD troikas or by other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized by many as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.
The agency was first administered by the GPU, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the  Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The Solovki prison camp, the first corrective labor camp constructed after the revolution, was established in 1918 and legalized by a decree "On the creation of the forced-labor camps" on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. According to Nicolas Werth, author of The Black Book of Communism, the yearly mortality rate in the Soviet concentration camps strongly varied, reaching 5% (1933) and 20% (1942–1943) while dropping considerably in the post-war years (about 1 to 3% per year at the beginning of the 1950s). The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or as a result of their detention. However, some historians who question the reliability of such data and instead rely heavily on literary sources come to higher estimations. Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands", and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. 
In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union. Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern and eastern Russia and in Kazakhstan such as Karaganda, Norilsk, Vorkuta and Magadan, were originally blocks of camps built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners.