Labor Camps Research Articles

Lviv Under the Soviets (1939-1941): Students, Refugees and Deportees

The Soviet aggression against Poland at the outbreak of the Second World War resulted in the annexation of more than 50% of the pre-war Polish territory to the Soviet Union, with the rest occupied by Germany. With a focus on western Ukraine, the initial period of Soviet rule is reviewed in the context of the German-Soviet geopolitical alliance, the troubled history of inter-ethnic relations, and the changes imposed by the regime. The situation at Lviv University illustrates the shift from Polish to Soviet sovereignty. In the autumn of 1939, with the earlier antisemitic policies lifted, many Jews applied for admission to the university under Soviet control. The university files show how the political changes were perceived at the time. They also highlight the influx of refugees escaping the German occupation in the rest of Poland. On a broader level, Soviet policies introduced contradictions that had a negative impact on all ethnic groups within the annexed territory. Even though the Soviets granted the right to citizenship to Polish citizens under their control, the regime unleashed systematic repressions. Removed from key positions, Poles were targeted by Soviet propaganda and the security apparatus. Despite a façade of Ukrainization, local Ukrainians were distrusted and their pre-war leaders persecuted. Jews were generally relieved that they had escaped falling under the Nazis. While some of them gained access to higher education and positions in the civil administration, many others were arrested and deported to labour camps, because of their pre-war political affiliations, ‘undesirable’ class distinctions, and refugee status.

‘There is more than one sort of prison, Captain’: A popular criminology of prisons and penal regimes in Star Wars

In this paper we emphasise how science fiction, as a projection of the possible, can forewarn of dystopic dangers in emergent and future penal regimes. In this popular criminology we explore three archetypes of the prison as they have appeared across the Star Wars franchise: the panoptic prison; the labour camp; and the smart prison. The panoptic prison of the Galactic Republic invokes reflective nostalgia; prompting critical discussion of the deficiencies of the modern prison. Under the Galactic Empire prisons become labour camps, recalling the horrors of the Gulag as violent and cruel manifestations of underpinning ideology. Whilst the fall of the Galactic Empire signalled a return to governance based on democratic values, the representation of the smart prison in the New Republic continues to resonate as a techno-Gulag, reading as an allegory for a deeper crisis of liberal democracy. Analysed as such, prisons in Star Wars exist at the intersection of the past, present and possible futures of penal regimes, and in our current political climate can be a resource for resistance to technological trends and dystopic dangers. Star Wars, we conclude, and science fiction more broadly, is well-positioned to inform a radical re-imagining of future prisons and penal regimes.

‘We build Barren Island, Barren Island builds us’: Of imprisoned humans and mobilized stone in the Yugoslav Cominformist Labor Camp (1949–1956)

ABSTRACT Goli Otok (Barren Island) was a site of the master political prison and forced labor camp of the socialist Yugoslavia between 1949 and 1956. The imprisoned, accused of siding with Stalin in the Tito–Stalin political rift, were sent to undergo ‘self-managed re-education’ through ‘socially beneficial labor’ in the island’s limestone quarries. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of that very limestone – the first known human dwellings on the previously uninhabited island. They were also often forced to break, crumble and to carry massive stone loads from one place to another and back, with no constructive or productive purpose. However, the labor camp authorities also operated a lucrative business, oriented towards country-wide distribution, and sometimes towards international export of the island’s limestone. The quarried stone of the island therefore travelled more widely than its excavators, whose movements were limited to their island-prison. Set at the intersection of labor history and environmental history and drawing on the archival materials of the Yugoslav State Security Service, oral history interviews with the former prisoners, and their published and unpublished written memoirs, this paper examines the interrelations of the prison-island, its stone material, and the prisoners’ laboring bodies.

The making of the Homo Polaris: human acclimatization to the Arctic environment and Soviet ideologies in Northern Medical Institutions

ABSTRACT This paper examines the history of the Soviet human acclimatization project in the North and Siberia, which spanned from medical experiments in Stalin’s forced labor camps to the subsequent wave of industrialization in the region. The author argues that human acclimatization in the North was a settler colonial science project aimed at facilitating Russian administrators and engineers in asserting control over the territory and its resources, while creating a new homogeneous ‘indigenous population’ in Siberia and the North. This envisioned population, referred to as Homo Polaris by the author, was intended to emerge through a two-way transformation: the adaptation of Indigenous peoples into Soviet ideologies and practices, and the acclimatization of settlers coming from the European part of the country to the Arctic environment. Although the administrators and medical doctors were unable to achieve this biopolitical objective, the complexities and dialogues surrounding these transformations shed light on the late Soviet settler-colonial ideologies and their impact on social life in Siberia from the 1950s to the 1980s. The research is based on a comprehensive analysis of both published and archival works by scholars involved in the project.

The ‘perimeter’ prisoners of Russian secret cities: the case of ZATO Krasnoyarsk-26

Since the 1930s, the Gulag system of labour camps was a driving force behind the main geopolitical projects of the Soviet Union, playing a critical role in mega-infrastructural projects to colonise hitherto unexploited territories. Among these was the network of secret cities built at the dawn of the Cold War. Whilst outwardly appearing like ordinary cities — with their green boulevards, central squares, and civic facilities — they were fully controlled and managed by the state; over decades elite scientists and technicians were brought together in these new settlements to work and live in total dedication to the Soviet atomic bomb project. These secret cities were known as Zakrytoye Administrativno-Territorial’noye Obrazovaniye [Closed Administrative-Territorial Formations], abbreviated as ZATOs. The research campuses, production and test zones, and civic and residential districts of the ZATOs were secured with walls, fences, watchtowers, and checkpoints. Beyond the secured perimeters, which still exist to regulate access to and from the outside world, lies the governmental and legislative apparatus which shaped the ZATOs’ economic, social, and psychological characteristics. For the inhabitants of ZATOs, the perimeter symbolised their connection to a higher purpose and would later evoke feelings of nostalgia and a sense of protection. Focusing primarily on one of these settlements, namely ZATO Krasnoyarsk-26, this paper links the story of the imprisoned labourers who constructed the ZATOs to that of the civilians who surrendered their liberty for a loftier cause. It will reveal a tight correlation between the Gulag infrastructure and the spatial arrangement of ZATOs showing how, in many aspects, ZATOs took on characteristics of carceral isolation, coercion, and immobility that are still relevant when addressing their contemporary condition.

Wastelands of empire, sites of ‘salvation’: landscapes of ‘reform’ in late nineteenth-century Germany

This essay traces a rural network of modern carceral and internal colonial land enclosures developed in late nineteenth-century Germany. It considers the extent to which long-running debates over the value of penal colonialism and deportation for the management of societal ‘threats’ influenced shifts in carceral policy of the time, long thought to have been largely determined by the welfare reform movement of the Wilhelmine period and the notion of ‘protective supervision’ that prevailed in its wake. It is argued that certain aspects of convict colonialism, publicly interrogated by German legal theorists, were quietly adapted by carceral reform practices beginning in the 1880s. This essay speculates on the spatial and territorial implications of those adaptations, examining the little-known prison labour camps located in the sewage farms of Berlin after 1890, the model establishment of the rural labour colony founded by the pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, and the Prussian Settlement Commission’s anti-Slavic, anti-migrant program of internal colonisation, established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. It is argued that links between them were crystallised in a racialised topos of waste, framed by an emergent environmental discourse that served to sediment difference. Together, these institutions of correction, the architectures of enclosure that attended them, and the segregated geographies that resulted from them transformed the meaning and administration of Germany’s rural landscape and demarcate modern imperial planning practices that mobilised space, territory, and environment as mediums of ‘progressive’ reform and ‘protective supervision’ tied to increasingly regimented and policed forms of settlement.

Verification of nationality and rehabilitation in Upper Silesia as a point of reference for Donbas

In Poland, the region where the phenomenon of multiculturalism is most strongly represented is Upper Silesia. Upper Silesia, its historical hosts, have been confronted with German, Polish and Czech nationalism since the mid-21st century. Initially, they were forced to determine their ethnic affiliation, then, due to the change of borders, they were forced to move to one or the other side of the newly established Polish-German border in 1922. After 1945, they were subjected to strong repression, deportation to forced labor camps, forced displacement, degrading verification of nationality, and then they were confronted with the Polish population who came to Upper Silesia. Most often, the Poles who arrived were hostile to the Upper Silesians. The aim of this article is to answer the question whether the experiences of integration of the indigenous population of Upper Silesia into the social, cultural, economic and political structures of the Polish state after World War II can be related to a similar process that will take place after the end of hostilities in the eastern regions of the Ukrainian state. . The starting point is the thesis that the Upper Silesian experience of the rehabilitation and citizenship verification procedures should serve as a warning against the mistakes made in Upper Silesia rather than as a useful reference point.

Scientific review and cultural significance of the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice, Poland

This article illustrates preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Science for society, society for science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice’. It presents the material traces of prisoner-of-war, resettlement and forced labour camps that functioned between 1870 and 1946 in Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice, Poland) and explains their modern social significance.

Mój ból jest większy niż twój

MY PAIN IS GREATER THAN YOURS: THE PROCESS OF COMMEMORATING KL PLASZOW
 This article presents an accompanying description of the process involved in commemorating the former labor and concentration camp, Plaszow. The actors involved primarily differ in the function they desire to attribute to the memorial, while the strong emotions accompanying them are primarily a consequence of the process’s underlying cause – death ingrained in the post-camp landscape. Engagement in the process evokes suffering, which limits the possibilities for dialogue surrounding commemoration. Recently, the appointment of a caretaker for the site of memory, the KL Plaszow Museum, has proven to be the most influential factor in the dynamics of the process. Given that the museum is an enduring institution, there is now a strong need to explore new forms of mediation that facilitate understanding. In the author’s view, specialists in culture studies, with their expert competencies, can serve as neutral intermediaries bridging the diverse expectations of the actors.

Labour as a Right, Duty, Matter of Honour and Repression in State-Socialist Bulgaria

The idea of labour free from exploitation has a fundamental place in communist ideology and was a constant slogan in the public rhetoric of the ‘peoples’ democracies’. This paper aims to examine how labour is defined in the official discourse of state-socialist Bulgaria, how it is associated with the ideas of freedom, coercion, the new communist moral order; and how labour is used as a repressive measure for annihilation the political opponents immediately after the seizure the political power by the Fatherland Front on September 9th ,1944 until the closure of the labour camps in 1962. The juxtaposition of the official state discourse of free labour without exploitation of workers and the people’s accounts reveal whether the ideologemes imposed by the state-party propaganda were accepted and became part of the people's thinking and vernacular memory. My thesis is that the ideologemes of free labour are accepted or at least not problematized in the narratives of the majority of ‘ordinary’ people who lived during the communist regime without being subjected to political repression. The other group, however - the victims of such repression - challenges the regime's propaganda ideologemes of freedom and free labour under socialism, and do so by recounting their own lives and speaking from the undeniable position of witnesses. Thus, in terms of remembering labour, freedom and coercion, the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s is divided into two ‘generational units’ (using Mannheim’s term), that remain on irreconcilable opposing positions.

Slaughtered like animals. Revealing the atrocities committed by the Nazis on captives at Treblinka I by skeletal trauma analysis

The infamous Treblinka camp was one of numerous extermination camps throughout Poland, where Germans carried out mass killings of Jews. There were two camps in Treblinka, AL Treblinka I, a forced labor camp, and KL Treblinka II, the site of the extermination camp. Treblinka I held captives of various origins and ethnic backgrounds who were serving their sentences by working in a pre-existing gravel pit. Many of those prisoners perished in the camp, and it was believed that the principal causes of their death were attributed to the horrific sanitary conditions in the camp as well as the strenuous hard work of daily life. In 2019, archaeologists uncovered a clandestine mass burial pit that contained commingled human skeleton remains at the Execution Site of the former Treblinka I camp. It was estimated that there were a minimum of forty-nine people in the pit. Within months, an anthropologist performed biological profile assessments and detailed trauma analysis on the recovered skeletal parts. The main goal was to study perimortem trauma patterns to infer the cause and manner of death of the victims. We hypothesized that the victims did not die solely because of the camps’ conditions but were brutally slaughtered by the camp guards. Our results were later compared with the survivors’ written testimonies. As a result of our research, we were able to show that the Treblinka I captives’ death was extremely brutal and that the killing methods were varied. This led us to conclude that multiple assailants were involved in the killing spree. All of our results were consistent with the written witness testimonies, which concurs with our skeletal material analysis that proves the atrocities committed by the Nazis on their civilian prisoners during the war took place.

Solitude and Despair in the Literary Oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński1

ABSTRACT This article looks at the solitude and despair in the literary oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, drawing on three stories constituting a ‘metaphysical direction’ rooted in Italian historiscapes, and which the writer published in a 1960 collection entitled Skrzydła ołtarza (Polyptych). It marked a new departure from his heavily political work grounded on personal experience of the war and totalitarianism. The article engages with this literature from the author’s personal circumstances, and looks at the sentiments he confronts us with from a long overview of writing upon solitude and on the subject of ‘the island’. It concludes that this ‘new’ direction was nevertheless grounded on sentiments touched upon in his early masterpiece of the Soviet labour camps, Inny Świat (1951), and that for Herling, who renewed his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith in 1943 whilst in hospital, religion constituted the solution to despair for all thinkers with a moral voice; specifically, the solace of compassion.

The punitive-penitentiary system of Transcarpathian Ukraine

A study of the process of normative-legal regulation of the activity of the punitive-penitentiary system in the territory of Transcarpathia in 1944-1946 was carried out.After the liberation of the territory of Transcarpathia in October 1944 local authorities faced the need to address a number of issues, including the formation of a system of punishments and the implementation of penitentiary activities. The processes of punitive-penitentiary nature took place as a gradual process of transformation, as a result of which Czechoslovak democratic traditions gradually adopted the features of the Soviet administrative-totalitarian system.The implementation of the above tasks began with the proclamation of a full amnesty to citizens of Transcarpathian Ukraine for crimes committed before the liberation of Transcarpathia. At the same time, work on the creation of correctional institutions begins. According to the relevant Resolution of the People’s Council of Transcarpathian Ukraine, a labor camp was established to serve sentences by persons sentenced to imprisonment.In some cases, as a form of punishment, the death penalty could be applied. However, such court decisions were executed only after approval by the People’s Council, which could replace them with imprisonment.At the same time, the leaders of Transcarpathia considered the re-education of offenders to be their main task. Therefore, forced (corrective) labor was considered the main type of punishment for offenders. For its organization, the position of referents for forced labor was established.
 At the same time, parole measures, pardon of convicts could be applied, and in cases where trials were inappropriate, a monetary fine was imposed. All this testified to the significant social orientation of state policy in Transcarpathia in the period 1944-1946.

Scrittura postmemoriale: memoria e trauma nei romanzi di Herta Müller

Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel/ Atemschaukel is an innovative attempt to remember and narrate traumatic experiences. The novel reads like a document and, at the same time, like fiction. Through a complex overlapping and poetic condensation of the most diverse memories, Herta Müller has created a place where she and her readers commemorate all those who perished or were exterminated in dictatorships, labour camps and death camps. The challenge is to keep lived memories alive by reinventing them in the process of post-memorial writing.

Più forte dell’orrore. Come la memoria del bello vinse il Lager e il Gulag

"The contribution outlines a particular dimension of the internment experience, that “remnant of spiritual freedom, of the free attitude of the ego towards the world – as Viktor Frankl explains – even in that state, only apparently of absolute compulsion”. Furthermore, it aims to present two cases in which this “remnant of humanity” is embodied in a literary memory which thus becomes a memory of authentic life, capable of brightening and shattering the nonsense of the forced labour camp. This is the experience that Primo Levi recounts in Chapter XI of Se questo è un uomo, in which the memory and the existential re-actualization of Dante’s Ulysses overcome the professed desperation of Levi’s title. This is the same experience as Georgij Aleksandrovič Lesskis did in 1939, when, in the horror of the Soviet correctional labour camp, was rescued, according to his own testimony, by the “fair, bright and warm world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace”."

Between Deprivation and Privilege: (Former) “Enemies of the People” in Communist and Postcommunist Romania

Communism everywhere it settled aimed to create a new society and the ‘new man’ in the shortest possible time. In order to put into practice such social engineering, it was necessary that those social categories refractory to change to be annihilated. There-fore, the former politicians, the landlords, the wealthy peasants (the kulak), the bour-geois, the intellectuals, the artists were methodically and constantly repressed. Laws, institutions and people were summoned to effect change through repressive methods. The beginning of the process of building the communist society created many ‘enemies of the people’, as the communists described them, victims of the class struggle, but also of their own ideals. Belief in the ‘Arrival of the Americans’, and in the short duration of Communism led them directly to prisons, hard labor and deportation camps. Many perished, but most escaped and returned to the society that was reconfiguring itself on new bases and with new values. The fall of communism brought their recognition as ‘victims’ of the totalitarian regim’s politics. In order to acknowledge their suffering the postcommunist Romanian state offers them compensations, granted them the label of ‘anti-communist fighter’, and eventually condemned Communism as ‘illegitimate and criminal’. My paper discusses all these issues while pointing out what was at stake in organized repression during communism as well as in recognizing the suffering of the repressed in the first postcommunist decades.

The Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in COVID-19 Recovered Patients: A Cross-sectional Study

Objective Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the anxiety disorders caused by a specific event, which can be catastrophic events (natural disasters, war, imprisonment in a forced labor camp) or everyday adversities (death of relatives, divorce, carrying bags). Since patients who have recovered from COVID-19 are exposed to such events, this research was conducted to determine the prevalence of PTSD in this group. Materials & Methods This study was cross-sectional. The statistical population included all patients who recovered from COVID-19 between November 2021 and February 2022 in Hamedan City, Iran; based on Krejcie and Morgan’s sample size table, 185 patients were selected by simple random sampling method. The research tool was the demographic questionnaire and the Mississippi post-traumatic stress disorder questionnaire (Mississippi PTSD); the data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Results The results showed that the Mean±SD score of PTSD was 80.37±17.37 in the subjects who recovered from COVID-19. The relationship between the demographic variables of gender (P=0.01), education (P=0.039), occupation (P=0.24), marriage (P=0.62), age (P=0.048), weight (P=0.047), height (P=0.023) with PTSD were reported. Conclusion The results showed that 76.2% of people who recovered from COVID-19 were exposed to PTSD with moderate and high severity; therefore, techniques to reduce anxiety from the coronavirus are recommended.

Отличительные черты индустриализации Коми АССР в 1927-1937 годы

Based on the documentary sources and scientific papers of Soviet and modern researchers, the paper analyzed why the industrialization of the Komi ASSR proceeded independently of the main strategic plans of the USSR. The first five-year development plans of the Komi region did not take into account the industrialization vector of the USSR aimed at a shift to a new technological paradigm. The wrong impressions about the role of the region in the economic system did not allow to archive the actual potential of the Komi region. The country was in dire need of oil and coal but the central planning authorities and scientific institutions did not see prospects for development of deposits on the Komi territory. Only the non-economic system of GULAG (Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps) by attracting a great deal of resources managed to work through the general skepticism about mineral resources of the region, and the Pechora brigade of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR determined a new position for the Komi region on the economic map of the country.

ГУЛАГ как неизбежность развития советской системы (1920-е годы)

The paper reveals the main problems and prerequisites to formation of the GULAG (Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps) in the 1920s. The specificity of this period of history is described in detail. The author utilizes an extensive material of letters, diaries and other private sources. The analysis of statistical data allows to trace the main formation trends of the totalitarian system of Stalinism. On the example of SLON (Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp), the author shows characteristic features of the GULAG system.

Gatekeepers of Extermination: SS Camp Physicians and Their Scope of Action.

The role of camp physicians of the Waffen-SS ("Armed SS," military branch of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel) in the implementation of the Holocaust has been the subject of limited research, even though they occupied a key position in the extermination process. From 1943 and 1944 onward, SS camp physicians made the individual medical decisions on whether each prisoner was fit for work or was immediately subjected to extermination, not only at the Auschwitz labor and extermination camp but also in pure labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau. This was due to a functional change in the concentration camp system during World War II, where the selection of prisoners, which had previously been carried out by nonmedical SS camp staff, became a main task of the medical camp staff. The initiative to transfer sole responsibility for the selections came from the physicians themselves and was influenced by structural racism, sociobiologically oriented medical expertise, and pure economic rationality. It can be seen as a further radicalization of the decision making practiced until then in the murder of the sick. However, there was a far-reaching scope of action within the hierarchical structures of the Waffen-SS medical service on both the macro and micro levels. But what can this teach us for medical practice today? The historical experience of the Holocaust and Nazi medicine can provide a moral compass for physicians to be sensitive to the potential for abuse of power and ethical dilemmas inherent in medicine. Thus, the lessons from the Holocaust could be a starting point for reflecting on the value of human life in the modern economized and highly hierarchical medical sector.