https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/06/01/poll-russians-support-return-gulags
June 1, 2021
A poll released by Russia’s state-funded VTsIOM polling agency on Tuesday found seven
out of ten Russians supporting the return of gulag labor camps, a notorious
Stalinist practice that used prisoners for slave labor on state construction
projects.
The Moscow
Times explained that a Gulag 2.0 would
supposedly be more humane than the notoriously brutal and deadly forced labor camps established by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and fully exposed to the
Western world by dissident writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his landmark 1973
book The Gulag Archipelago.
Stalin’s gulags held millions of inmates at their
peak, including political dissidents, purged Communist Party officials, and
random unlucky Soviet citizens in addition to convicted criminals. Tens of
thousands of those inmates died every year from accidents, starvation, summary
execution, and simply being worked to death.
The new labor camp proposal polled by VTsIOM would
involve “dispatching around 188,000 inmates to fill part of the shortage
created by a coronavirus-driven exodus of Central Asian migrant workers,” as
the Moscow Times put it.
The idea has been floated by “several cabinet
ministers, the state railway monopoly and the head of Russia’s penitentiary
system.”
None of these parties seems to enjoy comparisons
between their labor camp idea and the Stalinist gulags, although the Moscow
Times said they have been getting some cover from revisionist-history
op-eds in state media that seek to minimize the horrors of the original gulags
or even recast them as beneficial work programs for the poor, much like the way
today’s Chinese Communist Party attempts to justify its labor camps for the Uyghur Muslims.
One of those whitewashing articles, penned by columnist Victoria Nikiforova of the RIA news service on May 26,
gushed that Stalin’s gulags were a “social elevator” for the poor that only
seemed “quite unpleasant” to elite prisoners accustomed to lodging in luxury
hotels. Her comment about social elevators promptly became an unflattering
viral sensation among skeptical Russian readers, who had a field day posting her
quote alongside old photos of beaten, starving, bloodied gulag inmates.
Nikiforova predicted the new gulags would likewise be
a boon to the poor and Russian society at large, since they would inculcate a
“healthier attitude towards physical labor” and serve as “additional drivers of
the labor market in Russia.”
The aforementioned head of the Russian Federal
Penitentiary Service (FSIN), Alexander Kalashnikov, insisted last week that his proposed labor camps would not be gulags.
“The conditions there will be completely different
because an individual will be working and living in a communal home, or rent an
apartment and live with their family if they like. They will also be paid
well,” he said.
Respondents to the VTsIOM poll tended to see labor
camps as a reasonable use of prisoners for productive ends, a way for criminals
to repay the Russian state for the expense of housing them, and even as a way
for prisoners to earn money for the families while learning useful skills.
58 percent of respondents thought work camps would
help ease the transition of prisoners back into normal life. 62 percent thought
“prisoners themselves will prefer to serve their sentences” in correctional
labor camps, a figure that jumped to 74 percent among respondents 18-24 years
old.