Recently an uncovered reporter related to the Project Veritas project filmed a conversation with an Iowa organizer linked to the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign suggesting that Stalin had gulags for “a reason” and they were “not as bad as we know.”.
History says otherwise.
This Bernie organizer is 100% wrong in fact since its inception by the Soviet Union secret police, the NKVD the gulags were a bleak violent end for anyone deemed an enemy to Stalin
The Gulag prison camps were a death sentence for capitalist, political rivals, dissidents of the Soviet Union and anyone the state deemed an enemy.
The Kulaks, who were seen as wealthier than the peasant class were completely wiped out in a process Stalin called “dekulakization”.
They were enemies of socialism and therefor candidates for the Gulag. .
With Laventiy Beria as chief of the Soviet secret police he extorted dozens maybe hundreds of women into sex in exchange for leniency on their Gulag prison camps sentencing for their husbands or relatives.
Beria abused his position to intimidate women into sex.
He was perhaps Joseph Stalin’s closest confidante.
The Gulag
The Gulag refers to forced labor prison camps originally setup by Lenin
Originally the term Gulag was for the government body who managed the prison camps the term later became known for.
Stalin embraced the system in 1930 and multiplied its occupants tremendously.
The death toll of the gulags from operation between 1923 to 1961 ranges from an estimated 18 million people sent to the Gulag somewhere around 2-3 million died.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag prison camps and wrote later that it was a place where people were worked to death.
Solzhenitsyn claimed that “communism was the cause of the bitter pages of their lives.”.
What was his crime, why did he get sent to work camps by Stalin and the NKVD?
In 1945 he wrote some negative comments about how Stalin was running the war against the Nazis.
These letters were discovered and he was found guilty of writing anti-Soviet propaganda.
He was imprisoned until 1953.
Life in the Gulag
Stories of living in Stalin’s Gulag are horrendous.
Prisoners were starving to death and resorted to eating rats and dogs.
A famine in the 1930s resulted in massive reductions to food rations causing deaths to spike.
This also resulted in the rise of escaping prisoners who were in turn shot by guards and displayed around the camps to deter future escapes.
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