Things are not going well for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Casualties are high, morale is low and Ukraine is showing more resilience, and getting more Western help, than Vlad ever imagined possible.
What’s a troubled autocrat with a penchant for historical allusions to do? Take a bloodstained page from Joseph Stalin’s playbook and bring back the gulags.
As Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov write for the Center for European Policy Analysis, “gulag economics” is back on the Russian policy menu:
The tradition of using prison labor to satisfy the state’s needs originated in Stalin’s times, when millions of prisoners in Gulag labor camps, notorious for inhuman conditions, were mercilessly exploited to build roads and factories, dig channels and extract minerals.
The Kremlin is not embarrassed by this loud historical echo. Even before the war, in 2021, the government supported a plan developed by the Russian railway behemoth RZD along with the prison service to use convicts to build a new section of the Baikal-Amur Mainline track (BAM) in Siberia, a railway running from Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia to the Sea of Japan in the Far East.
Launched by Stalin in the 1930s, that project claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners, but the Kremlin accepted the idea of using free prison labor. The war has simply provided a justification to return to the old methods.
The idea that Putin once was considered a rational actor with whom the West could (mostly) get along with was always dangerously naïve. Given the resurgence of the gulag state? The attitude should be dead and buried. But not forgotten, less we allow hope to replace determination in ending Putin’s menace to the world and his own people.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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I bet it would put a drop in crime. Unless if the prisoners were prisoners of war, then it would be slavery. Just like was practiced for thousands of years.
The gulags hold political prisoners, not criminals.
Both actually. Fortunately, the U.S. has not year “progressed” to gulags, but we do have plenty of political prisoners. There was some talk by Dems of putting some gulags in North Dakota because its climate so much resembles Siberia. They could harvest NoDak sugar beets by hand.
Much like in Red China, where political prisoners, protesters and Ughers.perform slave labor.