Haunting message penned from Soviet 'slaves' found buried in Urals theatre
siberiantimes.com
siberiantimes.com
Feels good to have heard their words. Too bad we can't respond.
I'm a bit surprised by 1954 as the date, since it's pretty far from the original purges in the 30s, but not at all surprised by the find. The disappearances and summary judgements, resulting in either executions or the slow rot of the labor camps, are well documented.
A person I know from that same town found a German gun folded in oiled cloth in his parents' ceiling when he was renovating. The building was built by German POWs.
This isn't entirely true. The work camps were powered by convicts, but also by putatively free exiles who had been sent there for a variety of reasons. And in some cases, convicts who had completed their sentences were technically freed, but not allowed to leave the camps anyway.
Source: I'm currently reading "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224379.Gulag
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_State...
The point is there is a spectrum/grey line.
[0] See, e.g., US Constitution, Amendment XIII
Others have pointed this out, but penal servitude is alive and well in the US prison system as well [1] and it's not common to use the word slavery for that. Maybe they should, but it is arguably a different concept from chattel slavery.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_State...
EDIT: Judging from the down votes, I guess it is not a good time. Maybe tomorrow?
Oh and FYI, slavery for punishment is legal in the US.
The prison can't sell prisoners like you could sell a car or something.
I thought your initial comment was a little off-topic, personally. But the defensive / insistent tone in this reply makes me think that you actually were pushing an agenda, and that the criticisms were valid. (Essentially, to me, you proved their point: you weren't interested in discussing the focus of the article, but wanted to hijack the thread to talk about an issue important to you.)
Hijacking? It's seems a natural on-topic comment to me.
We are the future generation, and there is in fact prison slave labour now. It's directly on topic.
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." [emphasis mine]
So yes, involuntary servitude in prison systems is specifically allowed under the US Constitution, and you could even refer to US prisoners as slaves, and that would still be allowed.
Please note this is not a judgement on whether it should be this way or not, just that the US constitution specifically allows this occur.
[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...
I specifically mentioned the US system in my post, and my post was in response to the parent comment of "Where many are forced to work. I guess if you give them pennies on the dollar, they are not slaves right?" which was specifically in regards to the US penal system.
I think what you've done is (a) play a semantic game with the word "slavery" and (b) took the 13th Amendment wildly out of context. There are 13th Amendment restrictions on the circumstances in which a prisoner can be forced to work. Further, when prisoners refuse to work, they lose privileges; they are not sentenced for additional crimes.
There is no useful comparison to be made either to the Soviet penal labor system or to US slavery. The use of the word "slavery" in this context detracts from understanding, and serves to derail the thread.
I quoted the exact text of the 13th amendment. I did not quote the full text, but the other part of the text is exactly this:
"Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
I played no word games with "slavery", either in the use of the word, or it's context. I quoted directly from the US Constitution. There is no semantic game to play with the word slavery. The people who wrote the amendment, and those who ratified it, clearly understood what the word meant to them, and codified that it was OK to continue the practice, restricted to those "duly convicted". That they agreed that slavery should be abolished, but not for everyone, is interesting. If for no other reason that it can be used to peer in to the legislative process and see the compromises that were made, and the changes that the US has made since then.
Indeed, other than saying it was technically allowed by the US Constitution, I provided no other context. I didn't feel any was need as I was stating a fact, not an opinion. Just as I don't need to provide context to say that the JavaScript language has a keyword named var.
I think most US citizens do know that the 13th amendment abolished slavery, but not that it also codified slavery as well for a certain class of people. This is interesting, and unexpected.
Additionally, I find your comments such as "There is no useful comparison to be made either to the Soviet penal labor system or to US slavery." odd in the context of this subthread. I have not made any such comparisons, and you have repeatedly stated something like this in this subthread to me. Congress ratified a constitutional amendment barring slavery except for those convicted of crimes. Suggesting that this is not in some way related to US slavery seems odd. What other kind of slavery could the amendment writers have been speaking of if not US slavery?
A slave in a Soviet penal colony who refused to work would be shot or starved.
A slave in a US plantation who refused to work would be whipped to death.
A prison inmate who refuses to help do laundry will have their privileges curtailed and lose time off for good behavior.
The idea that you'd compare these groups of people, or think you can productively assign the three of them the same label, is very telling.
This is a story about Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe. The Soviet empire was literally industrialized on the backs of slaves, in the truest sense of the word. That is not something that can reasonably be said about Europe or the US. The comparison between Soviet labor camps and US prisons is unhelpful.
For instance, today, in China, you can be sentenced to force labor by a magistrate without trial; it is the moral equivalent of being sentenced to a year of labor at a traffic stop. There is an appeals process; it takes longer than the statutory maximum "reeducation through labor" sentence.
As a pedantipoint, this isn't really the case.
The Soviet coerced labor system was expansive and multifaceted and it's fair to say that much of the industrial and practically all agricultural work in the period was coerced. Penal forced labor (what you'd perfectly reasonably call slave labor) was a fraction of that. It was used for certain industrial and transportation projects and played a major role in raw materials extraction but, beside being murderous, it was also even more inefficient and corrupt than the rest of the Soviet economy.
The Soviet Union could not have industrialized on the backs of its slave laborers alone, even if it had wanted to.
Wikipedia's section seems to have references to fairly recent studies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Economic_role_of_the_Gula...
Bullshit. It certainly did. That later laws, and the 8th amendment, were used (rightfully) to remove the threat of slavery, does not negate that at the time the 13th amendment was ratified it did allow for actual slavery as a punishment.
Specifically:
On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed its adoption. [0]
During the second session to the Thirty-ninth Congress (December 12, 1866 - January 8, 1867), debates centered on the meaning of the exemption in the antislavery amendment, since punishment for crime found fit locale no only within the walls of prisons and jails but also on the auction block. In the very sentence abolishing slavery, provision had been made for its revival under another form and through the action of the courts of the United States. Those declared free by this clause of the Constitution found themselves returned to slavery. Senator Charles Sumner presented to Congress a notice posted by William Bryan, the sheriff of Anne Arundel County in Maryland: "Public Sale. -- The undersigned will sell at the court-house door, in the city Annapolis, at twelve o'clock m., on Saturday, 8th December, 1866, a negro man named Richard Harris, for six months, convicted at the October term, 1866, of the Ann Arundel county circuit court for larcenty, and sentenced by the court to be sold as a slave. Terms of sale, cash". During this same session of Congress, other cases were presented to demonstrate that these sales were nothing less than lingering relics of the Black Code. [1]
Please note that fully a year after the 18th amendment was passed, that slavery was still in use as a punishment for a convicted crime, and even after the amendment was passed, there was concern that the antislavery amendment wasn't actually doing it's job completely.
I will again note that I never made any comparisons to the any soviet system, and that all I did was note a historical oddity. As for it being "telling" that I assigned them the same label. I did not. The original poster did, I did not. We're not the same people, and whatever you see in me bringing this up, unless it's about a history lesson, then you're wrong. period.
The comparison between Soviet labor camps and US prisons is unhelpful.. I agree with you 100%, and I never made such comparison.
[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...
[1] - Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, ISBN 978-0820321660, pg 195
In the UK and Europe we see prison as THE punishment. Being deprived of your liberty and freedom is generally considered punishment enough. Some of the most successful prisons (in terms of re-offender rates) are in Denmark, where prisons are pretty damn comfortable and prisoners have many rights and access to support (and even the ability to leave the prison for periods of the day if they are trusted and to mix with prisoners of the opposite sex and civilians who choose to live in boarding available in prisons.
It's too bad, because your second graf raises some interesting questions.
In any case: this has nothing to do with the story we're commenting on.
Source: My wife's uncle that was a prison warder in Belmarsh, and people I have know who have been to prison.
More than from a fight in a gulag? Hell no.
It was also not helpful of you to post a story from 2010 about a Georgia prison strike in response to this article (and I'm a little surprised it got upvoted so much before being flagged off the front page):
These aren't the "warts of Russian history". Slave labor and terror were the flesh and bones of Russian history for over half a century. If you can dismiss that history with "there is injustice everywhere" handwaving, then you can accept pretty much anything.
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. [1]
That, I think, is a useful comparison, and one that we should be making and asking questions about.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-a...
"But given that economic inequality in the US is so high, and given the demographics of the kinds of people sent to prisons, we should be asking questions about the parallels between Soviet slave labor and US prisons."
Then I respond: "but the systems are similar in the way they both grabbed unprecedented levels of citizens, and possibly the justice of their convictions".
Why are the dots you've decided to connect the right ones, while the dots that I think are important are just playing a game?
It is good we are still able to hear the voices of the dead from the Gulag, not just to be reminded of who they were and how they died as a result of deliberate Soviet policy, but to be reminded of how badly misunderstood and misremembered the horrors of that policy are.
If the US prison system deliberately killed millions of people over decades by systematic intent to create industrial infrastructure in a nation previously dominated by peasant farming it would be comparable. Otherwise, not so much.
That the Soviet system deliberately killed millions of people over decades is not in dispute. The purpose of the Gulag is well-documented. But there are as always Denialists who will believe what they want and claim anything they think is remotely plausible to justify it.
http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-Abridged-Experiment-...
What worse is that when getting out the states themselves if not the federal government put many onerous barriers that prevent if not downright discourage employing former prisoners and those on probation. There are many jobs which require certification by government through regulation that explicit exclude felons.
The true issue is we have a system which does little to prevent repeat offenders because the government's own regulations put up too many barriers to employment after prison.
Russia is coming back at the main bogey man, don't you read the news?
;-)
That being said, there's a certain type of dishonest argument called a tu quoque - pointing at hypocrisy. It's often used to derail criticism of some terrible thing by saying 'oh, hey, you do it too', diverting the discussion to a debate about that.
With regards to the Soviet Union, the tu quoque has a special history, because they used it incredibly consistently throughout their history. The phrase 'А у вас негров линчуют' - roughly, 'but in your country, they lynch black people' - was used so often by Soviet politicians it became the punchline to popular jokes about food shortages and human rights violations.
That's probably why you were being downvoted - because, completely aside from the rightness or wrongness of your statement, comparison of the happily-gone Soviet Union to the current United States was seen as an attempt to move the conversation away from the awfulness of the Soviet Union's forced labor programs and these slaves' desire to communicate with future generations.
Prison takes away time which is the only thing a person can never get back, it should be reserved for people who are a danger to others.
Punishment should be actual punishment, corporal, work, that kind of thing. Something that a person will not like, but after they are done, they will hopefully be able to rejoin society with memories of what happens if they offend again.