Soviet Gulag System Essay

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The Soviet Gulag System The Soviet Gulag System was a network of labor camps that spanned across the entirety of the Soviet Union. The Gulags began as a way for the Soviet Union to harvest their far-off natural resources, but evoled into an extension of the Soviet Governments control of their citizens. The Gulags were a constant reminder to the Soviet people that following the status quo was required, and that going against it could mean years in gruesome conditions. The term Gulag, is actually an acronym that stands for the administration that ran the camps, the Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei which translates as the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag). The Soviet Gulag system can trace it roots back before the 1917 Russian Revolution, during the era of Czarist rule, where exiles would be placed into forced labor brigades which would be used to reach the hard to reach natural resources of Siberia and the far north of Russia. The System was used as a tool of the government to instill fear, but also to solve some of the …show more content…

Under applicable laws of Russia and the other former Soviet Republics, a person charged with crime could be subjected to “custodial measures of a medical nature” if the criminal act was proven and the person was found “non-imputable” due to mental illness (Bonnie)
Psychiatrists would misdiagnose prisoners with mental illnesses, which allowed them to imprison them in the Gulags, and force the prisoners to take medication that would effectively make them insane. The Soviet’s misuse of psychiatry allowed them to diagnose political dissidents with mental illness, which under their laws allowed the subjects to be imprisoned into Gulags, which finalized the Gulags shift from Labor Camp, to political

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