The Russians managed to create a truly massive change between 1920 and 1950 in the fabric of their nation. The peasantry were uprooted (the dreaded kulak), the intellectuals exiled, the brave expended ("It takes a very brave man to not be a hero in my army" - Stalin), and the survivors welded into a shambling zombie imitation of a 20th century industrialized nation.
It only cost thirty million dead. It remains a point of pride with some that the Russians had no formal execution camps and no gas chambers. The Gulag was not so personal as that. A wheezing engine running on human fuel, it piled up its corpses not through deliberate acts but through the most banal of human evils - the desire to make quota, the individual urge to survive pitted against the collective, the Russian prison culture that forbade any thief to work to expand the prison but allowed him to steal a zek's ("political" or Article 58 prisoner) clothes and bread and watch with indifference as he froze in the snow.
I must not discount Germany's contribution to the count, on the battlefield and behind the lines and in POW and extermination camps. But consider this: if you deserted the Soviet Army, you were shot. If you were a partisan and you could not prove your loyalty to Communism, you were shot. (If you could, you were exiled - we need no one with guerrilla training around here!) If you were a Soviet POW and survived, you were imprisoned on your return to Soviet control. (Traitor! Why did you not die?!? You did not do the utmost for Mother Russia! To Siberia with you!)
Generously let us suppose that German operations cost ten million lives.
That leaves another twenty million for ... ahem ... domestic consumption.
It can surprise no one that weapons regulations were a Big Deal in the Soviet Union. Guards became zeks for losing their issued weapons. Confiscation was constant and a single round of ammunition could get you a "tenner" (10 years) -- actually resisting with brandished arms would get a "quarter" (25 years) -- and fighting back would get you shot on the spot. Note that few zeks survived their sentences, one way or another.
Dogs were (and remain) a huge part of the prison industrial complex. Privately owned dogs, however, were not. Dogs are loyal to their owners. Individualism. A dog knows nothing of the State and fears not. Therefore all privately owned dogs which somehow came to the negative attention of the Organs (and what a loaded term that is to describe the not so secret police!) were promptly shot.
What I did not realize is that banning self-defense and encouraging private crime was an essential part of the newly established social controls. Stealing from the state was treason, an Article 58. Stealing from private persons in a country making a taboo of private property was ... trivial by comparison. Six months or a year, if that. But if you resisted being a victim of a crime, there was no right of self defense until _after_ you had actually been injured! Thievery was rampant in both freedom and in the camps. The margin of survival was thin - stealing a man's bread was the same as stealing his life.
Another parallel: a prisoner's life belongs to the State and therefore murdering a prisoner is depriving the State of its property. Administrators and guards were actually punished at times for these deaths. But in fights among prisoners, the murder of another prisoner was a tenner or a quarter -- with the oddity that your new offense started the clock over. If you were on a tenner and had served three years, then caught another tenner (for murder or for not cooperating with Security or for anti Soviet behavior as testified to by an informer), your total sentence was 13 years not 20. So the negative incentive for killing was so low that thieves would occasionally kill someone at random merely to transfer out of boredom or to spend winter in a warmer, larger camp.
An interesting side effect in the late 1940s was that the thieves and the politicals united in hatred of informers. Previously, thieves could be counted on to help keep politicals under control. But suddenly a huge wave of stabbings swept the prison system and while the offender could be a thief or a political, the dead were invariably ... informers. The thief would take their new sentence whistling. The political was less cheerful but at least as courageous. (Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome fear...)
In desperation the administration instituted the death penalty for prisoner-on-prisoner murder. It continued anyway - life was too cheap. There was only one solution. Stalin's death of course helped; the war's end helped; the new need to process millions of people, some battle hardened definitely helped ... but in that decade between 1945 and 1955, the Gulag did the one thing that no zek could imagine.
Improved conditions. Adequate food. Medical supplies. Commissions that reviewed conditions and cases, with power to make changes. Prisoners completing their sentences and being released, either locally ("exiles") or in some cases even back to Russia. An end to 'tenners' and 'quarters' handed out with abandon.
The Gulag wrested back control from the prisoners with the most dangerous weapon of all. Hope.
It is a truism in SERE ("Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape") that the best time to escape enemy control is immediately after capture. The enemy's control over you is weakest, friendly lines are as close as they will ever be, you are in the best physical condition of your captivity (even if wounded!) and enemy line troops are least well equipped to control prisoners.
Very few people escaped Gulag, despite such weak internal controls that one man transferred between camps not only had to push his drunken guard ahead of him in a wheelbarrow, but had to take care of his rifle so the guard would not pick up a charge for losing it.
One man was condemned to Gulag for saying aloud, just once, "The Soviet Union is one big camp!" Yet it was so very true - and the truth was worth at least a "quarter." Having escaped, there was nowhere to go!
Once the borders are closed and the camps are built, it is very late in the game. These are factors to watch.
Why am I concerned that it might happen here?
If you have read this far, you probably know why for yourself. But just in case...
There is nothing more dangerous than an idealist who vows to save you from yourself. Greed has limits. Idealism does not.
I don't particularly fear Trump. The Republic has survived cretins before and will again.
I fear the _backlash_ from Trump. I fear the people who will rush forward to build their more perfect world on the bones of the old. And I am nothing but firewood to them. So are you.
Somewhere, someone is sketching out that Brave New World -- and how to secure the borders and where to put the camps. To whoever that is, I have a uniquely Russian phrase. "Yob tvoyu mat!"
I'm too old to spend my declining years picking fruit. But that may be luxury itself compared to other options.
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