The Gulag Archiepelago III: Labor camps

August 1918, the term “concentration camp” was coined for the first time by the Soviets to refer to their own people who were imprisoned in their camps.

Before we go any further, I want you to register the words and internalize them. You are worthless, your life is meaningless, no one cares about you, your self-importance is an illusion, you are a cochroch, you have no rights, unfit to be treated like a dog, you are useless, you are a stupid shit head, you are insignificant and no one would care about you if you dropped dead right now.

That was the reality for people in labor camps in the Archiepelago. The labor camps were made for destruction, to break the human spirit and the human body. It was meant to cripple and decapitate any prospects you had for the future. You were meant to break down and crack, to be irrevocably shattered like a broken mirror. It meant to shatter your reflection, reducing you to a state of helplessness. Prisoners worked on digging canals until their backs snapped like a twig. Some prisoners worked for 14 hours straight in the icy-hell. There was no way to escape too, how can you when you were surrounded by water. Those who did the impossible task of escaping drowned instead. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. The working hours in most prisons were 8 hours non-stop everyday. No break, no lunch. If you stopped for some reason you were punished. As a punishment prisoners where dragged on horses by their legs until they stopped making a sound. They were stripped off their clothes and their hands were tied on a pole and a net of mosquitoes was released for them to feast on. They were beaten with clubs and torn a part by dogs like a Tarantino film. Sometimes prisoners were left outside in the snow to freeze to death. While other prisoners were burned to death. There were not enough clothes and some prisoners were forced to work naked in temperatures below 0, – 36F and – 70F. There were diseases and epidemics spreading in camps and because the interrogaters didn’t know how to treat pupils who contracted these sicknesses, they were simply isolated in cells and they lived there until they died. A lot of prisoners died of hunger. Others rot to death. They witnessed their bodies fail and decay, they witnessed their skins peeling of like a potato, they witnessed their teeth falling down on the ground. Hunger, a process that breaks down your cognitive abilities. A process that makes every other thing irrelevant. When you are hungry, you think of nothing else but the hunger. Nothing exists besides that hunger. You even dream about it. Hunger breaks you down slowly. It makes you weak, devours your muscles, decimates your immune system, kills off your will to live before you die and then kills you. Hunger was so dire in the Archiepelago that prisoners ate a corspe of a horse that was dead for 2 days, it smelled and had maggots. Prisoners made themselves invalids to get better jobs or to be released early for health purposes. At first some succeeded and got pardoned. They broke their legs. They damaged their lungs by smoking tea bags. They swallowed aluminum spoons so they can be sent to hospitals to have the stomachs open. They did everything imaginable to inflict pain on themselves and cause irrevocable damage to their health. Soon, the jailers caught on to the trend and extended the sentences of those who committed such acts, a lot were just shot.

For women, prostitution was a means of surviving. It was a curse being beautiful as you were always propositioned by a crowd of men. It was better to choose a handful who could protect you. Gang rapes were prominent and vaginal diseases were the norm. In one prison, nearly 50% of the prisoners had them. Women ceased to be feminine. Hostility and violence was the only way to survive. On a positive note, in 1948, the prisons were split up for women and men and the prisons were surrounded by barbedwire. This made things better. Ordinarily “better” was not in the Archiepelago’s vocabulary. 30-50 prisoners were shot daily behind their ears or head. The NKVD (the jailers) would decide that prisoners needed to be reduced to accommodate new recruits and old prisoners were just shot. It was 2 people per casket, that’s if you were lucky to get buried. Other bodies were left outside until the bodies decomposed. In some prisons, it was 1 casket for 6 bodies and people were buried naked in order to not waste underwear. Cannibalism was prevalent, people were cut into meat, they were cooked and they were eaten. Committing suicide was not easy too, one lady tried committing suicide 3 times. She tried to hang herself, the rope was cut, she slit her wrists, the blood was stopped, she tried jumping off a ledge but the prisoner caught her dress. She was saved 3 times only to be shot behind her head. If you wanted to poison yourself, then go on with it, you making the jailers jobs easier and bullets will be spared.

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