Prisoners Should Be Allowed To Work In The Gulag

Work in the GULAG was grueling. The prisoners were forced to work every hour of the day with the limited sources of food and sleep. They would be forced to build train tracks, work in the mines, or cut trees in the thick snow. By performing these tasks, the prisoners ran the risk of illness, freezing to death, or in the case of working in the woods, being crushed by a falling tree. Moving on further it is important to say that the Gulag had many types of people that were considered "criminals", be it real crime or not. Using this term "like that" is important because these Gulag camps were intended to put away whomever the government sought fit. There were real criminals; murderers, rapists, robbers mixed with unlucky people who smiled at someone's bad joke or took a few potatoes to feed their family. This shows what atrocities
Prisoners were given very little food rations and claustrophobic living quarters. Under zero Celsius temperatures, sometimes all year round, which were the cause of deaths and inability to work. The camps varied in size, one prisoner describes the camp "…was in the form of a rectangle about 220 x 90 meters, surrounded by a wooden fence, 2.5 meters high …a barrier inside the camp 3 meters from the fence" this barrier was their threshold where the guards from above were allowed to open fire. (Hosford).[ D. Hosford, P. Kachurin, T. Lamont. “Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and Their Legacy” 2006. Nov 30, 2016.] The immense number of prisoners’ death was not due to gas chambers or genocide like the events of the holocaust, instead, it was the cold, malnutrition, and exhaustion that caused deaths. This could attribute to the lack of worldly opinion of these camps. All the press in the USSR was controlled by Stalin and communist factions, and they were not actually committing murder, remember these were equivalent to a stimulus package for the rest of orderly