Expository Essay

Gulag: Absolute Dehumanization

During the 20th century, a new form of punishment arose from the ashes of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the prisoner of war camps controlled by the Third Reich and Imperial Japanese government. These work camps, controlled under the Gulag agency, were intended to punish political prisoners and criminals unsuitable for the traditional justice system. Under the regimes of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and the Kim dynasty of North Korea, millions of innocent people died, and in the case of the Korean prison camps innocent people still suffer to this day. Prison work camps dehumanize those who are unfortunate enough to be held within their foreboding walls; through brutal working conditions and total mistreatment, the prisoners of gulags are reduced from an individual to a number.

In his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives the fictional but historically accurate account of a day in the life of Ivan “Shukhov” Denisovich, a prisoner in a soviet work camp during the early 1950’s. He and a group of other prisoners are assigned to Gang 104, and use this title when they are called by the prison wardens and other officials in the camp. While some of the guards treat the prisoners with some level of respect, many of the guards treat the men like animals, disallowing them from getting medical attention and barring them from meals, which often consisted of a weak oatmeal gruel and possibly a lump of unidentifiable meat. Rather than use his name as his official registration in the camp, Shukhov is called Shcha - 854, removing his name and therefore part of his identity (Solzhenitsyn 30). As a number, the prisoners are no longer treated as people; they are simply a body with a regimented form of identification to be used when they are punished or registered as dead.

In addition to their reclassification as a letter and string of numbers, the prisoners of Shukhov’s camp faced brutal working conditions, toiling away in factories in below freezing temperatures without coats or other cold weather equipment (Solzhenitsyn 95). At the end of the work day, when the workers returned to the camps, the guards would count the number of prisoners present, and if one or two were missing, they’d search the roads by the camp for the frozen dead bodies of the missing prisoners.

While it is true that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a work of fiction, the the manner in which the prisoners in the gulag are treated is historically accurate. Millions of Soviet citizens died in Stalin’s work camps, as a result of mistreatment (Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom). Like the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, the real prisoners in gulags had no value in the eyes of the Soviet government. The horrendous conditions of the camps and the meager rations given to prisoners lead to millions of deaths, and with the deaths of these prisoners the Soviet government simply imprisoned more people in order to fill their ranks. In most cases, such as Shukhov’s in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the prisoners did not commit a crime that warranted their imprisonment in a work camp. For example, Jaan Kross, an Estonian writer, was imprisoned in a Soviet work camp simply because he was arrested by the German occupation two years prior (Books and Writers). The Soviet’s treated their people like cattle, and stripped them of all humanity, replacing them as if they were lead in a mechanical pencil.

When compared to the North Korean work camps of the 20th and 21st Centuries, the Soviet work camps are a leisurely stroll. The Kwan-Li-So, the North Korean work camps, house as many as 200,000 North Korean citizens, and it is possible that this number is far greater (North Korea Now). In Camp 22, a work camp with an area similar to Los Angeles, prisoners are worked to death in grueling conditions, and children are worked just as hard as their parents. Like the prisoners of the Soviet camps, they are stripped of all identification from before they were imprisoned. However, unlike the Soviet camps, North Korean prisoners live in constant fear of being beaten to death by the prison guards. In many camps, prison guards are given a college education if they kill escaping prisoners, so in some cases the guards kill prisoners indiscriminately to get this reward (North Korea Now). The only way prisoners escape Camp 22 is through death, and even then their bodies are buried within the confines of the camp.

Within the work camps of the Soviet Gulag agency and the North Korean government innocent people die at the hands of prison guards, from starvation, and from terrible conditions. Prison camps reduce their occupants from people to work mules, slaving away for imaginary crimes. Without a name or identity these people lose their humanity, and other than what little hope they have, they have nothing.

Works Cited

"Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom." Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom. Web. 21 May 2014.

"Jaan Kross." Jaan Kross. Web. 22 May 2014.

"North Korea’s Gulags." North Korea Now RSS. Web. 20 May 2014.

Solzenitsyn, Aleksandr. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. London: Frederick Warne, 1963. Print.

"Torture, Starvation, Infant Execution in N. Korea Prison Camps Exposed to UN Panel." - RT News. Web. 22 May 2014.