Concentration camp

A concentration camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. The term refers to situations where the internees are persons selected for their conformance to broad criteria without judicial process, rather than having been judged as individuals. Camps for prisoners of war are usually considered separately from this category, although informally (and in some other languages) they may also be called concentration camps. The word "concentration" indicates a regional concentration, but it also implies the crowded, and often unhealthy, state of the facilities.

Russia and the Soviet Union

In Imperial Russia, labor camps were known under the name katorga.

Related Topics:
Imperial Russia - Labor camp - Katorga

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In the Soviet Union, concentration camps were called simply camps, almost always plural ("lagerya"). These were used as forced labor camps, and were often filled with political prisoners. After Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book they have become known to the rest of the world as Gulags, after the branch of NKVD (state security service) that managed them. (In the Russian language, the term is used to denote the whole system, rather than individual camps.)

Related Topics:
Soviet Union - Labor camp - Alexander Solzhenitsyn - ''Gulags'' - NKVD - Russian language

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In addition to what is sometimes referred to as the GULAG proper (consisting of the "corrective labor camps") there were "corrective labor colonies", originally intended for prisoners with short sentences, and "special resettlements" of deported peasants. At its peak, the system held a combined total of 2 750 000 prisoners. The number of people who were prisoners at one point or the other is, of course, much larger.

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The total documentable deaths in the corrective-labor system from 1934 to 1953 amount to 1 054 000, including political and common prisoners; this does not

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include nearly 800 000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries" outside the camp system. From 1932 to 1940, at least 390 000 peasants died in places of peasant resettlement; this figure may overlap with the above, but, on the other hand, it does not include deaths outside the 1932-1940 period, or deaths among non-peasant internal exiles.

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An extensive List of Gulag camps is being compiled based on some official sources.

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A special kind of labor camps, sometimes called sharashka, were for forced engineering and scientific labor. They are treated in Solzhenitsyn's book The First Circle. The famous Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev worked in a "sharashka"; so did Lev Termen and many other prominent Russians.

Related Topics:
Sharashka - The First Circle - Sergey Korolev - Lev Termen

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There are three 'levels' of labor camps: Mild Regimen (which were unpleasant), Medium Regimen (which were hard-labor), and Strict Regimen (in which the conditions were yet worse).

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