Health

This chapter discusses the official perceptions of inmate health within the Gulag system. Rather than being concerned over the people's health, Gulag officials were more interested in their “physical labor capability” (kategoriia fizicheskoi trudosposobnosti). Gulag administrators needed people who could perform hard manual labor in logging, mining, and construction, so they examined and documented the bodies of prisoners to determine who was “fit for physical labor.” Inside the barbed wire, individuals constituted simply bodies, either “fit” or “weakened.” This chapter shows how individual bodies were perceived and treated within the Gulag health system and how prisoners were shuffled from one physical labor category to another.