Introduction

This introductory chapter argues that violent human exploitation constituted the essential purpose of Stalin's Gulag. Over the course of the Stalin years, this system of exploitation was unrelenting, punitive, and increasingly brutal. Camp prisoners had to be maximally “utilized” and worked to the point of utter depletion. Stalin's Gulag was, in many ways, less a concentration camp than a forced labor camp and less a prison system than a system of slavery. The official language of the camps, as revealed by recently declassified Gulag archival sources, illustrates the degree to which prisoners were constituted, exploited, and discarded as “human raw material.”