Creation of GULAG and democracy’s demise

Using the rare post-war opportunity of the wholesale collapse of statehood across the eastern half of Europe, the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership, seized power in Russia and, in 1922, the country was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The ambition was to spread Communism around the world and build a global Bolshevik empire. Between 1917 and 1921, Bolshevik-style revolutions and uprisings broke out from eastern France to Russia, and from Finland to Hungary. But after the defeat of the Red Army in the Bolshevik-Polish War (1919-1921), the westward spread of Communism was contained in Europe. The Kremlin had more success at spreading this ideology in Asia, leading to the founding of the Soviet satellite Communist states of Tannu Tuva and Mongolia in 1921 and 1924, respectively. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over the Soviet government. He progressively purged, incarcerated and murdered any competitors to power, eventually becoming the undisputed Vozhd (leader) in the wake of the 1936-1938 Great Purge that cost 1.2 million lives. Already, under Lenin, some socially, politically, economically and ethnically defined groups were expelled, incarcerated or exterminated beginning in 1919. The security police (NKVD, later KGB), founded in 1917, were tasked with carrying out such repressions. The Solovki concentration camp, founded in 1923 on the eponymous islands in the White Sea, was the beginning of the vast Soviet system of forced labour and concentration camps (GULAG). Until 1953, almost 20 million people were incarcerated in the camps, or more than 10% of the Soviet population. A tenth of the inmates were killed or died of malnutrition and hard labour. In 1960, seven years after Stalin’s death, GULAG was officially dissolved, but some of its penal colonies survived until the end of the Soviet Union and even continue in today’s Russian Federation. Soviet-style systems of concentration camps thrive to this day in the Communist polities of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea or Vietnam. Democratic interwar Germany (officially still known as the “German Empire”) secretly co-operated with the Kremlin, so the German army, severely limited by the Versailles decisions, could train in the SU. In 1933, riding on the wave of populism generated by staggering unemployment and the Versailles Diktat, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi (National Socialist German Workers’) Party seized power in Germany and began dismantling democracy. Although the Nazi regime was rabidly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet, it readily emulated the methods of the Stalinist totalitarianism, or a single leader’s full control over all public life in the country, including some spheres of citizens’ private lives. Unsurprisingly, like Stalin, Hitler styled himself as Führer (leader), and developed his personality cult. The first German concentration camps were built in 1933 and, like GULAG, were intended for the incarceration and extermination of socially, politically and ethnically defined groups of “undesirables.” Former German colonial officials were at hand to run the Nazi totalitarian system of repression. In the course of the planned Holodomor (FamineGenocide, 1932-1933), the Kremlin exterminated more than five million Ukrainians and half of all the Kazakhs. For this “success” in 1934, the SU was rewarded with long-sought membership in the League of Nations. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany improved on this method of extermination (remarkably, with the use of counting machines readily supplied by the US company IBM, paid for with money transfers channelled through banks in neutral Switzerland) and applied it for carrying out the Holocaust of Jews and Roma (Gypsies), and for murdering millions of “racially inferior” Slavs (Belarusians, Poles and Ukrainians) and Soviet PoWs. As in the case of the SU, slave labour became the backbone of the economy in the Greater German Empire (renamed as such in 1943).

from one state to another (ethnic cleansing), and then depriving workforce of menfolk (due to mass military mobilisation) translated into the collapse of economy between 1916 and 1926. Germany (alongside Austria and Hungary) were compelled to accept the Versailles peace settlement, but saw it as a humiliating western (Allied) imposition (Diktat). Although the US was this system’s main architect, Washington stayed away from the League of Nations (LN), which was to oversee the system. Furthermore, in the wake of the Great Depression (1929-1939), Britain and France also lost interest in maintaining the LN system. Between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, democracy was replaced with authoritarianism (fascism, populism, xenophobic nationalism) as the preferred manner of government in the eastern half of Europe, with the partial exception of Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia. Finally, in the Munich Agreement (1938), London and Paris unilaterally compelled Prague to give up Czechoslovakia’s border regions to Germany, Hungary and Poland. Democracy was over in central Europe.