Soviet gulags? They weren’t that bad, say LGBT students

A UNIVERSITY society faced a fierce backlash yesterday after it launched a bizarre defence of the Soviet Union’s gulags.

Critics of the communist regime were incarcerated for years and forced to work to the point of exhaustion, with more than a million dying in the notorious forced labour camps.

But the LGBT student union group at Goldsmiths, University of London, branded the atrocities a ‘myth’ – and described the camps as ‘compassionate’.

The group tweeted that the gulags focused on rehabilitation and allowed inmates to join book clubs and theatre groups and write for prison newspapers.

But the comments provoked fury among historians and relatives of victims.

Blogger Anna Polyakova, 27, whose great-grandmother Sofia Fedina, now 105, endured a decade in a work camp, said the idea that the Gulag was ‘a kind of summer vacation’ was nonsense.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘I was shocked, angry, offended, I was shaking [ after reading the comments]. My first thought was, what next, call Auschwitz a resort?’ The row began after the LGBT group tweeted that so- called TERFs – or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for feminists who do not accept trans women as real women – should be sent to gulags.

After criticism, the group said it wanted to ‘clarify what a gulag is’ and why sending people there was ‘actually a compassionate, non-violent course of action’. Tweeting as ‘LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths’, it wrote: ‘The penal system was a rehabillitary (sic) one and self supporting (sic), a far cry from the Western capitalist notion of prison. There were regular classes, book clubs, newspaper editorial teams, sports, theatre and performance groups.’

The LGBT society further tweeted that it was a ‘myth’ prisoners had died in the camps. The comments have since been deleted. PulitzerPrize winning historian Anne Applebaum, who wrote Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, responded: ‘This is … not accurate. Not even close. No, the gulag was not “rehabilatory”, or selfsupporting, or educational. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.’ A spokesman for Goldsmiths, University of London, said: ‘ In this exchange, the language used was clearly inappropriate and we support the decision of the Students’ Union to suspend the student society with immediate effect.’

And Goldsmiths Student Union added: ‘We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.’