Student union suspends trans rights group after it defends Soviet Gulags
‘The aim was to correct and change the ways of criminals’
STUDENTS at a London university who claimed the Soviet Gulag labour camps were “compassionate” places of rehabilitation have been condemned as being blind to reality.
Trans rights campaigners at Goldsmiths described the Gulags as benign places where inmates received education, training and enjoyed clubs, sport and theatre groups.
However, the overwhelming consensus among historians is that they were a brutal network of labour camps used by Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship to incarcerate opponents and so-called “enemies of the state”, and resulted in the deaths of more than a million people.
In a bizarre exchange on Twitter, the LGBTQ group at Goldsmiths Students’ Union described life in the Gulags as “rehabilitatory” and “educational”. Paradoxically the thread was written as an apparent justification for an earlier post by the same group which threatened to send a political opponent “to the Gulag”.
The threat was made against Claire Graham, a special needs teacher, who objected to LGBTQ Goldsmiths’ threat to target feminist academics they considered prejudiced against transgenders. Trans activists use the derogatory term TERF – trans-exclusionary radical feminist – against those they deem guilty of hate crimes for their opposition to men undergoing gender transition using women’s lavatories and other femaleonly spaces.
In its tweets, LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths said: “The ideas of TERFS and antitrans bigots literally kill and must be eradicated through re-education.”
Ms Graham said: “I thought their choice of language, in talking about lists and purging people, was intended to shut down debate about trans people and the law. I then received unpleasant and dehumanising threats about being sent to the Gulag. I feel bad for other trans people, because this kind of response by some makes them seem so extreme and intolerant.”
LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths later attempted to justify the threat to send Ms Graham to a Gulag by stating that “sending a bigot to one is actually a compassionate, non-violent course of action.”
The Twitter thread went on to claim the CIA lied about the Gulags, adding: “First myth to debunk: ‘u work until u die in gulags!’ The Soviets did away with life sentences and the longest sentence was 10 years. Capital punishment was reserved for the most heinous, serious crimes. The penal system was rehabilitatory. The aim was to correct and change the ways of criminals.”
It added: “Much like wider Soviet society, everyone who was ‘able’ to work did so at a wage proportionate to those who weren’t incapacitated and, as they gained skills, were able to move up the ranks and work under less supervision.
“Educational work was also a prominent feature of the Soviet penal system. There were regular classes, book clubs, newspaper editorial teams, sports, theatre and performance groups.”
But mainstream historians have said the Gulags, which reached their peak under Stalin’s rule, was a system of forced labour camps for convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, including Stalin’s left-wing, Trotskyist opponents and gay men and women.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, survived eight years in a Gulag and brought its horrors to world attention in The Gulag Archipelago. Soviet files show 1,053,829 people died between 1934 and 1953.
The historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, said: “The LGBTQ group’s interpretation is madness.”
Goldsmiths Students’ Union has suspended the group, saying its threat and refusal to apologise breached a code of conduct. It said: “We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets. They are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.” The LGBTQ group declined to comment.