At the same time as million disabled Jews, gypsys, homosexuals and died in Nazi concentration camps, other million people were killed in fields of works forced (Gulags) in the Soviet Union. Why the Nazi massacres took all the attention?

During the years of Joseph Stalin, who governed at the same time as Adolf Hitler during one of the bloodiest times and convulsas of history, one consolidated the system of fields of unavoidable works or gulags, obligatory exiles and massive deportations that the life to million people cost.

The objective era basically to have cheap manpower that it worked extracting mineral, destroying forests or constructing great infrastructure works like part of a greater effort to turn to the Soviet Union into a world-wide power.

For some historians, the fact that one does not remember more to the victims of gulags is that the life outside them was not far better. The loss of men during World War I, the civil war that followed the Revolution Bolshevik, the plans of agricultural colectivización and the Nazi invasion did not make of the Soviet Union (USSR) a particularly easy place for the daily life.

In fact, in the slang of gulags, the world beyond the wire fences was not synonymous of freedom. The word in Russian era bolshaya, the great prison, greater and less deadly than the field of forced works, but equal of cruel.

Without images

Diverse reasons exist for which nowadays they are known plus the crimes committed by the nazism that by the estalinismo. While to some they explain it historians from the necessity who had the allies to count on Moscow in their fight against Hitler, others allege more practical reasons as the lack of photographies or videos of gulags.

The schematics available of those enclosures do not show to corpses or dying prisoners. This enters within the hermetism that during all the was Soviet surrounded the estalinista repression.

According to Anne Applebaum, journalist of Washington Post and book author Gulag: a history that gained the prize .Pulitzer in 2004, in our society a fact which it is not illustrated by images simply does not exist.

Another one of the adduced reasons is that the Soviet massacres do not inspire the same visceral reaction that bring about the Nazi horrors because the death by extreme hunger, cold or own execution of gulags, does not bring about as much rejection as the gas chambers or the atrocious carried out medical experiments in the fields of Nazi Germany.

Finally, for many it is easier to watch with horror a system whose foundations are the genocide of a whole religion (the final solution against the Jews) and the dominion of the weak ones by a pure race, that one that inhaled to the government of the town and the brotherhood of the workers beyond the borders like the Comunism.

Gulags and Nazi concentration camps

The comparison with the Nazi concentration camps is inevitable. In both it was very important to humiliate to the prisoners and to prevail to them of basic needs like food, dream or shelter. In both systems the figure of the enemy was central in the construction of the state identity and the reinforcement of the superiority car-perception.

In both cases, the forced work and concentration camps acted economic and political as. On the one hand, they retired of the society the political opponents or enemy with the town and on the other they provided to the system of enslaved manpower.

But fundamental differences exist enters systems both: in the USSR the main function of gulags was to impel the productivity at the same time as the estalinismo undid of political opponents like the trotkistas or enemies of class like noble, bourgeois, or agriculturists owners of the Earth.

In the Nazi case, although some fields were also scene of forced works, in the majority of the cases the unique purpose was the extermination of the prisoners, who were directed to the gas chambers nothing else to arrive at the enclosures.

On the other hand, the sentence to works forced in a gulag was not a death sentence. Some escaped and many completed their sentences and returned to live in freedom.

However, to escape of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz or Mauthausen was practically impossible.

But what differentiates at present to both nightmares it is that one is universally well-known whereas the other continues being for many a mystery.

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