Matthew “Matt” Kafker, a university student studying for a degree in physics, fills his free time with a range of intellectual pursuits. Not only does he study such subjects as electrostatics, biophysics, and math, Matt Kafker reads books about the brain, religion and other topics. One of the more recent books that has captured the student’s attention is “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Originally published in 1973, “The Gulag Archipelago” tells the story of Solzhenitsyn’s eight-year experience in the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps. This system of camps, known as the Gulag Archipelago, reached their peak during Stalin’s rule of the country between the 1930s and 1950s. Stalin viewed these camps as an efficient way of increasing access to valuable resources in the Soviet Union and would send victims of his Great Purge campaign, which sought to eliminate Communist Party members who challenged him, to such camps.
During Stalin’s rule, there were hundreds of camps located throughout the country, most of which had 2,000 to 10,000 prisoners each. The largest of the camps were found in extreme geographical regions of the Soviet Union, such as the Arctic north.
All camps in the Gulag Archipelago system were overseen by the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. This organization was known as the GULAG, thus giving rise to the term “Gulag camp.” Prisoners at such camps often worked up to 14 hours a day performing physical, non-skilled labor, such as felling trees and mining coal by hand. Paired with unsanitary conditions, small food rations, and extreme climates, many of these prisoners died of cold, hunger, and other conditions.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of Gulag camps in the country diminished. However, those camps that remained still operated with prisoners up to the Gorbachev era in the 1980s.
