Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 276, The Soviet Gulag System, Part 4, The Work.

Last time, we discussed the life of prisoners within the Gulag.

Today, our topic will be the very types of work prisoners would do.

Before we get there, I'd like to say thanks to listener Mary T for subscribing to the podcast.

At the end of this episode, I'll share how you can help subscribe to the podcast to keep it going.

Work was at the core of everyday life in almost all Gulag system camps.

Your life and welfare depended on how well you worked or what you produced.

There were numerous jobs within the system.

Some were geared towards specific specialties of the inmates, like one of the camps within Moscow, with the prisoners designed airplanes.

Others might find work in nuclear power plants, farming and fishing.

Then there were the really tough jobs, like logging, mining for gold and coal, building highways in the Arctic tundra, and factories to support the war effort.

The Soviet economic system was propped up by slave labor in the Gulag.

The reliance on slave labor for those three decades was why the communist system was doomed to fail.

Slavery was a very inefficient economic system, and communism in the USSR was inefficient as well.

Those sentenced to short terms in the camps, under three years, usually had easier jobs, many surrounding a specific factory or occupation.

Those with longer terms usually would be bounced around numerous more physically straining jobs.

In her book Gulag, Applebaum gave a couple of examples of this.

Evgenia Ginsberg worked cutting trees, digging ditches, cleaning the camp guest house, washing ditches, tending chickens, doing laundry for camp commanders wives, and caring for prisoners' children.

Finally, she became a nurse.

During the 11 years he spent in camps, another political prisoner, Leonid Sitko, worked as a welder, as a stone mason and a quarry, as a construction worker on a building brigade.

As a porter in a railway depot, as a miner in a coal mine, and as a carpenter in a furniture factory, making tables and bookshelves.

The most important thing for the survival of the prisoner, also known as the Zech, was the brigades they were assigned to.

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