The Gulag is back: prisoners will be used for heavy work in Siberia and the Arctic

By June, 600 inmates will lay railroad tracks between Lake Baikal and the Amur River. The use of detainees appeared necessary after the collapse of migrations of Kyrgyz and Tajik seasonal workers. At least 15,000 workers will be needed. Meanwhile, discussions are being held on the "ecological clean-up" project of the Arctic Circle. Members of Putin's party denounce a possible return to the Stalinist system.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Starting next June, a group of about 600 inmates from the concentration camps will be used to lay the tracks on the section between Lake Baikal and the Amur River in Siberia. The sending of the first contingent of "forced labourers" to the service of the RŽD state railways was decided yesterday.

The use of prisoners for public work, where particularly heavy labour is required, has been under discussion for several months in the government and at various levels of administration. This is due to the serious decrease in migrant workers from Central Asian countries, especially Kyrgyz and Tajiks, due to anti-Covid measures and the widespread economic crisis, which makes Russia less attractive for seasonal foreign workers.

The Siberian leg of the railroad construction has been entrusted to the semi-public company Promstroj, which will be given the contingent with a contract granted by the federal FSIN correctional centre on the work of two groups, one of 150 and one of 430 people for general labour, cement workers and metal workers.

The company refused to comment on the n4ews to reporters. The head of the FSIN, Aleksandr Kalašnikov, instead publicly supported the initiative, stating that "it will not be like the Gulag of the past: it will be absolutely new and dignified working conditions".

The GULag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej, "general administration of labor camps") was the Stalinist system of using prisoners' as a labor force. Between 20 and 40 million people were used in industry, public works, and even more the war industry for decades during the Second World War. The most famous great Stalinist work was the Belomorkanal, the channel between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, inaugurated in 1933. Over 300,000 prisoners worked on it, many of whom lost their lives during the construction, due to extreme climatic conditions.

By 2030, Russian authorities plan to rebuild as many as 146 sectors along the masterful Baikal-Amur railway, including long stretches of tracks, stations, bridges, etc... The project will require at least 15,000 workers, which will be partly covered by employees of the Railways and soldiers of the railway armies (an already existing section of the Russian army), but the main part will have to be supplemented by the prisoners.

Anton Gorelkin, deputy of the State Duma, member of the Putinian party "United Russia", spoke out against the project. On his social media channels, he states that he considers it "a dangerous idea, which would bring our country back to the past of the GULag and forced labour, and would tempt us to put more and more people in prison". Indeed, the Stalinist system provided for mass "targeted" arrests to maintain the shares of prisoners-slaves in public works. This system was revealed to the world with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work "Gulag Archipelago" (photos 2 and 3).

Apparently the project is not to be limited to the Siberian railways. A proposal still under discussion involves sending inmates to "clean up" the territories of the Arctic, even above the Polar Circle, of the piles of waste piled up since Soviet times.

The Russian government intends to allocate over 15 billion rubles (about 200 million euros) for "the development of the Arctic zone", transforming its territories by 2024 to attract investors and tourists, create jobs and prepare the necessary infrastructure. For this project, the "ecological clean-up" of the Arctic appears to be an absolute priority (photo 4).

One decade ago, attempts were made in vain to intervene in the far north, which Russia considers absolutely strategic. According to various estimates, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean there are between 6 and 12 million large fuel drums, transported up there at the time of the USSR, as well as about 4 million tons of industrial and construction waste. There are also thousands of ships abandoned by unidentified owners along the shores. All this requires an enormous unskilled workforce for the collection, transport, compression of waste and other heavy labour, so much so that the numbers of "forced labourers" of Stalin's time pale into insignificance.