Gulag Source 1

"First, the starting point of the genuinely massive use of forced labor was determined fairly precisely (the end of the 1920s), and the main stages of development of the economy of the Gulag were described in general terms."

Page 112

Warrant: While the Gulag was a human catastrophe as it treated other people as animals, it did have economic benefits for Russia. This is why it has a history and started relatively early for the Soviet Union.

Gulag Source 1

"The initial notion was that the camps would be of modest sizes—to accommodate a total of up to 50,000 inmates"

Page 113

Warrant: Keep in mind, that there are a lot of these camps... For one to have 50,000 inmates shows how many people were apart of the gulag at it's prime.

Gulag Source 1

"Exiled peasants were placed in so-called special settlements in remote areas of the country (altogether more than 500,000 people were exiled after the first phase of this operation, before May 20, 1930). At the same time the number of prisoners in the newly created camps increased sharply—to nearly 180,000 as of January 1, 1930, which was several-fold above the limits that had been set just six months before."

Page 114

Warrant: This quote is primarily here for the numbers it provides. This gives an idea how big the gulag was on a numbers scale and what it meant to the Soviet/Russian population.

Gulag Source 1

"For example, in April 1930 the vice chairman of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda, sharply criticized the camp system and proposed replacing the camps with colonizing settlements situated in the country’s remote areas. Prisoners could live in these settlements with their families, in Yagoda’s view, work in lumbering or other industries and keep their own personal garden plots."

Warrant: There were other options compared to simply torturing the people with malnutrition and holding them as prisoners within the Gulag. This example proves that it was even thought about too.

Gulag Source 1

"As of January 1, 1933, the camps housed 334,000 inmates, while 1,142,000 people lived in special settlements. In late 1932 and early 1933 the OGPU leadership secured the government’s approval of new plans for development of the Gulag. These plans called for the special settlements in particular (they were renamed at the time as labor settlements) to be turned into the foundation of the Gulag. Only the most dangerous prisoners, with the longest sentences, were to be sent to the camps. The plan was to increase the contingents in the labor settlements to more than 3 million people, literally within a year. These numbers were subsequently reduced to 2 million, and the number of camp inmates was to stabilize at the 300,000 mark or even drop"

Page 116

Warrant: Even more numbers. A million people is a good quote to put within the essay and emphasize how many people were effected by the Gulag.

Gulag Source 1

"Though the number of prisoners remained stable, the production
and volume of major projects carried out by the camps increased.
In June 1935 the Gulag was assigned the priority construction of
the Norilsk Nickel Integrated Plant (which to this day is one of the
largest enterprises in Russia)."

Page 117

Warrant: Production increasing is why the Gulag stayed in place through the Soviet times. Production meant success, and why would someone change a strategy that is successful?

Gulag Source 1

"In September 1940,for example, a resolution was adopted to suspend the construction of the Kuibyshev hydraulic engineering system, which had been started in 1937.21 The government attributed the decision to ‘‘the lack of available manpower’’ to perform work at an ambitious new project—the construction of the Volga-Baltic and Northern Dvina water system. At the time of the suspension, an enormous sum had already been spent on the Kuibyshev system— 126.7 million rubles22—and between 30,000 and 40,000 prisoners had been deployed at the Samara camp, which had been serving the project."

Page 124

Warrant: A downfall of the Gulag was trying to sustain the amount of people that it held. This proves that in order to make projects happen, they had to be able to support the people there which ultimately they could not.

Gulag Source 1

"The untimely death of hundreds of thousands of people in the Gulag and the senseless waste in hard labor of energies and talents that could have been of incomparably greater usefulness if they had been at liberty significantly weakened the country’s labor capacity."

Page 126

Warrant: Death was common within the Gulag. Death was common but unnecessary. This quote helps to prove that people's lives were played with during the Gulag and was a huge downside of it.

Effectiveness Source 1

"As a purveyor of less than outstanding examples of production organization, the Gulag with its ‘‘cheap’’ manpower also had a corrupting effect on the sectors of the economy that were based on civilian labor."

Page 128

Warrant: The Gulag was effective for a reason. It used a mass amount of people for labor that would get done quickly and effectively. It was effective for how cheap it was to sustain these people and why it was used for the length it was.

Gulag Source 1

"If one compares the enormous volume of archival information about the economic activity of the Gulag with the extent to which the information is utilized, it is clear that research on this topic has only begun. Documents from the central archives have not been put to significant use. There are even fewer works on the Gulag’s individual economic units, based on local material. But if the initial attempts at such studies have not yet met with much success, the fact that such efforts are at least being made inspires some optimism"

Page

Warrant: There is still lots to know about the Gulag and what it meant to be a part of it. While research has been found, more and more is still coming today.

Loyalty Source 2

"Affirmations of loyalty formed part of the backdrop to everyday life, appearing, for example, on billboards printed with slogans such as “learning from the Soviet Union means learning to win” and hung on factory and school walls in the German Democratic Republic"

Page 1

Warrant: Loyalty was stressed within The Soviet Union during it's switch to Communism. This is obviously needed as without it would cause mass destruction within the Country itself.

Loyalty Source 2

"Whereas democracies have the advantage of being able to produce legitimacy through the mechanisms of elections and equal treatment under the law, communist dictatorships, like other authoritarian states, had to employ other means"

Page 4

Warrant: Democracy had it's advantages, but communism shifted the way people stayed loyal. This is extremely interesting as it applies to how the Count showed signs of loyalty through his time before leaving.

Loyalty Source 2

"Or, if transposed to our case: who were the audiences and what were the functions of the staged rituals of spurious loyalty in the Soviet Bloc?"

Page 5

Warrant: This is where the Count falls in. With him, loyalty was seen as something he subconsciously went to even when he was thrown under the bus. He had pride in the flag and that stood even when it betrayed him.

Loyalty Source 2

"Potemkinism” is not yet an adequate explanation for the phenomenon of
spurious loyalty, but it does call into question approaches that focus on the
individual and his or her divided loyalty or on a supposed deficit of legitimacy of the Soviet states based on an implicit comparison with the liberal
Western democratic norm."

Page 6

Warrant: Does this apply to the count? I want to try and prove that these stories were effective because of the fact people had subconscious loyalty for the Soviet Union even when it was throwing it's people under the bus.

Loyalty Source 2

"The role of planning in socialist political economy brings me to the final perspective on loyalty in the Soviet Bloc, one offered by systems theory. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that planning is impossible without a degree of trust"

Page 8

Warrant: Were people so obliged to follow what the Soviet Union was turning into because of the rough past? Obviously it wasn't for the better, but in their eyes was it worth a try?