It’s been a long time since slave labor was a thing in Russia, but it’s come back and from the least likely location.
The Left’s old pal, Vladimir Lenin, didn’t even wait to officially establish the USSR before getting going on labor camps — nobody ever accused him of being a lackadaisical Communist — while the Russian Civil War still raged. But as was his wont, Joseph Stalin built murderously on Lenin’s foundation.
At any time, Stalin’s gulag hosted up to 2.5 million slave laborers, usually “class enemies,” political prisoners, dissenters, or people convicted in kangaroo courts and sentenced to forced labor simply because that’s what commies do.
The Kremlin’s slave workers dug canals, built railroads, mined precious metals, even produced munitions, and died in large numbers. Labor was usually kept simple because it’s difficult for a man to concentrate on skilled work when there’s a bayonet pointed at his ribs.
An estimated 18 million people or more passed through Soviet labor camps, and two million or more perished there. They typically died from malnutrition or of exhaustion trying to fill impossible quotas — or simply froze to death.
Freezing to death so Comrade Stalin has enough metal to make the bullets he’ll shoot you with is just the “warmth of collectivism,” comrade.
After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev drastically reduced the size of the gulag and even scaled back its use as a tool of mass oppression. The Kremlin found quieter ways of dealing with dissenters, such as declaring them insane and keeping them doped up in so-called mental institutions.
The history matters, because it’s back — just in a different form.
Slave labor is back under Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, except that wartime losses forced him to import it from abroad.
Fox News spoke recently with “RT,” an anonymous North Korean dissident who spoke of his time as a slave laborer in Putin’s increasingly Soviet-like Russia.
RT described conditions like this:
Wake up before 6 a.m. to the Russian winter. Walk to the construction site as a group. Work from 7 a.m. until 10, 11 p.m., sometimes even midnight. Without breaks. There is no set end time. You finish when the target is met. Rain, snow, it does not matter. We worked with no gloves, no heating, no protective equipment. My hands cracked so badly I could not grip the tools. But you do not stop.
Authorities back home told RT that he could build a nest egg working in Russia. “I thought if I went to Russia and worked hard, I could save enough to build a better life for my family,” but whatever RT was paid in Russia was confiscated by his own government under a slave labor agreement between the two regimes.
“The money was not mine. It was never going to be mine.”
A Global Rights Compliance North Korea official told Fox, “Every North Korean worker deployed abroad must pay a mandatory monthly sum to the state, known as the gukga gyehoekbun. As one worker told us, it must be paid ‘no matter what, dead or alive.’”
If a worker manages to meet his quota, he gets to keep about $10 a month after “expenses” are paid. If he falls behind, he goes into debt and likely stays there. But workers who “fail too many times,” RT said, are repatriated. But “home does not mean relief. It means blacklisting, interrogation, and sometimes your family paying the price.”
The whole scheme is in defiance of U.N. sanctions, which I only bring up in order to mock the U.N. Work conditions described in the report are familiar to anyone who’s read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
Fox claims RT is just “one of the 100,000 workers sent overseas under North Korea’s state-sponsored labor program,” generating much-needed hard currency for Pyongyang.
“North Korea is not a country where citizens have agency,” the Milwaukee Independent reported last year following the dispatch of 6,000 North Korean slave laborers to Russia’s Kursk region. “The regime is not sending willing volunteers to aid a foreign ally. It is deploying laborers whose freedom, wages, and fates are entirely controlled by the state.”
“In return, Putin gains manpower unbound by Russian public opinion,” MI wrote, calling it a “grotesque mirror of the Soviet gulag system, now franchised through a 21st-century dictatorship.”
With no end in sight to the fighting, near-record interest rates, and Moscow under increasing budget pressure, something had to give. So Moscow reverted to the Soviet mean, importing slave labor from an actual Communist regime in North Korea.
Three decades ago, Russians failed at freedom. Now, even North Koreans must pay the price.
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