Introduction: Exploiting "human raw material" -- Food: "Whoever does not work, shall not eat" -- Prisoners: "The contingent" -- Health: "Physical labor capability" -- Illness and mortality: "Lost labor days" -- Invalids: "Inferior workforce" -- Releases: "Unloading the ballast" -- Power: "We are not doctors but delousers" -- Selection: "The more (and less) valuable human element" -- Exploitation: "Labor utilization" -- Epilogue: Deaths and deceptions
Summary
A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror In a shocking new study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag, historian Golfo Alexopoulos suggests that Soviet forced labor camps were driven by brutal exploitation and often administered as death camps. The first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror
