this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Crazy story about Joey Stalin. While working underground for the Bolsheviks, he was arrested and sent to the gulags repeatedly. He escaped from the Tsarist-era Gulags four different times before the Russian government fell in 1917.
Going from career criminal to the Soviet Era head of the police was one hell of a heel turn.
He was a prolific burglar, terrorist, extortionist and even pirate whose acts of expropriation supported both the ongoing operations in Russia and vacations of the likes of Lenin. A bloody bastard himself, he was very, intoxicatingly dedicated. And this trait goes through all of his life.
These weren't Gulags, not even by the dates - as they got organized under Stalin - but by the principle. It was a send-over to some remote region, just like Gulags, but that wasn't like a project of building BAM or factories most of the time, or even working. It was a pretty liberal (compared to a prison cell) containment but in a place that you can't easily leave, usually close to some settlement in the middle of nowhere. There are gossips about young Koba fucking around in them or living autonomously even from the guards. It was probably more of a hard sentence before, but by the 1910s no one gave a fuck. It was, though, compensated by him getting sent to the most brutal of these in the end, yet, he managed to live on his own terms there and prepare for escape as best as he could.
Gulags, or working concentration camps, were way more brutal. No gas chambers, just a rolled back strictness of the regime and inhumane conditions, demands, and a better control over transportation, ID checks, meaning even Stalin could've had troubles getting into St. Petersburg like he did since every bedbug is counted and has papers, unlike an escaping georgian with a long history of violence.
Katorga camps were established in the 17th century by Tsar Alexis of Russia in newly conquered, underpopulated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East. These wouldn't earn the moniker "Gulag" until the 1930s, but they occupied the same territory and served the same purpose. Hell, through the October Revolution many even kept the same staff.
"When people starved to death in a fenced off wilderness farmland under the Tsar, they had it too easy!"
Okay, buddy.
The Soviets never actually solved the problem of political corruption, and that was the main mechanism by which you escaped any of these prisons.
20th century mechanized bureaucracy afforded governments the ability to arrest and imprison at an industrial scale. But people were walking out of heavily fortified prisons straight into the 1990s, thanks to the abysmal economic conditions of staff and prisoners alike.
Forged documents were in abundant supply. And without a central electromic system of record, "having papers" was more a consequence of who you knew than who you actually were.
Places for ссылка weren't all equal. In the ealry 20th century this system was that leaky many Stalin's pals escapes it too, and actually comunicated with civil populace around their place of imprisonment. Corruption in the last years of Niko's reign was unlike to what it was in soviet era.
IIRC he even had an illegitimate kid in one.