Golfo Alexopoulos: Stalin's Forced Labor Camps: A Re-examination

Publication Date

3-27-2018

Abstract

Speaker: Golfo Alexopoulos (Professor of History, University of South Florida, Tampa and Director of the USF Institute on Russia)

Alexopoulos will discuss her new book, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag, which is the first scholarly work devoted to health and medicine in Stalin's forced labor camps. Drawing upon recently declassified Gulag archives, the book argues that the system of human exploitation in the Stalinist Gulag was willfully destructive. Stalin's camps systematically worked prisoners to the point of near death and then discarded them en masse. The book argues that prisoner mortality in the Gulag was much greater than previously believed and that Stalin's Gulag constituted one of the 20th century's greatest crimes against humanity.

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