Talk:Gulag

I see that there has been a Redirect from "Penal Colony" to Gulag.

Why? They're two separate things. The gulags were prison settlements within Russia. they were not colonies.

If you want "penal colonies", come Down Under. We have a range of them. Sydney (Port Jackson) was founded purely as a convict settlement in 1788. It was followed by Hobart in 1804, then Launceston - both in Tasmania - then Brisbane in 1824. I think that by 1825 Norfolk Island had been tried as a prison twice. The first major non-convict colony in Australia was Adelaide in 1836.

Can we please have "Penal Colony" released from the strictures of "Gulag" please? AlanE (talk) 21:18, 6 November 2016 (EST)

AlanE, I fixed it. Conservative (talk) 21:47, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Thanks mate. AlanE (talk) 22:04, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Many Gulag were in fact founded as penal colonies. The City of Magadan, fot instance. Long before Hitler, the communists did not herd people into gas ovens, they simply dumped hundreds and thousands off the Tran Siberian Railroad in the wilderness, out in the middle of nowhere, marked out on the ground were blocks and barracks were to built, and told to get to work. Many of these gulag/penal colonies did not need barbed wire fences as there was nowhere to go for an escapee.RobS^{#NeverHillary} 08:03, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Rob, if you squint and hold your head just right you may just catch a glimpse of the word "colony" in amongst the horrors of the labour camps that were the Gulag. But if you can describe a penal colony as being within the borders of its parent country and its inhabitants arriving there by train, you're stretching things.

Anyway, my aim in wanting change was not to deny Gulag as a penal colony so much as deny penal colony the need to be described as a gulag. Which they weren't.

AlanE (talk) 23:10, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Khrushchev amnesty 1953-1957

Many of those released under Khrushchev were German POWs. This is a central theme of the Gulag Archipelago - the fact that Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army Capitan in the War against fascism who defeated fascism, was held in the Gulag under Khrushchev, not Stalin, while the Germans who fought for fascism were allowed to go home. Is this point about justice, ideology, and the Khrushchev reform ets articulated in article? RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 14:06, 6 October 2018 (EDT)