Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

476 camp complexes. Overall, these complexes comprised thousands of individual camps,
encompassing millions of prisoners who had been arrested for a wide variety of reasons—
political, social, economic, racial, religious and national, as well as common crimes. It is
uncertain how many prisoners lost their lives during their incarceration in the gulag; some
as a result of outright murder, others by brutality, starvation, freezing, overwork, debility,
and despair. A figure of 2.7 million deaths has been arrived at, but this is an estimate, at
best—and this says nothing for the millions more who suffered permanent disability as a
result of their years-long ordeal. The gulag, as it had been administered by the KGB,
ceased to be with Stalin’s death in 1953; but it was only in the late 1980s that the camps
themselves, now transformed into labor camps for anti-Soviet prisoners, began to be dismantled
altogether.
Gulag Archipelago, The. Title of a trilogy written by Soviet dissident author Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918), published in English between 1973 and 1978. Solzhenitsyn’s
trilogy took its name from the gulag, a Russian acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei,
meaning “main camp administration” (of corrective labor camps). The gulag drew together
the massive network of labor camps that were scattered thickly throughout the USSR,
like islands of terror forming an archipelago in a broader Soviet firmament. Essentially a
critique of the communist state and how it worked in the USSR under Josef Stalin
(1879–1953) and his successors, The Gulag Archipelago is recognized as a masterwork,
though it has been criticized by some for its negativism about the achievements of the
Soviet social, economic, and political experiment. A counter-argument is that he had
much about which to be critical. In the camps themselves, for example, untold millions
lost their lives—whether through the brutality of the guards, the extreme harshness of
the Russian and Siberian winters, malnutrition, disease, and, often, violence at the hands
of other prisoners in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Solzhenitsyn’s work, therefore, is a
powerful attempt at bringing to a wider reading public a full appreciation of what it was
like to live in the Soviet terror state, a state that devoured its own people through the
creation of a system that institutionalized violence for the purpose of maintaining and
legitimizing the ongoing revolution required by the Stalinist interpretation of communist
ideology. For writing The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, charged with
treason, stripped of his citizenship, and deported from the Soviet Union. Earlier, in 1970,
he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; in 1994, after Perestroika had liberalized
the USSR and communism had collapsed, all charges were dropped. His citizenship
was restored, and he returned to Russia.
Gusmao, Xanana (b. 1946). Jose Alexandre “Xanana” Gusmao was born in a small
village in the Manaututo region of East Timor, then a Portuguese colony. He was educated
in a Catholic high school prior to attending Jesuit seminaries, and after graduation he
worked as a member of the colonial civil service in the Department of Forestry and Agriculture.
In 1974, when East Timor’s continued status as a Portuguese colony seemed to be
about to end, he joined the Associação Social Democratica Timorense (ASDT), which was
a broad-based, anticolonial association with nationalist leanings. In September 1974 the
ASDT transformed itself into a more radical (and socialist) movement, the Frente Revolucionária
do Timor-Leste Independente, or FRETILIN. Gusmao was elevated to the movement’s
Central Committee. With the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia on December 7,
1975, Gusmao became a member of FRETILIN’s armed wing, the Forças Armadas de
Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste, or FALANTIL, that was fighting a guerrilla war against
GUSMAO, XANANA
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