Reaction
of the
West
The first information about the existence of forced labour camps in the Soviet Union began to appear at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the Soviet authorities conducted a very effective propaganda campaign, using the support of many intellectuals who reported on their visits to the “motherland of the world proletariat”. As a result of World War II, thousands of citizens of other countries found themselves in the Soviet GULAG system. During the war, some Poles, among others, were released and left the USSR with the army of General Władysław Anders.
Thus, a large group of witnesses appeared in the West. After the war, others joined them. Gradually they began to write down their memories. The first attempts to present the whole system were also made. In the work “Soviet Justice” by Kazimierz Zamorski and Stanisław Starzewski, published in 1945 under pseudonyms, the first attempt was made to compile the available knowledge about the network of Soviet camps, including as a map.
The problem, however, was the reluctance of many Western societies to learn the truth about the ally that significantly contributed to the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. This situation began to change with the escalation of the Cold War. In countries where the influence of the local Communist Party was strong, telling the truth was still very difficult, but paradoxically, the attacks of the Communist press contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about the Soviet system of repression.
A great stir in France and abroad was caused by the trial of Viktor Kravchenko (a former Soviet official, author of widely read memoirs) against the left-wing weekly newspaper. Former prisoners acted as witnesses. The account of Margarete Buber-Neumann caused particular interest. She was first imprisoned in the Soviet GULAG and then transferred to the Nazi Ravensbrück camp after the Hitler-Stalin pact.
In 1947, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) asked the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) to address the issue of forced labour in the Soviet Union and its subordinate states. Many other organisations made similar appeals. The ECOSOC offered cooperation to the International Labour Office (ILO), which ultimately led to the establishment in 1951 of the Ad Hoc Committee on Forced Labour (voted against by the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland). During the work of the committee, testimonies of former prisoners were heard.
The slow actions of the UN were accompanied by increasing pressure from public opinion. In 1949, the French journalist David Rousset, author of some of the first books on Nazi concentration camps (and a former prisoner himself), published a dramatic appeal. He asked former prisoners of German camps to take up the matter of Soviet forced labour camps. As a result, the Commission Internationale contre le Régime Concentrationnaire (CIRC, the International Commission of Inquiry against the Concentration Camp Regime) was established. Rousset faced a wave of attacks for “spreading misinformation”. He sued some of the opponents for defamation, and the successful trials contributed publicity to the case. Abuse of the law and the issue of forced labour also became a subject of the work of the International Commission of Jurists, created in 1952. The ICJ and CIRC cooperated with the UN Ad Hoc Committee, passing on their findings. A number of other organisations also participated in the proceedings, among them the International League for Human Rights, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labour Camps, and organisations of emigrants from Albania, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Hungary.
In 1951, the AFL published the brochure “Slave Labor in the Soviet World” which was then translated into French, Greek, Spanish and Italian. It was very popular, as was the map of the GULAG, promoted by the eye-catching title “GULAG” —SLAVERY, INC. Within a few years, several dozen books by former prisoners of Soviet camps were published in various countries. The Soviet Union conducted its own propaganda campaign accusing the Western countries (mainly the USA) of the use of forced labour.
In 1953, the Ad Hoc Committee published its report. It analysed the situation in 24 countries, but the key findings were those concerning the countries of the Eastern Bloc, which confirmed the existence of a system of forced labour camps that served both economic and political repression purposes. Ultimately this led to the adoption of a 17 December 1954 resolution in which the UN General Assembly “Endorses the condemnation by the Economic and Social Council of the existence of systems of forced labour which are employed as a means of political coercion or punishment for holding or expressing political views, and which are on such a scale as to constitute an important element in the economy of a given country” and “Supports the Council's appeal to all Governments to re-examine their laws and administrative practices in the light of present conditions and the increasing desire of the peoples of the world to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person”. Although none of the states were mentioned by name, it was clear that the appeal was primarily related to the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. It was confirmed by the vote results – all the Communist states were against the resolution.
The spectacular defeat suffered by Moscow on the UN scene and the de-Stalinization announced in 1956 led to a change in Soviet policy. In 1957, the countries of the Eastern Bloc endorsed the ILO convention on the prohibition of forced labour. The camp system was mostly eliminated in the Eastern Bloc and reformed in the USSR. The world quickly forgot this story. As a result, the publication of the monumental work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago'', in the 1970s, was even more shocking. He recalled the fate of prisoners of the Soviet camp system, but the history of its counterparts in other European Communist countries remains forgotten to this day.
