Lincoln Land Community College hosts a traveling GULAG exhibit about Russian labor camp Perm-36 through June 25 in the LLCC library on the college’s main campus at 5250 Shepherd Road, Springfield.  An opening address was given Monday, June 4 by Chris McDonald, Ph.D., LLCC professor of political science, GULAG is the acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), that operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps during the Stalin era.  The term Gulag has evolved to represent the entire Soviet Union forced labor penal system.  Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the forced labor system grew to enormous proportions during Stalin’s reign. Although there were more than 12,000 forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, Perm-36 is the last surviving example from the system. Perm-36 served as a regular timber production labor camp.  There are three major periods of significance in the history of Perm-36: the Stalinist labor camp (1946-1956), the labor camp for high Soviet officials (1956-1971) and the labor camp for dissidents and human rights activists (1972-1987).  Each period exemplifies a significant aspect of the history of totalitarianism and political repression in the Soviet Union.  Perm-36 was the last of the forced labor camp system to be closed down in 1987 under President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost. The Gulag exhibit is presented by Midwest Institute and the Gulag Museum at Perm-36.  The Gulag Museum at Perm-36 preserves, documents and interprets the history of the last Soviet Union forced labor camp.  The Midwest Institute consortium was established in 1992 under Title VI funding from the U.S. Department of Education as a consortium of two-year colleges for the purpose of expanding or strengthening international-intercultural education. The exhibit will be available for viewing from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.  For more information, contact Victor Broderick, Ph.D., department chair of social sciences, at 786.2414.
Posted on Thursday, May 24, 2007
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