Topic Sentence: Prisoners in the labor camps slaved away at construction for the Soviet Union and built a majority of their economic infrastructure.
Position: - The prisoners who lived in the Gulag produced mass amounts of railroads to canals working day after day with no stop.
Evidence: “Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions” (The Gulag).
Discussion/Explanation: This evidence provides examples of what structures the prisoners were involved in.
Why: It's worth knowing that these prisons built enormous …show more content…
Why: Without the mass numbers of workers the prisons would not have been able to reach their potential.
How: The amount of people working is a huge deal because without them the Soviet Union wouldn't have been able to gain resources as easily.
Evidence: “Inmates filled the Gulag in three major waves: in 1929–32, the years of the collectivization of Soviet agriculture; in 1936–38, at the height of Stalin’s purges; and in the years immediately following World War II. Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 ‘some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago.’ Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947” (Gulag).
Discussion/Explanation: It shows a timeline in waves of how the number of prisoners were distributed and taken into the camps throughout time.
Why: The evidence allows you to see when the highest point of prisoner intake was and the approximate number of workers going to camps during those …show more content…
How: During this time period concentration camps were banished for good and none remained unlike forced labor camps that lived on for a small number of years.
Evidence: “With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps” (The Gulag).
Discussion/Explanation: This quotes goes into how the prisoners who were not guilty were set free and they only allowed criminals.
Why: This evidence matters because it overall states that the camps became specifically for people who had broken the law and not for workers who had done nothing wrong.
How: The fact that the camps eventually came to be used for good unlike concentration camps and extermination camps proves my thesis.
Transition Idea: - In the end something good came from something good
- Conclusion
Restated Thesis: Unlike what most people come to think of Soviet forced labor camps are not exactly the same as extermination camps but were produced to construct the Soviet Union's