Soviet History: Stalin’s Labor Army · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

J. Otto Pohl writes about a special category of Stalin's victims: “During World War II, the Stalin regime mobilized nearly 400,000 Soviet citizens belonging to suspect nationalities into forced labor detachments. The majority of these men and women, 220,000 in total, worked in corrective labor camps under conditions almost identical to Gulag inmates. […] Unlike Gulag prisoners, forced laborers in the labor army received no trials or sentences. Their only crime consisted in being able-bodied members of nationalities declared unreliable by the Stalin regime. These nationalities included Russian-Germans, Russian-Finns, Russian-Koreans, Russian-Bulgarians, Russian-Greeks, Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars.”