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| | Anne Applebaum -- Gulag: A History Intro |
 | | Even more broadly, ";Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths. |
 | | In the Soviet system, the dehumanization process also began at the moment of arrest, as we shall see, when prisoners were stripped of their clothes and identity, denied contact with outsiders, tortured, interrogated, and put through farcical trials, if they were tried at all. |
 | | In a peculiarly Soviet twist on the process, prisoners were deliberately "excommunicated" from Soviet life, forbidden to refer to one another as "comrade," and, from 1937 on, prohibited from earning the coveted title of "shock-worker," no matter how well they behaved or how hard they worked. |
| www.anneapplebaum.com /gulag/intro.html (9506 words) |
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