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From: rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Slave labor built Siberian pipeline
Message-ID: <1720@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 24-Feb-86 18:35:34 EST
Article-I.D.: bbncca.1720
Posted: Mon Feb 24 18:35:34 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Feb-86 05:27:34 EST
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 43



A while ago, Oded Feingold said that the Soviet segment of the
trans-Siberian petroleum pipeline was built in the early 1980s
with slave labor from the concentration camps of the Gulag.

I've found sources for this claim.  In "How Democracies Fail"
(Doubleday, 1983), Jean-Francois Revel says:

	....it occurred to the Sakharov Committee, the Frankfurt
	Association for the Defense of Human Rights, a few labor
	leaders and a handful of journalists to point out that
	much of the labor used in building the pipeline was
	probably slave labor from the gulags, in keeping with a
	long-standing Communist tradition in big works projects.

	[ page 140 ]

The French Government sent its ambassador in Moscow to go to
Siberia to "investigate" the matter.  But

	When we remember that diplomats assigned to Moscow can
	travel only to strictly defined areas, we can guess how
	much leeway the French ambassador was given to conduct
	his "investigation," which, needless to say, died at
	birth.  [ 140 ]

"L'Humanite," the newspaper of the French Communist Party, dispatched
"one of its own notoriously independent and impartial reporters to
Siberia," whose published report claimed not only that the pipeline
workers were there voluntarily, but displayed great enthusiasm, and
received high wages.

Finally,

	In "The First Guidebook to U.S.S.R. Prisons and Concentration
	Camps," Avraham Shifrin superimposed the pipeline route with
	wonderful precision on a map of the camps.  [ 141 ]


					Regards,

					Ron Rizzo