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From: desj@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (David desJardins)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Slave labor built Siberian pipeline
Message-ID: <12067@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Thu, 27-Feb-86 04:10:53 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12067
Posted: Thu Feb 27 04:10:53 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Feb-86 20:58:03 EST
References: <1720@bbncca.ARPA>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: desj@brahms.UUCP (David desJardins)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 57

In article <1720@bbncca.ARPA> rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) writes:
>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.

   I have this nasty feeling as I read this that you must be joking,
and I have missed all of the :-).  If this was a joke and I missed the
point feel free to flame at me for my stupidity...

>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 ]

   No evidence here, just unsupported speculation by ardent
anti-Soviets.

>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 ]

   In other words, no evidence here either.

>"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.

   And we all know that if those nasty Communists say one thing the
opposite must be true...

>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 ]

   So at last we have the evidence.  Did he happen by any chance to
superimpose either of these with railroad maps?  I'll bet they match
with "wonderful precision."  Or does the fact that the camps are near
the rail lines mean that the prisoners were forced to build those too? :-)

   -- David desJardins