Golfo Alexopoulos: Stalin\u27s Forced Labor Camps: A Re-examination

Speaker: Golfo Alexopoulos (Professor of History, University of South Florida, Tampa and Director of the USF Institute on Russia) Alexopoulos will discuss her new book, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin\u27s Gulag, which is the first scholarly work devoted to health and medicine in Stalin\u27s forced labor camps. Drawing upon recently declassified Gulag archives, the book argues that the system of human exploitation in the Stalinist Gulag was willfully destructive. Stalin\u27s camps systematically worked prisoners to the point of near death and then discarded them en masse. The book argues that prisoner mortality in the Gulag was much greater than previously believed and that Stalin\u27s Gulag constituted one of the 20th century\u27s greatest crimes against humanity