3 ms·

I don't understand the word "including". Do you mean that almost all of the prisoners were not Soviet citizens or they were innocent?

• petercooper 14y ago
  Well, quite a lot of the prisoners were not Soviet, for example, hundreds of thousands from Poland or even German Jews who fled Germany and then ended up in Russia's camps instead. I'm no historian but in this book, people from Soviet states like Lithuania seem to not be considered 'Soviet' in some sense - this term being limited mostly to Russians proper. On the 'innocence' point, I'm talking by Soviet legal standards. People were found guilty of all sorts of "crimes" at the time, but many were also never found "guilty" of anything and were merely picked up at random to meet labor requirements at the prison camps. In this book, they're split into "real criminals" (so murderers, thieves, etc), "politicals" (people who were targeted for their political affiliations), and then everyone else, including the innocents or relations of the aforementioned groups.