Labor camp
Labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are engaged in forced labor. It has many common aspects with slavery and convicts.
Nazis (see Nazi camps) and Stalin (see Gulag) used them both as a source of cheap labor force and as indirect extermination camps.
Katorga
Labor camps were known not only for totalitarian regimes. Imperial Russia had a system of penal servitude called katorga in Russian.
Unlike concentration camps, "katorga" was within normal judicial system of (Imperial) Russia, but in all remaining respects both share the main features:
- Confinement
- Simplified facilities, as opposed to prisons
- Forced labor, usually on hard, unskilled works.
Katorgas were established in underpopulated areas of Siberia and Russian Far East. Since these times Siberia had gained its fearful connotation of punishment.
Peter Kropotkin while being aide de camp to the governor of Transbaikalia was appointed to inspect the state of the prison system in the area and later descibed the findings in his book "In Russian and French Prisons".
References
- P.Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons, London: Ward and Downey; 1887.
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