ABSTRACT
From the 1930s through the early 1950s, the primary goal of the labor camp managers was to make those camps profitable and increase their contribution to Stalin's five-year plans and the building of the Soviet version of socialism. The paramount goal of Stalin's revolution from above was industrialization: to build, at any cost, an industrial base capable of supporting a modern military establishment. Society had been torn apart by relentless and extraordinary violence that began with World War I and ran through the 1917 revolutions, the civil war, collectivization, and the industrialization drive. Some veteran Bolsheviks had lived their lives only to serve the revolution and the Communist Party, and it was possible to convince them to render the party one more service, even in their disgrace. Collectivization and the industrialization drive had roots in both tsarist history and Bolshevik ideology, as did the overall concept of revolution from above.
