What kind of economy did the USSR have?

command economy
The economy used by the Soviet Union was a command economy which means that the government controlled all aspects of the economy.

Did the USSR have gulags?

The Gulag was a system of Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons. From the 1920s to the mid-1950s it housed political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. At its height, the Gulag imprisoned millions of people.

Did anyone survive the gulags?

A rare survivor of the harshest Stalin-era labour camps has died aged 89 in Russia’s far east. Vasily Kovalyov had survived icy punishment cells and beatings in the USSR’s notorious Gulag prison system. During an escape attempt in 1954 he spent five months hiding in a freezing mine with two other prisoners.

How much was 800 Roubles 1986?

There has been over 100\% inflation of the USD since 1985. So the simple math is 800 Soviet Rubles (in 1986) x 32 x 2 = $51,200 USD in 2021. In other words, it was an enormous sum of money. Particularly in a country with few goods to buy and extreme price controls set on housing and necessities.

Why was the gulag so important to the Soviet economy?

Because the Gulag could provide tens of thousands of laborers at zero cost, the Gulag quickly became dominant in these industries. No legitimately run business or government enterprise could compete with free labor. With a free labor force of millions, the Gulag was an incredibly important part of the Soviet economy.

How many people were in the Gulag in 1931?

The 1931–32 archives indicate the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; while in 1935, approximately 800,000 were in camps and 300,000 in colonies (annual averages). In the early 1930s, a tightening of Soviet penal policy caused significant growth of the prison camp population.

What did the author compare the Gulag to?

The author likened the scattered camps to “a chain of islands”, and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply “camps”) and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union.

Is there any information about the Gulag Archipelago?

Unlike the Holocaust camps in Europe during World War II, no film or images of the Gulag camps were available to the public. In 1973, The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West by Russian historian and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (though only a few underground copies were available in the Soviet Union at the time).