Posted on 03/11/2010 1:23:29 PM PST by Nachum
Claudia Rosett has a must read description of North Korean logging camps in the Russian wilderness:
In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia.
In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed by North Koreans. Both were in the Russian Far East, in areas once part of Stalin’s old gulag. One was based in a place called Tynda. The other was headquartered in a town called Chegdomyn, straddling a rail spur that ran a few hundred miles north from the major city of Khabarovsk, one of the main stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
(Excerpt) Read more at verumserum.com ...
I am so NOT surprised
True story: when I was in Grad School at Duke, I remember a fellow student saying, upon learning women were underrepresented in Soviet Academia, the following: “I am surprised the Soviet Union wouldn’t be more progressive than that.”
I suppose she would say the same now.
Now, as then, I am not the least surprised.
There is nothing new under the sun.
this is really pathetic, but those North Koreans may actually have better living conditions in a Russian Labor Camp than back home
The North Koreans owed a lot to the Russians. When the gulags began to wind down, they had to do something.
Lumber operations were considered “death camps” in the gulag system. Few could survive the work but lumber was vital to the Soviets and they had a lot of it.
No doubts the typical dim would like to send every non conformist away to a slave labor camp.
Well they are probably getting fed which is likely a step up from what would happen in North Korea.
And the world stands idly by.
I read about it many years ago. USSR contracted the logging operation out to NK and let them run it as they want. Still, there was a fierce competition in NK to get even the lowest ranking job in those logging camps because the pay was much better than in NK (and nearly free by USSR's standards.) In Siberia a nearest village could be hundreds of miles away; there would be no local police there, ever. So NK was just told to do the job and police itself, making sure that all the workers are accounted for. I'm sure NK had armed guards - not just to keep workers in, but primarily to keep the wildlife out. I guess it was theoretically possible for a NK worker to escape on a lumber train, but to get a job in USSR you had to have a proof of citizenship (the domestic passport, usually) so a runaway would have little chance of getting a legal job; with private business being prohibited in USSR, chances for an illegal job were nearly nonexistent.
Outsoursiong Evilson, more slavery! Why do we doubt the evil of statist communist regimes.
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