Why Did The Gulag's End Up To Communism

The Gulag's(Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), were a huge grid of labour camps that were dispersed across the Soviet Union. They kept the citizens of Russian in constant fear, if you spoke out against Stalin in any form, you could be sent to the Gulag's. Communism was enforced during Joseph Stalins reign, but this did nothing to speed up the USSR's industrialization. Then because of the communist policies, people started causing issues for the Soviet Government for political and religious reasons. As a result it provided the opportunity to maintain order by keeping the people in fear, this started with the Gulag's. However, to what extent did the Gulag's end up benefiting Stalin and the USSR? The Gulag was properly established on April 25th,

300,000 prisoners of war were sent to the Gulags. The conditions in these forced labour camps were awful. They had no sanitation, very little food, and slept in tiny rooms with wooden slates spread far apart for beds. Also the working conditions were very dangerous and detrimental to the convicts health. Since the conditions were so poor in these camps, it created a really high death rate. The camps mainly consisted of convicts anywhere from small time criminals to political prisoners. Stalin didn't really care about the high death rate because they were low life people, but they were his main work force. They built everything for Stalin and they did it very quickly because there were so many of them. The Gulag's produced 76% of Russia's tin, 60% of its gold, 46.5% of its of nickel, 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, and 25.3% of its timber. This greatly benefited Stalin and the USSR because he was able to industrialize Russian extremely fast with such a large work force. There was a problem with this work force though, they were not trained at all. Most of them were criminals who had no experience in building, this caused what they built to generally not be very good. They were a