SUMMARY:

The article discusses the rise of forced labor camps in the USSR on the example of mostly agricultural Karlag in Central Kazakhstan and the displacement of the local population it brought about, revealing a fundamental gap between Soviet dreams of social engineering and the actual inability to implement it productively. Stalinist policies completely ruined the region’s pastoral economy and replaced it with less productive collective farms. The largest of these were Karlag’s sovkhozes, which, despite their low-cost labor, incurred enormous overhead expenses in long-distance transportation and especially in compensation payments to the displaced local kolkhozes that lost good pastures and arable land. This was the cost of development of the Karaganda coal basin and, most importantly, of turning the uncoordinated “population” into an organized, highly mobile “labor force.”