Like the military, Gulag was required to have its own functioning medical system. This wasn’t only to keep prisoners fit for hard physical work but also because all Soviet citizens, free or not, had the right, enshrined in the Constitution, to medical care. Forget the fact that a substantial proportion of Gulag prisoners in the 1930s and 1940s had had their rights as citizens violated by being arrested for no good reason – condemned simply as ‘kulaks’ or ‘enemies of the people’, or as belonging
