When Nationalism is Good

With the thieves out of the way, the politicals began to unite in ways unprecedented in Gulag. The building blocks of this process were national, religious, and ethnic groups (Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Chechens, Armenians, Estonians, Muslims, Christians, etc.) who quickly consolidated into strong groups and led the way towards the building of a camp-wide coalition, primarily by launching huge campaigns of murder against camp informers or prisoners who otherwise colluded in any way with the camp administration. Along with the thieves, the informers were the primary impediment to the politicals uniting together in the past. The informers kept their identities secret, denounced fellow prisoners often, and worked assiduously to root out and finger potentially troublesome prisoners. Because of this, a massive chilling effect was created among prisoners, who feared opening up to or trusting each other. These national and ethnic blocks, though, began the fight against the informers, systematically fishing out and killing them with a vigour and efficiency so great that the remaining, unidentified informers fled to the camp administration for protection