thousands of peasants flooded into the camp system, victims of the 7 August law. According to official figures (which do not reflect all arrests), the number of Gulag inmates nearly doubled between 1932 and 1934, from 260,000 to 510,000. The camp system had neither the resources nor the organizational capacity to cope with this huge influx of people, many of whom arrived already emaciated by hunger. As a result, deaths in the Gulag also climbed from 4.81 per cent in 1932 to 15.3 per cent in 1933.104 Others may have been saved by their incarceration.
