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The Gulag, an
acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the
GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in charge of the
Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...
network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of
Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
, reaching its peak during
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word ''gulag'' in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of
political repression in the Soviet Union Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist ...
. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to
political prisoner A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although n ...
s, a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as
NKVD troika NKVD troika or Special troika (russian: особая тройка, osobaya troyka), in Soviet history, were the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD which would later be the beginning of the KGB) made up of three officials who issued ...
s or other instruments of
extrajudicial punishment Extrajudicial punishment is a punishment for an alleged crime or offense which is carried out without legal process or supervision by a court or tribunal through a legal proceeding. Politically motivated Extrajudicial punishment is often a fea ...
. In 1918–22, the agency was administered by the Cheka, followed by the
GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
(1922–23), the OGPU (1923–34), later known as the
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
(1934–46), and the
Ministry of Internal Affairs An interior ministry (sometimes called a ministry of internal affairs or ministry of home affairs) is a government department that is responsible for internal affairs. Lists of current ministries of internal affairs Named "ministry" * Ministry ...
(MVD) in the final years. The Solovki prison camp, the first correctional labour camp which was constructed after the revolution, was opened in 1918 and legalized by a decree, "On the creation of the forced-labor camps", on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million. The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. Some journalists and writers who question the reliability of such data heavily rely on
memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based in the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autobiog ...
sources that come to higher estimations. Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag. This policy can partially be attributed to the common practice of releasing prisoners who were suffering from incurable diseases as well as prisoners who were near death. Almost immediately after the death of Stalin, the Soviet establishment started to dismantle the Gulag system. A general
amnesty Amnesty (from the Ancient Greek ἀμνηστία, ''amnestia'', "forgetfulness, passing over") is defined as "A pardon extended by the government to a group or class of people, usually for a political offense; the act of a sovereign power offici ...
was granted in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death, but it was only offered to non-political prisoners and political prisoners who had been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. Shortly thereafter,
Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
was elected First Secretary, initiating the processes of de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw, triggering a mass release and rehabilitation of political prisoners. Six years later, on 25 January 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labor was not fully abolished even though it was restrained and it continues to exist in the
Russian Federation Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
, but its capacity is greatly reduced.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of ''
The Gulag Archipelago ''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr So ...
'' in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to " a chain of islands", and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Applebaum, Anne (2003) '' Gulag: A History''. Doubleday. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (simply referred to as "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union. Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern Russia, eastern
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
and
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
such as
Karaganda Karaganda or Qaraghandy ( kk, Қарағанды/Qarağandy, ; russian: Караганда, ) is the capital of Karaganda Region in the Republic of Kazakhstan. It is the fourth most populous city in Kazakhstan, behind Almaty (Alma-Ata), Astan ...
,
Norilsk Norilsk ( rus, Нори́льск, p=nɐˈrʲilʲsk, ''Norílʹsk'') is a closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk ...
,
Vorkuta Vorkuta (russian: Воркута́; kv, Вӧркута, ''Vörkuta''; Nenets for "the abundance of bears", "bear corner") is a coal-mining town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated just north of the Arctic Circle in the Pechora coal basin ...
and Magadan, were blocks of camps which were originally built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners.


Overview

Some historians estimate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period from 1918 to 1929 are more difficult to calculate). Other calculations, by historian
Orlando Figes Orlando Guy Figes () is a British historian and writer. Until his retirement, he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Figes is known for his works on Russian history, such as '' A People's Tragedy'' (1996), ''Nata ...
, refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953. A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the
USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, and 4–5 million passed through labor colonies, plus 3.5 million who were already in, or had been sent to, labor settlements. Conquest, Robert. 1997.
Victims of Stalinism: A Comment
." ''
Europe-Asia Studies ''Europe-Asia Studies'' is an academic peer-reviewed journal published 10 times a year by Routledge on behalf of the Institute of Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, and continuing (since vol. 45, 1993) the journal ''Soviet S ...
'' 49(7):1317–19. "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4–5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labor settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures." There are reservations to be made. For example, we now learn that the Gulag reported totals were of capacity rather than actual counts,leading to an underestimate in 1946 of around 15%. Then as to the numbers 'freed': there is no reason to accept the category simply because the MVD so listed them, and, in fact, we are told of 1947 (when the anecdotal evidence is of almost no one released) that this category concealed deaths: 100000 in the first quarter of the year'"
According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.


GULAG vs. GUPVI

The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the formal distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. GUPVI (ГУПВИ) was the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees (russian: Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных, russian: Glavnoye upravleniye po delam voyennoplennykh i internirovannykh, label=none, italic=yes), a department of NKVD (later MVD) in charge of handling of foreign
civilian internee A civilian internee is a civilian detained by a party to a war for security reasons. Internees are usually forced to reside in internment camps. Historical examples include Japanese American internment and internment of German Americans in the Un ...
s and
POWs A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...
(prisoners of war) in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
(1939–1953). In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG. Its major function was the organization of foreign
forced labor in the Soviet Union Forced labor was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. Forced labor also provided manpower for government projects and for reconstruction after the war. It began before the Gulag and Kolkho ...
. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system. The major memoir noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both camp systems were similar: hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. For the Soviet political prisoners, like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
, all foreign civilian detainees and foreign POWs were imprisoned in the GULAG; the surviving foreign civilians and POWs considered themselves prisoners in the GULAG. According to the estimates, in total, during the whole period of the existence of the GUPVI, there were over 500 POW camps (within the Soviet Union and abroad), which imprisoned over 4,000,000 POW. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time. Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment. About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned without trial; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences to imprisonment on cases investigated by the secret police throughout 1921–53. The GULAG was reduced in size following
Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
's death in 1953, in a period known as the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1960, the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD) ceased to function as the Soviet-wide administration of the camps in favour of individual republic MVD branches. The centralised detention facilities temporarily ceased functioning.


Contemporary usage of the word and the usage of other terms

Although the term ''Gulag'' was originally used in reference to a government agency, in
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
and many other languages, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting ''the Soviet system of
prison A prison, also known as a jail, gaol (dated, standard English, Australian, and historically in Canada), penitentiary (American English and Canadian English), detention center (or detention centre outside the US), correction center, corre ...
-based,
unfree labor Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of ex ...
''.
Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.
Western authors use the term ''Gulag'' to denote all the prisons and internment camps in the Soviet Union. The term's contemporary usage is at times notably not directly related to the USSR, such as in the expression " North Korea's Gulag" for camps operational today. The word ''Gulag'' was not often used in Russian, either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were ''the camps'' (лагеря, ''lagerya'') and ''the zone'' (зона, ''zona''), usually singular, for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, " correctional labour camp", was suggested for official use by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the session of July 27, 1929.


History


Background

The
Tsar Tsar ( or ), also spelled ''czar'', ''tzar'', or ''csar'', is a title used by East and South Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word ''caesar'', which was intended to mean "emperor" in the European medieval sense of the ter ...
and the
Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...
both used forced exile and forced labour as forms of judicial punishment.
Katorga Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', " galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisone ...
, a category of punishment which was reserved for those who were convicted of the most serious crimes, had many of the features which were associated with labor-camp imprisonment: confinement, simplified facilities (as opposed to the facilities which existed in prisons), and forced labor, usually involving hard, unskilled or semi-skilled work. According to historian
Anne Applebaum Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked at ''The Econ ...
, katorga was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000
katorga Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', " galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisone ...
convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 in 1916. Under the Imperial Russian penal system, those who were convicted of less serious crimes were sent to corrective prisons and they were also made to work. Forced exile to
Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...
had been in use for a wide range of offenses since the seventeenth century and it was a common punishment for political dissidents and revolutionaries. In the nineteenth century, the members of the failed
Decembrist revolt The Decembrist Revolt ( ru , Восстание декабристов, translit = Vosstaniye dekabristov , translation = Uprising of the Decembrists) took place in Russia on , during the interregnum following the sudden death of Emperor Al ...
and Polish nobles who resisted Russian rule were sent into exile. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to die for reading banned literature in 1849, but the sentence was commuted to banishment to Siberia. Members of various socialist revolutionary groups, including
Bolsheviks The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
such as
Sergo Ordzhonikidze Sergo Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze,, ; russian: Серго Константинович Орджоникидзе, Sergo Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze) born Grigol Konstantines dze Orjonikidze, russian: Григорий Константино ...
,
Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
,
Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...
, and
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
were also sent into exile. Convicts who were serving labor sentences and exiles were sent to the underpopulated areas of Siberia and the
Russian Far East The Russian Far East (russian: Дальний Восток России, r=Dal'niy Vostok Rossii, p=ˈdalʲnʲɪj vɐˈstok rɐˈsʲiɪ) is a region in Northeast Asia. It is the easternmost part of Russia and the Asian continent; and is admin ...
– regions that lacked towns or food sources as well as organized transportation systems. Despite the isolated conditions, some prisoners successfully escaped to populated areas. Stalin himself escaped three of the four times after he was sent into exile. Since these times, Siberia gained its fearful connotation as a place of punishment, a reputation which was further enhanced by the Soviet GULAG system. The Bolsheviks' own experiences with exile and forced labor provided them with a model which they could base their own system on, including the importance of strict enforcement. From 1920–1950, the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state considered repression a tool that they should use to secure the normal functioning of the Soviet state system and preserve and strengthen their positions within their social base, the working class (when the Bolsheviks took power, peasants represented 80% of the population). In the midst of the
Russian Civil War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Russian Civil War , partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I , image = , caption = Clockwise from top left: {{flatlist, *Soldiers ...
,
Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
and the Bolsheviks established a "special" prison camp system, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the Cheka. These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had a distinctly political purpose. These early camps of the GULAG system were introduced in order to isolate and eliminate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements, whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the
dictatorship of the proletariat In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a condition in which the proletariat holds state power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the ...
. Forced labor as a "method of reeducation" was applied in the Solovki prison camp as early as the 1920s,Applebaum, "Gulag: A History", Chapter 3 based on
Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...
's experiments with forced labor camps for Czech war prisoners from 1918 and his proposals to introduce "compulsory labor service" voiced in ''
Terrorism and Communism ''Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky'' (German: ''Terrorismus und Kommunismus: Anti-Kautsky;'' Russian: ''Терроризм и Коммунизм)'' is a book by Soviet Communist Party leader Leon Trotsky. First published in Germa ...
''. Various categories of prisoners were defined: petty criminals, POWs of the
Russian Civil War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Russian Civil War , partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I , image = , caption = Clockwise from top left: {{flatlist, *Soldiers ...
, officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, political enemies, dissidents and other people deemed dangerous for the state. In the first decade of Soviet rule, the judicial and penal systems were neither unified nor coordinated, and there was a distinction between criminal prisoners and political or "special" prisoners. The "traditional" judicial and prison system, which dealt with criminal prisoners, were first overseen by The People's Commissariat of Justice until 1922, after which they were overseen by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, also known as the
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
. The Cheka and its successor organizations, the GPU or
State Political Directorate The State Political Directorate (also translated as the State Political Administration) (GPU) was the intelligence service and secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) from February 6, 1922, to December 29, 1922, ...
and the OGPU, oversaw political prisoners and the "special" camps to which they were sent. In April 1929, the judicial distinctions between criminal and political prisoners were eliminated, and control of the entire Soviet penal system turned over to the OGPU. In 1928 there were 30,000 individuals interned; the authorities were opposed to compelled labor. In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration wrote:
The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing "golden sweat" from them, the organisation of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.
The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps" (russian: исправи́тельно-трудовые лагеря, ), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree from the
Sovnarkom The Councils of People's Commissars (SNK; russian: Совет народных комиссаров (СНК), ''Sovet narodnykh kommissarov''), commonly known as the ''Sovnarkom'' (Совнарком), were the highest executive authorities of ...
of July 11, 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of the Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929. One of the Gulag system founders was
Naftaly Frenkel Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel (russian: Нафталий Аронович Френкель; 1883 in Haifa – 1960 in Moscow) was a Soviet security officer and member of the Soviet secret police. Frenkel is best known for his role in the organisatio ...
. In 1923 he was arrested for illegally crossing borders and smuggling. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor at Solovki, which later came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag". While serving his sentence he wrote a letter to the camp administration detailing a number of "productivity improvement" proposals including the infamous system of labor exploitation whereas the inmates' food rations were to be linked to their rate of production, a proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). This notorious you-eat-as-you-work system would often kill weaker prisoners in weeks and caused countless casualties. The letter caught the attention of a number of high communist officials including
Genrikh Yagoda Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda ( rus, Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да, Genrikh Grigor'yevich Yagoda, born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda; 7 November 1891 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director ...
and Frenkel soon went from being an inmate to becoming a camp commander and an important Gulag official. His proposals soon saw widespread adoption in the Gulag system. After having appeared as an instrument and place for isolating counter-revolutionary and criminal elements, the Gulag, because of its principle of "correction by forced labor", it quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. Hence it is followed by one more important reason for the constancy of the repressive policy, namely, the state's interest in unremitting rates of receiving a cheap labor force that was forcibly used, mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north. The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions.


Formation and expansion under Stalin

The Gulag was an administration body that watched over the camps; eventually its name would be used for these camps retrospectively. After Lenin's death in 1924,
Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
was able to take control of the government, and began to form the gulag system. On June 27, 1929, the Politburo created a system of self-supporting camps that would eventually replace the existing prisons around the country. These prisons were meant to receive inmates that received a prison sentence that exceeded three years. Prisoners that had a shorter prison sentence than three years were to remain in the prison system that was still under the purview of the
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
. The purpose of these new camps was to colonise the remote and inhospitable environments throughout the Soviet Union. These changes took place around the same time that Stalin started to institute collectivisation and rapid industrial development.
Collectivisation Collective farming and communal farming are various types of, "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member- ...
resulted in a large scale purge of peasants and so-called
Kulaks Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ov ...
. The Kulaks were supposedly wealthy (comparatively to other Soviet peasants) and were considered to be capitalists by the state, and by extension enemies of socialism. The term would also become associated with anyone who opposed or even seemed unsatisfied with the Soviet government. By late 1929 Stalin began a program known as '' dekulakization''. Stalin demanded that the kulak class be completely wiped out, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of Soviet peasants. In a mere four months, 60,000 people were sent to the camps and another 154,000 exiled. This was only the beginning of the ''dekulakisation'' process, however. In 1931 alone 1,803,392 people were exiled. Although these massive relocation processes were successful in getting a large potential free forced labor work force where they needed to be, that is about all it was successful at doing. The " special settlers", as the Soviet government referred to them, all lived on starvation level rations, and many people starved to death in the camps, and anyone who was healthy enough to escape tried to do just that. This resulted in the government having to give rations to a group of people they were getting hardly any use out of, and was just costing the Soviet government money. The Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) quickly realised the problem, and began to reform the ''dekulakisation'' process. To help prevent the mass escapes the OGPU started to recruit people within the colony to help stop people who attempted to leave, and set up ambushes around known popular escape routes. The OGPU also attempted to raise the living conditions in these camps that would not encourage people to actively try and escape, and Kulaks were promised that they would regain their rights after five years. Even these revisions ultimately failed to resolve the problem, and the ''dekulakisation'' process was a failure in providing the government with a steady forced labor force. These prisoners were also lucky to be in the gulag in the early 1930s. Prisoners were relatively well off compared to what the prisoners would have to go through in the final years of the gulag. The Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930, as the GULAG by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the
Sovnarkom The Councils of People's Commissars (SNK; russian: Совет народных комиссаров (СНК), ''Sovet narodnykh kommissarov''), commonly known as the ''Sovnarkom'' (Совнарком), were the highest executive authorities of ...
order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930. It was renamed as the GULAG in November of that year. The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis.See, e.g. Jakobson, Michael. 1993. ''Origins of the GULag: The Soviet Prison Camp System 1917–34''. Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and was organized in 1969 as successor to the University of Kentucky Press. The university had sponsored scholarly publication since 1943. In 194 ...
. p. 88.
See, e.g. Ivanova, Galina M. 2000. ''Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Totalitarian System''. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. ch. 2. In any case, the development of the camp system followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet industrialisation campaign. Most of the camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas, as well as the realisation of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects. The plan to achieve these goals with " special settlements" instead of labor camps was dropped after the revealing of the
Nazino affair The Nazino tragedy (russian: Назинская трагедия, Nazinskaya tragediya) was the mass deportation of about 6,700 prisoners to Nazino Island, located on the Ob River in West Siberian Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Tomsk Obl ...
in 1933. The 1931–32 archives indicate the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; while in 1935, approximately 800,000 were in camps and 300,000 in colonies. Gulag population reached a peak value (1.5 million) in 1941, gradually decreased during the war and then started to grow again, achieving a maximum by 1953. Besides Gulag camps, a significant amount of prisoners, which confined prisoners serving short sentence terms. In the early 1930s, a tightening of the Soviet penal policy caused a significant growth of the prison camp population. During the
Great Purge The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secret ...
of 1937–38, mass arrests caused another increase in inmate numbers. Hundreds of thousands of persons were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the multiple passages of the notorious
Article 58 Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times. In particular, its Article 58-1 was updated by the listed sub-articles and ...
of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary activities". Under NKVD Order No. 00447, tens of thousands of Gulag inmates were executed in 1937–38 for "continuing counterrevolutionary activities". Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased more than eight times, and the number of prisoners with high education increased five times. It resulted in their increased share in the overall composition of the camp prisoners. Among the camp prisoners, the number and share of the intelligentsia was growing at the quickest pace. Distrust, hostility, and even hatred for the intelligentsia was a common characteristic of the Soviet leaders. Information regarding the imprisonment trends and consequences for the intelligentsia derive from the extrapolations of Viktor Zemskov from a collection of prison camp population movements data.


During World War II


Political role

On the eve of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, Soviet archives indicate a combined camp and colony population upwards of 1.6 million in 1939, according to V. P. Kozlov.See, for example, Gulaga, Naselenie. 2004. " sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomakh." ''Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov'', vol. 4, edited by V. P. Kozlov et al. Moskva:
ROSSPEN ROSSPEN or Political Encyclopedia Publishers (russian: РОССПЭН, Издательство «Политическая энциклопедия») is a Russian academic publisher. It is a major publisher of archival materials and research works ...
.
Anne Applebaum Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked at ''The Econ ...
and
Steven Rosefielde Steven R. Rosefielde (born 1942) is professor of comparative economic systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. ''Red Holocaust'' In ''Red Holocaust'', Rosefield ...
estimate that 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in Gulag system's prison camps and colonies when the war started. After the
German invasion of Poland The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week afte ...
that marked the start of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940 the Soviet Union occupied
Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...
, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political and anti-state (espionage, terrorism) crimes in the USSR in 1939–41 was 211,106. Approximately 300,000
Polish prisoners of war Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
were captured by the USSR during and after the "Polish Defensive War". Encyklopedia PWNbr>'KAMPANIA WRZEŚNIOWA 1939'
, last retrieved on December 10, 2005, Polish language
Almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered (see
Katyn massacre The Katyn massacre, "Katyń crime"; russian: link=yes, Катынская резня ''Katynskaya reznya'', "Katyn massacre", or russian: link=no, Катынский расстрел, ''Katynsky rasstrel'', "Katyn execution" was a series of m ...
) or sent to Gulag. Of the 10,000–12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940–41, most prisoners of war, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the
Polish Armed Forces in the East The Polish Armed Forces in the East ( pl, Polskie Siły Zbrojne na Wschodzie), also called Polish Army in the USSR, were the Polish Armed Forces, Polish military forces established in the Soviet Union during World War II. Two armies were formed ...
. Out of General Anders' 80,000 evacuees from Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947. During the
Great Patriotic War The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Poland and other Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltics), and Sou ...
, Gulag populations declined sharply due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942–43. In the winter of 1941 a quarter of the Gulag's population died of starvation. 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941–43, from a combination of their harsh working conditions and the famine caused by the German invasion. This period accounts for about half of all gulag deaths, according to Russian statistics. In 1943, the term ''
katorga Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', " galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisone ...
works'' () was reintroduced. They were initially intended for Nazi collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners (for example, members of deported peoples who fled from exile) were also sentenced to "katorga works". Prisoners sentenced to "katorga works" were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime and many of them perished.


Economic role

Up until World War II, the Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet "camp economy". Right before the war, forced labor provided 46.5% of the nation's
nickel Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow ...
, 76% of its
tin Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn (from la, stannum) and atomic number 50. Tin is a silvery-coloured metal. Tin is soft enough to be cut with little force and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, t ...
, 40% of its
cobalt Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, p ...
, 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25.3% of its timber. And in preparation for war, the NKVD put up many more factories and built highways and railroads. The Gulag quickly switched to the production of arms and supplies for the army after fighting began. At first, transportation remained a priority. In 1940 the NKVD focused most of its energy on railroad construction. This would prove extremely important when the German advance into the Soviet Union started in 1941. In addition, factories converted to produce ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Moreover, the NKVD gathered skilled workers and specialists from throughout the Gulag into 380 special colonies which produced tanks, aircraft, armaments, and ammunition. Despite its low capital costs, the camp economy suffered from serious flaws. For one, actual productivity almost never matched estimates: the estimates proved far too optimistic. In addition, scarcity of machinery and tools plagued the camps and the tools that the camps did have quickly broke. The Eastern Siberian Trust of the Chief Administration of Camps for Highway Construction destroyed ninety-four trucks in just three years. But the greatest problem was simple – forced labor was less efficient than free labor. In fact, prisoners in the Gulag were, on average, half as productive as free laborers in the USSR at the time, which may be partially explained by malnutrition. To make up for this disparity, the NKVD worked prisoners harder than ever. To meet rising demand, prisoners worked longer and longer hours, and on lower food-rations than ever before. A camp administrator said in a meeting: "There are cases when a prisoner is given only four or five hours out of twenty-four for rest, which significantly lowers his productivity." In the words of a former Gulag prisoner: "By the spring of 1942, the camp ceased to function. It was difficult to find people who were even able to gather firewood or bury the dead." The scarcity of food stemmed in part from the general strain on the entire Soviet Union, but also the lack of central aid to the Gulag during the war. The central government focused all its attention on the military and left the camps to their own devices. In 1942 the Gulag set up the Supply Administration to find their own food and industrial goods. During this time, not only did food become scarce, but the NKVD limited rations in an attempt to motivate the prisoners to work harder for more food, a policy that lasted until 1948. In addition to food shortages, the Gulag suffered from labor scarcity at the beginning of the war. The
Great Terror The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
of 1936–1938 had provided a large supply of free labor, but by the start of World War II the purges had slowed down. In order to complete all of their projects, camp administrators moved prisoners from project to project. To improve the situation, laws were implemented in mid-1940 that allowed giving short camp sentences (4 months or a year) to those convicted of petty theft, hooliganism, or labor-discipline infractions. By January 1941 the Gulag workforce had increased by approximately 300,000 prisoners. But in 1942 serious food shortages began, and camp populations dropped again. The camps lost still more prisoners to the war effort as the Soviet Union went into a total war footing in June 1941. Many laborers received early releases so that they could be drafted and sent to the front. Even as the pool of workers shrank, demand for outputs continued to grow rapidly. As a result, the Soviet government pushed the Gulag to "do more with less". With fewer able-bodied workers and few supplies from outside the camp system, camp administrators had to find a way to maintain production. The solution they found was to push the remaining prisoners still harder. The NKVD employed a system of setting unrealistically high production goals, straining resources in an attempt to encourage higher productivity. As the Axis armies pushed into Soviet territory from June 1941 on, labor resources became further strained, and many of the camps had to evacuate out of Western Russia. From the beginning of the war to halfway through 1944, 40 camps were set up, and 69 were disbanded. During evacuations, machinery received priority, leaving prisoners to reach safety on foot. The speed of
Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...
's advance prevented the evacuation of all laborers in good time, and the NKVD massacred many to prevent them from falling into German hands. While this practice denied the Germans a source of free labor, it also further restricted the Gulag's capacity to keep up with the Red Army's demands. When the tide of the war turned, however, and the Soviets started pushing the Axis invaders back, fresh batches of laborers replenished the camps. As the Red Army recaptured territories from the Germans, an influx of Soviet ex-POWs greatly increased the Gulag population.


After World War II

After World War II the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies, again, rose sharply, reaching approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 million of whom were in camps). When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, as many as two million former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated into the USSR. On February 11, 1945, at the conclusion of the
Yalta Conference The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...
, the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
and
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union. One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets.
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
and
U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left the Russian Empire and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947. Multiple sources state that Soviet POWs, on their return to the Soviet Union, were treated as
traitor Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...
s (see Order No. 270). According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving
Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag. However, that is a confusion with two other types of camps. During and after World War II, freed POWs went to special "filtration" camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 percent were cleared, and about 8 percent were arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Furthermore, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated Ostarbeiter, POWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, the major part of the population of these camps were cleared by NKVD and either sent home or conscripted (see table for details).Земсков В.Н. К вопросу о репатриации советских граждан. 1944–1951 годы // История СССР. 1990. № 4 Zemskov V.N. On repatriation of Soviet citizens. Istoriya SSSR., 1990, No.4 226,127 out of 1,539,475 POWs were transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag. After
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
's defeat, ten NKVD-run "special camps" subordinate to the Gulag were set up in the
Soviet Occupation Zone The Soviet Occupation Zone ( or german: Ostzone, label=none, "East Zone"; , ''Sovetskaya okkupatsionnaya zona Germanii'', "Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany") was an area of Germany in Central Europe that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a ...
of post-war Germany. These "special camps" were former Stalags, prisons, or
Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as con ...
such as Sachsenhausen (special camp number 7) and
Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
(special camp number 2). According to German government estimates "65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them." According to German researchers, Sachsenhausen, where 12,500 Soviet era victims have been uncovered, should be seen as an integral part of the Gulag system. Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms, sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At the beginning of 1953, the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners. In 1948 the system of "special camps" was established exclusively for a "special contingent" of
political prisoner A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although n ...
s, convicted according to the more severe sub-articles of
Article 58 Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times. In particular, its Article 58-1 was updated by the listed sub-articles and ...
(Enemies of people): treason, espionage, terrorism, etc., for various real political opponents, such as
Trotskyites Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
, "nationalists" (
Ukrainian nationalism Ukrainian nationalism refers to the promotion of the unity of Ukrainians as a people and it also refers to the promotion of the identity of Ukraine as a nation state. The nation building that arose as nationalism grew following the French Revol ...
),
white émigré White Russian émigrés were Russians who emigrated from the territory of the former Russian Empire in the wake of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Russian Civil War (1917–1923), and who were in opposition to the revolutionary Bolshevik commun ...
, as well as for fabricated ones. The state continued to maintain the extensive camp system for a while after Stalin's death in March 1953, although the period saw the grip of the camp authorities weaken, and a number of conflicts and uprisings occur (''see''
Bitch Wars The Bitch Wars, or Suka Wars (russian: Сучьи войны , translit= ''Suchyi voyny '' or in singular: russian: Сучья война , translit= ''Suchya voyna''), occurred in the Soviet Gulag labor-camp system between 1945 and 1953, around ...
;
Kengir uprising The Kengir uprising was a prisoner rebellion that occurred in Kengir (Steplag), a Soviet labor camp for political prisoners, during May and June of 1954. Its duration and intensity distinguished it from other Gulag rebellions during the same peri ...
;
Vorkuta uprising The Vorkuta Uprising was a major uprising of forced labor camp inmates at the Vorkuta Gulag in Vorkuta, Russian SFSR, USSR from 19 July (or 22 July) to 1 August 1953, shortly after the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria. The uprising was violently stopp ...
). The
amnesty Amnesty (from the Ancient Greek ἀμνηστία, ''amnestia'', "forgetfulness, passing over") is defined as "A pardon extended by the government to a group or class of people, usually for a political offense; the act of a sovereign power offici ...
in March 1953 was limited to non-political prisoners and for political prisoners sentenced to not more than 5 years, therefore mostly those convicted for common crimes were then freed. The release of political prisoners started in 1954 and became widespread, and also coupled with mass rehabilitations, after
Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
's denunciation of Stalinism in his
Secret Speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», «''O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh''»), popularly known as the "Secret Speech" (russian: секре ...
at the 20th Congress of the
CPSU "Hymn of the Bolshevik Party" , headquarters = 4 Staraya Square, Moscow , general_secretary = Vladimir Lenin (first) Mikhail Gorbachev (last) , founded = , banned = , founder = Vladimir Lenin , newspaper ...
in February 1956. The ''Gulag'' institution was closed by the
MVD The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD; russian: Министерство внутренних дел (МВД), ''Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del'') is the interior ministry of Russia. The MVD is responsible for law enfor ...
order No 020 of January 25, 1960 Memorial http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/r1/r1-4.htm but forced labor colonies for political and criminal prisoners continued to exist. Political prisoners continued to be kept in one of the most famous camps Perm-36 until 1987 when it was closed. The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population, informally or formally continues many practices endemic to the ''Gulag'' system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation. In the late 2000s, some human rights activists accused authorities of gradual removal of Gulag remembrance from places such as Perm-36 and Solovki prison camp. According to
Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...
, "At its height the Gulag consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000–10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railroads), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed tens of thousands of prisoners each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 million".


Death toll

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million (see History of Gulag population estimates). Mortality in Gulag camps in 1934–40 was 4–6 times higher than average in the Soviet Union. Post-1991 research by historians accessing archival materials brought this range down considerably. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. It was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death,Michael Ellman
Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments.
''Europe-Asia Studies'', Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov. 2002), pp. 1151–1172
Applebaum, Anne (2003) '' Gulag: A History.'' Doubleday. pg 583: "both archives and memoirs indicate that it was a common practice in many camps to release prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp death statistics." so a combined statistics on mortality ''in the camps'' and mortality ''caused by the camps'' was higher. The tentative historical consensus is that, of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.6 million Rosefielde, Steven. 2009. '' Red Holocaust.''
Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...
. . p. 67 "...more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537"; pg 77: "The best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."
and 1.76 million perished as a result of their detention, and about half of all deaths occurred between 1941 and 1943 following the German invasion."Demographic Losses Due to Repressions"
by Anatoly Vishnevsky, Director of the Centre for Human Demography and Ecology,
Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across ...
,
If prisoner deaths from labor colonies and special settlements are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, according to J. Otto Pohl's incomplete data.Pohl, ''The Stalinist Penal System'', p. 131. In her recent study, Golfo Alexopoulos attempted to challenge this consensus figure by encompassing those whose life was shortened due to GULAG conditions. Alexopoulos concluded from her research that a systematic practice of the Gulag was to release sick prisoners on the verge of death; and that all prisoners who received the health classification "invalid," "light physical labor," "light individualised labor," or "physically defective" that together according to Alexopoulos encompassed at least one third of all inmates who passed through the Gulag died or had their lives shortened due to detention in the Gulag in captivity or shortly after release. The GULAG mortality estimated in this way yields the figure of 6 million deaths. Historian Orlando Figes and Russian writer Vadim Erlikman have posited similar estimates.Erlikman, Vadim (2004). ''Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik''. Moscow 2004: Russkaia panorama. . The estimate of Alexopoulos however; has obvious methodological difficulties and is supported by misinterpreted evidence such as presuming that hundreds of thousands of prisoners "directed to other places of detention" in 1948 was a euphemism for releasing prisoners on the verge of death into labor colonies when it was really referring to internal transport in the Gulag rather than release. In a University of Oxford doctoral dissertation, in 2020, the problem of medical release (‘''aktirovka''’) and of mortality among ‘certified invalids’ (‘''aktirovannye''’) was considered in detail by Mikhail Nakonechnyi. He concluded that the number of terminally ill people discharged early on medical grounds from the Gulag was about 1 million. Mikhail added 800,000 – 850,000 excess deaths to the death toll directly caused by the results of GULAG incarceration, which brings the death toll to 2.5 million people.


Mortality rate

In 2009
Steven Rosefielde Steven R. Rosefielde (born 1942) is professor of comparative economic systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. ''Red Holocaust'' In ''Red Holocaust'', Rosefield ...
stated more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537, "the best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953." Certificates of death in the Gulag system for the period from 1930 to 1956
Dan Healey Dan Healey (born March 21, 1957) is a Canadian and English historian and Slavist. He is a pioneer of the study of the history of homosexuality in Russia. In 1981 he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Russian Language and Literature at the Uni ...
in 2018 also stated the same thing "New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity." The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953." Certificates of death in the Gulag system for the period from 1930 to 1956


Gulag administrators


Conditions

Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact of broader events (
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, countrywide
famines A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompan ...
and shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large numbers of prisoners) and the type of crime committed. Instead of being used for economic gain,
political prisoner A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although n ...
s were typically given the worst work or were dumped into the less productive parts of the gulag. For example Victor Herman, in his memoirs, compares the ''Burepolom'' and the ''Nuksha 2'' camps, which were both near Vyatka. In Burepolom there were roughly 3000 prisoners, all non-political, in the central compound. They could walk around at will, were lightly guarded, had unlocked barracks with mattresses and pillows, and watched western movies. However Nuksha 2, which housed serious criminals and political prisoners, featured guard towers with machine guns and locked barracks. In some camps prisoners were only permitted to send one letter a year and were not allowed to have photos of loved ones. Some prisoners were released early if they displayed good performance. There were several productive activities for prisoners in the camps. For example, in early 1935, a course in livestock raising was held for prisoners at a state farm; those who took it had their workday reduced to four hours. During that year the professional theater group in the camp complex gave 230 performances of plays and concerts to over 115,000 spectators. Camp newspapers also existed. Andrei Vyshinsky, chief procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memorandum to
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
chief Nikolai Yezhov in 1938, during the
Great Purge The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secret ...
, which stated:
Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and lice-ridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food…they collect orts
efuse In computing, an eFuse (electronic fuse) is a microscopic fuse put into a computer chip. This technology was invented by IBM in 2004 to allow for the dynamic real-time reprogramming of chips. In the abstract, computer logic is generally "etched ...
and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.
In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition allowing the fulfilment of construction and production plans handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet
production quota A production quota is a goal for the production of a good. It is typically set by a government or an organization, and can be applied to an individual worker, firm, industry or country. Quotas can be set high to encourage production, or can be u ...
), they instituted a number of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments (from 1950 onward), cuts of individual sentences, general early-release schemes for norm fulfilment and overfulfilment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946 onward), preferential treatment, sentence reduction and privileges for the most productive workers ( shock workers or
Stakhanovites The term Stakhanovite () originated in the Soviet Union and referred to workers who modeled themselves after Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, th ...
in Soviet parlance). Borodkin, Leonid, and Simon Ertz. 2005. "Forced Labor and the Need for Motivation: Wages and Bonuses in the Stalinist Camp System." ''Comparative Economic Studies'' 47(2):418–36. Inmates were used as camp guards and could purchase camp newspapers as well as
bond Bond or bonds may refer to: Common meanings * Bond (finance), a type of debt security * Bail bond, a commercial third-party guarantor of surety bonds in the United States * Chemical bond, the attraction of atoms, ions or molecules to form chemica ...
s. Robert W. Thurston writes that this was "at least an indication that they were still regarded as participants in society to some degree." Sports team, particularly soccer teams were set up by the prison authorities. Boris Sulim, a former prisoner who had worked in the Omsuchkan camp, close to Magadan, when he was a teenager stated:
I was 18 years old and Magadan seemed a very romantic place to me. I got 880 rubles a month and a 3000 ruble installation grant, which was a hell of a lot of money for a kid like me. I was able to give my mother some of it. They even gave me membership in the Komsomol. There was a mining and ore-processing plant which sent out parties to dig for tin. I worked at the radio station which kept contact with the parties. ..If the inmates were good and disciplined they had almost the same rights as the free workers. They were trusted and they even went to the movies. As for the reason they were in the camps, well, I never poked my nose into details. We all thought the people were there because they were guilty.
Immediately after the
German attack on the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...
in June 1941 the conditions in camps worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final period and after the end of the war. Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates, it is important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates: * ''Kulaks'', ''osadniks'', ''ukazniks'' (people sentenced for violation of various
ukase In Imperial Russia, a ukase () or ukaz (russian: указ ) was a proclamation of the tsar, government, or a religious leader ( patriarch) that had the force of law. " Edict" and "decree" are adequate translations using the terminology and concep ...
s, e.g.
Law of Spikelets The Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets (russian: Закон о трёх колосках, Закон о пяти колосках, Закон семь-восемь) was a decree in the Soviet Union to protect state property of kolkhozes (So ...
, decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of criminal law *Dedicated criminals: "
thieves in law A “thief in law” (Russian: вор в зако́не, Georgian: კანონიერი ქურდი), in the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet states, and respective diasporas abroad is a specifically granted formal and special status of ...
" *People sentenced for various
political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...
and religious reasons.


Gulag and famine (1932–1933)

The
Soviet famine of 1932–1933 The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
swept across many different regions of the Soviet Union. During this time, it is estimated that around six to seven million people starved to death. On 7 August 1932, a new edict drafted by Stalin specified a minimum sentence of ten years or execution for theft from collective farms or of cooperative property. Over the next few months, prosecutions rose fourfold. A large share of cases prosecuted under the law were for the theft of small quantities of grain worth less than fifty rubles. The law was later relaxed on 8 May 1933. Overall, during the first half of 1933, prisons saw more new incoming inmates than the three previous years combined. Prisoners in the camps faced harsh working conditions. One Soviet report stated that, in early 1933, up to 15% of the prison population in
Soviet Uzbekistan Uzbekistan (, ) is the common English name for the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR; uz, Ўзбекистон Совет Социалистик Республикаси, Oʻzbekiston Sovet Sotsialistik Respublikasi, in Russian: Уз ...
died monthly. During this time, prisoners were getting around worth of food a day. Many inmates attempted to flee, causing an upsurge in coercive and violent measures. Camps were directed "not to spare bullets".


Social conditions

The convicts in such camps were actively involved in all kinds of labor with one of them being logging (''lesopoval''). The working territory of logging presented by itself a square and was surrounded by forest clearing. Thus, all attempts to exit or escape from it were well observed from the four towers set at each of its corners. Locals who captured a runaway were given rewards. It is also said that camps in colder areas were less concerned with finding escaped prisoners as they would die anyhow from the severely cold winters. In such cases prisoners who did escape without getting shot were often found dead kilometres away from the camp.


Geography

In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen primarily for the isolated conditions involved. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. The site on the
Solovetsky Islands The Solovetsky Islands (russian: Солове́цкие острова́), or Solovki (), are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. As an administrative division, the islands are incorporated as Solovetsky District of ...
in the
White Sea The White Sea (russian: Белое море, ''Béloye móre''; Karelian and fi, Vienanmeri, lit. Dvina Sea; yrk, Сэрако ямʼ, ''Serako yam'') is a southern inlet of the Barents Sea located on the northwest coast of Russia. It is s ...
is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy, taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918. The
colloquial Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the style (sociolinguistics), linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom norm ...
name for the islands, " Solovki", entered the
vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
as a synonym for the labor camp in general. It was presented to the world as an example of the new Soviet method for "re-education of
class enemies The term enemy of the people or enemy of the nation, is a designation for the political or class opponents of the subgroup in power within a larger group. The term implies that by opposing the ruling subgroup, the "enemies" in question are ac ...
" and reintegrating them through labor into Soviet society. Initially the inmates, largely Russian intelligentsia, enjoyed relative freedom (within the natural confinement of the islands). Local newspapers and magazines were published and even some scientific research was carried out (e.g., a local botanical garden was maintained but unfortunately later lost completely). Eventually Solovki turned into an ordinary Gulag camp; in fact some historians maintain that it was a pilot camp of this type. In 1929
Maxim Gorky Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в;  – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and social ...
visited the camp and published an apology for it. The report of Gorky's trip to Solovki was included in the cycle of impressions titled "Po Soiuzu Sovetov," Part V, subtitled "Solovki." In the report, Gorky wrote that "camps such as 'Solovki' were absolutely necessary." With the new emphasis on Gulag as the means of concentrating cheap labor, new camps were then constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, wherever the economic task at hand dictated their existence (or was designed specifically to avail itself of them, such as the
White Sea-Baltic Canal White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White on ...
or the
Baikal Amur Mainline Lake Baikal (, russian: Oзеро Байкал, Ozero Baykal ); mn, Байгал нуур, Baigal nuur) is a rift lake in Russia. It is situated in southern Siberia, between the federal subjects of Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Repu ...
), including facilities in big cities — parts of the famous
Moscow Metro The Moscow Metro) is a metro system serving the Russian capital of Moscow as well as the neighbouring cities of Krasnogorsk, Reutov, Lyubertsy and Kotelniki in Moscow Oblast. Opened in 1935 with one line and 13 stations, it was the first ...
and the
Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...
new campus were built by forced labor. Many more projects during the rapid industrialisation of the 1930s, war-time and post-war periods were fulfilled on the backs of convicts. The activity of Gulag camps spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry. Gorky organized in 1933 a trip of 120 writers and artists to the White Sea–Baltic Canal, 36 of them wrote a propaganda book about the construction published in 1934 and destroyed in 1937. The majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia (the best known clusters are ''
Sevvostlag Sevvostlag (russian: Северо-восточные исправительно-трудовые лагеря, Севвостлаг, СВИТЛ, North-Eastern Corrective Labor Camps) was a system of forced labor camps set up to satisfy the wor ...
'' (''The North-East Camps'') along Kolyma river and ''
Norillag Norillag, Norilsk Corrective Labor Camp (russian: Норильлаг, Норильстрой, Норильский ИТЛ) was a gulag labor camp set by Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia and headquartered there. It existed from June 25, 1935 to Aug ...
'' near
Norilsk Norilsk ( rus, Нори́льск, p=nɐˈrʲilʲsk, ''Norílʹsk'') is a closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk ...
) and in the southeastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the steppes of
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
('' Luglag'', ''
Steplag Steplag or Stepnoy Camp Directorate, Special Camp No. 4 (Степлаг (Степной лагерь), Особлаг (Особый лагерь) № 4) was an MVD special camp for political prisoners within the Gulag system of the Soviet Union. ...
'', '' Peschanlag''). A very precise map was made by the Memorial Foundation. These were vast and sparsely inhabited regions with no roads (in fact, the construction of the roads themselves was assigned to the inmates of specialised railway camps) or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were generally spread throughout the entire
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
, including the European parts of
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
,
Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
, and
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
. There were several camps outside the Soviet Union, in
Czechoslovakia , rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי, , common_name = Czechoslovakia , life_span = 1918–19391945–1992 , p1 = Austria-Hungary , image_p1 ...
,
Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...
,
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
, and
Mongolia Mongolia; Mongolian script: , , ; lit. "Mongol Nation" or "State of Mongolia" () is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. It covers an area of , with a population of just 3.3 million, ...
, which were under the direct control of the Gulag. Not all camps were fortified; some in Siberia were marked only by posts. Escape was deterred by the harsh elements, as well as tracking dogs that were assigned to each camp. While during the 1920s and 1930s native tribes often aided escapees, many of the tribes were also
victimised Victimisation ( or victimization) is the process of being victimised or becoming a victim. The field that studies the process, rates, incidence, effects, and prevalence of victimisation is called victimology. Peer victimisation Peer victimisati ...
by escaped thieves. Tantalised by large rewards as well, they began aiding authorities in the capture of Gulag inmates. Camp guards were given stern incentives to keep their inmates in line at all costs; if a prisoner escaped under a guard's watch, the guard would often be stripped of his uniform and become a Gulag inmate himself. Further, if an escaping prisoner was shot, guards could be fined amounts that were often equivalent to one or two weeks wages. In some cases, teams of inmates were dropped off in new territory with a limited supply of resources and left to set up a new camp or die. Sometimes it took several waves of colonists before any one group survived to establish the camp. The area along the
Indigirka river The Indigirka ( rus, Индиги́рка, r=; sah, Индигиир, translit=Indigiir) is a river in the Sakha Republic in Russia between the Yana to the west and the Kolyma to the east. It is long. The area of its basin is . History The i ...
was known as ''the Gulag inside the Gulag''. In 1926, the Oimiakon (Оймякон) village in this region registered the record low temperature of −71.2 °C (−96 °F). Under the supervision of
Lavrenty Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (; rus, Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия, Lavréntiy Pávlovich Bériya, p=ˈbʲerʲiə; ka, ლავრენტი ბერია, tr, ;  – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Bolshevik ...
who headed both NKVD and the Soviet
atom bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
program until his demise in 1953, thousands of ''zeks'' (Gulag inmates) were used to mine
uranium Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
ore Ore is natural rock or sediment that contains one or more valuable minerals, typically containing metals, that can be mined, treated and sold at a profit.Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ore". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 7 Apr ...
and prepare test facilities on Novaya Zemlya,
Vaygach Island Vaygach Island (russian: Вайга́ч, ''Vajgač''; Nenets: Вай Хабць, romanized: ''Vai Habcj’'') an island in the Arctic Sea between the Pechora Sea and the Kara Sea. Vaygach Island is separated from the Yugorsky Peninsula in the ...
,
Semipalatinsk Semey ( kk, Семей, Semei, سەمەي; cyrl, Семей ), until 2007 known as Semipalatinsk (russian: Семипала́тинск) and in 1917–1920 as Alash-kala ( kk, Алаш-қала, ''Alaş-qala''), is a city in eastern Kazakhst ...
, among other sites. Throughout the
history of the Soviet Union The history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (USSR) reflects a period of change for both Russia and the world. Though the terms "Soviet Russia" and "Soviet Union" often are synonymous in everyday speech (either acknowledging the dominance ...
, there were at least 476 separate camp administrations. The Russian researcher Galina Ivanova stated that,
to date, Russian historians have discovered and described 476 camps that existed at different times on the territory of the USSR. It is well known that practically every one of them had several branches, many of which were quite large. In addition to the large numbers of camps, there were no less than 2,000 colonies. It would be virtually impossible to reflect the entire mass of Gulag facilities on a map that would also account for the various times of their existence.
Since many of these existed only for short periods, the number of camp administrations at any given point was lower. It peaked in the early 1950s when there were more than 100 camp administrations across the Soviet Union. Most camp administrations oversaw several single camp units, some as many as dozens or even hundreds.Anne Applebaum — Inside the Gulag
The infamous complexes were those at Kolyma,
Norilsk Norilsk ( rus, Нори́льск, p=nɐˈrʲilʲsk, ''Norílʹsk'') is a closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk ...
, and
Vorkuta Vorkuta (russian: Воркута́; kv, Вӧркута, ''Vörkuta''; Nenets for "the abundance of bears", "bear corner") is a coal-mining town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated just north of the Arctic Circle in the Pechora coal basin ...
, all in arctic or subarctic regions. However, prisoner mortality in Norilsk in most periods was actually lower than across the camp system as a whole.


Special institutions

* There were separate camps or zones within camps for juveniles (, ), the disabled (in
Spassk Spassk (russian: Спасск) is the name of several inhabited localities in Russia. Modern localities ;Urban localities *Spassk, Penza Oblast, a town in Spassky District of Penza Oblast *Spassk, Kemerovo Oblast, an urban-type settlement in Tasht ...
), and mothers (, ) with babies. * Family members of "Traitors of the Motherland" (, ) were placed under a special category of repression. * Secret research laboratories known as ''
Sharashka A Special Design Bureau (, ''osoboje konstruktorskoe bûro''; ОКБ), commonly informally known as a ''sharashka'' (russian: шара́шка, ; sometimes ''sharaga'', ''sharazhka'') was any of several secret research and development laboratories ...
'' () held arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, where they anonymously developed new technologies and also conducted basic research.


Historiography


Origins and functions of the Gulag

According to historian Stephen Barnes, the origins and functions of the Gulag can be looked at in four major ways: * The first approach was championed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and is what Barnes terms the moral explanation. According to this view, Soviet ideology eliminated the moral checks on the darker side of human nature – providing convenient justifications for violence and evil-doing on all levels: from political decision-making to personal relations. * Another approach is the political explanation, according to which the Gulag (along with executions) was primarily a means for eliminating the regime's perceived political enemies (this understanding is favoured by historian
Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...
, amongst others). * The economic explanation, in turn as set out by historian Anne Applebaum, argues that the Soviet regime instrumentalised the Gulag for its economic development projects. Although never economically profitable, it was perceived as such right up to Stalin's death in 1953. * Finally, Barnes advances his own, fourth explanation, which situates the Gulag in the context of modern projects of 'cleansing' the social body of hostile elements, through spatial isolation and physical elimination of individuals defined as harmful. Hannah Arendt argues that as part of a
totalitarian Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
system of government, the camps of the Gulag system were experiments in "total domination." In her view, the goal of a totalitarian system was not merely to establish limits on liberty, but rather to abolish liberty entirely in service of its ideology. She argues that the Gulag system was not merely political repression because the system survived and grew long after Stalin had wiped out all serious political resistance. Although the various camps were initially filled with criminals and political prisoners, eventually they were filled with prisoners who were arrested irrespective of anything relating to them as individuals, but rather only on the basis of their membership in some ever shifting category of imagined threats to the state.
Arendt, Hannah Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was born ...
. 1985. ''
The Origins of Totalitarianism ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, wherein she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century. History ...
''. Harcourt.
She also argues that the function of the Gulag system was not truly economic. Although the Soviet government deemed them all "forced labor" camps, this in fact highlighted that the work in the camps was deliberately pointless, since all Russian workers could be subject to forced labor. The only real economic purpose they typically served was financing the cost of their own supervision. Otherwise the work performed was generally useless, either by design or made that way through extremely poor planning and execution; some workers even preferred more difficult work if it was actually productive. She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps". In authentic labor camps, inmates worked in "relative freedom and are sentenced for limited periods." Concentration camps had extremely high mortality rates and but were still "essentially organized for labor purposes." Annihilation camps were those where the inmates were "systematically wiped out through starvation and neglect." She criticizes other commentators' conclusion that the purpose of the camps was a supply of cheap labor. According to her, the Soviets were able to liquidate the camp system without serious economic consequences, showing that the camps were not an important source of labor and were overall economically irrelevant. Arendt argues that together with the systematized, arbitrary cruelty inside the camps, this served the purpose of total domination by eliminating the idea that the arrestees had any political or legal rights. Morality was destroyed by maximizing cruelty and by organizing the camps internally to make the inmates and guards complicit. The terror resulting from the operation of the Gulag system caused people outside of the camps to cut all ties with anyone who was arrested or purged and to avoid forming ties with others for fear of being associated with anyone who was targeted. As a result, the camps were essential as the nucleus of a system that destroyed individuality and dissolved all social bonds. Thereby, the system attempted to eliminate any capacity for resistance or self-directed action in the greater population.


Archival documents

Statistical reports made by the OGPU-
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
- MGB-
MVD The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD; russian: Министерство внутренних дел (МВД), ''Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del'') is the interior ministry of Russia. The MVD is responsible for law enfor ...
between the 1930s and 1950s are kept in the
State Archive of the Russian Federation The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) (russian: Государственный архив Российской Федерации (ГАРФ)) is a large Russian state archive managed by Rosarkhiv (the Federal Archival Agency of R ...
formerly called Central State Archive of the October Revolution (CSAOR). These documents were highly classified and inaccessible. Amid glasnost and democratization in the late 1980s, Viktor Zemskov and other Russian researchers managed to gain access to the documents and published the highly classified statistical data collected by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD and related to the number of the Gulag prisoners, special settlers, etc. In 1995, Zemskov wrote that foreign scientists have begun to be admitted to the restricted-access collection of these documents in the State Archive of the Russian Federation since 1992. However, only one historian, namely Zemskov, was admitted to these archives, and later the archives were again "closed", according to Leonid Lopatnikov. Pressure from the Putin administration has exacerbated the difficulties of Gulag researchers. While considering the issue of reliability of the primary data provided by corrective labor institutions, it is necessary to take into account the following two circumstances. On the one hand, their administration was not interested to understate the number of prisoners in its reports, because it would have automatically led to a decrease in the food supply plan for camps, prisons, and corrective labor colonies. The decrement in food would have been accompanied by an increase in mortality that would have led to wrecking of the vast production program of the Gulag. On the other hand, overstatement of data of the number of prisoners also did not comply with departmental interests, because it was fraught with the same (i.e., impossible) increase in production tasks set by planning bodies. In those days, people were highly responsible for non-fulfilment of plan. It seems that a resultant of these objective departmental interests was a sufficient degree of reliability of the reports. Between 1990 and 1992, the first precise statistical data on the Gulag based on the Gulag archives were published by Viktor Zemskov. These had been generally accepted by leading Western scholars, despite the fact that a number of inconsistencies were found in this statistics. It is also necessary to note that not all the conclusions drawn by Zemskov based on his data have been generally accepted. Thus, Sergei Maksudov alleged that although literary sources, for example the books of Lev Razgon or
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
, did not envisage the total number of the camps very well and markedly exaggerated their size, on the other hand, Viktor Zemskov, who published many documents by the NKVD and
KGB The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
, was far from understanding of the Gulag essence and the nature of socio-political processes in the country. He added that without distinguishing the degree of accuracy and reliability of certain figures, without making a critical analysis of sources, without comparing new data with already known information, Zemskov absolutizes the published materials by presenting them as the ultimate truth. As a result, Maksudov charges that Zemskov's attempts to make generalized statements with reference to a particular document, as a rule, do not hold water. In response, Zemskov wrote that the charge that he allegedly did not compare new data with already known information could not be called fair. In his words, the trouble with most western writers is that they do not benefit from such comparisons. Zemskov added that when he tried not to overuse the juxtaposition of new information with "old" one, it was only because of a sense of delicacy, not to once again psychologically traumatize the researchers whose works used incorrect figures, as it turned out after the publication of the statistics by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD. According to French historian
Nicolas Werth Nicolas Werth (born 1950 in Paris) is a French historian. Biography Werth is a scholar of communist studies. He is the son of Alexander Werth, a Russian born British journalist and writer who lived in the USSR during World War II. Work Nico ...
, the mountains of the materials of the Gulag archives, which are stored in funds of the
State Archive of the Russian Federation The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) (russian: Государственный архив Российской Федерации (ГАРФ)) is a large Russian state archive managed by Rosarkhiv (the Federal Archival Agency of R ...
and were being constantly exposed during the last fifteen years, represent only a very small part of bureaucratic prose of immense size left over after the decades of "creativity" by the "dull and reptile" organization managing the Gulag. In many cases, local camp archives, which had been stored in sheds, barracks, or other rapidly disintegrating buildings, simply disappeared in the same way as most of the camp buildings did. In 2004 and 2005, some archival documents were published in the edition ''Istoriya Stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh — Pervaya Polovina 1950-kh Godov. Sobranie Dokumentov v 7 Tomakh'' (''The History of Stalin's Gulag. From the Late 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s. Collection of Documents in Seven Volumes''), wherein each of its seven volumes covered a particular issue indicated in the title of the volume: # ''Mass Repression in the USSR'' (''Massovye Repressii v SSSR''); # ''Punitive System. Structure and Cadres'' (''Karatelnaya Sistema. Struktura i Kadry''); # ''Economy of the Gulag'' (''Ekonomika Gulaga''); # ''The Population of the Gulag. The Number and Conditions of Confinement'' (''Naselenie Gulaga. Chislennost i Usloviya Soderzhaniya''); # ''Specsettlers in the USSR'' (''Specpereselentsy v SSSR''); # ''Uprisings, Riots, and Strikes of Prisoners'' (''Vosstaniya, Bunty i Zabastovki Zaklyuchyonnykh''); and # ''Soviet Repressive and Punitive Policy. Annotated Index of Cases of the SA RF'' (''Sovetskaya Pepressivno-karatelnaya Politika i Penitentsiarnaya Sistema. Annotirovanniy Ukazatel Del GA RF''). The edition contains the brief introductions by the two "patriarchs of the Gulag science",
Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...
and
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
, and 1431 documents, the overwhelming majority of which were obtained from funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation.


History of Gulag population estimates

During the decades before the dissolution of the USSR, the debates about the population size of GULAG failed to arrive at generally accepted figures; wide-ranging estimates have been offered,Edwin Bacon. Glasnost' and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labor around World War II. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 44, No. 6 (1992), pp. 1069–1086 and the bias toward higher or lower side was sometimes ascribed to political views of the particular author. Some of those earlier estimates (both high and low) are shown in the table below. The glasnost political reforms in the late 1980s and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR led to the release of a large amount of formerly classified archival documents, including new demographic and NKVD data. Analysis of the official GULAG statistics by Western scholars immediately demonstrated that, despite their inconsistency, they do not support previously published higher estimates. Importantly, the released documents made possible to clarify terminology used to describe different categories of forced labor population, because the use of the terms "forced labor", "GULAG", "camps" interchangeably by early researchers led to significant confusion and resulted in significant inconsistencies in the earlier estimates. Archival studies revealed several components of the NKVD penal system in the Stalinist USSR: prisons, labor camps, labor colonies, as well as various "settlements" (exile) and of non-custodial forced labor. Although most of them fit the definition of forced labor, only labor camps, and labor colonies were associated with punitive forced labor in detention. Forced labor camps ("GULAG camps") were hard regime camps, whose inmates were serving more than three-year terms. As a rule, they were situated in remote parts of the USSR, and labor conditions were extremely hard there. They formed a core of the GULAG system. The inmates of "corrective labor colonies" served shorter terms; these colonies were located in less remote parts of the USSR, and they were run by local NKVD administration. Preliminary analysis of the GULAG camps and colonies statistics (see the chart on the right) demonstrated that the population reached the maximum before the World War II, then dropped sharply, partially due to massive releases, partially due to wartime high mortality, and then was gradually increasing until the end of Stalin era, reaching the global maximum in 1953, when the combined population of GULAG camps and labor colonies amounted to 2,625,000."The Total Number of Repressed"
by Anatoly Vishnevsky, Director of the Center for Human Demography and Ecology,
Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across ...
,
The results of these archival studies convinced many scholars, including
Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...
or Stephen Wheatcroft to reconsider their earlier estimates of the size of the GULAG population, although the 'high numbers' of arrested and deaths are not radically different from earlier estimates. Although such scholars as Rosefielde or Vishnevsky point at several inconsistencies in archival data with Rosefielde pointing out the archival figure of 1,196,369 for the population of the Gulag and labor colonies combined on December 31, 1936, is less than half the 2.75 million labor camp population given to the Census Board by the NKVD for the 1937 census,Vishnevsky, Alantoly. Демографические потери от репрессий (The Demographic Loss of Repression), Demoscope Weekly, December 31, 2007
retrieved
April 13, 2011
it is generally believed that these data provide more reliable and detailed information that the indirect data and literary sources available for the scholars during the Cold War era. Although Conquest cited Beria's report to the Politburo of the labor camp numbers at the end of 1938 stating there were almost 7 million prisoners in the labor camps, more than three times the archival figure for 1938 and an official report to Stalin by the Soviet minister of State Security in 1952 stating there were 12 million prisoners in the labor camps. These data allowed scholars to conclude that during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG ''labor camps'' and 4–5 million passed through the ''labor colonies''. Thus, these figures reflect the number of convicted persons, and do not take into account the fact that a significant part of Gulag inmates had been convicted more than one time, so the actual number of convicted is somewhat overstated by these statistics. From other hand, during some periods of Gulag history the official figures of GULAG population reflected the camps' capacity, not the actual number of inmates, so the actual figures were 15% higher in, e.g. 1946. The USSR implemented a series of “labor disciplines” due to the lack of productivity of its Labour force in the early 1930s. 1.8 million workers were sentenced to 6 months in forced labor with a quarter of their original pay, 3.3 million faced sanctions, and 60k were imprisoned for absentees in 1940 alone. The conditions of Soviet workers worsened in WW2 as 1.3 million were punished in 1942, and 1 million each were punished in subsequent 1943 and 1944 with the reduction of 25% of food rations. Further more, 460 thousand were imprisoned throughout these years.


Impact


Culture

The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous. The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern
Russian folklore Folklore of Russia is folklore of Russians and other ethnic groups of Russia. Russian folklore takes its roots in the pagan beliefs of ancient Slavs and now is represented in the Russian fairy tales. Epic Russian bylinas are also an important ...
. Many songs by the authors-performers known as the ''bards'', most notably
Vladimir Vysotsky Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky ( rus, links=no, Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий, p=vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr sʲɪˈmʲɵnəvʲɪtɕ vɨˈsotskʲɪj; 25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980), was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor ...
and Alexander Galich, neither of whom ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and glorified the life of "Zeks". Words and phrases which originated in the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the 1960s and 1970s. The memoirs of Alexander Dolgun,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
,
Varlam Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (russian: Варла́м Ти́хонович Шала́мов; 18 June 1907 – 17 January 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent much of the period from 1 ...
and
Yevgenia Ginzburg Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg (December 20, 1904 – May 25, 1977) (russian: Евге́ния Соломо́новна Ги́нзбург) was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia ...
, among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned. Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in places like Magadan, where, for example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to
Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
's and
Eddie Rosner Adolph Ignatievich Rosner, known professionally as Ady Rosner and Eddie Rosner (26 May 1910 – 8 August 1976) was a Polish and Soviet jazz trumpeter sometimes called "The White Louis Armstrong" or "Polish Louis Armstrong". He was a prisoner in th ...
played jazz.


Literature

Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners have been published: *
Varlam Shalamov Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (russian: Варла́м Ти́хонович Шала́мов; 18 June 1907 – 17 January 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent much of the period from 1 ...
's '' Kolyma Tales'' is a short-story collection, cited by most major works on the Gulag, and widely considered one of the main Soviet accounts. * Victor Kravchenko wrote ''
I Chose Freedom ''I Chose Freedom: The Personal Political Life of a Soviet Official'' is a book by the Soviet Ukrainian defector Viktor Kravchenko. It was a bestseller in the United States and Europe. The book was written in 1946 and published in 1947. A review ...
'' after defecting to the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
in 1944. As a leader of industrial plants he had encountered forced labor camps in across the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1941. He describes a visit to one camp at Kemerovo on the
Tom River The Tom ( rus, Томь, p=tomʲ, cjs, Том) is a river in Russia, a right tributary of the Ob in Central Siberia. Its watershed lies within the Republic of Khakassia, Kemerovo Oblast, and Tomsk Oblast.KGB The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
for every convict they employed. * Anatoli Granovsky wrote ''I Was an NKVD Agent'' after defecting to Sweden in 1946 and included his experiences seeing gulag prisoners as a young boy, as well as his experiences as a prisoner himself in 1939. Granovsky's father was sent to the gulag in 1937. *
Julius Margolin Julius Margolin (russian: Юлий (Юлиус) Борисович Марголин, October 14, 1900 – January 21, 1971) was a Russian Empire-born Israeli writer and political activist. He was the author of ''A Journey to the Land Ze-Ka'' (Пу ...
's book ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'' was finished in 1947, but it was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the time, immediately after World War II. * Gustaw Herling-Grudziński wrote ''A World Apart'', which was translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an introduction by
Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
in 1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet communist system. * Victor Herman's book ''Coming out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life''. Herman experienced firsthand many places, prisons, and experiences that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was able to reference in only passing or through brief second hand accounts. *
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repres ...
's book ''
The Gulag Archipelago ''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr So ...
'' was not the first literary work about labor camps. His previous book on the subject, "
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' (russian: links=no, italics=yes, Один день Ивана Денисовича, Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, ) is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first p ...
", about a typical day in the life of a Gulag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, '' Novy Mir'' (''New World''), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. '' The First Circle'', an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the ''
Marfino Marfino (russian: Марфино) is the name of several rural localities in Russia. Astrakhan Oblast As of 2010, one rural locality in Astrakhan Oblast bears this name: * Marfino, Astrakhan Oblast, a '' selo'' in Marfinsky Selsoviet of Voloda ...
'' ''
sharashka A Special Design Bureau (, ''osoboje konstruktorskoe bûro''; ОКБ), commonly informally known as a ''sharashka'' (russian: шара́шка, ; sometimes ''sharaga'', ''sharazhka'') was any of several secret research and development laboratories ...
'' or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968. * Slavomir Rawicz's book " The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom": In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk—a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday horrors. * János Rózsás, a Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn, wrote many books and articles on the issue of the Gulag. * Zoltan Szalkai, a Hungarian documentary filmmaker, made several films about gulag camps. *
Karlo Štajner Karlo Štajner (15 January 1902 – 1 March 1992) was an Austrian-Yugoslav communist activist and a prominent Gulag survivor. Štajner was born in Vienna, where he joined the Communist Youth of Austria, but emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, C ...
, a Croatian communist who was active in the former
Kingdom of Yugoslavia The Kingdom of Yugoslavia ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Kraljevina Jugoslavija, Краљевина Југославија; sl, Kraljevina Jugoslavija) was a state in Southeast and Central Europe that existed from 1918 until 1941. From 1918 ...
and the manager of the Comintern Publishing House in Moscow 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home after being accused of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the next 20 years in camps from Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–
Yugoslavia Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...
n political normalization he was re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in 1956 and spent the rest of his life in
Zagreb Zagreb ( , , , ) is the capital and largest city of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb stands near the international border between Croatia and Slov ...
,
Croatia , image_flag = Flag of Croatia.svg , image_coat = Coat of arms of Croatia.svg , anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland") , image_map = , map_caption = , capit ...
. He wrote an impressive book titled ''7000 days in Siberia''. * ''Dancing Under the Red Star'' by Karl Tobien () tells the story of Margaret Werner, an athletic girl who moves to Russia right before the start of Stalin's terror. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who survived the Gulag to tell about it. * ''Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag'' (), by a member of the US Embassy, and ''I Was a Slave in Russia'' (), an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. They were interned due to their American citizenship for about eight years c. 1946–55. *
Yevgenia Ginzburg Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg (December 20, 1904 – May 25, 1977) (russian: Евге́ния Соломо́новна Ги́нзбург) was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia ...
wrote two famous books about her remembrances, ''Journey Into the Whirlwind'' and ''Within the Whirlwind''. * Savić Marković Štedimlija, a pro-
Croatia , image_flag = Flag of Croatia.svg , image_coat = Coat of arms of Croatia.svg , anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland") , image_map = , map_caption = , capit ...
n Montenegrin ideologist. Caught in
Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
by the
Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
in 1945, he was sent to the USSR and spent ten years in the Gulag. After his release, Marković wrote his autobiographical account in two volumes titled ''Ten years in Gulag'' (''Deset godina u Gulagu'', Matica crnogorska, Podgorica, Montenegro 2004). * Anița Nandriș-Cudla's book, ''20 Years in Siberia 0 de ani în Siberia' is the own life's account written by a Romanian peasant woman from Bucovina (Mahala village near Cernăuți) who managed to survive the harsh, forced labor system together with her three sons. Together with her husband and her three underage children, she was deported from Mahala village to the Soviet Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the Polar Circle, without a trial or even a communicated accusation. The same night of June 12 to 13, 1941, (that is before the breakout of the Second World War), overall 602 fellow villagers were arrested and deported, without any prior notice. Her mother received the same sentence but was spared from deportation after the fact that she was a paraplegic was acknowledged by the authorities. It was later discovered that the reason for her deportation and forced labor was the fake and nonsensical claim that, allegedly, her husband had been a mayor in the Romanian administration, a politician and a rich peasant, none of the latter of which was true. Separated from her husband, she brought up the three boys, overcame
typhus Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Common symptoms include fever, headache, and a rash. Typically these begin one to two weeks after exposure. ...
, scorbutus,
malnutrition Malnutrition occurs when an organism gets too few or too many nutrients, resulting in health problems. Specifically, it is "a deficiency, excess, or imbalance of energy, protein and other nutrients" which adversely affects the body's tissues ...
, extreme cold and harsh toils, to later return to Bucovina after rehabilitation. Her manuscript was written toward the end of her life, in the simple and direct language of a peasant with three years of public school education, and was secretly brought to Romania before the fall of Romanian communism, in 1982. Her manuscript was first published in 1991. Her deportation was shared mainly with Romanians from Bucovina and Basarabia, Finnish and Polish prisoners, as token proof to show that Gulag labor camps had also been used for the shattering/ extermination of the natives in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet Union. * Frantsishak Alyakhnovich – Solovki prisoner * Blagoy Popov, a Bulgarian communist and a defendant in the
Leipzig trial The Reichstag fire (german: Reichstagsbrand, ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of ...
, along with Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Tanev, was arrested in 1937 during the
Stalinist purges The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
and spent seventeen years in
Norillag Norillag, Norilsk Corrective Labor Camp (russian: Норильлаг, Норильстрой, Норильский ИТЛ) was a gulag labor camp set by Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia and headquartered there. It existed from June 25, 1935 to Aug ...
. Popov was released in 1954, after the death of Stalin, and returned to
Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedo ...
. He wrote his autobiographical account in the book ''From the Leipzig trial to the Siberia camps'' (''От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери'', Изток-Запад, София, България, 2012 ). * Mkrtich Armen, an Armenian writer who was imprisoned in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1945, published a collection of his memories under the title "They Ordered to Give You" in 1964. *
Gurgen Mahari Gurgen Mahari (''Gurgen Grigori Ajemian''; , 1903 in Van – June 17, 1969 in Yerevan) was an Armenian writer and poet. His most significant works include the semi-autobiographical novella '' Barbed Wires in Blossom'' (1968) and the novel '' ...
, an Armenian writer and poet, who was arrested in 1936, released in 1947, arrested again in 1948 and sent into Siberian exile as an "unreliable type" until 1954, wrote "Barbed Wires in Blossom", a novella based largely on his personal experiences in a Soviet gulag. * Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918–1999), a Soviet Engineer and eventual head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946.


In popular culture

Gulags appear in various modern media such as movies and video games as a popular setting or background. The '' Call of Duty'' series has many references to the gulag. A contemporary notable appearance of the gulag is the 2020 video game Call of Duty: Warzone, which has a mechanism whereby killed players are sent to the ''Gulag'', where they can engage in a 1v1 gunfight for a chance to return to the battlefield proper. It also appears in the show '' Stranger Things'''s season 4, when Jim Hopper is sent to a gulag camp.


Colonization

Soviet state documents show that the goals of the gulag included colonization of sparsely populated remote areas and exploiting its resources using forced labor. In 1929, OGPU was given the task to colonize these areas. To this end, the notion of " free settlement" was introduced. On 12 April 1930
Genrikh Yagoda Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda ( rus, Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да, Genrikh Grigor'yevich Yagoda, born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda; 7 November 1891 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director ...
wrote to the OGPU Commission: When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms, they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение, ''volnoye poseleniye'') outside the confinement of the camp. They were known as "free settlers" (; not to be confused with the term , " exile settlers"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land in the general vicinity of the place of confinement. The gulag inherited this approach from the
katorga Katorga ( rus, ка́торга, p=ˈkatərɡə; from medieval and modern Greek: ''katergon, κάτεργον'', " galley") was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (see Katorga labor in the Soviet Union). Prisone ...
system. It is estimated that of the 40,000 people collecting state pensions in
Vorkuta Vorkuta (russian: Воркута́; kv, Вӧркута, ''Vörkuta''; Nenets for "the abundance of bears", "bear corner") is a coal-mining town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated just north of the Arctic Circle in the Pechora coal basin ...
, 32,000 are trapped former gulag inmates, or their descendants.


Life after a term was served

Persons who served a term in a camp or prison were restricted from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous imprisonment was a triable offence. Persons who served terms as "politicals" were nuisances for " First Departments" (, outlets of the
secret police Secret police (or political police) are intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, religious, or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of ...
at all enterprises and institutions), because former "politicals" had to be monitored. Many people who were released from camps were restricted from settling in larger cities.


Memorialization


Gulag memorials

Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials to the victims of the Gulag made of boulders from the Solovki camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. Moscow's memorial is on
Lubyanka Square Lubyanskaya Square (, Lubyanskaya ploshchad'), or simply Lubyanka in Moscow lies about north-east of Red Square. History first records its name in 1480, when Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow, who had conquered Novgorod in 1471, settled many Novg ...
, the site of the headquarters of the NKVD. People gather at these memorials every year on the Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30).


Gulag Museum

Moscow has the State Gulag Museum whose first director was
Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseenko (russian: Анто́н Влади́мирович Анто́нов-Овсе́енко; 23 February 1920, Moscow, RSFSR – 9 July 2013, Moscow, Russia) was a Russian historian and writer. (Antonov-Ovseyenk ...
. In 2015, another museum dedicated to the Gulag was opened in Moscow.


See also

* List of concentration and internment camps#Russia and the Soviet Union *
List of Gulag camps The list below, enumerates the selected sites of the Soviet forced labor camps (known in Russian as the "corrective labor camps") of the Gulag. Most of them served mining, construction, and timber works. It is estimated that for most of its existenc ...
*
List of uprisings in the Gulag This is an incomplete list of uprisings in the Gulag: * Parbig uprising near Narym, 1931 * * SS ''Dalstroy'' explosion at Nakhodka Bay, 1946 *Kolyma rebellion, 1946 *Vorkuta uprising, 1948 * Nizhni Aturyakh camp, Berlag, uprising, 1949''Gulag Arch ...
* :Gulag detainees * :Gulag memoirs * :Gulag industry * :Gulag in literature and arts * :Prisons in the Soviet Union * Americans in the Gulag *
Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources use ...
*
Human rights in Russia Human rights in Russia have routinely been criticized by international organizations and independent domestic media outlets. Some of the most commonly cited violations include deaths in custody, the widespread and systematic use of torture by s ...
*
Prisons in Russia Prisons in Russia consist of four types of facilities: pre-trial institutions; educative or juvenile colonies; corrective colonies; and prisons. The corrective colony is the most common, with 705 institutions (excluding 7 corrective colonies for ...
/
Corrective labor colony A corrective colony (russian: исправительная колония, ispravitelnaya koloniya, ИК/IK) is the most common type of prison in Russia and some other post-Soviet states. Such colonies combine penal detention with compulsory w ...
*
Russian filtration camps of Ukrainians Filtration camps, also referred to as concentration camps, have been used by Russian forces during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to process Ukrainian citizens from regions under Russian occupation before transferring them into Russia. Beat ...
* Filtration camp system in Chechnya *
Forced labor in the Soviet Union Forced labor was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. Forced labor also provided manpower for government projects and for reconstruction after the war. It began before the Gulag and Kolkho ...
*
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union Forced settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous p ...
*
Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union Foreign forced labor was used by the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II, which continued up to 1950s. There have been two categories of foreigners amassed for forced labor: prisoners of war and civilians. Both of them were han ...
*
Human rights in the Soviet Union Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, an ...
*
Memorial (society) Memorial ( rus, Мемориал, p=mʲɪmərʲɪˈaɫ) is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph ...
(a Russian
human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...
organization) *
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union Throughout the history of the Soviet Union (1917–1991), there were periods when Soviet authorities brutally suppressed and persecuted various forms of Christianity to different extents depending on State interests. Soviet Marxist-Lenini ...
*
Persecution of Christians in Warsaw Pact countries After the October Revolution of November 7, 1917 (October 25 Old Calendar) there was a movement within the Soviet Union to unite all of the people of the world under Communist rule (see Communist International). This included the Eastern bloc countr ...
*
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent. During the leadership ...
*
Political repression in the Soviet Union Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist ...
* Population transfer in the Soviet Union *
Sharashka A Special Design Bureau (, ''osoboje konstruktorskoe bûro''; ОКБ), commonly informally known as a ''sharashka'' (russian: шара́шка, ; sometimes ''sharaga'', ''sharazhka'') was any of several secret research and development laboratories ...
*
Danube–Black Sea Canal The Danube–Black Sea Canal ( ro, Canalul Dunăre–Marea Neagră) is a navigable canal in Romania, which runs from Cernavodă on the Danube river, via two branches, to Constanța and Năvodari on the Black Sea. Administered from Agigea, it ...
*
White Sea–Baltic Canal The White Sea–Baltic Canal (russian: Беломо́рско-Балти́йский кана́л, , ), often abbreviated to White Sea Canal () is a ship canal in Russia opened on 2 August 1933. It connects the White Sea, in the Arctic Ocean, with ...
*
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes Crimes against humanity under communist regimes occurred during the 20th century, including forced deportations, massacres, torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, terror,Kemp-Welch, p. 42. ethnic cleansing, enslavement and t ...
*
Criticism of communist party rule The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. According to the critics, the rule by communist parties leads to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights ...
* Mass killings under communist regimes *
Concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia During World War II, numerous concentration camps existed in the Independent State of Croatia. Most of them were operated by the Croatian Ustaša authorities, but some of them were operated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Ustaša-operated ca ...
*
Forced labour camps in Communist Albania Communist Albania maintained labour camps (, meaning ''work camps'') throughout the territories it controlled. The first Communist Albanian labour camps were around Tirana (although several other camp systems were developed in the north and sou ...
**
Burrel Prison Burrel Prison () is a high security prison located outside the town of Burrel, in northeastern Albania at the District Police Station in Mat with a maximum capacity of 198 inmates. In 2011 the prison housed 182 inmates and employed 120 corrections ...
**
Qafë Bar Prison The Qafë Bar Prison () was a political prison in Communist Albania at the village of Qafë Bar. References See also *Forced labour camps in Communist Albania Communist Albania maintained labour camps (, meaning ''work camps'') throughout ...
**
Spaç Prison The Spaç Prison () was a political prison in Communist Albania at the village of Spaç. The former prison is listed as a second-category national monument. There were plans to turn the rapidly deteriorating site into a museum, but as of February ...
*
Francoist concentration camps In Francoist Spain at least two to three hundred concentration camps operated from 1936 until 1947, some permanent and many others temporary. The network of camps was an instrument of Franco's repression. People such as Republican ex-combatants ...
– the equivalent of the Gulag in
Francoist Spain Francoist Spain ( es, España franquista), or the Francoist dictatorship (), was the period of Spanish history between 1939 and 1975, when Francisco Franco ruled Spain after the Spanish Civil War with the title . After his death in 1975, Spai ...
*
Military Units to Aid Production Military Units to Aid Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) were agricultural forced labor camps operated by the Cuban government from November 1965 to July 1968 in the province of Camagüey.Guerra, Lillian. ""Gender ...
– the equivalent of the Gulag in
Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
*
Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as con ...
* Prisons in North Korea **
Kwalliso North Korea's political penal labor colonies, transliterated ''kwalliso'' or ''kwan-ri-so'', constitute one of three forms of political imprisonment in the country, the other two being what David Hawk translated as "short-term detention/for ...
*
Penal system in China The penal system in China is mostly composed of an administrative detention system and a judicial incarceration system. As of 2020, it is estimated that 1.7 million people had been incarcerated in China, which is the second-highest prison populat ...
**
Laogai ''Laogai'' (), short for ''laodong gaizao'' (), which means reform through labor, is a criminal justice system involving the use of penal labor and prison farms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and North Korea (DPRK). ''Láogǎi'' i ...
**
Re-education through labor Re-education through labor (RTL; ), abbreviated ''laojiao'' () was a system of administrative detention on Mainland China. Active from 1957 to 2013, the system was used to detain persons who were accused of committing minor crimes such as pet ...
**
Xinjiang internment camps The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers ( zh, 职业技能教育培训中心, Zhíyè jìnéng jiàoyù péixùn zhōngxīn) by the government of China, are internment camps operated b ...
*
Pitești Prison Pitești Prison ( ro, Închisoarea Pitești) was a penal facility in Pitești, Romania, best remembered for the Mind control, reeducation experiment (also known as ''Experimentul Pitești'' – the "Pitești Experiment" or ''Fenomenul Pitești'' ...
– the equivalent of the Gulag in the
Socialist Republic of Romania The Socialist Republic of Romania ( ro, Republica Socialistă România, RSR) was a Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989. From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian Peop ...
*
Re-education camp (Vietnam) Re-education camps ( vi, Trại cải tạo) were prison camps operated by the Communist government of Vietnam The Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (), also known as the Vietnamese Government or the Government of Vietnam (), ...
– the equivalent of the Gulag in
Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...


Notes


References


Further reading

* Applebaum, Anne. 2003. '' Gulag: A History''.
Broadway Books Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a Division of Random House, Inc., released its first list in Fall, 1996. Broadway was founded in 1995 as a unit of Bantam Doubleday Dell a unit of Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann acquired Rand ...
. hardcover, 720 pp., . * Ciszek, Walter. 1997. '' With God in Russia.''
Ignatius Press Ignatius Press is a Catholic publishing house based in San Francisco, California, US. It was founded in 1978 by Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit priest and former pupil of Pope Benedict XVI. Ignatius Press also produces '' Catholic World Report'' ...
. 433 pp., . * * Ertz, Simon. 2006. ''Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935–1953''. Duncker & Humblot. 273 pp., . * Figes, Orlando. 2007. ''The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia''. Allen Lane. hardcover, 740 pp., . * Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. 1999.
The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939
'. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universi ...
. 635 pp., . * Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. 2010. ''Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile'', (''Palgrave Studies in Oral History'')''.''
Palgrave Macmillan Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains off ...
. * Rawicz, Slawomir. 1995. ''The Long Walk''. * Gregory, Paul R., and Valery Lazarev, eds. 2003.
The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag
'. Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press The Hoover Institution (officially The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; abbreviated as Hoover) is an American public policy think tank and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and ...
. . * Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. 1996. ''A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II''. Penguin. 284 pp., . * Hochschild, Adam. 2003. ''The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin''. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
. 304 pp., paperback: . * Khlevniuk, Oleg V. 2004.
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
'. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. hardcover, 464 pp., . * Kizny, Tomasz. 2004. ''Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917–1990''. Firefly Books Ltd. 496 pp., . * Kozlov, V. P., ''et al''., eds. 2004–5. ''Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach'', 7 vols.. Moskva:
ROSSPEN ROSSPEN or Political Encyclopedia Publishers (russian: РОССПЭН, Издательство «Политическая энциклопедия») is a Russian academic publisher. It is a major publisher of archival materials and research works ...
. * * Rossi, Jacques. 1989. ''The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps''. . * Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1973. ''
The Gulag Archipelago ''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr So ...
''.
Harper & Row Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishin ...
. 660 pp., . * —— ''The Gulag Archipelago: Two''. Harper & Row. 712 pp., . * Tobien, Karl. 2006. ''Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag.''
WaterBrook Press Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
. . * Werth, Nicolas. 1999. "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union." Pp. 33–260 in '' The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression'', edited by S. Courtois et al.
Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...
. . * —— 2007. ''Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)'' with an introduction by J. T. Gross''.''
Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...
. 248 pp., . *
Remembering Stalin
" '' Azerbaijan International'' 13(4). 2005. *
The Literature of Stalin's Repressions
" ''Azerbaijan International'' 14(1). 2006. *


Articles

* Barenberg, Alan. 2015. "The Gulag in Vorkuta: Beyond Space and Time." ''Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research'' 7(1) * Barenberg, Alan, Wilson T. Bell, Sean Kinnear, Steven Maddox, and Lynne Viola. 2017.
New directions in Gulag studies: a roundtable discussion
" '' Canadian Slavonic Papers'' 59(3/4):376–95. * Bell, Wilson T. 2013. "Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De‐Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia." ''
The Russian Review ''The Russian Review'' is an independent peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary academic journal devoted to the history, literature, culture, fine arts, cinema, society, and politics of the Russian Federation, former Soviet Union and former Russian Empir ...
'' 72(1). * Kravchuk, Pavel. 2013.
Gulag far and near. The story of the penitentiary system
'' * Viola, Lynne. 2018. "New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note." ''Canadian Slavonic Papers'' 60(3/4):592–604. . * Hardy, Jeffrey S. 2017.
Of pelicans and prisoners: avian–human interactions in the Soviet Gulag
" ''Canadian Slavonic Papers'' 60(3/4):375–406. . * Healey, Dan. 2015. "Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag." '' Kritika'' 16(3)


Memoirs

* Baghirov, Ayyub.
999 999 or triple nine most often refers to: * 999 (emergency telephone number), a telephone number for the emergency services in several countries * 999 (number), an integer * AD 999, a year * 999 BC, a year Books * ''999'' (anthology) or ''999: T ...
2006.
Bitter Days of Kolyma
" '' Azerbaijan International'' 14(1):58–71. * Bardach, Janusz. 1999. '' Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag.''
University of California Press The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...
. . * Ciszek, Walter. 1997. ''He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith''. Doubleday. 216 pp., . * Dolgun, Alexander, and Patrick Watson. 1975. '' Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag''." New York:
Knopf Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...
. 370 pp., . * Ginzburg, Eugenia. 9672002. ''
Journey into the Whirlwind ''Journey into the Whirlwind'' is the English title of the memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg. It was published in English in 1967, some thirty years after the story begins. The two-part book is a highly detailed first-hand account of her life and impris ...
'', Harvest/HBJ Book. 432 pp., . * —— 1982. ''Within the Whirlwind'', Harvest/HBJ Book, 448 pp., . * Gliksman, Jerzy. 1948. ''Tell the West: An account of his experiences as a slave laborer in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics''. Gresham Press. 358pp. ** Abridged edition: New York:
National Committee for a Free Europe The National Committee for a Free Europe, later known as Free Europe Committee, was an anti-communist Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) front organization, founded on June 1, 1949, in New York City, which worked for the spreading of American infl ...
, 95pp. c. 1948. * Hollander, Paul, ed. 2006.
Editor’s Introduction: The Distinctive Features of Repression in Communist States
" Pp. xv–lxxviii in ''From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States'', with a foreword by A. Applebaum.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is a nonprofit educational organization that promotes conservative thought on college campuses. It was founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov with William F. Buckley Jr. as its first president. It sponsor ...
. . (From the annotation: "more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe.") * Margolin, Julius. 1952
ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ В СТРАНУ ЗЭ-КА ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'', full text, according to the original manuscript
(written in 1947) * Margolin, Julius. 2020 (1952). ''Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag'' (S. Hoffman, trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. * Mochulsky, Fyodor V. ''Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir''.
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
. 272 pp., the first memoir from an NKVD employee translated into English * Noble, John H. 1961. ''I Was a Slave in Russia'', Broadview, Illinois: Cicero Bible Press. *Petkevich, Tamara. 2010. ''Memoir of a Gulag Actress''.
Northern Illinois University Northern Illinois University (NIU) is a public research university in DeKalb, Illinois. It was founded as Northern Illinois State Normal School on May 22, 1895, by Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld as part of an expansion of the state's system ...
. * Rossi, Jacques. 2018. ''Fragments of Lives: Chronicles of the Gulag'' (Antonelli-Street trans.). Prague: Karolinum. * Sadigzade, Ummugulsum.
005 ''005'' is a 1981 arcade game by Sega. They advertised it as the first of their RasterScan Convert-a-Game series, designed so that it could be changed into another game in minutes "at a substantial savings". It is one of the first examples of a ...
2006.
Prison Diary: Tears Are My Only Companions
" translated by A. Mustafayeva, edited by B. Blair. ''Azerbaijan International'' 14(1):40–45. * Sadigzade, Ummugulsum, and her children. 2006.

" ''Azerbaijan International'' 14(1):48–53. (Children/family: Seyid Husein, Sayyara Sadigzade, Ogtay Sadigzade, Jighatay Sadigzade, Toghrul Sadigzade, and Gumral Sadigzade.) * Sadikhli, Murtuz. 9912006.
Memory of Blood
" ''Azerbaijan International'' 14(1):18–19. * Shalamov, Varlam. 1995. '' Kolyma Tales''.
Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Shumuk, Danylo. 1974. ''Za Chidnim Obriyam'' 'Beyond the Eastern Horizon'' Paris: Smoloskyp. 447 pp. * —— 1984. ''Life sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian political prisoner''. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study. 401 pp., . * Solomon, Michel. 1971. ''Magadan''. New York: Auerbach. . * Volovich, Hava. 1999. ''My Tale is Told: Women's Memoirs of Gulag'', by Simeon Vilensky. Indiana University Press.
Solzhenitsyn'sShalamov'sGinzburg's
works at Lib.ru (in original Russian) * Вернон Кресс (alias of Петр Зигмундович Демант) "Зекамерон XX века", autobiographical novel *Бирюков А.М. Колымские истории: очерки. Новосибирск, 2004


Fiction

* Amirejibi, Chabua. 2001. ''Gora Mborgali''. Tbilisi, Georgia: Chabua. 650 pp., . * Amis, Martin. 2006. '' House of Meetings''. New York:
Vintage Books Vintage Books is a trade paperback publishing imprint of Penguin Random House originally established by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. The company was purchased by Random House in April 1960, and a British division was set up in 1990. After Random ...
. 242 pp. . * Booth, Martin. 1998. ''The Industry Of Souls''. United Kingdom:
Dewi Lewis Publishing Dewi may refer to either a Welsh or Southeast Asian name. Neither is pronounced as "dewy". Welsh name Dewi (, also or ) is an alternate or diminutive form of the Welsh masculine given name Dafydd ("David"). It is most famously borne by the p ...
. 250 pp., . * Huseyn, Mehdi. 9642006.
Underground Rivers Flow Into the Sea
" '' Azerbaijan International'' 14(1):96–99. (First Novel About Exile to the Gulag by an Azerbaijani Writer.) * Müller, Herta. 2009. '' Everything I Possess I Carry With Me.'' * Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1962. ''
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' (russian: links=no, italics=yes, Один день Ивана Денисовича, Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha, ) is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first p ...
''. Signet Classic. 158 pp., . * —— 1968. ''In the First Circle''.
Northwestern University Press Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism ...
. 580 pp., .


External links


GULAG Online Exhibit, Global Museum on Communism, Victims of Communism Memorial FoundationGULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason UniversityGulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition
Blinken Open Society Archives
The website of the Virtual Gulag Museum
projected by the scientific information center Memorial
GULAG History Museum
in Moscow
Sound Archives. European Memories of the GulagGulag prisoners at work, 1936–1937
Photo album at NYPL Digital Gallery

Revelations from the Russian Archives at
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

''Brutal!'' Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard
(YT) {{Authority control Politics of the Soviet Union Human rights abuses in the Soviet Union Imprisonment and detention Joseph Stalin NKVD Penal labour Persecution of dissidents in the Soviet Union Political repression in the Soviet Union Soviet law Soviet phraseology