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Gulag

Right. Another history lesson. Try to keep up. Don't confuse this with Kulak or Gelug. The universe has enough confusion without your contribution.

Soviet forced penal labour camp system

For other uses, see Gulag (disambiguation).

Gulag

A trademark logo, circa 1939, for products manufactured in the Gulag camps. Because of course there was a brand.

A map depicting the camps between 1923 and 1961. A veritable rash upon the face of a continent.

  • An estimated 18,000,000 souls were processed through the Gulag's camps. A number so large it becomes meaningless, which was likely the point.
  • By March 1940, the system consisted of 53 Gulag camp directorates—colloquially and with chilling understatement, "camps"—and 423 labor colonies.
  • The tentative, bloodless consensus in contemporary Soviet historiography is that roughly 1,600,000 people died from their detention in these camps. A figure that feels both immense and insultingly precise.

Mass repression in the Soviet Union

Economic repression

Political repression

Ideological repression

Ethnic repression

Politics of the Soviet Union

Leadership

Communist Party

Legislature

Governance

Judiciary

Ideology

Society

A punishment cell block in a subcamp of Vorkutlag, 1945. Austere.

The Gulag was the Soviet Union's sprawling architecture of forced labor camps, a bureaucratic solution to the inconvenient problem of human dissent and a source of disposable labor. The word itself, Gulag, initially referred only to a specific division of the ever-shifting Soviet secret police. This division was tasked with managing the camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s, the era when Joseph Stalin perfected the art of industrial-scale misery. In the English-speaking world, however, the term has bled beyond its original meaning, now standing for the entire system of forced labor that persisted throughout the Soviet era. The acronym GULAG (ГУЛАГ) is a mouthful of bureaucratic jargon: "Glávnoye upravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh lageréy" (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й), or "Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps." The official name, naturally, changed several times. Tyranny enjoys rebranding.

The Gulag is recognized, even by those with a charitable view of history, as a primary instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. Its camps held a grim mixture of common criminals and political prisoners. A significant number of the latter were convicted through procedures so simplified they mock the very concept of justice, such as the infamous NKVD troikas or other mechanisms of extrajudicial punishment. This agency of suffering was established in 1930, first administered by the OGPU (1923–1934), which later morphed into the NKVD (1934–1946), and finally, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in its waning years.

The system of internment grew with the ferocity of a cancer, swelling to a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the close of 1940, the Gulag camps held 1.5 million people. The current scholarly consensus, a cold calculation derived from opened archives, suggests that of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million through its colonies between 1930 and 1953, somewhere between 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or died shortly after their release. Some journalists and writers, who perhaps place more stock in the testimony of those who survived the ordeal than in the meticulous records of their tormentors, argue for higher figures. The archival researchers, for their part, have found "no plan of destruction" and no official statement of intent to kill. A comforting thought, until you realize that releasing prisoners who were already dying from incurable diseases was a common practice, a neat trick to keep the mortality statistics tidy.

Almost as soon as Stalin's death was confirmed, the Soviet state began to dismantle its masterpiece. A mass general amnesty was declared, though it was cynically limited to non-political prisoners and politicals sentenced to five years or less. Soon after, Nikita Khrushchev ascended to First Secretary, kicking off the era of de-Stalinization and the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. This thaw triggered a mass release and rehabilitation of political prisoners. On January 25, 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished, its administrative remnants dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing people to penal labor, however, persists in the Russian Federation, a ghost of the past with a greatly reduced, but not absent, capacity.

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of eight years in the camps and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who burned the term into the global consciousness with his 1973 publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands" and, with the authority of an eyewitness, described the Gulag for what it was: a system where people were worked to death. As of March 1940, there were 53 such camp directorates and 423 labor colonies. Many of the bleak industrial towns that dot the map of northern and eastern Russia and Kazakhstan—places like Karaganda, Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan—were born as blocks of camps, built by prisoners and later inhabited by their former guards and ex-convicts. A living legacy, built on bones.

Etymology

GULAG (ГУЛАГ) is the acronym for "Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й" (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps). The name was tweaked several times, at one point becoming the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies (Главное управление исправительно-трудовых колоний (ГУИТК)), a change reflected in documents detailing camp subordination. In Russian, the term was rarely used colloquially. Prisoners and guards alike spoke of the camps (лагеря, lagerya) or the zone (зона, zona). The official, euphemistic term "correctional labour camp" was proposed for official use by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on July 27, 1929. "Correctional." A masterpiece of Orwellian understatement.

Though it began as a bureaucratic designation for a government agency, in English and other languages, the acronym has taken on the weight of a common noun. It signifies the entire Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor.

It has expanded even further, as Anne Applebaum notes:

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 often use "Gulag" as a catch-all for every prison and internment camp in the Soviet Union. The term's modern usage has detached from its origin, now serving as a grim shorthand for similar atrocities, such as in the phrase "North Korea's Gulag" for camps operating today.

Overview

Genrikh Yagoda (center) inspecting the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, 1935. Over his right shoulder, a young Nikita Khrushchev looks on. One wonders what he was thinking.

Some historians calculate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953. The numbers for the preceding decade, 1918 to 1929, are harder to pin down. Historian Orlando Figes suggests a staggering 25 million prisoners passed through the Gulag between 1928 and 1953. An additional 6 to 7 million were deported and exiled to the most remote and unforgiving corners of the USSR, while another 4 to 5 million were processed through labor colonies, plus 3.5 million who were already in, or had been sent to, labor settlements.

According to one set of estimates, the total camp population fluctuated from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. Other figures suggest that by early 1953, the number of prisoners in camps exceeded 2.4 million, with over 465,000 of them classified as political prisoners. Between 1934 and 1953, a revolving door of sorts existed: 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in any given year was released. A statistic that sounds hopeful until you remember the conditions they were released from, and the condition they were in upon release.

Any institutional analysis of this 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 (Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных, Glavnoye upravleniye po delam voyennoplennyh i internirovannyh). This was a department of the NKVD (and later the MVD) responsible for foreign civilian internees and prisoners of war during and after World War II. In many respects, the GUPVI system was a mirror image of the GULAG.

Its primary function was organizing foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. Its top brass was drawn from the GULAG's ranks. The main distinction, according to memoirs, was the absence of convicted criminals in GUPVI camps. Otherwise, the conditions were tragically similar: relentless labor, starvation rations, deplorable living conditions, and a consequently high mortality rate.

For Soviet political prisoners like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the distinction was academic; all foreign detainees and POWs were simply inmates of the Gulag. The survivors certainly saw themselves that way. Estimates suggest that over its existence, GUPVI operated over 500 POW camps, imprisoning over 4,000,000 people. Most Gulag inmates were not, in fact, political prisoners, though their numbers were always significant.

Petty crimes, or even a poorly timed joke about a Soviet official, could land you a prison sentence. About half of the political prisoners in the Gulag were imprisoned "by administrative means"—that is, without a trial. Official data indicates over 2.6 million such sentences were handed down by the secret police between 1921 and 1953. Sentences varied. After 1953, the maximum sentence for petty theft was six months, down from one to seven years. Theft of state property, however, could earn you 7 to 25 years. In 1958, the maximum sentence for any crime was reduced from 25 to 15 years. A gesture of magnanimity, no doubt.

In 1960, the MVD ceased to be the central administrator of the camps, with control passing to individual republic MVD branches. The centralized detention apparatus was, for a time, dismantled.

The fence at the old Gulag camp in Perm-36, founded in 1943, now a museum. A reminder that even nightmares can become tourist attractions.

History

Background

Prisoners on a ship en route to Sakhalin, a remote prison island, circa 1903. The past is never as far away as you think.

The tsars and the Russian Empire were no strangers to using forced exile and forced labour as punishment. Katorga, a sentence reserved for the most serious criminals, was a clear precursor to the Gulag, featuring confinement, spartan facilities, and hard, unskilled labor. Historian Anne Applebaum notes that katorga was not a common sentence; there were around 6,000 convicts in 1906, rising to 28,600 by 1916. Those convicted of lesser crimes were sent to corrective prisons, where they were also put to work.

Forced exile to Siberia was a tool used since the 17th century, a convenient way to deal with political dissidents and revolutionaries. In the 19th century, survivors of the failed Decembrist revolt and Polish nobles who resisted Russian rule found themselves dispatched to the east. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849 for the crime of reading banned literature, a sentence commuted to Siberian exile. Various socialist revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks like Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin, also did their time in exile. Convicts and exiles were sent to the vast, underpopulated regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East, areas devoid of towns, food, or reliable transport. Despite the isolation, escapes were not unheard of. Stalin himself escaped three of the four times he was sent into exile.

Siberia thus acquired its fearsome reputation as a place of punishment long before the Soviets perfected it. The Bolsheviks' own experiences provided a blueprint, teaching them the importance of strict enforcement. From 1920 to 1950, the Communist Party leaders viewed repression as a necessary tool to secure the state's functioning and solidify their power over the working class—never mind that peasants made up 80% of the population when they seized power.

During the Russian Civil War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a "special" prison camp system, separate from the traditional one and under the thumb of the Cheka. These camps, as Lenin conceived them, were explicitly political. Their purpose was to isolate and eliminate class-aliens, the socially dangerous, the disruptive, the suspicious—anyone whose thoughts or actions did not contribute to strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Forced labor as a "method of reeducation" was pioneered in the Solovki prison camp in the 1920s, building on Trotsky's experiments with forced labor for Czech war prisoners in 1918 and his proposals for "compulsory labor service" outlined in Terrorism and Communism. These early concentration camps were not identical to their later Stalinist or Nazi counterparts but were designed to isolate war prisoners in the extreme circumstances following World War I.

Prisoners were sorted into categories: petty criminals, Civil War POWs, officials accused of corruption, political enemies, and anyone else deemed a threat. In the first decade, the system was a mess, with a clear line between criminal and political prisoners. The traditional system was overseen by the People's Commissariat of Justice, then the NKVD. The Cheka and its successors—the GPU (State Political Directorate) and the OGPU—handled the politicals and their "special" camps. In April 1929, this distinction was erased, and the OGPU took control of the entire penal system. In 1928, there were 30,000 internees; the authorities were officially against compelled labor. A year earlier, the head 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.

How quaint.

The legal foundation for the "corrective labor camps" was a secret decree from the Sovnarkom on July 11, 1929, which mirrored a Politburo decision from June 27, 1929, about using penal labor.

One of the system's architects was Naftaly Frenkel. Arrested in 1923 for smuggling, he was sentenced to 10 years at Solovki. There, he penned a letter detailing "productivity improvement" proposals, including the infamous nourishment scale (шкала питания), where a prisoner's food ration was tied to their production rate. This "you-eat-as-you-work" system was brutally effective at killing the weak and became a cornerstone of the Gulag. The letter impressed officials like Genrikh Yagoda, and Frenkel was transformed from inmate to camp commander. A true success story.

The Gulag, initially a tool for isolating enemies, quickly evolved into an independent branch of the national economy, fueled by cheap labor. This created a perverse incentive for the state to maintain a steady influx of prisoners, especially for work in the extreme conditions of the north and east. The Gulag served two masters: punishment and profit.

Formation and expansion during Stalin's rule

The Gulag was the administrative body, but its name became synonymous with the camps it oversaw. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin consolidated power and began to shape the system. On June 27, 1929, the Politburo created a network of self-supporting camps to replace existing prisons. Prisoners with sentences over three years were sent there; those with shorter sentences remained under the NKVD.

The goal was to colonize the remote, inhospitable regions of the Soviet Union. This coincided with Stalin's push for collectivization and rapid industrialization, which necessitated a purge of peasants, the so-called kulaks. The kulaks were deemed wealthy peasants, and therefore capitalists and enemies of socialism. The term soon applied to anyone who seemed less than enthusiastic about the Soviet government. In late 1929, Stalin launched dekulakization, a program for the "complete elimination of the kulak class." In four months, 60,000 were sent to camps and 154,000 exiled. This was just the beginning. In 1931 alone, 1,803,392 people were exiled.

While these mass relocations successfully moved a potential labor force to where it was needed, they were a logistical nightmare. The "special settlers" lived on starvation rations. Many died, and those healthy enough to walk tried to escape. The state was pouring money into feeding a workforce it could barely use. The OGPU, realizing the problem, began recruiting prisoners as guards and setting up ambushes along escape routes. They even tried to improve living conditions and told kulaks they'd regain their rights in five years. None of it worked. The dekulakization process was a failure in its goal of creating a stable forced labor force.

The Gulag was officially established as the GULAG on April 25, 1930, by OGPU order 130/63, following a Sovnarkom order from April 7. It was renamed GULAG in November. The idea that mass arrests were driven by economic needs has been largely refuted by post-Soviet archival access, though some sources still support this hypothesis. In 1931-32, the Gulag held around 200,000 prisoners; by 1935, that number had swelled to 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies. The population peaked at 1.5 million in 1941, fell during the war, and then climbed again, reaching its zenith in 1953.

The population of Gulag camps (blue) and Gulag colonies (red) from 1934–53. A fever chart of repression.

In the early 1930s, a harsher penal policy caused the camp population to explode. The Great Purge of 1937–38 brought another massive influx. Hundreds of thousands were arrested under the sweeping terms of Article 58 of the Criminal Codes, which criminalized various "counterrevolutionary activities." Under NKVD Order No. 00447, tens of thousands of Gulag inmates were executed for "continuing counterrevolutionary activities."

Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased eightfold. The intelligentsia was a prime target, their share of the camp population growing faster than any other group. The Soviet leadership harbored a deep distrust and hatred for them. This data comes from the work of Viktor Zemskov, who extrapolated from prison population movement records.

During World War II

Political role

On the eve of World War II, Soviet archives show a combined camp and colony population of over 1.6 million in 1939. Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde estimate 1.2 to 1.5 million. After the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940, it occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. Hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of other annexed lands were arrested and sent to the Gulag. Official data, however, claims a more modest total of 211,106 sentences for political and anti-state crimes between 1939 and 1941.

Approximately 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured. Nearly all captured officers and many soldiers were either murdered (see the Katyn massacre) or sent to the Gulag. Of the 10,000–12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940–41, only 583 survived to be released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. Of the 80,000 evacuees under Polish General Władysław Anders who made it to Great Britain, only 310 chose to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947. A telling statistic.

During the Great Patriotic War, Gulag populations plummeted due to a massive spike in mortality in 1942–43. In the winter of 1941, a quarter of the Gulag's population starved to death. Between 1941 and 1943, 516,841 prisoners died, a result of brutal work and the famine caused by the German invasion. This period accounts for about half of all recorded Gulag deaths. In 1943, the term katorga works (каторжные работы) was reintroduced, initially for Nazi collaborators, but soon expanded to other political prisoners, like members of deported peoples who had fled exile. These prisoners were sent to the harshest camps, and few survived.

Economic role

A central shop in Norilsk, built by prisoners of the Norillag. Lithuanian deportees preparing logs for rafting on the Mana River.

By World War II, the Gulag had become a vast "camp economy." Just before the war, forced labor produced 46.5% of the nation's nickel, 76% of its tin, 40% of its cobalt, 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25.3% of its timber. The NKVD also built factories, highways, and railroads in preparation for war.

When the war began, the Gulag pivoted to producing arms and supplies. Railroad construction remained a priority, which proved vital during the German invasion. Factories were converted to produce ammunition and uniforms. The NKVD even gathered skilled workers from across the Gulag into 380 special colonies to produce tanks, aircraft, and armaments.

Despite low capital costs, the camp economy was deeply flawed. Productivity rarely matched the wildly optimistic estimates. Machinery was scarce and broke down constantly. The biggest problem, however, was that forced labor is inherently less efficient than free labor. Gulag prisoners were, on average, half as productive as free Soviet laborers, a fact not helped by malnutrition. To compensate, the NKVD simply worked the prisoners harder and longer, on even smaller rations. A camp administrator noted, "There are cases when a prisoner is given only four or five hours out of twenty-four for rest, which significantly lowers his productivity." A former prisoner recalled, "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."

Food scarcity was rampant, as the central government focused on the military and left the camps to fend for themselves. In 1942, the Gulag established a Supply Administration to find its own food. The NKVD also limited rations to "motivate" prisoners, a policy that lasted until 1948.

The Gulag also faced a labor shortage. The Great Terror had provided a steady supply, but by the war's start, the purges had slowed. New laws were passed in mid-1940 allowing short camp sentences for petty theft and hooliganism, adding 300,000 prisoners by January 1941. But the food shortages of 1942 decimated the population again. Many prisoners were also released early to be drafted.

Even as the workforce shrank, demand grew. The government pushed the Gulag to "do more with less." The NKVD set impossibly high production goals. As the Axis advanced, many camps in western Russia had to be evacuated. Machinery was prioritized over people, who were forced to walk. The speed of Operation Barbarossa meant many couldn't be evacuated; the NKVD massacred them to prevent them from falling into German hands. When the tide turned, a new influx of Soviet ex-POWs replenished the camps.

After World War II

The Transpolar Railway, a Gulag project from 1947 to 1953. A railroad to nowhere, built by ghosts.

After the war, the inmate population surged again, reaching 2.5 million by the early 1950s. As many as two million former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated to the USSR. At the Yalta Conference, the U.S. and U.K. signed a Repatriation Agreement, which was interpreted to mean the forced return of all Soviets. These operations took place from 1945 to 1947.

Soviet POWs, upon their return, were treated as traitors under Order No. 270. Some sources claim over 1.5 million were sent to the Gulag, but this is a confusion. Freed POWs went to "filtration" camps. By 1944, over 90% were cleared, and 8% were arrested or sent to penal battalions. By 1946, over 4 million repatriated persons had been processed. Of the 1,539,475 POWs, 226,127 were transferred to the NKVD—that is, the Gulag.

Results of the checks and filtration of repatriants (by March 1, 1946)

Category Total % Civilian % POWs %
Released and sent home 2,427,906 57.81 2,146,126 80.68 281,780 18.31
Conscripted 801,152 19.08 141,962 5.34 659,190 42.82
Sent to labor battalions of the Ministry of Defence 608,095 14.48 263,647 9.91 344,448 22.37
Sent to NKVD as spetskontingent (i.e. sent to GULAG) 272,867 6.50 46,740 1.76 226,127 14.69
Were waiting for transportation and worked for Soviet military units abroad 89,468 2.13 61,538 2.31 27,930 1.81
Total 4,199,488 100 2,660,013 100 1,539,475 100

After Nazi Germany's defeat, the NKVD set up ten "special camps" in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, repurposing former Stalags and Nazi concentration camps like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. German estimates suggest 65,000 people died in these Soviet-run camps. German researchers consider Sachsenhausen an integral part of the Gulag system.

During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit hub for prisoners destined for the Kolyma camps.

The main driver of the post-war prisoner boom was the tightening of property offense laws in 1947 during a famine, leading to hundreds of thousands of long sentences for petty theft. By early 1953, the prisoner population was over 2.4 million, with 465,000 politicals.

Political prisoners at lunch in the Minlag "special camp" coal mine. In these camps, prisoners wore numbered uniforms. A special kind of hell for a "special contingent."

In 1948, a system of "special camps" was created exclusively for political prisoners convicted under the harsher sub-articles of Article 58: Trotskyites, "nationalists" (Ukrainian nationalism), white émigrés, and other fabricated enemies. The system persisted after Stalin's death in March 1953, though the authorities' grip loosened, leading to conflicts and uprisings (see Bitch Wars, Kengir uprising, Vorkuta uprising).

The amnesty of 1953 was mostly for common criminals. The release of political prisoners began in 1954 and accelerated after Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956.

The Gulag institution was officially closed by MVD order Number 20 on January 25, 1960. Forced labor colonies, however, continued. Political prisoners were held in camps like Perm-36 until it was closed in 1987. The Russian penal system, despite reforms, retains many Gulag practices. In the late 2000s, human rights activists accused authorities of trying to erase the memory of the Gulag from places like Perm-36 and Solovki.

According to Encyclopædia Britannica:

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

Before the Soviet Union collapsed, estimates of Gulag victims were all over the map, from 2.3 to 17.6 million. Mortality rates in the camps from 1934–40 were four to six times higher than the Soviet average. Post-1991 archival research has narrowed the range considerably. A 1993 study of Soviet data puts the number of deaths in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953 at 1,053,829.

This number is deceptive. It was standard practice to release prisoners on the verge of death, a convenient way to sanitize the mortality statistics. The consensus now hovers around 1.6 to 1.76 million deaths resulting from detention, with about half of those occurring between 1941 and 1943. As Timothy Snyder notes, "with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive." A low bar for success. If you include deaths from labor colonies and special settlements, the toll rises to 2,749,163, according to J. Otto Pohl's incomplete data.

In a 2018 study, Golfo Alexopoulos challenged this consensus, arguing it should include those whose lives were shortened by the ordeal. She concludes that the practice of releasing terminally ill prisoners was systematic and that at least one-third of all inmates died or had their lives shortened due to their detention. This methodology yields a figure of 6 million deaths. Historian Orlando Figes and writer Vadim Erlikman have proposed similar estimates. However, Alexopoulos's methodology has been criticized for misinterpreting evidence, such as assuming that prisoners "directed to other places of detention" was a euphemism for releasing them to die.

Mikhail Nakonechnyi's 2020 doctoral dissertation at Oxford examined the practice of medical release (aktirovka). He concludes that about 1 million terminally ill people were discharged early and adds 800,000–850,000 excess deaths directly caused by incarceration, bringing the total to 2.5 million.

Mortality rate

In 2009, Steven Rosefielde stated that more complete archival data increases camp deaths to 1,258,537, and that "the best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953." Dan Healey echoed this in 2018, noting the tentative consensus of 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths between 1930 and 1953.

Certificates of death in the Gulag system for the period from 1930 to 1956

Year Deaths Mortality rate %
1930 7,980 4.20
1931 7,283 2.90
1932 13,197 4.80
1933 67,297 15.30
1934 25,187 4.28
1935 31,636 2.75
1936 24,993 2.11
1937 31,056 2.42
1938 108,654 5.35
1939 44,750 3.10
1940 41,275 2.72
1941 115,484 6.10
1942 352,560 24.90
1943 267,826 22.40
1944 114,481 9.20
1945 81,917 5.95
1946 30,715 2.20
1947 66,830 3.59
1948 50,659 2.28
1949 29,350 1.21
1950 24,511 0.95
1951 22,466 0.92
1952 20,643 0.84
1953 9,628 0.67
1954 8,358 0.69
1955 4,842 0.53
1956 3,164 0.40
Total 1,606,748 8.88

Administrators

A list of the men who ran the machine.

Name Years
Feodor (Teodors) Ivanovich Eihmans April 25, 1930 – June 16, 1930
Lazar Iosifovich Kogan June 16, 1930 – June 9, 1932
Matvei Davidovich Berman June 9, 1932 – August 16, 1937
Israel Israelevich Pliner August 16, 1937 – November 16, 1938
Gleb Vasilievich Filaretov November 16, 1938 – February 18, 1939
Vasili Vasilievich Chernyshev February 18, 1939 – February 26, 1941
Victor Grigorievich Nasedkin February 26, 1941 – September 2, 1947
Georgy Prokopievich Dobrynin September 2, 1947 – January 31, 1951
Ivan Ilich Dolgikh January 31, 1951 – October 5, 1954
Sergei Yegorovich Yegorov October 5, 1954 – April 4, 1956

Conditions

Living and working conditions varied. It depended on when and where you were, the whims of broader events like World War II, famines, and waves of terror, and what you were in for. Political prisoners usually got the worst work or were sent to the least productive corners of the Gulag. Victor Herman, in his memoirs, compared the Burepolom and Nuksha 2 camps near Vyatka.

Burepolom held about 3,000 non-political prisoners. They had relative freedom of movement, light guards, unlocked barracks with mattresses, and even watched Western movies. Nuksha 2, which housed serious criminals and politicals, was a different story: guard towers with machine guns and locked barracks. In some camps, prisoners could only send one letter a year and were denied photos of their families.

Some prisoners were released early for good performance. There were even "productive activities." In 1935, a livestock-raising course at a state farm reduced a prisoner's workday to four hours. A professional theater group gave 230 performances to over 115,000 spectators that year. Camp newspapers existed. A veneer of civilization over the abyss.

Andrei Vyshinsky, chief procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memo to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov in 1938, during the Great Purge, stating:

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 [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.

According to prisoner Yevgenia Ginzburg, inmates knew Yezhov was gone when conditions suddenly relaxed. A few days later, Beria's name appeared on official notices.

The central administration showed a discernible interest in keeping the workforce just alive enough to meet production plans. Punishments for refusing to work were severe, but there were also incentives: monetary bonuses, wage payments (from 1950), sentence reductions for meeting quotas, and preferential treatment for the most productive workers (shock workers or Stakhanovites).

Inmates were used as camp guards and could buy camp newspapers and bonds. Robert W. Thurston writes that this was "at least an indication that they were still regarded as participants in society to some degree." A very low degree. Sports teams, especially football, were also set up.

A reconstructed shack in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The number of bodies crammed inside is left to the imagination.

Boris Sulim, a former teenage prisoner at the Omsuchkan camp, 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... I was able to give my mother some of it. They even gave me membership in the Komsomol... 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.

After the German invasion in June 1941, conditions worsened drastically: quotas rose, rations were cut, and medical supplies vanished, causing mortality to skyrocket. The situation improved only near the end of the war.

It's useful to distinguish between three strata of inmates:

1932-33 famine

The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 killed an estimated six to seven million people. On August 7, 1932, Stalin's Law of Spikelets decreed a minimum sentence of ten years or execution for theft of collective farm property. Prosecutions quadrupled. Many cases involved stealing tiny amounts of grain. During the first half of 1933, prisons saw more new inmates than in the previous three years combined.

In the camps, conditions were brutal. A Soviet report stated that in early 1933, up to 15% of the prison population in Soviet Uzbekistan died monthly. Inmates received about 300 calories a day. Escape attempts surged, and camps were directed "not to spare bullets."

Social conditions

Convicts were used for all kinds of labor, including logging. The work area was a square in the forest, surrounded by a clearing and watched from four corner towers. Locals who captured a runaway were rewarded. In colder regions, guards were less concerned, knowing the winter would kill any escapee. Those who weren't shot were often found frozen miles from the camp.

Geography

Siberian taiga near Verkhoyansk. The record low temperature there was −68°C (−90°F). A perfect place to forget someone. Part of 'Project 503', a railroad from Salekhard to Igarka.

In its infancy, the Gulag chose sites for their isolation. Remote monasteries were frequently repurposed. The Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea hosted one of the earliest camps, established shortly after the 1918 Revolution. "Solovki" became a synonym for labor camps. It was presented as a model for the "re-education of class enemies." Initially, the inmates, mostly Russian intelligentsia, had relative freedom. They published newspapers and even conducted scientific research. Eventually, it became just another brutal Gulag camp. In 1929, Maxim Gorky visited and wrote a glowing apology, declaring that camps like Solovki were "absolutely necessary."

With the shift to using the Gulag for cheap labor, new camps sprang up wherever an economic task demanded them—the White Sea–Baltic Canal, the Baikal–Amur Mainline. Parts of the Moscow Metro and the Moscow State University campus were built by forced labor.

Most camps were in the remote northeast of Siberia (the most notorious being Sevvostlag along the Kolyma river and Norillag near Norilsk) and in the southeastern steppes of Kazakhstan (Luglag, Steplag, Peschanlag). These were vast, sparsely populated regions with no roads or food, but rich in resources. Camps were spread throughout the Soviet Union, including in European Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

There were even camps outside the Soviet Union—in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Mongolia—under direct Gulag control.

Throughout Soviet history, there were at least 476 separate camp administrations. As researcher Galina Ivanova stated:

to date, Russian historians have discovered and described 476 camps that existed at different times on the territory of the USSR... 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...

Many existed only briefly. The number peaked in the early 1950s at over 100. Most administrations oversaw multiple camp units. The complexes at Kolyma, Norilsk, and Vorkuta were infamous, yet prisoner mortality in Norilsk was often lower than the system's average.

Personnel

The ranks and insignia of the people who ran hell.

Higher Operational Personnel Senior Operational Personnel Middle Operational Personnel Junior Operational Personnel Enlisted Personnel
Rank insignia 1936-1943
Command category 3 4 5 6
Rank equivalent Komdiv Kombrig Colonel Major

The head of the Gulag held the rank of Commissar of State Security of the 2nd class. They wore NKVD uniforms. When the Gulag was transferred to the NKGB in 1943, the personnel adopted NKGB ranks.

  • Military personnel of guard units wore a silver triangle on their collar.
  • Technical-administrative and political personnel wore a red triangle.
  • Technical personnel wore crossed hammers and wrenches.

Special institutions

  • There were separate camps or zones for juveniles (maloletki), the disabled (at Spassk), and mothers with babies (mamki).
  • Family members of "Traitors of the Motherland" (ChSIR) were a special category of repressed people.
  • Secret research labs called Sharashkas held arrested scientists, where they developed new technologies anonymously.

Historiography

Origins and functions of the Gulag

According to historian Stephen Barnes, there are four main ways to look at the Gulag's origins and functions:

  • The moral explanation, championed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argues that Soviet ideology dismantled the moral checks on human nature, providing justifications for evil at every level.
  • The political explanation, favored by historians like Robert Conquest, sees the Gulag primarily as a tool for eliminating political enemies.
  • The economic explanation, as set out by Anne Applebaum, argues the regime used the Gulag for economic development. Though never truly profitable, it was perceived as such until Stalin's death.
  • Barnes's own fourth explanation situates the Gulag within modern projects of "cleansing" the social body of hostile elements through isolation and elimination.

Hannah Arendt argued that as part of a totalitarian system, the Gulag camps were experiments in "total domination." The goal was not just to limit liberty but to abolish it entirely. She argued the system wasn't merely for political repression, as it grew long after all serious opposition was crushed. The camps were filled with people arrested not for who they were, but because they belonged to some shifting category of imagined threats.

She also dismissed the economic function. The work was deliberately pointless, she argued, and the camps were economically irrelevant, serving only to finance their own supervision. She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps," where inmates were systematically wiped out through starvation and neglect. The arbitrary cruelty and complicity of inmates and guards served to destroy morality and individuality, atomizing society and eliminating any capacity for resistance.

Archival documents

Statistical reports from the OGPU–NKVD–MGB–MVD are held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. These were highly classified until the late 1980s, when researchers like Viktor Zemskov gained access. Since 1992, some foreign scientists have been admitted, though access remains restricted, especially under the Putin administration.

The reliability of these documents is a matter of debate. On one hand, understating prisoner numbers would reduce food supplies and increase mortality, jeopardizing production plans. On the other hand, overstating them would lead to impossibly high production quotas. This tension likely resulted in a reasonable degree of accuracy in the reports.

Between 1990 and 1992, Zemskov published the first precise data, which was largely accepted by Western scholars despite some inconsistencies. Critics like Sergei Maksudov argued that Zemskov, while publishing valuable documents, lacked a deep understanding of the Gulag's essence and absolutized the data without sufficient critical analysis. Zemskov retorted that Western writers were the ones who failed to benefit from comparing new and old data.

According to French historian Nicolas Werth, the accessible archives are just a fraction of the immense bureaucratic paper trail. Many local camp archives simply rotted away in sheds.

From 2004-2005, a seven-volume collection of archival documents, The History of Stalin's Gulag, was published, covering mass repression, the punitive system, the economy, the population, special settlers, uprisings, and an index of cases.

Population estimates

Before the archives opened, estimates of the Gulag population varied wildly, often colored by the author's political views.

Historical estimates of the Gulag population size

Gulag population Year the estimate was made for Source Methodology
15 million 1940–42 Mora & Zwiernag (1945) –
2.3 million December 1937 Timasheff (1948) Calculation of disenfranchised population
Up to 3.5 million 1941 Jasny (1951) Analysis of the output of Soviet enterprises run by NKVD
50 million total passed through – Solzhenitsyn (1975) Analysis of indirect data, own experience, and witness testimonies
17.6 million 1942 Anton Antonov-Ovseenko (1999) NKVD documents
4–5 million 1939 Wheatcroft (1981) Analysis of demographic data.
10.6 million 1941 Rosefielde (1981) Based on Mora & Zwiernak data and annual mortality.
5.5–9.5 million late 1938 Conquest (1991) 1937 Census figures, arrest/death estimates, various sources.
4–5 million every year – Volkogonov (1990s)

The archival data forced many scholars, including Robert Conquest, to revise their earlier estimates downward. While inconsistencies remain, the data is considered more reliable than the indirect sources used during the Cold War. These studies concluded that from 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through Gulag labor camps and 4–5 million through labor colonies. These figures count convictions, not individuals, so the number of people is somewhat lower due to repeat sentences. Conversely, at times the official figures reflected camp capacity, not the actual population, which could be 15% higher.

Impact

Culture

The Gulag's cultural impact was immense. It became a central part of modern Russian folklore. The songs of bards like Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich described camp life. Words and phrases from the camps entered the vernacular. The memoirs of survivors like Alexander Dolgun, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Yevgenia Ginzburg became symbols of defiance, testaments to the courage of the imprisoned. The forced migration of artists to Siberia also led to a strange cultural renaissance in places like Magadan, where the theater was on par with Moscow's.

Literature

Many eyewitness accounts have been published:

Colonization

The city of Vorkuta. A monument to forced settlement.

Soviet documents show the Gulag was intended to colonize remote areas. In 1929, the OGPU was tasked with this. The concept of "free settlement" was introduced. On April 12, 1930, Genrikh Yagoda wrote:

The camps must be transformed into colonizing settlements, without waiting for the end of periods of confinement... Here is my plan: to turn all the prisoners into a settler population until they have served their sentences.

Well-behaved prisoners who had served most of their term could be released to "free settlement" (volnoye poseleniye) outside the camp. Those who served their full term but were denied freedom of movement were also assigned to free settlement. Of the 40,000 people receiving state pensions in Vorkuta, an estimated 32,000 are former inmates or their descendants, trapped in the place of their imprisonment.

Economics

A 2024 study found that areas near Gulag camps that held a larger share of educated elites among their prisoners have since shown greater economic growth, demonstrating the long-run persistence of human capital across generations. An ironic legacy.

Life after a term was served

Release was not freedom. Ex-prisoners were barred from many jobs. Hiding a past imprisonment was a crime. Former "politicals" were monitored by the "First Departments" (secret police outlets) at their workplaces. Many were forbidden from settling in large cities, a policy known as the 101st kilometre.

Memorials

Memorial in Astana, Kazakhstan, to the prisoners of the Akmola Female Labor Camp. Map of Stalin's Gulag camps in the Gulag Museum in Moscow. Memorial in St. Petersburg.

Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials made from boulders taken from the Solovki camp. Moscow's is on Lubyanka Square, site of the NKVD headquarters. People gather there annually on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions (October 30). The State Gulag Museum in Moscow was founded in 2001 by survivor Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. In November 2024, the Gulag History Museum in Moscow was ordered to close for "fire safety" violations, part of the Putin regime's broader crackdown on dissent. History, it seems, is a fire hazard.