Gulag

• 1. Introduction

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  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn likened the Gulag to a chain of islands. He had survived eight years inside it, and in 1973 he gave the system its international name with The Gulag Archipelago. The word itself was once narrow. GULAG stood for the Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps, a branch of the Soviet secret police. In English the term grew to mean something vast. It came to name the whole machinery prisoners called the meat-grinder. The arrests. The interrogations. The transport in unheated cattle cars. The forced labor. The destruction of families. The years in exile. Some 14 million people passed through the camps from 1930 to 1953, and another 4 million through the colonies. How did a prison directorate become a branch of the national economy? Why did towns like Norilsk and Magadan rise from blocks of camps? And how do historians count the dead when the archives stayed locked for decades?

• 2. Before The Camps

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  Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to die in 1849 for reading banned literature. His sentence was commuted to banishment in Siberia. He joined a long Russian habit. The tsar used forced exile and forced labor as punishment, and exile to Siberia had served for a wide range of offenses since the 17th century. Katorga was the harshest tsarist category, reserved for the most serious crimes, with confinement and hard unskilled work. The historian Anne Applebaum notes katorga was not common. Roughly 6,000 katorga convicts served sentences in 1906, rising to as many as 28,600 by 1916. The Bolsheviks knew this world from the inside. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin were all sent into exile. Stalin escaped three of the four times he was sent away. Their own experience handed them a model, including the value of strict enforcement. In the Russian Civil War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks built a special prison camp system under the Cheka, separate from the traditional prisons. These early camps had a political purpose, made to isolate elements judged class-alien, socially dangerous, or disloyal to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

• 3. The Hunger Scale

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  Naftaly Frenkel was arrested in 1923 for illegally crossing borders and smuggling. He drew 10 years of hard labor at Solovki, later called the first camp of the Gulag. From inside, he wrote a letter to the camp administration with productivity proposals. The most infamous tied a prisoner's food ration to his rate of work, a scheme known as the nourishment scale. This you-eat-as-you-work system could kill weaker prisoners within weeks. The letter reached high officials including Genrikh Yagoda. Frenkel went from inmate to camp commander, and his proposals spread across the system. The logic ran against earlier Soviet thinking. In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration condemned squeezing golden sweat from prisoners as fundamentally lacking in corrective significance. Yet the camps soon became, in effect, an independent branch of the national economy, built on cheap forced labor used mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north. The state had a steady interest in that labor. By 1928 there were 30,000 individuals interned, with the authorities still opposed to compelled work. A secret Sovnarkom decree of the 11th of July 1929 set the legal base for the corrective labor camps.

• 4. Stalin's Expansion

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  On the 27th of June 1929, the Politburo created a system of self-supporting camps meant to replace the country's prisons. Prisoners with sentences over three years went to these camps, and the purpose was to colonise remote and inhospitable corners of the Soviet Union. The timing was no accident. Stalin was launching collectivization and rapid industrial development. Collectivisation brought a large-scale purge of peasants and so-called kulaks, who the state branded as wealthy capitalists and enemies of socialism. By late 1929 Stalin launched dekulakization and demanded the complete elimination of the kulak class. In just four months, 60,000 people were sent to the camps and 154,000 others were exiled. In 1931 alone, 1,803,392 people were exiled. The special settlers lived on starvation rations, and many starved to death. The healthy tried to escape. The OGPU recruited prisoners as informers, set ambushes on escape routes, and told kulaks they would regain their rights in five years. The Gulag was officially established on the 25th of April 1930 by OGPU order. The 1931-32 archives show roughly 200,000 prisoners in the camps. By 1935 there were about 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies.

• 5. Article Fifty-Eight

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  Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government were punishable by imprisonment. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, though significant numbers were present at any one time. About half of the political prisoners were jailed by administrative means, without trial in courts, often through NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. Official data record over 2.6 million sentences on cases investigated by the secret police across 1921 to 1953. During the Great Purge of 1937 to 1938, mass arrests swelled the camps again. Hundreds of thousands were sentenced under Article 58 of the criminal codes, which defined punishment for counterrevolutionary activities. Under NKVD Order No. 00447, tens of thousands of inmates already in the Gulag were executed in 1937-38 for continuing counterrevolutionary activities. The educated did not escape. Between 1934 and 1941 the number of prisoners with higher education rose more than eightfold. Distrust and even hatred for the intelligentsia ran through the Soviet leadership. In 1948 a system of special camps was set up for political prisoners alone, for the severe sub-articles of Article 58: treason, espionage, terrorism. They held Trotskyites, nationalists, white emigres, and people convicted on fabricated charges.

• 6. The Camp Economy

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  Right before the war, forced labor supplied 60% of the nation's gold and 76% of its tin, along with large shares of its nickel, cobalt, chrome-iron ore, and timber. The NKVD gathered skilled workers into 380 special colonies that produced tanks, aircraft, armaments, and ammunition. Yet the camp economy ran on serious flaws. Actual productivity almost never matched the optimistic estimates. Machinery was scarce, and the tools that existed broke fast. The Eastern Siberian Trust for Highway Construction destroyed 94 trucks in three years. Worst of all, forced labor was less efficient than free labor. Prisoners were, on average, half as productive as free Soviet workers, a gap partly explained by malnutrition. The NKVD answered by working prisoners harder, on longer hours and lower rations. One camp administrator admitted that some prisoners were given only four or five hours of rest out of twenty-four. A former prisoner recalled that by the spring of 1942 the camp ceased to function, and it was hard to find people able to gather firewood or bury the dead. This view of the camps as economic tools, instrumentalised yet never truly profitable, is the economic explanation set out by Anne Applebaum.

• 7. War And After

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  In the winter of 1941, a quarter of the Gulag's population died of starvation. The German invasion brought a steep rise in mortality, and 516,841 prisoners died in the camps from 1941 to 1943. That stretch accounts for about half of all Gulag deaths. In 1942 the Gulag set up a Supply Administration to find its own food, because the central government left the camps to their own devices and focused on the military. As the Axis advanced from June 1941, camps in western Russia had to evacuate. Machinery received priority, leaving prisoners to reach safety on foot. When the Germans moved too fast, the NKVD massacred prisoners to keep them from falling into enemy hands. After the war the camp population rose sharply, reaching about 2.5 million by the early 1950s. As many as two million former Soviet citizens were forcibly repatriated under a Repatriation Agreement signed at the close of the Yalta Conference on the 11th of February 1945. Returning Soviet POWs were treated as traitors under Order No. 270. Of the 1,539,475 POWs processed by March 1946, 226,127 were transferred to the NKVD, that is, into the Gulag. Ten NKVD special camps, including former Nazi sites at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, were set up in occupied Germany.

• 8. Counting The Dead

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  Before the Soviet Union fell, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million. The locked archives made honest counting impossible, and the bias toward higher or lower figures was sometimes ascribed to an author's politics. Solzhenitsyn estimated 50 million people passed through the Gulag in total. After 1991, historians reached the once-secret records. A 1993 study of archival data estimated 1,053,829 deaths in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. The tentative consensus holds that of the 18 million people who passed through from 1930 to 1953, between 1.6 million and 1.76 million died as a result of their detention. Timothy Snyder writes that, apart from the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Not every scholar agrees. In her 2018 study, Golfo Alexopoulos counts those whose lives were shortened by extreme conditions and arrives at 6 million deaths, though her method has been criticised for misread evidence. The dismantling came quickly after Stalin died in March 1953. An amnesty that year freed mostly non-political prisoners. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism in his Secret Speech in February 1956, the release and rehabilitation of political prisoners became widespread. The Gulag was formally closed on the 25th of January 1960, yet one of its most famous camps, Perm-36, held political prisoners until 1987.