Gulag

Gulag, agency of the secret police of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) created in the 1930s to administer concentration camps, forced labor camps, transit prisons, and exile sites. The term Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, Russian for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.” The word is also commonly applied to the far-flung network of camps and sites run by the Gulag administration.

The Gulag agency and its camps played a central role in the mass imprisonment and repression that took place in the 1930s under the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a period known as the Great Purge or Great Terror. The Gulag system subsequently expanded, reaching its zenith during the early years of the Cold War, and continued to play an important role until Stalin’s death in 1953.

The history of labor camps in the Soviet Union begins almost from the first year of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1918 (see Russian Revolutions of 1917). Labor camps were known to be in existence as early as mid-1918, and were legalized by decrees in September 1918 and April 1919. Also in 1919 the Soviet secret police, then known as the Cheka and later as the KGB, was empowered to arrest “class enemies.” Many were executed outright or sent to prison camps. The widespread use of labor in prisons, however, was sanctioned only in the late 1920s under Stalin. The camps and prisons built and administered by the Gulag agency served a dual function, both as a place to put the masses of detainees (commonly known by the Russian term zeks) and to help curtail an immense shortage of labor that resulted from Stalin’s industrialization policies.

Gulag prisons were originally centered in Karelia, along the White Sea coast, and in Vorkuta and Pechora, in the Arctic regions of European Russia. By the late 1930s Gulag camps were set up throughout the USSR, including in Moscow, and numbered in the thousands. By the end of the 1930s the Gulag system was responsible for much of the USSR’s logging and extraction of copper, gold, and coal. The camps became an increasingly important component of the Soviet economy during and after World War II (1939-1945). The camps contributed to the rapid postwar industrialization of the USSR, as well as to the massive buildup of the Soviet military complex during the early years of the Cold War.

Few of the people sent to the Gulag camps were criminals. The great majority were political prisoners, including intellectuals and Communist Party and army officials who had been (usually falsely) accused of being “enemies of the people,” spies, or saboteurs. Estimates of the number of Soviet citizens sent to the Gulag camps vary considerably. According to a widely cited estimate by British scholar Edwin Bacon, a total of 18 million Soviet citizens passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953. During the same period, incomplete archival sources suggest that 2,749,163 individuals died in the camps and in “special exile” villages. However, recently opened Soviet archives may provide a more complete reckoning of total Gulag prisoners and deaths. The Gulag system began to be dismantled after Stalin’s death in 1953. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied in the following years.

The harsh and often deadly conditions in the Gulag camps have been attested to by a number of survivors, perhaps the most noteworthy being Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His book Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956 (3 vols., The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956), which first appeared in 1973 and was translated into English in 1974, is a massively documented exposé of the Soviet prison system. More recently, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum made extensive use of newly opened archives, as well as memoirs and interviews, to document the history of the Gulag system in her book Gulag: A History (2003), which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004.