The Gulag labor camp system

The Gulag, short for Main Administration of Camps, was the Soviet system of forced labor camps and penal colonies. The secret police, then called the OGPU, set up the administration in 1930 and took over camps that had begun under Lenin in the early 1920s, such as the Solovki monastery island in the White Sea. Over the next two decades it grew into hundreds of camps spread from the Arctic north to Central Asia and the Far East. Between 1930 and 1953 about 18 million people passed through its camps and colonies, according to Soviet archives opened in the 1990s.¹³²

The system grew from Stalin's rush to industrialize. Collectivization of agriculture in 1929 to 1933 and the campaign against so-called kulaks sent millions of peasants into exile and camps. The first Five-Year Plan required timber, coal, gold and canals in remote and freezing regions where free labor would not go, and forced labor was cheap. Prisoners built the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1931 to 1933, mined gold at Kolyma, nickel at Norilsk and coal at Vorkuta, and laid railways. Inmates included farmers, ordinary criminals, and many people convicted for political crimes under Article 58 of the criminal code. The Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 added a huge wave, and wartime deported peoples were sent to special settlements.²³

Conditions were harsh. Hunger, cold, overwork and disease killed many, and archival records count about 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953. Estimates differ, especially if deaths in transit, in exile and shortly after release are included. After Stalin died in 1953, amnesties released many prisoners, and the camps shrank after Khrushchev's 1956 speech. The Gulag was officially abolished in 1960. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself a prisoner, made it known to the world with The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973.³⁵¹