The longest-serving chief who built up the Gulag
On the evening of 24 December 1938, Malenkov told Berman that 'Comrade Stalin cannot keep the brother of a German spy in government.' Chekists led their former boss to the Black Maria.
Berman entered the Cheka at twenty in 1918 and rose through Siberian and Central Asian posts, serving as internal affairs commissar of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR and chairman of the Uzbek GPU. From 1932 to 1937 he headed the Gulag, the longest-serving of its early chiefs, and transformed the camp system from a corrective-labour experiment into a central instrument of the Soviet economy. He delivered the White Sea–Baltic Canal and the Moscow–Volga Canal with prisoner labour and promoted 'reforging' (perekovka) as the public doctrine justifying forced labour. Moved to People's Commissar of Communications in 1937, he was arrested in Malenkov's office in December 1938 and shot in March 1939. He was rehabilitated in 1957.
Career Timeline
- 1923–1924People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Buryat-Mongolian ASSR
- 1927–1928Chairman of the GPU of the Uzbek SSR
- 1930–1932Deputy chief of the Gulag
- 1932–1937Chief of the Gulag
- 1936–1937Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs (concurrent)
- 1937–1938People's Commissar of Communications
- 1938–1939Arrested, tried and executed
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionChief of uyezd Cheka
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationHe made the Gulag an instrument of the economyHeading the Gulag from 1932 to 1937, he expanded the camp system from a corrective-labour experiment into a central instrument of the Soviet economy, building the White Sea-Baltic and then the Moscow-Volga Canal with prisoner labour.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeThe Gulag chief who received the terror's prisonersHe headed the Gulag from 1932 to 1937, sitting at the top of the camp system as it absorbed the terror's prisoners, and was arrested in December 1938 and shot the following year.
The White Sea–Baltic Canal and 'Reforging' (Perekovka)
From 1931 to 1933, the White Sea–Baltic Canal (Belomorkanal) was the USSR's first large-scale forced-labour construction project, and as Gulag chief Berman directly supervised its southern camp division. The project mobilised roughly 100,000 prisoners under brutal conditions, with a monthly mortality rate reaching 14 percent. Berman formed part of the on-site command alongside Naftaly Frenkel and Semyon Firin; a photograph of the three together has become one of the defining images of the early Gulag leadership.
Berman was not merely an administrator but also an ideologue of Gulag forced labour. The camp newspaper Perekovka (literally 'Reforging') was published on site, and the concept of perekovka became official doctrine: forced labour was propagandised not as punishment but as a transformative process that reforged prisoners into 'new Soviet people.' Berman received the Order of Lenin in August 1933 immediately after the canal's completion, and he was honoured in the propaganda volume The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal, edited by Maxim Gorky the following year.
The reality was the opposite. Naftaly Frenkel wrote in internal directives: 'Take everything from the prisoner in the first three months. After that, we don't need him.' Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, later named Berman alongside Frenkel, Firin, and others as 'Stalin and Yagoda's chief henchmen, the main overseers of Belomor, six hired killers' responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Berman also headed construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal from 1936 to 1937, earning him an additional Order of the Red Star.