Gulag

Formation

Camps first appeared during the civil war. From 1918 the Cheka ran facilities holding hostages and political prisoners, and a decree of 1919 gave forced-labour camps a legal basis. The special camp established on the Solovetsky Islands in 1923 was the first case to combine large-scale isolation with labour mobilization.

The name Gulag dates from April 1930, when an OGPU order created the Main Camp Administration. When the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was formed in 1934 the administration passed under it, becoming a single agency with charge of camps, labour colonies, and special settlements together.

The camp as an economic agency

The Gulag was a punitive institution and an economic ministry at once. The White Sea-Baltic and Moscow-Volga canals, the gold fields of Kolyma, the mines of Norilsk and Vorkuta, and railway construction across the far north and Siberia were built with prisoner labour, and the NKVD functioned as an enterprise receiving its own production targets from the planning authorities.

This double character governed the logic of the camps. Demand for labour bore on the scale of arrests, and conversely the classification of prisoners by capacity for work determined where they were sent. The pairing of remote resource extraction with forced labour left its mark on the geography of Soviet industrialization itself.

Scale

Figures established since the archives opened put the number who passed through camps and labour colonies between 1930 and 1953 at roughly 18 million. Those deported as special settlers are counted separately. The confined population reached its peak in the early 1950s at more than 2.5 million.

The emerging scholarly consensus is that roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million of them died in the camps or soon after release, with mortality highest in the war years of 1942 and 1943.

Dismantling and memory

A large amnesty followed immediately after Stalin's death in March 1953, and prisoner risings broke out that year and the next at Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Kengir. After the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 political prisoners were released and rehabilitated in large numbers, and the Main Camp Administration was abolished in 1960.

It was through testimony that the Gulag became a byword for Soviet state violence. The publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in Paris in 1973 established the word as a common noun in the West, while Shalamov's Kolyma Tales and Ginzburg's memoirs recorded other layers of camp experience.