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Gulag

The Gulag[c][d] was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union.[10][11][12][9] The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й" (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps), but the full official name of the agency changed several times.

For other uses, see Gulag (disambiguation).

The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners, a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. In 1918–1922, the agency was administered by the Cheka, followed by the GPU (1922–1923), the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as the NKVD (1934–1946), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. The Solovki prison camp, the first correctional labour camp which was constructed after the revolution, was opened in 1918 and legalized by a decree, "On the creation of the forced-labor camps", on April 15, 1919.


The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million.[13] The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released.[1][2][3] Some journalists and writers who question the reliability of such data heavily rely on memoir sources that come to higher estimations.[1][7] Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag.[1] This policy can partially be attributed to the common practice of releasing prisoners who were suffering from incurable diseases as well as prisoners who were near death.[13][14]


Almost immediately after the death of Stalin, the Soviet establishment started to dismantle the Gulag system. A mass general amnesty was granted in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death, but it was only offered to non-political prisoners and political prisoners who had been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. Shortly thereafter, Nikita Khrushchev was elected First Secretary, initiating the processes of de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw, triggering a mass release and rehabilitation of political prisoners. Six years later, on 25 January 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labor continues to exist in the Russian Federation, but its capacity is greatly reduced.[15][16]


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands", and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.[17] In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (simply referred to as "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union.[4] Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern Russia, eastern Russia and Kazakhstan such as Karaganda, Norilsk, Vorkuta and Magadan, were blocks of camps which were originally built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners.[18]

, osadniks, ukazniks (people sentenced for violation of various ukases, e.g. Law of Spikelets, decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of criminal law

Kulaks

Dedicated criminals: ""

thieves in law

People sentenced for various and religious reasons.

political

There were separate camps or zones within camps for juveniles (малолетки, maloletki), the disabled (in ), and mothers (мамки, mamki) with babies.

Spassk

(ЧСИР, член семьи изменника Родины, ChSIR, Chlyen sem'i izmennika Rodini) were placed under a special category of repression.

Family members of "Traitors of the Motherland"

Secret research laboratories known as (шарашка) held arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, where they anonymously developed new technologies and also conducted basic research.

Sharashka

Historiography[edit]

Origins and functions of the Gulag[edit]

According to historian Stephen Barnes, the origins and functions of the Gulag can be looked at in four major ways:[125]

's Kolyma Tales is a short-story collection, cited by most major works on the Gulag, and widely considered one of the main Soviet accounts.

Varlam Shalamov

wrote I Chose Freedom after defecting to the United States in 1944. As a leader of industrial plants he had encountered forced labor camps in across the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1941. He describes a visit to one camp at Kemerovo on the Tom River in Siberia. Factories paid a fixed sum to the KGB for every convict they employed.

Victor Kravchenko

wrote I Was an NKVD Agent after defecting to Sweden in 1946 and included his experiences seeing gulag prisoners as a young boy, as well as his experiences as a prisoner himself in 1939. Granovsky's father was sent to the gulag in 1937.

Anatoli Granovsky

's book A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka was finished in 1947, but it was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the time, immediately after World War II.

Julius Margolin

wrote A World Apart, which was translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet communist system.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński

's book Coming out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life. Herman experienced firsthand many places, prisons, and experiences that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was able to reference in only passing or through brief second hand accounts.

Victor Herman

's book The Gulag Archipelago was not the first literary work about labor camps. His previous book on the subject, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", about a typical day in the life of a Gulag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, Novy Mir (New World), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. The First Circle, an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the Marfino sharashka or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

's book "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom": In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk.

Slavomir Rawicz

a Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn,[159] wrote many books and articles on the issue of the Gulag.

János Rózsás

a Hungarian documentary filmmaker, made several films about gulag camps.

Zoltan Szalkai

a Croatian communist who was active in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the manager of the Comintern Publishing House in Moscow 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home after being accused of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the next 20 years in camps from Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–Yugoslavian political normalization he was re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in 1956 and spent the rest of his life in Zagreb, Croatia. He wrote an impressive book titled 7000 days in Siberia.

Karlo Štajner

Dancing Under the Red Star by (ISBN 1-4000-7078-3) tells the story of Margaret Werner, an athletic girl who moves to Russia right before Stalin came to power. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who was held in the Gulag to tell about it.

Karl Tobien

Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag ( 0-394-49497-0), by a member of the US Embassy, and I Was a Slave in Russia (ISBN 0-8159-5800-5), an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. They were interned due to their American citizenship for about eight years c. 1946–55.

ISBN

wrote two famous books about her remembrances, Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.

Yevgenia Ginzburg

a pro-Croatian Montenegrin ideologist. Caught in Austria by the Red Army in 1945, he was sent to the USSR and spent ten years in the Gulag. After his release, Marković wrote his autobiographical account in two volumes titled Ten years in Gulag (Deset godina u Gulagu, Matica crnogorska, Podgorica, Montenegro 2004).

Savić Marković Štedimlija

's book, 20 Years in Siberia [20 de ani în Siberia] is the own life's account written by a Romanian peasant woman from Bucovina (Mahala village near Cernăuți) who managed to survive the harsh, forced labor system together with her three sons. Together with her husband and her three underage children, she was deported from Mahala village to the Soviet Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the Polar Circle, without a trial or even a communicated accusation. The same night of June 12 to 13, 1941, (that is, just before Germany's invasion of the USSR), overall 602 fellow villagers were arrested and deported, without any prior notice. Her mother received the same sentence but was spared from deportation after the fact that she was a paraplegic was acknowledged by the authorities. It was later discovered that the reason for her deportation and forced labor was the fake and nonsensical claim that, allegedly, her husband had been a mayor in the Romanian administration, a politician and a rich peasant, none of the latter of which was true. Separated from her husband, she brought up the three boys, overcame typhus, scorbutus, malnutrition, extreme cold and harsh toils, to later return to Bucovina after rehabilitation. Her manuscript was written toward the end of her life, in the simple and direct language of a peasant with three years of public school education, and was secretly brought to Romania before the fall of Romanian communism, in 1982. Her manuscript was first published in 1991. Her deportation was shared mainly with Romanians from Bucovina and Basarabia, Finnish and Polish prisoners, as token proof to show that Gulag labor camps had also been used for the shattering/ extermination of the natives in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

Anița Nandriș-Cudla

– Solovki prisoner

Frantsishak Alyakhnovich

a Bulgarian communist and a defendant in the Leipzig trial, along with Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Tanev, was arrested in 1937 during the Stalinist purges and spent seventeen years in Norillag. Popov was released in 1954, after the death of Stalin, and returned to Bulgaria.[160] He wrote his autobiographical account in the book From the Leipzig trial to the Siberia camps (От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери, Изток-Запад, София, България, 2012 ISBN 978-619-152-025-1).

Blagoy Popov

an Armenian writer who was imprisoned in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1945, published a collection of his memories under the title "They Ordered to Give You" in 1964.

Mkrtich Armen

an Armenian writer and poet, who was arrested in 1936, released in 1947, arrested again in 1948 and sent into Siberian exile as an "unreliable type" until 1954, wrote "Barbed Wires in Blossom", a novella based largely on his personal experiences in a Soviet gulag.

Gurgen Mahari

is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918–1999), a Soviet Engineer and eventual head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946.

Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir

. 2003. Gulag: A History. Broadway Books. hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.

Applebaum, Anne

. 1997. With God in Russia. Ignatius Press. 433 pp., ISBN 0-89870-574-6.

Ciszek, Walter

, ed. (2016). The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison (illustrated hardcover ed.). Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822944645. Retrieved December 2, 2021 – via Google Books.

David-Fox, Michael

Ertz, Simon. 2006. Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935–1953. Duncker & Humblot. 273 pp.,  978-3-428-11863-2.

ISBN

. 2007. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Allen Lane. hardcover, 740 pp., ISBN 0-14-101351-6.

Figes, Orlando

and Oleg V. Naumov. 1999. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 635 pp., ISBN 0-300-07772-6.

Getty, J. Arch

Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. 2010. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile, (Palgrave Studies in Oral History). Palgrave Macmillan.  0-230-61063-3

ISBN

. 1995. The Long Walk. ISBN 1-55821-684-7

Rawicz, Slawomir

Gregory, Paul R., and Valery Lazarev, eds. 2003. . Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 0-8179-3942-3.

The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag

. 1996. A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II. Penguin. 284 pp., ISBN 0-14-025184-7.

Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw

. 2003. The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 304 pp., paperback: ISBN 0-618-25747-0.

Hochschild, Adam

2004. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. hardcover, 464 pp., ISBN 0-300-09284-9.

Khlevniuk, Oleg V.

Kizny, Tomasz. 2004. Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917–1990. Firefly Books Ltd. 496 pp.,  1-55297-964-4.

ISBN

Kozlov, V. P., et al., eds. 2004–5. Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach, 7 vols.. Moskva: . ISBN 5-8243-0604-4

ROSSPEN

Mielke, Tomas M. (2017). The Russian Homosexual Lexicon: Consensual and Prison Camp Sexuality Among Men. CreateSpace.  9781544658490.

ISBN

. 1989. The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps. ISBN 1-55778-024-2.

Rossi, Jacques

. 1973. The Gulag Archipelago. Harper & Row. 660 pp., ISBN 0-06-080332-0.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

—— The Gulag Archipelago: Two. Harper & Row. 712 pp.,  0-06-080345-2.

ISBN

Tobien, Karl. 2006. Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag. WaterBrook Press.  1-4000-7078-3.

ISBN

Werth, Nicolas. 1999. "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union." Pp. 33–260 in , edited by S. Courtois et al. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-07608-7.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

—— 2007. Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity) with an introduction by . Princeton University Press. 248 pp., ISBN 0-691-13083-3.

J. T. Gross

"." Azerbaijan International 13(4). 2005.

Remembering Stalin

"." Azerbaijan International 14(1). 2006.

The Literature of Stalin's Repressions

Петров Н. В.; Кокурин А. И. (2000). [Gulag. Main camp administration. 1918–1960] (PDF, immediate download) (in Russian). Moscow. ISBN 978-5-85646-046-8. Archived from the original on November 13, 2015.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

ГУЛАГ: Главное управление лагерей. 1918–1960

GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

Blinken Open Society Archives

Gulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition

Archived August 17, 2011, at the Wayback Machine projected by the scientific information center Memorial

The website of the Virtual Gulag Museum

in Moscow

GULAG History Museum

Sound Archives. European Memories of the Gulag

Photo album at NYPL Digital Gallery

Gulag prisoners at work, 1936–1937

Revelations from the Russian Archives at Library of Congress

The GULAG

(YT)

Brutal! Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard