Gulag

Gulag, (Russian, Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagery) “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps”, branch of the secret police of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics created in the 1930s to administer concentration camps, forced labour camps, and transit prisons. The Gulag played a central role in the mass imprisonment and repression which took place in the 1930s under the regime of Joseph Stalin, a period also known as the “Great Terror”.

The history of labour camps in the Soviet Union begins almost from the very first year of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Labour camps were known to be in existence as early as mid-1918, and were legalized by decrees in September 1918 and April 1919. The widespread use of labour in prisons, however, was sanctioned only in the late 1920s under Stalin. The labour camps built and administered by the Gulag served a dual function: as a place to put the masses of detainees (commonly known by the Russian term, “zeks”) and to help curtail an immense shortage of labour which resulted from Stalin's industrialization policies.

Gulag prisons were originally centred in Karelia along the White Sea coast and in Vorkuta and Pechora in the Arctic regions of European Russia. By the late 1930s Gulag labour camps were set up just about everywhere in the Soviet Union, including Moscow. The Gulag's role in industrializing the Soviet Union became increasingly more important and by the end of the 1930s was responsible for much of the country's logging, and extraction of copper, gold, and coal.

Estimates of the number of Soviet citizens sent to the Gulag camps vary and are now being reassessed in light of new information. It is known that millions of those arrested were sent to Gulag camps and that approximately 900,000 died in them. The majority of those sent to the Gulag camps were so-called political prisoners—intellectuals, party and army officials, who had been (usually falsely) accused of being “enemies of the people”, spies or saboteurs. 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, whose book, The Gulag Archipelago (1973), was one of the first comprehensive accounts of the Soviet camps.