Everything about The Gulag totally explained
The
Gulag was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the
Soviet Union. "Gulag" is the Russian
acronym for
The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies —
Главное
Управление Исправительно-Трудовых
Лагерей и колоний,
Glavnoye
Upravleniye Ispravitel'no-Trudovykh
Lagerey i koloniy — of the
NKVD. Eventually, by
metonymy, the usage of "Gulag" began generally denoting the entire penal labor system in the USSR, then any such penal system. In Russian,
Gulag is pronounced: ()
, by
Anne Applebaum, explains:
Kolyma,
Norilsk, and
Vorkuta.
More than 18 million people passed through the
Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with further millions being
deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR.
Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although the political prisoner population always was significant. People could be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as unexcused absences from work, petty theft, or anti-government jokes. About half of the political prisoners were sent to Gulag prison camps
without trial; per official data, there were more than 2.6 million imprisonment sentences in cases investigated by the secret police, 1921-1953.
Modern usage and other terminology
Although
Gulag originally was the name of a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a noun, denoting:
the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children. Thus, "Gulag" means the repressive Soviet "meat-grinder" procedural system and its consequences — arrests, interrogations, transport (in unheated rail road cattle cars), forced labor, familial separation,
exile, and early death, .
The word "Gulag" wasn't often used in Russian — either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were
the camps and
the zone,
always singular — for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official
politburo of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929, replacing
concentration camp, then the common usage .
History
Early Soviet period
From 1918, camp-type detention facilities were set up, as a reformed analogy of the earlier system of
penal labor (
katorgas), operated in
Siberia in
Imperial Russia. The two main types were "
Vechecka Special-purpose Camps" and
forced labor camps . They were installed for various categories of people deemed dangerous for the state: for common criminals, for prisoners of the
Russian Civil War, for officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, various political enemies and dissidents, as well as former aristocrats, businessmen and large land owners. These camps, however, were not on the same scale as those in the Stalin era. In 1928 there were 30,000 prisoners in camps, and the authorities were opposed to compelling them to work. In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration wrote that: “The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing ‘golden sweat’ from them, the organisation of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.”
Convict labour system expansion under Stalin
The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps", the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree of
Sovnarkom of
July 11 1929 about the use of
penal labor (see its
wikisource reference) that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of
Politburo meeting of
June 27,
1929.
As an all-
Union institution and a main administration with the
OGPU (the Soviet
secret police), the GULAG was officially established on
April 25,
1930 as the "ULAG" by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated
April 7, 1930, and was renamed into GULAG in November.
In the early 1930s a drastic tightening of Soviet penal policy caused a significant growth of the prison camp population. During the period of the
Great Purge (1937–38) mass arrests caused another upsurge in inmate numbers. During these years hundreds of thousands of individuals were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the multiple passages of the notorious
Article 58 of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary activities."
Under
NKVD Order № 00447 tens of thousands of GULAG inmates who were accused of "continuing anti-Soviet activity in imprisonment" were executed in 1937-38.
The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis. In any case the development of the camp system followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet
industrialization campaign. Most of the camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas as well as the realization of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects.
In 1931–32 the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; in 1935 — approximately 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies (annual averages), and in 1939 — about 1.3 millions in camps and 350,000 in colonies. (all data about the numbers of prisoners here and below are taken from formerly secret documents produced by the
NKVD).
GULAG during World War II
After the
Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding
German invasion that marked the start of
World War II in 1939, the
Soviet Union annexed eastern parts (so-called "
Kresy") of the
Second Polish Republic. In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed
Estonia,
Latvia,
Lithuania,
Bessarabia and
Bukovina. Hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the GULAG camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political crimes in USSR in 1939-41 was only 211,106.
During the
Great Patriotic War, Gulag populations declined sharply, as a consequence of the mass releases of hundreds of thousands of prisoners who were conscripted and sent directly to the front lines and a steep rise in mortality in 1942–43. 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941-43.
In 1943, the term "katorga works" (каторжные работы) was reintroduced. They were initially intended for
Nazi collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners (for example, members of
deported peoples who fled from exile) were also sentenced to "katorga works". Prisoners sentenced to "katorga works" were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime and many of them perished.
GULAG after WWII
After World War II the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies again rose sharply, reaching approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 million of whom were in camps).
When the war ended in May 1945, as many as two million former Russian citizens were
forcefully repatriated (against their will) into the USSR. On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the
Yalta Conference, the
United States and
United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union. One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets.
British and
U.S. civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the
Soviet Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945-1947.
The Soviet
POWs on their return to the Soviet Union were often treated as
traitors (see
Order No. 270). According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving
Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans have been sent to the Gulag.
For years after World War II, a significant minority of the inmates were
Ukrainians,
Lithuanians,
Latvians and
Estonians from lands newly incorporated into the Soviet Union, as well as
Finns,
Poles,
Romanians and others.
POWs, in contrast, were kept in a separate camp system (see
POW labor in the Soviet Union), which was managed by
GUPVI, a separate main administration with the
NKVD/
MVD.
Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms, sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465 thousand were political prisoners.
A distinctive incentive scheme that included both coercive and motivational elements and was applied universally in all camps consisted in standardized "nourishment scales": the size of the inmates’ ration depended on the percentage of the work quota delivered.
Naftaly Frenkel is credited for the introduction of this policy. While it was effective in compelling many prisoners to make serious work efforts, for many a prisoner it had the adverse effect, accelerating the exhaustion and sometimes causing the death of persons unable to fulfill high production quota.
Immediately after the
German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the conditions in camps worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final period and after the end of the war.
Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates, it's important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates:
- people used to physical labor: "kulaks", osadniks, "ukazniks" (people sentenced for violation of various ukases, such as Law of Spikelets, decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of criminal law
- dedicated criminals
- people unused to physical labour sentenced for various political and religious reasons.
Mortality in GULAG camps in 1934-40 was 4-6 times higher than average in Russia. The estimated total number of those who died in imprisonment in 1930-1953 is 1.76 million, about half of which occurred between 1941-1943 following the German invasion.
Geography
In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen primarily for the ease of isolation of prisoners. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. The site on the
Solovetsky Islands in the
White Sea is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy, taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918. The
colloquial name for the islands, "
Solovki", entered the
vernacular as a
synonym for the labour camp in general. It was being presented to the world as an example of the new Soviet way of "re-education of
class enemies" and reintegrating them through labour into the Soviet society. Initially the inmates, the significant part being Russian
intelligentsia, enjoyed relative freedom (within the natural confinement of the islands). Local newspapers and magazines were edited and even some scientific research was carried out (for example, a local botanical garden was maintained, but unfortunately later lost completely). Eventually it turned into an ordinary Gulag camp; in fact some historians maintain that Solovki was a pilot camp of this type. See
Solovki for more detail.
Maxim Gorky visited the camp in 1929 and published an apology of it.
With the new emphasis on Gulag as the means of concentrating cheap labour, new camps were then constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, wherever the economic task at hand dictated their existence (or was designed specifically to avail itself of them, such as
Belomorkanal or
Baikal Amur Mainline), including facilities in big cities — parts of the famous
Moscow Metro and the
Moscow State University new campus were built by forced labour. Many more projects during the rapid industrialization of the 1930s,
war-time and post-war periods were fulfilled on the backs of convicts, and the activity of Gulag camps spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry.
The majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia (the best known clusters are
Sevvostlag (
The North-East Camps) along
Kolyma river and
Norillag near
Norilsk) and in the south-eastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the
steppes of
Kazakhstan (
Luglag,
Steplag,
Peschanlag). These were vast and sparsely inhabited regions with no roads (in fact, the construction of the roads themselves was assigned to the inmates of specialized railroad camps) or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were generally spread throughout the entire
Soviet Union, including the European parts of
Russia,
Byelorussia, and
Ukraine. There were also several camps located outside of the Soviet Union, in
Czechoslovakia,
Hungary,
Poland, and
Mongolia, which were under the direct control of the Gulag.
Not all camps were fortified; in fact some in Siberia were marked only by posts. Escape was deterred by the harsh elements, as well as tracking dogs that were assigned to each camp. While during the 1920s and 1930s native tribes often aided escapees, many of the tribes were also victimized by escaped thieves. Tantalized by large rewards as well, they began aiding authorities in the capture of Gulag inmates. Camp guards were also given stern incentive to keep their inmates in line at all costs; if a prisoner escaped under a guard's watch, the guard would often be stripped of his uniform and become a Gulag inmate himself. Further, if an escaping prisoner was shot, guards could be fined amounts that were often equivalent to one or two weeks wages.
In some cases, teams of inmates were dropped to a new territory with a limited supply of resources and left to set up a new camp or die. Sometimes it took several attempts before the next wave of colonists could survive the elements.
The area along the
Indigirka river was known as
the Gulag inside the Gulag. In 1926, the
Oimiakon (Оймякон) village in this region registered the record low temperature of −71.2 °C (−96 °F).
Under the supervision of
Lavrenty Beria who headed both NKVD and the Soviet
Atom bomb program until his demise in 1953, thousands of
zeks were used to mine
uranium ore and prepare test facilities on
Novaya Zemlya,
Vaygach Island,
Semipalatinsk, among other sites.
Special insititutions
Special camps or zones for children (Gulag jargon:, underaged), for disabled (in Spassk), and for mothers with babies.
Camps for "wives of traitors of Motherland" — there was a special category of repression: "Traitor of Motherland Family Member" .
Sharashka (the goofing-off place) were in fact secret research laboratories, where the arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, were anonymously developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.
Influence
Culture
The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous.
The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore. Many songs by the authors-performers known as the bards, most notably Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich, neither of whom ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and glorified the life of "Zeks". Words and phrases which originated in the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the 1960s and 1970s.
The memoirs of Alexander Dolgun, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings, particularly those of Solzhenitsyn, harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned.
Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in places like Magadan, where, for example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to Moscow's.
Literature
Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners were published before World War II.
Julius Margolin'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.
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński 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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago wasn't the first literary work about labour camps. His previous book on the subject, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", about a typical day of the 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 but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968.
János Rózsás, Hungarian writer, often called as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn, wrote a lot of books and articles on the issue of GULAG.
Zoltan Szalkai, Hungarian documentary filmmaker made several films of gulag camps.
Karlo Štajner, an Austrian communist active in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia and manager of Comintern Publishing House in Moscow from 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home under accusation of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the following 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 entitled 7000 days in Siberia.
Dancing Under the Red Star by Karl Tobien (ISBN 1-4000-7078-3) tells the story of Margaret Werner, a young athletic girl who moves to Russia right before the start of Stalin's terror. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who survived the Gulag to tell about it.
"Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag." (ISBN 0-394-49497-0), of a member of the US Embassy, and "I Was a Slave in Russia" (ISBN 0-815-95800-5), an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. Both were interned due to their American citizenship for about 8 years circa 1946–55.
"The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom" In the camps of the Siberian gulag, friends said it was hopeless. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1942 Sławomir Rawicz and four companions walked into British India, having journeyed four thousand miles by foot over tundra, Gobi, frozen rivers, and Himalayan peaks. Along the way, they encountered what appeared to be a Yeti family. (ISBN-13: 978-1592289448 )
Colonization
Soviet show that among the goals of the GULAG was colonization of sparsely populated remote areas. To this end, the notion of "free settlement" was introduced.
When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms, they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение, "volnoye poseleniye") outside the confinement of the camp. They were known as "free settlers" (вольнопоселенцы, "volnoposelentsy", not to be confused with the term ссыльнопоселенцы, "ssyl'noposelentsy", "exile settlers"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land in the general vicinity of the place of confinement.
This implement was also inherited from the katorga system.
Life after term served
Persons who served a term in a camp or in a prison were restricted from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous imprisonment was a triable offence. Persons who served terms as "politicals" were nuisances for "First Departments" (outlets of the secret police at all enterprises and institutions), because former "politicals" had to be monitored.
Many people released from camps were restricted from settling in larger cities.
Lack of prosecution
It has often been asked why there has been nothing along the lines of the Nuremberg Trials for those guilty of atrocities at the Gulag camps. Two recent books, reviewed by Peter Rollberg in the Moscow Times, cast some light on this. Tomasz Kizny's
Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990 details the history of the labour camps over the years while Oleg Khlevniuk's The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror presents records of confidential memos, official resolutions, individual testimonies and tabulated statistics. Rollberg explains how both books contribute to our understanding of why there were no post-Communism trials. "The gulag had already killed tens of thousands of its own most ardent killers. Again and again, yesterday's judges were declared today's criminals, so that Soviet society never had to own up to its millions of state-backed murders."
Gulag memorials
The Memorial pictured below in St Petersburg is made of a boulder from the Solovki camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. People gather here every year on the Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30).
Image:GulagMemorial.jpg|The Gulag Memorial.
Literature
Anne Applebaum,, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.
Walter Ciszek, With God in Russia, Ignatius Press, 1997, 433 pp., ISBN 0-8987-0574-6.
Nicolas Werth, "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union, in Stephane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, pp. 33-260.
Alexander Dolgun, Patrick Watson, "Alexander Dolgun's story: An American in the Gulag", NY, Knopf, 1975, 370 pp., ISBN 978-0394494975.
Simon Ertz, Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935-1953, Duncker & Humblot, 2006, 273 pp., ISBN 9783428118632.
J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press, 1999, 635 pp., ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, 432 pp., ISBN 0156027518.
Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 1982, 448 pp., ISBN 0156976498.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II, Penguin, 1996, 284 pp., ISBN 0-14-025184-7.
Paul Gregory, Valery Lazarev, eds, The Economics of Forced Labour: The Soviet Gulag, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8179-3942-3, full text available online at "Hoover Books Online"
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004, hardcover, 464 pp., ISBN 0-300-09284-9.
Tomasz Kizny, Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990, Firefly Books Ltd., 2004, 496 pp., ISBN 1-55297-964-4.
John H. Noble, I Was a Slave in Russia, Broadview, Illinois: Cicero Bible Press, 1961).
Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labour Camps, 1989, ISBN 1-55778-024-2.
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Penguin Books, 1995, 528 pp., ISBN 0-14-018695-6.
Danylo Shumuk,
- Life sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian political prisoner, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study, 1984, 401 pp., ISBN 978-0920862179.
- Za Chidnim Obriyam -(Beyond The Eastern Horizon),Paris, Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1974, 447 pp.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Signet Classic, 158 pp., ISBN 0-451-52310-5.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, 660 pp., ISBN 0-06-080332-0.
- The Gulag Archipelago: Two, Harper & Row, 712 pp., ISBN 0-06-080345-2.
- The First Circle, Northwestern University Press, 580 pp., ISBN 978-0810115903.
Solzhenitsyn's, Shalamov's, Ginzburg's works at Lib.ru (in original Russian)
Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh - pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach, ed. by V. P. Kozlov et al., Moskva: ROSSPEN 2004-5, 7 vols. ISBN 5-8243-0604-4
Chabua Amirejibi, გორა მბორგალი (Gora Mborgali). Tbilisi, Georgia: Chabua, 2001, 650 pp., ISBN 99940-734-1-9.Further Information
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