Gulag (from the Russian Главное Управление Исправительно-Трудовых Лагерей, "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey", "The Chief Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps") was the branch of the Soviet internal police and security service (at various times named the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MGB/MVD or KGB) that dealt with forced labor camps. Exposed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, the Gulag system was an example of some of the worst governmental activity against its own citizens in modern history.
History
The Gulag was an extension of earlier labor camps (katorgas) operated in Siberia as a part of penal system in Imperial Russia, which quickly overflowed with the enemies of the people, frequently a designation used by the Bolshevik regime for political enemies and dissidents. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. One such name, "Solovki", turned synonym for "torture" after 1918. New camps were constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, including facilities in Moscow and Leningrad.
Officially the Gulag was 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, and terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960, as the MVD was officially eliminated by the order 44-16 of Presidium of Supreme Council of the USSR, to reemerge as the KGB.
The Gulag is most widely associated with Stalin's Great Purges, which led to a significant increase of the proportion of political prisoners in the camps. In 1931-32, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps, in 1935 approximately 1 million (including colonies) and in 1938 nearly 2 million people. During World War II, the camp population declined sharply due to mass releases of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, who were sent directly to the front, but also due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942-43. After WWII the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies rose again and reached a number of approximately 2.5 million people in the early 1950s.
The Communist leadership continued to sponsor Gulag for a while after Stalin's death, and it is estimated that a total of 1.5 to 2 million people have died in the camps and colonies. Large numbers of non-political prisoners were released in 1953 during the months after the dictator's death. Mass releases and rehabilitations of political prisoners started in 1954 and continued after Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February, 1956.
Geography
The majority of Gulag camps have been positioned in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia (the best known are Sevvostlag near Kolyma, Norillag near Norilsk) and in the south-eastern parts of Russia, mainly in Kazakhstan (Luglag, Steplag, Peschanlag). These are vast and uninhabited regions with no roads or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources (such as timber). However, camps were also spread throughout the entire Soviet Union, including the European parts of Russia, Belarus, and the 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.
Conditions
In order to mine, process and ship resources, the inmates were forced to work in inhuman conditions. In spite of the brutal climate, they were almost never adequately clothed, fed, or given medical treatment, nor were they given any means to combat the lack of vitamins that led to nutritional diseases such as scurvy. In some camps, the fatality rate during the first months was as high as 80%. Many projects of the Soviet rapid industrialization of the late 1930s, war-time and post-war periods were built by this labor.
A unique form of Gulag camps called sharashka (шарашка) were in fact secret research laboratories, where anonymous scientists were developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.
Influence
The tragedy caused by the Gulag system 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) such as Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Alexander Gorodnitsky, none of whom incidentally ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag.
Chilling memoirs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg, among other books became a symbol of defiance in the Soviet totalitarian society. See also samizdat.
References
- 1Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages, ISBN 0767900561