GUlag, Russian acronym for Main Administration of Camps', a branch of the NKVD dedicated to the running of Soviet slave labour camps. By extension, the term is also used to describe the network of camps over which the GUlag presided.

Together with ordinary gaols and zones of administrative exile, the camps constituted the core of the Soviet system of repression. The inmates, both men and women, would usually have passed a brief period of arrest and interrogation before being sentenced in absentia to a fixed period of 8, 10, 12, or 25 year's hard labour. They could expect their sentence to include a further period of ‘free exile’ outside the camp. The vast majority did not live to see the end of their sentences. Many succumbed during the initial journey in penal convoys, which took them in sealed cattle wagons or river barges to the most distant and inhospitable regions of the country. The average life expectancy within the camps was one winter. For all practical purposes, to be sent to the GUlag was equivalent to a death sentence.

The first camps had been set up shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 and were used in the civil war from 1918 to 1920. In the late 1920s Stalin expanded their staff, their powers, and functions with the inception of forced-rate industrialization and forcible agriculture collectivization. The system came into its own with the so-called Great Terror, with the most intensive spate of incarceration occurring from 1936 to 1938. But the camp system of mass slave labour was maintained thereafter, and the arrest of innocent Soviet citizens continued to be a widespread practice. During the campaign of ‘dekulakization’, as also in the later stages of the Great Terror, the Soviet security services had frequently resorted to mass shootings as they did in the Katyń forest. But the relative decline of the Terror after 1939, together with the increased demand for labour, restored the GUlag's primacy.

Information about the GUlag began to be brought to the West during the late 1920s by some of the few who had managed to escape. In 1930 the US Treasury Department imposed an embargo on Soviet pulpwood and matches, largely on the basis of evidence that slave labour had been used in their manufacture. In the UK the Anti-Slavery Society launched an enquiry which concluded that prisoners were being used as forced labour in the lumber camps and there were grim accounts of their working conditions. These stories were reinforced by the Poles of Anders' Army when they left the USSR in 1942. They were the largest group of people to come to the West with first-hand evidence of the GUlag, and they brought with them NKVD documents relating to the Poles' imprisonment in the camps and their subsequent release—evidence which had never been seen in the West before.

The start of the Second World War in September 1939 gave Stalin his chance to occupy Estonia, Latvia, Lithunia, eastern Poland, and eastern Romania, where vast numbers of arrests took place. The terror machinery set up already in the USSR was geographically redeployed by the NKVD troops under the leadership of Beria.

Soviet repressive policy had a brutal underlying rationale. Many of the victims belonged to the military, political, professional, and cultural élites, especially in the newly-occupied areas. Stalin intended to remove all real and potential influences which obstructed the imposition of a Stalinist political structure and ideology.

Conditions in the GUlag were inhuman. Prisoners were forced to toil on a starvation diet and under extreme, climatic rigours. Non-fulfilment of demanding norms was punished by the reduction of rations, and minor breaches of discipline by beatings and shootings. The Soviet novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself aninmate of the GUlag system, calculated that the death rate from malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion during the war years reached 1% per day. It was not unusual for those few prisoners who served their term to be refused release on the grounds that they were a fortiori the most useful workers.

Most camp prisoners underwent a worsening of their conditions after Germany's invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA). Hitler's occupation of Ukraine and parts of the Volga region created difficulties of food supplies: and the GUlag population was compelled to bear the collective brunt of the crisis. Even the planned ration for prisoners, below the minimum for subsistence as it was, was not fully delivered. The death rate in camps doubled in 1941 and quintupled in 1942 over the previous period.

Forced labour was directed to vital national projects: the construction of railways, factories, and flats in climatically harsh areas; the mining of gold and coal; the felling of forests. Without slave labourers, Stalin's industrial economy would have fallen well short of its goal. But even Stalin and Beria had to recognize wartime priorities. It is reckoned that up to a million prisoners received early release from captivity during the German–Soviet war. In some cases, high-ranking officers re-entered the Red Army with their previous ranks restored. Otherwise they were enlisted into units carrying out the most dangerous offensive duties. The decline in the number of camp inmates was reversed from the beginning of 1944 when victory was all but certain and captured enemy soldiers and repatriated Soviet prisoners-of-war entered the GUlag.

The largest camp complexes were located near to mineral resources in the most northerly latitudes. One, in the district of Vorkuta, consisted of some thirty compounds scattered round the frozen coalfield of northern Russia. ‘In Vorkuta’, the historian Robert Conquest has written of the area (The Great Terror, London, 1968, p. 334), ‘it is below zero Centigrade for two-thirds of the year, and for more than 100 days the Khanovey, or “wind of winds”, blows across the tundra…few would be alive after a year or two’. Another in the gold-mining district of Kolyma in north-east Siberia covered an area similar to that of the UK. (Its victims outnumbered those of Auschwitz.) A major collecting centre was sited at Magadan on the Pacific coast. In between them existed what Solzhenitsyn called an ‘archipelago’ of hundreds of lesser transit camps, project centres, and feeder stations.

A member of Anders' Army, imprisoned at Kolyma, later reported that: ‘there were about 5,000 prisoners, 436 of them Poles. About seven to eleven men died daily from famine and exhaustion, from beatings at work and from frost, and when the frost reached minus 68 degrees centigrade, more died from so-called thermic shock. Of all the Poles, only 46 remained with me, the rest starved to death or died from exhaustion. In March 1941, a new prisoner arrived at the Komsomoles mine in Kolyma, a Russian and former chief of the local N.K.V.D in northern Kamchatka, Tchukotka Peninsula, where there are lead mines. In conversation with him I learned that in August 1940 a boat had arrived at Tchukotka carrying 3,000 Poles, mostly military and police personnel. All these Poles who arrived in Tchukotka were sent to the lead mine, and their working parties were purposely sent to the worst galleries. Poles working in these mines suffered from lead poisoning, and about 40 died daily. Before he left about 90 per cent of the Poles had died. In 1941 Georgians and Kazaks were received to replace the Poles. Up to the time of my departure from Kolyma, July 7th, 1942, no Poles had returned from Tchukotka.’ (Quoted in W. Anders, An Army in Exile, London, 1949, p. 73).

The scale of the GUlag's operation beggars belief. At the end of the Great Terror in March 1939, up to 10% of the Soviet population may have found themselves in the camps. The historian Robert Conquest has estimated one million deaths per annum during the war years that followed. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953 the total number of victims of the GUlag probably exceeded 20 million. Revised estimates based on Soviet records have been eagerly awaited since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Comparisons with German and Japanese practices are instructive. The Nazis disliked arresting Germans unless they were pol itical opponents, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, or mentally disturbed individuals. The Japanese repressed fellow Japanese only in cases of proven political or moral delinquency (see Tokkō). Stalin was the sole war leader who kept millions of fellow-citizens deprived of the means to life without giving any reasons for their repression.

At the end of the war in the Far East in August 1945 hundreds of thousands of Japanese were also interned in the GUlag. Within two weeks of the Red Army overrunning Manchukuo (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns), Japanese troops and civilians in Manchukuo, North Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands were organized into 569 labour gangs, each about a thousand strong; and by late August 1945, 639,635 Japanese (including 575,000 soldiers belonging to the Kwantung Army) had been interned. The soldiers were put in about 2,000 prisoner-of-war camps located in eastern Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Central Asia, and the southern (Rostov) and western (Moscow) parts of the Soviet Union. The camps were built by the POW themselves, and 80% were in Siberia where the temperature dropped to 30–40 °C below zero in winter time. Lack of winter clothes, fuel, food, and medicine took a toll of more than 60,000 men, about 10% of the internees, in eleven years of internment. Many of them were buried without markers, their whereabouts unknown to this day.

Japanese POW were mobilized in forced labour of all sorts such as mining coal, cutting timber, constructing railways, roads, and buildings, and working as labourers in farms, factories, and wharves. The construction of the Bam railway (second Siberian railway) and the Ulgar railway (350 km. long, connecting the first and second Siberian railways) was so harsh that under every railway sleeper there lay the body of a Japanese soldier. It is no exaggeration that Japanese POW helped the USSR's post-war reconstruction.

Soviet administrators and some turncoat Japanese imposed a production quota, according to which food was rationed. Exerting themselves to achieve the quota, hundreds of POW died of exhaustion.

Soviet authorities brain-washed Japanese internees by organizing in each POW camp a ‘Friendship Association’. Prisoners were required to read propaganda material, which promoted class struggle and attacked the Japanese social class structure. Leaders of this brain-washing campaign were radicals who held real power in the POW camps, and they often served as informers betraying fellow POW who were unsympathetic to communist doctrine and uncooperative with Soviet officials. Those opposed to communism were held back from repatriation, which began in late December 1946. By 1950 just over 530,000 had been repatriated. This left some 3,000 Japanese still held in prisons. As a result of negotiations between International Red Cross representatives of both countries and of Stalin's death, repatriation resumed in December 1953. With the normalization of Japan–Soviet diplomatic relations in October 1956, the remaining 1,049 prisoners were repatriated in December.

The Japanese government and private organizations set up by former POW continued to press the Soviet government for details about the deaths of prisoners and the locations of some 780 burial grounds, information which was in part supplied by the then Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, when he visited Japan in April 1991.

Akashi Yogi,/ Norman Davies,/ and Robert Service

Bibliography

Buca, E. , Vorkuta (London, 1976).
Conquest, G. R. A. , Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (London, 1987).

GULAG

Stalinist labor camps.

The prison camp system of the Stalin era, whose acronym in Russian (GULag—hereafter Gulag) stood for Glavnoye upravlenie lagerei, or Main Camp Administration, grew into an enormous network of camps lasting into the mid-1950s. Other penal institutions, including prisons, labor colonies, and special settlements, supplemented the labor camps to form a vast number of sites available to the Soviet government for the incarceration and exile of its enemies. While much larger than both its tsarist and Soviet antecedents in size and scope, Stalin's prison empire evolved along lines clearly established over centuries of Russian rule. But the gulag far outpaced all predecessor systems and became an infamous symbol of state repression in the twentieth century.

Although unprecedented in reach, the labyrinth of Stalinist camps had its roots in both the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The secret police under the tsars, ranging from the oprichniki at the time of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century to the Third Section and Okhranka of later years, established the broad historical outlines for Stalinist institutions. Imprisonment, involuntary servitude, and exile to Siberia formed a long and well-known experience meted out by these prerevolutionary organs of state security. Soon after the October Revolution, however, the new government under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin also issued key resolutions on incarceration, forced labor, and internal exile that explicitly set the stage for the gulag. The Temporary Instructions on Deprivation of Freedom (July 1918) and the Decree on Red Terror (September 1918) took aim at class enemies of the new regime to be sent to prison for various offenses. Other Bolshevik decrees from as early as January 1918 stipulated arrest and hard labor for political opponents of the new state as well as workers who had violated the labor code. The initial Soviet secret police agency, the Cheka (acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution and Sabotage), controlled many but not all of the camps, which would in time be reintegrated with other prison structures and grow to an immense scale.

Other than proportion, one of the critical differences between this embryonic camp system under Lenin and its successor under Stalin concerned the problem of jurisdiction. In Lenin's time, the Soviet government lacked a centralized administration for its prison organizations. The Cheka, People's Commissariat of the Interior, and People's Commissariat of Justice all oversaw various offshoots of the penal camp complex. In 1922 and 1923, the GPU (State Political Administration) and then the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) replaced the Cheka as the main secret police organization and assumed command over many of the labor camps. The first and largest cluster of prison camps under its authority, the primary ones of which existed on the Solovetski Islands in the White Sea to the north of Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924), became known at this time as SLON (Northern Camps of Special Designation). While Lenin left no blueprint for a future camp leviathan under Stalin, the infamous archipelago of Gulag sites that lasted until the time of Nikita Khrushchev clearly grew out of these early variants. In 1930, the gulag was officially established just as the parameters of the labor camp network began to expand greatly after Stalin's consolidation of power.

The tremendous growth in inmate numbers throughout the 1930s proved a defining feature of Stalinism, and certainly one that sets it apart from previous eras. Whereas prisoner counts of the Stalin era would rise into the millions, neither the tsars nor Soviet leaders before 1929 incarcerated

more than a few hundred thousand inmates. The collectivization of agriculture and the dekulakization campaign in the early 1930s began new trends in the Soviet Union, ushering in much higher rates of imprisonment. The Great Purges later in the decade again increased these statistics, particularly in the number of political prisoners sentenced to the Gulag. Other events, such as signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in August 1939, led to further waves of inmates, including Polish and Baltic citizens who joined their Soviet counterparts in remote camp zones across the USSR. By the 1940s, the Stalinist labor camps contained a multinational assortment of prisoners.

The troika, or three-person extrajudicial panel that could both try and sentence the accused even in absentia, became infamous in the late 1930s as a common mechanism for dispatching enemies of the state to widespread gulag regions. Comprising fourteen sections, Article 58 of the well-worn Soviet Criminal Code found extensive and arbitrary application throughout the Stalin era as the labor camps began to stretch to all corners of the nation. The organs of state security became preoccupied with the shipment of prisoners to penal sites across the country. One of the most legendary in the early 1930s involved construction of the Baltic–White Sea Canal. Other inmates labored under similarly hostile conditions on the Solovetski Islands, or at gulag sites in and around Vorkuta, Magadan, Pechora, and Karaganda.

Throughout its history, the gulag served both a punitive and economic function. From its very origins, Soviet prisons and camps had been repositories for enemies of the regime. Useful both for isolating and punishing real and imagined opponents, the labor camps in particular became a tool of repressive state policy. But while inefficient and substandard in many respects, the gulag fulfilled a vital economic role as well. Russia had long wrestled with the question of adequate labor in remote parts of the empire, which only compounded the intractable problems of a cash-poor economy nationwide. Although the roots of serfdom can in part be found in such conditions, Peter the Great in later years addressed numerous shortcomings with everincreasing levels of coercion that expanded the realm of forced labor to include large prisoner contingents and peasants ascribed to factories. Political exile and hard labor became synonymous with Siberia in particular, and provided a blueprint for the Stalin era.

Although going far beyond Petrine goals, Stalin employed similar methods in the twentieth century. Inmates offered a bottomless pool of workers to be sent to areas historically poor in labor supply. The most famous and important gulag zones, focused upon the procurement of lumber and minerals, were located in remote northern and eastern regions of the USSR far from population centers. Leaving aside the question of productivity and efficiency, both of which registered at exceedingly low levels in the camps, the Soviet state sought a fulfillment of industrialization targets in such areas through the widespread application of prison contingents. But the labor camps soon grew beyond this scope, and began to fill economic functions within a larger national framework. Some gulag sites in time even appeared in and around major cities and industries. The Soviet government expanded the use of inmates in numerous largescale construction projects, particularly involving railroad, canal, and highway plans. Eventually, the secret police concentrated inmate scientists in special prison laboratories known as sharashkas, where vital technical research proceeded under the punitive eye of the state.

While circumstances proved much better in such special design bureaus, most inmates throughout the gulag system both lived and worked under grueling conditions. Aside from enervating physical labor in extreme winter climates, prisoners suffered as well from poor living arrangements and minimal food rations. Hard labor in the mines and forests of Siberia was backbreaking and required a stamina that few inmates could maintain over long periods. Turning Marxism on its head, inmates also received caloric norms based upon a sliding scale of labor output that penalized low production levels even from the least healthy. Moreover, prisoners were subject to the whims of an unpredictable camp hierarchy that meted out harsh punishments for offenses, however minor. The threat of the isolator or lengthier terms of incarceration hung over every inmate and made the camp population dread the seemingly wanton authority of the camp bosses.

As a rule, conditions within the camps worsened over time up through the end of the 1930s and early 1940s. The brunt of this fell on the politicals, who as a result of the Great Purges had begun to arrive in the gulag in significant numbers by this time. Constituting the most dangerous element in the view of the Soviet government, political prisoners occupied the lowest rung in the camps. Moreover, prison bosses favored actual criminals convicted for far lesser economic crimes, and placed them in positions of authority within the informal camp structure. The result was an inverted universe in which normal societal mores were suspended and the rules of the criminal world came to the fore. For many inmates, such moral corrosion proved even more onerous than the physical hardships of camp life.

The gulag incarcerated several million inmates over the length of its existence. Archival records reveal that the numbers were not as high as those posited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others in previous years, although exact counts remain elusive for several reasons. In terms of the gulag proper, the highest camp figures for any one time were to be found in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even then, there were not much more than two million prisoners on average within the camps at any given moment. Additional totals from internal exile, special settlement, and labor colonies augmented this number. But statistics convey only a narrow viewpoint on the reality of the gulag, which proved to be one of the most repressive mechanisms in the history of the Soviet Union.

See also: beria, lavrenti pavlovich; prisons; purges, the great; state security, organs of; yezhov, nikolai ivanovich

bibliography

Applebaum, Anne. (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Broadway Books.

Ginzburg, Evgeniia. (1967). Journey into the Whirlwind, tr. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Ivanovna, Galina Mikhailovna. (2000). Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, ed. Donald J. Raleigh, tr. Carol Flath. Armonk, NY:M. E. Sharpe.

Khlevniuk, Oleg. (2003). History of the Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. (1974–1978). The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 3 vols. tr. Thomas P. Whitney and H. Willetts. New York: Harper and Row.

David J. Nordlander

Gulag system of forced-labor prison camps in the USSR, from the Russian acronym [GULag] for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police (originally the Cheka; subsequently the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and finally the KGB). The Gulag was first established under Vladimir Lenin during the early Bolshevik years (c.1920). The vast penal network, which ultimately included 476 camp complexes, functioned throughout Russia, many in the wastes of Siberia and the Soviet Far East. The system reached its peak after 1928 under Joseph Stalin , who used it to maintain the Soviet state by keeping its populace in a state of terror. Gulag deaths of both political prisoners and common criminals from overwork, starvation, and other forms of maltreatment are estimated to have been in the millions during Stalin's years in power.

Perhaps the best known of the Gulag camp complexes was Kolyma, an area in the Far East about six times the size of France that contained more than 100 camps. About three million are thought to have died there from its establishment in 1931 to 1953, the year of Stalin's death. The Gulag scheme was adapted into the infamous concentration camp system used during World War II, especially as Nazi death factories. The Soviet system was publicized in the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , particularly in his book The Gulag Archipelago (1973, tr. 1974). Millions were released from the Gulag under Nikita Khrushchev , and the system was finally abolished by Mikhail Gorbachev .

Bibliography: See A. Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union (tr. 1980), A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003).

gulag Network of detention centres and forced-labour prisons within the former Soviet Union. The term is an acronym in Russian for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps. Established in 1918, gulags were secret concentration camps used to silence political and religious dissenters.

GULAG, see Great Purge

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Gulag (ˈguːlæg) Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei (Soviet prison and labour camp system)