GULAG.

An acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitelnotrudovykh LAGerei (Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), tasked with oversight of the Soviet forced-labor concentration camp and internal exile system, the term gulag has come to represent the entire Soviet penal system. Often understood incorrectly as a system only for political prisoners, the gulag served more generally, holding millions of people convicted of various political and nonpolitical crimes in a myriad of different types of prisons, concentration camps, and internal exile.

THE INSTITUTIONS AND SCOPE
OF THE GULAG

Gulag prisons primarily served as the place of detention for those under investigation. Prisons such as the Lubyanka, Butyrka, and Lefortovo along with countless lesser-known prisons in the regional cities of the Soviet Union were notorious as places of torturous interrogation and a rude introduction for the newly arrested to gulag life. Only a small portion of gulag inmates, usually those deemed too dangerous or too famous to be placed in regular forced-labor camps, actually served their sentences in prisons.

The gulag included a great variety of forced-labor concentration camps. This was the primary place of detention for nearly all who had been individually convicted of an alleged crime. Many prisoners lived in a camp zone surrounded by a fence or barbed wire, overlooked by manned watchtowers, and containing a number of overcrowded, poorly heated barracks. During nonworking hours, the prisoners were usually relatively free to move about the camp zone. Others lived in especially strict regime camps with locked barracks, barred windows, and heavily restricted and guarded movements within the camp zone. Not all forced-labor camp prisoners, however, lived in the typical camp zone. For many, a camp meant a relatively unguarded existence on the Kazakh steppe or in the frozen Siberian countryside. In whatever locale, life in a gulag camp was extremely harsh. Prisoners were poorly fed. Violence was endemic in the gulag. The largest Soviet concentration camps were located in the geographic extremes of the Soviet Union from the arctic north to the Siberian east to the Central Asian south, though camps existed in virtually every part of the Soviet Union. Some of the most famous gulag camp locales—Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk, Solovki, and Karaganda—struck fear into prisoners much like the more famous place-names of the Nazi camp system.

The system of internal exile was used mostly for large groups of people condemned not for particular "crimes" but for membership in a suspect group sometimes defined by class—such as the so-called kulaks (rich peasants) deported during the early 1930s drive to collectivize agriculture—and sometimes including entire nationalities, such as the Soviet Germans, Chechens, and others deported en masse before and during the war. Exile typically required that a person live within a fixed region deep in Siberia or Central Asia. Exiles had a portion of their pay garnisheed in favor of the state and had to report periodically to the local secret police; leaving the region of exile without permission was treated as escape and subject to very stiff penalties. Otherwise, they lived remarkably similarly to other Soviet citizens.

The gulag was a mass, social institution. Before the opening of the archives in the late 1980s, historians speculated that the gulag's population was in the tens of millions. It is now known with a degree of accuracy that the total population of prisons, camps, and exile reached a maximum of some 5.2 million people in the early 1950s just before Joseph Stalin's death. With the exception of World War II, the gulag population grew almost without interruption throughout the Stalin era. Throughout its history, some 18 million people passed through the prisons and camps of the gulag, and perhaps another 6 or 7 million were subject to internal exile. An unknown number, well into the millions, died in gulag camps and in places of exile. At the same time, in one of the most important revelations of gulag archival studies, no less than 20 percent of the camp population was released every year from 1934 to 1953, with the number released in a given year never less than 150,000 and frequently topping 500,000. Though these gulag demographic figures are smaller than once thought, they still bespeak a massive institution that touched all parts of Soviet society.

Additionally, much more has been learned about the makeup of the prisoner population since the archives have opened. The near exclusive reliance on memoirs from political prisoners once gave the impression that they were the dominant gulag demographic. Political prisoners—a group not limited to real opponents of the Soviet regime but also including many caught up in the paranoid arms of the secret police—typically comprised no more than one-quarter of the gulag population. Many gulag prisoners were similar to detained criminals in any country. The gulag held the Soviet Union's robbers, rapists, murderers, and thieves. Nevertheless, the largest group was composed of the victims of arbitrary and draconian legal campaigns under which petty theft or unexcused absences from work were punished by many years in concentration camps. These "crimes" would likely have gone unpunished in most countries, but these prisoners made up the majority of the gulag population.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE GULAG

The gulag served several functions; it was simultaneously a detention system, a forced-labor system, and a penal system participating in a radically utopian drive to end criminality and build a "socialist" society. These various functions sometimes competed with and sometimes complemented one another.

First, the gulag was a system of detention focused on isolating those deemed unfit for and/or dangerous to Soviet society. Soviet leaders frequently spoke of the gulag system as a prophylactic measure aimed at protecting society from criminals, class enemies, and enemies of the people. Gulag officials were constantly focused on battling with prisoner escapes, as they sought to complete their detention function. Often, however, this role as detention system was undercut by another function of the gulag—its role as a system of forced labor. For example, prisoners at Karlag, an agricultural camp in central Kazakhstan, simply could not all be kept in a camp zone, because they were constantly moving with herds of grazing animals about the steppe lands. This made prevention of escape very difficult.

In the gulag, all able-bodied inmates were required to work, and this massive system was an active participant in the Soviet economy. Gulag inmates opened remote regions to mine gold, copper, and coal; to build cities, railroads, canals, and highways; to fell trees; and to operate vast agricultural enterprises. Many historians have understood the gulag primarily as a slave labor system with the Soviet economy built on the backs of prisoner labor. In this view, the gulag arose and expanded primarily as a result of Stalin's crash industrialization policies, which created a need for a labor force in the geographic extremes of the Soviet Union. Scholarship, however, has revealed the extreme inefficiency of gulag labor and the tremendous expense of operating the camp system. The gulag was quite simply a financial burden, not a financial boon for the Soviet state. Further, convinced that they were using essentially "free" labor, Soviet economic planners utilized gulag laborers on a variety of projects that ultimately proved to have little or no economic value. Many of these projects were closed down immediately after the death of Stalin, as even gulag administrators had come to realize their pointlessness.

While the gulag's employees strove constantly to make their system more economically productive, new evidence suggests that economic motivation was not the primary explanation for the growth of the gulag. Arrests occurred chaotically and inefficiently, not at the urging of camp administrators, but as a result of various politicized legal campaigns. Camp administrators did not clamor for more prisoners, but were typically caught unaware and unprepared for massive influxes of prisoners, and they struggled to find shelter, food, and even work for new prisoners. Furthermore, arrests were not limited to the healthy working population, but included women, children, the ill, and the elderly.

Gulag prisoners were never treated in an undifferentiated fashion, and this in part served the gulag's third major function. It was an active participant in the utopian drive to build a new "socialist" society and a new "Soviet man." The most salient feature of the gulag was an apparent paradox: forced labor, high death rates, and an oppressive atmosphere of violence, cold, and constant hunger coexisted with camp newspapers and cultural activities, a constant propaganda barrage of correction and reeducation, and the steady release of a significant portion of the prisoner population. The gulag was more complex than a simple system of industrialized death such as the Nazi camp system. If more than 150,000 gulag prisoners were released every year, the question of how Soviet authorities determined who would be released and how they prepared them for reentry into Soviet society simply must be addressed. At the same time, each year thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of gulag prisoners died. Their fate must also be considered in order to understand the function of the camp system.

The gulag upon closer reflection comes to appear as a "last chance" for prisoners to remake themselves into fit Soviet citizens. The Bolsheviks were engaged in a radical project to build a utopian socialist society. In accord with their Manichaean worldview, they fully expected opposition to building that perfect society. Many whom they understood as their most implacable enemies, they merely executed, but many others were kept alive (at least temporarily) in the gulag. The Bolsheviks could not escape their fundamental belief in the malleability of the human soul, and they believed that labor was the key to "reforging" criminals. The very harshness of the gulag was seen as necessary to break down a criminal's resistance in order to rebuild that person into a proper Soviet citizen. If a prisoner refused correction, the brutality of the gulag would lead to inevitable death. The Bolsheviks were no humanitarians. If mistakes were to be made, it was better to kill too many than too few.

Many gulag practices were designed based on a categorization matrix that placed prisoners into a hierarchy according to their perceived "redeemability" and level of reeducation. Complex hierarchies of living and working conditions, differentiation of food rations, and practices of early release tied survival directly to reeducation. The gulag served as a crossroads, constantly redefining the line between those who could be reclaimed for Soviet society and those who were destined to die in the camps.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE GULAG

The gulag was thoroughly integrated into the fabric of the Soviet Union. Major historical events and turning points greatly affected the lives and fates of gulag inmates and exiles. In many respects, the gulag was born with 1917's October Revolution itself. As early as 1918, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders spoke of putting class enemies in "concentration camps." Yet the origins of the gulag must be sought not only in these first Soviet concentration camps founded as part of the Leninist regime's extraordinarily violent reaction to its enemies after October. The gulag's origins are also found in the more utopian ideals that viewed inmate labor as the key to teaching the prisoner that under socialism work would no longer be a hateful, exploitive activity. Thus, corrective labor long preceded the arrival of crash industrialization and was filled with ideological and political content.

The explosion of the gulag population coincided with Stalin's great "revolution from above." This was not, however, a product merely of the economic demands of industrialization and collectivization. It was part of the all-encompassing social and cultural transformations accompanying the "building of socialism." Soviet authorities attempted with great haste to cleanse their newly emerging society of the criminals, class enemies, and political opponents who seemed to contaminate the new world.

The 1920s and the early 1930s represented the acme of Soviet belief in the capacity to rehabilitate prisoners by means of corrective labor. Corrective labor camps not only were openly discussed but were also in fact a source of pride. In the early 1930s, paeans to the building of the White Sea–Baltic Canal proudly announced the use of convict labor in their construction in the volume Belomor, which was published not only in the Soviet Union but also in the United States in an English translation. The Bolsheviks claimed to be transforming humans as proudly as they were transforming nature.

As the 1930s progressed, optimism and openness about penal practices gave way to skepticism and secrecy. Prisoner transports were hidden as "special equipment." Prisoner correspondence was severely restricted. Released prisoners signed secrecy agreements forbidding them to talk about the camps. Nobody could enter regions such as Kolyma without special entrance permits. With the adoption of the Stalin Constitution in 1936, the Soviet Union was officially declared a socialist state of workers and peasants. The class enemy had officially been destroyed; socialism had been achieved. The continued existence of criminality was an embarrassment for a polity that explained such problems in terms of the social milieu. Capitalism could no longer offer a legitimate excuse for crime, and the Soviet penal system became notably less compromising toward enemies and lawbreakers. In 1937 and 1938 the "Great Terror" saw a massive number of executions in and outside of the gulag, as many of those who failed to prove their rehabilitation during the transition period were annihilated. Nonetheless, the drive to reeducate prisoners never disappeared in internal gulag discussions. Not all prisoners were killed, and releases continued.

Socialism achieved did not end the gulag, but it did shift its understanding of its own population. With the class enemy defeated, the categorization of Soviet enemies increasingly turned from the terms of class toward the terms of nation. The class enemy became the enemy of the people. Although the focus on class never entirely disappeared, the path was cleared for a major wave of ethno-national group deportations that would continue right through the war. The 1937 exile of the Far Eastern Soviet Koreans, though not the first ethnic deportation, did offer the first instance in which an entire undifferentiated national group was deported from a particular territory. The deportation of the Soviet Koreans provided an example for the coming wartime exile of entire nationalities, when among others every last Soviet German, Chechen, Ingush, and Crimean Tatar was subject to internal exile regardless of their geographical location, class position, military service, or even Communist Party membership.

The 1939 and 1940 annexations of western Ukraine, western Byelorussia, and the Baltic changed the face of the gulag. These "westerners" had never been exposed to socialism in power and carried with them the living memory of different systems of government and different penal institutions. Many Poles arrested after 1939 but released after the June 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would be the first major informants to the West about the gulag system.

The years 1941 and 1942 saw the largest prisoner releases at any time in the Stalin era, when some one million inmates sentenced for relatively minor crimes were released into the Red Army. Many went on to earn orders and medals for their deeds during the war. Not all inmates, however, could join the Red Army, as political prisoners were left behind in the camps. Further, a very small subsection of political prisoners, the so-called especially dangerous state criminals, were subjected to a new type of severe isolation in the harshest climatic conditions performing the most dangerous labor in so-called katorga (a tsarist-era term for forced labor) camp subdivisions.

Two new postwar prisoner contingents reshaped gulag society. First, the arrest of many thousands of Red Army veterans introduced a new and often prestigious element into camp society. Their firsthand experience with the standards of life outside Soviet borders combined with an assertiveness and sense of entitlement earned on the battlefield tended to render these postwar inmates less docile than their prewar predecessors. The second postwar contingent was even more assertive and combative. These prisoners from among the nationalist organizations and partisan armies of the western territories and the Baltic states brought to the gulag a strong sense of national identity, well-developed and explicitly anti-Soviet ideologies, and combat experience fighting Soviet power. Both Red Army veterans and the nationalist guerrillas played substantial leadership roles during the mass gulag strikes of the 1950s.

The late 1940s was the apogee of the gulag system, when the system became rigidified and the prisoner population reached historic maximums. In 1948 new "special camps" were created to hold a much-expanded group of so-called especially dangerous state criminals. For the first time, many political prisoners were largely isolated from the gulag's regular criminal population. Their isolation led to a new political consciousness that would be a strong contributing factor to the post-Stalin strikes. The postwar era also saw the application of permanent, lifelong exile to all those nationalities deported during the war and the permanent deportation of all those prisoners released from special camps.

Only Stalin's death in 1953 made the gulag's decline thinkable. Within three weeks of Stalin's death, the first major amnesty was declared, starting the gulag's population decline. The partial nature of the amnesty, especially its near total exclusion of political prisoners, touched off a wave of prisoner uprisings of a size and scope unprecedented in gulag history. Soon after the strikes, the gulag as the massive phenomenon containing millions of prisoners came to an end. Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech" denouncing Stalin set in motion the final act of largely emptying the labor camps and the system of exile.

Forced-labor camps would continue to exist in the Soviet Union right up until the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, but they became much smaller and ever more focused on recidivists and serious criminals. Soviet dissidents made up an important but exceedingly small portion of the post-Stalin camp population. The last camp for political prisoners—located outside Perm, Russia—was closed in 1988 and was later turned into the Gulag Museum.

See alsoConcentration Camps; Forced Labor; Soviet Union.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Gorky, Maxim, L. Auerbach, and S. G. Firin, eds. Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. Translated by Amabel Williams-Ellis. New York, 1935. Reprint, Westport, Conn., 1977. The original ideologically correct presentation of Soviet corrective labor.

Khlevniuk, Oleg V. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo with editorial assistance and commentary by David J. Nordlander. New Haven, Conn., 2004. A new English-language edition of documents from official Soviet archives.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. 3 vols. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York, 1991–1992. A combination primary source and secondary source. Still the best single study of the gulag.

Secondary Sources

Adler, Nanci. The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System. New Brunswick, N.J., 2002.

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York, 2003. A recent—Pulitzer Prize–winning—popular history of the gulag.

Bacon, Edwin. The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives. Basingstoke, U.K., 1994. The first limited book-length English-language study to use select official archival sources.

Barnes, Steven A. "Soviet Society Confined: The Gulag in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan, 1930s–1950s." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003.

Courtois, Stéphane, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, et al. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Dallin, David J., and Boris I. Nicolaevsky. Forced Labor in Soviet Russia. New Haven, Conn., 1947. Reprint, New York, 1974. The first scholarly study of the gulag.

Getty, J. Arch, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov. "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence." American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (1993): 1017–1049. The new demographic information on the gulag that is only now changing conceptions of the institution.

Gregory, Paul R., and Valery Lazarev, eds. The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag. Stanford, Calif., 2003. Groundbreaking study of gulag economy.

Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna. Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System. Translated by Carol Flath. Edited by Donald J. Raleigh. Armonk, N.Y., 2000.

Jakobson, Michael. Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934. Lexington, Ky., 1993.

Steven A. Barnes