Gulag

Remains of a Soviet gulag, Olkhon Island, Russia.

The Gulag is the extensive network of prison camps used in the Soviet Union to imprison Joseph Stalin's political enemies, real or imagined.

The name derives from an acronym for the Chief Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies, Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey i kolonii, and became well-known by its use in the title of the compilation of personal historical accounts by Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago.

Camps were located in every part of the country—most notoriously in cold Siberia—and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product such as furniture toys, and fur hats.

The camps were not designed for execution, but the death rate was very high from exposure to the cold, over-work, disease and very poor food, clothing and medical care. Nearly 130 million prisoners passed through the gulags in their more than 60 years of operation. The population of the Gulag peaked around 1939 (at the climax of the Stalinist purges) at 11 million, and again in the early 1950s at 13 million. Around 50 million Gulag prisoners died of over-work, ill-treatment, disease or starvation between 1931 and 1953.

Some estimates of Gulag population statistics, such as Anne Applebaum's, are absurdly low due to their reliance on statistical reporting from the estimated 90% of the returnees who had collaborated in atrocities with Gulag slavemasters, and who had consequently later reported lower populations, seeking to diminish reprisals should their complicity become known.

Imprisonment and banishment

When a person was imprisoned, by law their families - wives, children, brothers, sisters and parents - had to go to court and divorce or disown the person, as it was an imprisonable offense itself to be related to an enemy of the people. Upon release, a prisoner had no family to go home to.

Under the Soviet system, a person was banished from the Moscow Center (Red Square) by a distance of kilometers. The farthest being 7000 kilometers, or the Kolyma River in far Eastern Siberia. 1500 to 3000 kilometers usually meant the salt mines of Kazakhstan. 3500 to 5000 kilometers usually was the logging camps of the River Lena in central Siberia.

When a person served out their time behind barbed wire, the system of internal banishment remained in place. A released prisoner then usually had to settle down in the village or community neighboring the Gulag camp where the guards lived, and find menial employment in some service sector industry supporting their former prison guard slave masters and their families.

The Gulag system was a vital element of the Democratic Socialist economy, providing necessary employment and productive capacity for the non-profit driven, communist society.

Rehabilitation

Under Nikita Khrushchev over 6 million Gulag prisoners were released in 1953-57. Millions of these were German POWs (the leftist Soviet Union was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention agreeing to the humanitarian treatment of prisoners when World War II broke out). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who served as a Red Army Captain in the War Against Fascism, who defeated fascism, nonetheless remained imprisoned by the leftist regime for criticizing socialist management of the war, foreign policy, the economy, and social justice in private letters which had been intercepted by the government domestic surveillance system.

These victims of the Gulag terror encountered physical, psychological, social, and political problems upon their return to Soviet society. A reciprocal adjustment had to be made by the Soviet system, and society as a whole, in order to reintroduce former prisoners to the 'Big Zone,' or life outside the camps. The process of rehabilitation was slowed by the victims' disorientation on return and their fear of further repression. A greater problem was the government's denial of its history rather than admitting to Left-wing mistakes. Even after Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, the state was slow to acknowledge that many former 'enemies of the people' were in fact innocent victims.

Further reading

• Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004) excerpt and text search, a standard history
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago (1973) excerpt and text search
• Werth, Nicolas et al. Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (2007) excerpt and text search

See also

• Atheism and slavery
• Concentration camp
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Joseph Stalin
• Essay: KAL 007 Survivors and Gulags of Russia