The Gulag

• What it was
• The story, 1918–1960
• Map by year
• The numbers
• Solzhenitsyn and other witnesses
• Remembrance
• For families
• Sources

• about 18 millionpeople passed through the camps and colonies, 1930–1953 (estimates range from about 14 to 18 million)
• about 6 millionmore were deported to "special settlements" and exile in the same years
• about 2.5 millionprisoners at one time at the peak, 1950–1953, in camps and colonies
• 1.5 to 1.8 milliondeaths recorded in the camps and colonies; many historians estimate more (see the numbers)

What the Gulag was

GULAG is a Russian abbreviation for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, the "Main Camp Administration": the office of the Soviet secret police that ran the country's forced-labor camps. The word has come to mean the whole system, and, more widely, any network of camps for political prisoners.

The first Soviet camps opened in 1918, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. The system as most people mean it took shape in 1929 and 1930, when the government decided to send long-term prisoners to camps in remote parts of the country and put them to work. The secret police ran it under a series of names: the OGPU (to 1934), the NKVD (1934–1946) and the MVD (from 1946). The GULAG administration itself was abolished in 1960.

Camps, colonies and settlements

• Corrective-labor camps (lagerya, ITL) were large complexes, often spread over hundreds of miles, for prisoners with longer sentences. Each had many smaller camp points.
• Corrective-labor colonies (ITK) were smaller, for shorter sentences, and were found all over the country.
• Special settlements were villages in remote places where whole families were sent to live and work under police watch. They were not behind barbed wire, but people could not leave.

Who was sent there

• Political prisoners. Most were convicted under Article 58 of the criminal code, for "counter-revolutionary" crimes. Its wording was so broad that a joke, a letter, a lost document or a relative abroad could lead to a sentence of ten years or more. At the start of 1953 a little under one prisoner in five was held under political articles; in some years the share was higher.
• People convicted of ordinary crimes, from theft and violence to small offenses such as being late to work or taking grain from a collective farm, which were punished harshly under laws of the 1930s and 1940s.
• Deported peoples. Peasant families labeled "kulaks" (1930–1933), and later whole nationalities, among them Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and Kalmyks, and many people from the Baltic states, Poland and western Ukraine, were sent to special settlements.
• Prisoners of war and soldiers who had been captured, and some returning Soviet citizens, after World War II. Prisoners of war were held mostly in a separate camp system.

Forced labor and the economy

The camps were meant to punish and to isolate people seen as enemies, and also to put prisoners to work where free workers were hard to find. Prisoners dug canals, built railways and cities, cut timber, and mined coal, gold, nickel and other metals in the Far North and Far East. Some of the best known projects:

• the White Sea–Baltic Canal (1931–1933), dug largely by hand;
• the Kolyma gold fields in the Far East, run by the trust Dalstroy;
• the coal mines of Vorkuta and the nickel and copper works at Norilsk, both above the Arctic Circle;
• the Moscow–Volga Canal, the Baikal–Amur railway, the Volga–Don Canal and big dams on the Volga.

Historians who have studied the camp records generally find that prisoner labor was costly and inefficient: the camps needed guards, transport and supplies, prisoners were often weak or ill, and output fell short of plans.

The story, 1918 to 1960

1. 1918–1922During the Russian Civil War, the new government opens camps for its opponents and for prisoners of the war.
2. 1923A camp is set up in the old monastery on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. "Solovki" becomes the model for later camps, combining prison and forced labor.
3. 1929–1933The first Five-Year Plan and the drive to put peasants on collective farms. About 1.8 million people labeled "kulaks" are deported in 1930–1931 alone. In 1930 the OGPU sets up the camp administration that gives the Gulag its name, and prisoners build the White Sea–Baltic Canal.
4. 1934The camps pass to the new NKVD.
5. 1937–1938The Great Terror. NKVD orders, such as Order No. 00447 of July 1937, give each region numbers (limits) of people to arrest and to sentence, and the limits are raised again and again. Archival figures show about 1.5 million arrests and about 680,000 executions in these two years. The camps fill quickly.
6. 1939–1941After the Soviet Union takes eastern Poland, the Baltic states and other lands, hundreds of thousands of their people are deported.
7. 1941–1945War with Germany. Food runs short across the country, and in the camps 1942 and 1943 are the years with by far the most deaths. Nearly a million prisoners are released early, many of them into the army. Whole nationalities accused of disloyalty are deported to Siberia and Central Asia.
8. 1946–1952The camps grow again, with returning soldiers and civilians, people from the western borderlands, and new laws on theft. In 1948 "special camps" are opened for political prisoners. By 1950 the camps and colonies hold about 2.5 million people, more than ever before.
9. 1953Stalin dies on March 5. Within weeks an amnesty frees about 1.2 million prisoners, mostly people with short sentences for ordinary crimes. Political prisoners mostly stay, and strikes break out at Norilsk and Vorkuta.
10. 1954At Kengir in Kazakhstan, prisoners take over their camp for about forty days. Troops end the uprising by force; by official count dozens of prisoners were killed, and survivors reported more.
11. 1956On February 25, Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Communist Party congress condemns crimes of the Stalin years. Commissions review cases, and most political prisoners are released; many are officially cleared.
12. 1957–1960Most big camps are closed or turned into ordinary prison colonies. The GULAG administration is abolished in 1960.
13. 1960s–1980sSmaller camps for political prisoners remain, mostly in Mordovia and near Perm, until the late 1980s.

The map, year by year

The map shows a selection of 45 major camp complexes, not every camp: the system had hundreds of camp administrations and thousands of camp points. Move the slider from 1923 to 1960 to see camps open (filled dots) and close (hollow rings). Choose a dot, or move to it with the Tab key and press Enter, to read about it.

Years are when each camp existed as a named administration; many sites were used before or after under other names. Locations are approximate, to the nearest town. The borders are those of 1945 to 1991; before 1939–1945 the country was smaller in the west.

The numbers

For decades, outsiders could only estimate the size of the Gulag from the accounts of former prisoners and from census figures. After 1989, the Soviet and then Russian archives opened the camp administration's own statistics. Historians such as Viktor Zemskov, J. Arch Getty, Gábor Rittersporn, Oleg Khlevniuk and Anne Applebaum have studied them. The chart shows two of the most used series.

How many people passed through?

The camps had a constant turnover: people arrived, finished their terms, were released, transferred or died. So the number who ever passed through is much larger than the number held at any one time. Counting arrivals in the records, historians most often give about 18 million people in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1953; estimates range from about 14 million to 18 million, and a few are higher. About 6 million more were deported to special settlements and exile. Some people were counted more than once, because they were sentenced again.

How many were there at once?

The year-start counts rose from under 200,000 in 1930 to about 1.9 million in 1941, fell during the war, and reached a peak of about 2.5 million in the camps and colonies from 1950 to 1953. On top of that, about 2.75 million people lived in special settlements at the start of 1953, and prisons held many more awaiting trial or transport.

How many died?

• Recorded deaths. The camp administration's own records show about 1.6 million deaths in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1956. Historians who rely mainly on these records give totals of about 1.5 to 1.8 million. About half the deaths came in the war years 1941 to 1944, above all 1942 and 1943, when food ran out.
• Higher estimates. Prisoners who were close to death were often released shortly before they died, and some died on the way to or between camps; these deaths were not counted as camp deaths. Studying medical and release records, historians such as Golfo Alexopoulos (2017) and Mikhail Nakonechnyi (2020) argue that the true toll was considerably higher. Nakonechnyi's estimate, counting deaths soon after release, is about 2.5 million; others give different figures.
• Not in these numbers. Executions are counted separately: about 680,000 in 1937–1938 alone. So are deaths in special settlements, which were very high in the first years; the archives record about 390,000 for 1932 to 1940.

Solzhenitsyn and other witnesses

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was an artillery officer when he was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in letters to a friend. He spent eight years in prisons and camps, including a special camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, and then three years in exile. His short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a single ordinary day of a prisoner in a camp, was published in the Moscow magazine Novy Mir in November 1962, with Khrushchev's approval. It was the first time Soviet readers could read openly about the camps, and it made Solzhenitsyn famous at home and abroad.

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago in secret between 1958 and 1968. He called it "an experiment in literary investigation." It is not a novel. It joins his own experience to the letters, memories and accounts of 227 other former prisoners to describe the whole system: arrest, interrogation, trials, transport, life and work in the camps, and the camps' history from 1918. Its title pictures the camps as a chain of islands scattered across the country, hidden from ordinary life but always near it.

In 1973 the secret police found one of the hidden copies, and Solzhenitsyn decided to publish at once. The first volume came out in Russian in Paris in December 1973, and translations soon followed. In February 1974 he was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union. He had already won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. The book could not be published in the Soviet Union until 1989.

The book made the word "gulag" known around the world, and it changed many readers' views of the Soviet Union, especially in Western Europe. When the archives opened after 1991, they confirmed the system it described: its size and spread across the country, its use of prisoners as a workforce, and the kinds of cases that sent people there. Some of the totals that circulated before the archives opened, including some Solzhenitsyn repeated, proved higher than the archival records show; historians still debate how far the records undercount.

The book is still under copyright, so we describe it here in our own words. Look for it at a library: an abridged one-volume edition is the usual place to start.

Varlam Shalamov and other memoirs

Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) spent about seventeen years in the camps, most of them in Kolyma. His Kolyma Tales, short stories written from 1954 to 1973, are spare and unsentimental, and many readers rank them with the greatest writing about the camps. They appeared abroad first and in the Soviet Union only at the end of the 1980s. Other well-known memoirs include Evgenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind and its sequel, about her eighteen years in prison, the camps and exile.

See also the book's page in our home library and the Russian reading path in Reading Paths.

Remembrance

• Memorial was founded in 1989 by former prisoners, historians and others, with the physicist Andrei Sakharov as its first honorary chairman. It gathered the names and stories of victims of repression, built databases of millions of names, and published reference works, including the camp handbook used for this page's map. In December 2021, Russian courts ordered its main organizations to be dissolved.
• The Solovetsky Stone, a boulder brought from the Solovetsky Islands, was set up in Lubyanka Square in Moscow in 1990. Every year on October 30, the day of remembrance for victims of political repression, people gather there and at other memorials.
• Museums and memorials include the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, the Perm-36 camp near Perm, kept as a museum, the ALZhIR memorial near Astana in Kazakhstan, and the Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan, the gateway to Kolyma. Many towns built by prisoners, such as Vorkuta, Norilsk and Magadan, have their own memorials, as do the home countries of deported peoples.

For families

This page is written for teens and adults. The subject is hard: it is about the suffering of millions of people, many of whom died. We have left out graphic detail, but please read it first before sharing it with a younger child. For children of about 9 to 12, the box below gives a gentle summary.

Questions to talk about

1. Why do you think the government kept the camps secret, and why did writers like Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov risk so much to write about them?
2. Historians give different numbers for how many people died. What makes something hard to count? How can we tell which numbers to trust?
3. The camps held people convicted of real crimes alongside people convicted for their words or their families. Why does it matter that a court be fair, even to people accused of crimes?
4. Look at the map in 1937, 1950 and 1956. What changed, and what events explain it?
5. Why do people build memorials and keep lists of names? What do they do for the families of the people remembered, and for everyone else?

For younger children, the Stories from History lessons Two World Wars and The World from 1945 to 2000 tell the story of these years at their level.

Sources

Histories and archival studies

• J. Arch Getty, 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. Prisoners on January 1, 1930–1953 (the chart), arrests and executions of 1937–1938, deaths in special settlements, and camp sizes in 1939.
• V. N. Zemskov, "GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1991, nos. 6 and 7, and Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930–1960 (Moscow: Nauka, 2005). Deaths recorded each year in camps and colonies, 1930–1956, and the number of special settlers.
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). The overall history, the estimate of about 18 million through the camps and about 6 million in exile, and the camps' economy.
• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The camps' origins, the 1930s and the Terror.
• M. B. Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Memorial and Zven'ya, 1998). The camp handbook behind the map's years, places and kinds of work.
• Michael Ellman, "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 7 (2002): 1151–1172. How the archival numbers were made and how far they can be trusted.
• Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), and Mikhail Nakonechnyi, "'Factory of Invalids': Mortality, Disability, and Early Release on Medical Grounds in GULAG, 1930–1955" (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2020). The arguments for higher death tolls.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973–1975; English translation, New York: Harper & Row, 1974–1978), and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Summarized, not quoted beyond the subtitle.
• Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales; Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (1967).

Encyclopedia articles

• Grokipedia: Gulag, List of Gulag camps, Solovki prison camp, White Sea–Baltic Canal, Dalstroy, Sevvostlag, Vorkutlag, Norillag, Kraslag, Salekhard–Igarka Railway, Dekulakization, Great Purge, NKVD Order No. 00447, Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Norilsk uprising, Vorkuta uprising, Kengir uprising, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Memorial (society), Perm-36, Mask of Sorrow.
• Wikipedia (no Grokipedia article): Solovetsky Stone, Gulag History Museum, and the table of yearly deaths in Gulag.

The map and chart

Our own drawings. Country outlines from Natural Earth (public domain), in a conic projection; the Soviet Union is drawn as the union of its fifteen republics at their borders after 1945. Camp locations are approximate, placed at the nearest town.