Gulags
Gulags
The term gulag refers primarily to the system of forced labor camps existing in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until the mid-1950s, although it is also used in a more generic sense to refer to later labor camps in the Soviet Union and to similar institutions elsewhere. Gulag is an acronym from the Russian phrase Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei (“main administration of camps”). The gulag played a key role during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin as both a source of labor for the Soviet Union’s industrialization drive, and a means of removing from society those deemed undesirable by the Soviet state.
The gulag incarcerated around twenty million people in total between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. The number of inmates in the gulag was a matter of fierce scholarly debate during the cold war, but with the opening up of Russian archives beginning in the early 1990s, a broad consensus has been reached, although precise figures remain a matter of dispute, depending on which categories of imprisonment are counted as part of the gulag. Twenty million represents the total number of individuals in the gulag during the Stalin era; the highest gulag population at any given time was just over two and half million, in 1952.
A Soviet Politburo decision of June 1929, “On the Use of the Labor of Convicted Criminals,” marked the beginning of the widespread use of forced labor to contribute to the national economy, and coincided with Stalin’s drive for rapid industrialization of his largely rural country. The growing gulag camp network provided a means of forcing the millions of people thrown off the land during the collectivization of agriculture to be used in the cause of industrialization, chiefly plant and infrastructure construction and the development of remote areas rich in raw materials. Soviet economic plans included targets for gulag production, and the prisoner population grew inexorably, interrupted only by World War II, to its peak in the early 1950s. Judicial procedures were cursory and entirely subject to the Communist Party, dominated by Stalin.
Living conditions for gulag prisoners undermined the view that they were a valuable labor resource. Rations were poor and used as a reward for meeting output targets. In some periods, particularly around World War II, starvation and disease were rife.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev authorized the rapid winding down of the mass gulag system. At first celebrated as enlightened, “corrective labor” by the Soviet authorities in propagandistic films and books, the gulag system was shrouded in a veil of official secrecy from the late 1930s until the Khrushchev years. In 1962 the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation and marked the height of the relative cultural thaw of that time. A decade later, with the more conservative Leonid Brezhnev in power, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) had to be published abroad. Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970; in 1974 he was deported from the Soviet Union and stripped of his citizenship. In the post-Soviet era, the fate of gulag prisoners has been written about widely in Russia and abroad; memorials have been raised, though there is still no single central memorial, and independent groups, often made up of survivors and the relatives of victims, have sought to keep the memory of the gulag alive.
SEE ALSO Colonialism; Concentration Camps; Imprisonment; Khrushchev, Nikita; Prison Psychology; Prisons; Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr; Stalin, Joseph; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. [1962] 1974. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. New York: Signet.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. [1973] 2002. The Gulag Archipelago. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abr. Edward E. Ericson Jr. New York: Harper Perennial Classics.
Edwin Bacon