The GULAG

The name 'GULAG' is an acronym for the Russian Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey, meaning 'Main Directorate of [Forced Labour] Camps'' - ie the ministry, not the camps.  It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, in his famous book The Gulag Archipelago, noticing the ugliness/menace of the name, applied it to the whole network of camps.  The Bolsheviks called the camps: kontslagerya ('containment camps') until 1930, when they were officially renamed: ispravitelno-trudovye lagerya (ITL), or ‘corrective-labour camps’. 

1.  THE KONTSLAGERYA

The Bolsheviks inherited a system of prison camps from the Tsarist regime, notably Sovoletsky – a former monastery on an island in the White Sea.  Lenin wanted to use these camps to re-educate political opponents (SRs, Anarchists etc.), and the 300-or-so political prisoners at Sovoletsky had a relatively easy time of it, billeted in the nearby Savvatyevo monastery building, with reasonable food, newspapers and freedom of movement – they had the time to write and put on plays, produced their own camp newspapers, and wrote articles on local folklore. 

The rest of the island, however, was used to imprison people who were not political intellectuals, such as criminals, and (in the Civil War) White Russian POWs and spies.  They were poorly-treated, suffering starvation and epidemics (notably typhus) – perhaps as many as half of them died each year.  They were also subject to random executions and sadism – eg forced to jump into the sea when a guard shouted ‘Dolphin’.  Prisoners who complained would be tied naked in the forest at night, to be exsanguinated by the mosquitoes.  It would appear that this cruelty was a result of lack of supervision, rather than intended – Moscow officials who visited were horrified – but, when the were told that they could not shoot prisoners, the guards started taking them to a long flight of steps and throwing them down it instead. 

In 1923, the CHEKA morphed into OGPU, with orders to reign in the indiscriminate killing.  At the same time, Naftaly Frenkel – an inmate sentenced to 10 years for smuggling – suggested an improvement.  He argued that the prisoners – many of whom had useful skills – needed occupying, and motivating.  Within a year he was in charge of the camps’ Economic-Commercial Dept., negotiating sales of wood, and supplying cheap labour for road-building.  As for the prisoners, they were subjected to ‘eat-as-you-work’: they were given a production target for the day – the ‘norm’ – and received rations dependent on the proportion of the norm they produced.  ‘Shockworkers’ who had overfulfilled the norm received a new set of work clothes every six months, and ate better food at separate tables, beneath posters reading ‘For the best workers, the best food’; the rest sat beneath posters reading ‘Here they get worse food: refusers, loafers, lazy-bones’.  Of course, the less you ate, the less you could do; one of former-prisoner Varlam Shalamov’s harrowing Kolyma Tales tells the story of Ivan Ivanovich who, on arriving, had been "an excellent ‘worker’ … Now that he had become weak from hunger, he was unable to understand why everyone beat him".  Finally, put on the easiest detail but unable to do any more, he sat and waited for the foreman:

Our worst fears were realized. 

‘OK, you’ve had your rest.  Your time is up.  Might as well give someone else a chance.  This has been a bit like a sanatorium or maybe a health club for you,’ the foreman joked without cracking a smile…

We pretended to laugh, out of politeness. 

‘When do we go back?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Ivan Ivanovich didn’t ask any more questions.  He hanged himself that night ten paces from the cabin. 

In 1925, the political prisoners at Savvatyevo were given two hours to pack, loaded onto trains, and distributed round the rest of the GULAG – there were to be no more free rides. 

2.  THE ISPRAVITELNO-TRUDOVYE LAGERYA (ITL)

Historians agree that 1929 marked a turning point in the history of the GULAG.  It was the year that Trotsky deported into exile and Stalin gained full control of the Politburo.  It was the year the first Five Year Plan for industrial growth was implemented. 

It was the year when large numbers of kulaks were rebelling against forcible collectivisation,.  It was also the year when OGPU was given sweeping new powers by changes to Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code (which dealt with treason and counter-revolution) to include damaging communal property, deliberate carelessness at work, and failing to report others who were guilty of counter-revolutionary activities.  As a result, the largerya suddenly found themselves faced with large numbers of extra inmates. 

In May 1929 a Commission headed by the Commissar for Justice, N Yansom, delivered the report it had been preparing over the last year: the camps were to be run by OGPU, and they were to be used to grow the economy – particularly to exploit the resources of the North. 

Over the next 5 years, hundreds of thousands of prisoners undertook the ‘Opening Up of the Far North’.  They: built the White Sea Canal, new roads and railways; built and operated chemical plants; conducted vast logging operations; opened gold and coal mines; conducted exploratory and geological expeditions.  It was convenient that the organisation needing the workers (OGPU) was the organisation securing the convicts (OGPU) – historian Anne Applebaum (2003) noticed how, when, for instance, engineering skills were needed, there would be a sudden arrival of prisoners who were engineers. 

During the 1930s, the number of inmates grew rapidly until it reached 1⅓ million in 1941 … but you have to realise that there were maybe half as many again, mainly kulaks, who were sent as exiles/colonists, and lived in communities outside the camps. 

The prisoners arrived to nothing, and started by building their own prison camp.  The colonists arrived to nothing, and were left to cope.  In 1933, a party of 6,000 exiled peasants was placed on Nazino Island in Western Siberia.  The ground was frozen and they had no tools, and no food.  A single boat-load of flour was delivered, which they had no means of preparing.  When the authorities returned three months later, 4,000 of the settlers were dead, and the remaining 2,000 had to be arrested for cannibalism. 

Although these years were times of high mortality, Applebaum felt that the system was neglectful and overwhelmed, rather than intentionally deadly.  As time went on, the camps became better organised.  Eduard Berzin, the camp commander at Kolyma gold mine, believed that healthy prisoners were more productive; he provided adequate food, fur caps and felt boots.  When the temperature fell below -60°C, work was cancelled.  Good workers might be promoted, and allowed to live in the nearby free exiles’ villages, to have books and writing paper, to have a family. 

By the end of the 1930s, forced labour provided 25% of the Soviet Union’s timber, 40% of its iron ore, and 60% of its gold. 

3.  THE GREAT TERROR AND WORLD WAR II

In 1937, Stalin unleashed a time of murder on an industrial scale.  The GULAG suffered alongside everybody else.  Yagoda, head of the NKVD was shot.  His successor, Nikolai Yezhov, after organising thousands of executions, was also shot, as was the head of the GULAG, Kolyma commander Eduard Berzin, and many other camps commanders.  The inmates suffered alongside their gaolers.  Applebaum labelled 1937-38 as:

a genuine watershed, for it was in this year that the Soviet camps temporarily transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident, into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger numbers than they had been in the past. 

The NKVD set up ‘troikas’ – committees of three NKVD officers – to decide, without trial, lawyers, or even being present – whom to execute.  The inmates would be assembled, and a list of hundreds of names read out and told to get on the transport for execution; the result was chaos, as people tried to collect their things, and say goodbye. 

It was worse than just mass-murder, however, for there was an accompanying systematic attempt to dehumanise the prisoners into ‘units of labour’.  All talk of re-education or rehabilitation was ended.  Whereas in the past prisoners had come to be referred to by their job (eg ‘lumberjack’), they were all now simply zeks (a derogatory abbreviation of the Russian word for 'prisoner': zakliuchenny).  To hide the slaughter that was taking place from the rest of the world, the NKVD devised a system of code-names: camps were ‘trusts’; men were ‘accounts; exiles, ‘rubbish’.  Political prisoners were labelled vragi naroda (‘enemies of the people’), and referred to as ‘vermin’, ‘filth’ and ‘weeds’.  Bread rations, which had become adequate, were more-than-halved.  So did living and working conditions worsen; for instance, in 1939, prisoners began working in Kolyma’s uranium mines with virtually no protection against radiation. 

The Terror came to an abrupt end in 1938, but things further worsened in WWII when, to meet the needs of the military, hours were increased (sometimes to a 20-hour day) and rations decreased.  To increase the number of workers, the law was changed allow short camp sentences to those convicted of petty crimes like hooliganism.  And a new category of especially harsh prison – the Katorga – was introduced for Nazi POWs and collaborators. 

4.  THE EXPERIENCE OF THE CAMPS

To get an idea of what it was like to be a prisoner on the camps, read Varlam Shalamov’s harrowing Kolyma Tales short stories, and his Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag. 

Some of the features you will discover include:

1.  The terror and bewilderment of arrest, interrogation and days spent in unheated, sealed trucks being transported to the camp. 

2.  The system of ‘eat-as-you-work’, coupled with poor rations and shifts lasting 12–16 hours in extreme conditions, led to rapid physical decline to exhaustion and death. 

The prisoners were so famished that at Zarosshy Spring [relates one eye-witness account] they ate the corpse of a horse which had been lying dead for more than a week and which not only stank but was covered with flies and maggots….  At Mylga they ate Iceland moss, like the deer… Multitudes of ‘goners’, unable to walk by themselves were dragged to work on sledges by other ‘goners’ who had not yet become quite so weak.  Those who lagged behind were beaten with clubs and torn by dogs. 

3.  The freezing cold: the second of Shalamov’s Forty-Five Things was: "The main means for depraving the soul is the cold": 

At the end of the workday [wrote a Solovetsky Islands veteran] there were corpses left on the work site.  One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in that position….  Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other…. 

And in the summer bones remained from corpses which had not been removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into the concrete mixer.  And in this way they got into the concrete of the last lock at the city of Belomorsk and will be preserved there forever. 

4.  Disease: scurvy, dysentery & typhus spread in overcrowded, unsanitary barracks, with little or no medical care. 

5.  Cruelty/sadism and carelessness towards suffering of the guards.  Brutal Punishments – solitary confinement in unheated cells, reduced rations, beatings, and execution. 

6.  The danger from the criminals; if you were weak, other inmates would take your possessions and clothing. 

7.  Betrayal: the NKVD encouraged informants (stukachi) to denounce others in exchange for minor privileges. 

8.  Tufta: shirking!  This could be as simple as hiding a rock in your sack, or stealing the work of others, to meet your production norm.  In one quarry the zeks, realising that the guards could only see half of them, would from time to time move one place to the right, so that everyone could have some time sat out-of-sight doing nothing. 

9.  Survival strategies: some inmates would works to the best of their ability, for personal satisfaction; some became ‘trusties’; some found a friend; others kept their mind busy, memorised poetry, sang, tried to be kind.  Havign a faith helped – another of Shalamov’s Forty-Five Things (albeit #7th) was: "I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers".  By contrast, he found that (#8}: "Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily". 

10.  Isolation and loss of Identity: the most tragic thing is to read the many tales of human beings reduced to hopelessness, depravity and inhumanity.  The very first of Shalamov’s Forty-Five Things was: "The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization.  A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labour, cold, hunger, and beatings". 

5.  INTERPRETATIONS

The Wikipedia article on the Gulag comments:

The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. 

And that, I suppose, is how it is most often treated – it is addressed, for instance, as part of my own webpage on Stalin’s Terror, and it was to the GULAG that hundreds of thousands of people were sent under Article 58, and where tens of thousands of them were executed during the Great Terror.  The historian Stephen Barnes (2011) gave this process a positive twist, seeing the GULAG as a 'social cleansing' of those who were damaging the nation. 

But that is not the whole story, is it, because the GULAG was more than socio-political repression – it was also a prison system for ‘ordinary’ criminals, and it suffered alongside its inmates during 1937-38. 

Neither for Solzhenitsyn was the GULAG about politics: "let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its cover shut right now".  For Solzhenitsyn, the GULAG was about ideology and morality – "the line dividing good and evil" -- the moment when Marxism lost its right to rule. 

For Applebaum, apart from brief periods – at the start, when it was about re-education, and in 1937-38, when it was about execution – the GULAG was an economic system of forced labour, which took advantage of the political repression to provide itself with ‘units of labour’. 

The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the GULAG was neither political nor economic, but purely an attempt to destroy individuality and social bonds. 

Russian writer Ivan Chukhin (1990) speculated that the GULAG was simply a project to raise Stalin’s prestige; other historians have argued that they were local projects, or that there was no design to them at all. 

Maybe the answer lies in that the GULAG was a tool, not a cause.  It did not have meaning of its own – it was used by those in power to help deliver what they wanted.  And thus it was, at different times for different people, a way to re-educate political dissidents, a punishment for criminals, the executioner of enemies, an instrument of terror, an economic organ, a coloniser of new lands, a means to slake their blood-lust & sadism … and others. 

For millions of Soviet citizens, it was a place of inconceivable horror, suffering and death.