Gulag (pronounced goo-lahg)
(1) The
system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union (with initial capital).
(2)
Individually, a Soviet forced-labor camp (usually with initial capital).
(3) By
association, any prison or detention camp, especially one used for political
prisoners (usually not with initial capital).
(4) Figuratively,
any place regarded as undesirable or one perceived as being a “punishment-post”
(not with initial capital).
(5)
Figuratively, any system used to silence dissent (not with initial capital).
1930-1931:
From the Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG, GULag or Gulág), the acronym (Гла́вное управле́ние
исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje
upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj) translated usually as “Main
Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps” but also, inter alia, “Chief
Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”, “Main Directorate for Places of
Detention”, “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps” etc.). The noun plural was Gulags.
An
example of the way in which a bland acronym (like the 1933 Gestapo (an abbreviated form of the German Geheime Staatspolizei (the construct being Ge(heime) Sta(ats)po(lizei),
literally “secret state police”) can become a byword for something awful, although
technically, the acronym GULag (Glávnoje
upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps))
didn’t come into use until 1930, the origin of what quickly would evolve into a
vast, nation-wide network of concentration camps lies in the legal device created
almost immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917. This was the concept of the “class enemy”, a
logical crime to gazette under Marxist-Leninist theory and one that could be
applied literally to anybody, regardless of their conduct; it was essentially the same idea as the crime of
“unspecified offences” which appears in the judicial sentences of some
authoritarian states. Russia, as many of
the Bolsheviks knew from personal experience, had a long tradition of “internal
exile” and the new regime extended this concept, creating concentration camps
for class enemies where convicts were required to perform useful manual labor
(forestry, mining, quarrying etc).
The early camps, authorized by decree in April 1919, were the prisoner of war (POW) facilities which had become redundant after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) which concluded hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers although the first model camp was in the White Sea region, in what were once the Orthodox Church's monastery buildings on the Solovetsky Islands and the first prisoners were anti-Bolsheviks, mostly left-wing intellectuals and members of the White Army. The Cheka, the Russian secret police (the first in the alphabet soup of the names adopted (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB, (most famously) KGB & FSB), was allocated the role of administration. Reflecting the love secret police everywhere have for mysterious acronyms, the Cheka created SLON (Northern Camps of Special Significance) as an administrative template for the Solovetsky Islands which, briefly, was the only camp complex in the Soviet state. The number of concentration (usually described as “correctional labor”) camps grew sufficiently during the 1920s to outgrow the bureaucratic structures initially formed by the Cheka and in 1930 the GULag was created as a separate division of the secret police which worked in conjunction with the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labor of prisoners. Although the camps were sometimes used for those guilty of “normal” criminal offences, the great majority of inmates were political prisoners who were sometimes genuine political dissidents but could be there for entirely arbitrary reasons or even as victims of personal vendettas. In these aspects there are parallels with the Nazi's concentration camps which also worked as systems of coercion, punishment & repression although the GULag never had a programme industrially to exterminate an entire race. There was another striking similarity in the camp architecture of the two dictatorships which were nominally ideological opponents. The German equivalent of the GULag, the Konzentrationlager is remembered for the words Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) rendered in wrought iron above the gates of Auschwitz I; the inscription через труд (through labor (ie get back home through working)) was the message at the prisoners' entrance to the Magaden camp in Siberia.
What is
sometime neglected in the history of the GULag (and other systems of
concentration camps) is that while it is well-understood as part of a system of
repression, there were genuine attempts to locate the camps in places where the
labor extracted from the inmates could be applied to the maximum benefit for
the state, something of great significance because in 1929 comrade Stalin (1878–1953;
Soviet leader 1922–1953) announced a programme of rapid industrialization and the
first of a succession of five-year plans. In support of this, the Politburo abolished
any distinction between political and other crimes and intruded a unified
network of camps to replace the hitherto dual prison system. From this point, accelerating from the
mid-1930s, archipelagos of camps were built (substantially by the prisoners)
close to sites of huge economic projects such as a canal from the White Sea to
the Baltic Sea, gold mining in Kolyma and lines of communications such as the Baikal-Amur
Mainline.
The GULag’s second great growth spurt happened during Stalin’s “Great Terror” in
1936-1938 when the upper echelons of the Communist Party, the armed forces, the
civil service and even the GULag management were subject to purges and while
there were many executions, most were sent to the camps which, never designed
for such numbers, were unable to handle the mass influx and the already high
death rate increased sometimes threefold. During comrade Stalin's great purges, the (whispered) joke was that the Russian population consisted of (1) those in the gulag, (2) those just released and (3) those about to go back. On a somewhat smaller scale, rapid inflows also happened in the early
years of World War II because of the need to imprison those deported from
territory just occupied by the Soviet Union (Eastern Poland, the Baltics,
Bessarabia) but this pressure on capacity was more than off-set by the sudden release
of many prisoners to meet the needs of the Red Army which had suffered massive
losses in the Nazi invasion. Needing
troops, all was suddenly forgiven and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that the
numbers in the camps began again to trend upwards, reflecting the waves of
arrests among the ranks of the Red Army, former German POWs and ethnic
minorities, including Soviet Jews. The
Cold War also fed the GULag. In
1948-1949, Stalin launched the construction of new megalomaniacal projects,
including the Volga-Don Canal, new power stations, dams, and communications, among
them the Dead Road and a tunnel and railway to Sakhalin Island, both of which,
despite a horrific death-toll, proved impossible to build and were cancelled
when Stalin died in 1953.
After
Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced for many of those serving sentences
for criminal offences and almost all of those deemed to have committed “minor
offences” were released although political prisoners remained imprisoned and it
wasn’t until “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader
1953-1964) that widespread releases were ordered after almost four million
political crime cases were reviewed and in 1957, as one of a number of reforms,
the GULag was abolished and most of the camps shut down. Khrushchev himself announced that the Soviet
economy would no longer based on the slave labor of prisoners which, as a
piece of economic analysis was true but while the numbers of political
prisoners fell, they did not disappear although they tended now to be only
imprisoned for genuine opposition to the regime, dispatched most frequently to
labor camps in Mordovia or in camps clustered around the Urals. The conditions
remained grim but the death rates were tiny compared to those suffered in
Stalin’s time but what also disguised the extent of post-Stalinist repression
was than many dissidents were technically not imprisoned but instead declared
insane and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, many of which closely
resembled prisons. There, the “insane”
were often subject to cruel & unusual “medical” procedures.
The
number of people who passed through the GULag can never exactly be known but,
using archival material which became accessible after the Soviet Union was
dissolved in 1991, historians have estimated between 15-18 million were
imprisoned and the death-toll may have been almost 10%, the overwhelming
majority of whom were from Russia or the constituent republics of the USSR but
others were foreigners, mostly Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians & Frenchmen. The network of camps dotted around the USSR
consisted of almost 500 administrative centres, each running as few as dozens
or as many as hundreds of individual camps, historians having documented just under
30,000. In the West the term GULag became
widely known only after the publication in 1973 Russian of novelist Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's (1918–2008) three-volume The
Gulag Archipelago, described by the author as "An Experiment in
Literary Investigation" which he wrote between 1958-1968, using
documentary sources including legal papers, interviews, diaries, statements and
his personal experience as a GULag prisoner.
Map of the GULag camp distribution, Plain Talk magazine, 1950.
However, both the system of slavery and the word “GULag” had, during comrade Stalin’s time, been publicized in the West, remarkably accurate maps published in 1950 in the US in Plain Talk (A US anti-communist monthly magazine, 1946–1950) magazine but, despite it being the high Cold War, the revelations didn’t resonate in public consciousness as they would a generation later when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago.
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