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chapter 13
Historicising the Gulag1
Lynne Viola
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ground-breaking Gulag Archipelago, published in
English in the early 1970s, provided a generation of scholars and students
with what has become the classic depiction of Stalin’s penal labour system.
Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Gulag as a specifically Soviet phenomenon, with
its origins in the October 1917 Revolution and the very ideology of the “dictator-
ship of the proletariat.” His Gulag was an archipelago, isolated from society at
large and located in the most remote regions of the Soviet Union.2 In 2003,
Anne Applebaum published the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History,
generally following Solzhenitsyn’s periodization, thesis, and categorizations,
but with access to selected archival sources and a far broader range of
published sources.3 By that time, however, the standard understanding of the
Gulag was already, to a great extent, in the process of revision, remolding, and
expansion as Russian and foreign scholars began intensive work in the archives,
producing dissertations and monographs and publishing new memoirs and
collections of archival documents. Traditional western understandings of
the Gulag turned out to be incomplete, unintentionally biased by sources,
and full of inflated statistics. Moreover, the very brutalities of the system
along with the passions of Cold War, have meant that our understanding of
the Gulag long remained, in a very real sense, outside of history. Greater
empirical understanding and the emergence of new ways of understanding
the Soviet experience suggest that it is time to begin the process of historicis-
ing the Gulag.
What then was the Gulag? The term, GULag, was a standard administrative
acronym, standing for Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, or the
Main Administrative of Corrective Labour Camps. It came into being as an
institutional entity in 1930. The institution’s name changed slightly over the
1 I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Global Convict Labour Conference
for their many insightful comments, as well as Alan Barenberg, Seth Bernstein, Lilia
Topouzova, Anna Hajkova, and the members of the Russian History reading group at the
University of Toronto.
2 Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry
Willetts, 3 vols. (New York, 1973).
3 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003).
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years; for example, in 1933, it became the Main Administration of Camps
and Labour Settlements. Technically, GULag was simply a bureaucratic
designation.4
In the popular understanding, however, the Gulag is synonymous with
Soviet labour or correctional camps, if not the entirety of Soviet repression.
The term has been used to characterize a vast array of other repressive systems
as well, ranging from penal systems in other Communist countries to the
United States’ Guantanamo Bay. The camps were the hallmark of the Soviet
system, as presented in Solzhenitsyn and also in literary works and memoirs
written by intellectuals who had been interned in them. A popular assump-
tion, reinforced by Applebaum’s study, is that the Soviet camps resembled the
Nazi camps – in themselves not a singular unity – in discipline, order, punish-
ment, and control.
New research has broadened our definition of the Gulag to extend beyond
the classic labour camps as well as to reveal constant change and adaptation
over time. In fact, it is almost impossible to describe the system, as it was in
continual administrative flux. There were, first of all, a variety of different types
of camps. As we learn more about individual camps, it is fair to say that no two
camps were alike despite sharing rules and regimen which, at times, remained
little more than paper constructs, impossible to implement and not suitable
for local conditions. There were extremely large camps, often devoted to a par-
ticular branch of the economy (in the main, mining, forestry, construction, and
agriculture) and gigantic construction projects like the Belomor (White Sea)
Canal. The largest camps were often a kind of base camp for a series of what
could be called “satellite” camps, sometimes colonies, branching off from the
main camp. There was also a variety of special camps, including transit camps;
filtration camps (proverchno-fil’tratsionnyi lager) for checking those who were
in occupied territories during and after World War II; and the postwar special
or strict regime camps (osobye lageri, 1948–54) for the especially “politically
dangerous,” which began with a population of about 100,000 in five camps and
increased to some 221,435 prisoners in 12 camps by January 1953.5 (The action
of Solzhenitysn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for example, takes place
4 For a discussion (with documents) of the birth of GULag, see S.A. Krasil’nikov, “Rozhdenie
GULAGa: diskussii v verkhnikh eshelonakh vlasti: postanovleniia Politburo TsK vkp(b),
1929–1930,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 4 (1997).
5 Stalinskie stroiki gulaga, 1930–1953. Dokumenty (Moscow, 2005); Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga.
Konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh, 7 vols.
(Moscow, 2004), vol. 1, 85–86; vol. 2, 40–42; and Gulag, 1918–1960. Dokumenty (Moscow, 2000),
9, 135–141.
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in a special camp.) Estimates suggest that in 1942–3, there were anywhere from
55 to 65 labour camps, each with multiple subdivisions.6 No two camps were
entirely alike. The sector of the economy very much defined the lives of the
prisoners as well as the basic set-up of the camps. Individual “Gulag bosses”
could also put their personal imprint on a camp.7 And the geographic location
of a camp could determine such life and death issues as food and medical
supplies, the quality and quantity of camp personnel, and relations with what
Solzhenityn would have called the “mainland” – Moscow, the centre.
In addition to this variety of camps, there were also different types of labour
colonies, a topic we know far less about. There were colonies that served as
labour offshoots from the main camps, colonies that housed minors, and spe-
cialized colonies for invalids (from among already interned populations).
Estimates for 1940 indicate that there were 425 such labour colonies, with a
population of about 315,000 people.8 There was also the “other archipelago,”
the special settlements, sometimes called labour settlements, as many as 2,000
of them, which formed an entirely different world within the Gulag. The spe-
cial settlements arose in 1930 and fell under the jurisdiction of GULag in
mid-1931. These settlements accounted for roughly half of the forced labour
population of the Gulag; in the first half of the 1930s, their population exceeded
that of the camps. Until the (partial) opening of Soviet archives, relatively little
was known about these settlements – generally small, remote pinpoints on
maps with populations consisting of entire families, who were set down and
told to build homes, plant crops (when possible) for self-sufficiency, and avail
themselves to nearby industries (timber, mining, fishing, etc.) in need of labour.
New Soviet archival sources and a flood of first-hand reports from former
special/labour settlers and their children have served to open up this other
archipelago that lived in the shadow of the labour camps.
The settlements were populated in waves. First came the “kulaks” – the
oxymoronic peasant capitalists – close to 2 million people, who were
deported during the collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the resulting
6 Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v sssr. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1998), 48.
7 For the impressions of one “Gulag boss,” see Deborah Kaple, ed. and trans, Gulag Boss:
A Soviet Memoir (New York, 2011).
8 Arch Getty, Gabor 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, 98:4 (Oct. 1993), 1019–1020. The authors suggest that most prisoners of labour colo-
nies had short sentences (under three years). The authors also note the presence of “a system
of non-custodial ‘corrective work’, which included various penalties and fines… [and] consti-
tuted 48 percent of all court sentences in 1935,” generally of one year and less.
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famine.9 Then there was a variety of suspect populations, mainly social
marginals from the cities, deported to the settlements in the mid-1930s,
followed by the large deportations of “ethnic” contingents – first diasporic bor-
der populations, then the “socially dangerous” of newly occupied countries on
the eve, during, and after wwii along with the “dangerous nations” from within
the Soviet Union which were deported in their entirety.10 In a far from exhaus-
tive list, there was also the institution of the sharashka which exploited the
intellectual and scientific knowledge of specialized prisoners. (Solzhenitsyn’s
novel, The First Circle, is set in a sharashka.) Given the secrecy of the projects
worked on in these settings, very little information has emerged for their
specialized study.
The Gulag was a far more varied creature than a simple labour camp – not
that a labour camp is at all simple. It was never a static institution, but rather
evolved with the times. Its population reflected the history of the ussr as it
passed through collectivization, the Great Terror of 1937–38 with its notorious
mass operations, paranoid border cleansings, and social purges of occupied
countries. The lowpoint in the lives of its inmates was surely reached during
the worst of the war, when the Gulag was the last on the hierarchy of food
supply and received its staff from the detritus of the unconscriptable reserve
secret police cadres. It never had much of a highpoint except for the size of its
population. The highpoint was reached in the early 1950s when some 5 million
people inhabited the various islands of the Gulag.
Along with the many faces of Soviet penality, there was also what the Oxford
scholar Judith Pallot has called a “geography of penality.”11 Although a map of
the Gulag – –
will show that many, if not most camps were located in and around cities, the
Gulag in almost all of its manifestations tackled an enduring problem of
Russian history – how to extract vital natural resources from remote, climati-
cally hostile regions where it was impossible to maintain a “free” labour force.
Soviet leaders consciously sought to solve this problem with the use of forced
9 Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York,
2007); Politbiuro i krest’ianstvo: Vysylka, spetsposelenie, 1930–1940. Dokumenty, 2 vols.
(Moscow, 2005–6); and V.P. Danilov and S.A. Krasil’nikov, eds., Spetspereselentsy
v Zapadnoi Sibiri, 4 vols. (Novosibirsk, 1992–96).
10 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 1, 257–262; Stalinskie deportatsii, 1928–1953. Dokumenty
(Moscow, 2005). The best general study of Soviet forced migrations is Pavel Polian, Against
Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the ussr (Budapest, 2004).
11 Judith Pallot, “Forced Labour for Forestry: The Twentieth Century History of Colonization
and Settlement in the North of Perm’ Oblast’,” Europe-Asia Studies, 54:6 (2002).
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labour. As early as 1923, Felix (Iron) Dzerzhinskii, the renowned first leader of
the Cheka (the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police) and, at this time,
the head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, insisted:
We will have to organize forced labour (penal servitude) at camps for
colonizing underdeveloped areas that will be run with iron discipline.
We have sufficient locations and space…the republic cannot be merciful
to criminals and cannot waste resources on them; they must cover the
costs associated with their care with their own labour.12
Self-sufficiency would be an enduring principle of the Gulag; it would also be
an enduringly faulty principle.
In 1928, Commissar of Justice, Nikolai Ianson, reiterated Dzerzhinskii’s
ideas in a proposal to use penal labour in the great northern forests to boost the
hard currency-earning timber export industry. His recommendations seemed
eminently practical given the unreliability of seasonal (free) peasant labour not
to mention general prison overcrowding in what had become a very costly
institution to maintain. Furthermore, forced labour had already been employed
in gold mining in 1927 in what was deemed a successful endeavor. Ianson made
his suggestions amid a fierce, ongoing battle for control of the penal population
waged among his commissariat, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and the
ogpu (Ob’edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, the Unified
State Political Administration or secret police). Ianson – and others – saw a
new type of penal labour camp as a solution to a variety of problems, ranging
from prison overcrowding and reform to colonization and economic develop-
ment.13 Needless to say, this thinking was based on ideological presumptions
that there were dangerous class enemies lurking within a Soviet Union,
surrounded by a capitalist encirclement that inevitably would lead to war.
The introduction of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 pushed the issue of
penal labour to the top of the agenda for Soviet planners. De facto ogpu chief
Genrikh Iagoda spearheaded these initiatives. In April 1929, the commissariats
of justice and internal affairs and the ogpu submitted a joint report calling
for the creation of a network of self-supporting labour camps based on labour
service rather than just isolation. The report’s authors recommended that all
prisoners serving sentences of three or more years should be transferred to
such camps. One month later, the Politburo endorsed most of the report’s
12 Galina Mikhailovna Ivanovna, Lamp Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian
System, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, ny, 2000), 186.
13 Viola, Unknown Gulag, 58–59.
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conclusions and, in late June 1929, issued a foundational decree calling for the
expansion of the existing camp system, the creation of additional facilities,
and the transfer of all prisoners serving more than three years to the ogpu in
order to help the secret police with its plans to colonize and exploit far north-
ern and eastern territories. The ogpu bested its institutional rivals and took
control of what would soon become a rapidly expanding penal population and
forced labour system. The next year witnessed the formal birth of the GULag
under the jurisdiction of ogpu.14
On 11 January 1930, Iagoda queried his subordinates in the ogpu as to the
feasibility of organising special settlements where the now-to-be-deported
kulaks and their families could work without guards. Three months later, as the
kulaks were being shipped in cattle cars to the hinterlands of the Soviet Union,
he wrote a memorandum that discussed the “transform[ation of] the camps
into a new arrangement.” He elaborated on this point at length, noting:
Now the camps are only holding pens for prisoners whose labour we use
only for today… We need to turn the camps into colonization villages with-
out any expectation of a set period of imprisonment. The philanthropic
stimulus of shortening sentences for good behavior is not only unsuit-
able, but even harmful. It (this stimulus) gives the false impression of the
“correction” of prisoners, a hypocritical kind of penance necessary to
bourgeois society but not to us… We need to colonize the north in the
fastest of tempos… We need to do this: we will give groups (1,500 people)
of selected prisoners in various regions lumber and have them build huts
where they will be able to live. Those who wish can send for their fami-
lies. A commandant will manage [the settlements]. The settlements will
have from 200 to 300 families. In their free time, when forestry work is
complete, they, especially the weaker ones, can raise pigs, mow hay, catch
fish. In the beginning, they will live on rations, later [they will live] on
their own account… In the winter the entire population will go to forestry
work or other work that we assign… [And] instead of the 10–15 people
who guard now the thousands [of prisoners], there will be one comman-
dant… We must do this now, immediately.15
Iagoda’s inspiration derived from the ongoing experience of dekulakization –
the liquidation of the kulaks as a class which accompanied Soviet collectiviza-
tion. In 1930 and 1931 alone, close to 2 million so-called kulaks would be subject
14 See Krasil’nikov, “Rozhdenie,” for a detailed chronology.
15 A.N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi gulag: Dokumenty i fakty (Moscow, 1999), 8–9.
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to (internal) forced deportation. The plans of the 1920s had not envisioned
this sudden large population of enemies – or at least the archives offer up no
evidence of foresight. Collectivization was therefore fortuitous, serendipitous,
in providing the Gulag with its first mass population. Suddenly hundreds of
thousands of peasant families were pouring into the most remote areas of the
country. The entire process developed very much “on the fly” – na khodu, as
regional officials complained – with plans (and Iagoda’s grand inspiration)
developing literally as the kulaks were arriving in the frozen tundra to build the
special settlements. The mortality rate in the Northern Territories alone in 1930
was “not less than 15 percent,”16 a percentage that surpassed the state’s “planned
loss” of 5 percent of special settlers as an acceptable loss.17
Regional Communist Party chiefs reacted in a variety of ways to this sudden
influx of labour. Some, like Bergavinov in the Northern Territories, were enthu-
siastic supporters of penal labour, viewing the kulaks as the “fulcrum” which
would provide a steady and permanent supply of labour to colonize the North
and work in the important forestry industries. Others were initially more skep-
tical, reasonably wondering how to keep such a large influx of families alive
long enough to exploit their labour. Eventually, however, it became routine for
party chiefs and industry bosses alike to request penal labour in the same way
that they would request any other resource in the planning process.18
By 1935, the nkvd (ogpu’s successor, Narodnyi komisssariat vnutrennykh
del, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs ussr) listed its primary exile
zones as West and East Siberia, Central Asia, the European North, and the
Urals.19 These were all remote areas with vital natural resources necessary for
Stalin’s vast industrialization effort. On the eve of the Great Terror, in 1937, the
Politburo ordered the Forestry Commissariat to transfer entire land tracts and
forests to GULag for the organization of new work camps.20
In addition to the vital supply of raw materials for rapid industrialization,
the “geography of penality” contributed to the colonization of the hinterlands
by forced labour, as networks of roads, canals, bridges, and towns multiplied.
The colonization of these vast land masses was a monumental undertaking
that addressed the perennial need of tsars and commissars alike – getting the
16 rgaspi (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii), f. 17, op. 120,
d. 52, l. 119.
17 Danilov and Krasil’nikov, Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri, vol. 3, 10.
18 Viola, Unknown Gulag, 60–61.
19 David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet
Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, ct, 2009), 253–254.
20 V.P. Danilov. R.T. Manning, and L. Viola, eds., Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i
raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy. 1927–1939., 5 vols. (Moscow, 1999–2006), vol. 5,
kniga 1, 328–329. Also see ibid., 337.
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labour resources to remote areas to extract raw materials, and keeping them
there. The works of Judith Pallot and Alan Barenberg have documented how
towns and cities, with free populations and released prisoners forbidden to
return to their homes, developed in symbiosis with the Gulag, depending on its
economy for work and survival.21
The Gulag was an economic giant. By the end of the 1930s, the GULag
administered a vast economic empire that accounted for up to 15% of capital
investments nationally and dominated the production of gold, diamond,
nickel, and tin. After the war, the Ministry of Internal Affairs – nkvd’s succes-
sor institution – became the largest construction industry.22 Intentions, how-
ever, were far grander than results. Although Gulag labour often successfully
fulfilled a stop gap measure, it was not in the end an efficient work force. Oleg
Khlevniuk and others have documented well the economic inefficiencies and
wastefulness of the Gulag, factors of central importance when secret police
chief L.P. Beria attempted to reform the Gulag after the death of Stalin.23
The geography of penality and to some extent its economy then suggests
a Gulag, which was, to use Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, an archipelago, remote,
isolated and a world apart. But was it? Although Solzhenitsyn is mostly correct,
his metaphor more accurately fits many of the large and remote labour camps,
special settlements, and postwar special regime camps. A glance at a map of
the Gulag reveals the high concentration of camps around towns and cities.
These camps served as conduits of forced labour or as special service camps of
various kinds. At the same time, camps in remote areas were sometimes less
isolated than expected. Most special/labour settlements were intended to be
distant from other settled population points; in fact, some came to rely on
near-by villages or on local indigenous inhabitants. Labour camps often led to
burgeoning populations and urbanization, as towns and cities grew in direct
21 Pallot, “Forced Labour,” and Alan Barenberg, “From Prisoners to Miners: The Gulag and Its
Legacy in Vorkuta,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007. Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town,
Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven and London, CT, 2014)
came out while this book was in production. See also the important and highly original
work of Nick Baron, Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning, and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–
1939 (New York, 2007); idem, “Conflict and Complicity: The Expansion of the Karelian
Gulag, 1923–33,” Cahiers du monde russe, 42:2–4 (2001); idem, “Production and Terror: The
Operation of the Karelian Gulag, 1933–39,” Cahiers du monde russe, 43:1 (2002); and idem,
“Stalinist Planning as Political Practice: Control and Repression on the Soviet Periphery,
1935–38,” Europe-Asia Studies, 56:3 (2004).
22 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 1, 50; vol. 3, 44.
23 See the essays by Oleg Khlevniuk (“The Economy of the ogpu, nkvd, and mvd of the ussr,
1930–1953: The Scale, Structure, and Trends of Development”) and others in Paul R. Gregory
and Valery Lazarev, eds., The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, 2003).
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symbiosis with the camps. Alan Barenberg’s work on Vorkuta demonstrates
this symbiosis well. He shows how released prisoners stayed on to work as
“free” labour at Vorkuta when they found that they could not return home after
serving their sentences or found that they had no where to go.24 Former pris-
oners also made up a significant percentage of “free” Gulag workers. In 1937,
40% of free workers in the camps were said to be former prisoners.25 Some
camps became “company towns” or family enterprises, with Gulag employees
extending over several generations and consisting of networks of relatives.
Judith Pallot has written about family day holidays, songs, and museums show-
ing Gulag staff lineage in contemporary penal settings.26
The various institutions of the Gulag were not closed systems. The borders
of both special/labour settlements and labour camps were extremely porous.
Wilson Bell has documented extensive interactions between prisoners and the
free population in his descriptions of the phenomenon of unconvoyed labour.
Unconvoyed labour, in principle not to include prisoners charged with “coun-
terrevolutionary” crimes, were allowed to leave the camp for work outside the
zone. Some prisoners kept homes, lovers, and black market businesses on
the outside.27 The Gulag also experienced massive escapes. Peasant escapes
from the special settlements reached a highpoint of 215,856 in 1932, but
remained in five digit figures in seven out of nine years between 1932 and
1940.28 Escapes from labour camps were also high through most of the 1930s,
though slowing from 1939 and into the 1940s. In 1934, 83,490 inmates fled the
camps, in 1935, 67,493, in 1936, 58,313, in 1937, 58,264, in 1938, 32,033, in 1939,
12,333, and in 1940, 11,813.29 The fate of escapees was varied. Most fled into the
more anonymous cities or joined “bands” in the interior; some were caught
and re-interned; many died.
The porous nature of the Gulag extended to the legal status of its popula-
tion. Much of our earliest knowledge of the Gulag population came from liter-
ary and memoir sources.30 Varlam Shalamov penned classic fictional portraits
24 Barenberg, “From Prisoners to Miners.”
25 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 2, 34, 44–48.
26 Judith Pallot, Laura Piacentini, and Dominique Moran, “Patriotic Discourses in Russia’s
Penal Peripheries: Remembering the Mordovan Gulag,” Europe-Asia Studies, 62:1
(Jan. 2010).
27 Wilson Bell, “The Gulag and Soviet Society in Western Siberia, 1929–1953,” PhD diss.,
University of Toronto, 2011.
28 garf (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii), f. 9479, op. 1, d. 89, l. 217. Doubtless,
these statistics include multiple escape attempts.
29 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 4, 111.
30 For an excellent introduction to this work, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago:
Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington, 2000).
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of the Gulag and its inhabitants.31 Eugeniia Ginzburg wrote what may be the
quintessential camp memoir in her Journey into the Whirlwind.32 This vast and
extremely valuable literature captures best the world of the intellectuals who
wrote it and who, along with members of the Communist Party, in fact, made
up no more than a minority of the Gulag’s population. Stark binaries between
“political” prisoners and “real criminals” are highlighted as are binaries
between victims and victimizers. And indeed there is little question that such
binaries were very real in the lives of these victims.
Yet, it is now apparent that the sentences prisoners held did not always
convey political or criminal status. The designation of a “counterrevolution-
ary” crime could be subjective at best. Moreover, thousands of peasants were
charged with theft for stealing a handful of grain. White-collar crime was wide-
spread. Neither of these categories fits traditional images.33 It is now clear that
the majority of the Gulag population was from the peasantry, not from mem-
bers of the intelligentsia or the Communist Party. It was a Gulag of peasantries.
It was also a Gulag of nationalities as wave after wave of “ethnic” contingents
entered the camps and settlements through the 1930s and 1940s.
There was a huge gray area around the victim-victimizer binary. Victims
could be the worse possible victimizers in the case of the petty and more seri-
ous criminals who virtually ruled the camps at times. Highly qualified, skilled
prisoners could take on positions as specialists, rate setters, doctors, and
nurses, placing themselves in a very gray area. And although their positions are
indeed incommensurate, Gulag staff and especially the conscripted VOKhR
guards (Voenizirovannaia okhrana, or armed guards, mobilized mainly from
army reserves) often lived similarly hungry, cold, and isolated lives. Moreover,
former secret police and Gulag officials could also find themselves suddenly on
the other side of (the largely absent) barbed wire according to the whims of
Stalinist policy.
Demographic data on the settlements and camps became available in the
early 1990s. Family units (or the surviving remnants thereof) predominated
in the special and labour settlements, often without the head of household
who was consigned to the camps. Children made up roughly one-third of the
special and labour settlement population, and much of the burden of labour
31 Varlam Shalmov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York, 1994).
32 Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and
Max Hayward (New York, 1967). The sequel in English is Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian
Boland (New York, 1981).
33 See Table 7 in Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the
Pre-War Years,” 1031, for the array of crimes committed by Gulag inhabitants.
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was placed on women and young people.34 In the camps, the majority of
inhabitants were men, mostly between the ages of 25 and 40. In 1940, for exam-
ple, 9.6% of the camp population was between the ages of 19 to 24; 34.8%, 25
to 30; 30% 31 to 40, 16.7% 40 to 50. In the same year, women made up 8.1% of
the camp population; by 1945, however, their weight in the camp population
reached 24%, no doubt as a result of war time mobilizations of male penal
labour.35
The inhabitants of the Gulag were administered by a staff of over 300,000.
In 1946, the total complement of Gulag workers was 330,438 people, with
only 295,124 of these positions actually filled, leaving over 10% of jobs vacant.
Roughly 100,000 of this number were VOKhR guards (the majority of whom
were not members of the Communist Party). The percentage of women among
staff was very small, except for the war years, during which women and older
reserve nkvd cadres worked the Gulag. As of February 1949, from a total
of 337,474 staff positions, still only 276,661 were filled.36 nkvd was never
able to fully staff the Gulag. In general, the consequence of this was that the
cadres sent were the worst of the worst. Most were poorly educated and few
were party members. The Gulag therefore had to depend on prisoners to
staff some specialist jobs and also to work as guards. Beria attempted to end
this practice. On 1 Jan. 1939, 25,000 prisoners worked as guards; by 1 Sept. 1940,
only 2,650 did.37
The forced workers of the Gulag, in camps and special/labour settlements
alike, suffered more from sheer neglect and negligence than from strict regimes
and harsh oversight. Although the literature has often compared Soviet and
Nazi concentration camps, the comparison is facile given the many different
types of camps and penal institutions in both systems. In the case of the Soviet
penal system, living and working conditions varied widely as did the degree
of control and regimentation. The special/labour settlements generally had a
komandant in charge (though sometimes one komandant served several
settlements), but nothing more in the way of guards or barbed wires. The
camps varied widely depending upon whether a camp was strict regime.
Smaller, remote subcamps were often virtually autonomous, cut off for months
at a time in winter or during the spring thaw and left unstaffed because of
cadres shortages. Barbed wire and high intensity lighting were deficit items.
34 Viola, Unknown Gulag, Chap. 5.
35 Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War
Years,” 1025, 1028.
36 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 4, 257–258, 163–164, 277–284; vol. 2, 355–358.
37 Istoriia Stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 2, 34, 44–48.
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The metropole was known for its almost aesthetic planning – detailed and
impossible to fulfill. The periphery was known for its singular inability to fulfill
Moscow’s plans – whether due to sheer (usually material) inability, corruption,
or unwillingness. There was a massive disconnect between policy and policy
implementation, inevitably at the price of prisoners’ health, safety, and lives.38
After the war, when the camps filled with pows and insurgents from the
border areas, it became more difficult to govern them. A series of major revolts
broke out just after the death of Stalin, which served, along with the economic
problems of the Gulag, to prod the state toward reform in the post-Stalin
years.39 As the Gulag’s population declined and the institution disappeared
(as a bureaucracy), Moscow was forced to find other incentives, largely
economic or patriotic, to maintain labour in the land of the Gulag. When the
Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, some of the old Gulag towns and cities
were hit hard economically, with the centre unable and increasingly unwilling
to supply them.40 Only the oil boom of later years has succeeded in bringing
back to life the Gulag hinterlands.
Attempts to historicize the Gulag were long hindered by the politics of Cold
War and the entirely legitimate emotions surrounding the tragedies of Stalin’s
years in power. For Soviet scholars, the topic was simply taboo. Most western
scholars followed Solzhenitsyn’s lead, attributing the Gulag to the repressive
nature of the Communist regime and/or to the criminal and/or pathological
nature of Stalin. There is no doubt that these factors played a key role in the
dynamics of repression and the use of forced labour in Soviet development.
At the same time, the post-Soviet emergence of what some are calling
“Gulag studies” emphasizes the complexities and contradictions of the Gulag.
Monocausal explanations of the Gulag are no longer feasible or indeed partic-
ularly helpful.
Archival research has deeply enriched our empirical understanding of the
Gulag, leading to debates about the respective roles in the Gulag of politics,
38 For information on conditions in the special settlements, see Viola, Unknown Gulag.
For conditions in subcamps, see Kaple, Gulag Boss.
39 For information on the rebellions, see Barenberg, “From Prisoners to Miners;” Steven
A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton,
2011), Chapter 6; idem, “In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens: An Uprising in the Post-
Stalin Gulag,” Slavic Review, 64:4 (2005); and Andrea Graziosi, “The Great Strikes of 1953 in
Soviet Labor Camps in the Accounts of their Participants: A Review,” Cahier du monde
russe et sovietique, 33:4 (1992). On the economic problems of the Gulag, see Gregory and
Lazarev, eds., The Economics of Forced Labor, Chap. 4.
40 See Viola, Unknown Gulag, 192–193.
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economics, and ideology. The work of Oleg Khlevniuk, the dean of Russian
historians, tends to stress a top-down view of the Gulag based on the centrality
of politics. In brief, Khlevniuk understands Stalinist repression as a paranoid
response to the international situation. Stalin’s “solution” was to arrest, kill, or
intern all potential soldiers of a much-dreaded “5th column.” Khlevniuk down-
plays economic factors, documenting the highly inefficient nature of forced
labour, the absurdity of much of the planning, and the limited economic con-
tributions compared to the costs of the Gulag.41 Other scholars look less at
results and more at intentions, concluding that the Gulag was a key actor in the
Soviet economy under Stalin. The work of Galina Ivanova, Paul Gregory,
and others has focused very closely and in great detail on the economy of the
Gulag. In these works, we see how the ogpu/nkvd became an economic
empire within the empire based on its control of enormous resources of forced
labour.42 It should be noted, however, that neither Khlevniuk nor the econo-
mists would argue in monocausal terms.
Ideology remains a key factor of analysis in recent Gulag studies. While
post-Soviet historians have emphasized the “totalitarian” nature of the Gulag
and, more recently, its contribution to victory in wwii, some western scholars,
influenced by the modernity school of the 1990s, have stressed the redemptive
and transformational nature of Soviet ideology in and out of the Gulag. Stephen
Barnes, for example, has written about the Karaganda camp system. His basic
thesis is that the Gulag was a tool of modernity aimed at the removal from
Soviet society of “unhealthy elements” and their remolding within the Gulag.
Barnes, however, never mistakes intention for reality. Based on groundbreak-
ing research, his work amply demonstrates the punitive and repressive nature
of forced labour and, again, does not rely on a monocausal understanding.43
Other works, including my own, have joined questions of colonization,
expansion, and resource extraction to the repressive politics of the Stalin
regime. Local studies by Pallot, Baron, and Barenberg have demonstrated
the role the Gulag played in the Soviet colonization of the hinterlands.
My own work places resource extraction – of grain, natural resources, and
41 See Oleg Khlevniuk, “The Economy of the ogpu, nkvd, and mvd of the ussr, 1930–1953,”
in Gregory and Lazarev, eds., The Economy of Forced Labor, 43–66; idem., “The Economy of
the Gulag,” in Paul R. Gregory, ed., Behind the Facade of Stalin’s Command Economy
(Stanford, 2001), 111–130; and idem., The History of the Gulag from Collectivization to the
Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven, 2004).
42 Ivanovna, Labor Camp Socialism; Gregory, ed., Behind the Facade; idem., The Political
Economy of Stalinism (Cambridge, 2004).
43 Barnes, Death and Redemption.
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labour power – at the centre of attention in Stalin’s quest for economic autar-
chy in the context of the worsening international situation of the 1930s. These
works do not lose sight of politics, but seek to show the role of the Gulag in
Soviet development.44
Equally important are the ways in which our understanding of periodiza-
tion has changed, thus historicising and contextualising important aspects
of Gulag development. Solzhenitsyn, of course, looked to Lenin and the very
revolution of October 1917 to situate the origins of the Gulag. Khlevniuk stresses
the distinctiveness of the Stalin-era gulag, mainly in terms of scope and
power.45 Although we will likely always debate whether the Gulag began with
Lenin or with Stalin, that debate is perhaps less interesting than other nuances
in the periodization.
It is now clear, for example, that the dual policies of collectivization and the
liquidation of the kulaks as a class were central to the formation of the Stalinist
Gulag, its contours and growth. The repressed kulaks formed a ready-made
population for the Gulag. The heads of the families labeled as the most danger-
ous kulaks were sent directly into labour camps. Their families and the families
of “less dangerous” kulaks were sent into the special settlements. The popula-
tion of these settlements surpassed that of the labour camps through the early
to mid-1930s. There was no blueprint for this massive phase in the develop-
ment of the Gulag. Studies of dekulakization and the peasant deportations
have demonstrated the extent to which the Gulag developed on the fly, thus
putting the lie to conceptions of an all-controlling state and ideological fore-
sight. This fact demonstrates how essential it is to contextualize the history of
the Gulag within the general fabric of Soviet history.46
Recent work by Paul Hagenloh and David Shearer continues in this vein,
highlighting the importance of social policing and the urban purges of the
early and mid-1930s. Their work shows how the process of police categoriza-
tion, the repression of marginals and those considered socially dangerous, and
the use of arrest and exile would eventually feed directly into the mass opera-
tions of the Great Terror. Their work illuminates the massive social disorder
caused by the First Five-Year Plan and collectivization and how important
questions of law and order were to the Stalinist regime, thus again highlighting
the significance of context.47
44 See the works cited above by Baron, Barenberg, Pallot, and Viola.
45 Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, Chap. 8; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 1.
46 Viola, Unknown Gulag.
47 Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism; and Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and
Mass Repression in the ussr, 1926–1941 (Baltimore, 2009).
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It is also clear that the Gulag developed within the fabric of Soviet history,
reflecting its development at key periods of time. Policy eruptions like deku-
lakization and the Great Terror manifested themselves in extreme disorganiza-
tion in the Gulag. The war served as the absolute low point in the life of Gulag
inhabitants, mortality rates, and sheer misery. Rebellion and reform within
the Gulag were also closely tied to what was happening “on the mainland,”
especially the uncertainty following Stalin’s death.48
The evolution of new ways of periodising the Gulag, then, is important to
our understanding of the larger symbiotic relation between the Gulag and the
evolution of the Stalinist dictatorship and economy, thus offering the begin-
nings of an historicization of the Gulag. However, to truly begin to historicize
the Gulag, it is necessary to explore other, macrohistorical factors at work in
those times.
In the 1990s, a series of young historians began the work of historicising the
Soviet experience within the context of modernity studies. Their approach was
comparative (European) and strongly influenced by postmodernist trends in
the general historiography. In particular, the work of Zygmunt Bauman on the
“gardening state” played a central role in largely theoretical rather than empiri-
cal efforts to understand Soviet repression.49 Stephen Kotkin, Amir Weiner,
Peter Holquist, and David Hoffman, among others, sought to contextualize
Soviet policies, including repression, within a theory of “progressive moder-
nity,” whereby the Soviet state sought to create an enlightenment utopia based
on socialist desiderata.50 In this respect, the Soviet state acted similarly to
other modern states in its use of social engineering to create a more “healthy”
and homogenous society. The Gulag then served to remove from society the
48 See, e.g., Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the
Archives (New York, 1994); and Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag
Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009).
49 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989).
50 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); idem,
“Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar conjuncture,” Kritika, 2:1 (2001); Amir
Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management
in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003); idem, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a
Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,”
American Historical Review, 104:4 (1999); Peter Holquist, “To Count, To Extract, To
Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet
Russia,” in Terry Martin and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and
Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001); David Hoffmann, Stalinist
Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003); idem, Cultivating
the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, 2011).
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socially or politically impure and, in some cases, to remold and remake certain
categories of prisoners through labour.
This work was an important first step in broadening our contextual under-
standing of Soviet history and Soviet repression. Modernity theory presented
an argument against the more traditional notion of the Soviet Union as some-
how sui generis. One might ask, however, whether a specifically European
modernity was the best model for the multi-ethnic and agrarian Soviet Union.
One might also ask just how modern the Gulag was. Although its scale and
ambition were most certainly of the twentieth century, its actual everyday
functioning and appearance were anything but modern in the European
sense.51 Moreover, the modernity theorists largely neglect the forced labour
aspect of Soviet repression, instead highlighting its political and supposedly
redemptive features.52 Finally, the very ideology of the Soviet state suggests a
very different type or at least ideal of modernity from that of the capitalist
west.
What the Soviet Union did have in common with European modernity
was the centrality of resources in its expansion and the need for colonies.
The Soviet Union was an extraction state; its colonies (prewar) were entirely
internal. In lieu of overseas colonies, the Stalinist state extended its reach into
the Soviet hinterlands with a combination of voluntary and involuntary migra-
tions. It also exploited its own peasantry as an internal resource for the supply
of grain, taxes, labour power, and soldiers, bringing its particular “civilising
mission” to the peasantry in the form of the collective farm and a communist
ideology that was anathema to the peasantry. Yet this “modern” extraction
state grew out of key structural problems long inherent to the Russian empire.
However much a monstrosity the Gulag was, an aberration in its scope and
radicalism, it nevertheless shared its basic desiderata with the Tsarist state.53
The Soviet state confronted many of the same structural, geographical, and
developmental constraints that the tsars had faced. The history of the
Muscovite and Imperial periods is very much a history of state building from
the centre outward. The Muscovite princes “gathered” the lands (and the
revenues); the tsars extended their reign in an almost continuous process of
geographical expansion and (often failed) administrative reform. State build-
ing emanated from the centre; power was centrifugal. The absence of natural
51 See, e.g., Lynne Viola, “The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special
Villages,” Kritika, 4:1 (2003).
52 Barnes, Death and Redemption, is a notable exception.
53 This argument is developed more fully in my essay, “Stalin’s Empire,” in Tim Snyder and
Ray Brandon, ed., Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (New York, 2014).
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geographical boundaries and the need to maintain a strong military pushed
state building and expansion. Newly acquired territories were peopled by a
continuous process of migration and colonization, voluntary and involuntary,
while borders were shored up by the strategic placement of service gentry in
those territories through land grants.54 In the Imperial period, state building
and expansion in Russia often evolved in response to the West, meaning
England, France, Austria, and Prussia. Russia was continually playing catch up
with its economy in order to compete with western Europe on the world stage.
The state was the main player in economic modernization during the
periods of greatest momentum. Economic development in turn bolstered
state building as the state strengthened its administrative and military power
in conjunction with economic progress. Economic development also encour-
aged expansion as the state sought outlets to ports and access to natural
resources, which then encouraged more colonization in the wake of expan-
sion. State building, economic modernization, and expansion depended upon
the extreme centralization of resources. The Russian state became an extrac-
tion state, dependent upon the countryside and the villages for revenue, a
condition compounded by the slow development of urbanization and the
country’s largely agrarian economy. Both the state and towns developed in an
exploitative symbiosis with the countryside, which found itself in an increas-
ingly subordinate economic position. Taxes, grain, labour, and soldiers were
siphoned from the countryside as the Russian state developed.
Soviet planners, once in power, also faced the daunting task of developing a
backward economy in their efforts to restore Russia’s place on the world stage.
They too combined extreme centralization with the mobilization of all
resources, human and material, to develop the nation’s economy. They too
viewed the peasant as “other.” They too desired to tap the rich natural resources
of Russia’s far east and north for industrialization. The problem was of course
that Russia’s most important mineral and natural resources were located in
geographically and climatically hostile areas that lacked even the most ele-
mentary infrastructure to maintain a labour force.55 Attracting a permanent
labour force to these areas had been a perennial problem for the Russian
Imperial government. Since the time of Peter the Great, the state had used
54 For a recent study, see Willard Sutherland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on
the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004). Also see Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist
Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge, 1999).
55 This is not to say that there were no indigenous people living in these areas; Moscow,
however, generally discounted them as “backward” or “hostile” and, in the case of nomadic
people and hunters, not suitable material for labour exploitation.
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colonization, administrative exile, and serf or penal labour to try to solve the
labour shortage in these areas, as well as to rid the community of socially unde-
sirable elements. The Russian empire’s penal system was always based on
forced labour and internal exile; under both tsars and Soviets alike, only a
small minority of convicts were held in prisons.56 Unsurprisingly, the new
rulers of Russia fell back in part on the methods and examples of their
predecessors.
The goal of the First Five Year Plan was to create an autarkic economic
system. Under that plan, the development of new industries would take place
deep in the Soviet Union’s interior, far from the borders and any threat of inva-
sion. Although not solely in charge, the ogpu led the way in developing and
colonising the far north and east, in addition to “cleansing” the borderlands
of suspect class and national elements. Paramount to meeting the demands of
extraction was the mobilization of human resources to those regions that were
to be developed. Industrial development went hand-in-hand with territorial
colonization.
The peasantry served as the fulcrum of modernization in what was one of
the most radical transformations of modern history. It remained an internal
resource for labour and capital (via grain) to fuel Soviet development through-
out the Stalin era, if not the Soviet epoch as a whole. Stalin said as much in
1928, when he called for the peasantry to pay a “tribute” to finance Soviet
industrialization, equating the peasant with the overseas colonies he claimed
financed British economic development.57 And the Gulag was very much a
peasant Gulag.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union developed as a fortress state. The ideological
tenet of inevitable war with the capitalist world and Stalin’s own tyrannical
inclinations combined with a state of internal war during collectivization
and dekulakization to feed the terror and to fill the Gulag with a continuous
flow of victims. The Gulag was conceived as a defensive empire, based mainly
56 For more information, see Abby M. Schrader, “Branding the Exiles ‘Other’: Corporal
Punishment and the Construction of Boundaries in mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in
David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity (London, 2000), 24–25;
and Richard Hellie, “Migration in Early Modern Russia, 1480s–1780s,” in David Eltis, ed.,
Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, 2002), 292–323. The most
important work on the prerevolutionary exile and forced labour system is Andrew
A. Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822 (New York, 2008); and idem, Exile, Murder and
Madness in Siberia, 1823–61 (New York, 2010).
57 Lynne Viola, V.P. Danilov, N.A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov, et al., eds., The War against the
Peasantry, trans. Steven Shabad (New Haven, 2005), 98–99.
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on forced internal colonization and the use of penal labour. Terror was a cud-
gel for reestablishing order, a substitute for administration (especially in rural
areas), an instrument for the mobilization of labour and resources for industry,
and a tool of colonization. Through the Gulag, the ogpu, and later the nkvd,
emerged as an economic empire with control of vast resources, capital, and
labour. Its personnel expanded dramatically, and it began its rise as a state
within the state, responsible to Stalin alone.
The Gulag then must be grounded in an understanding of its particular and
its universal features. In its scale and political ambition, it was both modern
and Soviet. At the same time, it was firmly rooted in Russian historical soil.
Both before and after the revolution, the institutions of exile and forced labour
served as the primary forms of penality as well as a mechanism for ridding
society of socially and politically undesirable elements. Penal labour served as
an important fulcrum of economic development. In the context of the twenti-
eth century, the Gulag served the purposes of Stalin’s developing extraction
state as it evolved in tandem with other European states and their struggles for
resources. It is essential to note, however, that historicization is not the same as
“normalization.” There was nothing “normal” about the Gulag. Historicization
is a tool of understanding. It does not change the fact that the Gulag will always
remain synonymous with the worst violence of the Stalin era.
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