View source for Gulag

{{Short description|Soviet forced penal labour camp system}}
{{other uses}}
{{distinguish|Kulak|Gelug}}
{{use American English|date=December 2019}}
{{use mdy dates|date=May 2016}}
{{Infobox
| title            = Gulag
| image            = [[File:GULAG Logo.svg|100px]]<br />{{center|Trademark logo (1939) for products manufactured in the Gulag camps}}{{parabr}}[[File:Gulag Location Map.svg|220px]]<br />{{center|Map of the camps between 1923 and 1961{{Efn|Based on data from [[Memorial (society)|Memorial]], a [[Human rights group|human-rights group]].}}}}<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Gulag montage.jpg|320px]] -->
| datastyle        = text-align:left
| data2            = * 18,000,000 people passed through the Gulag's camps<ref name="Healey"/><ref name="Wheatcroft1999">{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G.|year=1999|title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf|journal=[[Europe-Asia Studies]]|volume=51|issue=2|page=320|doi=10.1080/09668139999056}}</ref><ref name="Rosefielde7677"/>
* 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union as of March 1940<ref name="GRZ">{{cite journal|author1=Getty, Arch |author2=Rittersporn, Gábor |author3=Zemskov, Viktor |title=Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence|journal=[[American Historical Review]]|date=October 1993 |volume=98 |issue=4 |pages=1017–1049 |doi=10.2307/2166597 |jstor=2166597 |url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/GTY-Penal_System.pdf}}</ref> 
* The tentative consensus in contemporary Soviet historiography is that roughly 1,600,000{{Efn|Some disputed<ref name="Healey"/> estimates range from over 2.7<ref name= pohl>Pohl, ''The Stalinist Penal System'', p. 131.</ref> to 6<ref name="alexgula" /> million.<ref name="Healey"/>}} died due to detention in the camps.<ref name="Healey"/><ref name="Wheatcroft1999"/><ref name="Rosefielde7677"/>
}}
{{Infobox Russian term
| image = 
| caption = 
| russian = ГУЛАГ
| rusr = Gulag
| literal meaning = Main Administration of Camps / General Authority of Camps
}}
{{Repression in the Soviet Union}}
{{Soviet Union sidebar}}
[[File:Vorkuta.jpg|thumb|A punishment cell block in one of the subcamps of [[Vorkutlag]], 1945]]
The '''Gulag'''{{Efn|{{IPAc-en|ˈ|g|uː|l|ɑː|g}}, {{IPAc-en|ukalso|-|l|æ|g}}; {{IPA|ru|ɡʊˈlak|lang|ru-Gulag.ogg}}.<ref name="Applebaum, Anne 2003, pp. 50">Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History''. Doubleday, 2003, pp. 50.</ref> Also spelled '''GULAG''', or '''GULag'''.|name=|group=}}{{Efn|{{lang|ru|ГУЛАГ, ГУЛаг}}, an [[acronym]] for {{lang|ru|Глaвное управлeние лагерeй}} {{IPA|ru|ɡɫavnəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje ɫəɡʲɪˈrʲej}}, {{transliteration|ru|Glavnoye upravleniye lagerey}}, "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the [[State Political Directorate|GPU]] was the '''Main Administration of [[Correctional labour camp|Correctional Labor Camps]]''' ({{lang|ru|Главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей}}, {{IPA|ru|ˈɡɫavnəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje ɪsprɐˈvʲitʲɪlʲnə trʊdɐˈvɨx ɫəɡʲɪˈrʲej}} {{transliteration|ru|Glavnoje upravlenije ispraviteljno-trudovyh lagerej}}).|name=|group=}} was a system of [[Labor camp|forced labor camps]] in the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>"[http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/ Introduction: Stalin's Gulag]." ''GULAG: Soviet Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom''. US: [[Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media|Center for History and New Media]], [[George Mason University]]. Retrieved 23 June 2020.</ref><ref>"[https://www.history.com/topics/russia/gulag Gulag]." ''[[History.com]]''. [[A&E Networks]]. 2018. Retrieved 23 June 2020.</ref><ref name="Applebaum, Anne 2003, pp. 50"/> The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the [[Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies|Soviet secret police]] that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during [[Joseph Stalin]]'s rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the [[Soviet era]]. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "'''G'''lávnoye '''u'''pravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh '''lag'''eréy " (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й or "Main Directorate of [[Correctional Labour Camp]]s"), but the full official name of the agency [[#Etymology|changed several times]].

The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of [[political repression in the Soviet Union]]. The camps housed both ordinary criminals and [[political prisoner]]s, a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as [[NKVD troika]]s or other instruments of [[extrajudicial punishment]]. The agency was established in 1930 and initially was administered by the [[Joint State Political Directorate|OGPU]] (1923–1934), later known as the [[NKVD]] (1934–1946), and the [[Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union)|Ministry of Internal Affairs]] (MVD) in the final years. 

The [[internment]] system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5&nbsp;million.<ref name="Ellman_SRS" /> The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14&nbsp;million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4&nbsp;million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or died soon after they were released.<ref name="Healey" /><ref name="Wheatcroft1999">{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G.|year=1999|title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf|journal=[[Europe-Asia Studies]]|volume=51|issue=2|page=320|doi=10.1080/09668139999056}}</ref><ref name="Rosefielde7677"/> Some journalists and writers who question the reliability of such data heavily rely on [[memoir]] sources that come to higher estimations.<ref name="Healey"/><ref name=":1">{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2009/10/091023_figes_int|title=Ученый: при Сталине погибло больше, чем в холокост|last=Figes|first=Orlando|date=2009|website=BBC News|quote=Хотя даже по самым консервативным оценкам, от 20 до 25 млн человек стали жертвами репрессий, из которых, возможно, от пяти до шести миллионов погибли в результате пребывания в ГУЛАГе. Translation: 'The most conservative calculations speak of 20–25 million victims of repression, 5 to 6 million of whom died in the Gulag.'}}</ref> Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag.<ref name="Healey" /> This policy can partially be attributed to the common practice of releasing prisoners who were suffering from incurable diseases as well as prisoners who were near death.<ref name="Ellman_SRS" /><ref name="Applebaum583"/>

Almost immediately after the [[Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin|death of Stalin]], the Soviet establishment started to dismantle the Gulag system. A [[Amnesty of 1953|mass general amnesty]] was granted in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death, but it was only offered to non-political prisoners and political prisoners who had been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. Shortly thereafter, [[Nikita Khrushchev]] was elected [[General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|First Secretary]], initiating the processes of [[de-Stalinization]] and the [[Khrushchev Thaw]], triggering a mass release and [[Rehabilitation (Soviet)|rehabilitation]] of political prisoners. Six years later, on 25 January 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to [[penal labor]] continues to exist in the [[Russian Federation]], but its capacity is greatly reduced.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Смирнов|first=М.Б.|title=Система Исправительно-трудовьх лагерей в СССР|publisher=Звенья|year=1998|isbn=5-7870-0022-6|location=Moscow}}</ref><ref name=":0" />

[[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], winner of the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]], who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to "[[Archipelago|a chain of islands]]", and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.<ref name="Applebaum 2003">[[Anne Applebaum|Applebaum, Anne]] (2003) ''[[Gulag: A History]]''. [[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]]. {{ISBN|0-7679-0056-1}}</ref> In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (simply referred to as "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union.<ref name="GRZ">{{cite journal|author1=Getty, Arch |author2=Rittersporn, Gábor |author3=Zemskov, Viktor |title=Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence|journal=[[American Historical Review]]|date=October 1993 |volume=98 |issue=4 |pages=1017–1049 |doi=10.2307/2166597 |jstor=2166597 |url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/GTY-Penal_System.pdf}}</ref> Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern Russia, eastern Russia and [[Kazakhstan]] such as [[Karaganda]], [[Norilsk]], [[Vorkuta]] and [[Magadan]], were blocks of camps which were originally built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.arlindo-correia.org/041003.html |title=Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps |publisher=Arlindo-correia.org |access-date=January 6, 2009}}</ref>

== Etymology ==
{{expand section|date=January 2022}}
GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й" (Main Directorate of [[Correctional Labour Camp]]s). It was renamed several times, e.g., to Main Directorate of [[Corrective labor colony|Correctional Labor Colonies]] ({{lang|ru|Главное управление исправительно-трудовых колоний (ГУИТК)}}), which names can be seen in the documents describing the subordination of various camps.<ref>[http://old.memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/r1/r1-4.htm ГЛАВНОЕ УПРАВЛЕНИЕ ЛАГЕРЕЙ ОГПУ–НКВД–МВД], a section from "Система исправительно-трудовых лагерей в СССР", Moscow, 1998, {{ISBN|5-7870-0022-6}}</ref>

== Overview ==
[[File:Yagoda kanal Moskva Volga.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Genrikh Yagoda]] (middle) inspecting the construction of the [[Moscow Canal|Moscow-Volga canal]], 1935. Behind his right shoulder is [[Nikita Khrushchev]].]]
Some historians estimate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period from 1918 to 1929 are more difficult to calculate).<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> Other calculations, by historian [[Orlando Figes]], refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile|url=https://archive.org/details/gulagvoicesoralh00ghei_465|url-access=limited|last=J. Gheith, K. Jolluck|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan US|year=2011|isbn=978-0-230-61062-0|pages=[https://archive.org/details/gulagvoicesoralh00ghei_465/page/n23 3]|quote=Orlando Figes Estimates that 25 million people circulated through the Gulag system between 1928 and 1953}}</ref> A further 6–7 million were [[Population transfer in the Soviet Union#Timeline|deported and exiled]] to remote areas of the [[Soviet Union|USSR]], and 4–5 million passed through [[corrective labor colony|labor colonies]], plus {{awrap|3.5 million}} who were already in, or had been sent to, [[Forced settlements in the Soviet Union|labor settlements]].<ref name="ConquestGRZ">[[Robert Conquest|Conquest, Robert]]. 1997. "[http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/CNQ-Victims_Stalinism.pdf Victims of Stalinism: A Comment] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927152248/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/CNQ-Victims_Stalinism.pdf |date=September 27, 2011 }}." ''[[Europe-Asia Studies]]'' 49(7):1317–19, {{JSTOR|154087}}.
:''Quote:'' "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4–5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labor settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures." There are reservations to be made. For example, we now learn that the Gulag reported totals were of capacity rather than actual counts, leading to an underestimate in 1946 of around 15%. Then as to the numbers 'freed': there is no reason to accept the category simply because the MVD so listed them, and, in fact, we are told of 1947 (when the anecdotal evidence is of almost no one released) that this category concealed deaths: 100000 in the first quarter of the year'"</ref>

According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.<ref name="GRZ" /> According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.<ref name="gulag2"/><ref>{{Citation |last=Земсков |first=Виктор |title=ГУЛАГ (историко-социологический аспект) |date=1991 |work=Социологические исследования |volume=6 |issue=7 |url=https://scepsis.net/library/id_937.html |access-date=2024-06-22}}</ref> Between the years 1934 to 1953, 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in each given year were released.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barnes |first1=Steven A. |title=Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society |date=2011 |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=71–72}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Alexopoulos |first1=Golfo |title=Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin's Gulag |journal=[[Slavic Review]] |date=Summer 2005 |volume=64 |issue=2 |pages=274–306|doi=10.2307/3649985 |jstor=3649985 |s2cid=73613155 }}</ref>

The [[institutional analysis]] of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the formal distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. GUPVI (ГУПВИ) was the [[Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees]] ({{lang|ru|Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных}}, {{lang|ru-Latn|Glavnoye upravleniye po delam voyennoplennyh i internirovannyh}}), a department of NKVD (later MVD) in charge of handling of foreign [[civilian internee]]s and [[Prisoner of war|POWs]] (prisoners of war) in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II (1939–1953). In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=9539851382536|title=H-Net Reviews|access-date=December 27, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070627065714/http://h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=9539851382536|archive-date=June 27, 2007}}</ref>

Its major function was the organization of foreign [[forced labor in the Soviet Union]]. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system. The major memoir noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both camp systems were similar: hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate.<ref>[http://www.memo.ru/HISTORY/POLAcy/g_3.htm Репрессии против поляков и польских граждан<!-- Bot generated title -->] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141213064253/http://www.memo.ru/history/polacy/g_3.htm |date=December 13, 2014 }}</ref>

For the Soviet political prisoners, like [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], all foreign civilian detainees and foreign POWs were imprisoned in the GULAG; the surviving foreign civilians and POWs considered themselves prisoners in the GULAG. According to the estimates, in total, during the whole period of the existence of the GUPVI, there were over 500 POW camps (within the Soviet Union and abroad), which imprisoned over 4,000,000 POW.<ref>MVD of Russia: An Encyclopedia ({{lang|ru|МВД России: энциклопедия}}), 2002, {{ISBN|5-224-03722-0}}, p.541</ref> Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time.<ref name="gulag2">{{cite web|url=http://publicist.n1.by/articles/repressions/repressions_gulag2.html |title=Repressions |publisher=Publicist.n1.by |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080327005552/http://publicist.n1.by/articles/repressions/repressions_gulag2.html |archive-date=March 27, 2008 }}</ref>

Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/crimes.php |title=What Were Their Crimes? |publisher=Gulaghistory.org |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-date=November 5, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071105114641/http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/crimes.php }}</ref><ref>Uschan, M. ''Political Leaders''. Lucent Books. 2002.</ref> About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned "[[by administrative means]]", i.e., without trial at courts; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences to imprisonment on cases investigated by the secret police throughout 1921–53.<ref name="organy1">{{cite web|url=http://publicist.n1.by/articles/repressions/repressions_organy1.html |title=Repressions |publisher=Publicist.n1.by |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080311080150/http://publicist.n1.by/articles/repressions/repressions_organy1.html |archive-date=March 11, 2008 }}</ref> Maximum sentences varied depending on the type of crime and changed over time. From 1953, the maximum sentence for petty theft was six months,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Daly |first1=Jonathan |title=Crime and Punishment in Russia A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin |date=2018 |publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing}}</ref> having previously been one year and seven years. Theft of state property however, had a minimum sentence of seven years and a maximum of twenty five.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Filtzer |first1=Donald |title=Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War II |date=2002 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=28–9}}</ref> In 1958, the maximum sentence for any crime was reduced from twenty five to fifteen years.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hardy |first1=Jeffrey S. |title=The Gulag After Stalin Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953-1964 |date=2016 |publisher=Cornell University Press |page=124}}</ref>

In 1960, the [[Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union)|Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del]] (MVD) ceased to function as the Soviet-wide administration of the camps in favour of individual republic MVD branches. The centralised detention administrations temporarily ceased functioning.<ref>http://penpolit.ru/author-item+M5cd00dd4488.html {{Dead link|date=December 2011}}</ref><ref>[http://www.nwtc.edu/Archives/LaborCamps05-30.htm News Release: Forced labor camp artifacts from Soviet era on display at NWTC]  {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080828051139/http://www.nwtc.edu/Archives/LaborCamps05-30.htm |date=August 28, 2008 }}</ref>

== Contemporary usage of the word and the usage of other terms ==
[[File:The fence at the old GULag in Perm-36.JPG|thumb|The fence at the old Gulag camp in [[Perm-36]], founded in 1943, turned into a museum. Many [[Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists|Ukrainian nationalists]] were repressed and held at this camp.]]
Although the term ''Gulag'' was originally used in reference to a government agency, in English and many other languages, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting ''the Soviet system of [[prison]]-based, [[unfree labor]]''.<ref name="anneapplebaum">{{cite web|first=Anne|last=Applebaum|title=GULAG: a history|url=http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071013124127/http://anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html|archive-date=October 13, 2007|access-date=December 21, 2007}}</ref>

<blockquote>Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.</blockquote>

Western authors use the term ''Gulag'' to denote all the prisons and internment camps in the Soviet Union. The term's contemporary usage is at times notably not directly related to the USSR, such as in the expression "[[Prison camps in North Korea|North Korea's Gulag]]"<ref>{{cite web | title=The Hidden Gulag – Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps| work=The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea| url= http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_HiddenGulag2_Web_5-18.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121021061756/http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_HiddenGulag2_Web_5-18.pdf |archive-date=2012-10-21 |url-status=live | access-date=September 20, 2012}}</ref> for camps operational today.<ref name="guardianunlimitedkorea">{{cite news
 | url = https://www.theguardian.com/korea/article/0,2763,1136483,00.html#article_continue
 | title = Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag
 | access-date = December 21, 2007
 | first =  Antony
 | last =  Barnett
 | date = February 1, 2004
 | work = Guardian Unlimited
| location=London
}}</ref>

The word ''Gulag'' was not often used in Russian, either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were ''the camps'' (лагеря, ''lagerya'') and ''the zone'' (зона, ''zona''), usually singular, for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, "[[correctional labour camp]]", was suggested for official use by the [[Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Politburo]] of the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] in the session of July 27, 1929.

== History ==

=== Background ===
[[File:V.M. Doroshevich-Sakhalin. Part I. Prisoners on Steamship of Voluntary Fleet.png|thumb|Prisoners on a ship on their way to  [[Sakhalin]], remote prison island, c. 1903]]

The [[Tsardom of Russia|Tsar]] and the [[Russian Empire]] both used forced [[exile]] and [[forced labour]] as forms of judicial punishment. [[Katorga]], a category of punishment which was reserved for those who were convicted of the most serious crimes, had many of the features which were associated with labor-camp imprisonment: confinement, simplified facilities (as opposed to the facilities which existed in prisons), and forced labor, usually involving hard, unskilled or semi-skilled work. According to historian [[Anne Applebaum]], katorga was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000 [[katorga]] convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 of them were serving sentences in 1916.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxxi</ref> Under the Imperial Russian penal system, those who were convicted of less serious crimes were sent to corrective prisons and they were also made to work.<ref>Jakobson, Michael. ''Origins of the Gulag''. E-book, The University Press of Kentucky, 2015, pp. 11</ref>

Forced exile to [[Siberia]] had been in use for a wide range of offenses since the seventeenth century and it was a common punishment for political dissidents and revolutionaries. In the nineteenth century, the members of the failed [[Decembrist revolt]] and [[Sybirak|Polish nobles who resisted Russian rule]] were sent into exile. [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]] was sentenced to die for reading banned literature in 1849, but the sentence was commuted to banishment to Siberia.  Members of various socialist revolutionary groups, including [[Bolsheviks]] such as [[Sergo Ordzhonikidze]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Leon Trotsky]], and [[Joseph Stalin]] were also sent into exile.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxix–xxx</ref>

Convicts who were serving labor sentences and exiles were sent to the underpopulated areas of Siberia and the [[Russian Far East]] – regions that lacked towns or food sources as well as organized transportation systems. Despite the isolated conditions, some prisoners successfully escaped to populated areas. Stalin himself escaped three of the four times after he was sent into exile.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. xxxiii</ref> Since these times, Siberia gained its fearful connotation as a place of punishment, a reputation which was further enhanced by the Soviet GULAG system. The Bolsheviks' own experiences with exile and forced labor provided them with a model which they could base their own system on, including the importance of strict enforcement.

From 1920 to 1950, the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state considered repression a tool that they should use to secure the normal functioning of the Soviet state system and preserve and strengthen their positions within their social base, the working class (when the Bolsheviks took power, peasants represented 80% of the population).<ref name="Земсков">{{cite journal|last=Земсков|first=Виктор|title=ГУЛАГ (историко-социологический аспект)|journal=Социологические исследования |year=1991|issue=6–7|url=http://scepsis.ru/library/id_937.html |access-date=August 14, 2011}}</ref>

In the midst of the [[Russian Civil War]], Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a "special" prison camp system, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the [[Cheka]].<ref>Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 12</ref> These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had a distinctly political purpose.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 5</ref> These early camps of the GULAG system were introduced in order to isolate and eliminate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements, whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the [[dictatorship of the proletariat]].<ref name="Земсков" />

Forced labor as a "method of reeducation" was applied in the [[Solovki prison camp]] as early as the 1920s,<ref name="ApplebaumChapter3">Applebaum, "Gulag: A History", Chapter 3</ref> based on Trotsky's experiments with forced labor camps for Czech war prisoners from 1918 and his proposals to introduce "compulsory labor service" voiced in ''[[Terrorism and Communism]]''.<ref name="ApplebaumChapter3" /><ref>"The only way to attract the labor power necessary for our economic problems is to introduce compulsory labor service", in: {{cite web|title=Leon Trotsky: Terrorism and Communism (Chapter 8) |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch08.htm |website=www.marxists.org |access-date=August 6, 2015 |first=Leon |last=Trotsky}}</ref> These concentration camps were not identical to the Stalinist or Hitler camps, but were introduced to isolate war prisoners given the extreme historical situation following [[World War I]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Krausz |first1=Tamás |title=Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography |date=27 February 2015 |publisher=NYU Press |isbn=978-1-58367-449-9 |page=512 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=z23IBgAAQBAJ&dq=lenin+concentration+camps+stalinist+obviously&pg=PA512 |language=en}}</ref>

Various categories of prisoners were defined: petty criminals, POWs of the Russian Civil War, officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, political enemies, dissidents and other people deemed dangerous for the state. In the first decade of Soviet rule, the judicial and penal systems were neither unified nor coordinated, and there was a distinction between criminal prisoners and political or "special" prisoners.

The "traditional" judicial and prison system, which dealt with criminal prisoners, were first overseen by The People's Commissariat of Justice until 1922, after which they were overseen by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, also known as the [[NKVD]].<ref>Jakobson, Michael. ''Origins of the Gulag.'' E-book, The University Press of Kentucky, pp. 52</ref> The Cheka and its successor organizations, the GPU or [[State Political Directorate]] and the [[OGPU]], oversaw political prisoners and the "special" camps to which they were sent.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2004, pp. 12.</ref> In April 1929, the judicial distinctions between criminal and political prisoners were eliminated, and control of the entire Soviet penal system turned over to the OGPU.<ref>Applebaum, Anne. ''Gulag: A History.'' Anchor, 2003, pp. 50.</ref> In 1928, there were 30,000 individuals interned; the authorities were opposed to compelled labor. In 1927, the official in charge of prison administration wrote:

<blockquote>The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing "golden sweat" from them, the organisation of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.<ref>[[David Dallin]] and [[Boris Nicolaevsky]], ''Forced Labor in Soviet Russia'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 153.</ref></blockquote>

The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps" ({{lang|ru|исправи́тельно-трудовые лагеря}}, {{lang|ru-Latn|Ispravitel'no-trudovye lagerya}}), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree from the [[Sovnarkom]] of July 11, 1929, about the use of [[penal labor]] that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of the [[Politburo]] meeting of June 27, 1929.{{citation needed|date=April 2018}}<ref>{{Cite book |title=Transcripts from the Soviet Archives Volume III |publisher=Erdogan A |year=2021 |isbn=978-1-329-63144-1 |publication-date=February 9, 2021}}</ref>

One of the Gulag system founders was [[Naftaly Frenkel]]. In 1923, he was arrested for illegally crossing borders and smuggling. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor at [[Solovki prison camp|Solovki]], which later came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag". While serving his sentence he wrote a letter to the camp administration detailing a number of "productivity improvement" proposals including the infamous system of labor exploitation whereby the inmates' food rations were to be linked to their rate of production, a proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). This notorious you-eat-as-you-work system would often kill weaker prisoners in weeks and caused countless casualties. The letter caught the attention of a number of high communist officials including [[Genrikh Yagoda]] and Frenkel soon went from being an inmate to becoming a camp commander and an important Gulag official. His proposals soon saw widespread adoption in the Gulag system.<ref>Applebaum, Anne (2004). Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. London: Penguin Books., p. 52-53</ref>

After having appeared as an instrument and place for isolating counter-revolutionary and criminal elements, the Gulag, because of its principle of "correction by forced labor", quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. Hence it is followed by one more important reason for the constancy of the repressive policy, namely, the state's interest in unremitting rates of receiving a cheap labor force that was forcibly used, mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north.<ref name="Земсков" /> The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions.<ref name="Ellman">{{cite journal |last=Ellman |first=Michael |title=Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments |journal=Europe-Asia Studies |year=2002 |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=1151–1172 |s2cid=43510161 |url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf |access-date=August 14, 2011 |doi=10.1080/0966813022000017177 |archive-date=May 25, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190525134942/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref>

=== Formation and expansion during Stalin's rule ===
The Gulag was an administrative body that watched over the camps; eventually, its name would retrospectively be used as a name for these camps. After [[Death and state funeral of Vladimir Lenin|Lenin's death in 1924]], Stalin was able to take control of the government, and he began to form the gulag system. On June 27, 1929, the [[Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Politburo]] created a system of self-supporting camps that would eventually replace the existing prisons around the country.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Khlevniuk|first1=Oleg|title=The History of the Gulag|date=2004|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|page=9}}</ref> Prisoners who received a prison sentence which exceeded three years were required to remain in these prisons. Prisoners who received a prison sentence which was shorter than three years were required to remain in the prison system that was still under the purview of the [[NKVD]].

The purpose of these new camps was to colonise the remote and inhospitable environments throughout the Soviet Union. These changes took place around the time when Stalin started to institute [[Collectivization in the Soviet Union|collectivization]] and rapid industrial development. [[Collectivisation in the Soviet Union|Collectivisation]] resulted in a large-scale [[purge]] of peasants and so-called [[Kulaks]]. In contrast to other Soviet peasants, the Kulaks were supposedly wealthy, and as a result, the state classified them as [[Capitalism|capitalists]], and by extension, it also classified them as [[Enemy of the people#Soviet Union|enemies of socialism]]. The term would also become associated with anyone who opposed or even seemed disssatisfied with the [[Government of the Soviet Union|Soviet government]].

By late 1929, Stalin launched a program which was known as ''[[dekulakization]]''. Stalin demanded the complete elimination of the kulak class, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of Soviet peasants. In just four months, 60,000 people were sent to the camps and 154,000 other people were exiled. However, this was only the beginning of the ''dekulakisation'' process. In 1931 alone, 1,803,392 people were exiled.<ref>{{cite book |last1=khlevniuk|first1=Oleg |title=The History of the Gulag|date=2004|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|page=11}}</ref>

Although these massive relocation processes were successful in transferring a large potential free forced labor work force to places where it was needed, that is about all it was successful in doing. All of the "[[Forced settlements in the Soviet Union|special settlers]]", as the Soviet government referred to them, lived on starvation level rations, and as a result, many people starved to death in the camps, and anyone who was healthy enough to escape tried to do just that. This situation forced the government to give rations to a group of people which it was hardly getting any use out of, and as a result, it was just costing the Soviet government money. The [[Joint State Political Directorate|Unified State Political Administration]] (OGPU) quickly discovered the problem, and in response, it began to reform the ''dekulakisation'' process.<ref name="The History of the Gulag">{{cite book |last1=Khlevniuk|first1=Oleg |title=The History of the Gulag|date=2004|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|page=17}}</ref>

In an attempt to prevent mass escapes from the colony, the OGPU started to recruit prisoners who lived inside it, and it also set up ambushes around popular escape routes. The OGPU also attempted to raise the living conditions in these camps in order to discourage people from actively trying to escape from them, and Kulaks were told that they would regain their rights in five years. Even these revisions ultimately failed to resolve the problem, and as a result, the ''dekulakisation'' process was a failure because it did not lead to the creation of a steady forced labor force for the government.<ref name="The History of the Gulag"/>

The Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930, as the GULAG by the [[Joint State Political Directorate|OGPU]] order 130/63 in accordance with the [[Council of People's Commissars|Sovnarkom]] order 22 p.&nbsp;248 dated April 7, 1930. It was renamed as the GULAG in November of that year.<ref name="memo" />

The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis.<ref name="Jakobson">See, e.g. Jakobson, Michael. 1993. ''Origins of the GULag: The Soviet Prison Camp System 1917–34''. Lexington, Kentucky: [[University Press of Kentucky]]. p. 88.</ref><ref name="Ivanova">See, e.g. Ivanova, Galina M. 2000. ''Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Totalitarian System''. Armonk, New York: [[M. E. Sharpe]]. ch. 2.</ref>

The 1931–32 archives indicate the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; while in 1935, approximately 800,000 were in camps and 300,000 in colonies.<ref name=Kozlov /> Gulag population reached a peak value (1.5 million) in 1941, gradually decreased during the war and then started to grow again, achieving a maximum by 1953.<ref name="GRZ"/> Besides Gulag camps, a significant amount of prisoners, which confined prisoners serving short sentence terms.<ref name="GRZ"/>
[[File:USSR custodial population in 1934-53.png|thumb|The population of Gulag camps (blue) and Gulag colonies (red) in 1934–53.<ref name="GRZ"/>]]

In the early 1930s, a tightening of the Soviet penal policy caused a significant growth of the prison camp population.<ref>{{Cite book|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HYSGZs6mW5wC|title=Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps|last=Applebaum|first=Anne|date=2012-08-02|publisher=Penguin Books Limited|isbn=978-0-14-197526-9|chapter=The Camps Expand}}</ref>

During the [[Great Purge]] of 1937–38, mass arrests caused another increase in inmate numbers. Hundreds of thousands of persons were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of the multiple passages of the notorious [[Article 58]] of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary activities". Under [[NKVD Order No. 00447]], tens of thousands of Gulag inmates were executed in 1937–38 for "continuing counterrevolutionary activities".
 
Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased more than eight times, and the number of prisoners with high education increased five times.<ref name="Земсков" /> It resulted in their increased share in the overall composition of the camp prisoners.<ref name="Земсков" /> Among the camp prisoners, the number and share of the intelligentsia was growing at the quickest pace.<ref name="Земсков" /> Distrust, hostility, and even hatred for the intelligentsia was a common characteristic of the Soviet leaders.<ref name="Земсков" /> Information regarding the imprisonment trends and consequences for the intelligentsia derive from the extrapolations of [[Viktor Zemskov]] from a collection of prison camp population movements data.<ref name="Земсков" /><ref>{{cite web|title=Таблица 3. Движение лагерного населения ГУЛАГа|url=http://scepsis.net/library/misc/id-937_table3.html}}</ref>

=== During World War II ===
==== Political role ====
On the eve of World War II, Soviet archives indicate a combined camp and colony population upwards of 1.6 million in 1939, according to V. P. Kozlov.<ref name="Kozlov">See, for example, Gulaga, Naselenie. 2004. " sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomakh." ''Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov'', vol. 4, edited by V. P. Kozlov et al. Moskva: [[ROSSPEN]].</ref> [[Anne Applebaum]] and [[Steven Rosefielde]] estimate that 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in Gulag system's prison camps and colonies when the war started.<ref name="rosenf">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L4s1H9v2yOwC&pg=PA95 |title=The Russian economy: from Lenin to Putin| first= Steven |last=Rosefielde|isbn=978-1-4051-1337-3|date=2007-02-12|publisher=Wiley }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=8fIfmxAs_T0C&pg=PA446 |title=Gulag: a history |first= Anne |last= Applebaum|isbn=978-0-7679-0056-0 |year=2003 |publisher=Doubleday }}</ref>

After the [[Invasion of Poland|German invasion of Poland]] that marked the start of World War II in Europe, the [[Soviet invasion of Poland|Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts]] of the [[Second Polish Republic]]. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied [[Estonia]], [[Latvia]], [[Lithuania]], [[Bessarabia]] (now the Republic of Moldova) and [[Bukovina]]. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens<ref>Franciszek Proch, Poland's Way of the Cross, New York 1987 P.146</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/poland_WWII_casualties.htm |title=Project In Posterum |publisher=Project In Posterum |access-date=December 19, 2011 |archive-date=November 14, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171114152931/http://www.projectinposterum.org/docs/poland_WWII_casualties.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political and anti-state (espionage, terrorism) crimes in the USSR in 1939–41 was 211,106.<ref name="organy1"/>

Approximately 300,000 [[Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union (after 1939)|Polish prisoners of war]] were captured by the USSR during and after the [[Soviet invasion of Poland|"Polish Defensive War"]].<ref name="PWN_KW">[[Internetowa encyklopedia PWN|Encyklopedia PWN]] [http://encyklopedia.pwn.pl/33490_1.html 'KAMPANIA WRZEŚNIOWA 1939'] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050927194547/http://encyklopedia.pwn.pl/33490_1.html |date=September 27, 2005 }}, last retrieved on December 10, 2005, Polish language</ref> Almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered (see [[Katyn massacre]]) or sent to Gulag.<ref name="Chodakiewicz">{{cite book| author =Marek Jan Chodakiewicz | title =Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939–1947 | year =2004  | publisher =Lexington Books | isbn =978-0-7391-0484-2| author-link =Marek Jan Chodakiewicz }}</ref> Of the 10,000–12,000 Poles sent to [[Kolyma]] in 1940–41, most [[prisoners of war]], only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the [[Polish Armed Forces in the East]].<ref>{{cite news |url=http://my.telegraph.co.uk/beanbean/beanbean/4054641/A_Polish_life_5_Starobielsk_and_the_transSiberian_railway/ |title=A Polish life. 5: Starobielsk and the trans-Siberian railway |author=beanbean |date=May 2, 2008 |work=[[My Telegraph]] |access-date=May 8, 2012 |location=London |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140531104804/http://my.telegraph.co.uk/beanbean/beanbean/4054641/A_Polish_life_5_Starobielsk_and_the_transSiberian_railway/ |archive-date=May 31, 2014}}</ref> Out of [[Władysław Anders|General Anders]]' 80,000 evacuees from Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.wajszczuk.v.pl/english/drzewo/czytelnia/michael_hope.htm |first=Michael |last=Hope |title=Polish deportees in the Soviet Union |publisher=Wajszczuk.v.pl |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090408081337/http://www.wajszczuk.v.pl/english/drzewo/czytelnia/michael_hope.htm |archive-date=April 8, 2009}}</ref>

During the [[Great Patriotic War]], Gulag populations declined sharply due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942–43. In the winter of 1941, a quarter of the Gulag's population died of [[starvation]].<ref>[http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/ GULAG: a History], Anne Applebaum</ref> 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941–43,<ref>Zemskov, ''Gulag'', Sociologičeskije issledovanija, 1991, No. 6, pp. 14–15.</ref><ref name="gulag1">{{cite web|url=http://publicist.n1.by/articles/repressions/repressions_gulag1.html |title=Repressions |publisher=Publicist.n1.by |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090419222914/http://soviet-history.com/doc/prison/gulag_info1.php |archive-date=April 19, 2009 }}</ref> from a combination of their harsh working conditions and the famine caused by the German invasion. This period accounts for about half of all gulag deaths, according to Russian statistics.

In 1943, the term ''[[katorga]] works'' ({{lang|ru|каторжные работы}}) was reintroduced. They were initially intended for [[Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy|Nazi collaborators]], but then other categories of political prisoners (for example, members of [[Population transfer in the Soviet Union|deported peoples]] who fled from exile) were also sentenced to "katorga works". Prisoners sentenced to "katorga works" were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime and many of them perished.<ref name="gulag1" />

==== Economic role ====
[[File:Central shop in Norilsk in 1957.jpg|thumb|Central shop in [[Norilsk]] built by prisoners of the [[Norillag]]]]
[[File:Logging at Small Ungut (no border).jpeg|thumb|Lithuanian deportees preparing logs for rafting on the [[Mana (Russia)|Mana River]]]]
Up until World War II, the Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet "camp economy". Right before the war, forced labor provided 46.5% of the nation's [[nickel]], 76% of its [[tin]], 40% of its [[cobalt]], 40.5% of its [[Chromite|chrome-iron ore]], 60% of its [[gold]], and 25.3% of its [[Lumber|timber]].<ref name="Ivanova: labor camps"/> And in preparation for war, the NKVD put up many more factories and built highways and railroads.

The Gulag quickly switched to the production of arms and supplies for the army after fighting began. At first, transportation remained a priority. In 1940, the NKVD focused most of its energy on railroad construction.<ref name=khlev>{{cite book | last= Khevniuk | first= Oleg V. |title= The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror|year= 2004|publisher= Yale University Press|pages= 236–286}}</ref> This would prove extremely important when the German advance into the Soviet Union started in 1941. In addition, factories converted to produce ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Moreover, the NKVD gathered skilled workers and specialists from throughout the Gulag into 380 special colonies which produced tanks, aircraft, armaments, and ammunition.<ref name="Ivanova: labor camps">{{cite book|last= Ivanova|first= Galina Mikhailovna|title= Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System|year= 2000|publisher= Sharpe|location= Armonk, New York|pages= 69–126}}</ref>

Despite its low capital costs, the camp economy suffered from serious flaws. For one, actual productivity almost never matched estimates: the estimates proved far too optimistic. In addition, scarcity of machinery and tools plagued the camps and the tools that the camps did have quickly broke. The Eastern Siberian Trust of the Chief Administration of Camps for Highway Construction destroyed ninety-four trucks in just three years.<ref name="Ivanova: labor camps" /> But the greatest problem was simple – forced labor was less efficient than free labor. In fact, prisoners in the Gulag were, on average, half as productive as free laborers in the USSR at the time,<ref name="Ivanova: labor camps" /> which may be partially explained by malnutrition.

To make up for this disparity, the NKVD worked prisoners harder than ever. To meet rising demand, prisoners worked longer and longer hours, and on lower food-rations than ever before. A camp administrator said in a meeting: "There are cases when a prisoner is given only four or five hours out of twenty-four for rest, which significantly lowers his productivity." In the words of a former Gulag prisoner: "By the spring of 1942, the camp ceased to function. It was difficult to find people who were even able to gather firewood or bury the dead."<ref name="Ivanova: labor camps" />

The scarcity of food stemmed in part from the general strain on the entire Soviet Union, but also the lack of central aid to the Gulag during the war. The central government focused all its attention on the military and left the camps to their own devices. In 1942, the Gulag set up the Supply Administration to find their own food and industrial goods. During this time, not only did food become scarce, but the NKVD limited rations in an attempt to motivate the prisoners to work harder for more food, a policy that lasted until 1948.<ref name=ebacon>{{cite book|last= Bacon|first= Edwin|title= The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labor System in the Light of the Archives|year= 1994|publisher= New York University Press|location= New York|pages= 42–63, 82–100, 123–144}}</ref>

In addition to food shortages, the Gulag suffered from labor scarcity at the beginning of the war. The [[Great Purge|Great Terror]] of 1936–1938 had provided a large supply of free labor, but by the start of World War II the purges had slowed down. In order to complete all of their [[project]]s, camp administrators moved prisoners from project to project.<ref name=khlev /> To improve the situation, laws were implemented in mid-1940 that allowed giving short camp sentences (4 months or a year) to those convicted of petty theft, hooliganism, or labor-discipline infractions. By January 1941, the Gulag workforce had increased by approximately 300,000 prisoners.<ref name=khlev /> But in 1942, serious food shortages began, and camp populations dropped again. The camps lost still more prisoners to the war effort as the Soviet Union went into a total war footing in June 1941. Many laborers received early releases so that they could be drafted and sent to the front.<ref name=ebacon />

Even as the pool of workers shrank, demand for outputs continued to grow rapidly. As a result, the Soviet government pushed the Gulag to "do more with less". With fewer able-bodied workers and few supplies from outside the camp system, camp administrators had to find a way to maintain production. The solution they found was to push the remaining prisoners still harder. The NKVD employed a system of setting unrealistically high production goals, straining resources in an attempt to encourage higher productivity. As the Axis armies pushed into Soviet territory from June 1941 on, labor resources became further strained, and many of the camps had to evacuate out of Western Russia.<ref name=ebacon />

From the beginning of the war to halfway through 1944, 40 camps were set up, and 69 were disbanded. During evacuations, machinery received priority, leaving prisoners to reach safety on foot. The speed of [[Operation Barbarossa]]'s advance prevented the evacuation of all prisoners in good time, and the NKVD [[NKVD prisoner massacres|massacred many to prevent them from falling into German hands]]. While this practice denied the Germans a source of free labor, it also further restricted the Gulag's capacity to keep up with the Red Army's demands. When the tide of the war turned, however, and the Soviets started pushing the Axis invaders back, fresh batches of laborers replenished the camps. As the Red Army recaptured territories from the Germans, an influx of Soviet ex-POWs greatly increased the Gulag population.<ref name=ebacon />

=== After World War II ===
<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Labor camp.jpg|thumb|Upper Debin Camp, painted by former prisoner [[Nikolai Getman]]]] -->
[[File:Transpolar Railway between Salekhard and Nadym.jpg|thumb| The [[Salekhard–Igarka Railway|Transpolar Railway]] was a project of the Gulag system that took place from 1947 to 1953.]]
After World War II, the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies sharply rose again, reaching approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 million of whom were in camps).

When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, as many as two million former Russian citizens were [[Operation Keelhaul|forcefully repatriated into the USSR]].<ref>Mark Elliott. "The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944–47", ''Political Science Quarterly'', Vol. 88, No. 2 (June 1973), pp. 253–275.</ref> On February 11, 1945, at the conclusion of the [[Yalta Conference]], the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union.<ref name="darkside">{{cite web|url=http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895a.asp |title=Repatriation – The Dark Side of World War II |publisher=Fff.org |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120117182523/http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895a.asp |archive-date=January 17, 2012 }}</ref> One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets. British and United States civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left the Russian Empire and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947.<ref name="forced">{{cite web|url=http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=1988&month=12 |title=Forced Repatriation to the Soviet Union: The Secret Betrayal |publisher=Hillsdale.edu |date=September 1, 1939 |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120207142426/http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=1988&month=12 |archive-date=February 7, 2012 }}</ref>

Multiple sources state that [[German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war|Soviet POWs]], on their return to the Soviet Union, were treated as [[traitor]]s (see [[Order No. 270]]).<ref name="warlords">{{cite web|url=http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/t-z/warlords1stalin.html |title=The warlords: Joseph Stalin |publisher=Channel4.com |date=March 6, 1953 |access-date=January 6, 2009}}</ref><ref name="remembrance">{{cite web|url=http://www.stsg.de/main/zeithain/geschichte/gedenken/index_en.php |title=Remembrance (Zeithain Memorial Grove) |publisher=Stsg.de |date=August 16, 1941 |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080227000846/http://www.stsg.de/main/zeithain/geschichte/gedenken/index_en.php |archive-date=February 27, 2008 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.historynet.com/wars_conflicts/world_war_2/3037296.html |title=Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II |publisher=Historynet.com |date=September 8, 1941 |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080330210330/http://www.historynet.com/wars_conflicts/world_war_2/3037296.html |archive-date=March 30, 2008}}</ref> According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving [[Red Army]] soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag.<ref name="sort">{{cite web|url=http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3063246.html |title=Sorting Pieces of the Russian Past |publisher=Hoover.org |date=October 23, 2002 |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090218232551/http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3063246.html |archive-date=February 18, 2009 }}</ref><ref name="brutality">{{cite news|url=https://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/patriots-ignore-greatest-brutality/2007/08/12/1186857342382.html?page=2 |title=Patriots ignore greatest brutality |publisher=Smh.com.au |date=August 13, 2007 |access-date=January 6, 2009}}</ref><ref name="moreorless">{{cite web |url=http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/stalin.html |title=Joseph Stalin killer file |publisher=Moreorless.au.com |date=May 23, 2001 |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130803144222/http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/stalin.html |archive-date=August 3, 2013}}</ref> However, that is a confusion with two other types of camps. During and after World War II, freed POWs went to special "filtration" camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 percent were cleared, and about 8 percent were arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD.

Furthermore, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated ''[[Ostarbeiter]]'', POWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, the major part of the population of these camps were cleared by NKVD and either sent home or conscripted (see table for details).<ref name="ZemscovRep">Земсков В.Н. К вопросу о репатриации советских граждан. 1944–1951 годы // История СССР. 1990. № 4 Zemskov V.N. On repatriation of Soviet citizens. Istoriya SSSR., 1990, No.4</ref> 226,127 out of 1,539,475 POWs were transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.<ref name="ZemscovRep" /><ref>("Военно-исторический журнал" ("Military-Historical Magazine"), 1997, №5. page 32)</ref>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Results of the checks and the filtration of the repatriants (by March 1, 1946)'''<ref name="ZemscovRep" />'''
|-
!Category ||Total || % || Civilian|| % ||POWs || %
|-
|Released and sent home{{Efn|Including those who died in custody.}} || 2,427,906 || 57.81 || 2,146,126 || 80.68 || 281,780 || 18.31
|-
|Conscripted || 801,152 || 19.08 || 141,962 || 5.34 || 659,190 || 42.82
|-
|Sent to labor battalions of the Ministry of Defence || 608,095 || 14.48 || 263,647 || 9.91 || 344,448 || 22.37
|-
|Sent to NKVD as ''spetskontingent''{{Efn|''Special contingent''.}} (i.e. sent to GULAG) || 272,867 || 6.50 || 46,740 || 1.76 || 226,127 || 14.69
|-
|Were waiting for transportation and worked for Soviet military units abroad || 89,468 || 2.13 || 61,538 || 2.31 || 27,930 ||1.81
|-
|'''Total''' ||'''4,199,488''' || '''100''' || '''2,660,013''' || '''100''' || '''1,539,475''' || '''100'''
|}

After [[Nazi Germany]]'s defeat, [[NKVD special camps|ten NKVD-run "special camps"]] subordinate to the Gulag were set up in the [[Soviet Occupation Zone]] of [[Allied Occupation Zones in Germany|post-war Germany]]. These "special camps" were former [[Stalag]]s, prisons, or [[Nazi concentration camps]] such as [[Sachsenhausen concentration camp|Sachsenhausen]] ([[NKVD special camp Nr. 7|special camp number 7]]) and [[Buchenwald]] ([[NKVD special camp Nr. 2|special camp number 2]]). According to German government estimates "65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them."<ref>[https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6D61131F937A1575AC0A964958260&sec=&spon=&scp=13&sq=Sachsenhausen&st=cse Germans Find Mass Graves at an Ex-Soviet Camp] New York Times, September 24, 1992</ref> According to German researchers, Sachsenhausen, where 12,500 Soviet era victims have been uncovered, should be seen as an integral part of the Gulag system.<ref>[https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CEFDA163EF934A25751C1A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1 Ex-Death Camp Tells Story Of Nazi and Soviet Horrors] New York Times, December 17, 2001</ref>
[[File:Magadan seen from mountain.jpg|thumb|During the Stalin era, [[Magadan]] was a major transit center for prisoners sent to the [[Kolyma]] camps.]]

Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms, sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At the beginning of 1953, the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.<ref name="gulag1" />
[[File:Political prisoners at Intalag, USSR.jpg|thumb|Political prisoners eating lunch in the [[Minlag]] "special camp" coal mine. In "special camps" prisoners had to wear prison garb with personal numbers.]]
In 1948, the [[MVD special camp|system of "special camps"]] was established exclusively for a "special contingent" of [[political prisoner]]s, convicted according to the more severe sub-articles of [[Article 58]] (Enemies of people): treason, espionage, terrorism, etc., for various real political opponents, such as [[Trotskyites]], "nationalists" ([[Ukrainian nationalism]]), [[white émigré]], as well as for fabricated ones.

The state continued to maintain the extensive camp system for a while after Stalin's death in March 1953, although the period saw the grip of the camp authorities weaken, and a number of conflicts and uprisings occur (''see'' [[Bitch Wars]]; [[Kengir uprising]]; [[Vorkuta uprising]]).

The [[amnesty of 1953]] was limited to non-political prisoners and for political prisoners sentenced to not more than {{awrap|5 years}}, therefore mostly those convicted for common crimes were then freed. The release of political prisoners started in 1954 and became widespread, and also coupled with mass [[rehabilitation (Soviet)|rehabilitations]], after [[Nikita Khrushchev]]'s denunciation of [[Stalinism]] in his [[Secret Speech]] at the 20th Congress of the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|CPSU]] in February 1956.

The ''Gulag'' institution was closed by the [[Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union)|MVD]] order No 020 of January 25, 1960,<ref name="memo">[[Memorial (society)|Memorial]] http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/r1/r1-4.htm</ref> but forced labor colonies for political and criminal prisoners continued to exist. Political prisoners continued to be kept in one of the most famous camps [[Perm-36]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.russianmuseums.info/M3029 |title=The museum of history of political repressions "Perm-36" |access-date=October 29, 2013 |archive-date=September 2, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130902030729/http://www.russianmuseums.info/M3029 }}</ref> until 1987 when it was closed.<ref>{{cite web|title=Perm-36|url=https://www.wmf.org/project/perm-36|access-date=2020-11-11|website=World Monuments Fund}}</ref>

The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population, informally or formally continues many practices endemic to the ''Gulag'' system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation.<ref name=":0">{{cite news |url=https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21588130-russias-prison-colonies-resemble-old-soviet-camps-slave-labour-and-criminal-cultures |title=Slave labour and criminal cultures |newspaper=The Economist |date=October 19, 2013}}</ref>

In the late 2000s, some human rights activists accused authorities of gradual removal of Gulag remembrance from places such as [[Perm-36]] and [[Solovki prison camp]].<ref>{{cite web|title = Сюжеты о "Перми-36" на НТВ сочли "квазижурналистским пасквилем"|url = http://59.ru/text/newsline/892938.html|access-date = August 31, 2015|date = February 13, 2015}}</ref>

According to [[Encyclopædia Britannica]],
{{Blockquote|text=At its height the Gulag consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000–10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railroads), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed tens of thousands of prisoners each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 million.<ref>{{cite web|title=Gulag {{!}} Definition, History, & Facts|url=https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag|access-date=2021-02-18|website=Encyclopædia Britannica}}</ref>}}

== Death toll ==

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million (see [[#History of Gulag population estimates|History of Gulag population estimates]]). Mortality in Gulag camps in 1934–40 was 4–6 times higher than average in the Soviet Union. Post-1991 research by historians accessing archival materials brought this range down considerably.<ref>{{cite journal|author1=Getty, J. A. |author2=Rittersporn, G. T.|author3=Zemskov, V. N.|year=1993|title=Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years |url=http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html|journal=American Historical Review|volume=98|issue=4 |pages=1017–1049|doi=10.2307/2166597|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080611064213/http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html |archive-date=11 June 2008 |quote=The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as "revisionists" and mocked by those proposing high estimates.|jstor=2166597|url-access=subscription}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G. |title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word|journal= [[Europe-Asia Studies]]|volume= 51|issue= 2 |year=1999|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf|pages=340–342|doi=10.1080/09668139999056}}
:''Quote:'' "For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, ''The Great Terror: A Re-assessment'' (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), ''Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives'' (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles."</ref> In a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.<ref name="GRZ" />{{rp|1024}}

It was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death,<ref name="Ellman_SRS">Michael Ellman. [http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments.] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190525134942/http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf |date=May 25, 2019 }} ''Europe-Asia Studies'', Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov. 2002), pp. 1151–1172</ref><ref name="Applebaum583">[[Anne Applebaum|Applebaum, Anne]] (2003) ''[[Gulag: A History]].'' [[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]]. {{ISBN|0-7679-0056-1}} pg 583: "both archives and memoirs indicate that it was a common practice in many camps to release prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp death statistics."</ref> so a combined statistics on mortality ''in the camps'' and mortality ''caused by the camps'' was higher. The tentative historical consensus is that, of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.6 million<ref name="Wheatcroft1999"/><ref name="Rosefielde7677">[[Steven Rosefielde|Rosefielde, Steven]]. 2009. ''[[Red Holocaust (2009 book)|Red Holocaust]].'' [[Routledge]]. {{ISBN|0-415-77757-7}}. p. 67 "...more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537"; pg 77: "The best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."</ref> and 1.76 million<ref name=Vish/> perished as a result of their detention,<ref name="Healey"/> and about half of all deaths occurred between 1941 and 1943 following the German invasion.<ref name=Vish>[http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php "Demographic Losses Due to Repressions"], by [[Anatoly Vishnevsky]], Director of the Centre for Human Demography and Ecology, [[Russian Academy of Sciences]], {{in lang|ru}}</ref><ref>[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300092844 "The History of the GULAG"] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100622052449/http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300092844 |date=June 22, 2010 }}, by [[Oleg V. Khlevniuk]]</ref> [[Timothy Snyder]] writes that "with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive".<ref>{{cite news |last1=Snyder |first1=Timothy |title=Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse? |url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-who-was-worse/#:~:text=Mass%20murder%20in%20the%20Soviet,disconcertingly%20close%20to%20Nazi%20motivations.&text=It%20turns%20out%20that%2C%20with,entered%20the%20Gulag%20left%20alive. |work=[[New York Review of Books]] |date=27 January 2011}}</ref> If prisoner deaths from [[Corrective labor colony#Soviet Union|labor colonies]] and [[Forced settlements in the Soviet Union|special settlements]] are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, according to J. Otto Pohl's incomplete data.<ref name="Applebaum583" /><ref name= pohl>Pohl, ''The Stalinist Penal System'', p. 131.</ref>

In her 2018 study, Golfo Alexopoulos attempted to challenge this consensus figure by encompassing those whose life was shortened due to GULAG conditions.<ref name="Healey">{{cite journal |last1= Healey|first1=Dan|author-link=Dan Healey|date=1 June 2018|title=GOLFO ALEXOPOULOS. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag|url=https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/ou_press/golfo-alexopoulos-illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalin-s-gulag-i363rKPYOp|journal=[[The American Historical Review]]|volume=123 |issue=3 |pages=1049–1051|doi=10.1093/ahr/123.3.1049|quote="New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity." The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953."|url-access=subscription}}</ref> Alexopoulos concluded from her research that a systematic practice of the Gulag was to release sick prisoners on the verge of death; and that all prisoners who received the health classification "invalid", "light physical labor", "light individualised labor", or "physically defective" that together according to Alexopoulos encompassed at least one third of all inmates who passed through the Gulag died or had their lives shortened due to detention in the Gulag in captivity or shortly after release.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Golfo Alexopoulos |title=Medicine and Mortality in the Gulag |date=April 12, 2019 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwUgqHthjTs?t=50m25s |publisher=NYUJordanCenter}}</ref>

The GULAG mortality estimated in this way yields the figure of 6 million deaths.<ref name="alexgula">{{Cite book|title=Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag|last=Alexopoulos|first=Golfo|publisher=Yale University Press|year=2017|isbn=978-0-300-17941-5}}</ref> Historian Orlando Figes and Russian writer Vadim Erlikman have posited similar estimates.<ref name=":1"/><ref name=vadim>Erlikman, Vadim (2004). ''Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik''. Moscow 2004: Russkaia panorama. {{ISBN|5-93165-107-1}}.</ref> The estimate of Alexopoulos, however, has obvious methodological difficulties<ref name = "Healey"/> and is supported by misinterpreted evidence, such as presuming that hundreds of thousands of prisoners "directed to other places of detention" in 1948 was a euphemism for releasing prisoners on the verge of death into labor colonies, when it was really referring to internal transport in the Gulag rather than release.<ref name=Hardjal>{{cite journal |last1=Hardy |first1=Jeffery |title=Slavic Review, Volume 77, Issue 1 Spring 2018 pp.269–270 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalins-gulag-by-golfo-alexopoulos-new-haven-yale-university-press-2007-xi-308-pp-notes-index-maps-6500-hard-bound/130C12D73C6AE10333805FF0AD847790/core-reader |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190429033750/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalins-gulag-by-golfo-alexopoulos-new-haven-yale-university-press-2007-xi-308-pp-notes-index-maps-6500-hard-bound/130C12D73C6AE10333805FF0AD847790/core-reader |archive-date=29 April 2019 |journal=Slavic Review |date=April 2018 |volume=77 |issue=1 |pages=269–270 |publisher=© Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 |doi=10.1017/slr.2018.57 |access-date=29 July 2019}}</ref>

In a University of Oxford doctoral dissertation, in 2020, the problem of medical release ({{'}}''aktirovka''{{'}}) and of mortality among 'certified invalids' ({{'}}''aktirovannye''{{'}}) was considered in detail by Mikhail Nakonechnyi. He concluded that the number of terminally ill people discharged early on medical grounds from the Gulag was about 1 million. Mikhail added 800,000–850,000 excess deaths to the death toll directly caused by the results of GULAG incarceration, which brings the death toll to 2.5 million people.<ref>{{cite thesis |last1=Nakonechnyi |first1=Mikhail |title='Factory of invalids': Mortality, disability and early release on medical grounds in GULAG, 1930–1955 |date=2020 |publisher=University of Oxford |url=https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f81e082c-a3b1-46a8-993c-4a134c199d89}}</ref>

=== Mortality rate ===
In 2009, [[Steven Rosefielde]] stated more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537, "the best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."<ref name="Rosefielde7677" /> [[Dan Healey]] in 2018 also stated the same thing "New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity." The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Healey|first=Dan|date=2018-06-01|title=Golfo Alexopoulos. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag.|url=https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/3/1049/5025385|journal=The American Historical Review|volume=123|issue=3|pages=1049–1051|doi=10.1093/ahr/123.3.1049|issn=0002-8762|url-access=subscription}}</ref>

Certificates of death in the Gulag system for the period from 1930 to 1956<ref name="mortality">{{Cite book|title=Документ № 103. Справка о смертности заключённых в системе ГУЛага за период 1930—1956 гг.|publisher=Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia"|isbn=5-85646-046-4|url=http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1009320|date=2000}}</ref> 

{| class="wikitable"
 !Year 
 !Deaths
 ! Mortality rate %
 |-
 |1930
 | align="right" | 7,980
 | align="right" | 4.20
 |-
 |1931
 | align="right" | 7,283
 | align="right" | 2.90
 |-
 |1932
 | align="right" | 13,197
 | align="right" | 4.80
 |-
 |1933
 | align="right" | 67,297
 | align="right" | 15.30
 |-
 |1934
 | align="right" | 25,187
 | align="right" | 4.28
 |-
 |1935
 | align="right" | 31,636
 | align="right" | 2.75
 |-
 |1936
 | align="right" | 24,993
 | align="right" | 2.11
 |-
 |1937
 | align="right" | 31,056
 | align="right" | 2.42
 |-
 |1938
 | align="right" | 108,654
 | align="right" | 5.35
 |-
 |1939
 | align="right" | 44,750
 | align="right" | 3.10
 |-
 |1940
 | align="right" | 41,275
 | align="right" | 2.72
 |-
 |1941
 | align="right" | 115,484
 | align="right" | 6.10
 |-
 |1942
 | align="right" | 352,560
 | align="right" | 24.90
 |-
 |1943
 | align="right" | 267,826
 | align="right" | 22.40
 |-
 |1944
 | align="right" | 114,481
 | align="right" | 9.20
 |-
 |1945
 | align="right" | 81,917
 | align="right" | 5.95
 |-
 |1946
 | align="right" | 30,715
 | align="right" | 2.20
 |-
 |1947
 | align="right" | 66,830
 | align="right" | 3.59
 |-
 |1948
 | align="right" | 50,659
 | align="right" | 2.28
 |-
 |1949
 | align="right" | 29,350
 | align="right" | 1.21
 |-
 |1950
 | align="right" | 24,511
 | align="right" | 0.95
 |-
 |1951
 | align="right" | 22,466
 | align="right" | 0.92
 |-
 |1952
 | align="right" | 20,643
 | align="right" | 0.84
 |-
 |1953
 | align="right" | 9,628
 | align="right" | 0.67
 |-
 |1954
 | align="right" | 8,358
 | align="right" | 0.69
 |-
 |1955
 | align="right" | 4,842
 | align="right" | 0.53
 |-
 |1956
 | align="right" | 3,164
 | align="right" | 0.40
 |-
 !Total
 |1,606,748
 | align="right" | 8.88
|}

== Gulag administrators ==
{| class=wikitable
|-
! Name
! Years<ref>[http://www.statearchive.ru/470 History of Gulag in 7 Volumes. Volume 2: Structure and Personnel] documents, ed. [[Nikita Petrov|Petrov N. V.]] [[State Archive of the Russian Federation]], 2004 {{in lang|ru}}</ref><ref>[http://www.memo.ru/history/nkvd/kto/centr.htm The Heads of the Central Committee of NKVD] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111021040407/http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/kto/centr.htm |date=October 21, 2011 }} [[Nikita Petrov|Petrov N. V.]], Sorokyn K. V. ''Who Headed NKVD 1934—1941'' Moscow: [[Memorial (society)|Memorial]], 1999, 504 pages. {{ISBN|5-7870-0032-3}}</ref><ref>[http://istmat.info/node/38978 Lubyanka. VCheka — KGB. Documents 1917–1960] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201213222752/http://istmat.info/node/38978 |date=December 13, 2020 }} Moscow: International Democracy Fund, 1997. {{ISBN|5-89511-004-5}}</ref>
|-
|[[Teodors Eihmans|Feodor (Teodors) Ivanovich Eihmans]]
| April 25, 1930 – June 16, 1930
|-
|[[Lazar Kogan|Lazar Iosifovich Kogan]]
| June 16, 1930 – June 9, 1932
|-
|[[Matvei Berman|Matvei Davidovich Berman]]
| June 9, 1932 – August 16, 1937
|-
|[[Israel Pliner|Israel Israelevich Pliner]]
| August 16, 1937 – November 16, 1938
|-
|[[Gleb Filaretov|Gleb Vasilievich Filaretov]]
| November 16, 1938 – February 18, 1939
|-
|[[Vasili Chernyshev|Vasili Vasilievich Chernyshev]]
| February 18, 1939 – February 26, 1941
|-
|[[Victor Nasedkin|Victor Grigorievich Nasedkin]]
| February 26, 1941 – September 2, 1947
|-
|[[Georgy Dobrynin|Georgy Prokopievich Dobrynin]]
| September 2, 1947 – January 31, 1951
|-
|[[Ivan Ilich Dolgikh]]
| January 31, 1951 – October 5, 1954
|-
|[[Sergei Yegorovich Yegorov]]
| October 5, 1954 – April 4, 1956
|}

== Conditions ==
Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact of broader events (World War II, countrywide [[Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR|famines]] and shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large numbers of prisoners) and the type of crime committed. Instead of being used for economic gain, [[political prisoner]]s were typically given the worst work or were dumped into the less productive parts of the gulag. For example [[Victor Herman]], in his memoirs, compares the {{ill|Burepolom|ru|Буреполом}} and the {{ill|Nuksha|ru|Нукша}} 2 camps, which were both near [[Kirov, Kirov Oblast|Vyatka]].<ref>[http://www.jamestown.org/getman_paintings.php?painting_id=29 The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman]  {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071127121250/http://www.jamestown.org/getman_paintings.php?painting_id=29 |date=November 27, 2007 }}</ref><ref name=Thurston>{{cite book |last1=Thurston |first1=Robert W. |title=Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941 |publisher=Yale University Press |pages=102–104}}</ref>

In Burepolom there were roughly 3,000 prisoners, all non-political, in the central compound. They could walk around at will, were lightly guarded, had unlocked barracks with mattresses and pillows, and watched western movies{{clarify|date=October 2022|reason=Western as in Western European/American or western as in the genre with cowboys?}}. However Nuksha 2, which housed serious criminals and political prisoners, featured guard towers with machine guns and locked barracks.<ref name="Thurston" /> In some camps prisoners were only permitted to send one letter a year and were not allowed to have photos of loved ones.<ref>{{cite web|date=2017-12-29|title=Stalin's legacy lives on in city that slaves built – archive, 1994|url=http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/29/stalin-russia-soviet-union-gulag-norilsk|access-date=2021-04-12|website=the Guardian}}</ref>

Some prisoners were released early if they displayed good performance.<ref name="Thurston" /> There were several productive activities for prisoners in the camps. For example, in early 1935, a course in livestock raising was held for prisoners at a [[Sovkhoz|state farm]]; those who took it had their workday reduced to four hours.<ref name="Thurston" /> During that year the professional theater group in the camp complex gave 230 performances of plays and concerts to over 115,000 spectators.<ref name="Thurston" /> Camp newspapers also existed.<ref name="Thurston" />

[[Andrei Vyshinsky]], chief procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memorandum to [[NKVD]] chief [[Nikolai Yezhov]] in 1938, during the [[Great Purge]], which stated:<ref>[[Jonathan Brent|Brent, Jonathan]]. 2008. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20090224230330/http://atlasandco.com/images/uploads/samples/pdf/InsideStalinArchives-web.pdf Introduction]." Pp. 1–18 in ''Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia.'' Atlas & Co. {{ISBN|0-9777433-3-0}}. Archived from the [http://atlasandco.com/images/uploads/samples/pdf/InsideStalinArchives-web.pdf original] on February 24, 2009. p. 12.</ref>

<blockquote>Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and lice-ridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food…they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.</blockquote>

According to prisoner [[Yevgenia Ginzburg]], Gulag inmates could tell when Yezhov was no longer in charge as one day the conditions relaxed. A few days later Beria's name appeared in official prison notices.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Getty |first1=J. Arch |title=Origins of the Great Purges |date=1985 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=189}}</ref>

In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition allowing the fulfilment of construction and production plans handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet [[production quota]]), they instituted a number of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments (from 1950 onward), cuts of individual sentences, general early-release schemes for norm fulfilment and overfulfilment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946 onward), preferential treatment, sentence reduction and privileges for the most productive workers ([[Udarnik|shock workers]] or [[Stakhanovite movement|Stakhanovites]] in Soviet parlance).<ref name="borodkin">[[Leonid Borodin|Borodkin, Leonid]], and Simon Ertz. 2005. "Forced Labor and the Need for Motivation: Wages and Bonuses in the Stalinist Camp System." ''Comparative Economic Studies'' 47(2):418–36.</ref><ref name=Thurston/>

Inmates were used as camp guards and could purchase camp newspapers as well as [[bond (finance)|bond]]s. [[Robert W. Thurston]] writes that this was "at least an indication that they were still regarded as participants in society to some degree."<ref name=Thurston/> Sports teams, particularly [[soccer|football]] teams, were set up by the prison authorities.<ref>Maddox, S. (2018). Gulag Football: Competitive and Recreational Sport in Stalin's System of Forced Labor. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 19(3), 509–536.</ref>

[[File:Shack from Gulag - Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.JPG|thumb|A shack in a prison camp – a reconstruction in the [[Museum of the Occupation of Latvia]]. The number of prisoners confined to each shack is not stated]]

Boris Sulim, a former prisoner who had worked in the Omsuchkan camp, close to [[Magadan]], when he was a teenager stated:<ref>{{Cite book|last=Remnick|first=David|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dEvoAgAAQBAJ|title=Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire|date=2014-04-02|publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-8041-7358-2|page=425}}</ref>

<blockquote>I was 18 years old and Magadan seemed a very romantic place to me. I got 880 rubles a month and a 3000 ruble installation grant, which was a hell of a lot of money for a kid like me. I was able to give my mother some of it. They even gave me membership in the Komsomol. There was a mining and ore-processing plant which sent out parties to dig for tin. I worked at the radio station which kept contact with the parties. [...] If the inmates were good and disciplined they had almost the same rights as the free workers. They were trusted and they even went to the movies. As for the reason they were in the camps, well, I never poked my nose into details. We all thought the people were there because they were guilty.</blockquote>

Immediately after the [[Operation Barbarossa|German attack on the Soviet Union]] in June 1941 the conditions in camps worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final period and after the end of the war.

Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates, it is important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates:

*''[[Kulak]]s'', ''[[osadnik]]s'', ''[[ukaznik]]s'' (people sentenced for violation of various [[ukase]]s, e.g. [[Law of Spikelets]], decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of [[criminal law]]
*Dedicated criminals: "[[thieves in law]]"
*People sentenced for various [[political prisoner|political]] and religious reasons.

=== Gulag and famine (1932–1933) ===
The [[Soviet famine of 1932–1933]] swept across many different regions of the Soviet Union. During this time, it is estimated that around six to seven million people starved to death.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Khlevniuk|first1=Oleg|title=The History of the Gulag|date=2004|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|page=55}}</ref> On 7 August 1932, a new decree drafted by Stalin ([[Law of Spikelets]]) specified a minimum sentence of ten years or execution for theft from collective farms or of cooperative property. Over the next few months, prosecutions rose fourfold. A large share of cases prosecuted under the law were for the theft of small quantities of grain worth less than fifty rubles. The law was later relaxed on 8 May 1933.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/persa/010fulltext.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170307204130/https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/persa/010fulltext.pdf |archive-date=2017-03-07 |url-status=live|title=Theft Under Stalin: A Property Rights Analysis|last=Gorlizki|first=Yoram |date=28 June 2001 |access-date=7 March 2017}}</ref> Overall, during the first half of 1933, prisons saw more new incoming inmates than the three previous years combined.

Prisoners in the camps faced harsh working conditions. One Soviet report stated that, in early 1933, up to 15% of the prison population in [[Soviet Uzbekistan]] died monthly. During this time, prisoners were getting around {{convert|300|Cal|kJ}} worth of food a day. Many inmates attempted to flee, causing an upsurge in coercive and violent measures. Camps were directed "not to spare bullets".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Khlevniuk|first1=Oleg |title=The History of the Gulag|date=2004|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|page=61}}</ref>

=== Social conditions ===
{{More citations needed section|date=February 2014}}

The convicts in such camps were actively involved in all kinds of labor with one of them being [[logging]]. The working territory of logging presented by itself a square and was surrounded by forest clearing. Thus, all attempts to exit or escape from it were well observed from the four towers set at each of its corners.

Locals who captured a [[Fugitive|runaway]] were given rewards.<ref>"[http://www.jamestown.org/aboutus/getmanpaintings/getmancatalog/ Nikolai Getman: The Gulag Collection] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120513172402/http://www.jamestown.org/aboutus/getmanpaintings/getmancatalog/ |date=May 13, 2012 }}"</ref> It is also said that camps in colder areas were less concerned with finding escaped prisoners as they would die anyhow from the severely cold winters. In such cases prisoners who did escape without getting shot were often found dead kilometres away from the camp.

== Geography ==
{{Further|List of Gulag camps}}
[[File:Talkessel von Werchojansk.JPG|thumb|Siberian [[taiga]] in the river valley near [[Verkhoyansk]]. The lowest temperature recorded there was −68°C (−90°F).]]
[[File:Ru200008020027.jpg|thumb|upright|Part of 'Project 503' to build a railroad from [[Salekhard]] to [[Igarka]] near [[Turukhansk]] on the [[Yenisey]]]]
{{More citations needed section|date=September 2007}}In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen primarily for the isolated conditions involved. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. The site on the [[Solovetsky Islands]] in the [[White Sea]] is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy, taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918.<ref name="Applebaum 2003" /> The [[colloquial]] name for the islands, "[[Solovki prison camp|Solovki]]", entered the [[vernacular]] as a [[synonym]] for the labor camp in general. It was presented to the world as an example of the new Soviet method for "re-education of [[class enemy|class enemies]]" and reintegrating them through labor into Soviet society. Initially the inmates, largely Russian [[intelligentsia]], enjoyed relative freedom within the natural confinement of the islands.<ref name=Yedlin>{{cite book|last=Yedlin|first=Tova|title=Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography|year=1999|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-275-96605-8|page=188 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Zxt5_vI_ozcC&pg=PA188}}</ref>

Local newspapers and magazines were published. Even some scientific research was carried out, e.g., a local botanical garden was maintained but unfortunately later lost completely. Eventually, Solovki turned into an ordinary Gulag camp. Some historians maintain that it was a pilot camp of this type. In 1929, [[Maxim Gorky]] visited the camp and published an apology for it. The report of Gorky's trip to Solovki was included in the cycle of impressions titled "Po Soiuzu Sovetov", Part V, subtitled "Solovki." In the report, Gorky wrote that "camps such as 'Solovki' were absolutely necessary."<ref name=Yedlin/>

With the new emphasis on Gulag as the means of concentrating cheap labor, new camps were then constructed throughout the Soviet sphere of influence, wherever the economic task at hand dictated their existence, or was designed specifically to avail itself of them, such as the [[White Sea–Baltic Canal]] or the [[Baikal–Amur Mainline]], including facilities in big cities — parts of the famous [[Moscow Metro]] and the [[Moscow State University]] new campus were built by forced labor. Many more projects during the rapid industrialisation of the 1930s, [[World War II|war-time]] and post-war periods were fulfilled on the backs of convicts. The activity of Gulag camps spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry. Gorky organized in 1933 a trip of 120 writers and artists to the White Sea–Baltic Canal, 36 of them wrote a propaganda book about the construction published in 1934 and destroyed in 1937.

The majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia (the best known clusters are ''[[Sevvostlag]]'' (''The North-East Camps'') along [[Kolyma]] river and ''[[Norillag]]'' near [[Norilsk]]) and in the southeastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the [[steppe]]s of [[Kazakhstan]] (''[[Luglag]]'', ''[[Steplag]]'', ''[[Peschanlag]]''). A detailed map was made by the Memorial Foundation.<ref>Map of Gulag, made by the Memorial Foundation on: [https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.g-to-g.com/picts/user/repressed/mapgulag_1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.g-to-g.com/showpict.php%3Fpict%3D/repressed/mapgulag_1.jpg%26at%3DCorrective%2520Labor%2520Camps%2520%28GULAG%29%2520map%2520%281:%252025%2520000%2520000%29%2520-%2520by%2520Magazine%2520Map%2520and%2520Ryazan%2520Memorial%2520Society%26caption%3DCorrective%2520Labor%2520Camps%2520%28GULAG%29%2520map%2520%281:%252025%2520000%2520000%29%253CBR%253Eby%2520Magazine%2520Map%2520and%2520Ryazan%2520Memorial%2520Society&usg=__HktMeLxUyIicCykfQtiNhzBMdvI=&h=1020&w=1516&sz=150&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=22GAI-e-k3ouhM:&tbnh=147&tbnw=227&ei=M0XqTa3EFISV8QPN7-WPAQ&prev=/search%3Fq%3DGulag%2Bmap%26hl%3Dfr%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:fr:official%26biw%3D1108%26bih%3D615%26gbv%3D2%26tbm%3Disch&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=795&vpy=97&dur=4204&hovh=184&hovw=274&tx=153&ty=97&page=1&ndsp=13&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0&biw=1108&bih=615].</ref>

These were vast and sparsely inhabited regions with no roads or sources of food, but rich in minerals and other natural resources, such as timber. The construction of the roads was assigned to the inmates of specialised railway camps. Camps were generally spread throughout the entire Soviet Union, including the European parts of Russia, [[Belarus]], and [[Ukraine]]. 

There were several camps outside the Soviet Union, in [[Czechoslovakia]], Hungary, Poland, and [[Mongolia]], which were under the direct control of the Gulag.{{cn|date=November 2023}}

Throughout the [[history of the Soviet Union]], there were at least 476 separate camp administrations.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/gulag3.htm |title=Система исправительно-трудовых лагерей в СССР |publisher=Memo.ru |access-date=January 6, 2009}}</ref><ref name="Ivanova 2000">{{cite book |last1=Ivanova |first1=Galina |last2=Flath |first2=Carol |last3=Raleigh |first3=Donald |title=Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System |year=2000 |publisher=M.E. Sharpe |location=London |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q3y8D69IyG4C&pg=PA188 |isbn=978-0-7656-0426-2 |page=188}}</ref> The Russian researcher Galina Ivanova stated that,<ref name="Ivanova 2000" />

<blockquote>to date, Russian historians have discovered and described 476 camps that existed at different times on the territory of the USSR. It is well known that practically every one of them had several branches, many of which were quite large. In addition to the large numbers of camps, there were no less than 2,000 colonies. It would be virtually impossible to reflect the entire mass of Gulag facilities on a map that would also account for the various times of their existence.</blockquote>

Since many of these existed only for short periods, the number of camp administrations at any given point was lower. It peaked in the early 1950s when there were more than 100 camp administrations across the Soviet Union. Most camp administrations oversaw several single camp units, some as many as dozens or even hundreds.<ref name="Anne Applebaum — Inside the Gulag">[http://www.anneapplebaum.com/communism/2000/06_15_nyrb_gulag.html Anne Applebaum — Inside the Gulag]  {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081015012139/http://www.anneapplebaum.com/communism/2000/06_15_nyrb_gulag.html |date=October 15, 2008 }}</ref> The infamous complexes were those at [[Kolyma]], [[Norilsk]], and [[Vorkuta]], all in arctic or subarctic regions. However, prisoner mortality in Norilsk in most periods was actually lower than across the camp system as a whole.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817939423_75.pdf |title=Coercion versus Motivation: Forced Labor in Norilsk |access-date=January 6, 2009 |archive-date=December 3, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081203230839/http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817939423_75.pdf }}</ref>

==Personnel==
{|  style="width:100%; border:1px solid #8888aa; background:#fff; padding:5px; font-size:95%; margin:0 12px 12px 0; text-align:center; "
|- style="background:#ccc;"
! 
! colspan="2" |Higher Operational Personnel 
! colspan="3" |Senior Operational Personnel  
! colspan="3" |Middle Operational Personnel 
! colspan="2" |Junior Operational Personnel  
! colspan="1" |Enlisted Personnel 

|-  style="text-align:center;
! RANK INSIGNIA 1936-1943
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936вс2.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936вс1.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936срс3.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936срс2.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936срс1.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936сс3.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936сс2.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936сс1.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936мс3.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936мс2.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
| [[File:ГУЛАГ1936мс.png|50px|петлица ГУЛАГ]]
|-  style="text-align:center;
| '''Command category'''
| '''3'''
| '''4'''
| '''5'''
| '''6'''
| '''7'''
| '''8'''
| '''9'''
| '''10'''
| '''11'''
| '''12'''
| '''''None'''''
|-  style="text-align:center;
! ''[[Military ranks of the Soviet Union (1935–1940)|Rank equivalent]]''
| [[Komdiv]]
| [[Kombrig]]
| Colonel
| Major
| Captain
| Senior Lieutenant
| Lieutenant
| [[Starshina]]
| Junior Platoon Commander
| Section Commander
| Red Army Man
|-
|'''''Source:''''' <ref>[http://www.opoccuu.com/gulag.htm ''Знаки различия ГУЛАГа''] Retrieved 2024-12-26.</ref>
|-
|}
[[File:Форма ГУЛАГ 1936-1943.png|right|thumb|Gulag personnel uniforms 1936-1943.]]
Command Category 1 (head of the Gulag) was a Commissar of State Security of the 2nd class; Command Category 2 (deputy head of the Gulag) was a Commissar of State Security of the 3rd class. They wore the uniform and insignia of the [[NKVD]]. When the GULAG was transferred to the [[NKGB]] in 1943, the GULAG personnel began to use NKGB  ranks and distinctions.
*7 - Military personnel of the guard units wore a silver triangle on the collar.
*9 - Technical-administrative and political personnel of the guard units wore a red triangle on the collar.
* 10 - Technical personnel wore crossed hammers and wrenches on the collar.

== Special institutions ==
* There were separate camps or zones within camps for juveniles ({{lang|ru|малолетки}}, {{transliteration|ru|maloletki}}), the disabled (in [[Spassk]]), and mothers ({{lang|ru|мамки}}, {{transliteration|ru|mamki}}) with babies.
* [[Traitor of Motherland Family Member|Family members of "Traitors of the Motherland"]] ({{lang|ru|ЧСИР, член семьи изменника Родины}}, {{transliteration|ru|ChSIR, Chlyen sem'i izmennika Rodini}}) were placed under a special category of repression.
* Secret research laboratories known as ''[[Sharashka]]'' ({{lang|ru|шарашка}}) held arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, where they anonymously developed new technologies and also conducted basic research.

== Historiography ==

=== Origins and functions of the Gulag ===
According to historian Stephen Barnes, the origins and functions of the Gulag can be looked at in four major ways:<ref>{{Cite book |last=Barnes |first=Stephen A. |title=Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society |publisher=Princeton University Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-691-15112-0 |location=Princeton |pages=7–16}}</ref>

* The first approach was championed by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|Alexander Solzhenitsyn]], and is what Barnes terms the '''[[moral explanation]]'''. According to this view, Soviet ideology eliminated the moral checks on the darker side of human nature – providing convenient justifications for violence and evil-doing on all levels: from political decision-making to personal relations. 
* Another approach is the '''political explanation''', according to which the Gulag (along with executions) was primarily a means for eliminating the regime's perceived political enemies (this understanding is favoured by historian [[Robert Conquest]], amongst others). 
* The '''economic explanation''', in turn as set out by historian Anne Applebaum, argues that the Soviet regime instrumentalised the Gulag for its economic development projects. Although never economically profitable, it was perceived as such right up to Stalin's death in 1953.
* Finally, Barnes advances his own, fourth explanation, which situates the Gulag in the context of modern projects of ''''cleansing'''<nowiki/>' the social body of hostile elements, through spatial isolation and physical elimination of individuals defined as harmful.

[[Hannah Arendt]] argues that as part of a [[totalitarian]] system of government, the camps of the Gulag system were experiments in "total domination." In her view, the goal of a totalitarian system was not merely to establish limits on liberty, but rather to abolish liberty entirely in service of its ideology. She argues that the Gulag system was not merely political repression because the system survived and grew long after Stalin had wiped out all serious political resistance. Although the various camps were initially filled with criminals and political prisoners, eventually they were filled with prisoners who were arrested irrespective of anything relating to them as individuals, but rather only on the basis of their membership in some ever shifting category of imagined threats to the state.<ref name="ReferenceA">[[Hannah Arendt|Arendt, Hannah]]. 1985. ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]''. [[Harcourt (publisher)|Harcourt]].</ref>{{Rp|437–59}}

She also argues that the function of the Gulag system was not truly economic. Although the Soviet government deemed them all "forced labor" camps, this in fact highlighted that the work in the camps was deliberately pointless, since all Russian workers could be subject to forced labor.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}} The only real economic purpose they typically served was financing the cost of their own supervision. Otherwise the work performed was generally useless, either by design or made that way through extremely poor planning and execution; some workers even preferred more difficult work if it was actually productive. She differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps".<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}}

In authentic labor camps, inmates worked in "relative freedom and are sentenced for limited periods." Concentration camps had extremely high mortality rates and but were still "essentially organized for labor purposes." Annihilation camps were those where the inmates were "systematically wiped out through starvation and neglect." She criticizes other commentators' conclusion that the purpose of the camps was a supply of cheap labor. According to her, the Soviets were able to liquidate the camp system without serious economic consequences, showing that the camps were not an important source of labor and were overall economically irrelevant.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|444–5}}

Arendt argues that together with the systematized, arbitrary cruelty inside the camps, this served the purpose of total domination by eliminating the idea that the arrestees had any political or legal rights. Morality was destroyed by maximizing cruelty and by organizing the camps internally to make the inmates and guards complicit. The terror resulting from the operation of the Gulag system caused people outside of the camps to cut all ties with anyone who was arrested or purged and to avoid forming ties with others for fear of being associated with anyone who was targeted. As a result, the camps were essential as the nucleus of a system that destroyed individuality and dissolved all social bonds. Thereby, the system attempted to eliminate any capacity for resistance or self-directed action in the greater population.<ref name="ReferenceA" />{{Rp|437–59}}

=== Archival documents ===
Statistical reports made by the [[OGPU]]–[[NKVD]]–[[Ministry for State Security (USSR)|MGB]]–[[Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union)|MVD]] between the 1930s and 1950s are kept in the [[State Archive of the Russian Federation]] formerly called Central State Archive of the October Revolution (CSAOR). These documents were highly classified and inaccessible. Amid [[glasnost]] and [[democratization]] in the late 1980s, [[Viktor Zemskov]] and other Russian researchers managed to gain access to the documents and published the highly classified statistical data collected by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD and related to the number of the Gulag prisoners, special settlers, etc. In 1995, Zemskov wrote that foreign scientists have begun to be admitted to the restricted-access collection of these documents in the State Archive of the Russian Federation since 1992.<ref name="К вопросу">{{cite journal |last=Земсков|first=Виктор|title=К вопросу о масштабах репрессий в СССР|journal=Социологические исследования|year=1995|issue=9|pages=118–127 |url=http://scepsis.ru/library/id_957.html|access-date=August 20, 2011}}</ref> However, only one historian, namely Zemskov, was admitted to these archives, and later the archives were again "closed", according to Leonid Lopatnikov.<ref name="Лопатников">{{cite journal |last=Лопатников|first=Леонид|title=К дискуссиям о статистике "Большого террора"|journal=Вестник Европы|year=2009|issue=26–27 |url=http://magazines.russ.ru/vestnik/2009/26/ll28.html|access-date=August 20, 2011}}</ref> Pressure from the [[Putin administration]] has exacerbated the difficulties of Gulag researchers.<ref>{{Cite news |last1=Nechepurenko |first1=Ivan |title=Born in Soviet Exile, They Might Die in a Russian One |work=[[The New York Times]] |date=2021-03-13 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/world/europe/russia-stalin-exile.html |issn=0362-4331 |quote=To ensure that the preferred version of history prevailed, the Kremlin has squeezed historians, researchers and rights groups that focus on gulag research and memory. }}</ref>

While considering the issue of reliability of the primary data provided by corrective labor institutions, it is necessary to take into account the following two circumstances. On the one hand, their administration was not interested to understate the number of prisoners in its reports, because it would have automatically led to a decrease in the food supply plan for camps, prisons, and corrective labor colonies. The decrement in food would have been accompanied by an increase in mortality that would have led to wrecking of the vast production program of the Gulag. On the other hand, overstatement of data of the number of prisoners also did not comply with departmental interests, because it was fraught with the same (i.e., impossible) increase in production tasks set by planning bodies. In those days, people were highly responsible for non-fulfilment of plan. It seems that a resultant of these objective departmental interests was a sufficient degree of reliability of the reports.<ref name="Репрессии">{{cite journal|last=Земсков|first=Виктор|title=Политические репрессии в СССР (1917–1990 гг.).|journal=Россия XXI|year=1994 |issue=1–2|pages=107–124|url=http://kob.rv.ua/doki-dai/dotu/other/zemskov/zemskov_politrepressii(1917-1990).pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120330205748/http://kob.rv.ua/doki-dai/dotu/other/zemskov/zemskov_politrepressii(1917-1990).pdf|archive-date=March 30, 2012|access-date=August 17, 2011}}</ref>

Between 1990 and 1992, the first precise statistical data on the Gulag based on the Gulag archives were published by [[Viktor Zemskov]].<ref name="Rousso, Golsan">{{cite book|last1=Rousso|first1=Henry|author-link1=Henry Rousso|last2=Golsan|first2=Richard|title=Stalinism and nazism: history and memory compared|year=2004|publisher=U of Nebraska Press|isbn=978-0-8032-9000-6|page=92|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CIt7fMp30sAC&pg=PA92 }}</ref> These had been generally accepted by leading Western scholars,<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /><ref name=Ellman_SRS /> despite the fact that a number of inconsistencies were found in this statistics.<ref name= Vishnevsky /> Not all the conclusions drawn by Zemskov based on his data have been generally accepted. Thus, Sergei Maksudov alleged that although literary sources, for example the books of [[Lev Razgon]] or [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], did not envisage the total number of the camps very well and markedly exaggerated their size. On the other hand, Viktor Zemskov, who published many documents by the NKVD and [[KGB]], was far from understanding of the Gulag essence and the nature of socio-political processes in the country. He added that without distinguishing the degree of accuracy and reliability of certain figures, without making a critical analysis of sources, without comparing new data with already known information, Zemskov absolutizes the published materials by presenting them as the ultimate truth. As a result, Maksudov charges that Zemskov's attempts to make generalized statements with reference to a particular document, as a rule, do not hold water.<ref name="Максудов">{{cite journal|last=Максудов|first=Сергей|title=О публикациях в журнале "Социс"|journal=Социологические исследования|year=1995|issue=9|pages=114–118|url=http://scepsis.ru/library/id_956.html|access-date=August 17, 2011}}</ref>
[[File:Frenkel2.jpg|thumb|[[OGPU]] chiefs responsible for construction of the [[White Sea–Baltic Canal]], 1932: right: [[Naftaly Frenkel|Frenkel]]; center: [[Matvei Berman|Berman]]; left: Afanasyev (Head of the southern part of [[Belbaltlag]])]]

In response, Zemskov wrote that the charge that he allegedly did not compare new data with already known information could not be called fair. In his words, the trouble with most western writers is that they do not benefit from such comparisons. Zemskov added that when he tried not to overuse the juxtaposition of new information with "old" one, it was only because of a sense of delicacy, not to once again psychologically traumatize the researchers whose works used incorrect figures, as it turned out after the publication of the statistics by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD.<ref name="К вопросу" />

According to French historian [[Nicolas Werth]], the mountains of the materials of the Gulag archives, which are stored in funds of the [[State Archive of the Russian Federation]] and were being constantly exposed during the last fifteen years, represent only a very small part of bureaucratic prose of immense size left over after the decades of "creativity" by the "dull and reptile" organization managing the Gulag. In many cases, local camp archives, which had been stored in sheds, barracks, or other rapidly disintegrating buildings, simply disappeared in the same way as most of the camp buildings did.<ref name="Werth">{{cite journal|last=Werth|first=Nicolas|title=Der Gulag im Prisma der Archive. Zugänge, Erkenntnisse, Ergebnisse|url=http://dl.oe.dgo-online.org/issues/dl/0706de.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140109222749/http://dl.oe.dgo-online.org/issues/dl/0706de.pdf|archive-date=2014-01-09|journal=Osteuropa|date=June 2007|volume=57|issue=6|pages=9–30}}</ref>

In 2004 and 2005, some archival documents were published in the edition ''Istoriya Stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh — Pervaya Polovina 1950-kh Godov. Sobranie Dokumentov v 7 Tomakh'' (''The History of Stalin's Gulag. From the Late 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s. Collection of Documents in Seven Volumes''), wherein each of its seven volumes covered a particular issue indicated in the title of the volume:

# ''Mass Repression in the USSR'' (''Massovye Repressii v SSSR'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 1. Массовые репрессии в СССР|year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0605-7}}</ref> 
# ''Punitive System. Structure and Cadres'' (''Karatelnaya Sistema. Struktura i Kadry'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 2. Карательная система. Структура и кадры|year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0606-4}}</ref>
# ''Economy of the Gulag'' (''Ekonomika Gulaga'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 3. Экономика Гулага|year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0607-1}}</ref>
# ''The Population of the Gulag. The Number and Conditions of Confinement'' (''Naselenie Gulaga. Chislennost i Usloviya Soderzhaniya'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 4. Население Гулага. Численность и условия содержания|year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0608-8}}</ref>
# ''Specsettlers in the USSR'' (''Specpereselentsy v SSSR'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 5. Спецпереселенцы в СССР|year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия |location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0608-8}}</ref>
# ''Uprisings, Riots, and Strikes of Prisoners'' (''Vosstaniya, Bunty i Zabastovki Zaklyuchyonnykh'');<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 6. Восстания, бунты и забастовки заключенных |year=2004|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0610-1}}</ref> and
# ''Soviet Repressive and Punitive Policy. Annotated Index of Cases of the SA RF'' (''Sovetskaya Pepressivno-karatelnaya Politika i Penitentsiarnaya Sistema. Annotirovanniy Ukazatel Del GA RF'').<ref>{{cite book|title=История сталинского Гулага. Конец 1920–х — первая половина 1950–х годов. Собрание документов в 7 томах. Том 7. Советская репрессивно-карательная политика и пенитенциарная система. Аннотированный указатель дел ГА РФ|year=2005|publisher=Российская политическая энциклопедия|location=Москва|isbn=978-5-8243-0611-8}}</ref>

The edition contains the brief introductions by the two "patriarchs of the Gulag science", [[Robert Conquest]] and [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], and 1,431 documents, the overwhelming majority of which were obtained from funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation.<ref name="Полян">{{cite journal|last=Полян|first=Павел|title=Новые карты архипелага ГУЛАГ|journal=Неприкосновенный запас|year=2006|volume=2|issue=46 |url=http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2006/2/po32.html|pages=277–286|access-date=August 20, 2011}}</ref>

=== History of Gulag population estimates ===
During the decades before the dissolution of the USSR, the debates about the population size of GULAG failed to arrive at generally accepted figures; wide-ranging estimates have been offered,<ref name="Bacon">Edwin Bacon. Glasnost' and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labor around World War II. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 44, No. 6 (1992), pp. 1069–1086</ref> and the bias toward higher or lower side was sometimes ascribed to political views of the particular author.<ref name="Bacon" /> Some of those earlier estimates (both high and low) are shown in the table below.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|+Historical estimates of the GULAG population size (in chronological order)
|-
|'''GULAG population''' ||  '''Year the estimate was made for''' || '''Source''' || '''Methodology'''
|-
|15 million || 1940–42 || Mora & Zwiernag (1945)<ref>Cited in [[David Dallin]] and [[Boris Nicolaevsky]], ''Forced Labor in Soviet Russia'', New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 59-62.</ref> || –
|-
|2.3 million || December 1937 || Timasheff (1948)<ref>N. S. Timasheff. The Postwar Population of the Soviet Union. ''[[American Journal of Sociology]]'', Vol. 54, No. 2 (Sep. 1948), pp. 148–155</ref> || Calculation of disenfranchised population
|-
|Up to 3.5 million || 1941 || Jasny (1951)<ref>Naum Jasny. Labor and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps. ''Journal of Political Economy'', Vol. 59, No. 5 (Oct. 1951), pp. 405–419</ref> || Analysis of the output of the Soviet enterprises run by NKVD
|-
|50 million || total number of persons<br />passed through GULAG|| Solzhenitsyn (1975)<ref name=GARCH>Solzhenitsyn, A. ''The Gulag Archipelago Two'', Harper and Row, 1975. Estimate was through 1953.</ref> || Analysis of various indirect data, <br />including own experience and testimonies of numerous witnesses
|-
|17.6 million || 1942 || [[Anton Antonov-Ovseenko]] (1999)<ref>{{in lang|ru}} ''Beria'' Moscow, ACT, 1999, {{ISBN|5-237-03178-1}}, page 203.</ref> || [[NKVD]] documents<ref>According to [[Anton Antonov-Ovseenko]], "average number of prisoners [in Gulag] was 17.6 million in 1942, which many times exceeds the "declassified" official (forged) data frequently published in press"; the number was taken from an NKVD document dated January 18, 1945. The number of prisoners in 1943 was estimated as 13 million.</ref>
|-
|4–5 million || 1939 || Wheatcroft (1981)<ref>S. G. Wheatcroft. On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929–56. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr. 1981), pp. 265–295</ref> || Analysis of demographic data.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|10.6 million || 1941 || Rosefielde (1981)<ref>Steven Rosefielde. An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour 1929–56. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jan. 1981), pp. 51–87</ref> || Based on data of Mora & Zwiernak and annual mortality.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|5.5–9.5 million || late 1938 || Conquest (1991)<ref>Robert Conquest. Excess Deaths and Camp Numbers: Some Comments. ''Soviet Studies'', Vol. 43, No. 5 (1991), pp. 949–952</ref> || 1937 Census figures, arrest and deaths<br /> estimates, variety of personal and literary sources.{{ref|ros_note|a}}
|-
|4–5 million || every single year || Volkogonov (1990s)<ref name=Rappaport>Rappaport, H. Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion. ABC-CLIO Greenwood. 1999.</ref> ||
|-
|colspan="6" style="text-align: center;" |a.{{note|ros_note}}''Note: Later numbers from Rosefielde, Wheatcroft and Conquest were revised down by the authors themselves.''<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /><ref name="rosenf" />
|}
The [[glasnost]] political reforms in the late 1980s and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, led to the release of a large amount of formerly classified archival documents<ref>Andrea Graziosi. The New Soviet Archival Sources. Hypotheses for a Critical Assessment. ''Cahiers du Monde russe'', Vol. 40, No. 1/2, Archives et nouvelles sources de l'histoiresoviétique, une réévaluation / Assessing the New Soviet Archival Sources (Jan. – Jun. 1999), pp. 13–63</ref> including new demographic and NKVD data.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> Analysis of the official GULAG statistics by Western scholars immediately demonstrated that, despite their inconsistency, they do not support previously published higher estimates.<ref name="Bacon" /> Importantly, the released documents made possible to clarify terminology used to describe different categories of forced labor population, because the use of the terms "forced labor", "GULAG", "camps" interchangeably by early researchers led to significant confusion and resulted in significant inconsistencies in the earlier estimates.<ref name="Bacon" />

Archival studies revealed several components of the NKVD penal system in the Stalinist USSR: prisons, labor camps, labor colonies, as well as various "settlements" (exile) and of non-custodial forced labor.<ref name="GRZ" /> Although most of them fit the definition of forced labor, only labor camps, and labor colonies were associated with punitive forced labor in detention.<ref name="GRZ" /> Forced labor camps ("GULAG camps") were hard regime camps, whose inmates were serving more than three-year terms. As a rule, they were situated in remote parts of the USSR, and labor conditions were extremely hard there. They formed a core of the GULAG system. The inmates of "corrective labor colonies" served shorter terms; these colonies were located in less remote parts of the USSR, and they were run by local NKVD administration.<ref name="GRZ" />

Preliminary analysis of the GULAG camps and colonies statistics (see the chart on the right) demonstrated that the population reached the maximum before the World War II, then dropped sharply, partially due to massive releases, partially due to wartime high mortality, and then was gradually increasing until the end of Stalin era, reaching the global maximum in 1953, when the combined population of GULAG camps and labor colonies amounted to 2,625,000.<ref name="Anatoly Vishnevsky">[http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema05.php "The Total Number of Repressed"], by [[Anatoly Vishnevsky]], Director of the Center for Human Demography and Ecology, [[Russian Academy of Sciences]], {{in lang|ru}}</ref>

The results of these archival studies convinced many scholars, including [[Robert Conquest]]<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> or Stephen Wheatcroft to reconsider their earlier estimates of the size of the GULAG population, although the 'high numbers' of arrested and deaths are not radically different from earlier estimates.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> Although such scholars as Rosefielde or Vishnevsky point at several inconsistencies in archival data with Rosefielde pointing out the archival figure of 1,196,369 for the population of the Gulag and labor colonies combined on December 31, 1936, is less than half the 2.75 million labor camp population given to the Census Board by the NKVD for the 1937 census,<ref>{{cite journal |author=Steven Rosefielde |journal=Communist and Post-Communist Studies |volume=30 |issue=3 |pages=l-33 |date=1997 |url=http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/rosefielde.pdf |title=Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR During the 1930s |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111113035745/http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/rosefielde.pdf |archive-date=November 13, 2011}}</ref><ref name= Vishnevsky>Vishnevsky, Alantoly. Демографические потери от репрессий (The Demographic Loss of Repression), Demoscope Weekly, December 31, 2007, [http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php retrieved] April 13, 2011</ref> it is generally believed that these data provide more reliable and detailed information that the indirect data and literary sources available for the scholars during the Cold War era.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> Although Conquest cited Beria's report to the Politburo of the labor camp numbers at the end of 1938 stating there were almost 7 million prisoners in the labor camps, more than three times the archival figure for 1938 and an official report to Stalin by the Soviet minister of State Security in 1952 stating there were 12 million prisoners in the labor camps.<ref>{{cite web |author=Robert Conquest |url=https://www.bu.edu/iscip/pubseries/PubSeries1conquest.pdf |title=Knowing the Soviet Union: The Historical Dimension |access-date=January 31, 2017 |archive-date=October 18, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121018091358/http://www.bu.edu/iscip/pubseries/PubSeries1conquest.pdf }}</ref>

These data allowed scholars to conclude that during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG ''labor camps'' and 4–5 million passed through the ''labor colonies''.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" /> Thus, these figures reflect the number of convicted persons, and do not take into account the fact that a significant part of Gulag inmates had been convicted more than one time, so the actual number of convicted is somewhat overstated by these statistics.<ref name=Ellman_SRS /> From other hand, during some periods of Gulag history the official figures of GULAG population reflected the camps' capacity, not the actual number of inmates, so the actual figures were 15% higher in, e.g. 1946.<ref name="ConquestGRZ" />

The USSR implemented a number of labor disciplinary measures, due to the lack of productivity of its labour force in the early 1930s. 1.8 million workers were sentenced to 6 months in forced labor with a quarter of their original pay, 3.3 million faced sanctions, and 60k were imprisoned for absentees in 1940 alone. The conditions of Soviet workers worsened in WW2 as 1.3 million were punished in 1942, and 1 million each were punished in subsequent 1943 and 1944 with the reduction of 25% of food rations. Further more, 460 thousand were imprisoned throughout these years.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939423_23.pdf|author=Andrei Sokolov|publisher=Hoover Press
|title=Forced Labor in Soviet Industry: The End of the 1930s to the Mid-1950s An Overview|date=January 2003}}</ref>

== Impact ==
{{More citations needed section|date=December 2010}}

=== Culture ===
<!-- this section is for the general influence on the Soviet culture of **Gulag itself**, not a list of publications about Gulag -->

The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous.

The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern [[Russian folklore]]. Many songs by the authors-performers known as the [[Bard (Soviet Union)|''bards'']], most notably [[Vladimir Vysotsky]] and [[Alexander Galich (writer)|Alexander Galich]], neither of whom ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and glorified the life of "[[wiktionary:zek|zeks]]". Words and phrases which originated in the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the 1960s and 1970s.
The memoirs of [[Alexander Dolgun]], [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], [[Varlam Shalamov]] and [[Yevgenia Ginzburg]], among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned.

Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in places like [[Magadan]], where, for example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to Moscow's and [[Eddie Rosner]] played jazz.

==== Literature ====
Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners have been published:
* [[Varlam Shalamov]]'s ''[[The Kolyma Tales|Kolyma Tales]]'' is a short-story collection, cited by most major works on the Gulag, and widely considered one of the main Soviet accounts.
* [[Victor Kravchenko (defector)|Victor Kravchenko]] wrote ''[[I Chose Freedom (book)|I Chose Freedom]]'' after defecting to the United States in 1944. As a leader of industrial plants he had encountered forced labor camps in across the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1941. He describes a visit to one camp at [[Kemerovo]] on the [[Tom River]] in Siberia. Factories paid a fixed sum to the [[KGB]] for every convict they employed.
* [[Anatoli Granovsky]] wrote ''I Was an NKVD Agent'' after [[Defection|defecting]] to Sweden in 1946 and included his experiences seeing gulag prisoners as a young boy, as well as his experiences as a prisoner himself in 1939. Granovsky's father was sent to the gulag in 1937.
* [[Julius Margolin]]'s book ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'' was finished in 1947, but it was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the time, immediately after World War II.
* [[Gustaw Herling-Grudziński]] wrote ''A World Apart'', which was translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an introduction by [[Bertrand Russell]] in 1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet communist system.
* [[Victor Herman]]'s book ''Coming out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life''. Herman experienced firsthand many places, prisons, and experiences that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was able to reference in only passing or through brief second hand accounts.
* [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]'s book ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' was not the first literary work about labor camps. His previous book on the subject, "[[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]", about a typical day in the life of a Gulag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, ''[[Novy Mir]]'' (''New World''), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. ''[[The First Circle]]'', an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the ''[[Marfino]]'' ''[[sharashka]]'' or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968.
* [[Slavomir Rawicz]]'s book "[[The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom]]": In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk.
* [[János Rózsás]], a Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn,<ref>{{Cite book | url=https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/one-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich-inscribed-first-edition-alexander-solzhenitsyn-signed/ | title=One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich}}</ref> wrote many books and articles on the issue of the Gulag.
*[[Zoltan Szalkai]], a Hungarian documentary filmmaker, made several films about gulag camps.
* [[Karlo Štajner]], a Croatian communist who was active in the former [[Kingdom of Yugoslavia]] and the manager of the [[Comintern Publishing House]] in Moscow 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home after being accused of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the next 20 years in camps from Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–[[Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia|Yugoslavia]]n political normalization he was re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in 1956 and spent the rest of his life in [[Zagreb]], [[Croatia]]. He wrote an impressive book titled ''7000 days in Siberia''.
* ''Dancing Under the Red Star'' by [[Karl Tobien]] ({{ISBN|1-4000-7078-3}}) tells the story of Margaret Werner, an athletic girl who moves to Russia right before Stalin came to power. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who was held in the Gulag to tell about it.
* ''Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag'' ({{ISBN|0-394-49497-0}}), by a member of the US Embassy, and ''I Was a Slave in Russia'' {{awrap|({{ISBN|0-8159-5800-5}}),}} an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. They were interned due to their American citizenship for about eight years c. 1946–55.
* [[Yevgenia Ginzburg]] wrote two famous books about her remembrances, ''Journey Into the Whirlwind'' and ''Within the Whirlwind''.
*[[Savić Marković Štedimlija]], a pro-[[Croatia]]n Montenegrin ideologist. Caught in Austria by the [[Red Army]] in 1945, he was sent to the USSR and spent ten years in the Gulag. After his release, Marković wrote his autobiographical account in two volumes titled ''Ten years in Gulag'' (''Deset godina u Gulagu'', Matica crnogorska, Podgorica, Montenegro 2004).
* [[Anița Nandriș-Cudla]]'s book, ''20 Years in Siberia [20 de ani în Siberia]'' is the own life's account written by a Romanian peasant woman from Bucovina (Mahala village near Cernăuți) who managed to survive the harsh, forced labor system together with her three sons. Together with her husband and her three underage children, she was deported from Mahala village to the Soviet Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the Polar Circle, without a trial or even a communicated accusation. The same night of June 12 to 13, 1941, (that is, just before Germany's invasion of the USSR), overall 602 fellow villagers were arrested and deported, without any prior notice. Her mother received the same sentence but was spared from deportation after the fact that she was a paraplegic was acknowledged by the authorities. It was later discovered that the reason for her deportation and forced labor was the fake and nonsensical claim that, allegedly, her husband had been a mayor in the Romanian administration, a politician and a rich peasant, none of the latter of which was true. Separated from her husband, she brought up the three boys, overcame [[typhus]], [[scorbutus]], [[malnutrition]], extreme cold and harsh toils, to later return to Bucovina after rehabilitation. Her manuscript was written toward the end of her life, in the simple and direct language of a peasant with three years of public school education, and was secretly brought to Romania before the fall of Romanian communism, in 1982. Her manuscript was first published in 1991. Her deportation was shared mainly with Romanians from Bucovina and Basarabia, Finnish and Polish prisoners, as token proof to show that Gulag labor camps had also been used for the shattering/ extermination of the natives in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
* [[Frantsishak Alyakhnovich]] – Solovki prisoner
* [[Blagoy Popov]], a Bulgarian communist and a defendant in the [[Reichstag fire|Leipzig trial]], along with [[Georgi Dimitrov]] and [[Vasil Tanev]], was arrested in 1937 during the [[Stalinist purges]] and spent seventeen years in [[Norillag]]. Popov was released in 1954, after the death of Stalin, and returned to [[Bulgaria]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери |last=Попов |first=Благой |publisher=Издателство "Изток-Запад" |year=2012 |isbn=978-619-152-025-1 |location=София |pages=37, 57}}</ref> He wrote his autobiographical account in the book ''From the Leipzig trial to the Siberia camps'' (''От Лайпцигския процес в Сибирските лагери'', Изток-Запад, София, България, 2012 {{ISBN|978-619-152-025-1}}).
* [[Mkrtich Armen]], an Armenian writer who was imprisoned in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1945, published a collection of his memories under the title "They Ordered to Give You" in 1964.
* [[Gurgen Mahari]], an Armenian writer and poet, who was arrested in 1936, released in 1947, arrested again in 1948 and sent into Siberian exile as an "unreliable type" until 1954, wrote "Barbed Wires in Blossom", a novella based largely on his personal experiences in a Soviet gulag.
* [[Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir]] is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918–1999), a Soviet Engineer and eventual head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946.

=== Colonization ===
[[File:Vorkuta r.jpg|thumb|The city of [[Vorkuta]]]]
Soviet [[wikisource:Об использовании труда уголовно-заключенных|state documents]] show that the goals of the gulag included colonization of sparsely populated remote areas and exploiting its resources using forced labor. In 1929, [[OGPU]] was given the task to colonize these areas.<ref name="Petrov10"/> To this end, the notion of "[[free settlement]]" was introduced. On 12 April 1930 [[Genrikh Yagoda]] wrote to the OGPU Commission:

{{blockquote|The camps must be transformed into colonizing settlements, without waiting for the end of periods of confinement... Here is my plan: to turn all the prisoners into a settler population until they have served their sentences.<ref name="Petrov10">{{cite book |last=Petrov| first=Nikita|author-link=Nikita Petrov| chapter=The GULag as Instrument of the USSR's Punitive System 1917–39 |title=Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Index on the Italian Victims of Repression in the USSR|editor-last1=Dundovich| editor-first1=Elena |editor-last2=Gori| editor-first2=Francesca |editor-last3=Guercetti| editor-first3=Emanuela |isbn=978-88-07-99058-8 |oclc=803610496| year=2003| pages=8–10| publisher=Feltrinelli Editore|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X2FGqiDKFysC&pg=PA10 }}</ref>}}

When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms, they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение, ''volnoye poseleniye'') outside the confinement of the camp. They were known as "free settlers" ({{Langx|ru|вольнопоселенцы|translit=volnoposelentsy|label=none}}; not to be confused with the term {{Langx|ru|ссыльнопоселенцы|translit=ssyl'noposelentsy|label=none}}, "[[Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union|exile settlers]]"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land in the general vicinity of the place of confinement.

The gulag inherited this approach from the [[katorga]] system.

It is estimated that of the 40,000 people collecting state pensions in [[Vorkuta Gulag|Vorkuta]], 32,000 are trapped former gulag inmates, or their descendants.<ref>Robert Conquest, Paul Hollander: Political violence: belief, behavior, and legitimation p.55, Palgrave Macmillan;(2008) {{ISBN|978-0-230-60646-3}}</ref>

=== Economics ===
According to a 2024 study, areas near gulag camps that held a larger share of educated elites among its prisoner population have subsequently been characterized by greater economic growth.<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal |last1=Toews |first1=Gerhard |last2=Vézina |first2=Pierre-Louis |date=2025 |title=Enemies of the People |url=https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20220231 |journal=American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics |language=en |volume=17 |issue=1 |pages=310–342 |doi=10.1257/mac.20220231 |issn=1945-7707|url-access=subscription }}</ref> According to the authors, it demonstrates long-run persistence of human capital across generations.<ref name=":2" />

=== Life after a term was served ===
Persons who served a term in a camp or prison were restricted from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous imprisonment was a triable offence. Persons who served terms as "politicals" were nuisances for "[[First Department]]s" ({{Langx|ru|Первый Отдел|translit=Pervyj Otdel|label=none}}, outlets of the [[secret police]] at all enterprises and institutions), because former "politicals" had to be monitored.{{Citation needed|date=March 2023}}

Many people who were released from camps were restricted from [[101st kilometre|settling in larger cities]].

== Memorialization ==
[[File:Gulag ALZHIR in Astana, Kazakhstan, Monument to the victims 03.jpg|thumb|Memorial in Astana, Kazakhstan, dedicated to the wives of Akmola Labor Camp prisoners.]]
=== Gulag memorials ===
[[File:State Museum of Gulag History (2017-12-12) - 59.jpg|thumb|right|Map of Stalin's Gulag camps in Gulag Museum in Moscow]]
[[File:GulagMemorial.jpg|thumb|Memorial in [[St. Petersburg, Russia|St. Petersburg]]]]
<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Magadan, 09.06 019.jpg|right|thumb|''[[Mask of Sorrow]]'' monument in the Russian Far Eastern city of [[Magadan]], in memory of the Gulag prisoners who died in the [[Dalstroi]] [[labor camps]]]] -->
{{Main|Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions}}
Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials to the victims of the Gulag made of boulders from the [[Solovki camp]] — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. Moscow's memorial is on [[Lubyanka Square]], the site of the headquarters of the NKVD. People gather at these memorials every year on the [[Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions|Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30)]].

=== Gulag Museum ===
[[File:GULag 2 Museum Moscow Russia.jpg|thumb|Gulag Museum in Moscow, founded in 2001 by historian [[Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko]]]]

Moscow has the State Gulag Museum whose first director was [[Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko]].<ref name="Гальперович">{{cite web |last=Гальперович |first=Данила |title=Директор Государственного музея ГУЛАГа Антон Владимирович Антонов-Овсеенко |work=Радио Свобода |url=http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/transcript/2085640.html |publisher=[[Radio Liberty]] |access-date=August 19, 2011|date=June 27, 2010 |archive-date=November 23, 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111123080758/http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/transcript/2085640.html}}</ref><ref name="Banerji">{{cite book|last=Banerji|first=Arup|title=Writing history in the Soviet Union: making the past work|year=2008|publisher=[[Berghahn Books]]|isbn=978-81-87358-37-4|page=271|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NqJS-H-odnYC&pg=PA271}}</ref><ref name="Museum">{{cite web |title=About State Gulag Museum|url=http://www.gmig.ru/o-muzee|publisher=The State Gulag Museum|access-date=August 19, 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180625124244/http://www.gmig.ru/o-muzee|archive-date=June 25, 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://thegulag.org/|title=Gulag – Museum on Communism|access-date=December 5, 2012|archive-date=September 21, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220921212148/http://www.thegulag.org/}}</ref> In 2015, another museum dedicated to the Gulag was opened in Moscow.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34675413 |title=New Russian Gulag museum recreates Soviet terror |work=BBC |date=October 30, 2015 }}</ref>

== See also ==
* [[Katorga]]
* [[List of concentration and internment camps#Russia and the Soviet Union]]
* [[List of Gulag camps]]
* [[Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin]]
* [[Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union]]
* [[Human rights in the Soviet Union]]
* [[Memorial (society)]] (a Russian [[human rights]] organization)

== Notes ==
{{Notelist}}

== References ==
{{Reflist|30em}}

== Further reading ==
{{See also|Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union#Terror, famine and the Gulag}}
* [[Anne Applebaum|Applebaum, Anne]]. 2003. ''[[Gulag: A History]]''. Broadway Books. hardcover, 720 pp., {{ISBN|0-7679-0056-1}}.
* [[Walter Ciszek|Ciszek, Walter]]. 1997. ''[[With God in Russia]].'' Ignatius Press. 433 pp., {{ISBN|0-89870-574-6}}.
* {{cite book|editor-last=David-Fox|editor-first=Michael|editor-link=Michael David-Fox|year=2016 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mj3BjwEACAAJ |title=The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison |edition=illustrated hardcover|location=Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |publisher=University of Pittsburgh Press |isbn=978-0-8229-4464-5|via=Google Books|access-date=2 December 2021}}
* Ertz, Simon. 2006. ''Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935–1953''. Duncker & Humblot. 273 pp., {{ISBN|978-3-428-11863-2}}.
* [[Orlando Figes|Figes, Orlando]]. 2007. ''The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia''. Allen Lane. hardcover, 740 pp., {{ISBN|0-14-101351-6}}.
* [[J. Arch Getty|Getty, J. Arch]], and [[Oleg Naumov|Oleg V. Naumov]]. 1999. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=wZ-v1Gj7UhIC The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939]''. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 635 pp., {{ISBN|0-300-07772-6}}.
* Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. 2010. ''Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile'', (''Palgrave Studies in Oral History'')''.'' Palgrave Macmillan. {{ISBN|0-230-61063-3}}
*[[Slawomir Rawicz|Rawicz, Slawomir]]. 1995. ''The Long Walk''. {{ISBN|1-55821-684-7}}
* Gregory, Paul R., and Valery Lazarev, eds. 2003. ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20050306042638/http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/gulag.html The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag]''. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. {{ISBN|0-8179-3942-3}}.
*[[Gustaw Herling-Grudziński|Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw]]. 1996. ''A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II''. Penguin. 284 pp., {{ISBN|0-14-025184-7}}.
* [[Adam Hochschild|Hochschild, Adam]]. 2003. ''The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 304 pp., paperback: {{ISBN|0-618-25747-0}}.
* [[Oleg Khlevniuk|Khlevniuk, Oleg V.]] 2004. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=nCSUFttQVH0C&q=The+History+of+the+Gulag%3A+From+Collectivization+to+the+Great+Terror The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror]''. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. hardcover, 464 pp., {{ISBN|0-300-09284-9}}.
* Kizny, Tomasz. 2004. ''Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917–1990''. Firefly Books Ltd. 496 pp., {{ISBN|1-55297-964-4}}.
* Kozlov, V. P., ''et al''., eds. 2004–5. ''Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach'', 7 vols.. Moskva: [[ROSSPEN]]. {{ISBN|5-8243-0604-4}}
* {{cite book|title=The Russian Homosexual Lexicon: Consensual and Prison Camp Sexuality Among Men|last=Mielke|first=Tomas M.|year=2017|publisher=CreateSpace|isbn=978-1-5446-5849-0}}
*[[Jacques Rossi|Rossi, Jacques]]. 1989. ''The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps''. {{ISBN|1-55778-024-2}}.
*[[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr]]. 1973. ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]''. Harper & Row. 660 pp., {{ISBN|0-06-080332-0}}.
* —— ''The Gulag Archipelago: Two''. Harper & Row. 712 pp., {{ISBN|0-06-080345-2}}.
* Tobien, Karl. 2006. ''Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag.'' WaterBrook Press. {{ISBN|1-4000-7078-3}}.
* Werth, Nicolas. 1999. "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union." Pp.&nbsp;33–260 in ''[[The Black Book of Communism|The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression]]'', edited by [[Stephane Courtois|S. Courtois]] et al. Harvard University Press. {{ISBN|0-674-07608-7}}.
* —— 2007. ''Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)'' with an introduction by [[Jan T. Gross|J. T. Gross]]''.'' Princeton University Press. 248 pp., {{ISBN|0-691-13083-3}}.
* "[http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai134_folder/134_articles/134_index.html Remembering Stalin]." ''[[Azerbaijan International]]'' 13(4). 2005.
* "[http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_index.html The Literature of Stalin's Repressions]." ''Azerbaijan International'' 14(1). 2006.
* {{cite book|author1=Петров Н. В. |author2=Кокурин А. И. |script-title=ru:ГУЛАГ: Главное управление лагерей. 1918–1960|trans-title=Gulag. Main camp administration. 1918–1960 |location=Moscow|publisher=Международный Фонд "Демократия" |year=2000|isbn=978-5-85646-046-8|language=ru |url=http://elib.npu.edu.ua/bscatalog/download/EigokdMFesAu |url-status=live|format=PDF, immediate download|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151113180343/http://elib.npu.edu.ua/bscatalog/download/EigokdMFesAu|archive-date=November 13, 2015}}

=== Articles ===
* Barenberg, Alan. 2015. "The Gulag in Vorkuta: Beyond Space and Time." ''Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research'' 7(1)
* Barenberg, Alan, Wilson T. Bell, Sean Kinnear, Steven Maddox, and [[Lynne Viola]]. 2017. "[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00085006.2017.1384665?src=recsys&journalCode=rcsp20 New directions in Gulag studies: a roundtable discussion]." ''[[Canadian Slavonic Papers]]'' 59(3/4):376–95. {{doi|10.1080/00085006.2017.1384665}}
* Bell, Wilson T. 2013. "Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De‐Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia." ''[[The Russian Review]]'' 72(1).
* Kravchuk, Pavel. 2013. ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20150227201132/http://pda.novayagazeta.ru/letters/181.html Gulag far and near. The story of the penitentiary system].''
* [[Lynne Viola|Viola, Lynne]]. 2018. "New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note." ''Canadian Slavonic Papers'' 60(3/4):592–604. {{doi|10.1080/00085006.2018.1497393}}.
* Hardy, Jeffrey S. 2017. "[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00085006.2017.1396837 Of pelicans and prisoners: avian–human interactions in the Soviet Gulag]." ''Canadian Slavonic Papers'' 60(3/4):375–406. {{doi|10.1080/00085006.2017.1396837}}.
* Healey, Dan. 2015. "Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag." ''[[Kritika (journal)|Kritika]]'' 16(3)

=== Memoirs ===
* [http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141%20folder/141%20articles/141%20kolyma.html Baghirov, Ayyub. 1999. Bitter Days in Kolyma (Russian).]{{Dead link|date=November 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} ''Off to the Unknown: Stalin's Notorious Prison Camps in Siberia'' (excerpt in English), AZER.com at ''[[Azerbaijan International]]'', Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 58–71.
*[[Janusz Bardach|Bardach, Janusz]]. 1999. ''[[Man Is Wolf to Man|Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag]].'' University of California Press. {{ISBN|0-520-22152-4}}.
*[[Walter Ciszek|Ciszek, Walter]]. 1997. ''He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith''. Doubleday. 216 pp., {{ISBN|978-0-385-04051-8}}.
*[[Alexander Dolgun|Dolgun, Alexander]], and [[Patrick Watson (producer)|Patrick Watson]]. 1975. ''[[Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag]]''." New York: Knopf. 370 pp., {{ISBN|978-0-394-49497-5}}.
*[[Yevgenia Ginzburg|Ginzburg, Eugenia]]. [1967] 2002. ''[[Journey into the Whirlwind]]'', Harvest/HBJ Book. 432 pp., {{ISBN|0-15-602751-8}}.
* —— 1982. ''Within the Whirlwind'', Harvest/HBJ Book, 448 pp., {{ISBN|0-15-697649-8}}.
* Gliksman, Jerzy. 1948. ''Tell the West: An account of his experiences as a slave laborer in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics''. Gresham Press. 358pp.
** Abridged edition: New York: [[National Committee for a Free Europe]], 95pp. c. 1948.
*[https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_dissolution_family.html Hasanov, Anvar (Interview with his daughter Naila Hasanova] about her father who fought in WWII, was captured by Germans, but was sent to the GULAG when he returned home to the Soviet Union.) ''Stalin's Legacy: Dissolution of the Family. Don't Wait for Me''. AZER.com at ''Azerbaijan International,'' Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 90-94.

*[[Paul Hollander|Hollander, Paul]], ed. 2006. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20060527190257/http://www.isi.org/books/content/384intro.pdf Editor's Introduction: The Distinctive Features of Repression in Communist States]." Pp. xv–lxxviii in ''From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States'', with a foreword by [[Anne Applebaum|A. Applebaum]]. [[Intercollegiate Studies Institute]]. {{ISBN|1-932236-78-3}}. (From the annotation: "more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe.")
*[[Julius Margolin|Margolin, Julius]]. 1952. [http://www.lib.ru/MEMUARY/MARGOLIN/Puteshestvie_v_stranu_ze-ka.txt ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ В СТРАНУ ЗЭ-КА ''A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka'', full text, according to the original manuscript] (written in 1947) {{in lang|ru}}
*[[Julius Margolin|Margolin, Julius]]. 2020 (1952). ''Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag'' (S. Hoffman, trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-19-750214-3}}
* Mochulsky, Fyodor V. ''Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir''. Oxford University Press. 272 pp., the first memoir from an NKVD employee translated into English
*[[John H. Noble|Noble, John H.]] 1961. ''I Was a Slave in Russia'', Broadview, Illinois: Cicero Bible Press.
*Petkevich, Tamara. 2010. ''Memoir of a Gulag Actress''. Northern Illinois University.
* Rossi, Jacques. 2018. ''Fragments of Lives: Chronicles of the Gulag'' (Antonelli-Street trans.). Prague: Karolinum. {{ISBN|978-80-246-3700-6}} 
* [[Ümmügülsüm|Sadigzade, Ummugulsum]]. "[http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_prison_diary_ummugul.html Prison Diary: Tears Are My Only Companions]", AZER.com at ''Azerbaijan International,'' Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 40–45.
* [[Ümmügülsüm|Sadigzade, Ummugulsum]], and her children. [http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_prison_letters.html Letters from Prison]." AZER.com at ''Azerbaijan International'', Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 48–53. (Correspondence between an imprisoned mother and her children: Ummugulsum with her family: Sayyara Sadigzade, Ogtay Sadigzade, Jighatay Sadigzade, Toghrul Sadigzade and Gumral Sadigzade.)
* [http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_sadikhli_siberia.html Sadikhli, Murtuz, "Mass Deportation to Siberia: No More Tears Left to Cry" (English)] from ''Memory of Blood, (Azeri)'' 1991. AZER.com at ''Azerbaijan International'', Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 72-79.
*[[Varlam Shalamov|Shalamov, Varlam]]. 1995. ''[[The Kolyma Tales|Kolyma Tales]]''. Penguin Books. 528 pp., {{ISBN|0-14-018695-6}}.
* [[Danylo Shumuk|Shumuk, Danylo]]. 1974. ''Za Chidnim Obriyam'' [''Beyond the Eastern Horizon'']. Paris: Smoloskyp. 447 pp.
* —— 1984. ''Life sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian political prisoner''. [[Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies|Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study]]. 401 pp., {{ISBN|978-0-920862-17-9}}.
* Solomon, Michel. 1971. ''Magadan''. New York: Auerbach. {{ISBN|0-87769-085-5}}.
*[[Hava Volovich|Volovich, Hava]]. 1999. ''Till My Tale is Told: Women's Memoirs of Gulag'', ed. Simeon Vilensky. Indiana University Press.
*[http://lib.ru/PROZA/SOLZHENICYN/ Solzhenitsyn's], [http://lib.ru/PROZA/SHALAMOW/ Shalamov's], [http://lib.ru/PROZA/GINZBURG_E/ Ginzburg's] works at Lib.ru (in original Russian)
* Вернон Кресс (alias of Петр Зигмундович Демант) "Зекамерон XX века", autobiographical novel {{in lang|ru}}
*Бирюков А.М. Колымские истории: очерки. Новосибирск, 2004

=== Fiction ===
*[[Chabua Amirejibi|Amirejibi, Chabua]]. 2001. ''Gora Mborgali''. Tbilisi, Georgia: Chabua. 650 pp., {{ISBN|99940-734-1-9}}.
* [[Martin Amis|Amis, Martin]]. 2006. ''[[House of Meetings]]''. New York: Vintage Books. 242 pp. {{ISBN|978-1-4000-9601-5}}.
* [[Martin Booth|Booth, Martin]]. 1998. ''The Industry Of Souls''. United Kingdom: Dewi Lewis Publishing. 250 pp., {{ISBN|0-312-26753-3}}.
* [[Mehdi Huseyn|Huseyn, Mehdi]]. 1964. [http://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_mehdi_husein_rivers.html ''Underground Rivers Flow Into the Sea (Azeri)'']." AZER.com at ''[[Azerbaijan International]]'', Vol. 14:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 96–99 (excerpt in English).  First novel about exile to the GULAG by an Azerbaijani Writer.
*[[Herta Müller|Müller, Herta]]. 2009. ''[[Everything I Possess I Carry With Me]].''
* [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr]]. 1962. ''[[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]''. Signet Classic. 158 pp., {{ISBN|0-451-52310-5}}.
* —— 1968. [[The First Circle|''In the First Circle'']]. Northwestern University Press. 580 pp., {{ISBN|978-0-8101-1590-3}}.

==External links==
{{Commons category|Gulag}}
{{Wiktionary}}

*[https://web.archive.org/web/20180430155402/http://gulaghistory.org/ GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University]
*[http://w3.osaarchivum.org/gulag/ Gulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition], [[Blinken Open Society Archives]]
*The website of the Virtual Gulag Museum is no longer accessible (January 2025). See, instead, the Map of Memory produced by the same organisation.
*[https://en.mapofmemory.org/ Map of Memory: Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag (2016)]
*[https://en.mapofmemory.org/gulag-northwest-russia-1931-1960 "The Gulag in Northwest Russia, 1931-1960", Map of Memory (2016)]
*[https://gmig.ru/en/ GULAG History Museum] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191119163440/https://gmig.ru/en/ |date=November 19, 2019 }} in Moscow
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20111202070620/http://museum.gulagmemories.eu/en Sound Archives. European Memories of the Gulag]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20111008071148/http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?parent_id=288285&word= Gulag prisoners at work, 1936–1937] Photo album at NYPL Digital Gallery
*[https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/gula.html The GULAG], Revelations from the Russian Archives at [[Library of Congress]]
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gtIYa5ao2o ''Brutal!'' Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev, a retired Soviet prison guard] (YT)

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[[Category:Gulag| ]]
[[Category:Politics of the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Human rights abuses in the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Imprisonment and detention]]
[[Category:Vladimir Lenin]]
[[Category:Joseph Stalin]]
[[Category:NKVD|*]]
[[Category:Penal labour]]
[[Category:Persecution of dissidents in the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Law of the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Soviet phraseology]]
[[Category:Former penal colonies]]