Gulag Archipelago Summary
Gulag Archipelago Summary
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GULag is the acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies (Russian: Главное Управление Исправительно-Трудовых Лагерей и колоний; Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityel'no-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy) of the NKVD. It was officially created on April 25, 1930 and dissolved on January 13, 1960. Eventually, by metonymy, the usage of "the Gulag" began generally denoting the entire penal labor system in the USSR, then any such penal system. In Russian, Gulag is pronounced: (Russian: ГУЛаг, listen (help·info))
The term became known to general public in the West with the 1973 publication by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, of The Gulag Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands" and described the Gulag as a system where people worked to death. Some scholars concur with this view, whereas others argue that Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it was not a death camp, although during some periods of its history mortality was high there.
On March 1940, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labour colonies in the USSR. Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were camps originally built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.
More than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR. According to a 1993 study of incomplete archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the GULag from 1934 to 1953. More complete data puts the death toll for this same time period at 1,258,537, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953. These estimates exclude those who died shortly after their release but whose death resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps, which was a common practice. The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953).
Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although the political prisoner population was always significant. People could be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as anti-government jokes. About half of the political prisoners were sent to Gulag prison camps without trial; official data suggest that there were more than 2.6 million imprisonment sentences in cases investigated by the secret police, 1921-1953. The Gulag was radically reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1960 the Soviet-wide MVD (oversight organization for the Gulag) was shut down in favor of individual republic MVD (Ministry of Interior). The nation-wide centralized command detention facilities (Gulag) temporarily ceased to function. Political prisoners continued to exist in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era.
Although Gulag was originally the name of a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting: the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.
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.
Other authors, mostly in the West, use gulag as denoting all the prisons and internment camps in Soviet history (1917–1991) with the plural gulags. The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression "North Korea's Gulag".
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, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.
Mass killings under Communist regimes •
The term became known to general public in the West with the 1973 publication by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, of The Gulag Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to "a chain of islands" and described the Gulag as a system where people worked to death. Some scholars concur with this view, whereas others argue that Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it was not a death camp, although during some periods of its history mortality was high there.
On March 1940, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labour colonies in the USSR. Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were camps originally built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.
More than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR. According to a 1993 study of incomplete archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the GULag from 1934 to 1953. More complete data puts the death toll for this same time period at 1,258,537, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953. These estimates exclude those who died shortly after their release but whose death resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps, which was a common practice. The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953).
Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although the political prisoner population was always significant. People could be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as anti-government jokes. About half of the political prisoners were sent to Gulag prison camps without trial; official data suggest that there were more than 2.6 million imprisonment sentences in cases investigated by the secret police, 1921-1953. The Gulag was radically reduced in size following Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1960 the Soviet-wide MVD (oversight organization for the Gulag) was shut down in favor of individual republic MVD (Ministry of Interior). The nation-wide centralized command detention facilities (Gulag) temporarily ceased to function. Political prisoners continued to exist in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era.
Although Gulag was originally the name of a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting: the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.
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.
Other authors, mostly in the West, use gulag as denoting all the prisons and internment camps in Soviet history (1917–1991) with the plural gulags. The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression "North Korea's Gulag".
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, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.
Mass killings under Communist regimes •
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