An Introduction to the Horrors of the Soviet Gulag

*Gulag prisoners building a construction project.*

Opening Note to the Series

This is a project that is very dear to me. After years of working in education, I have been shocked to discover that most students are unaware of the existence of the Russian Gulag. Even outside of the classroom, I rarely meet people familiar with the Soviet Union’s concentration camps. Each year, students around the world are taught in devastating detail the horrors of the Holocaust. Why is it that such an education is never extended to the Soviet holocaust — a system of mass murder that spanned decades and resulted in the deaths of millions?

In a small attempt to rectify this, I developed and taught a semester class on the Gulag. However, during my research, I was frustrated at the lack of resources available. There are a handful of phenomenal books — namely Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, both of which I will draw on extensively — but there is a distinct lack of online educational resources, especially when compared to those available for other mass murders of the 20th century.

In addition, there was an emotional struggle in researching this topic. It is a difficult history to be immersed in; the opening of every book also opens very painful feelings. Soviet scholar Robert Conquest noted that it took so many years to write his foundational book on the Soviet terror-famine of Ukraine (the Holodomor) because he had to stop writing to catch his breath — the horrors of the history took a physical toll.

After many months within the world of the Gulag, I understand him. While there are stories of heroism, courage and kindness scattered throughout, one very rarely comes across them; it is, fundamentally, a very dark history. It takes a real effort to engage with this history: not because it is uninteresting, but rather because of the weariness it lays upon one’s soul.

This essay is intended as an introduction to the history, growth and development of the Gulag. It is an overview of the entire system and meant to familiarize people with its basic history and structure. Following this, I will be releasing a series of essays on my substack following a prisoner’s typical journey through the Gulag: arrest, prison, camps, and release.

As we begin our perilous journey into the Soviet Gulag, we are encouraged by the words of the Gulag’s most famous prisoner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in the Gulag.*

The Silence

“There is always this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth.”

So Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds readers at the beginning of The Gulag Archipelago. The Soviet Union Gulag is one of the worst atrocities committed in the entirety of human history. Yet, most of us in the West remain ignorant of it. Why? Is it because we believe it could not happen here? Because we fail to learn or understand Russian history? Or, perhaps more controversially, why is it that communism is not decried in the same way that Nazism is? The communist hammer and sickle insignia is widely accepted — printed on t-shirts, flown as flags, tattooed on arms — and is in no way objected to in the same way as the Nazi insignia, despite millions more people dying as a result of the communist Soviet regime than under Hitler’s fascism.

It is not ignorance; we cannot use the excuse that we did not know. By the end of the 1920s, much was already known in the West about the Soviet camps. In fact, from the Russian Revolution onwards, official information about the camps was available, even to those outside of Russia. In her introduction to Gulag: A History, historian Anne Applebaum makes the case that “to condemn the Soviet Union too thoroughly would be to condemn a part of what some of the Western Left once held dear.” Moreover, no one wanted to consider that America — bastion of freedom and democracy — won the Second World War with the help of a mass murder, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, simply displacing one murderer for another.

While the Nuremberg Trials were bringing thousands of Nazi murderers to justice, the Gulag was still an essential part of Soviet life. As Solzhenitsyn decries, “by 1966 eighty six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. We do not hesitate to devote to the subject page after newspaper page and hour after hour of radio time.” Where is the justice for the millions who died in the Gulag? In 2025, we have yet to witness a single trial against anyone involved in the camps. Our silence on this moment in history speaks volumes. As Solzhenitsyn warns us, it can — and likely will — happen again. Shame on us who fail to remember.

*The Nuremberg Trials, November 20, 1945.*

Bolshevik Beginnings

“Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

The Gulag was a system of mass concentration camps spread across the Soviet Union. GULAG, in Russian, stands for “Main Camp Administration.” The idea was conceived under Vladimir Lenin — communist leader of the Bolshevik Party — and was codified and expanded under the reign of Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 to his death in 1953.

Historians and prisoners rightfully agree that the camps were “a country within a country” — the geographic spread of the camps was enormous. It began in the islands of Solovetsky and flung its arms across the entirety of the Soviet Union. Although numbers vary, there is an overall consensus that between 1930 and 1960 more than 25 million people were imprisoned or exiled. Within this timeframe, one in five prisoners were executed.

To understand the genesis of the Gulag and the scope of its horror, we must first begin in Tsarist Russia. The Gulag has roots in the forced labor brigades that operated in Siberia from the 17th to 20th centuries; between 1824 and 1889 alone, 720,000 settlers were forced to work in the extreme conditions of Siberia.

Mass execution and imprisonment, however, were unique to the Gulag. In fact, as Solzhenitsyn points out, capital punishment was used sparingly in Tsarist Russia — from 1876 to 1904, only about 17 people per year were executed. When 1905 saw a spike of executions, following the 1905 Revolution, voices called it an “epidemic of executions.” The Bolsheviks, creators of the Gulag, even criticized the 1917 government for reinstating capital punishment.

The Bolsheviks — the revolutionary communist group led by Lenin that would go on to create the Soviet Union — like any good follower of Karl Marx believed that crime was a product of capitalism and would disappear with the advent of communism. This obviously proved untrue, and by the summer of 1918 Lenin demanded that “unreliable elements” be locked up in camps. A policy of “red terror” was introduced in the fall:

“Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin … let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible …” (Bolshevik Newspaper)

By 1921, 84 camps were created, all of which aimed at the “rehabilitation” of prisoners, helping them become successful members of the new Soviet society.

*The* ***Solovetsky Monastery, location of the first permanent camp.***

The First Camp: Solovetsky

The first camp designed with the idea of permanence was Solovetsky, built on an archipelago spreading across islands in the White Sea. Solovetsky had once been a monastery; its high walls and cold winds seemed to breed loneliness. It was here that the experiment of slave labor began.

“As you know here, there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority. Any rights you had before you can forget. Here we have our own laws.”

By all accounts, Solovetsky was a disastrous place. Devastatingly, it is also remembered as one of the most mild prisons of the Gulag. Prisoners sent to the archipelago found themselves overworked, starved, tortured, and diseased. One fourth to one half of all prisoners died of epidemics each year.

Perhaps the most important development Solovetsky produced was that of Naftaly Frenkel. Frenkel’s story is shrouded in mystery, but he miraculously found his way from a prisoner to the camp commander. It was under him that Solovetsky was transformed into a profitable economic institution, and this success likely contributed to the transition of the Gulag into economic labor camps.

Frenkel saw all prisoners as potential laborers and pioneered the system of sorting prisoners into three groups: heavy work, light work, and invalids. Based on one’s group, there were different sets of tasks — and different quotas of food. One camp chart shows “800 grams of bread and 80 grams of meat given to the first group; 500 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the second group; and 400 grams of bread and 40 grams of meat to the third group.” As Applebaum points out, the system quickly sorted prisoners into those who would survive and those who would not.

*Map of the spread of Gulag camps, 1951.*

Stalin Takes Control

In 1929, Stalin began to take a significant interest in the camps; he saw them as an opportunity to speed up industrialization and help excavate resources. Forced labor provided a free and seemingly profitable opportunity to contribute to his Five Year Plan — an effort to rapidly industrialize the country.

Stalin demanded regular reports on the productivity of the camps. Applebaum notes an important question for historians: Did the camps come about haphazardly, as a side effect of collectivization, industrialization, and the other processes taking place in the country? Or did Stalin carefully plot the growth of the Gulag, planning in advance to arrest millions of people?

The Gulag was also utilized as an opportunity to highlight the superiority of communism through massive construction projects. One of the most ambitious — and most disastrous — was that of the White Sea Canal. It was an extremely ambitious project: the goal was to connect the White Sea with the Baltic Sea in under 20 months. Stalin specifically stated that he wanted to project to be built with slave labor; Gulag inmates were shipped in, numbering around 170,000. Many inmates were transported from the Solovetsky Islands, including ex-inmate Nafty Frenkel. He managed the canal work from November 1931 until its completion in August 1933. The canal was completed without any modern technology; all tools were handmade — and broke constantly.

A book was written to showcase the “success” of the White Sea Canal, entitled The Canal Named for Stalin. As Applebaum points out, the book is an extraordinary testament to the corruption of Soviet writers. The account is littered with heartwarming stories of prisoners “reforming” themselves through their work. This was during a time in which the Gulag still advertised itself as a “reforming” institution. One such example is seen in a poem “written” by one of the canal workers:

“But then they took me to the canal/Everything past now seems a bad dream/It is as if I were reborn/I want to work, and live and sing.”

At the same time, canal bosses told workers,

“You are obliged to create something valuable to the state with your work, and we are obliged to make of you someone who is valuable to the state.”

It is estimated that 25,000 prisoners died building the canal. The canal itself was an utter failure: it was practically inaccessible and barely used.

Aside from construction projects, Gulag prisoners were also used to populate remote regions of Russia. Solzhenitsyn describes the process as,

“... the authorities began to round up the very best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of their possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and the taiga.”

These exile settlements transported families and individuals from across the country and deposited them in some of the most remote, dangerous and deadly regions of Russia. The process, called the “Opening Up of the Far North,” was seen as a triumph over nature — a victory for communism in its ability to harness the human spirit and exert its will.

The most famous area subject to the “Opening Up of the Far North” was Kolyma, a word that came to signify some of the greatest of hardships of the Gulag. Within the labor camps, inmates were expected to engage in mining and construction, all taking place in an area covered in permafrost. It is one of the most inhospitable regions of Russia: in winter, temperatures drop as low as -50 degrees Fahrenheit and in summer, clouds of mosquitoes attack without rest.

The Heights of the Gulag

Beginning in the year 1937, the nature of the Gulag changed. It was also the year of the Great Purge — the imprisonment, execution and exile of thousands of state party members. The moment was marked with the issuance of Order No. 00447 in August of 1937. The order initiated one of the most violent and aggressive terrors in the Soviet Union and aimed to eliminate “anti-Soviet elements” from society. The result was 1.5 million new convictions in 16 months with at least 680,000 of these prisoners condemned to death.

It was in this year, Applebaum points out, that Gulag camps were transformed from indifferently managed prisons into intentional death camps where prisoners were worked to death or murdered in large numbers.

By the early 1950s, the Gulag reached its highest level of prisoners. Despite its dominating role in the Soviet economy, it was starting to become clear to everyone — except Stalin — that the camps were wasteful and unprofitable.

Stalin, determined to showcase the possibilities of Gulag labor, launched another wave of unsuccessful construction projects. The most famous of these was the Kolyma Highway, infamously monikered the “Road of Bones,” built with slave labor from the Gulag camps. The project was typical of Gulag initiatives: plagued with a lack of equipment, little food, and violent and unproductive leadership. However, these projects and resettlement colonies were continued throughout Stalin’s life, as emblematic of the superiority and strength of communist resolve.

The Thaw

Stalin died in 1953, and his death marked a shift in the development of the Gulag. By the summer of 1954, it was widely accepted that the camps were unprofitable. Restrictions on prisoners were relaxed, including measures such as bringing back the 8 hour workday, allowing for easier early release, and permitting prisoners to write letters. After Nikita Khrushchev came to power following Stalin’s death, he pushed for fast investigations into individual cases in an effort to release additional prisoners.

This continued into the 1960s. However, the camps were given new energy under the next General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev. A wave of new arrests occurred under him, targeting people for literary, religious or political opposition to Soviet system.

Finally, in 1987, a new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, began to dismantle the Gulag system on a mass scale. His policy of “Glasnost” or “openness” was intended only to be an economic policy; however, it quickly bled over into every area of Soviet rule, ultimately questioning the very legitimacy of communist power.

A general pardon was issued to all Soviet political prisoners 1986.

The momentous occasion received little attention, whether in Russia or international news.

This essay is the beginning of a series on life in the Gulag. To read the next installment please subscribe to my substack, A Country of the Mind.

Bibliography

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction by Alan Barenberg