Gulag Work Camps

Some peasants were accused of "individualistic tendencies" & opposed the establishment of collective farms including:

• Ukrainians
• Kazakhs
• Uzbeks
• Kirghiz
• Mordovians
• Caucasians

• Stalin was very suspicious of people who lived or had relatives abroad
• This included foreign communists who fled to the Soviet Union to avoid persecution from their own gov'ts
• They were arrested by the secret police and deported to Siberia
• Jews from Germany, Austria & Hungary

Gulag Camp Locations

GULAG

System of Forced Labor Camps, Siberia

The Great Thaw

TIMELINE

• After Stalin's death in 1953 = Gulag population greatly reduced
• 1954 - release of political prisoners began
• February 1956 - Nikita Khrushchev' s Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party - denounces Stalinsim
• speech also triggered human rights campaigns in other communist countries like Poland and Hungary

• Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, halted "De-Stalinization" and prohibited any expressed negativity of the labor camps
• suspended "Rehabilitations," which pardoned both living and deceased prisoners who had served their sentences

• End of the 1950s, all "corrective labor camps" essentially gone
• January 1960 - MVD (Soviet Internal Affairs Ministry) Order 20 officially dissolves Gulag

• forced labor camps still existed on small-scale until Gorbachev period
• government allowed journalists/activist to scrutinize camps
• advancement of democratization = prisoners freed from camps

1937-1938:

• Great Terror: one in every twenty people in Soviet Union arrested

1938:

• 1,888,571 people in prison camps (in addition, a great many more people were executed)
• Beria replaces Yezhov

1939:

• Camps in almost every region, in every time zone in Soviet Union
• 1,672,992 people in prison camps

July 1941-1944:

• Mass Amnesties: 975,000 prisoners released into Red Army over three years

1945:

• 1,460,677 people in prison camps

1950:

• Prison population reaches its highest levels: 2,525,146 people in prison camps

March 5, 1953:

• Death of Stalin
• 2,468,524 people in prison camps

March 27, 1953:

• Amnesty for prisoners with less than five year sentences, pregnant women, women with children, all children under eighteen
• One million people released

December 1953:

• Beria executed

1954:

• Many restrictions lifted on prisoners remaining in GULAG system: could receive mail and buy clothing

1956:

• Khrushchev’s Secret Speech acknowledges “excesses” of Stalin and his associates

1950s:

• Arrests of dissidents continues; some are in camps, some in psychiatric hospitals

1986:

• Gorbachev issues general pardon for all political prisoners and prisons shut down for good

1995:

• GULAG Museum opens at site of Perm-36 Prison Camp

17th-20th centuries:

• forced labor brigades in Siberia

August 1918:

• Vladimir Lenin orders “Kulaks” (wealthier peasants), priests, and other “unreliables” to be “locked up in a concentration camp outside of town”

Sept. 1918:

• Red Terror initiated by Lenin: Arrest and incarceration of “Landowners, industrialists, merchants, priests and anti-Soviet officers” all to be detained in concentration camps

December 1919:

• 21 registered concentration camps

December 1920:

• 107 registered concentration camps

1923:

• Solovetsky monastery in northwestern Russia turned over to OGPU (precursor of NKVD and KGB) for use as a prison camp

November 1925:

• Decision to make systematic use of prison labor out of economic necessity, and for large scale construction projects

1929:

• Decision to create mass camp system as an element in transforming Soviet Union into industrialized country

1930-1933:

• Two million Kulaks exiled to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other remote regions

1930:

• 179,000 people in prison camps

1931:

• 212,000 people in prison camps

1932-1933:

• White Sea Canal camp set up to construct canal connecting inland waterways with White Sea

1934:

• Camps expand into Far Eastern Siberia and Kazakhstan

1934:

• 510,307 people in prison camps

Working Life

Camp Life

What is a Gulag?

(Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey)

• work up to 14 hours per day
• exhausting physical work
• barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labor
• no value in the eyes of the authorities
• those who died of hunger, cold, and hard labor were replaced by new prisoners

Stalin's Rise to Power

Tools

Belbaltlag, a Gulag camp for building the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal

• camp zone surrounded by a fence or barbed wire
• overlooked by armed guards in watch towers
• overcrowded, stinking, poorly-heated barracks
• life was brutal and violent
• violence among prisoners
• violence at hands of the guards
• prisoners competed for access to all of life’s necessities
• prisoners were watched by informers

History

• 1928 - Stalin has complete control of Communist Party and government
• Stalin's first Five Year Plan began transformation from Russia's mainly agricultural economy to an industrialized state
• completely unrealistic expectations
• those who couldn't meet expectations accused of sabotage and imprisoned as examples
• 1930-1933 - campaign against "Kulaks"
• took away everything from peasants under premise of "hoarding and individualistic behavior"
• 2 million exiled to Siberia, 100,000 sent to Gulag
• 1934 - Kirov Affair - Stalin's close associate Sergei Kirov assassinated
• set off wave of arrests for suspected "anti-Soviet" behavior
• 1937-1938 - The Great Terror - one of most repressive times in Soviet history
• 1,575,259 people arrested, more than half of them shot
• approximately 1,500 people executed every day
• "here today, gone tomorrow"

• built between 1931 and 1933
• first massive construction project of the Gulag
• over 100,000 prisoners dug a 141-mile canal with few tools other than simple pickaxes, shovels, and makeshift wheelbarrows
• many prisoners died during construction.

millions of Gulag prisoners manually unearthed rocks and dug frozen ground during the massive Gulag projects in the 1930s and 1940s

Kolyma, Northeastern Siberia

Living Quarters

Prisoners mine gold

Clothing

Camp jacket of maximum security prisoner.

Typical winter overcoat provided to Gulag prisoners.

Eatery

• Portion of hand-made spoon from labor camp Bugutychag, Kolyma, 1930s
• Dish from labor camp Stvor, Perm region, 1950s.
• Pot made out of a tin can from a labor camp in Kolyma, 1930s, made in camp workshops by prisoners who exchanged them for food
• Camp mug from labor camp Bugutychag, Kolyma, 1930s, originally manufactured as a kerosene measuring cup

Crimes

Special Camps

• Acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps
• Soviet forced labor penal system during Stalin era
• A campaign to turn Soviet Union into modern industrial power & collectivize agriculture

• In the Soviet Occupation Zone after Hitler's defeat, Stalin turned Nazi concentration camps were into the Gulag's "special camps"
• Many German prisoners of war were forced into these camps

Resistance

• Political Prisoners
• real opponents of the Soviet regime
• innocents who were caught by the paranoid Soviet secret police
• Petty theft, lateness, or unexcused absences from work were punishable by years in the camps
• Prisoners were not given a trial

Who got sent there?

Special Camp Number 7 - Sachsenhausen

Late to work 3 times = 3 years in Gulag

• Active and passive resistance
• Many inmates escaped without recapture in the early years
• Most effective was work slow-downs and misrepresentation of output
• Unfortunately, many who resisted were executed
• Some large scale revolts had to be suppressed with tanks
• Uprising in many camps in 1953-54

• Mostly robbers, rapists, murderers, thieves, and simple citizens caught up in the government's waves of repression
• However, many were not guilty of any crime
• Inmates = "zeks"
• 18 million people in total were imprisoned
• The highest camp population was in 1950 with a total of 2,525,146 inmates

Works Referenced

"About The Museum | Gulag | Museum on Communism." About The Museum | Gulag | Museum on Communism. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.

Journal Article, PDF

"Gulag Fact Sheet." GULAG FACT SHEET (n.d.): n. pag. National Parks Service. National Parks Service. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.

Website Article

"Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom." Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014.

Website Article

Kersnovskaia, Evfrosiniia. Dokhodiaga. N.d. Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow., Moscow. Living in the Gulag. Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.

Drawing Accessed Online

Murderers and Political Prisoners. Perf. Jon Utley. Gulag Museum on Communism. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.

Innocent joke about communist party official = 25 years in Gulag

Film

Simkin, John. "Soviet Gulags." Spartacus Educational. N.p., Aug. 2014. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.

Website Article

• Gulag = "state camp administration'
• arose in Soviet Union after 1929
• similar systems had been used under Lenin since 1919 as a progressive alternative to prison in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution
• served mainly to gain control over population rather than actually punish crime
• Moscow News 1990 report -
• 1931-1953: 3,778,234 people arrested, 786,098 shot
• 1929-1953: 18 million people passed through camps, 6 million exiled
• located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North
• contributed greatly to Soviet economy (free labor)
• constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, hydroelectric stations, and remote roads
• high death rate = required more inmates to continue economic projects
• resulted in influx of camp populations during 1930s
• Soviet Secret Policemen were assigned a certain arrest quota
• during WWII, camp populations declined to head to the front, but afterward, populations rose again.
• economic output of Gulag camps never compensated the cost of running them
• eventually the camps were deemed inefficient and shut down

Stealing something as simple as left over potatoes for your family = 10 years in Gulag

Prisoners

• They had almost no value
• Gulag prisoners that were released were restricted to residency "in the zone" = camp complex
• They were forced to continue working as "free laborers" doing much of the same work they did as prisoners.
• Not really "free"

Avery Collins, Caroline Forster, Natalia Perez, Jordan Rosen, Amy Virasak