Gulag: An Introduction

By Anne Applebaum, author of "Gulag: A History"

The Gulag, the vast network of labor camps

which was once scattered across the length and
breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of
the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea,
from the Arctic circle to the plains of Central Asia,
from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from
central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. The
word "GULAG" is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration,
the institution which ran the Soviet camps. But over time, the word has also come to signify
the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labour camps, punishment
camps, criminal and political camps, womens camps, childrens camps, transit camps. Even
more broadly, Gulag has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of
procedures that Alexander Solzhenitsyn once called our 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.

The Gulag had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the forced labor brigades which operated in
Siberia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It then took on its
modern and more familiar form almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. By the end
of the summer of 1918, Lenin, the revolutions leader, had already called for mass terror to
put down his opponents, demanding that unreliable elements be locked up in concentration
camps outside major towns. A string of aristocrats, merchants, and other people defined as
potential enemies were duly imprisoned. By 1921, there were already 84 camps in 43
provinces, mostly designed to rehabilitate these
first enemies of the people.

From 1929, the camps took on a new significance. In

that year, Stalin decided to use forced labor both to
speed up the Soviet Unions industrialization, and to
excavate the natural resources in the Soviet Unions
barely habitable far north. On his instructions, the
secret police took control of the Soviet prison system.
Helped along by the mass arrests of 1937-38, the
camps entered a period of rapid expansion. By the
end of the 1930s, they could be found in every one of the Soviet Unions twelve time zones.

Contrary to popular assumption, the Gulag did not cease growing in the 1930s, but rather
continued to expand throughout the war and into the 1940s, reaching its apex in the early
1950s. By that time the camps had come to play a central role in the Soviet economy.
Prisoners worked in almost every industry imaginable - logging, mining, construction, factory
work, farming, the designing of airplanes and artillery and lived, in effect, in a country within
a country, almost a separate civilization. The Gulag, which eventually came to include at least
476 camp systems each of which in turn could contain hundreds of small camps - had its
own laws, its own customs, its own morality, even its own slang. It spawned its own literature,
its own villains, its own heroes, and it left its mark upon all who passed through it, whether as
prisoners or guards. Years after being released, the Gulags inhabitants were often able to
recognize former inmates on the street, simply from the look in their eyes.

Such encounters were frequent, for the camps had a large turnover. Although arrests were
constant, so were releases. Prisoners were freed because they finished their sentences,
because they were let into the Red Army, because they were invalids or women with small
children, because they had been promoted from captive to guard. Although the total number
of prisoners in the camps generally hovered around 2 million, this constant number means
that the total number of Soviet citizens who had some experience of the camps is far higher.
From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion, until 1953, when Stalin died, the best
estimates indicate that some eighteen million people passed through this massive system.
About another six million were sent into exile, deported to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian
forests. Legally obliged to remain in their exile villages, they too were forced laborers, even
though they did not live behind barbed wire.

As a system of mass forced labour, the camps

disappeared when Stalin died. Although he had believed
all of his life that the Gulag was critical to Soviet
economic growth, his political heirs knew well that the
camps were, in fact, a source of economic backwardness
and distorted investment. Within days of his death,
Stalins successors began to dismantle them. Three
major rebellions, along with a host of smaller but no less
dangerous incidents, helped to accelerate the process.

Nevertheless, the camps did not disappear altogether. Instead, they evolved. Throughout the
1970s and early 1980s, a few of them were redesigned, and put to use as prisons for a new
generation of democratic activists, anti-Soviet nationalists - and criminals. Thanks to the
Soviet dissident network and the international human rights movement, news of these post-
Stalinist camps appeared regularly in the West. Gradually, they came to play a role in Cold
War diplomacy. Even in the 1980s, the American president, Ronald Reagan, and his Soviet
counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, were still discussing the Soviet camps. Only in 1987 did
Gorbachev himself the grandson of Gulag prisoners finally begin to dissolve them
altogether.

Yet although they lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself, and although many millions of
people passed through them, the true history of the Soviet Unions concentration camps was,
until recently, not at all well known. There were some good reasons for this general
ignorance: Before the fall of the Soviet Union, archives were closed. Access to camp sites was
forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had
done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that the
subject, in our image-driven culture, didnt really exist either.

Ideology twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet and East European history as well.
In fact, in the 1920s, a great deal was known in the West about the bloodiness of Lenins
revolution. Western socialists, many of whose brethren had been jailed by the Bolsheviks,
protested loudly and strongly against the crime of the Russian revolution. In the 1930s,
however, as Americans became more interested in learning how socialism could be applied
here, the tone changed. Writers and journalists went off to the USSR, trying to learn lessons
they could use at home. The New York Times employed a correspondent, Walter Duranty, who
lauded the five-year plan and argued, against all evidence, that it was a massive success
and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a part of the Western
Left struggled to explain and sometimes to excuse the camps, and the terror which created
them, precisely because they wanted to try some aspects of the Soviet experiment at home.
In 1936, after millions of Soviet peasants had died of famine, and millions more were in camps
or in exile, the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a vast survey of the
Soviet Union, which explained, among other things, how the downtrodden Russian peasant is
gradually acquiring a sense of political freedom.

These sentiments reached their peak during the Second World War, when Stalin was our ally
and we had other reasons to ignore the truth about his repressive regime. In 1944,
the American vice-president, Henry Wallace, actually went to Kolyma, one of the most
notorious camps, during a trip across the USSR. Imagining he was visiting some kind of
industrial complex, he told his hosts that Soviet Asia,
as he called it, reminded him of the Wild West: The
vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide
rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate from
tropical to polar her inexhaustible wealth, remind me
of my homeland. According to a report that the boss of
Kolyma later wrote for Beria, then the head of the
security services, Wallace did ask to see prisoners, but
was kept away. He was not alone in refusing to see the
truth about Stalins system: Roosevelt and Churchill had
their photographs taken with Stalin too.

All of that contributed to our firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly just war,
and even today few want that conviction shaken. We remember D-Day, the liberation of the
Nazi concentration camps, the children welcoming American GI s with cheers on the streets.
We do not remember that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler,
our enemy, were liberated. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with
the help of another.

During the Cold War, it is true, our awareness of Soviet atrocities went up but in the 1960s,
they receded again. Even in the 1980s, there were still American academics who went on
describing the advantages of East German health care or Polish peace initiatives. In the
academic world, some Western historians downplayed the history of the camps, if not
because they were actually pro-Soviet, then because they were opposed to Americas role in
the Cold War. Right up to the very end, our views of the Soviet Union, and its repressive
system, always had more to do with American politics and American ideological struggles
than they did with the Soviet Union itself.

Now, at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, that has finally begun to
change. The Soviet Union is well and truly gone. The opening of the Soviet archives has
enabled historians to write dozens of new books and monographs on the Soviet camps. The
end of the Cold War also means that some of the political taboos which once surrounded
Soviet history are gone. Finally, Soviet history has become a neutral subject, not a highly
politicized one - at least in the Anglophone world, and at least among historians. Now that the
history of the Gulag can now be told, I hope that this virtual museum will help to tell it.