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AIS HISTORY
CONFERENCE
AUGUST 2009
MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY
THE GULAGS
Jan Brady, Head of HSIE,
Arden Anglican School
Jan Brady, Arden, Gulags, March 2009
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GULAG
Glavnoë Upravlenie (Ispravitel’notrudovykh [kolony]) Lagerei
(Main Camp Administration)
(of the Concentration [Labour] Camps)
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ALSO CAME TO MEAN
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More than just the later concentration camps
(kontslager)
Also the labour camps (trudposelka)
Under the Bolsheviks, the first, special northern camps
set up in the 1920s such as Solovetsky
The Gulags, or labour camps – of which there were
many divisions
–
–
–
–
–
–
the
the
the
the
the
the
punishment camps
criminal camps
political camps
women’s camps
children’s camps
transit camps
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AND
the system of Soviet repression, the socalled ‘meat grinder’
Arrest  Interrogation  Incarceration
 Transportation  Forced labour 
Break-up of the family  Exile  Death
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SOURCES
Gulag: a History by Anne Applebaum
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsynneeds careful use. He was not imprisoned until after
World War Two – beyond our study period
The Great Terror: a reassessment by Robert Conquest
Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934-1941 by Robert
W. Thurston
The Unknown Gulag by Lynne Viola
Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick
An Economic History of the USSR by Alec Nove
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WHAT WERE THE GULAGS?
Penal labour camps as distinct from the
criminal prisons
 Under the control of the OGPU/NKVD
 Processed about 20 million people in the
1920s -1940s
 Eventually became an integral part of the
economic structure of Stalinist Russia
 Effectively the militarisation of labour

(one of Trotsky’s suggestions for which he was exiled)
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ALSO
A place where ‘political’ prisoners could
contribute to society and be ‘rehabilitated’
 Isolated and, supposedly, self-sufficient
 Often built by the first prisoners sent there
who lived in ‘shalash’
or makeshift
cabins made from the first fellings of
trees, or dugouts ‘zemlianki’

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WHY ‘GULAG ARCHIPELAGO’?
First ‘planned for permanency’ OGPU Gulag
established at Solovetsky Monastery
– Slowly expanded to take in other islands
of the archipelago
– became the SYMBOL of the system
 Soviets claimed the camp ‘system’ originated
there Solzhenitsyn used this imagery for his
book
 the west gained a sound-bite

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WHERE WERE THE GULAGS?
White Sea –
Baltic Sea
Canal
Solovetsky
Kolyma River
Kiev
Perm
Tashkent
Ulan Bator
Vladivostok
Basic map from - http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1277/1350612315_f3b856d3a0_o.jpg
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SOLOVETSKY MONASTERY
TODAY
http://www.daylife.com/photo/0dC92gG5cb85F
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Perm 326 – Timber getting
Southern Urals
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/perm36.php
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Kolyma – North Western
Siberia
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North-eastern Siberia
Down to -50 degrees C
Work stopped at -25 degrees
Snow 9 months of the year
Frozen all year round
About 120 camps in an area
four times the size of France
Gold mining mostly but also
fur and timber getting
The camps held about 500
000 people but it is
estimated that more than 2
million died in this area over
a 15 year period – the ships
just kept bringing them in
http://www.videofact.com/polska/obozy/kolyma3opt.jpg
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Mining at Kolyma
gulaghistory.org/.../images/kolyma_detail.jpg
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WESTERN SIBERIAN GULAG
AFTER IT WAS ABANDONED
http://images.onesite.com/blogs.telegraph.co.uk/user/paul_willis/gulag.jpg
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First major building program of the
Gulags
incentraleurope.radio.cz/ice/article/66519
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http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/worksrc/images/belbaltlag.jpgBelbaltlag Camp on the White Sea-Baltic
Sea Canal, from a 1932 Russian Documentary
The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal built between 1931 and 1933
First major construction of the Gulag system
100 000 prisoners constructed a 141 mile canal with hand tools in
20 months
Lauded as a great success it was a failure
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WHITE SEA – BALTIC SEA CANAL
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Linked Leningrad with
Archangel by waterway
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meant that it was possible to
move by water from Archangel
on the White Sea to Odessa on
the Black Sea
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No longer dependent on sailing
south through the Baltic and
around Norway and Finland
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Psychologically important but a
failure anyway
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LIFE IN THE CAMPS
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Men and women, ‘zeks’ , mostly lived in separate
barracks
They were crowded, filthy, boring, full of sickness
Moved from camp to camp by rail in special prison
vans – ‘Stolypin cars’ or vagonzaks
Solitary confinement used for recidivists – the
isolator
Clothing limited to rags
Limited medical services
No work = no food = starvation = death
A return to serfdom
Zeks were not people
butGulags,
‘enemies
of the people’17
Jan Brady, Arden,
March 2009
AN AVERAGE DAY
OFTEN 7 DAYS A WEEK
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Reveille – usually about 5.00 a.m. summer and winter
10 minutes for breakfast – the best meal of the day
March out of camp for the work day
5 minutes rest at the noon break
5 minutes rest at supper
Sleep occupied the rest of the time
To break the monotony there were, however,
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–
–
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Roll calls
Occasional medical inspections
Occasional delousing
Occasional Sundays off
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Work and Food
Prisoners worked up to 14 hours per
day even in the dark of winter
 Usually the work was hard, physical
labour – timber getting, mining
 Food was limited, of poor quality and
often rotten – meatless gruel, hard
bread

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More work
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/08/04/article-10412770228FD7800000578-542_468x286.jpg
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LIVING CONDITIONS - MEN
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Average life expectancy was one to two years
Disease was rife
Extreme violence, generated by the real criminals (‘urkas’)
– had their own laws made the zeks’ lives miserable
– treated the men as objects and gambled their lives, their clothes, their
belongings between them often killing zeks without remorse or
interference from the guards
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Lived in barracks, 200 men on 50 bunks on bug-ridden mattresses
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LIVING CONDITIONS - WOMEN
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/women.php
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WOMEN IN THE GULAGS
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Lived in crowded barracks the same as the men
Used and abused by male inmates and guards alike
Many took ‘camp husbands’ for protection
Expected to do the same hard labour as men
Pregnant women, ‘mamka’ were occasionally released
but generally their babies were taken away from them at
birth, put into special orphanages, ‘detdom’
and lost
forever to their families
Those children were the ‘lucky’ ones. Most starved to
death because the mothers had no milk
Many children became street urchins. ‘besprizornye’
literally, ‘without family support’
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THE GULAGS
AND
THE SYLLABUS
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GULAGS AND THE SYLLABUS
Not just Stalin’s tool
 Labour camps established in Siberia by the
earliest Romanovs (katorgas)
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– most revolutionaries of note, whether Decembrist,
Populist, Mensheviki, Bolsheviki or simply separatist,
spent time in Tsarist labour camps in Siberia at one
time or another
– disaffected intellectuals and writers, such as
Dostöevsky and Pushkin, were exiled to the camps
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RELEVANCE?
Can be used in almost every question set on
the key features and issues!
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Communism in theory and practice
Bolshevik consolidation of power
changes in society
leadership conflict and differing visions for the
USSR
Purpose and impact of collectivisation and
industrialisation
Nature and impact of Stalinism
Aims and impact of Soviet foreign policy
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Communism in theory and practice 
In theory – the recognition of the soviets as the
supreme political authority and the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat (April Theses)
 In practice – enemies, real or potential, from the
soviets (Mensheviki), the Party and the
proletariat were put into concentration camps
around the country as part of the mass terror
campaign beginning in 1918.
 By 1921 there were already 84 new camps in 43
provinces
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Bolshevik consolidation of power 
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Communist Russia’s camps were created during
the upheaval of the civil war
 For the removal of ‘aristocrats, merchants, and other people
defined as potential ‘enemies’ such as ‘vrediteli’ (wreckers)
 As a way of organizing compulsory work duty to rehabilitate
wealth capitalists whom Lenin labelled as ‘millionairesaboteurs’
 As a place for the emerging ‘class enemies’
 Initially used the prisoner of war camps outside towns
 Under the control of the Cheka and Felix Dzerzhinsky (Iron
Felix) – the Red Terror – ‘the swift, wide-ranging, and unjust
violence carried out by the state’
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Consolidation – Iron Felix and the
Red Terror 
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Organized, not ad hoc
Established after an attempt on Lenin’s life by
Fanya Kaplan
Part of the Civil War but fought on the home
front
Aimed at anyone deemed anti-Revolutionary
Expanded quickly
– 21 camps in 1919
– 107 by the end of 1920
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Changes 
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The ‘Red Terror’ imprisoned people not for what
they had done (eg committed a crime) but for
who they were!
– Lenin believed that criminals were victims of society’s
evils and that if he removed the bourgeois elements,
the need for crime and, therefore, criminals, would
disappear
– Suddenly being bourgeoisie, a merchant, a
landowner, industrialist or even a priest was
dangerous
– Only the proletariat, lowest ranked soldiers and
sailors and the peasants were at the top of society
and, of course, the Party Members – but no-one was
safe
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
The red letters are
ГЛУ or GPU for
Gosudarstvennoye
Politicheskoye
Upravlenie or the
Government Political
Administration
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In this poster of the
1920s the GPU
strikes the counterrevolutionary
saboteur on the head
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGPU
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Leadership conflict and differing visions
for the USSR
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Exile was the weapon of choice for Stalin
in his conflict with the other leaders after
Lenin’s death
– Stalin wanted them dead but was not
prepared to take that risk
– Exile was the solution
– Old Bolsheviks, New Bolsheviks, Syndicalists,
Unionists, members of the Politburo or the
Central Committee – most ended up in exile
– Trotsky the classic example
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Purpose and impact of
Collectivisation 
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Dekulakisation – ‘the civil war in the rural areas … the
first great crisis of the Stalin regime … the beginning of
a whole new era of terror’
– Forced famine in Ukraine, North Caucausus and the Lower Volga
– the breadbasket of Europe
– The collective farm system was established
– The Soviet Union was in charge of dissenting voices in
conquered territories
– This ‘Harvest of Sorrow’
resulted in over 1.8 mill people
being deported to the Urals, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan,
Central Asia and the Far East
– These were the spetspereselentsy or ‘special settlers’ and were
the first mass deportations of the Stalinist period. Their labour
in extracting minerals helped industry develop
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Purpose and impact of
industrialisation 
The USSR needed to modernize, and fast
 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the
industrialized world
 Could not meet a European military threat
 Did not want to rely on imports any more
 Had enormous resources but untapped
 Needed an enormous workforce to
mobilize resources
Solution? Forced labour from the camps
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Nature and impact of Stalinism 
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Dekulakisation and The Harvest of Sorrow
Industrialisation and modernisation through forced
labour
– Dnieper Dam
– Volga-Baltic Waterway
– White Sea Canal
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First round of Show Trials 1928-1933
– Trotskyites, Bukharinites, Tsarist sympathisers, Old Bolsheviks
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First round of purges of the Party (‘chiski’
cleansings) and the Military
or
– the bourgeois specialists – Shakhty Show Trial
– Sukhanov,
– More than 11% of the Party and 5% of the Military cadres
The end of Trotsky
Most ended up in some form of labour camp though many
of the higher party officials were placed in better camps
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Aims and impact of Soviet Foreign
Policy 
To win at all costs but how could they do
that with so many of their officers purged
and in camps
 Between 1937 and 1938 about 45% of the
command and political staff of the army
‘disappeared’.
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THE GULAGS
Best read for students – Applebaum
 Much of Conquest based on Applebaum
 New books – Thurston and Viola both
extremely valuable
 For Stalin’s view of the use of the Gulags
see Simon Seabag Montefiore’s, Red Tsar
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ANY FOLLOW UP?
Contact me at
[email protected]
Or
[email protected]
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