Gulag named a directorate and came to mean an archipelago of camps
The Gulag began as the Soviet secret-police division that ran forced-labor camps from the nineteen thirties into the early nineteen fifties under Stalin, yet English usage often stretches the word across the whole Soviet forced-labor system. The abbreviation expands to Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps.
It was a chief tool of political repression, holding ordinary criminals and political prisoners alike, many sentenced by simplified NKVD troikas or other extrajudicial routes. Founded in nineteen thirty and run successively by the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD, the network ballooned from about one hundred thousand internees in the nineteen twenties to some one point five million in camps by the end of nineteen forty. Scholars converging on data estimate that of roughly fourteen million camp prisoners and four million colony prisoners from nineteen thirty to fifty-three, about one point five to one point seven million died inside or soon after release.
After Stalin’s death a broad amnesty freed many non-political and short-sentence political prisoners; Khrushchev’s thaw accelerated releases and rehabilitation. The system was formally abolished on twenty-five January nineteen sixty. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel laureate who survived eight years inside, fixed the image worldwide with The Gulag Archipelago in nineteen seventy-three, likening scattered camps to a chain of islands where people were worked to death.
In March nineteen forty there were fifty-three camp directorates and four hundred twenty-three labor colonies. Russians more often spoke of camps than of the bureaucratic acronym, which itself was renamed at times. The word that started as an office title became a shorthand for a continent-spanning carceral economy.
The camps had older roots. Tsarist Russia already used katorga, a harsh penal-labour sentence that held about 6,000 convicts in 1906 and up to 28,600 by 1916, and exile to Siberia had punished dissidents since the seventeenth century; Fyodor Dostoevsky was banished there in 1849, and Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all knew exile firsthand. Under Soviet rule most inmates at any moment were not political prisoners, and between a fifth and two-fifths were released each year from 1934 to 1953, yet even jokes about officials could bring a sentence. The labour left permanent marks on the map: Norilsk, Vorkuta, Magadan and Karaganda began as prisoner-built camp blocks.
Source: Gulag
