Established after the Bolsheviks took power in 1919, the gulags were forced labor camps where at least 1 million people died over the next 50 years.
During the days of Joseph Stalin, one wrong word could end with the secret police at your door, ready to drag you off to a Soviet gulag. Historians estimate that between 15 and 18 million people were thrown into these forced labor camps during Stalin’s reign, where inmates toiled under torturous conditions — sometimes to their deaths.
Some were political prisoners, rounded up for speaking out against the Soviet regime. Others were petty criminals and thieves. And some were just ordinary people, accused of saying an unkind word about a Soviet official.
They came from all over. Though many hailed from the Soviet Union — the U.S.S.R. came to encompass 15 countries before it collapsed in 1991 — gulags also imprisoned people of other nationalities. Polish, French, and American prisoners toiled within these prison camps during the 20th century.
Wherever the gulag inmates came from, their fate was the same: backbreaking labor in freezing, remote locations with little protection from the elements and little food. The photographs below tell their story.
Molotov, USSR. Date unspecified.David Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Vaygach Island, USSR. 1931.Wikimedia Commons
Influential families in conquered states would often be forced into labor to help systematically destroy their culture.
Circa 1941.Wikimedia Commons
Siberia. 1934.The Central Russian Film and Photo Archive
Katyn, Russia. April 30, 1943.Wikimedia Commons
Ternopil, Ukraine. July 10, 1941.Wikimedia Commons
Likely at Vaygach Island. Circa 1930-1932.Public Domain
Circa 1947.Kauno IX forto muziejus/Kaunas 9th Fort Museum/Wikimedia Commons
Circa 1940s. Wikimedia Commons
Siberia, USSR. Date unspecified.Library of Congress
Circa 1924 or 1925.Public Domain
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
25,000 people died while working in the harsh conditions at the canal.
USSR. 1932.Wikimedia Commons
Kengir. Circa 1949–1956.Kauno IX forto muziejus/Kaunas 9th Fort Museum/Wikimedia Commons
USSR. July 1932.Wikimedia Commons
Circa 1956.Kauno IX forto muziejus/Kaunas 9th Fort Museum/Wikimedia Commons
1932.Public Domain
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
Moscow, USSR. 1937.Wikimedia Commons
Magadan, USSR. 1970s.Wikimedia Commons
Florensky was sentenced to 10 years of labor in Stalin's gulags. He would not serve the full ten years. Just a few years after this photo was taken, he was dragged out into the woods and shot.
USSR. February 27, 1933.Wikimedia Commons
USSR. May 1, 1934.Wikimedia Commons
Inta, USSR. 1955.Wikimedia Commons
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
June 1929.Public Domain
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
1934.Public Domain
USSR. Circa 1930-1933.Wikimedia Commons
USSR. Circa 1930-1933.Wikimedia Commons
Tyutyunnyk was allowed to live in Soviet Ukraine after the war — until 1929, when Soviet policies changed. He was arrested, taken to Moscow, imprisoned, and killed.
USSR. 1929.Wikimedia Commons
Vaygach Island, USSR. Circa 1931-1932.Wikimedia Commons
Moscow, USSR. 1935. Wikimedia Commons
Vorkuta, USSR. 1945.Wikimedia Commons
Vaygach Island, USSR. 1933.Wikimedia Commons
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
USSR. Circa 1936-1937.New York Public Library
The route would come to be known as the "Road of Bones" due to how many people died during its construction.
USSR. Circa 1930s.Wikimedia Commons
USSR. Circa 1937-1938.Wikimedia Commons
Date unknown. Фото з архіву В. А. Мітіна/Wikimedia Commons
The Early History Of The Gulags
The history of forced labor camps in Russia is a long one. Early examples of a forced-labor-based penal system date back to the Russian Empire, when the tsar instituted the first "katorga" camps in the 17th century.
Katorga was the term for a judicial ruling that sent the convicted person to Siberia or the Russian Far East, where there were few people and fewer towns. There, prisoners would be forced to labor on the region's deeply underdeveloped infrastructure — a job no one would voluntarily undertake.
But it was the government of Vladimir Lenin that developed the Soviet gulag system and implemented it on a massive scale.
In the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, Communist leaders found that there were a number of new ideologies floating around Russia — and nobody knew how fatal an inspiring new ideology could be better than the leaders of the Russian Revolution.
Wikimedia CommonsThe Soviet gulag system started under Vladimir Lenin, but was greatly expanded under his successor, Joseph Stalin.
They decided that it would be best if those who disagreed with the new order found somewhere else to be — and if the state could profit from forced labor at the same time, all the better. In 1919, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee passed a decree that approved the formation of forced labor camps across the Soviet Union.
This updated katorga system was publicly dubbed a "re-education" campaign. Through hard labor, society's uncooperative citizens would learn to respect the common people and the new dictatorship of the proletariat.
While Lenin ruled, there were some questions about both the morality and the efficacy of using forced labor to bring workers into the Communist fold. These doubts didn't stop the proliferation of new labor camps, however. By 1921, 84 camps had opened up across the Soviet Union.
But things intensified when Joseph Stalin came to power after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924. Under Stalin's iron-fisted rule, the Soviet gulag prisons became a nightmare of historic proportions.
How Stalin Transformed The Soviet Gulag
When Joseph Stalin came to power, he became determined to industrialize the Soviet Union. He instituted a series of five-year plans and strategies like collectivization (collective farming). And Stalin saw that the forced prison camps started under Lenin could play an important role in his strategy.
Public DomainA pro-collectivization poster, which reads, in part: "Long live the day of harvest and collectivization."
Not only did he believe that these camps could help power the Soviet Union's growth, but they also were a convenient place to send anyone who stood in his way. For example, many of the early prisoners under Stalin were kulaks, or peasants, who were sent to the camps because they resisted giving up their farms and joining a collective. Other kulaks could also be sent to the camps for telling anti-Stalin jokes or even being late to work.
The term "gulag" was officially born in the 1930s. GULAG stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey (Main Camp Administration). And under Stalin's Great Purge from 1936 to 1938, which cracked down on all forms of dissent — both real and imagined — countless people were sent to fill these gulags across the country.
Public DomainGulag prisoners toiling on the White Sea–Baltic Canal circa 1931 to 1933. Some 25,000 people lost their lives while working on the canal, which had to be widened and deepened, anyway.
Anyone suspected of being disloyal to Stalin was in danger, whether they were members of the Communist Party, military officers, government officials, or ordinary people who showed the slightest sign of disloyalty.
Over the two years of the Great Purge, some 750,000 people were executed. But many more were sent to gulags. Eventually, some 30,000 camps soon operated across the Soviet Union, and they'd eventually imprison between 15 and 18 million souls.
So what was life like for people inside these camps?
Daily Life In The U.S.S.R.'s Forced Labor Camps
Conditions in the gulags were brutal. Gulag prisoners were often forced to work on ambitious Soviet projects, like the the Moscow–Volga Canal, the White Sea–Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway (also known as the "Road of Bones").
The Central Russian Film and Photo ArchivePrisoners of Belbaltlag, a gulag camp for building the White Sea–Baltic Canal.
They were worked — almost literally — to the bone, using simple supplies like pickaxes or even their bare hands to do intense manual labor. Some inmates worked until they collapsed, often literally dropping dead. Others purposefully maimed themselves in hopes of escaping the torturous labor.
The workday was bad enough, but the rest of life in the gulags themselves was no better. Prisoners were given thin soup and chunks of bread. Often, the amount of food they received was directly tied to the work they'd done, so if a prisoner worked less, he got less food. Starving and unable to work more, he got even fewer rations. Eventually, unable to work and forbidden from eating, the prisoner would slowly die of starvation.
Prisoners were so deprived of food, in fact, that they were forced to jealously guard their daily bread ration. There was no worse crime among prisoners than someone who stole bread from someone else. "Accidents" for thieves like this were easy to arrange.
But even if someone was able to work and got enough to eat, the nights remained a daily torture. Stuffed into barracks with other prisoners and forced to sleep on uncomfortable cots, sleep never came easily.
"A lesson to learn: How to distribute your body on the planks trying to avoid excessive suffering?" Jacques Rossi, a prisoner who spent 19 years in the gulag, later wrote. "A position on your back means all your bones are in direct painful contact with wood..."
Regina Gorzkowski-RossiAn illustration of the gulag barracks by Jacques Rossi.
He continued: "To sleep on your belly is equally uncomfortable. Until you sleep on your right side with your left knee pushed against your chest, you counterbalance the weight of your left hip and relieve the right side of your rib cage. You leave your right arm along the body, and put your right... cheekbone against the back of your left hand."
No exceptions were made for women, many of whom were only imprisoned because of the imagined crimes of their husbands or fathers. Their accounts are some of the most harrowing to emerge from the gulag prisons.
Women In The Gulag System
Though women were usually housed in barracks apart from the men, camp life did little to really separate the genders. Many reported the most effective survival strategy was to take a "camp husband" — a man who would exchange protection or rations for sexual favors. But many women were often victims of rape and violence by their fellow inmates as well as the guards.
Public DomainAili Jürgenson, a 14-year-old from Estonia who was arrested for blowing up a Soviet monument. She was sent to a gulag camp, but ultimately survived her brutal punishment.
A survivor named Elena Glinka recalled a horrific mass rape which once occurred called the "Kolyma tram."
"The men rushed the women and began to haul them into the building, twisting their arms, dragging them through the grass, brutally beating any who resisted," Glinka later recalled.
She continued: "A line of about 12 men formed by each woman, and the Kolyma tram began. When it was over, the dead women were dragged away by their feet; the survivors were doused with water from the buckets and revived. Then the lines formed up again."
Not only were women in the gulags subjected to horrifying sexual violence, but they also had to deal with heartbreaking moments when it came to their children. If a woman had a child with her, she would have to divide her rations to feed them — sometimes as little as 140 grams of bread per day.
But for some of the female prisoners, simply being allowed to keep their own children was a blessing. Many of the children born in gulags were shipped to distant orphanages or put under the "care" of the officials.
The End Of The Soviet Gulag System
For decades, the gulags struck fear into Soviet citizens everywhere. Friends and neighbors disappeared; rumors about camp conditions spread. No one knew who would get taken next, or why.
"[The gulag] created fear," Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History, told The Atlantic in 2013. "It was very spread out, it had branches all over the Soviet Union and everybody knew about it. Everybody was aware that it existed. It wasn't some kind of hidden part of society. It functioned as something that would scare people."
Kaunas 9th Fort Museum/Wikimedia CommonsA barrack in the Kolyma region in the 1950s.
Joseph Stalin found the gulags so effective that he actually planned on expanding them. In the 1950s, he ordered the construction of several more camps, purportedly because he was planning a second Great Purge that would target Soviet Jews. However, Joseph Stalin died in 1953 before this could get started.
This ushered in the beginning of the end of the Soviet gulag system. When Nikita Khrushchev became the premier in 1958, he instituted a policy of a policy of "de-Stalinization" and leniency dubbed the "Khrushchev Thaw." That said, the gulags did not disappear completely.
Over the next 30 years, criminals, democratic activists, and anti-Soviet nationalists were still sent to the prison camps. In fact, some new camps were even built.
Wrestling With A Difficult Legacy
Ninaras/Wikimedia CommonsA monument to the victims of the Akmola Labour Camp for Wives of Political Dissidents in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Today, the gulags remain a thorny part of Soviet history. Though some Russians view them today as a "necessary evil," it's unclear how much they really helped production in the Soviet Union. Some 25,000 people lost their lives while building the White Sea–Baltic Canal, for example, and the canal itself was originally far too shallow and narrow for any ship to navigate.
And then there's the question of "what if." What if Soviet citizens had fought back against the gulag system? What if they had revolted against fear? That's the question that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously asked in The Gulag Archipelago (1973), a work so controversial that Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship.
"What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family?" Solzhenitsyn asked.
"Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?"
But such a thing never came to pass. By the time Stalin died, countless people had perished. Some worked themselves to death, some had starved, and others were simply dragged out into the woods and shot.
It is unlikely the world will ever have an accurate count of the lives lost because of the camps. Some 10 percent of gulag prisoners died every year, and at least 1.5 million people died while imprisoned. But this doesn't account for the ripple effects — the families impacted, the livelihoods lost, and the deep, cruel emotional devastation.
Though some of Stalin's successors ruled with a gentler hand, the damage had been done. Take a look at what life was like in Soviet gulags in the gallery above.
After reading about the gulag prisons of the Soviet Union, check out these photos of abandoned Soviet monuments and fascinating Soviet propaganda posters.
