GULAG is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei, Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, that operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps (Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag). Eventually, Gulag became the general term pertaining to the entire system of penal labor camps (Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag). The Gulag system was first established under Vladimir Lenin as a progressive alternate to prison during the early Bolshevik revolution years.

The system reached its peak after 1929 during the rule of Joseph Stalin of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR), who used it to maintain the Soviet state by keeping its populace under an everlasting state of terror. He implemented this system to, in essence, get rid of a population of about 20 million people under his rule. This large amount of people ranged from criminal prisoners to politicians, and even innocent people caught in bad situations (Online Exhibit).

Joseph Stalin came into power during the years 1926-1930, when he assumed the position of supreme leader of the Soviet Union. After Stalin achieved complete power, he set Russia on a devastating path that would ultimately lead to millions of deaths. The first of his acts were the Five Year Plans. Stalin increased the quota of which farmers had to turn in to the state and made them collectivize their lands. A great famine ensued and up to 14.5 million Soviet peasants died.

The next event Stalin carried out was the Great Purge, where he deported, exiled, and imprisoned at least 9.5 million people, five million of which were sent to the Gulag and perished. Stalin personally ordered the trials of about 44,000 people and signed thousands of death warrants (Killer File: Joseph Stalin). Through this act, he rid the Communist Party of all the people who had brought him to power, as well as purged the military leadership (Joseph Stalin: Soviet Premier). Those who were not killed were, ironically, the unluckiest. They would have to suffer the harsh life of Stalin’s Gulag.

The Gulag held many types of prisoners. It served as the Soviet’s main penal system. People would spend their sentences here, and not in ordinary prisons. Among the camp population would be criminals such as robbers, rapists, thieves, and murderers. If one was to so much as steal a pound of potatoes, he or she could be sentenced up to ten years in the Gulag. This was the case for Maria Tchebotareva. During the massive 1932-1933 famine, the peasant mother allegedly stole three pounds of rye from her former field-confiscated by the state as part of collectivization.

Soviet authorities sentenced her to ten years in the Gulag (Online Exhibit). In addition to the norm, the Gulag held opponents of the Soviet regime. Anyone who stood out as a small threat was sent to a penal camp. Several innocent people were sentenced to the Gulag for minor “crimes” such as coming to work late three times (considered sabotage) or telling a small joke about a government official (punishable up to 25 years in Gulag). The majority of the prisoners were the victims of severe legal campaigns where simple rule breaking, as addressed above, could mean a sentence of over five years (What Were Their Crimes?).

The Gulags that criminals would be serving time in were nothing like Russian prisons. After 1929 when the Soviet Secret Police took over the Gulag system, these camps transformed from simple prison camps to an economic empire based on forced labor. Some Gulags were logging operations, others ran mines, many built railroads, a few dug canals, and some built new factories and cities. Each camp was assigned a production target, just like every other economic enterprise of the Soviet Union.

To fulfill the camps’ economic goals, more and more prisoners were required, which accounts for the rapid increase in camp population after 1929, during the rule of Stalin. Eventually, every Soviet Secret Policeman was assigned a certain arrest quota in order to ensure a large enough labor force in the Gulags. In order to achieve this quota, the Secret Police simply fabricated cases against ordinary, innocent people (Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

The Soviet Secret Police conducted millions of arrests, the majority of which were night arrests. The arrests could be considered an art form, perfected by the Secret Police.

Arrests are classified according to various criteria: nighttime and daytime; at home, at work, during a journey; first-time arrests and repeats; individual and group arrests. Arrests are distinguished by the degree of surprise required and the amount of resistance expected. (Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: an Experiment in Literary Investigation 7)

These people had no time to think or rebel; they were outnumbered. Soon after the arrest took place, the new criminals would be shipped off to Gulag camps via sea or railroad.

The transportation methods to the Gulags were often more disturbing and painful than the camps themselves. The level of terror of the journey depended largely on the guards, as some were friendlier than others. Most long journeys began at the railroad station. However, prisoners were not loaded onto trains at the station in full public view; they were loaded at sidings down the track, away from public glare. It was done secretively, just as the process of arrest late at night was secret (Rossi 56-57).

It was usual for up to sixty or more people to be crammed into one carriage, which was constructed from wooden planks and had a few rows of horizontal boards to sleep on. There was no illumination, and rats and vermin abounded (Rossi 182). Through varying weather, the captives were only allowed to wear the clothes they were arrested in. Food rations included bread every two or three days and salted herring that caused severe thirst.

Prisoners being transported by sea simultaneously experienced these living conditions. Though transport by sea only occurred eight to fifteen times a year, it was generally more perilous than railroad transfer. In the late summer of 1933, the Dzhurma (transport ship) with 12,000 prisoners aboard was blocked in the ice flows. Rescuing the prisoners was determined to be uneconomical and they all perished (Rossi 103). Those who did not die while trying to make it to the camps were once again the unlucky individuals.

Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south (Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag).

Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps. (Introduction: Stalin’s Gulag).

The prisoners worked up to 14 hours per day cutting trees, mining, and performing other physically exhausting activities. When some were not working, they would be called to line up in the forest and would all be shot down by machine guns. This cruel camp life lingered on until eventually, the entire Gulag system was deemed inefficient and abandoned (Killer File: Joseph Stalin).

Camp output almost never compensated for the cost of running the Gulags. Most of the felled trees rotted and never reached lumber mills; many of the railroad lines and canals the prisoners built were never used; and most of the construction was hopelessly shoddy. Not only had the USSR not gained anything economically from the camps, they were also responsible for the deaths of approximately 18 million Russian people. Even though Stalin died on March 5, 1963, his Gulag system meagerly survived.

Soon, Stalin’s successors deemed the Gulag a complete economic failure and closed the operation (Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. He was a great believer in the superiority of socialism and in the possibility to create a socialist system without the violence and repression of the earlier Soviet eras (Introduction: After the USSR). The vast majority of information regarding the Gulag system was unknown to him, but once he learned of it, he unwittingly started a movement that led to the final collapse of the Gulag system, and the entire Soviet Empire (Introduction: After the USSR).

During Joseph Stalin’s reign, approximately 18 million people died in his Gulag camps, the majority being innocent people who committed no crimes or injustices. It is a revealing, yet sickening discovery that people know what the Holocaust is, but have never heard of Stalin’s Gulag and the millions that perished. The Global Community cannot allow events like this to vanish into the library shelves.

The greatest weakness of mankind is forgetting; without the past, we are eternally lost in the future. Without mistakes to learn from, humans cannot expect to move forwards in correcting their occurrences. When those who were silenced finally speak up, there will be a final solution to our problems, and it will not be genocide. Instead, it will be a culmination of the ideas every human being that walks free and believes in liberty.