The Gulag () was the government agency that administered the main Soviet penal labour camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, with large numbers convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.
GULag is the acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies () of the NKVD. It was officially created on April 25, 1930 and dissolved on January 13, 1960. Some scholars concur with this view, whereas others argue that the Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it did not have death camps, although during some periods of its history, mortality was high in the labor camps.
On March 1940, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labour colonies in the USSR.
Brief history
More than 14 million people passed through the
Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being
deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR. According to a 1993 study of incomplete archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. These estimates exclude those who died shortly after their release but whose death resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps; such deaths happened frequently. The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953). People could be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as petty theft, unexcused absences from work, and anti-government jokes. About half of the political prisoners were sent to Gulag prison camps
without trial; official data suggest that there were more than 2.6 million imprisonment sentences in cases investigated by the secret police, 1921-1953. The Gulag was radically reduced in size following
Stalin’s death in 1953.
In 1960 the Soviet-wide MVD (oversight organization for the Gulag) was shut down in favor of individual republic MVD (Ministry of Interior). The nationwide centralized command detention facilities (Gulag) temporarily ceased to function. Political prisoners continued to be held in the Soviet Union right up to the Gorbachev era.
Modern usage and other terminology
Although
Gulag was originally the name of a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting:
the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.
Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "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.
Other authors, mostly in the West, use
gulag as denoting all the prisons and internment camps in Soviet history (1917–1991) with the plural
gulags. The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression "
North Korea's Gulag".
The word Gulag was not often used in Russian — either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were the camps () and the zone (), usually singular — for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.
History
Background
On the eve of the 1917 revolution, 28,600 convicts were serving sentences of hard labor. After the
Russian Revolution of 1917 the Russian penal system was taken over by the
Bolsheviks. From 1918, camp-type detention facilities were set up, as a reformed analogy of the earlier system of
penal labor (
katorgas), operated in
Siberia in
Imperial Russia. The two main types were "
Vechecka Special-purpose Camps" () and
forced labor camps (). They were installed for various categories of people deemed dangerous for the state: for common criminals, for prisoners of the
Russian Civil War, for officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, various political enemies and dissidents, as well as former aristocrats, businessmen and large land owners. These camps, however, were not on the same scale as those in the Stalin era. In 1928 there were 30,000 prisoners in camps, and the authorities were opposed to compelling them to work. In 1927 the official in charge of prison administration wrote that: "The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing ‘golden sweat’ from them, the organization of production in places of confinement, which while profitable from a commercial point of view is fundamentally lacking in corrective significance – these are entirely inadmissible in Soviet places of confinement.”
The legal base and the guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps" (), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree of Sovnarkom of July 11, 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929.
Creation of "GULag" and its expansion under Stalin
As an all-
Union institution and a main administration with the
OGPU (the Soviet
secret police), the GULag was officially established on April 25, 1930 as the "ULAG" by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930, and was renamed into GULag in November. In any case the development of the camp system followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet
industrialization campaign. Most of the camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas as well as the realization of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects.
In 1931–32 the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; in 1935 — approximately 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies (annual averages), and in 1939 — about 1.3 millions in camps and 350,000 in colonies.
During World War II
After the
German invasion of Poland that marked the start of
World War II in 1939, the
Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the
Second Polish Republic. In 1940 the Soviet Union occupied
Estonia,
Latvia,
Lithuania,
Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and
Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the gulag camps. However, according to the official data, the total number of sentences for political and antistate (espionage, terrorism) crimes in USSR in 1939-41 was 211,106. Almost all of the captured officers and a large number of ordinary soldiers were then murdered (see
Katyn massacre) or sent to GULag Of the 10,000-12,000 Poles sent to
Kolyma in
1940-1941, most
POWs, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the
Polish Armed Forces in the East. Out of
Anders' 80,000 evacuees from Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947.
During the war, Gulag populations declined sharply due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942–43. In the winter of 1941 a quarter of the Gulag's population died of starvation. 516,841 prisoners died in prison camps in 1941-43.
In 1943, the term katorga works (каторжные работы) was reintroduced. They were initially intended for Nazi collaborators, but then other categories of political prisoners (for example, members of deported peoples who fled from exile) were also sentenced to "katorga works". Prisoners sentenced to "katorga works" were sent to Gulag prison camps with the most harsh regime and many of them perished. On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the Soviet Union. One interpretation of this agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets. British and U.S. civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union up to two million former residents of the Soviet Union, including persons who had left the Russian Empire and established different citizenship years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945-1947.
Often, one finds statements that Soviet POWs on their return to the Soviet Union were often treated as traitors (see Order No. 270). According to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag. However, that is a confusion with two other types of camps. During and after World War II freed PoWs went to special "filtration" camps. Of these, by 1944, more than 90 per cent were cleared, and about 8 per cent were arrested or condemned to penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated Ostarbeiter, PoWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, 80 per cent civilians and 20 per cent of PoWs were freed, 5 per cent of civilians, and 43 per cent of PoWs re-drafted, 10 per cent of civilians and 22 per cent of PoWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2 per cent of civilians and 15 per cent of the PoWs (226,127 out of 1,539,475 total) transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.
After Nazi Germany's defeat, ten NKVD-run "special camps" subordinate to the GULag were set up in the Soviet Occupation Zone of post-war Germany. These "special camps" were former Stalags, prisons, or Nazi concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen (special camp number 7) and Buchenwald (special camp number 2). According to German government estimates "65,000 people died in those Soviet-run camps or in transportation to them." According to German researchers Sachsenhausen, where 12,500 Soviet era victims have been uncovered, should be seen as an integral part of the Gulag system.
For years after World War II, a significant minority of the inmates were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians from lands newly incorporated into the Soviet Union, as well as Finns, Poles, Volga Germans, Romanians and others. POWs, in contrast, were kept in a separate camp system (see POW labor in the Soviet Union), which was managed by GUPVI, a separate main administration with the NKVD/MVD.
Yet the major reason for the post-war increase in the number of prisoners was the tightening of legislation on property offences in summer 1947 (at this time there was a famine in some parts of the Soviet Union, claiming about 1 million lives), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of convictions to lengthy prison terms, sometimes on the basis of cases of petty theft or embezzlement. At the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465 thousand were political prisoners.
(See also Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union)
Conditions
Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact of broader events (
World War II, countrywide
famines and shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large numbers of prisoners). However, to one degree or another, the large majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations, inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing, poor hygiene, and inadequate health care. Most prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor. In most periods and economic branches, the degree of mechanization of work processes was significantly lower than in the civilian industry: tools were often primitive and machinery, if existent, short in supply. Officially established work hours were in most periods longer and days off were fewer than for civilian workers. Often official work time regulations were extended by local camp administrators.
Andrei Vyshinsky, procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memorandum to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov in 1938 which stated:
Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.
In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition allowing the fulfillment of construction and production plans handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet production quota), they instituted a number of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments (from 1950 onwards), cuts of individual sentences, general early-release schemes for norm fulfillment and overfulfillment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946 onwards), preferential treatment, and privileges for the most productive workers (shock workers or Stakhanovites in Soviet parlance).
A distinctive incentive scheme that included both coercive and motivational elements and was applied universally in all camps consisted in standardized "nourishment scales": the size of the inmates’ ration depended on the percentage of the work quota delivered. Naftaly Frenkel is credited for the introduction of this policy. While it was effective in compelling many prisoners to work harder, for many a prisoner it had the adverse effect, accelerating the exhaustion and sometimes causing the death of persons unable to fulfill high production quota.
Immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the conditions in camps worsened drastically: quotas were increased, rations cut, and medical supplies came close to none, all of which led to a sharp increase in mortality. The situation slowly improved in the final period and after the end of the war.
Considering the overall conditions and their influence on inmates, it is important to distinguish three major strata of Gulag inmates:
people used to physical labor: "kulaks", osadniks, "ukazniks" (people sentenced for violation of various ukases, such as Law of Spikelets, decree about work discipline, etc.), occasional violators of criminal law
dedicated criminals
people unused to physical labour sentenced for various political and religious reasons.
Mortality in GULag camps in 1934-40 was 4-6 times higher than average in Russia. The estimated total number of those who died in imprisonment in 1930-1953 is 1.76 million, about half of which occurred between 1941-1943 following the German invasion. If prisoner deaths from labor colonies and special settlements are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, although the historian who compiled this estimate (J. Otto Pohl) stresses that it is incomplete, and doesn't cover all prisoner categories for every year. Other scholars have stressed that internal discrepancies in archival material suggests that the NKVD Gulag data are seriously incomplete.
When investigating the shooting of these "escaping" prisoners, the position of the dead body was usually the only factor considered. That the body would lay with its feet to the camp and its head away from it was considered sufficient evidence of an escape attempt. As a result, it was common practice for the guards to simply adjust the position of the body after killing a "runner" to ensure that the killing would be declared justified. There is some evidence that money rewards were given to any guards who shot an escaping prisoner, but the official rules (as seen below) state guards were fined for escaping prisoners.
Geography
to
Igarka near
Turukhansk on the
Yenisey]]
In the early days of Gulag, the locations for the camps were chosen primarily for their isolated locations. Remote monasteries in particular were frequently reused as sites for new camps. The site on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea is one of the earliest and also most noteworthy, taking root soon after the Revolution in 1918. Since many of these existed only for short periods of time, the number of camp administrations at any given point was lower. It peaked in the early 1950s, when there were more than a hundred different camp administrations across the Soviet Union. Most camp administrations oversaw not just one, but several single camp units, some as many as dozens or even hundreds. The infamous complexes were those at Kolyma, Norilsk, and Vorkuta, all in arctic or subarctic regions. However, prisoner mortality in Norilsk in most periods was actually lower than across the camp system as a whole.
Special institutions
Special camps or
zones for children (Gulag
jargon: ,
underaged), for disabled (in
Spassk), and for mothers () with babies.
Camps for "wives of traitors of Motherland" — there was a special category of repression: "
Traitor of Motherland Family Member" ().
Sharashka (,
the goofing-off place) were in fact secret research laboratories, where the arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, were anonymously developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.
Influence
Culture
The Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals. Its cultural impact was enormous.
The Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore. Many songs by the authors-performers known as the bards, most notably Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich, neither of whom ever served time in the camps, describe life inside the Gulag and glorified the life of "Zeks". Words and phrases which originated in the labor camps became part of the Russian/Soviet vernacular in the 1960s and 1970s.
The memoirs of Alexander Dolgun, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings, particularly those of Solzhenitsyn, harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned.
Another cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union linked with the Gulag was the forced migration of many artists and other people of culture to Siberia. This resulted in a Renaissance of sorts in places like Magadan, where, for example, the quality of theatre production was comparable to Moscow's.
Literature
Many eyewitness accounts of Gulag prisoners were published before World War II.
Victor Kravchenko wrote "I Chose Freedom" after defecting to the United States in 1944. As a leader of industrial plants he had encountered forced labour camps in various parts of the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1941. He describes a visit to one camp at Kemerovo on river Tom in Siberia. Factories paid a fixed sum to the KGB for every convict they employed.
Anatoli Granovsky wrote "I Was an NKVD Agent" after defecting to Sweden in 1946 and included his experiences seeing gulag prisoners as a young boy, as well as his experiences as a prisoner himself in 1939. Granovsky's father was sent to the gulag in 1937.
Julius Margolin's book A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka was finished in 1947, but it was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union at the time, immediately after World War II.
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński wrote A World Apart, which was translated into English by Andrzej Ciolkosz and published with an introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1951. By describing life in the gulag in a harrowing personal account, it provides an in-depth, original analysis of the nature of the Soviet communist system.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago was not the first literary work about labour camps. His previous book on the subject, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", about a typical day of the GULag inmate, was originally published in the most prestigious Soviet monthly, Novy Mir, (New World), in November 1962, but was soon banned and withdrawn from all libraries. It was the first work to demonstrate the Gulag as an instrument of governmental repression against its own citizens on a massive scale. The First Circle, an account of three days in the lives of prisoners in the Marfino sharashka or special prison was submitted for publication to the Soviet authorities shortly after One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but was rejected and later published abroad in 1968.
János Rózsás, Hungarian writer, often referred to as the Hungarian Solzhenitsyn, wrote a lot of books and articles on the issue of GULag.
Zoltan Szalkai, Hungarian documentary filmmaker made several films of gulag camps.
Karlo Štajner, an Croatian communist active in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia and manager of Comintern Publishing House in Moscow from 1932–39, was arrested one night and taken from his Moscow home under accusation of anti-revolutionary activities. He spent the following 20 years in camps from Solovki to Norilsk. After USSR–Yugoslavian political normalization he was re-tried and quickly found innocent. He left the Soviet Union with his wife, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, in 1956 and spent the rest of his life in Zagreb, Croatia. He wrote an impressive book entitled 7000 days in Siberia.
Dancing Under the Red Star by Karl Tobien (ISBN 1-4000-7078-3) tells the story of Margaret Werner, a young athletic girl who moves to Russia right before the start of Stalin's terror. She faces many hardships, as her father is taken away from her and imprisoned. Werner is the only American woman who survived the Gulag to tell about it.
"Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag." (ISBN 0-394-49497-0), of a member of the US Embassy, and "I Was a Slave in Russia" (ISBN 0-815-95800-5), an American factory owner's son, were two more American citizens interned who wrote of their ordeal. Both were interned due to their American citizenship for about 8 years circa 1946–55.
Eugenia Ginsburg, a journalist, wrote two famous books, Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.
Savić Marković Štedimlija, pro-Croatian Montenegrin ideologist and Ustasha regime collaborator.
Caught on the run in
Austria by Red Army in 1945, he was sent to the USSR and spent ten years in Gulag.
After release, Marković wrote autobiographic account in two volumes titled
Ten years in Gulag (
Deset godina u Gulagu, Matica crnogorska, Podgorica, Montenegro 2004)
Colonization
Soviet show that among the goals of the gulag was colonisation of sparsely populated remote areas. To this end, the notion of "
free settlement" was introduced.
When well-behaved persons had served the majority of their terms, they could be released for "free settlement" (вольное поселение, volnoye poseleniye) outside the confinement of the camp. They were known as "free settlers" (вольнопоселенцы, volnoposelentsy, not to be confused with the term ссыльнопоселенцы,ssyl'noposelentsy, "exile settlers"). In addition, for persons who served full term, but who were denied the free choice of place of residence, it was recommended to assign them for "free settlement" and give them land in the general vicinity of the place of confinement.
This implement was also inherited from the katorga system.
Life after term served
Persons who served a term in a camp or in a prison were restricted from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous imprisonment was a triable offence. Persons who served terms as "politicals" were nuisances for "
First Departments" (, outlets of the
secret police at all enterprises and institutions), because former "politicals" had to be monitored.
Many people released from camps were restricted from settling in larger cities.
Lack of prosecution
It has often been asked why there has been nothing along the lines of the
Nuremberg Trials for those guilty of atrocities at the Gulag camps. Two recent books, reviewed by Peter Rollberg in the
Moscow Times, cast some light on this. Tomasz Kizny's
Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990 details the history of the labour camps over the years while
Oleg Khlevniuk's
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror presents records of confidential memos, official resolutions, individual testimonies and tabulated statistics. Rollberg explains how both books contribute to our understanding of why there were no post-Communism trials. "The gulag had already killed tens of thousands of its own most ardent killers. Again and again, yesterday's judges were declared today's criminals, so that Soviet society never had to own up to its millions of state-backed murders."
Gulag memorials
on
Lubyanka Square]]
, in memory of the Gulag prisoners that died in the
Dalstroi labor camps]]
Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have memorials to the victims of the Gulag made of boulders from the
Solovki camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. Moscow's memorial is on
Lubyanka Square, the site of the headquarters of the NKVD. People gather at these memorials every year on the
Day of Victims of the Repression (October 30).
Notable Gulag Prisoners
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nikolai Getman
Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky
Sergey Korolyov
Varlam Shalamov
See also
Index of Soviet Union-related articles
List of Gulag camps
List of uprisings in the Gulag
101st kilometre
Article 58
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Kengir uprising
Kolyma
Mass graves in the Soviet Union
Memorial
Nazino affair
Norilsk uprising, an uprising in Norilsk "Gorlag" (mining camp), 1953
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union
Russian Mafia
Soviet political repression
Thief in law
USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941)
;Forced labor camps elsewhere:
*Devil's Island (France)
*The Vietnamese Gulag
*Extermination through labour (Nazi Germany)
*Danube-Black Sea Canal (Communist Romania)
*Katorga (Russian Empire)
*Laogai (China)
*Goli Otok (Yugoslavia)
*Yodok (North Korea)
*Camp 22 (North Korea)
References
Books
Anne Applebaum, , Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.
Walter Ciszek, With God in Russia, Ignatius Press, 1997, 433 pp., ISBN 0-8987-0574-6.
Simon Ertz, Zwangsarbeit im stalinistischen Lagersystem: Eine Untersuchung der Methoden, Strategien und Ziele ihrer Ausnutzung am Beispiel Norilsk, 1935-1953, Duncker & Humblot, 2006, 273 pp., ISBN 9783428118632.
Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, Allen Lane, 2007, hardcover, 740 pp., ISBN 0141013516.
J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press, 1999, 635 pp., ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile (Palgrave Studies in Oral History). Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN 0230610633
Slawomir Rawicz. "The Long Walk". 1995. ISBN 1558216847
Paul R. Gregory, Valery Lazarev, eds, The Economics of Forced Labour: The Soviet Gulag, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8179-3942-3, full text available online at "Hoover Books Online"
Jan T. Gross (intro) and Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity). Princeton University Press, 2007. 248 pp., ISBN 0691130833.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II, Penguin, 1996, 284 pp., ISBN 0-14-025184-7.
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 304 pp., paperback: ISBN 0-618-25747-0.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004, hardcover, 464 pp., ISBN 0-300-09284-9.
Tomasz Kizny, Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990, Firefly Books Ltd., 2004, 496 pp., ISBN 1-55297-964-4.
Istorija stalinskogo Gulaga: konec 1920-kh - pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov; sobranie dokumentov v 7 tomach, ed. by V. P. Kozlov et al., Moskva: ROSSPEN 2004-5, 7 vols. ISBN 5-8243-0604-4
Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labour Camps, 1989, ISBN 1-55778-024-2.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
*The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, 660 pp., ISBN 0-06-080332-0.
*The Gulag Archipelago: Two, Harper & Row, 712 pp., ISBN 0-06-080345-2.
Karl Tobien. Dancing Under the Red Star: The Extraordinary Story of Margaret Werner, the Only American Woman to Survive Stalin's Gulag. WaterBrook Press, 2006. ISBN 1400070783
Nicolas Werth, "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union, in Stephane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, pp. 33–260.
"The Literature of Stalin's Repressions" in Azerbaijan International, Vol 14:1 (Spring 2006)
Memoirs
Ayyub Baghirov (1906-1973), Bitter Days of Kolyma
Murtuz Sadikhli (1927-1997), Memory of Blood
Ummugulsum Sadigzade (died 1944), Prison Diary: Tears Are My Only Companions
Ummugulsum Sadigzade (died 1944), Letters from Prison to her Young Children
Remembering Stalin - Azerbaijan International 13.4 (Winter 2005)
Anne Applebaum (foreword) and Paul Hollander (introduction and editor). From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006. ISBN 1932236783 (from the annotation: "more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe")
Janusz Bardach, Man Is Wolf To Man: Surviving the Gulag. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520221524
Alexander Dolgun, Patrick Watson, "Alexander Dolgun's story: An American in the Gulag", NY, Knopf, 1975, 370 pp., ISBN 978-0394494975.
Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, 432 pp., ISBN 0156027518.
Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, Harvest/HBJ Book, 1982, 448 pp., ISBN 0156976498.
Jerzy Gliksman, Tell the West: An account of his experiences as a slave laborer in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Gresham Press, 358pp. (abridged edition: New York : National Committee for a Free Europe, c 1948, 95pp.)
Julius Margolin,
ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ В СТРАНУ ЗЭ-КА A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka, full text, according to the original manuscript (book written in 1947-47, first printed in 1952)
John H. Noble, I Was a Slave in Russia, Broadview, Illinois: Cicero Bible Press, 1961).
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Penguin Books, 1995, 528 pp., ISBN 0-14-018695-6.
Danylo Shumuk,
* Life sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian political prisoner, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study, 1984, 401 pp., ISBN 978-0920862179.
* Za Chidnim Obriyam -(Beyond The Eastern Horizon),Paris, Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1974, 447 pp.
Solzhenitsyn's, Shalamov's, Ginzburg's works at Lib.ru (in original Russian)
Вернон Кресс (alias of Петр Зигмундович Демант) "Зекамерон XX века", autobiographical novel
Бирюков А.М. Колымские истории: очерки. Новосибирск, 2004
Fiction
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
*One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Signet Classic, 158 pp., ISBN 0-451-52310-5.
*The First Circle, Northwestern University Press, 580 pp., ISBN 978-0810115903.
Chabua Amirejibi, Gora Mborgali. Tbilisi, Georgia: Chabua, 2001, 650 pp., ISBN 99940-734-1-9.
Mehdi Husein (1905-1965), "Underground Rivers Flow Into the Sea" (Excerpts - First Novel About Exile to the Gulag by an Azerbaijani Writer)
Martin Amis, House of Meetings. New York: Vintage Books, 2006, 242 pp., ISBN 978-1-4000-9601-5.
Herta Müller
*Everything I Possess I Carry With Me
Martin Booth, The Industry Of Souls. United Kingdom: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998, 250 pp., ISBN 0-312-26753-3.
External links
GULAG: Many Days, Many Lives, Online Exhibit, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Gulag: Forced Labor Camps, Online Exhibition, Open Society Archives
Virtual Gulag Museum
Gulag prisoners at work, 1936-1937 Photoalbum at NYPL Digital Gallery
The GULAG, Revelations from the Russian Archives at Library of Congress
GULAG 113, Canadian documentary film about Estonians in the GULAG, website includes photos video.
Gulag Photo album (prisoners of Kolyma and Chukotka labour camps, 1951-55)
Pages about the Kolyma camps and the evolution of GULAG
The Soviet Gulag Era in Pictures - 1927 through 1953
The Economics of the GULAG
Stories from the Gulag Dossier by Radio France Internationale in English
interactive map of GULAG (in German)
I Was a Slave in Russia: An American Tells His Story Archive.org online ebook.
Category:Joseph Stalin
Category:Soviet phraseology
Category:Russian loanwords
Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union
Category:Political repression
Category:Penal labor
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