1. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
The Soviet Gulag
Cris Martin
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
Mention what the program is, what we do, and discuss the curriculum unit that everyone will receive.

2. Soviet GULAG Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey—Main Camp Administration
Although less well known than Hitler’s concentration camps, GULAG forced labor camps existed for a much longer period of time, served a much more complex purpose and personally affected a larger number of people. Map of camp distribution…most camps were clustered around natural resources…coal, gold, timber, cotton, water for fishing.
Over time, 476 camp systems that contained hundreds, thousands of individual camps. Between (Stalin’s reign) historians estimate 18 million were imprisoned, 6 million were exiled. In short, 15% of the population. It is known that the inmate population reached its maximum right before Stalin’s death in 1953, and that the population steadily grew each year throughout his reign, barring the years of World War II when prisoners were released to fight with the Red Army.

3. Gulag Statistics
Existed 1918—1987, most active during Stalin’s reign,
476 camp systems, hundreds, thousands of individual camps
Estimated 18 million imprisoned, 6 million exiled (15% of the population)
“A single round number of dead victims would be extremely satisfying, particularly since it would allow us to compare Stalin directly with Hitler or with Mao. Yet, even if we could find one, I’m not sure it would really tell the whole story of suffering either. No official figures, for example, can possibly reflect the mortality of the wives and children and aging parents left behind…”
~Anne Appelbaum

4. Early Soviet History 1921: USSR established under Lenin
1922: Stalin named General Secretary of Communist Party
1924: Lenin dies
1929: Stalin overcomes rivals to become head of USSR
First camp built in 1918 by Lenin as a temporary means to contain threats to the fledgling Soviet regime. Consider the fact that the Communists have to transform this nation, long ruled by an autocratic tsar, into a communist nation where power is allegedly shared by the people. All industry and property was now owned by the state.
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands: and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing Stalin from this post and appointing someone else who differs from Stalin in one weighty respect: being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate of his comrades."

5. Communism
Political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society.
In theory, communism would create a classless society of abundance and freedom, in which all people enjoy equal social and economic status.

6. Stalin’s Goals Industrialization Collectivization of Agriculture
Dekulakization
5 Year Plan

7. Rationale behind Gulag
Remove criminal elements from Soviet society
Rehabilitation and construction of supreme Soviet utopia
Stalin’s psyche and need for power
Economy
Originally camps were just prisons where undesirables were kept, mostly political prisoners who posed a threat to the fledgling Soviet regime as well as criminals. 2) True belief that through hard work, men and women could rejoin society and be contributors to the mighty Soviet Socialist republic. Communist leaders expected opposition to building of Soviet society—those they felt could not be reformed or were too dangerous a threat were immediately executed, and others they felt could be rehabilitated were sent to the Gulag. 3) After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin came to power after a long struggle with several other prominent Communists, including Trotsky, Bukharin, and Zinoviev. Once in power, he did whatever was necessary to remain in power, including terrorizing his own people in order to keep them loyal. 4) The economic reasons behind the Gulag are complex…

8. Soviet economy Free labor would benefit Soviet industrialization
Prisoners were too ill, weak, underfed, untrained to be productive
System became to large and far-reaching
Gulag became financial burden despite attempts to make it more productive in the early 1940s
Idea to make use of free labor to industrialize a highly agriculture, somewhat backwards Soviet Union. In fact, Stalin argued in 1931 that the USSR was 50 or 100 years behind most other industrialized nations. In 1929, Stalin launched his 5 year plan, which laid out what industrial gains the USSR would make by year plan called for 20 percent increase in industrial output which meant more resources were needed and more workers were needed to claim those resources. It seems logical to think that using free labor would be cost effective, but prisoners were too ill, weak, underfed, untrained, to be effective, resources in the large system were not managed well. Still, eventually, there was not a single major town or city in the USSR that did not have camps and there was no major industry that did not rely on prison labor. Prisoners even made clothes and children’s toys. Over time, the system snowballed and became more of a financial burden than a boon.

9. Belomor Canal 141 miles long, only 6-12 feet deep
Basically useless for large vessels, barges, passenger ships
Stalin considered it a great success
Over 100,000 prisoners died during its construction
Today, only boats per day use canal
Russian leaders had dreamed of creating a canal that linked the White and Baltic Seas for many years but considered it unfeasible. Stalin undertook the challenge as part of his first 5-year plan, and ordered Gulag prisoners to finish the job in just 2 years; it was completed 4 months ahead of schedule. Prisoners used very rudimentary tools—shovels, spades, wheelbarrows, dirt and rocks to complete the canal. It’s completion was considered a great success, and was highly propagandized. Stalin was considered a genius and a hero despite the fact that it was virtually useless.

10. Types of prisoners Criminals Political Prisoners Other Article 58
Despite previously wide-held beliefs, Gulag camps were not full of political prisoners. In fact, recent research has shown that only 25% of the entire camp population was comprised of people charged with political treason. The Gulag had become the Soviet Union’s prison system, and consequently also contained murderers, rapists, thieves, etc. In a cruel twist of fate, camp guards often put the criminals in charge of the barracks, as they could keep the political prisoners and others through violence and threats, which made less work for the guards. 25% of the prison pop. at a given time was made up of political prisoners, arrested and charged under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code. This states that a person is involved in counter-revolutionary activities when, “the person who committed them, although not directly pursuing a counter revolutionary aim, knowlingly entertained the possibility of this arising or should have foreseen the socially dangerous character of the consequences of his action.” Not all of these individuals was actually involved in counter-revolutionary activity. Many of them (and many others besides them) were arrested for crimes so minor that they wouldn’t be considered crimes elsewhere—stealing a loaf of bread to feed ones children, being late to work three times, telling a joke about Stalin, writing a book or a play that is remotely critical of the regime… The fact that so many were arrested for doing so little created a culture of fear and paranoia throughout the Soviet Union, where family, friends, and colleagues all became suspects and people turned on one another to protect themselves.

11. Propaganda and a culture of fear
“Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. People were afraid to talk to one another or meet, especially families in which the father or mother had already been ‘isolated.’”
~Yelena Sidorkina, arrested 1937
Be Vigilant! This poster and hundreds, thousands more like it cautioned Soviet citizens that enemies were all around them. They were encouraged to turn them in in order to keep the USSR strong, free of enemies of the people. Neighbors would turn against neighbors in order to keep themselves out of the Gulag. Clearly, even those individuals who escaped incarceration, and had no relatives in a camp (these people were the minority) were affected by the Gulag, as it pervaded the entire society, instilling everyone with the fear that they were the next one to be arrested.

12. I won the Nobel Prize for Literature, what did you do?
This comic looks at the all too common practice of arresting people who had done nothing wrong. Consider also Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sentenced to eight years hard labor for criticizing Stalin in a private letter to a personal friend. His imprisonment was to be followed by permanent exile.

13. The Great Terror
700,000 shot
Kirov’s assassination led to new decrees and greater power for NKVD
Claimed life of Yagoda, and Yezhov (pictured).
Applebaum argues this is the year the camps transitioned from poorly managed prison camps where people accidentally died to places where people were intentionally worked to death or murdered in much higher numbers. These new decrees—which gave NKVD further power to arrest, interrogate and execute “enemies of the people” claimed high-powered victims like Kamenev, Bukharin and Zinoviev. They suffered through much-publicized show trials where they were forced to confess to crimes they had not committed. It should be no surprise that Stalin felt they were a threat to his leadership, particularly since they challenged him for command of the USSR after Lenin’s death years earlier. The Great Terror helped Stalin eliminate enemies and create a very loyal Soviet populace. It also made loyal associates out of other Soviet leaders.

14. A prisoner’s journey Arrest/interrogation/prison Trial? Transport
Arrests happened in a variety of ways (on the street, at the office…you may even have been called to the local NKVD office and questioned several times before being formally charged) although most occurred in the dead of the night, at the home of the accused. People became terrified of the late night knock on the door. Those charged were immediately brought to a local prison, where they were interrogated and often forced to sign false confessions. People would confess to nearly anything after being threatened with physical violence, beaten, or having their spouses, children or parents threatened. That person may or may not have a trial to establish their guilt—if he or she did, it was conducted by a troika (three judge panel) and usually took less than five minutes start to finish. During this period, the accused were housed in filthy, rat and lice-infested, overcrowded prison cells where they were denied any contact with the outside world and often not even allowed to speak to the other prisoners. It was an extremely dehumanizing process. Eventually, when it was decided where they would be serving their sentence, they would be transferred to that location on a train or a ship. The journey was always brutal, with similar conditions as the prison, little to no food or water, and no bathrooms. Many people died before they even reached the camp destination.

15. Life in the Camps: Work Work varied by camp location
Survival often depended on your job
Fulfilling the norm
Tufta, or cheating
Avoiding work
Work days lasted anywhere from 12 to 16 hours…. Prisoners only got Sundays off, and that was not even always guaranteed. As mentioned previously, camps were set up to accomplish certain tasks—constructing railroads, fishing, mining, picking cotton, cutting trees, etc. Often, survival depended on what job you had in a particular camp. At a timber camp, for example, in addition to cutting trees, they needed people to serve food, cut hair, admit people to the camp hospital paint prisoner numbers on jackets. Obviously, if you were able to land one of these cushier jobs you were more likely to survive your sentence. The production at each camp was controlled by something called the norm, which is basically a production quota. The norms were set impossibly high at each camp, so high that even a healthy, well-fed worker couldn’t accomplish them in a day. It was even more difficult for sick, weak, hungry prisoners to accomplish the norm, and there were penalties for not meeting the norm, which I’ll talk about in minute. In order to avoid these penalties, prisoners would cheat, a practice that was called tufta. For example, instead of cutting down new trees, prisoners would comb the woods for fallen trees, and cut the end off to make it look like it had been recently chopped down. Finally, prisoners would do almost anything to avoid work—cut off their own fingers, burn their hands on the barracks stove, inject themselves with turpentine to create boils on the skin…anything to get into the hospital ward for a few days. Women would often get pregnant on purpose in order to receive more food and a lighter workload.

16. Life in the Camps: Food Daily rations
Cauldron I: 300 g. bread, 1 liter thin soup, spoonful of groats, 1 liter soup
Cauldron II: 500 g. bread, 1 liter soup, 2 spoonfuls groats, 1 piece spoiled fish
Cauldron III: 700 g. bread, 1/2liter soup, 2 liters soup, 2 spoonfuls groats, 1 piece spoiled fish
Dictated camp life
What you ate depended on how much of the norm was fulfilled
Victim of the “big ration”
For most, life in the camp was dictated by food—how much you would receive as your ration, if you could filch off someone else (particularly if someone had received a package from home), and how to best break up your daily ration to sustain you throughout the day. This is very clearly elaborated in One Day in the Life…. The amount of food you received in a given day depended solely on how much work you had completed. If you fulfilled 125% of the norm, you ate from cauldron three; if you fulfilled % of the norm you ate from cauldron two; if you did not fulfill the norm, you ate from cauldron one. Although the individuals eating from cauldron three were better fed, they were overworking themselves, becoming victims of the big ration. A doctor allegedly claimed that “the discrepancy between the energy expended in work and that provided by the ‘big ration’ was so great that the healthiest forest worker was doomed to death by starvation within several months.”

17. Life in the camps: Weather, Violence
Russian winters
Barracks
Threats from criminals
The weather was yet another element that camp prisoners had to struggle with—long Russian winters claimed the lives of many. In addition to working outdoors for hours, barracks themselves were heated using only stoves, which made little difference in the depths of winter. Most prisoners slept in every article of clothing they had. Most of their clothes were not appropriate for the weather, and they would wrap themselves in any additional scrap of cloth they could find. Also, since criminals were put in charge of the barracks by the prison guards, there was the constant treat of violence, and women often feared that they would be raped.

18. Aftermath 1953: Stalin died Within 3 weeks, mass amnesty declared
1956: Khrushchev’s secret speech
Destalinization
1951: A Day in the Life published
Restalinization under
Brezhnev
Any prisoner with less than 5 year sentence, pregnant women, children under 18, released—over 1 million people total. Camp population then stood at approximately 1.5 million prisoners. In 1956 Khruschev gave the speech, “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences” to the 20th Party congress, denouncing Stalin and his actions. He also held other party members responsible for treating Stalin like a God and allowing him to get away with all of the terrible things he did. Not until 1961 was Stalin’s body removed from its place of honor in Lenin’s tomb. Khruschev allowed memoirs and literature that was previously only published and distributed underground (samizdat) to be published through official Soviet presses, including Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.Then, Khruschev began to reverse course, saying that discussing the Gulag was dangerous. Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor after he was forced from power, took this stance, and Destalinization officially came to an end.

19. The end of the Gulag 1988: Last camp closed
Today still little discussion of Gulag in Russia
No national monument to victims and survivors
In 2003, Russian citizens were asked, “What role did Stalin play in the history of our country?”
Positive %
Surely Negative %
Difficult to say %
During the 1970s and 80s, remaining Gulag camps were used to house human rights advocates and high ranking party members who had made errors in judgment. Certainly members of Soviet society who were committed to talking about the camps and their legacy, but the government continued to brush it under the carpet and punish those who tried to make a difference by arguing that Soviet citizens deserved all of the rights that were laid out in the Soviet constitution. Even under Gorbachev’s glasnost, period of openness, most Soviet citizens seemed to have willed amnesia and preferred to move on than dwell on the past. In 1992, a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government rehabilitated all of the victims of political repression and mandated compensation for survivors, but this money never came. These steps were purely symbolic and no real efforts have been made to make amends for Stalin’s oppression. In fact, there are many Russians who are growing nostalgic for communism and Stalin, particularly since life is not easy them now.

20. Themes Identity Power Reconciliation
Identity—what it meant to be a Soviet citizen, part of this great new utopia, as well as the opposite side of the coin. What it meant to be an enemy of the people, an outcast. Power—obviously, Stalin’s need for power drove this terrible machine. He created a culture where people were too afraid to stand up for themselves and their fellow man, to cry out against injustices. There has been no war crimes tribunal, no truth and reconciliation movement in Russia…many people argue that this is the reason why Vladimir Putin is the type of leader that he is, and why his alleged abuses of power are not investigated.

21. Why should we care?
“I wrote my book about the Gulag not ‘so that it will not happen again,’ as the cliche has it, but because it probably will happen again. We need to know why--and each story, each memoir, each document is a piece of the puzzle. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”
~Anne Applebaum
Thank you