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75-620: Gulag forced labor camp [REDACTED] Inmates during the construction Belbaltlag (Russian names: Белбалтлаг, БелБалтлаг, ББЛ, Беломорско-Балтийский ИТЛ ) was the Soviet Gulag forced labor camp whose main purpose was manning the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal . It was established on November 16, 1931 from the Solovki prison camp and closed on February 26, 1941. Most of

150-482: A camp commander and an important Gulag official. His proposals soon saw widespread adoption in the Gulag system. After having appeared as an instrument and place for isolating counter-revolutionary and criminal elements, the Gulag, because of its principle of "correction by forced labor", quickly became, in fact, an independent branch of the national economy secured on the cheap labor force presented by prisoners. Hence it

225-602: A department of NKVD (later MVD) in charge of handling of foreign civilian internees and POWs (prisoners of war) in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II (1939–1953). In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG. Its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union . The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system. The major memoir noted distinction from GULAG

300-414: A distinctly political purpose. These early camps of the GULAG system were introduced in order to isolate and eliminate class-alien, socially dangerous, disruptive, suspicious, and other disloyal elements, whose deeds and thoughts were not contributing to the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat . Forced labor as a "method of reeducation" was applied in the Solovki prison camp as early as

375-615: A genre of their own, including, from the First World War , Ernst Jünger ( Storm of Steel ) and Frederic Manning 's Her Privates We . Memoirs documenting incarceration by Nazi Germany during the war include Primo Levi 's If This Is a Man , which covers his arrest as a member of the Italian Resistance Movement , followed by his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz ; and Elie Wiesel 's Night , which

450-527: A literary work of art or historical document, are emerging as a personal and family responsibility. The Association of Personal Historians was a trade association for professionals who assisted individuals, families, and organizations in documenting their life stories. It dissolved in 2017. With the expressed interest of preserving history through the eyes of those who lived it, some organizations work with potential memoirists to bring their work to fruition. The Veterans History Project , for example, compiles

525-401: A meeting: "There are cases when a prisoner is given only four or five hours out of twenty-four for rest, which significantly lowers his productivity." In the words of a former Gulag prisoner: "By the spring of 1942, the camp ceased to function. It was difficult to find people who were even able to gather firewood or bury the dead." The scarcity of food stemmed in part from the general strain on

600-550: A minimum sentence of seven years and a maximum of twenty five. In 1958, the maximum sentence for any crime was reduced from twenty five to fifteen years. In 1960, the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD) ceased to function as the Soviet-wide administration of the camps in favour of individual republic MVD branches. The centralised detention administrations temporarily ceased functioning. Although

675-544: A policy that lasted until 1948. Memoir Memoirs have been written since the ancient times, as shown by Julius Caesar 's Commentarii de Bello Gallico , also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars . In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars . His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on

750-587: A reputation which was further enhanced by the Soviet GULAG system. The Bolsheviks' own experiences with exile and forced labor provided them with a model which they could base their own system on, including the importance of strict enforcement. From 1920 to 1950, the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet state considered repression a tool that they should use to secure the normal functioning of

825-473: A significant amount of prisoners, which confined prisoners serving short sentence terms. In the early 1930s, a tightening of the Soviet penal policy caused a significant growth of the prison camp population. During the Great Purge of 1937–38, mass arrests caused another increase in inmate numbers. Hundreds of thousands of persons were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms on the grounds of one of

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900-405: A way to record and publish their own account of their public exploits. Authors included politicians or people in court society and were later joined by military leaders and businessmen. An exception to these models is Henry David Thoreau 's 1854 memoir Walden , which presents his experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond . Twentieth-century war memoirs became

975-510: A writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. The Sarashina Nikki is an example of an early Japanese memoir, written in the Heian period . A genre of book writing, Nikki Bungaku , emerged during this time. In the Middle Ages , Geoffrey of Villehardouin , Jean de Joinville , and Philippe de Commines wrote memoirs, while the genre was represented toward

1050-465: Is based on his life prior to and during his time in the Auschwitz, Buna Werke , and Buchenwald concentration camps. In the early 1990s, memoirs written by ordinary people experienced a sudden upsurge, as an increasing number of people realized that their ancestors' and their own stories were about to disappear, in part as a result of the opportunities and distractions of technological advances. At

1125-479: Is followed by one more important reason for the constancy of the repressive policy, namely, the state's interest in unremitting rates of receiving a cheap labor force that was forcibly used, mainly in the extreme conditions of the east and north. The Gulag possessed both punitive and economic functions. The Gulag was an administration body that watched over the camps; eventually its name would be used for these camps retrospectively. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin

1200-571: Is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union . The camps housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners , a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment . In 1918–1922, the agency was administered by the Cheka , followed by the GPU (1922–1923), the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as

1275-564: The Great Patriotic 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, from a combination of their harsh working conditions and the famine caused by the German invasion. This period accounts for about half of all gulag deaths, according to Russian statistics. In 1943,

1350-557: The Khrushchev Thaw , triggering a mass release and rehabilitation of political prisoners. Six years later, on 25 January 1960, the Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labor continues to exist in the Russian Federation , but its capacity is greatly reduced. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , winner of

1425-518: The NKVD (1934–1946), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. The Solovki prison camp , the first correctional labour camp which was constructed after the revolution, was opened in 1918 and legalized by a decree, "On the creation of the forced-labor camps", on April 15, 1919. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940,

1500-567: The Nobel Prize in Literature , who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to " a chain of islands ", and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (simply referred to as "camps") and 423 labor colonies in

1575-619: The Russian Civil War , officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, political enemies, dissidents and other people deemed dangerous for the state. In the first decade of Soviet rule, the judicial and penal systems were neither unified nor coordinated, and there was a distinction between criminal prisoners and political or "special" prisoners. The "traditional" judicial and prison system, which dealt with criminal prisoners, were first overseen by The People's Commissariat of Justice until 1922, after which they were overseen by

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1650-565: The Russian Empire both used forced exile and forced labour as forms of judicial punishment. Katorga , a category of punishment which was reserved for those who were convicted of the most serious crimes, had many of the features which were associated with labor-camp imprisonment: confinement, simplified facilities (as opposed to the facilities which existed in prisons), and forced labor, usually involving hard, unskilled or semi-skilled work. According to historian Anne Applebaum , katorga

1725-529: The Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930. It was renamed as the GULAG in November of that year. The hypothesis that economic considerations were responsible for mass arrests during the period of Stalinism has been refuted on the grounds of former Soviet archives that have become accessible since the 1990s, although some archival sources also tend to support an economic hypothesis. In any case,

1800-427: The death of Stalin , the Soviet establishment started to dismantle the Gulag system. A mass general amnesty was granted in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death, but it was only offered to non-political prisoners and political prisoners who had been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. Shortly thereafter, Nikita Khrushchev was elected First Secretary , initiating the processes of de-Stalinization and

1875-575: The 1920s, based on Trotsky 's experiments with forced labor camps for Czech war prisoners from 1918 and his proposals to introduce "compulsory labor service" voiced in Terrorism and Communism . These concentration camps were not identical to the Stalinist or Hitler camps, but were introduced to isolate war prisoners given the extreme historical situation following World War 1 . Various categories of prisoners were defined: petty criminals, POWs of

1950-573: The 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin 's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era . The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for " Г ла́вное У правле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГ ере́й" (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps ), but the full official name of the agency changed several times . The Gulag

2025-747: The Chief Administration of Camps for Highway Construction destroyed ninety-four trucks in just three years. But the greatest problem was simple – forced labor was less efficient than free labor. In fact, prisoners in the Gulag were, on average, half as productive as free laborers in the USSR at the time, which may be partially explained by malnutrition. To make up for this disparity, the NKVD worked prisoners harder than ever. To meet rising demand, prisoners worked longer and longer hours, and on lower food-rations than ever before. A camp administrator said in

2100-622: The Civil War ) is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate . The noted Libanius , teacher of rhetoric who lived between an estimated 314 and 394 AD, framed his life memoir as one of his literary orations , which were written to be read aloud in the privacy of his study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome , that memoirs were like "memos", or pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing, which

2175-495: The GULAG. According to the estimates, in total, during the whole period of the existence of the GUPVI, there were over 500 POW camps (within the Soviet Union and abroad), which imprisoned over 4,000,000 POW. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time. Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment. About half of political prisoners in

2250-523: The Gulag Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Articles containing Russian-language text Gulag The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union . The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from

2325-466: The Gulag camps were imprisoned " by administrative means ", i.e., without trial at courts; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences to imprisonment on cases investigated by the secret police throughout 1921–53. Maximum sentences varied depending on the type of crime and changed over time. From 1953, the maximum sentence for petty theft was six months, having previously been one year and seven years. Theft of state property however, had

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2400-457: The Gulag in 1928–1953. A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR , and 4–5 million passed through labor colonies , plus 3.5 million who were already in, or had been sent to, labor settlements . According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953

2475-422: The Gulag into 380 special colonies which produced tanks, aircraft, armaments, and ammunition. Despite its low capital costs, the camp economy suffered from serious flaws. For one, actual productivity almost never matched estimates: the estimates proved far too optimistic. In addition, scarcity of machinery and tools plagued the camps and the tools that the camps did have quickly broke. The Eastern Siberian Trust of

2550-431: The Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet "camp economy". Right before the war, forced labor provided 46.5% of the nation's nickel , 76% of its tin , 40% of its cobalt , 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25.3% of its timber. And in preparation for war, the NKVD put up many more factories and built highways and railroads. The Gulag quickly switched to the production of arms and supplies for

2625-428: The Gulag system founders was Naftaly Frenkel . In 1923, he was arrested for illegally crossing borders and smuggling. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor at Solovki , which later came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag". While serving his sentence he wrote a letter to the camp administration detailing a number of "productivity improvement" proposals including the infamous system of labor exploitation whereby

2700-462: The OGPU started to recruit people within the colony to help stop people who attempted to leave, and set up ambushes around known popular escape routes. The OGPU also attempted to raise the living conditions in these camps that would not encourage people to actively try and escape, and Kulaks were promised that they would regain their rights after five years. Even these revisions ultimately failed to resolve

2775-511: The OGPU. In 1928, there were 30,000 individuals interned; the authorities were opposed to compelled labor. In 1927, the official in charge of prison administration wrote: The exploitation of prison labour, the system of squeezing "golden sweat" from them, the organisation 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

2850-515: The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, also known as the NKVD . The Cheka and its successor organizations, the GPU or State Political Directorate and the OGPU , oversaw political prisoners and the "special" camps to which they were sent. In April 1929, the judicial distinctions between criminal and political prisoners were eliminated, and control of the entire Soviet penal system turned over to

2925-409: The Soviet Union. Many mining and industrial towns and cities in northern Russia, eastern Russia and Kazakhstan such as Karaganda , Norilsk , Vorkuta and Magadan , were blocks of camps which were originally built by prisoners and subsequently run by ex-prisoners. GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное управле́ние испави́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й" (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps ). It

3000-489: The Soviet state system and preserve and strengthen their positions within their social base, the working class (when the Bolsheviks took power, peasants represented 80% of the population). In the midst of the Russian Civil War , Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a "special" prison camp system, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the Cheka . These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had

3075-410: The army after fighting began. At first, transportation remained a priority. In 1940, the NKVD focused most of its energy on railroad construction. This would prove extremely important when the German advance into the Soviet Union started in 1941. In addition, factories converted to produce ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Moreover, the NKVD gathered skilled workers and specialists from throughout

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3150-488: The camps and another 154,000 exiled. This was only the beginning of the dekulakisation process, however. In 1931 alone, 1,803,392 people were exiled. Although these massive relocation processes were successful in getting a large potential free forced labor work force where they needed to be, that is about all it was successful at doing. The " special settlers ", as the Soviet government referred to them, all lived on starvation level rations, and many people starved to death in

3225-412: The camps, and anyone who was healthy enough to escape tried to do just that. This resulted in the government having to give rations to a group of people they were getting hardly any use out of, and was just costing the Soviet government money. The Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) quickly realised the problem, and began to reform the dekulakisation process. To help prevent the mass escapes

3300-638: 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 1940–41, most prisoners of war , only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East . Out of General Anders ' 80,000 evacuees from Soviet Union gathered in Great Britain only 310 volunteered to return to Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947. During

3375-431: The castle of La Ferté-Vidame . While Saint-Simon was considered a writer possessing a high level of skill for narrative and character development, it was not until well after his death that his work as a memoirist was recognized, resulting in literary fame. Over the latter half of the 18th through the mid-20th century, memoirists generally included those who were noted within their chosen profession. These authors wrote as

3450-554: The development of the camp system followed economic lines. The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet industrialisation 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 realisation of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects. The plan to achieve these goals with " special settlements " instead of labor camps

3525-583: The end of the Renaissance , through the works of Blaise de Montluc and Margaret of Valois , that she was the first woman to write her Memoirs in modern-style. Until the Age of Enlightenment encompassing the 17th and 18th centuries, works of memoir were written by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury ; François de La Rochefoucauld , Prince de Marcillac of France; and Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon , who wrote Memoirs at his family's home at

3600-512: The entire Soviet Union, but also the lack of central aid to the Gulag during the war. The central government focused all its attention on the military and left the camps to their own devices. In 1942, the Gulag set up the Supply Administration to find their own food and industrial goods. During this time, not only did food become scarce, but the NKVD limited rations in an attempt to motivate the prisoners to work harder for more food,

3675-466: The guidance for the creation of the system of "corrective labor camps" ( исправи́тельно-трудовые лагеря , Ispravitel'no-trudovye lagerya ), the backbone of what is commonly referred to as the "Gulag", was a secret decree from the Sovnarkom of July 11, 1929, about the use of penal labor that duplicated the corresponding appendix to the minutes of the Politburo meeting of June 27, 1929. One of

3750-399: The inmates' food rations were to be linked to their rate of production, a proposal known as nourishment scale (шкала питания). This notorious you-eat-as-you-work system would often kill weaker prisoners in weeks and caused countless casualties. The letter caught the attention of a number of high communist officials including Genrikh Yagoda and Frenkel soon went from being an inmate to becoming

3825-419: The intelligentsia derive from the extrapolations of Viktor Zemskov from a collection of prison camp population movements data. On the eve of World War II, Soviet archives indicate a combined camp and colony population upwards of 1.6 million in 1939, according to V. P. Kozlov. Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde estimate that 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in Gulag system's prison camps and colonies when

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3900-583: The memoirs of those who have served in a branch of the United States Armed Forces – especially those who have seen active combat. Memoirs are usually understood to be factual accounts of people's lives, typically from their early years, and are derived from the French term mémoire , meaning "reminiscence" or "memory." However, some works, which may be called free memoirs, are less strictly bound to remembered facts: "One type of life story

3975-542: The multiple passages of the notorious Article 58 of the Criminal Codes of the Union republics, which defined punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary activities". Under NKVD Order No. 00447 , tens of thousands of Gulag inmates were executed in 1937–38 for "continuing counterrevolutionary activities". Between 1934 and 1941, the number of prisoners with higher education increased more than eight times, and

4050-530: The nineteenth century, the members of the failed Decembrist revolt and Polish nobles who resisted Russian rule were sent into exile. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to die for reading banned literature in 1849, but the sentence was commuted to banishment to Siberia. Members of various socialist revolutionary groups, including Bolsheviks such as Sergo Ordzhonikidze , Vladimir Lenin , Leon Trotsky , and Joseph Stalin were also sent into exile. Convicts who were serving labor sentences and exiles were sent to

4125-437: The number of prisoners with high education increased five times. It resulted in their increased share in the overall composition of the camp prisoners. Among the camp prisoners, the number and share of the intelligentsia was growing at the quickest pace. Distrust, hostility, and even hatred for the intelligentsia was a common characteristic of the Soviet leaders. Information regarding the imprisonment trends and consequences for

4200-407: 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 anti-state (espionage, terrorism) crimes in the USSR in 1939–41 was 211,106. Approximately 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the "Polish Defensive War" . Almost all of

4275-405: The population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million. The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or died soon after they were released. Some journalists and writers who question

4350-518: The prison system that was still under the purview of the NKVD . The purpose of these new camps was to colonise the remote and inhospitable environments throughout the Soviet Union. These changes took place around the same time that Stalin started to institute collectivisation and rapid industrial development. Collectivisation resulted in a large scale purge of peasants and so-called Kulaks . The Kulaks were supposedly wealthy, comparatively to other Soviet peasants, and were considered to be capitalists by

4425-432: The problem, and the dekulakisation process was a failure in providing the government with a steady forced labor force. These prisoners were also lucky to be in the gulag in the early 1930s. Prisoners were relatively well off compared to what the prisoners would have to go through in the final years of the gulag. The Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930, as the GULAG by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with

4500-501: The reliability of such data heavily rely on memoir sources that come to higher estimations. Archival researchers have found "no plan of destruction" of the gulag population and no statement of official intent to kill them, and prisoner releases vastly exceeded the number of deaths in the Gulag. This policy can partially be attributed to the common practice of releasing prisoners who were suffering from incurable diseases as well as prisoners who were near death. Almost immediately after

4575-402: The same time, psychology and other research began to show that familiarity with genealogy helps people find their place in the world and that life review helps people come to terms with their own past. With the advent of inexpensive digital book production in the first decade of the 21st century, the genre exploded. Memoirs written as a way to pass down a personal legacy, rather than as

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4650-410: The state, and by extension enemies of socialism. The term would also become associated with anyone who opposed or even seemed unsatisfied with the Soviet government. By late 1929, Stalin began a program known as dekulakization . Stalin demanded that the kulak class be completely wiped out, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of Soviet peasants. In a mere four months, 60,000 people were sent to

4725-426: 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. Up until World War II,

4800-413: The term Gulag was originally used in reference to a government agency, in English and many other languages, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting the Soviet system of prison -based, unfree labor . 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,

4875-542: The time its headquarters were in Medvezhyegorsk . Its ocupation varied between about 58,000 and 99,000. After the construction of canal was finished the inmates were tasked with logging , various other constructions, fishing and manufacturing of various consumer foods. References [ edit ] ^ БЕЛОМОРО-БАЛТИЙСКИЙ ИТЛ Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Belbaltlag&oldid=1254355741 " Category : Camps of

4950-713: The total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners. Between the years 1934 to 1953, 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in each given year were released. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the formal distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. GUPVI (ГУПВИ) was the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees ( Главное управление по делам военнопленных и интернированных , [Glavnoye upravleniye po delam voyennoplennyh i internirovannyh] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |label= ( help ) ),

5025-434: The transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths. Western authors use the term Gulag to denote all the prisons and internment camps in the Soviet Union. The term's contemporary usage is at times notably not directly related to the USSR, such as in the expression " North Korea's Gulag " for camps operational today. The word Gulag

5100-468: The underpopulated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East – regions that lacked towns or food sources as well as organized transportation systems. Despite the isolated conditions, some prisoners successfully escaped to populated areas. Stalin himself escaped three of the four times after he was sent into exile. Since these times, Siberia gained its fearful connotation as a place of punishment,

5175-647: The war started. After the German invasion of Poland that marked the start of World War II in Europe, 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

5250-409: Was able to take control of the government, and began to form the gulag system. On June 27, 1929, the Politburo created a system of self-supporting camps that would eventually replace the existing prisons around the country. These prisons were meant to receive inmates that received a prison sentence that exceeded three years. Prisoners who had a shorter prison sentence than three years were to remain in

5325-463: Was dropped after the revealing of the Nazino affair in 1933. The 1931–32 archives indicate the Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; while in 1935, approximately 800,000 were in camps and 300,000 in colonies. Gulag population reached a peak value (1.5 million) in 1941, gradually decreased during the war and then started to grow again, achieving a maximum by 1953. Besides Gulag camps,

5400-522: Was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 in 1916. Under the Imperial Russian penal system, those who were convicted of less serious crimes were sent to corrective prisons and they were also made to work. Forced exile to Siberia had been in use for a wide range of offenses since the seventeenth century and it was a common punishment for political dissidents and revolutionaries. In

5475-542: Was not often used in Russian, either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were the camps (лагеря, lagerya ) and the zone (зона, zona ), usually singular, for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, " correctional labour camp ", was suggested for official use by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the session of July 27, 1929. The Tsar and

5550-513: Was renamed several times, e.g., to Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies ( Главное управление исправительно-трудовых колоний (ГУИТК) ), which names can be seen in the documents describing the subordination of various camps. Some historians estimate that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period from 1918 to 1929 are more difficult to calculate). Other calculations, by historian Orlando Figes , refer to 25 million prisoners of

5625-417: Was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both camp systems were similar: hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. For the Soviet political prisoners, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , all foreign civilian detainees and foreign POWs were imprisoned in the GULAG; the surviving foreign civilians and POWs considered themselves prisoners in

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