State-Introduced Slavery in Soviet Forced Labor Camps

Introduction

In October 1917, a political group came to power in Russia that declared productive labor the basic element of society. The first constitution of 1918 proclaimed work to be the duty of all citizens under the slogan “He shall not eat who does not work.”¹ At the same time, the government set itself the ambitious goal of transforming the hitherto peasant country into the world’s first socialist state. Under the guise of short-term efforts to achieve this goal and the “re-education” of people who were “not accustomed to work,” various forms of coerced labor were already introduced shortly after the Revolution, and further developed under Stalin. The transitions between the forced labor of prisoners and “free” labor became increasingly fluid: laws and government measures limited “free labor,” such as by calling on the population to perform shock labor and by the administrative persecution of job changes²; “special resettlers” (spetspereselentsy) of the 1930s as well as people in the trudarmiia, the labor columns, were deported to remote areas and subject to imposed labor without being incarcerated or separated from their families; and a significant number of convicts (15–50 percent) performed forced labor without deprivation of freedom. But the most severe form of forced labor existed in the camps and colonies of the Main Administration of the Camps (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) that existed from 1930 until 1959.³

The notorious camps of Stalinist times, which became known worldwide under the acronym of its Main Administration, the GULAG, are alongside the Nazi concentration camps prototypical of the ruthless economic exploitation of prisoners in modern times. Originating in the diverse camps of the 1920s, the Gulag experienced its ascent during the years of Stalin’s forced industrialization. By government decree, the camp system of the secret police (OGPU) was expanded in 1929 in order to colonize scarcely populated regions of the Soviet Union, to exploit its resources and to isolate sections of society considered dangerous or obstructive to the construction of socialism. In its heydays the Main Administration managed over 50 camp complexes, each of them consisting of a varying number of sub-camps and subdivisions. Quite to the contrary than initially proclaimed, only the biggest camp complexes were situated in the Far East while many smaller camps lay in more populated western parts of the Soviet Union. A tight network of larger and smaller camps stretched across the entire country. In almost twenty years of its existence, up to approximately 18–20 million people in total served a term in the camps of the Gulag. The apogee of the camps with around 2–3 million prisoners simultaneously was experienced in the last years of Stalin’s life.⁴

By exploiting the prisoners, the camps took part in the development of infrastructure, in timber and agriculture, in the exploitation of raw material deposits, in industries important to the war economy, and, in the case of some specialists, also in research. In particular, the use of prisoners in the timber industry triggered the first contemporary discussions in the West about the nature of this form of prisoners’ work. Repeatedly, Western countries complained about “forced labor” in Soviet Russia, especially in connection with the 1926 League of Nations Geneva Convention on Slavery and the 1930 International Labor Organization Convention Against Forced Labor. The Cold War gave yet another kick-off for attacking the Soviet Union on slavery—and this with extremely exaggerated figures, as we now know. In 1949, delegates to the United Nations Economic and Social Council criticized the Soviet Union for exploiting in its camp and colonies up to 14 million people as “slaves.” Two years earlier, the Russian Menshevik emigrants David Dallin and Boris Nikolaevsky had published a book entitled Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, in which they used the terms forced labor and slavery interchangeably. They clearly classified Gulag prisoners as slaves arguing that they were “torn out of life and society, deprived of everything including hope, and nothing is left to them but their chains…”.⁵

If we leave the anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War behind, what does—or does not—qualify the system of the Gulag as a form of slavery? Poorly equipped and fed, the majority of those imprisoned in the Gulag were forced to perform unskilled, emaciating labor. The product of their labor was claimed by the Main Administration of the Camps or by economic enterprises that “rented” the prisoners. Gulag inmates were deprived of their right of freedom and could exert no or only limited influence on working conditions, the length of the workday, accommodation, or mobility. Most of the time Gulag prisoners received neither direct nor indirect wages. Even in the understanding of the sources, these people were degraded to labor force (rabochaia sila, r/s), to human raw material (chelovecheskoe syr’e) that could be moved at will from job to job and across the Soviet Union. The Main Administration of the Camps, thus, exercised ownership toward the prisoners. Moreover, for the time of their imprisonment many Gulag prisoners, depending on what they were convicted of, lost any political rights, many lost ties to their families. Moreover, imprisonment in the camps represented a clear break in their life history. They were, thus, excluded from society. Consequently, some characteristics can be found that are attributed to slavery in all disciplines that try to determine the nature of slavery.⁶

Interestingly, however, today’s international scholars on the history of the Gulag use the terms slavery or slaves rather reservedly.⁷ Golfo Alexopoulos is one of the few who explicitly described the Gulag as a “system of slavery” and called for a comparative study of slavery and Gulag forced labor. She argues that “as in the case of global slavery, the Gulag found legitimacy in an elaborate narrative of difference that involved the presumption of dangerousness and guilt.”⁸ Camp inmates were perceived as commodities, they were exploited for their labor.⁹ Marc Buggeln, who is more oriented toward existing definitions of slavery than Alexopoulos, argued for the inclusion of Nazi and Gulag camps in research on slavery, too, emphasizing primarily the social exclusion and the degradation of the prisoners.¹⁰ However, in the case of the Gulag, social exclusion was never absolute, nor was the degradation of prisoners as pronounced as in Nazi camps. Often enough prisoners worked side by side with free laborers, and the social dividing line between “slaves” and “slaveholders” was permeable in both directions. In some cases, Gulag imprisonment was even not the lowest hierarchical level.¹¹ What also complicates matters is the fact that the Gulag was an integral part of the Soviet penal system and Soviet society. Social exclusion, the loss of freedom and self-determination can consequently also be understood as part of the penalty which we find in other penal contexts, too. Moreover, different to other forms of slavery, Gulag “slaves” were not seen as a valuable investment and missed any protection of their labor force.¹² The biggest difference, however, may lie in the question of entry and exit. Both were at least formally determined by more or—often—less legally secured judgments. The status of being a “slave” in the context of the Gulag was temporary and determined theoretically by the length of a fixed period of detention. In principle, each Gulag inmate could hope for an exit at some point. This limits both the transferability of the concept of slavery and of the typology developed by Marcel van Linden—in which he calls for a dissection of coerced labor by examining the entry, extraction of labor, and exits from such arrangements—onto Gulag studies. In the case of van der Linden’s typology, at least the question of its extension must be raised. In order to do this, it is first necessary to explain how the Gulag came into being and how it fits into Soviet contexts of labor and the penal system.

The Gulag and (Coerced) Labor in the Soviet Union

The origins of the Gulag go far back into the first years of Soviet rule. On the one hand, the Gulag is rooted in the Bolshevik terror against all actual and potential enemies, which resulted, among other things, in the establishment of concentration and special camps of the political police (the Tcheka, in 1924 renamed into OGPU). On the other hand, the Gulag is grounded in the efforts to reform the penal system according to the differentiation and correction of prisoners combined with the idea to abolish “bourgeoise” prisons. The reformers, who were embedded in the penitentiary discourses of the modernizing states of their time, called for new forms of places of detention to serve primarily the correction of the detainees, but also to become independent of state subsidies. Inmate labor—and especially “socially important” labor—should serve both goals: the betterment of the prisoners and the self-sufficiency of the places of detainment. Moreover, the Soviet Constitution had declared that only those who performed productive labor should have the right to participate in the Soviet state and would receive an adequate basic living, an attitude that was to become fundamental to the forced labor system of the camps.¹³

During the 1920s, several institutions experimented in the spirit of the reformers, but in the end the OGPU most convincingly argued to have achieved the best realization of the new penitentiary system in its Camp for Special Purposes on the Solovki islands in the White Sea, due to its successful economic integration of the prisoners in logging, fishing, and construction but also due to an alleged successful “re-education” of its camp inmates. In 1929, the Soviet government assigned the OGPU to establish new camps on the model of its Solovetsky camps. The expansion and development of the camps coincided with the forced collectivization of the country and a rapid industrialization. To conclude from this that the Gulag was a natural continuation of the camps of the 1920s, or that the government aimed from 1929 onward to use the camps as a reservoir of an army of cheap, disposable labor slaves for its economic goals seems premature, however. Even in the 1930s, the camps were only one form of penal system and continued to exist in parallel with more lenient alternative forms of punishment. Moreover, internal documents show that even in 1930 the camps were still seen as a provisional and temporary measure, and that in many areas the government preferred free labor and mechanization over prisoners’ labor. An economic priority in the expansion of the camp system also seems questionable in view of the skyrocketing prisoner numbers. The camp population grew from 19,876 in April 1929 to 170,000 in August 1930; between 1930 and 1933 the numbers almost doubled. Such an unexpected rapid growth not only challenged the camp administrations to accommodate the prisoners but also to organize work for them all. Political, penal, and economic interests in the formation and expansion of the camp system were hence intertwined and often competed with each other.¹⁴

If in the beginning the colonization of remote regions was formulated as a reason for the expansion of the camp system, the economic focus of the camps soon shifted to large-scale infrastructural construction projects. Camp inmates worked on the construction of canals, hydroelectric power plants, railroad tracks, and others. Individual camps were devoted to agriculture, while the Main Administration also provided contract laborers for non-Gulag enterprises. Over the years, various restructurings of the Main Administration and of the individual camps took place, all designed to increase productivity. These reorganizations, especially those under Lavrentii Beriia in 1939, transformed the Gulag step after step into a giant economic enterprise under the aegis of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD, which in 1946 was converted into the Ministry for the Interior, the MVD.

These restructurings, the vast geographical spread of the camps as well as the multitude of different fields of activity already indicate that we are dealing with a very diverse, constantly evolving system, which hardly allows accurate statements for all camps and all times. Moreover, although the Corrective-Labor Code of 1924 and its modification of 1933 as well as several regulations on the camps issued either by the government or the Main Administration determined the basic features of camp life, of prisoners’ work, their food rations and housing, the actual circumstances on the ground depended on a number of other factors: the character of the camp commanders, their willingness to follow instructions, the type of work performed, the composition of the prisoners’ society and especially the ratio of hard-core criminals, the geographical location of the camp, climatic conditions, and more. Individual experiences could vary greatly even within one camp complex.¹⁵ Abuse of power and violence on spot, however, should in no way absolve the central authorities of their complicity in disastrous living and working conditions. A general disregard for human life was a constant feature of the Gulag, and even economic considerations led only to limited long-term improvements for the camp inmates.

What most of the projects and work assignments had in common was that they were carried out with extremely little investment and material input, which brings us to the question of the economic benefit that forced prison labor ultimately possessed for the state. Overall, it is difficult to evaluate the economic efforts of the camps and their contribution to the Soviet economy. In terms of the share in the total Soviet labor force, the camps played a negligible role (approximately 3 percent in 1940, including inmates of colonies and special settlers) and their share in the GDP was even less. The White Sea Canal is often used as an example to underscore the absolute nonsense of Gulag construction projects. Certainly, the canal was completed in the prescribed time, but in the end, it was not deep enough to really fulfill its original purpose. With the quite successful mining of raw materials and probably also with some construction work, however, the Gulag did play an important part in some sectors of the Soviet economy. And if we look at Vorkuta and Magadan, for example, the camps took their share in the development of sparsely populated regions. Ultimately, some projects would probably never have been started without the reservoir of ostensibly cheap labor.¹⁶ This reservoir was constantly replenished with ever new and growing contingents of prisoners.

Entry into the Gulag

There existed two ways to enter the Gulag system: a court decision or an administrative order. In 1935, for example, about half of the Gulag prisoners entered the camps through regular judicial proceedings; for the other half, the security organs and their special courts or rather special commissions had ordered camp detention. Theoretically, only those who had been sentenced to at least three years of imprisonment were to be sent to the camps. In reality, we find quite a number of prisoners who served a sentence less than three years. The majority, however, was sentenced either to 10 years of forced labor in the camps (30 percent in 1939), 5 years (22 percent), or 3 years (19 percent). These figures alone show that the Gulag administration did not operate with a fixed labor force that remained constant over the years. Instead, it had a steadily growing labor force, but one that was subject to large fluctuations.

The vast majority of Gulag prisoners were male (80–90 percent) and between 18 and 40 years old, i.e. at the prime working age.¹⁷ The overwhelming majority had a rural background, one-fifth were workers. As far as the ethnicity of the camp inmates is concerned, the composition of the camps’ population most of the time reflected the one of the Soviet Union, the largest ethnic groups being Russians (around 60 percent), Ukrainians (approximately 14 percent), and Belarusians (around 3 percent). It was not until the outbreak of the war that the proportion of ethnic minorities living in border regions and belonging to nationalities the Soviet Union was in war with grew disproportionately due to political fears of a fifth column. After the war, this shift continued for a couple of years due to the imprisonment of alleged or real “collaborators” from the occupied territories. Nevertheless, all in all, Soviet forced labor was characterized by the fact that it did not subjugate a foreign nationality or an ethnic or religious minority perceived as alien, but could affect anyone of its populace.

At least two-thirds of all Gulag inmates had been sentenced due to criminal offenses like theft, murder, “hooliganism,” or banditry or due to malpractices. However, it should be noted in this context that in the Soviet Union even minor violations of labor or social discipline were criminalized. Hiding a chicken from the requisition troops to ensure one’s own survival, for example, or repeatedly being late for work was considered sabotage and state crimes. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that, contrary to long-held assumptions, political prisoners, that is those arrested for so-called “counterrevolutionary” crimes, made up only one-third or even less of all Gulag inmates. “Counterrevolution” was punished by the notorious paragraph 58 of the Criminal Code, whose subparagraphs on terror, espionage, diversion, etc., were extremely imprecisely formulated and even prosecuted unreported knowledge of such an offense.¹⁸

The criminalization of the smallest infractions of order and the broad interpretability of some paragraphs of the Criminal Code resulted in the fact that every Soviet citizen could potentially become a prisoner in the Gulag system. Even though the majority of the Gulag inmates were of working age, there could be found also non-employable groups of persons among them. During the Great Terror in 1938/39 even weak and sick, fully and partially disabled people came into the camps, against the original regulation that only persons capable of work should be transferred from the prisons to the Gulag. This and the often very rapid increase in the prisoner contingents confronted the camp administrations with huge problems both in terms of accommodation, equipment, and food and in terms of productivity and labor deployment. To increase productivity, the Main Administration and local camp officials resorted to a bouquet of measures on all three levels designed by Marcel van der Linden—compensation, coercion, and commitment.

Life and Work in the Gulag

As in free Soviet society, work formed the bedrock of camp life. In principle, every prisoner had to work. Gulag administration sorted its prisoners into three, later four categories of work capacity. Category 1 included all those who were capable of heavy physical work, while category 2 included those who had minor physical deficits and who should be used for medium-heavy work. The third category included those who could perform only light physical work due to physical defects and illnesses. Category 4 was the category for the disabled and the invalids. The categorization was done by medical examination, but there were also specifications that said what percentage of the prisoners had to be in which category. Single camps and camp units would be sharply criticized from Moscow, for example, when the proportion of prisoners in category 4 rose to 20 percent during the war years.

There existed some gradations between the individual camps, which can be attributed on the one hand to the system of punitive differentiation, and on the other hand to economic considerations. Camps with economic priority, such as the camp complex in Norilsk, where the important raw materials nickel, cobalt, and copper were mined, received only those prisoners who were of good physical constitution. Agricultural camps, on the other hand, stayed behind with the old and sick and with invalids. At the same time, camps that required hard physical labor represented one of the harshest forms within the camp system with its graduated detention regimes, except for the punishment camps and punishment isolators. Accordingly, living conditions were particularly harsh for those assigned to hard physical work.

Insufficiently clothed, inadequately equipped, and malnourished, the prisoners performing hard physical work came closest to what we associate with slave laborers. During long working days they fulfilled unskilled work. In theory, decrees limited daily working hours to 8 to 9 hours and allowed prisoners one day off per week. Recollections of former Gulag inmates¹⁹ as well as official data indicate, though, that actual working hours always exceeded Moscow’s specifications. Regularly the prisoners were neither granted the work-free days to which they were entitled, nor did work stop on excessively cold days, as was actually prescribed. At the same time, however, prisoners who were either assigned according to their vocational training or worked in the administration or in the camps’ self-sufficiency facilities were subject to less harsh working and often also less harsh living conditions. Consequently, depending on the sector of work, large differences in the status of the prisoners can be observed.

Most commonly prisoners lived in guarded camp zones (in Russian: zona). Surrounded by barbed wire or wooden fences, the zona included sleeping barracks or dugouts, a kitchen and canteen, sanitary facilities, punitive isolation cells, and in larger camp units also infirmary barracks, a club or theater, and a banya. Within the zona the prisoners could move relatively freely in their leisure time and could engage in sports, in cultural activities, or in vocational training programs—as long as the offers existed and as long as the prisoners were not too exhausted after a long day’s work. The wooden barracks were equipped with wooden bunk beds, an oven, a few tables, and possibly a few cupboards. These mass shelters prevented any privacy, often did not provide sufficient protection against the extreme weather conditions, and were infested with bugs and lice. Occasionally, however, prisoners lived outside the camp zone, either in rented rooms or in huts or tents that had been set up at short notice for a specific work assignment. These prisoners often received a so-called “dry ration” and cooked for themselves. Especially if they worked far away from the next camp zone, they could live rather free and untouched. In addition, there was the phenomenon of de-convoyed prisoners (a minimum of 10 percent), who lived inside the camp zone, but were able to move freely outside of it. Camp society was, thus, far more complex, than we might suspect.

The wide-ranging use of the prisoners’ labor even in administration and the guards is above all related to a lack of cadres and to the fact that the camps ideally should become independent of state subsidies—a goal that was never achieved. Even those responsible for the system were clearly aware that unfree labor was much less productive than free labor. Questions of increasing productivity were therefore frequently discussed. At different times various measures were taken to increase the productivity of the prisoners. Some of these measures were coercive and based on the threat of corporal punishment or the deprivation of food, others enticed with perks or rewards—just like outside the camp zone.²⁰

The slightest work incentives were generated by recognition and pride. The early 1930s in particular were marked by campaigns to promote an enthusiasm for work among Gulag inmates by presenting the projects as relevant to the construction of socialism. In official propaganda, for example, kanaloarmeitsy, that is “soldiers of the canal,” built the waterway connecting the Baltic with the White Sea. These forced laborers fulfilled a duty which was described as similarly important as the service in the Red Army.²¹ Similarly, the Second World War triggered solidarity with the system and a certain enthusiasm for work.²² In the early 1930s, camp units called each other to a socialist competition. Whole departments received awards from the camp management if they showed high working productivity whereby quantity rather than quality counted. Similar prominence was given to well-performing prisoners, who were celebrated as shock workers and stakhanovtsy in the pages of camp newspapers, on wall newspapers, and posters and who received honorary certificates (pochetnye gramoty).

Even if some of the Gulag inmates might have honored such a public praise or were caught up in the enthusiasm for the construction project or the social relevance of a particular task, considerably more attractive were material awards and monetary bonuses and, thus, material compensation. For a permanent over-fulfillment of the work quota shock workers and stakhanovtsy were supposed to get an improved equipment, better living conditions, and above all an increased food ration and a “necessarily saturating” breakfast. Prisoners with a good working performance could be transferred to lighter camp regimes or received permission for additional visiting days or packages from home or passports for a free movement in and out of the camp zone. To relate compensation solely to a direct or indirect wage system, as Marcel van der Linden does, thus falls obviously short in the context of the Gulag.

The link between labor productivity and food ration, the so-called kotlovka, did not only account for compensation but implied a coercive aspect, too: in accordance with the first Soviet constitution, a full ration was received only for those who fulfilled the quota. Low productivity led to a significant cut in the food supply: Instead of 800 g of bread per day, a poor worker received only 500 g or even only 200 g. And the bread was the basic food in the camps. Thus, apart from the camp regulations, kotlovka, that is the deprivation of food as a punishment for low productivity, was probably the main incentive for camp prisoners to submit to forced labor. Since the work quota was often overestimated and since the full ration did not provide the camp inmates with the necessary calories a vicious circle began, especially for prisoners who were not used to physical labor and who were emaciated after months in prison. Working ability and thus also the productivity of many prisoners decreased sufficiently already in the first months of their term. This is evident not only by relatively high death rates but also by uncountable cases of scurvy, pellagra, diarrhea, or tuberculosis—diseases, all of which indicate substantial malnutrition. Although time and again even the Main Administration explained the prisoners’ low productivity as well as high rates of deaths and invalids with the inadequate nutritional situation, nothing changed in the long run.²³

In addition to the deprivation of food, “absentees, those refusing to work, and wreckers” had to fear a whole range of punishments. They could lose the right to correspond with their families, some were beaten, others were sent to camp units and work assignments with even harsher working and living conditions, to detention cells or punishment isolation. In the early 1930s, it was common practice to leave the prisoners at the working place until the quota was reached. Additionally, “wreckers” were publicly pilloried, whether through newspaper articles, display boards, or fictitious graves with low standard fulfillment inscribed on their tombstones. Especially in the 1930s, the names of those who had underperformed were displayed every evening on a blackboard under the heading “our shame” while those who had overperformed were praised as “our pride.” Such ostracism by the collective was further advanced when the labor output of the worker brigade as a whole was calculated. Poor work performance by an individual member of the brigade now fell on the small collective and could have serious consequences for all of its members.

Although the pressure on the individual was increased by collective accountability, the latter also opened up spaces of mutual help. Strong prisoners could compensate for the low work performance of their weaker fellow prisoners and thus ensure their survival. There were also prisoners who evaded the obligation to work. In particular, hardened criminals successfully resisted being coerced to work or in turn forced fellow inmates to do their share of the work for them. Other prisoners had often no other choice but malingering or to mutilate themselves in order to escape the obligation to work.²⁴ However, throughout the history of the Gulag there were also repeated strikes or minor revolts through which the prisoners hoped to achieve improvements in the regime and in working conditions. Moreover, there existed the possibility of filing complaints, which in some cases even entailed a criminal investigation. The camp inmates, therefore, were not totally deprived of all possibilities of influencing their situation, to voice criticism, although only a minority took advantage of these opportunities. A much more common way to counter the work pressure was the “technique of fictitious accounting” (tufta). Reports were frequently falsified and labor output statistics exaggerated.

The greatest positive impact on the labor productivity of Gulag inmates had neither coercion nor commitment or material compensation but the compensation through the crediting of working days to the period of imprisonment. The system of “workday credits” changed often over time and differentiated between prisoners from accepted strata of society (workers, peasants) and those who were accused to be “enemies of the people.” For the latter category the accountability of working days was limited, but “socially reliable” prisoners could reduce their sentence significantly by a third if not by half. In 1939, though, the NKVD abolished this very successful incentive and replaced it with improved food rations and monetary bonuses.

Already in the late 1940s, the system of “workday credits” was slowly but increasingly reintroduced. Once again, the discussion about productivity and profitability of the camps had gained new momentum. In April 1950, the government even implemented wages for all Gulag inmates.²⁵ These wages corresponded in theory with those for civilians; however, costs for food, accommodation, and clothing as well as taxes were deducted. If we follow Oleg Khlevnyuk this introduction of wages signified “a conversion of slaves to serfs.”²⁶ For Khlevniuk, therefore, compensation through direct wages makes the difference between slavery and serfdom.

Material and monetary incentives should not cover the fact that due to kotlovka coercion most of the time prevailed. Moreover, even if material compensation was provided on paper, the realization was hampered by a general poor supply of the camps. In general, high work quota paired with malnutrition and insufficient equipment made it difficult for the majority of the prisoners to meet or exceed the quota anyway. A large proportion of the prisoners could therefore hardly hope for early release on the basis of good work performance, but had to rely on other forms of exit.

Return from the Gulag

Looking at statistics of individual camps and of the Main Administration of the Camps, four main forms of exit can be identified: release, transfer, death, and escape. As already indicated above, death was, thus, not the one and only way out of the Gulag. Mortality rates varied widely over the years and likewise from camp to camp and they often correspond with external factors and increased mortality rates outside the camp zone. It is striking, for example, that particularly high death rates correspond to the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 (approximately 15 percent of all Gulag inmates), the Great Terror of 1938 (5.35 percent), the Second World War (6 percent in 1941 up to 24.9 percent in 1942), and the scarcity of supplies after World War II (3–4 percent in 1947–1948). In most other years, mortality lay below 3 percent and from 1949 onward, it stabilized well below 1 percent of the whole Gulag population.²⁷ Low mortality rates, however, were due less to substantially improved living conditions—although after the hunger years of 1932–33 and 1945–1946 supply did indeed improve—than to the method of early release for seriously ill and weak prisoners whose death was imminent at short notice. This method artificially reduced the mortality rate significantly. For example, between 1946 and 1948, 148,205 persons died in the camps, another 102,000 received early release due to their miserable state of health. Moreover, when using official data of the Gulag, it should also be noted that those who died on the way into the camps, who were shot by the guards or killed by co-prisoners or who died while trying to escape were not included into the statistics. All figures of the camp administrations concerning the death of prisoners should therefore be supplemented by an estimated figure of unrecorded cases that might double the official death rates.²⁸

Far more common than death was the transfer of Gulag inmates to other forms of imprisonment. In some years, the number of those transferred even exceeded those released. Until 1937, moreover, flight represented a not insignificant form of exit. In the years 1935 to 1937, the number of fugitives even exceeded the number of those who died, although it must be said that, as a rule, almost half of the fugitives were picked up again. From 1938 on, the camps got a better grip on guarding the inmates and the number of escapees dropped from approximately 22 to 4.5 percent of all those leaving the camps. After 1943, the numbers dropped significantly once again, so that from this point on, flight can hardly be called a reliable exit.

The most common way out of the Gulag was release, i.e. a conditional exit. Like the entry, the exit out of the Gulag system was determined essentially by criminal law and by special orders of the penal authorities. Archival sources suggest that at least 20 percent, in some years even up to 40 percent of the camps’ inmates were released every year. As indicated above, these figures should be treated with caution. But even if we acknowledge that the Gulag administration learned to release precisely the weak and sick prisoners who barely survived liberation in order to get rid of unproductive eaters and to polish mortality statistics, it cannot be denied that a substantial number of Gulag prisoners was freed and survived. Exit through release was achieved either through amnesties, by serving the term, by early release due to excellent work performance and good behavior, by work contracts, due to petitions or early release campaigns.

Economically prioritized camps in particular encouraged early release through contracts with prisoners. Prisoners agreed to settle near the camp despite their release. The freedmen continued to work for the camps as free laborers, lived outside the zona and could bring their families to live with them. Both the example of Vorkuta and Magadan show, that a significant number of city dwellers were such ex-prisoners.

Petitions for early release could be submitted individually both by prisoners themselves, especially those with a high work record, and by their relatives. Frequently, the poor health of the person concerned was the decisive factor for petitions by family and friends. Amnesties occurred after the completion of a major task like the building of the Belomor canal, after the war and to an even greater extent after Stalin’s death. Only those sentenced for “counterrevolutionary” crimes did often not profit from most forms of early release and amnesties. In this context it should also be mentioned that the smallest violations of camp discipline or reduced work performance prevented any accounting of work days and could easily lead to an extension of the period of imprisonment. Especially during World War II, in accordance with government decrees, camp administrators withheld releases even of those whose term of imprisonment had expired (order N°221 1941). Or prisoners were released but were not allowed to leave the camp premises (order N°185 1942). In addition, reports from former prisoners as well as administrative documents testify to the fact that quite frequently additional terms were imposed without explanation. At the same time the Second World War triggered several waves of “early release” into Red Army squads. Exit through release was thus the most common, but not necessarily the most reliable, way of leaving the camps.

For many prisoners, the release did often not imply an immediate full return to society and a re-establishment of the individual status quo ante. Many were forced to settle temporarily near the camps or in prescribed regions. These ex-prisoners remained restricted in their freedom of movement and disadvantaged compared to the normal population by being denied wage supplements and other benefits. Even freedmen who were allowed to move out of the former camp area had only limited freedom to choose where to settle. In particular, the major urban centers of the Soviet Union remained closed to many Gulag returnees for several years. In addition, political prisoners, in particular, did not regain their civil rights for the first five years after release. Passports or special forms stigmatized them as criminals and ex-Gulag inmates and thus made them second-class citizens. At least, the release could bring a reunion with the families, as long as husbands, wives, or children had not broken away from the detainee and survived repressions and exile themselves.²⁹

Once at liberty did not mean that the ex-prisoner was safe from re-arrest, too. Under Stalin, therefore, any exit from the Gulag was only conditional. Only the reforms after Stalin’s death brought unconditional freedom—within the framework of normal criminal prosecution—and thanks to a wave of rehabilitation social recognition.³⁰ Already the reforms toward the end of Stalin’s rule and the introduction of wages had prepared the end of the phase of “slavery,” however. Only months after Stalin’s death the Soviet government amnestied large contingents of the Gulag prisoners. Shortly after, the whole camp system and its Main Administration were restructured. The Ministry for the Interior lost its economic functions and most of its penal ones, too. In October 1959, the Soviet government dissolved the Main Administration of the Camps. This ended the existence of the Gulag as an administrative body and as a system of massive repression and ruthless exploitation of prison labor.³¹

Notes

• 1. Chapter 5, Paragraph 18, Constitutsia (osnovnoi zakon) Rossiiskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Federativnoi Sovetskoi Respubliki [Constitution (basic law) of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic] (Petrograd: Izdanie Petrogradskogo Soveta rabochikh i krasn. deputatov, 1918), 6.

• 2. Marcel van der Linden, “Forced Labour and Non-Capitalist Industrialization: The Case of Stalinism (c. 1929–c. 1956),” in Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues, eds. Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 1997), 351–62.

• 3. Following the historiographical discourse, this article uses the term Gulag to symbolize the camp system within the Soviet Union as a whole, including the camps situated along the river Kolyma in the Far East as well as the camps for prisoners of war during and after World Ward II. Both belonged most of their existence to a different administrative system though, the Dalstroi and the GUPVI, respectively. For Dalstroi see the publications of David Nordlander as well as Anatolij Shirokov, Dal’stroi v sotsial’no-ėkonomicheskom razvitii Severo-Vostoka SSSR: 1930–1950-e gg. [Dal’stroi within the social-economic development of the North-East of the USSR: 1930 to the 1950s] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014). For GUPVI see Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI. Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1956 [In the GUPVI Archipelago: Prisoners of War and Internment in the Soviet Union 1941–1956] (Wien et al.: Oldenbourg, 1995).

  In order to leave the argumentation coherent this article concentrates on the camps under control of the Main Administration. It leaves out labor colonies, special settlements or the “labor army” (trudarmiia) although they also belonged under the control of the Main Administration and although in the special settlements in the 1930s as many people were repressed as in the camps. For the special settlements see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); for the trudarmiia see Arkadij A. German, Nemtsy SSSR v “Trudovoi armii” (1941–1945) [The Germans of the USSR in the “Trudovoi armii” (1941–1945)] (Moscow: Gotika, 1998).

• 4. An excellent overview of the geographical and numerical development of the camps including the number of prisoners and the mortality is provided by the interactive map of the Moscow State Museum of the History of the Gulag: https://gulagmap.ru/. However, the prisoner figures given there per year are in part somewhat lower than those used in research.

• 5. David D. Dallin and Boris I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), XIV.

• 6. Cf. Marc Buggeln, “From Private to State Slavery and Back Again. Slavery and the Camp Systems in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Eurozine (2017), https://www.eurozine.com/from-private-to-state-slavery-and-back-again/.

• 7. As the most striking example Alan Barenberg, “Forced Labor in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union,” in Cambridge World History of Slavery, eds. D. Eltis, S. Engerman, S. Drescher, and D. Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 630–54.

• 8. Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 5.

• 9. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Destructive Labor Camps. Rethinking Solzhenitsyn ‘s Play on Words,” in The Soviet Gulag. Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison ed. MichaelDavid-Fox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) 42–64, here 44.

• 10. Buggeln, “From Private.”

• 11. The permeability of camp boundaries describe in particular Alan Barenberg, “Prisoners without Borders: Zazonniki and the Transformation of Vorkuta after Stalin,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 57, no. 4 (2009): 513–34; and Willson T. Bell, “Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-conveoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia,” Russian Review 72, no. 1 (2013): 116–41.

• 12. See David Brian Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

• 13. On the development of the camps in the 1920s and early 1930s see Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Die “inhaftierte” Presse. Das Pressewesen sowjetischer Zwangsarbeitslager, 1923–1937 [The “Imprisoned” Press. The Press of Soviet Forced Labor Camps, 1923–1937] (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Michael Jakobson, Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).

• 14. The argument that political interests outweighed economic ones in the formation of the Gulag is stressed by Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag. From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 23–24. See also Wilson T. Bell, Stalin’s Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

• 15. Wilson T. Bell uses the Siblag to illustrate the diversity of possible individual experience in a camp complex. Bell, Stalin’s Gulag.

• 16. For a discussion of the economic significance of the camps, see Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds., The Economics of Forced Labor. The Soviet Gulag (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003).

• 17. In general, women are significantly less likely to be found in prison systems worldwide. In the Soviet Union they were probably also more likely to be sentenced to serve in Corrective Labor Colonies than to a term in the Gulag. Only during the war the percentage of women in the Gulag rose to 20 percent.

• 18. An overview of the composition of the camp prisoners according to gender, age, ethnicity, social origin, educational background, reason for conviction, term of imprisonment can be found in files of the main administration, printed in Aleksandr Kokurin, ed., GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960 [GULAG (Main Administration of the Camps), 1917–1960] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), and in Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: konets 1920-kh-pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh [The History of Stalin’s Gulag: From the End of the 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s: A Collection of Documents in Seven Volumes], vol. 4, Naselenie Gulaga: Chislennost’ i usloviia soderzhaniia, ed. I. V. Bezborodova (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2004).

• 19. Sarah Young has compiled a bibliography of English-language Gulag memoirs: https://sarahjyoung.com/site/gulag-bibliography/gulag-bibliography-english-language-texts-and-translations/ (accessed 1 November 2021). For those able to read Russian the Sakharov Centre in Moscow provides a database of Gulag memoirs: https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=list (accessed 1 November 2021).

• 20. With regard to incentives and penalties to increase productivity, see, for example, Fischer von Weikersthal, Die “inhaftierte” Presse; Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption. The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

• 21. On the general enthusiasm connected to the Belomor-project both in- and outside the camp see Julie Draskoczy, Belomor. Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014).

• 22. See Steven Barnes, “All for the Front, All for Victory! The Mobilization of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union during World War Two,” International Labor and Working-Class History 58 (2000): 239–60.

• 23. Golfo Alexopoulos interprets this fact to suggest that the camps were “a willfully destructive institution,” (Alexopoulos, Illness, 1).

• 24. Dan Healey, “‘Dramatological’ Trauma in the Gulag. Malingering, Self-Inflicted Injuries and the Prisoner-Patient,” in (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag. Fiction and Reality, eds. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2016), 37–62.

• 25. Remuneration had been introduced in individual camps as early as 1940.

• 26. Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930–1953,” in The Economics of Forced Labor. The Soviet Gulag, eds. Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), 43–66, here 57.

• 27. Compare the graphs on p. 140 in Volkhard Knigge and Irina Scherbakova, eds., GULAG. Spuren und Zeugnisse 1929–1956 [Gulag. Traces and Testimonies] (Weimar: Wallstein, 2012).

• 28. Any figures provided by the camp administration should be treated with extreme caution, since, on the one hand, presentation and accounting methods changed over the years and, on the other hand, some of the people involved in the preparation of the figures were not qualified in accounting. In addition, statistics were frequently fudged, which was quite common in the Soviet Union. Galina Ivanova, “GULAG-Statistiken im Spiegel von Archivmaterialien und Memoiren,” [Gulag Statistics in the Mirror of Archival Materials and Memoirs] in (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag. Fiction and Reality, eds. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal and Karoline Thaidigsmann (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2016), 21–35.

• 29. Life after the Gulag is treated by Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor. Beyond the Soviet System (London et al.: Routledge, 2004); Stephen F. Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin (London et al.: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Meinhard Stark, Die Gezeichneten. Gulag-Häftlinge nach der Entlassung [The Marked. Gulag Prisoners after Release] (Berlin: Metropol, 2011).

• 30. However, rehabilitations should not be overestimated due to their slow and limited nature.

• 31. It is therefore misleading to adopt the dissident narrative and to extend the term Gulag to the Soviet Union’s system of prisons and penal colonies after 1960. Similarly, an equation of today’s Russian penal system with the Gulag evoked by prominent political prisoners or Western media is misleading. Neither did political repression take place after 1960 on a scale even approaching that of the Stalin years, nor were and are inmates exploited as ruthlessly as Gulag inmates for the state economy. On the dismantling of the Gulag system after Stalin’s death see Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (Ithaca et al.: Cornell University Press, 2016).