Gulag: The Story

The first concentration camps were set up in 1918, a few months after the October Revolution. The new Bolshevik regime wants to get rid of political adversaries and re-educate the so-called "anti-social" elements through work. The first large-scale experiment takes place on the Solovki archipelago, very close to the Arctic Circle. Thousands of political and ordinary detainees, men and women, are deported there and subjected to forced labour. In 1922, after the withdrawal of Lenin, Stalin gradually takes power and decrees from the end of the 1920s the industrialization of the country with collectivization of the lands. Titanic projects are launched in the most remote regions, such as the Kolyma, in Siberia. The political police (Tcheka, then Guépéou) send hundreds of thousands of innocent people to the labor camps, where their labour constitutes a major economic resource.

In 1934, Stalin launched the works of the Volga-Moscow canal and the construction of a new Trans-Siberian railway. The NKVD multiplies the camps and transforms the Gulag into a real prison industry. The number of deportees crosses the million mark in 1935. A spectacular showcase of the great terror unleashed in 1937, the Moscow trials concealed the extent of the repression which was now in full bloom across all levelsl of Soviet society. Mass executions and arbitrary arrests are accelerating. In August 1939, after the signing of the German-Soviet pact, hundreds of thousands of Poles, Baltics, West Ukrainians and Moldavians join some 2 million Soviet deportees in the Gulag camps. . Famine and disease ravage the ranks of the detainees as Hitler invades Russia. In 1945, despite the victory over Nazi Germany, the Gulag archipelago, an essential engine of the Soviet production machine, begin to expand again.

The populations of the newly occupied eastern territories remain suspected of anti-Sovietism. The third category targeted is that of intellectuals, in particular within an expanding Soviet student population. Women, including many war widows sentenced to heavy penalties for petty pilfering, now represent a quarter of the zeks. Nearly 2 million detainees, many of them at the extreme limit of survival, are still crammed into the camps. Little by little, these appalling living conditions bring down the economic profitability of the Gulag. On March 5, 1953, after the death of Stalin, a million releases are pronounced. In 1956, Khrushchev, exonerating himself from his responsibility, denounces the crimes of Stalinism, causing a huge shock wave in the world. The concentration camp system does not disappear completely, but will never again regain the scale of its past forty years of mass repression.