Gulag: The Story

Origins 1917 – 1933 (1x1)

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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.