After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 Lenin announced that any "class enemy", even in the absence of evidence of any crime against the state, could not be trusted and should not be treated better than a criminal. Since 1918, camp-type detention facilities were set up, as a reformed extension of earlier labour camps (katorgas), operated in Siberia as a part of penal system in Imperial Russia. The two main types were "Vechecka Special-purpose Camps" (?????? ?????? ???) and forced labor camps (?????? ?????????????? ?????). They were installed for various categories of people deemed dangerous for the state: for common criminals, for prisoners of Russian Civil War, for officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, various political enemies and dissidents, as well as former aristocrats, businessmen and large land owners.
Soviet poster of the 1920s: The GPU strikes on the head the counter-revolutionary saboteur
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Soviet poster of the 1920s: The GPU strikes on the head the counter-revolutionary saboteur
As an all-Union institution, the Gulag was officially established on April 25, 1930 as the "Ulag" by the OGPU order 130/63 in accordance with the Sovnarkom order 22 p. 248 dated April 7, 1930, and was renamed into Gulag in November. The Gulag grew quickly. Failed projects, bad harvests, accidents, poor production, and poor planning were routinely attributed to corruption and sabotage, and accused thieves and saboteurs on whom to put the blame were found en masse. At the same time the rapidly increasing need for natural resources and a booming industrialization program fueled a demand for cheap labour. Denunciations, quotas for arrest, summary executions, and secret police activity became widespread. The widest opportunities for an easy, in most cases automatic, conviction of any person of a crime were provided by the Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. In 1931?32, Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; in 1935 ? approximately 1 million (including colonies), and after the Great Purge of 1937, nearly 2 million people. By contrast, the US prisoner labourer population (on chain gangs and in prisons) remained around a few hundred thousand prisoners.
During World War II, Gulag populations declined sharply, owing to mass "releases" of hundreds of thousands of prisoners who were conscripted and sent directly to the front lines, but mainly due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942?43. After WWII the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies rose again sharply and reached the number of approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s. While some of these were deserters and war criminals, there were also repatriated Russian prisoners of war and "Eastern workers", were universally accused of treason and "cooperation with an enemy" (formally, they did work for Nazis). Large numbers of civilians from the Russian territories which came under foreign occupation, as well as from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union after the war were also sent there. It was not uncommon for the survivors of Nazi camps to be transported directly to the Soviet labour camps.
For years after WWII, a significant minority of the inmates were Germans, Finns, Poles, Romanians and other POWs and persons from the foreign countries "liberated" by the Red Army.
The state continued to maintain Gulag for a while after Stalin's death in March of 1953. The subsequent amnesty program was limited to those who had to serve at most 5 years, therefore mostly those convicted of common crimes were then freed. The releases of political prisoners started in 1954 and became widespread, and also coupled with mass rehabilitations, after Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in his Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February, 1956.
Officially Gulag was terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960, as the MVD itself was officially eliminated by the order 44-16 of Presidium of Supreme Council of the USSR, to reemerge as the KGB.
The total documentable deaths in the corrective-labour system from 1934 to 1953 amount to 1,054,000, including political and common prisoners; note that this does not include nearly 800,000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries", as they were generally conducted outside the camp system. From 1932 to 1940, at least 390,000 peasants died in places of labor settlements; this figure may overlap with the above, but, on the other hand, it does not include deaths outside the 1932-1940 period, or deaths among non-peasant internal exiles. The number of people who were prisoners at one point or the other is, of course, much larger, and one may assume that many of the survivors suffered permanent physical and psychological damage.
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